Sex and Death in the American Novel

by Martinez, Sarah

  I spent four painful years of college trying to stay awake while professors regurgitated an outline of the assigned textbook. It was something to see him with all his passion directed not inward as most professors, babbling for their own benefit, but out toward a useful purpose. He used the word fuck—in English and the Spanish ‘chinga’—more than any professor I'd ever had. I have no doubt that he let his personality dictate how he spoke, but I also think he did it to hold their attention. It mattered to him that they were engaged, that they learned something. He cared like no one I'd ever known, and I found myself filled with immense gratitude for him.

  It took forever for the students to file out as half of them had to stop and speak with him, but finally I was the only one left in the room. He peered into the back of the room, shaded his eyes from the overhead lights and said, “Can I help you with something?”

  I croaked the words, “It's me—” I started again after clearing my throat. “Hi.” I tried to give a nonchalant wave. I felt like a fraud. “It's Vivi.”

  “Vivi,” he said, walking down the long aisle until he stood before me. “What are you doing here?”

  I looked up at him, my throat began to close up, and he took my hand. “Come with me.”

  He dragged me down to the front of the room, packed up his papers and put one arm around me. I fought the urge to blubber as he led me past the students and faculty weaving through the hallways, up a flight of stairs, until he closed the door of his office.

  He set his bag on his desk and sat in the chair next to me. “You haven't talked to Jasper yet, have you?”

  “He told you?” I was humiliated, though not surprised. I put my head in my hands and said, “I fucked up and I have no idea how to fix it.”

  He ran his hand over the back of my head until I sat up and faced him.

  “Look chica, this really is between you and Jasper. He is pretty upset, I won't lie to you.”

  “Fuck.” I wanted to throw up. “I told him I liked you because you didn't judge me.”

  “He told me that too.”

  We sat listening to the ticking of the clock on the brick wall behind his desk. I watched a small brown bird land on a leafy branch outside his window. The branch was thin and the weight of the bird made it bounce, but instead of flitting away with fear, the bird hung on.

  “I thought I could do what I wanted, bring everyone along for the ride, and it all blew up in my face.”

  “Explain this to me,” he said and leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands in his lap.

  I laughed at how formal he had become. He didn't smile.

  I ground my teeth together. He was so direct, I felt more naked here in front of him with all our clothes on than I had since I'd met him.

  I couldn't stand the force of his gaze. I turned my eyes to the floor. “I didn't mean to hurt him.”

  Alejandro broke his pose, hunched over his legs. “You did.”

  I shook my head and faced him again. His jaw was set and his eyes were direct, but they were softer this time. “I care very much about both of you. If my coming into your lives is going to cause the two of you to hurt each other, then…”

  “You're great.” I tried to keep the panic out of my voice, even as my eyes began to bulge and leak hot tears. “You get me. You didn't do anything wrong. I have never felt so understood as when I'm with you. I've never felt like I was doing the right things: in my life, in my work, in bed… You can't go away. Shit. Fuck. What a goddam mess. A giant fucking clusterfuck.”

  He laughed and took my hand, running his thumb over the back, and leaned forward as if he were going to kiss me. He got so close I could smell every intoxicating molecule of him; espresso, cinnamon, a perfume completely his own. “Call him.”

  I nodded vigorously; maybe there was a way out after all. I nodded and wiped my eyes with the inside of my wrist.

  “Good.”

  As he led me out of the office I turned and hugged him. He hesitated a moment and then wrapped his arms around me, letting his chin and lips linger at my collarbone before he pulled away.

  “Can I tell you something? I fucking hated college. Especially lit classes. I felt like it was the instructor's job to unlearn everything my father, my mother and any great author I ever read had taught me. They sucked the originality out of everything. Watching you today was really something. You made me believe in teachers again.”

  “I think you are probably biased.”

  “No. It's true.” It occurred to me that teaching might have been what he was doing all along with me.

  I called Jasper that night.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hello, Vivi.”

  “Is this an okay time to call? Have I waited long enough?”

  “Sure.” His voice sounded off.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Probably not,” he said.

  I didn't know what to say to that. “Did something happen?”

  “Yeah.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair and waited for the rest. When he didn't say anything else, I plowed ahead. “I'm sorry about what I said about your work. I actually do understand why you are such a big deal, I just—”

  “I got that a long time ago, the fact that you never brought it up was all I needed. I'm just sorry it took you being so angry to feel like you could be honest with me.”

  That hurt, as I knew it would.

  “Still, I hurt you and for that I am sorry, and I wish I could take it all back.”

  “You know what? I don't even care about that. It doesn't change the fact that I miss you.”

  “I miss you too,” I said, my heart soaring at those words, but the tone at the end of the sentence denoted there was more going on that he wasn't telling me.

  “Are you working again?”

  “Not really.”

  “I'm so sorry about everything I said. I don't know where that came from.”

  “I do. And you do too.”

  “I went and saw Alejandro.”

  “He told me.”

  More silence. I wished for the old banter again, the silly innuendos over the phone, anticipating his next words…

  More silence.

  “I don't want to fight. But I think there is something else going on with you. It's like you're avoiding it by running around with me.”

