Sex Still Spoken Here: An Anthology

by Carol Queen

  A Short Story

  Holly Zwalf

  She tells me that her lovers have always been two-toned. The most recent, the one we both shared for a brief overlap of time, was baby-powder and engine grease. The one before that, vegan cupcakes and leather. And me? I ask. She pauses. She is thoughtful, and I like this because I know that it means I can trust her. Sea salt and eucalyptus, she finally says, and then nods as though to settle it—yes, that’s it. That’s you.

  She takes me away for four days, north to the redwoods. At lunchtime we stop for oysters, two dozen of them safe in their shells that we pry open and suck dry, like thirsty men at the pub after a long Sunday spent in church. I have always maintained that oysters are like orgasms, but these are different. These are like another’s, not your own, a movement in three parts—the sweetness of a beginning, the salty crescendo, and last, the tenderness of a body gone limp in your arms. That is how these treasures taste: fresh, alive, complex.

  The first night we camp, drinking red wine in plastic cups and hanging our bums over the flames of the strange eco-friendly faux wood logs to keep warm. Beside us the river is slow and silver under a full moon, and a small black cat from the farm house slinks around chasing shadows. The tent is cold but we are new lovers, and new lovers don’t pay attention to the weather. After we have finished the cat scratches to be let in, so I unzip the fly and she crawls in between us, and it almost feels like home.

  It rains in the night and by morning I am getting a cold, so I no longer feel guilty that we have booked a cabin for the next two nights. We spend a lazy day driving through the Californian fog, emerging occasionally beside a rugged cliff or a mock-chateau winery, sniffing the reds as though we can afford more than just the one lower-end bottle. The vineyards and the European-style buildings help me to forget where I am. Some of them are reminiscent of the southern parts of France, some the Swiss Alps, others perfect replicas of quaint English cottages. America has the knack of combining three or four different cultures in the one moment, a nostalgic nod to its European roots, perhaps, or an unashamed attempt to import a sense of timeless history into a young (in white terms) land. I am in search of a nice port. I have aspirations to drink it by the fire in our log cabin in the woods, or in the hot tub that we have been told nestles romantically in the trees, surrounded by fairy lights and tranquillity. However as night falls so does the rain, and when we arrive the fire is a fake gas flame and the hot tub is broken, so we drink the port out of Ikea tumblers in the tiny oval bathtub, our bodies stuck together out of sheer necessity, my back against her stomach, knees and elbows protruding awkwardly. Only our bums and cunts are properly submerged in the warm water.

  The next day there is sun, plentiful and strong. We set up our camping stove on the verandah and cook pancakes, flipping them over with a knife, and afterwards we wander across to the beach. At the top of the cliff we stop. The sun is hot on my arms and below us the ocean is thrashing around madly in the wake of last night’s storm, like a three- headed monster with too many elbows and legs. I watch the waves pounding the sand and imagine that force inside me, heaving, thrusting, surging. I am beginning to understand what Annie Sprinkle means by eco-sexuality—today I want the whole world to fuck me. I tell my lover this and she takes the hint, and when we get down onto the sand she takes me, swiftly, suavely, my arse resting on a piece of bony driftwood as I face the roiling water, watching it crest over the rocks in a rush as I cum in much the same way. This is the closest I get to religion, sharing my orgasms with the sky.

  We save the redwoods for the last day. Mid-morning we stop for an impromptu picnic in between one tourist attraction and the next, and after eating she leads me off into the trees, her hemp rope coiled around one arm. This is why we came here; this is the reason for our trip. We find the perfect spot: a young shaggy trunk, straight and slim, stretching confidently beside a stream. She ties my hands above my head and then slowly coils the rope around both my chest and the tree, looping intricate knots around each breast, the rope binding me firmly against the crumbling bark like a hug. As I am gradually restrained I try to match my breathing to hers as she has taught me, fighting the panic inside. The noise of the road disappears and I disappear along with it. I hand myself over and let go.

