by Elle Nash
Sam put his hands in his pockets, shoulders up to his ears, and walked away. When he got to the door, he looked back at me.
“Yeah,” he said. “Friday.”
The rest of the day, Sam was more quiet than usual. He also didn’t mention Friday again, even when Jenny and I were in the same room or working the same shift. On Thursday, though, Jenny was at the register and I was stocking shelves when Sam walked out of the back room. He stopped, like he forgot we were both working that day. There were no customers in the store. Jenny and I both looked at him, and this wide, stupid smirk spread across his clean-shaven face. None of us said anything.
I considered the mechanics of a threesome with Sam and Jenny. Who would kiss whom first? What would I do if Sam was penetrating Jenny, and would Jenny be doing anything with me? Matt and Frankie’s attention that first night had triangulated on me, and while it felt like there was considerable pressure to perform for them, it was easy because I was the object being acted upon and the object against which their desires were playing out. If Jenny and I were actually to sleep with Sam, I wondered if she or I would be more dominant, who would get penetrated first, and whether this weird sexual politicking would feel good or if it would become very awkward afterward. I wondered if the feeling that I was both competing with Jenny for Sam’s attention and also with Sam for Jenny’s attention would leave me unable to act at all. Or perhaps the solution was simply to drink a lot, take a few pills, and let it all play out as chill as humanly possible.
I’m not really sure why we thought proposing a threesome would be some kind of revenge. After all of the time I spent waiting for Sam to validate me, I think I wanted to finally say to him, Look what we can do to you. And look how easy it is to get you to do this.
THERE IS A COST TO BEING SPECIAL
ON FRIDAY, FRANKIE SAID she wanted to play a game, which was unusual. She asked if she could come over to my place.
“I want to play dress-up,” she said.
Frankie had asked to see my place before. I was hesitant, in part because my mother had become reclusive since we moved to Lamplighter. If she was home, she was either completely overwhelming in her desire to host, bringing my friends slices of American cheese and Ritz stacked on paper plates with cups of soda, or she would be entirely motionless, slumped on the couch watching whatever was on the TV, Dr. Phil or Judge Judy or the evening news.
Playing dress-up seemed innocuous. When we arrived, my mother’s car was gone. Frankie unbuckled the baby from the backseat of the car and carried him on her hip as she followed me up the wooden porch. Jett hardly looked like Matt’s child, except for his lips. He had the same pouty lips, only smaller. Mostly he looked like his mother. He smiled and flapped his arms at me, gurgled in a strange language. He seemed to like my attention, and I was happy to oblige. As we walked into the house, Frankie spoke again.
“The caveat,” she said, “is that we’re going to go to Wal-Mart in whatever outfit I pick for you.”
My hairs rose on my arms. I felt tricked, but I didn’t want to tell Frankie no. I wondered what sort of outfit she had in mind for me.
The trailer was dark. I turned on the light in the hallway that led to my room, which felt foreign since I had been spending so much time away from it. My closet was a mess. I sat on the unmade bed, holding Jett in my lap. Frankie began throwing clothes out of the closet and rummaging through a laundry basket of clean clothes on the floor.
“Are you always this disorganized?” she asked.
“I haven’t been home in a while,” I said, although the state of my room was pretty typical. I had two perpetual piles of clothes on my floor, clean and dirty, and hardly ever wore anything hung up in my closet. I surreptitiously kicked the trash back under my bed, empty soda bottles and candy wrappers.
Frankie had me try on a few pairs of short shorts and a dress before she settled on a pinstripe miniskirt that I’d bought from a cheap, fast-fashion retailer and never wore. She managed to find the one water bra I’d owned in high school, buried at the back of my closet. She dug out a cropped striped polo and a pair of industrial goth platform boots. When she was happy with the outfit, I looked in the mirror. It didn’t seem so bad, even if the skirt was pretty short.
The Wal-Mart parking lot looked busy.
