Hungry for the World

by Kim Barnes

  THE NEXT WEEK I dressed in my newest pantsuit—pink polyester with satin trim—tucked my briefcase under my arm, and drove to David’s apartment. He would make me dinner while I sold him on the benefits of a policy with Northwestern Mutual.

  I’d drawn up a contract for $70,000 of whole-life, pleased with myself for daring such a high figure, probably more than he needed, but he could afford it. My commission would be enough to keep the creditors at bay for another month, give me room to rethink my direction.

  I watched David negotiate the small kitchen, watched the way he leaned himself against the counter, the smooth movement of his fingers as he separated the lettuce, peeled the spuds to milky whiteness. I liked the feeling of being waited on by a man who didn’t seem to mind time over the stove. Deer meat from the previous fall, potatoes fried with onions, canned corn or peas on the side, a bottle of wine, Riunite or Lancer’s—nothing beyond what I was accustomed to. I savored the thinly cut venison, savored not only the mild wildness but the taste memory that brought with it the familiarity of past family dinners.

  When I looked at David sitting next to me, this is what I saw: a man who knew what I knew, whose senses responded to the same smells and sounds, the same tastes I had known all my life. He seemed to embody everything I had treasured and lost, yet there was more to him than anything I had left behind: he was both recognizable and strange, comfort and compulsion. He was the projection of myself, a masculine reflection of my own codes and inspirations.

  The distance that remained between us puzzled me. David still hadn’t touched me that I can remember, and I think that I would. But if I can’t remember what came before that evening, I will never forget what came after.

  We were sitting on his couch, watching an HBO special. I was a little light-headed from my glass of wine, yet very aware of his presence beside me, he at one end of the sofa, I at the other. Each time he reached to adjust the volume or pour more wine, I felt my breath catch, the heat that came between us.

  Las Vegas was on the screen, showgirls with their feathers and bare breasts. I watched with embarrassment, both at the display and at my being bashful about it. (HBO was the underground in Lewiston, Idaho, 1978; in another few years MTV would blow us away.) It was the first time I’d seen nudity onscreen. Once again I felt David watching me, gauging my reaction.

  It would be a lie to say I wasn’t aroused, less by the show than by his eyes on me. The eyes not of a lecher but of a discerner, a practiced and particular intelligence. What excited me had to do with unspeakable possibility. Whatever rules had governed me fell away in his presence because this was his game, and my first time at his table. I was waiting, for what I wasn’t sure. But now I could feel it about to happen, each minute drawing me nearer to the knowing.

  David began to speak to me then, in a way that was more direct, more intense than he had before. Had I ever looked at pornography? he asked. Yes, I answered, but I did not tell him of the books Les and I had found in our uncle’s room. What I mentioned instead were John’s occasional Playboy, a single, tattered Playgirl a friend had gotten at her wedding shower. He smiled. No, not that kind. He went into his bedroom and came back with magazines, women splayed and rouged, tipped up for the camera, tipped back for the men who held their knees.

  A page, a level at a time, he took me down, until what I saw before me bore no resemblance to the airbrushed depictions of Ivy League girls gone bad for the weekend. What I remember are the colors—smoky black, lacquered red.

  As I thumbed through the magazines, David told me of the topless dancers and prostitutes in Seattle he had met and befriended during the twelve-hour layovers of his truck route. He made me understand that they waited for his arrival, that what he gave to them overshadowed anything they might offer. I was intrigued. Why would this man court me as he had, so modestly, if he were the Don Juan of Puget Sound? Why would he want me?

  He pulled me from the couch and led me to his bedroom. I felt his hands for the first time, gentle, he said, because this was the beginning and there would be more, but gentle for now so that I would learn how much I must trust him.

  THIS IS WHAT I KNOW of seduction: it can be flowered and perfumed, or it can spring from sweat and darkness; it can come sweet and slow, or fast and hard like birth. It can find you at work or at home, awake or asleep. It can begin with a kiss or the withholding of a kiss. It’s a flower that opens, a bruise that spreads.