  She unbuckles my belt and tugs my jeans down around my knees, wriggling her hand under the elastic of my knickers. I am painfully aware that if someone walked by she would not have enough time to untie me. I also do not care. She fucks me, fast and then slow, and unlike on the beach this orgasm is gathered up from all around, held tight, and then flung out wide like handfuls of water sparkling in the sun. When I stop shuddering I remember where I am and I am suddenly overcome. I can’t stop laughing, I feel like I am on acid, I feel like I have transcended, I feel like there are wings thrumming the air, just out of sight. I forget about history and futures and sums that don’t add up, and for a moment I believe in something bigger.

  When we drive through the grand finale, the Avenue of the Giants where the largest of the redwoods reside, it is late afternoon and the sunlight slats diagonally through the leaves in golden bars. In the deepest part there is a stillness that is overwhelming. The air feels so calm, so solid, so sure. No wars, no famines, no heartbreaks have ever touched this peace. I suppose this is what two thousand years of growing upwards will do to you. Despite the sunshine a chill invades us, and I seek refuge in the heat of her mouth. She draws me in to the shadows of a partially-hollowed trunk and slides her fingers inside me, and instead I find myself shivering on her palm.

  We drive home with some of this silence still spun like fairy floss between us. We drive into the night, the dense emptiness parting on either side of our headlights and closing back in around us at the boot. This country thinks it is the centre of the universe, but I have begun to understand. This is a country where the lights are so bright that nighttime is a myth, where the moon is obscured by a neon sign. How can you remember your place in the universe when you’ve drowned out all of the stars? But tonight there are no stars. Instead there is a storm waiting in the wings, clouds obscuring all chance at navigation, no way of telling which is up or down, which is sea or land, which is solid or only a shadow. I am delirious in this newfound anonymity, floating oblivious past the unseen alien landscape, alone at last in this over-populated, over-consuming, over-suspicious country. But she has started to panic—I can tell by the shortness of her breath. She is from a place where the roads are lit by the houses which flank it, where roads don’t connect towns but connect houses to cities, where you cannot drive for longer than a breath without sharing it with a hundred others. And I am from a place where the distance between homes can mean the distance between new lovers at the moment when they realise it won’t last; I am from a country where the distance between us and the rest of the world means that we can forget our humanity and turn away those who seek it. And it’s lonely, but apparently it’s safe.

  As we are slowly embraced by the outstretched fingers of a glowing San Francisco I leave my sense of home behind me in the dark. Soon the road is flanked not by trees but by my fellow homeless—the needy and the maimed—lining the streets like an assembly of war memorials come to life, though one would hardly call it living. Theirs is a hopelessness that could rival the homeless orphans of Cambodia, though at least in Cambodia it’s always summer. Apparently the great American dream is only viable if you have somewhere warm to sleep, somewhere safe to dream it. And this is not my dream.

  They say that love knows no borders, but mine is eucalyptus and sea salt, and hers? Hers is the metallic tang of the Golden Gate, the rust of an ancient redwood. And I am trying to work out how to tell her when she says, hey, are we cool? and I no longer know how to answer. I like her, this butch with her feminist convictions, her romantic plans and her filthy mind. I like her so much but it makes no difference, not when you’ve closed down the borders of your heart. We sit there together in the dark with the gearstick and my history between us, craw
ling through the tragic streets. Her thick tough-boy fingers tremble against the steering wheel and I want to open the door and get out, but we are moving too fast. Eventually we pull up at my house. I look into her chameleon eyes as though for an answer, but of course all I find are more questions. What are we going to do? I ask no one in particular as I get out of the car. Make me into a good short story, she says.

  [go to top]

  Carol Queen

  Bio

  Carol Queen is a widely-published author of erotica, memoir, essays, and sex information. She is the founding director of the Center for Sex & Culture (sexandculture.org) where she co- facilitates the Erotic Reading Circle with Jen Cross; she also facilitated the ERC throughout the 1990s when it was held at Good Vibrations and edited the first anthology of ERC stories, Sex Spoken Here, with Jack Davis. More about CQ at www.carolqueen.com.