“Now for the last touches,” Frankie said. She pulled a leather dog collar and a chain leash from her purse. I looked at the collar and then at the baby in the backseat. Frankie fastened the heavy collar around me, the cold metal slicking along my skin.
Frankie pushed the cart with baby Jett in it, holding the leash in her right hand. I walked in front of them. It felt like a parade.
“I need milk,” she said. “Get me milk.”
I walked in front of her, the weight of the leash swinging behind me, heading for the milk. I picked it up, put it in the cart, and then looked to her for her next command.
People stared. Some shook their heads in disbelief. No one approached us or said anything. A part of me was aroused by the excitement, but my face burned every time I made eye contact with someone. It was easy to do what she said, but I was praying that my mother, or Sam, or someone from high school would not be here to see me. My mind was fighting it. You just have to do this, I told myself. Her approval was more seductive than my shame.
Frankie seemed oblivious to the people watching us. Once her shopping list was finished, she walked me to the lingerie section and told me to get on my hands and knees. I looked at her pleadingly.
“Don’t you like me?” she said.
“Of course, but I—”
“No one is watching,” she said. “If you really like me, you’ll do this.”
But people were watching. A feeling pressed up into my chest from my stomach. I didn’t want to disappoint her.
I got on my hands and knees between towers of socks and hosiery, the industrial-grade carpet flat and hard beneath my palms. She left Jett in the cart and stood behind me with the leash. I could see both of our reflections in a garment mirror. The low thud in my chest seemed to grow louder as pressure built in my head, as if my body was trying to suffocate itself. I struggled to catch my breath. A few people turned their heads toward us. She looked down at me, grinning from ear to ear.
“Now, walk!” she said.
I started to crawl forward like an animal. The tough carpet scraped my knees. I watched the faces of other people. I didn’t look like them. They all looked the same—clean, happy. I felt vulnerable and sad and empty, even as I was satisfied that I was brave enough to do what Frankie wanted. All I could think about was how I was not like these people, and how that was bad. I wanted to feel part of something. I wanted Frankie to like me so badly. I was ready to mold myself into what she wanted. The glee with which she enjoyed my humiliation was frightening and felt cruel, but it was hard to discern whether it was truly meant to be cruel or just playful. She was not afraid to demand what she wanted, and I envied that. I spent so much of my life doing what everybody asked me that I wasn’t even sure what I wanted anymore, if I wanted anything, if I had needs at all.
Later that night, I brought a duffel bag of different outfits with me to Jenny’s house, as well as makeup and a curling iron. Jenny poured me a glass of vodka and Cherry Coke and we drank as we tried on different outfits. I felt almost bored with playing dress-up after what had happened earlier that day.
She wore a bra and panty set I recognized from the lingerie section at Wal-Mart. The lace appliqué on the cups had worn down and was coming off a little. She tried on three different skirts, throwing each of them onto the mess of her floor. We were listening to a CD I made for the summer, a mix of late ’90s and early 2000s hip hop in between some top forty songs. I listened to that mix on repeat for so long that even now listening to those songs brings back the smell of Cherry Coke and the feeling of standing in Jenny’s room, trying on our clothes.
Her body was wide and sleek like a satin ribbon. Pelvic bones thrust out from her hips, which were
the same width as her shoulders. As she twisted, admiring herself in the mirror, the ribbon of her body bent one way and then the other. She bit her bottom lip like she were about to say the word fuck, like she was thinking about how good she looked, or maybe how bad. She got on her hands and knees and rummaged through piles of clean and dirty laundry before picking up a pair of tight black jeans and a white T-shirt.
“Maybe simple is better?” she asked. “Jeans or skirt?”
She brought the jeans to her nose and sniffed them before putting them on, one leg at a time, and then threw the T-shirt on, which messed up the plop of dusty blond hair that sat in a bun on her head.
Since we had slept together, I felt more comfortable around her, and less like I had to perform for a stranger who had certain expectations of me. I posed in front of the mirror and shook my hips to the rhythm of the music. She made kissy faces at me, and then at herself, at our reflections dancing in the mirror.