  For each of us, there exists the possibility of being seduced, and for each of us, two kinds of seduction. The first is romantic and hoped for; the second is perhaps the truer, its shape less familiar, its tenets less defined. When in it, we don’t know where we’re headed, what to protest, how to protect ourselves. It’s like being led blind down a dark corridor, yet when you stop to push against the walls, they disappear, and you are free. Can’t you see? Free.

  THE MYSTERIOUSNESS, THE HIDDEN store of knowledge—I believed that physical intimacy was David’s way of allowing me entrance into his life. Although he still said little about his family and his past, he began to speak openly about his former lovers, and I saw that sharing his bed allowed me to share his confidence. As I listened to his detailed stories of marathon lovemaking, jealous husbands, risky rendezvous, I sensed that he was gauging my response, watching me for signs of jealousy or possessiveness. I sensed, too, that such response would not please him.

  We talked frankly of sexual experience and technique, and for the first time I was able to express myself openly, candidly. David was not covetous of my past, nor did he respond with juvenile lechery. He listened as calmly and pleasantly as though I were reciting my school lessons, nodding his encouragement. Perhaps we spoke of the ridiculous nature of monogamy, the artificial construct of marriage. Perhaps we agreed on the merits of sexual freedom, some intellectualized form of the free love I had romanticized as a teenager, when I’d longed to be with the hippies in Haight-Ashbury. David was an anarchist, and in my zealous bid for my own social and spiritual emancipation, he seemed a wise and worthy guide, the engine that would carry me toward my destination.

  One night he opened the top drawer of his bureau; it was a treasure chest of sex toys, condoms, foams and jellies—a grown-up version of the pediatrician’s trunk of goodies that I was allowed to rummage through after braving my weekly allergy shot.

  “What’s your preference?” he asked, but I was too amazed and too shy to risk a response. He laughed, patted the bed beside him. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. We don’t even have to have sex. We can just lie here and talk. It’s up to you.”

  I felt enormous relief and gratitude. David’s generosity convinced me that I was on a new and wonderful path. Here was a man with whom I could explore the sexual forest without fear of judgment or reprisal. There were a few times at first when I tested the truth of his words: what would he do if I said no? How many times would he lie beside me with only a light touch of hands between us? But he held steady. His mood, his contentment, seemed to have little to do with me, though I could tell he took pleasure in my company. Perhaps it was his age, his maturity and experience, that accounted for the absence of slavering eagerness. He never mewled or humped or pouted. I felt as though I had been liberated, as though, finally, I was with a man who would not depend upon me to pacify. Liberated, too, from that sense of myself as possession, for David made it clear that he would not ask me to belong only to him.

  But who else would I choose to be with? No one held my interest like David; no one offered the kind of possibility that he did. Yet I didn’t consider “falling in love” with David. Ours was a practical and unencumbered union, and I liked it that way. Although much of our intimate time together revolved around discussion and demonstration of sexual variation, I found that what excited me about David had little to do with the physical. My arousal was intellectual. It was the knowing that lured me, that deep current that pulled me farther away from shore. Secrets, things hidden and unspoken, the moon’s shadowed
face: I believed that there was nothing that I did not want to observe and understand, no knowledge that I did not yearn to possess. My body was the decoy, my mind the open maw. Feed me, I said to David, and he did.

  WHAT I FELT in the beginning, then, was strength, sureness, new power, exalted independence. We hunted and fished, cooked together, read together, entertained each other long into the night and never spoke of the next day or month or year except in terms of activity and destination. If we did not love each other, we loved what we shared together, and I began to wonder if this wasn’t the more blessed state. When my karate lessons conflicted with his nights home, I quit the class, unwilling to miss out on a chance to share David’s company.