  Mini-Interview

  How is the Erotic Reading Circle part of your writing process? I have way too little time to write as much as I’d like, but whenever I work on something new, I immediately take it to the Circle. I receive loving and honest feedback and it is so valuable and inspirational. I’ve not done a “regular” writing group, but I think the Circle is so diverse and interesting; it’s hard to imagine another group that allows its writers to come from so many different places, on so many different things, and most importantly, come from so many varying levels of experience. It’s so amazing to hear a seasoned writer’s new work and a brand-new writer’s first-ever story, all in the span of a couple of hours.

  Do you write under your own name? YES. To me, writing is activism, and it takes the point off my spear if I am not willing to stand up and speak for my work and for the change I want it to create in the world. If I were concerned about doing this work, I don’t think I’d be able to do it––on the contrary, it’s an honor to be able to lend my thoughts, my time, and my name to trying to make a more sex-positive world.

  What’s the inside scoop on your story? Sometimes when you have a big crush, you try to turn it into something more; sometimes (like this time), you just let it transmute into the raw material for a story. This piece works out not only my fondness for a certain person, but also some of the many feelings I have about the Interwebs.

  Mirror in the Machine

  Carol Queen

  I’ve never gotten all the way to page 33 when I googled somebody before. This is really a first. I actually do so much less google-fact-finding than most people—the way I understand it, anyhow, the way things have gone since I was a pup, or even dating, which in my case should always have been called “fucking new people,” pretty much everybody now seeks all earthly knowledge about each other via the infinite number of Ones on the magic eight-ball search engine. Bosses stalk their new hires and moms stalk their daughters’ fiances. Boys and girls dream about Mr. Right, or Mr. Right Now, or alternatively Princess Charming or the right sugarbutch. And self-esteem is sized by how many page views each one of us commands. As my favorite columnist Jon Carroll has said, “You can, of course, google yourself—but you may not like the results”; of course, that’s true of any search for truth, isn’t it? And the glowing box on my lap that has in it all the information in the world, providing I can divine the right search words to find it, our new eon’s answer to the name by which to call a demon or a magic decoder ring—it’s chock full of truth and everything else besides, tells me everything about you, I think, except how your first kiss would taste. And I can set my subconscious to dream about that, in fact I have, so I already know.

  And of course there’s the alchemy-inflected secret skill of reading between the lines on each others’ Facebook pages—and thank god you friended me back, so at least I feel like I’ve reached the door to the temple.

  What does all this mean? One, that I haven’t been this interested in anybody since dinosaurs ruled the earth. No, since the paradigm changed. Because I had a crush this hot ten years ago—was it fifteen?—and in those days secret knowledge was gained by triangulating with your other lovers, watching who you liked and who liked you, fitting yourself in like a puzzle piece. And before that it was Robert, I think that happened in the old-fashioned way, just meeting, falling desperately in lust, letting love follow right on its heels like a puppy that has to go where the old dog does because that’s how it learns and besides, it’s afraid of being lonely.

  But you, I met your work before I ever knew your name, zapping electronically into my cortex and beginning to seed and flower there. I think this might be a new way to find the people we’re supposed to know, but maybe it’s only a coincidence, a distraction, a haze over the landscape from a fire that was burning already. Maybe, too, this is just as starfucky as I have ever gotten. Anyway, it suddenly seemed important, very important, to google you, and now I have learned several new things about you, and I’m only up to page 33, and there are 864,000 results, so it seems as though this project will continue. Clearly I haven’t wanted to know someone the way I want to know you since the computer gave us the opportunity to see a person sliced sushi-thin and laid out forever, each bit transparent, adding up to everything if only you find that all the links are live.