  “Didn't I explain that? I just need a break.”

  “I think there's something else,” I said.

  Jasper's voice slurred and then got clear. “You're just making up excuses. You're the one with something going on and somehow I am the one who has to take all the shit for it.”

  “Maybe, but I don't think you're telling me everything. I just haven't been able to figure it all out yet. Sometimes you make me feel like you disapprove of me and other times I think it's all in my head.”

  “I thought we just agreed we weren't going to care about each other's work. Or maybe that only applies to mine.” A frustrated breath and then, “Anyway, I thought we were happy. I am resting, that's all.”

  He took in another ragged breath and let it out. A flick of a lighter signaled the lighting of a cigarette. “I can't help what's in your head. You're the one who is turning me into your dad. I'm the same person I always was, just more relaxed. What's wrong with that?”

  “Why is everything always about my dad?” My hands began to tremble, and I felt my chest tighten. “It's so easy, right. I have some daddy issue because I didn't open some stupid letters.”

  Silence on his end.

  “Why do you keep digging into that part of my life, making up your own reasons for everything? You hardly ever talk about your parents with me. There's so much about you that I don't know and you know everything about me.”

  “I am just trying to understand you. Vivi, look. About the other night, or the morning after. I needed more time to process before I could talk about it. Don't you think you overreacted just a little?”

  I held my lips shut and breathed through my nos
e. Images of his sweet gentle face all by himself in his dark apartment invaded. My innocent, beautiful, pure and perfect Jasper. “Maybe you need to be with someone more conventional.” I gulped in too much air and choked on my own words. “What if I am really bad for you?”

  “You can't be serious.”

  I felt hard inside, like I was going to burst into sobs at any moment. “The last thing I ever wanted was to screw up your flow or change you. I used to think you were so repressed, so stiff,” I took another gulp of air, “but it isn't my place to change that. I love you, Jasper…so much. I thought this might work after we got rid of all the other weirdness. I want you to go back to your work and being perfect and forget about me. Go back to the way you were. At least then your life was working.”

  “It's working now! Jesus, Vivi. I can't believe you're turning this into such a big deal. Is this about the thing with Alejandro or because I took a break from my work? Why can't I take a break? Why can't I just take time to focus on you? What's so wrong with that? Isn't that what women always say they want?” The anger in his voice once again was satisfying.

  I kept silent as everything I thought to say seemed like it would make things worse. I groaned into the phone for lack of anything else to say.

  “Can I just say something, and then we can end this if that's what you want?”

  “Okay.” That's not what I wanted, but to explain anything more would have been to invite something I wasn't sure I'd know what to do with. He cleared his throat. “I trusted you too. I am not perfect and won't always say the right things. I was honest when I told you I wasn't sure about what we did with Alejandro. I said the first thing that came to my head. I'm sorry for that.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut so hard I saw stars. I was frustrated and terrified of where my words were leading us. “You're still not saying you're okay with what we did. I am changing you. That is obvious. You're going to resent that sooner or later.”

  I had to say something to get him to move on, go back to his own life, his work, back to being important and special and let me go back to whatever weird hellish non-letter-opening existence was set out for me. “I miss my freedom. I miss being just me. Feeling what I want, and wanting what I want.”

  “You don't want me anymore?”

  When he said this my heart hurt. My stomach flopped and the words, ‘that's not true’ hung in my mind's eye, but I said, “Not when what I want and what you want are not the same. Not when I feel like some kind of freak that you're just taking pity on.”

  “I never wanted to make you feel that way. You're wonderful.” Here his voice took on a pleading quality and again I wanted to both embrace that and hurt him at the same time.

  “You say that now, but what about next time? I hate this shame. I never felt shame like I did that morning. And it's not because of what we did. I shared with you something so intimate, so wonderful, and to find you could even doubt it…I don't know what to do with that.”

  He was silent. It sounded like he was going to speak but then thought better of it. He exhaled into the phone.

  “Good night,” I finally said.

  “Good night.”

  Weeks passed. I saw Alejandro a few more times. At first we talked about Jasper, how I let him go, and why. I got the idea by the way he answered certain questions that he had never stopped talking to Jasper.

  Then when it was obvious I wasn't going to change my mind, we moved on to other topics. We saw a lot of movies. We drank a lot of mochas in the afternoons and red wine at night and talked about my work, his work. He told me about his family and how they had come from a town outside of Mexico City called Puebla.

  I finally got to see his apartment, a small one-room place near Green Lake where he liked to do his morning run. The living room shelves, as I expected, were crammed with books. Tons of science fiction, tons of history—he owned more books by women than I did; admittedly not hard to do, but still I found this curious and felt a pang of guilt. How could I rail against the male voice when that was all I chose to read? Here on this guy's shelf sat books by Erica Jong, Andre Norton, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison and lots of female PhDs studying everything from the second-generation immigrant experience to arguments in support of all literary genres.

  As with all the men in my life, from my father to Tristan to Eric, if I couldn't read him, I read his books; The Monk, Moby Dick, Texaco. One night I read to him from his copy of Loose Woman and he listened with his eyes closed and his hands behind his head, laughing and correcting my pronunciation when I read the words in Spanish.