This was the kind of relationship I thought I’d have with Frankie. Jenny was not examining the parts of me, either in whole, seeing me naked, or in pieces with her hands inside of me. Jenny simply experienced me and allowed me to be experienced. Spending time with her was a release from the pressure that had built up with Matt and Frankie. I wondered why I wanted to spend time with them so badly, until I remembered the egg feeling, being encased between their bodies.
I felt like I could trust Jenny. I wanted to tell her about the Wal-Mart incident, but worried she might judge me for being weak or weird.
We danced for a while before I stopped to take another sip. The more we drank, the more Jenny would fall into me, grabbing the soft, exposed parts of my body.
At eight, we both texted Sam, asking him when we should come over. I laid down on her bed and we talked about work. I thought about sharing with her my anxiety surrounding who would do what tonight, and when, and in what positions. Still, I didn’t want to come off as weak by revealing my fears. I liked that things felt easy with her, and so I talked around my fears instead, asking her what she thought we would do. We discussed things like Is he just going to hand me off and then start on you and How do you get a blowjob from two girls at once. We laughed nervously as we discussed each potential situation, and then I realized that we had not heard from Sam all day. I wondered if he would disappear, and in a way I felt a sense of relief.
At ten, we texted him again. Still no response. By then we were both hammered. We’d listened through my whole CD a half dozen times and settled on our outfits and to pass the time we watched The Hunchback of Notre Dame on her tiny TV.
There is a fear that comes with opening yourself up like that, even when it is just sex. The moment Sam was pulling at my hips in the pool, I felt every eye on me waiting for me to perform. It was why I tugged him out of the pool, why he followed me into his bathroom and into the shower. There was a natural desire to only be seen by each other.
It’s easier than a threesome. Three people observing and experiencing a situation make what’s happening more true than if it’s just between two. What happens between two people stays between them, and there are only two truths. In the shower after the pool party, there was Sam’s version of events and there was my version. The truth cannot be known by anyone other than the person who experienced it. Add a third person, and you get much, much closer to it.
SOLVE ET COAGULA
AT SOME POINT AFTER MATT tattooed me, he let me borrow the autobiography of Marilyn Manson. On the cover is a picture of Manson with an overlay of ribs from a medical book. At the time, The Golden Age of Grotesque was only two years old. The album was inscribed with the Waffen-like double M’s that had become emblematic of the current iteration of his work. Matt had those double M’s tattooed on his bicep. I would see them, myself underneath him, and rub the blank ink with my thumb in the same way that he had rubbed the ink on the back of my thigh.
A week after the Wal-Mart incident, we were all hanging out at their apartment. Frankie was making dinner, the baby was napping. Matt and I sat on the couch, alone for the first time ever. My time had either been spent with both of them together or with Frankie alone. This was the unspoken arrangement of the relationship. I did not know how I should act with just Matt. He wanted to discuss the details of Manson’s book with me, of which I had already read about half.
“Manson is a Satanist,” he said.
“What does that even mean?”
I had never met any Satanists, though I had been accused of being one in high school many times. I didn’t know much about Christianity, despite the religious nature of our town. But Matt called himself a Satanist, too. He had also suggested I get the Satanic Bible. He said something about religion being an opiate, how everyone in Colorado Springs was just following rules for the sake of following them, and how Satanism was somehow an answer to break free from these constraints.
“It’s an antidote,” Matt said. “A rejection of the puritanical world that is always pulling you outside of yourself and asking you to serve others shamefully. Always asking you to turn the other cheek.”
Frankie clinked dishes in the kitchen, but she couldn’t see us. I found it hard to concentrate on what Matt was saying because I was so focused on the novelty of our privacy. I inched closer to him, but it felt wrong somehow. Although Frankie and I were allowed to spend time together, it seemed like she might be upset by me and Matt being close.
“Would you prefer serving shamelessly?” I asked.
“Maybe if you did,” he said.
He grabbed his own copy of the Satanic Bible from a bookshelf. I noticed words tattooed on the sides of his forearms but couldn’t catch what they said.