  Our time in public had about it an air of jubilation. David was a movable feast of hedonistic indulgence. People were joyful around him. His was perhaps the truest laugh I have ever heard, and when I picture him, even now, he is that man I first came to know, giddy as a child when something pleases him, his smile so full it wrinkles his eyes and sets him to bouncing with glee.

  Our out-on-the-town fun was freewheeling if dangerous: barreling from one bar to the next, meeting friends and drinking tequila slammers—a shot glass of Cuervo and soda banged down on the table, creating a head of foam that we drank in one swallow. It was the incense of marijuana, which I seldom smoked but all those around me clamored for: I loved to be with them in the basements, bathrooms, and backseats as they broke into gales of raucous laughter. It was the dancing, dancing, dancing at our town’s first disco. The lights were everywhere: the floor itself pulsing, the strobes, the mirrored ball hung from the ceiling reflecting it all back in a shower of color. Sometimes we huddled inside the glass sound booth, where the deejay shared with us his tiny vials of amyl nitrate. We closed the place down six nights a week, swaying in line through the Hustle with John Travolta wannabes (bull-necked farm boys jabbing the air), drunk on Pink Cadillacs and Wet Dreams and whatever other mixture of alcohol and syrup the bartender could concoct.

  Or we went to Modern West, a cowboy bar with a slick floor large enough to accommodate a small village of couples engaged in controlled collisions. I mingled in my shiny dress and strappy high heels, smug among the pearl-buttoned cowgirls twirling in their Lady Wranglers. I learned to brace myself against the pull and thrust of Western swing, sore the next morning from being snapped and retrieved by ropey-armed cowboys.

  When last call came, we stepped out into the street, benumbed by alcohol and the absence of light, possessed of a sudden and deep unwillingness to do anything but continue what the evening had begun. The word would go out that there was a party, and for a time the party was always at David’s. He had rented a new and expensive apartment closer to downtown, in an upscale complex, pool and hot tub included.

  The crowd was made up of men and women I knew or knew of, whose faces were familiar because I had seen them around town: grocery clerks and lawyers, sales reps and waitresses, some pushing middle age, others too young to be legal. The gatherings had an underground feel to them, as though what brought people to the door—and got them through it—were a secret code, some cryptic tattoo. Uneasy with the pounding music, the cocaine lined out on the bathroom vanity, I’d watch and sip at my gin.

  “You’re too tight,” David would tell me, rubbing my back. He didn’t like to see me turn down a good high, he said. “Loosen up, have fun. I’ll take care of you.” I’d smile, assuring him that I wasn’t the drudge, the straightlaced church girl I’d once been.

  David introduced me to his male friends with obvious satisfaction, but instead of remaining close by, demonstrating his attachment, he would smile encouragingly, then turn his attention to another cluster of people. I wasn’t used to such autonomy. Tom and John had hovered at my side like guard dogs, fierce and territorial, sniffing the air for rival scent. David’s benign behavior reminded me more of Thane, who had governed me with equanimity and had never been threatened by other men. In fact, David seemed to view me much as Thane had: not as a girlfriend, a love interest, but as an affectionate compatriot. I was a good traveling companion, game for adventure, not given to petty grievances and suffocating restrictions. I had succeeded in remaking myself into that hybrid I believed might grant me the greatest access into the world of men: a masculine spirit and intellect; a feminine body and libido. With my mind, I challenged and prevailed; with my sex, I appeased and confirmed. It was a delicate balance, easily upset should I fail to abide by the rules, and one of those rules was that I would not be like other women; I would demand nothing that might impinge upon the man’s license to live his life free of female imposition.

  So that when, one evening, I missed David’s presence at the party and found him standing in the kitchen, sheltered by the refrigerator’s open door, his back to its interior, I did not hesitate when he motioned me forward. There, I watched a girl I’d gone to school with kneel before him, her face damp and eerily blue in the cold light. I did not turn away because I couldn’t: I was mesmerized by what I was seeing, and I knew as well that my presence was linked to David’s pleasure. I also knew that it was not simply the young woman who had tantalized David: it was the proximity of those who might find them, the possibility, the hope of being discovered. My role was to bear witness, even as David kept his eyes on me, for I was the one on whom the perfection of the moment depended.