  We spent more and more time at his apartment, later into the evenings. He would whip up green enchiladas or chocolaty mole, and a host of foods that included complex flavorful chorizos fried up on the stove—with the window open in the living room, flapping a dishtowel to clear out the greasy vapors. The chilies he toasted had me hacking into the drizzled night. We were sinking into an emotional ease I had never experienced before, only with wonderful cuisine. The evenings spent like this were so easy. I should have been happy.

  When Boy in a Box was released, he came to a guest lecture I gave at the University, sitting in the front row, giving me a friendly face to focus on while I tried to make sense out of the questions and sentiment directed at me. Legitimate interest was a strange thing. I felt like I had to try to sound more learned, use the words of the Dreadfuls—refer to my work as the text, and try to refer to other books like Tropic of Cancer in the same way. When I found myself straining to find something that sounded better than the real magazine article I'd read that got me so fired up in the first place, I saw what a fraud I was morphing into. I am not an academic. I am a smut writer, free to think and say what I want. Let the rest of them categorize how they would.

  I read for twenty minutes: one hard-core scene and one where the main character contemplates her actions. After the reading I took questions. The first came from a tall woman in the back with spiky hair and deep red lips. She stood up, moved to the middle aisle and spoke in a clear voice that carried down the twenty rows of seats to where I stood baking under the house lights. “So, you did such a wonderful job capturing the ugliness and violence of the privileged macho sensibility. You showed us all, in a really novel way, what some people are capable of. I thought it was brilliantly done. By flipping the roles the way you did, I think you were making the point that we still let men get away with awful behavior and excuse it based on their gender and expected roles.”

  I shifted my weight. “I sense a question coming…”

  She looked down and shook her head. “Sorry…I just wanted to know how you got into the right creative place to be able to imagine all this ugliness?”

  I took a breath. Alejandro gazed up at me and opened his eyes wide as if he could spur me to a more intelligent answer by just giving me a look. For a second I aimed my attention on my mother who sat with her friends, dressed in a silky pastel pantsuit with a boldly patterned wrap that matched the suit and set off her eyes. “The strongest woman I know gave up everything that was important to her to support a man's dreams.” My mother covered her face and shook her head, but when she dropped her hand I saw tears in her eyes and she gave me a warm smile. “If I did that, I would be carrying an immense amount of resentment, and I can imagine it being directed outward, to make someone else feel as bad as I did.” I spoke to the woman in the middle aisle again, the one who was still hoping to sort her own version of an answer from my words, “I know strength, I know recovery from tragedy, and I believe this same strength could easily be twisted into something awful, the same intelligence could be used to perpetrate any number of crimes. I have used men for sex, for comfort, to distract myself from some truly painful emotions. I was in pain, so I passed it on. For this book, all I did was imagine that same type of ugliness in myself and amplified it.” I surveyed the room. “Am I the only one here who can channel the beast? And beast it is…I would submit that there is a dark place inside all of us. Maybe I am just better a
ble to access it?”

  The woman furrowed her brow, sat down and for the rest of the session I answered questions about what it was like to write porn, why I wrote mostly for gay men, and there was even a question on how to break into the market. That one made me genuinely happy, and when we left the auditorium I gave the woman my contact information and as much encouragement as I could before my mother hurried me out.

  Afterward, we had another repeat of the dinner with Jasper, only now it was me sitting at the end of the table, Mother on one side, Alejandro on the other. My friend. When I looked across the table there was so much understanding in his eyes: there was an empty space at the table.

  One Friday night, Alejandro and I went to a restored ballroom on Capitol Hill for an Argentine Tango exhibition and dance. The heavy drapes, the chalky Malbec and low lighting all brought me back in time. I imagined we were in a salon in Buenos Aires and it was 2:00 a.m. I wore a dress that left my breasts pulled to either side, exposing my bare chest. The dark, rich fabric shimmered indigo and silver and draped near the bottom. I got to wear the shoes I ordered from a woman in Uruguay, traditional with a strap at the ankle, but with extra padding to save my feet. Alejandro dressed in a dark pinstripe suit and he even wore a fedora. The hat and jacket didn't last very long once we got going, but it was fun to see him so spiffy. Jasper needed to fade into a crowd and measure everyone around him; Alejandro wore his personality on his sleeve. This left me free to enjoy myself and not worry about anything else.

  We danced two circles around the floor walking, adjusting. Inevitably I thought of Eric but not for very long; Alejandro had a way of keeping my attention focused on him. The strength of his arms, the force of his gaze, the close contact he maintained; he understood how to connect. He held me so that our bodies molded together, all the way to my knees in a close embrace that felt like we became one person. His technique wasn't as perfect as Eric's—or as elegant—but he was creative. We practiced simple movements like ochos. By the way he moved his shoulders, I knew to pivot on one foot, twisting my hips, facing the other direction, until he stopped us and gathered me close to him again to a slinky walk. At times he would stop me in the middle of one movement with a foot placed in my way, forcing me to step over, and at one place he pulled me back so that my leg wrapped around his thigh for only a second.