“Do you know what the Baphomet is?” he asked. I shook my head. He pointed to the image on the cover of the book. It was glossy black, and in the middle was this red-pink pentagram with the tip of the star pointing down, toward the earth. In the star was the image of a goat head.
“Inscribed on his arms are the words solve and coagula,” Matt said. He raised his arms into a prayer position so I could read his forearms, where the same words were tattooed. “It means to dissolve and come together.”
I thought about it for a second. I thought about blood, and bodies and blood, and how the coming together of different meats and textures created a human body and then a human brain. How the leap from primordial soup was a kind of coagulation, reaching back to spores and algae. Life was a kind of summoning. Sex was a kind of summoning too, a coagulation of fluids from two people to create another tiny person, the way my parents had created me and so on. I thought about the word dissolve and how bodies decayed all the time, the way my father’s liver had decayed, and how my mother’s body was slowly rotting now, and how I might also be decaying. Every pill or drink I took was a tiny death. I thought about how entropy seemed to be the natural state of the universe. How everything was coming apart, all the time, while also desperately trying to stay together.
“That’s basically every force in life,” I said.
“The Baphomet scares people because of that,” he said. “Everyone has this demi urge to destroy and to create.” He moved his face closer to mine. His eyes got really serious and he talked in a low voice. “The darkness inside of them that wants to destroy, to do the bad thing, that wants to serve themselves over others. Everyone has it.”
“Is that why I’m here?” I asked. “Are you serving yourself?”
“What I’m telling you is that wanting to serve yourself isn’t a bad thing,” he said. “Frances was feeling isolated being a new mom. But it’s also a way for all of us to push our boundaries a little, don’t you think?” he added.
I wondered if Frankie had decided that she needed companionship, and why that companionship had to include sex. At the same time, I had never been very close with any girls in my life unless I was also trying to sleep with them. I think it was less a tendency to sexualize every relationship and more that straight women did not understand me. I naturally disconnected from t
hem. I wondered if this was because sex, that coagula, was the real undercurrent of life. Maybe I had to be sexually attracted to someone to bother spending time with them. Or maybe I craved a tenderness that could only be traded through opening up and sacrificing the vulnerability of my body to another human being. A kind of closeness that I could get from only one other place, a place that disappeared the day my mother became a widow and retreated into herself.
I often felt my presence on Earth served as a daily reminder to my mother that the man she loved so dearly was dead.
Matt sat so that our legs were touching on the couch. Frankie continued to clean in the kitchen. She might walk in and end this short moment we had. His face was close to mine. The heat of his breath emanated between us. He moved his mouth to my ear.
“That’s how black magic scares people,” he said. “When people come into contact with the things that allow you to communicate with that dark part of yourself, it puts a fear in them. A holy fear. Why do you think Christians fear it so much?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I thought back to the times I went to church, which was not that often. “Do they?”
“Because they are lying to themselves!” Matt said. “That’s all god is anyway, a lie you tell yourself that you’re good and wholesome. Everyone is bad. Everyone. And the world is so fucked up because people aren’t willing to accept that being bad is a natural thing humans do. They are all just playing a game, where they’re lying to each other constantly until they die, because they are afraid.”
I was less interested in the religious aspect of his motivations and more interested in this dark space inside of him that seemed to assume the worst in everyone. Was I bad, too? I wondered what he thought of my motivations to be here, and of his own motivations, if he was the one who wanted to open their relationship up more than Frankie.
“So what of it,” he said. “Are you afraid?”
The whisper sent an electric pulse through my body, raising all the hair on my skin. My mouth went dry and my hands felt numb. I thought about the way Frankie pulled me through the apartment for the first time, how her eyes watched every movement I made. I wondered if she was also as nervous but had sequestered the feeling within herself. The authority with which she wanted me to do things, and how I followed—the way she gleaned pleasure from my embarrassment. She really did enjoy me, so long as I did what she said. I feared her authority, how sure she was of herself.