  I watched until I heard a distant voice ask where I was, and when I left the kitchen and entered the larger room of people, I felt dizzy and breathless, as though I’d just stepped off a carnival ride. I knew they were still in there, and that others might find them, and I was both alarmed and exalted by the possibility. When after a time the young woman came from the kitchen, and then David behind her, I lowered my eyes, perhaps out of some residual shame, although the emotions that filled me were too numerous and disparate to name. I sparked with the charge of negative and positive, the push and pull of learned rejection and curious accommodation. When David made his way to my side, he smiled down at me and nodded as though confirming the delicious secret between us, and I felt my identity shift. I was no longer an artless young woman, a Lewiston girl, a tentative purveyor of light pleasure. I was a coconspirator, a partner in the confederacy of the senses.

  Later that night, David urged me to tell him exactly what I had seen, what I had felt. He filled in his own details—her tongue, her teeth, the nape of her neck. Together, we spoke the story again and again, gave it color and texture, until I believed that I had not simply watched but had been there with them, in that harbor of blue light and cool air.

  When, at the next party, I watched David ascend the stairs to his bedroom, another woman at his side, I didn’t lower my eyes but poured myself another shot of schnapps and lit another cigarette, biding my time. There were those who looked at me with pity, but I met their gaze with studied nonchalance. I knew that, when the evening was over, I would be the one left in David’s bed, and that I would possess the secrets of the women who had long since staggered to their cars alone.

  I believed that this was a private and privileged thing between David and me. Any confusion I felt was replaced with David’s assurance that this, indeed, was what he wanted: my observation, my passive participation. When David touched me, I believed that I became for him the embodiment of every mouth and breast, the manifestation, the fulfillment of his truest need.

  But what was it that I wanted from David? The answer came to me clearly: not devotion, not domestic provision, but companionship. I wanted to be in his presence; I wanted the gift of his attention, the gratification of being his confidante, the one on whom he could depend. I wanted to be different from the other women he had told me about who had failed him, fickle and easily wounded; I wanted to be the antithesis of the female defined for me by the church, by my own family, by the books whose priggish heroines teased and withheld.

  This was what kept me there—not the sex, not even the perception that I was winning David with my tolerance and patience—but the
belief that I was setting myself apart, escaping my fate, ascending to a higher level of insight. Anything less would disappoint this man who had chosen me to accompany him toward discovery, who depended upon me to share the transcendence of his vision.

  With David, there was no denial, no boundaries, or so it seemed. Over the next several months, those boundaries would become more clear. They were his boundaries, and though they bore no resemblance to the rules I had been raised to abide by, they were no less absolute.

  Perhaps I believed that I could exist at the margins, that I could walk away whenever I chose, just as I had walked away from the house of my father, that I could pack my bags and step through that door, shrug off my fetters, and begin a new journey.

  I wonder now when my sense of that journey changed. I wonder when it was I first heard the shades being drawn against the light, the doors closing, the slow, metallic clicking of locks.

  ———

  EARLY SUMMER. I lay one evening in the sleeper of David’s semi, listening to his easy banter with the shift workers. It was the first time David had offered to take me with him to Seattle, and we were docked to pick up our load and head west.

  The tractor was a twenty-one-gear Freightliner, pulling a single trailer from Lewiston to Pasco, double from there into Tacoma/Seattle. My presence in the sleeper was a secret because no riders were allowed, and I spent the first few miles hidden behind the coarse black curtain that divided the cab. A pillow, a blanket thrown over a thin pad—nothing like other sleepers I’d seen at the car shows, with their king-size beds, walls plushly lined with fake fur and velveteen drapes. My Spartan quarters smelled of old smoke, unlaundered linen, moisture sweated and pooled against vinyl.