  And even with all that info sizzling on the superhighway like a mirage cooking on the asphalt—well, it is a mirage, isn’t it? I accumulate bits of knowledge. I try to find holes and things that fit into holes, like tinkertoys expanding out into a shape I can recognize. No, it’s more like stacking the facts up into a house of cards. I don’t know what’s foundational. I don’t know which of these bits of data you would even consider true. You do have a wiki page, and the skeleton of what I know about you is there, but where is the spirit that animates the bones of your life? And if all that’s onscreen are dead words, why have I even bothered to get to page 33?

  Also, you have a common name and I have to sift and winnow down each line listed for me on each page to see if it’s you at all. I already found all the surrealism I expected plus some that is just universal bonus, the great laughter of the stars asking me whether my love is true enough to tell you apart from the woman who cut her daughter’s arms off to devote her to God, and the man whose night in a motel with two hookers started out just great, until …

  I can tell you apart from all of them, mostly. I see obituaries for you on every page and I know you’re not dead; that’s comforting, given that I hope one day to drift off to sleep with two of your fingers still hooked into my cunt, my hand on your heart. I can see your shaved head but not, however, anything that tells me whether I will be met more happily by you if I myself am shaved. You brilliant children today, you shave everything, don’t you? How would I know this? Why do I think I believe it?

  So far I’m not clear whether you like to fuck or be fucked, dance or watch the dance—both, I think, I think you go both ways about everything, but maybe that’s only because I do, only me looking for a mirror in the machine and pretending I found one in you.

  You make your own mirrors, I think; you like the space under water, not, apparently, associating it with the world of the drowned. You’re not emailing me back fast enough, but you sent me a picture and used the word love with it. We who will not be colonized by love use that word in so many ways, like a spice, a gift, a vow, even just a flirt, maybe even a flirt we don’t intend ever to ignite. I wonder whether one of these googled pages will tell me what that word means to you. Also whether you fuck boys or girls. Also whether you fuck people younger than you, or older. Because I am older, and I always will be, won’t I?

  And this brings me to Complication Number One. I’m so glad that “It’s complicated” is now an option for us to use to define our relationship status, because it always has been complicated, and I believe, thinking backward, that I have always wanted it to be this way: I have never wanted it simple when I could have it involved, even involuted, spiraled around like a shell or the universe. In that sense you are perfect, this is perfect. But I have seen someone like me recently, older than she used to be,
fall in lust, be caught in a crush, and it was like she dropped her panties on the bus, not on purpose, her dignity lost up her cunt, teetering and without any footing. Inside, where I have for quite a long time stayed still like an animal frozen in the grass, not sure if I’m rabbit or fox or, in fact, a cougar waiting to come out of her cave, inside I feel the heat of that welling-up of desire. The gratitude. The whispered admission that I was not sure how much more of this I was in line for. I’m afraid of it, really. Of course I want it, but to tip over and have everything spill out?

  That assumes that it would spill. Is there a time when all the contents of my desire, everything stacked up like a Jell-O parfait with colors and textures matched like my mom’s old pastel pantsuits, will jell? Will hold together and not moistly crack open and apart like the heart’s own earthquake? Lust and connection, the hormonal roil of new love, even the love that isn’t capital-L, first act of the drama, expectation starting to bubble like the soup you can’t afford to burn? If I can pray for that time to have arrived, and really what else would I work up enough ego to pray for—a state of grace where I can hope for humility enough to float desire there on the pond whose waters you retreat under, humility enough to avoid humiliation if the boat casts the wrong shadow on the ripples you go underneath to watch. I can’t even swim, so your water thing? It is the biggest mystery to me.

  Are you down there for the light and the vision change? Are you there to block out almost all the sound of the surface world? Are you there because you like to flirt with drowning, or need to, or are just waiting to be taken? That’s what love is, to me. It’s what love has been. I don’t know, in fact, what it is now. Here’s my blood: the last time it burned, a chemist could have filtered out hormones at a titer high enough to drop in the reservoir and turn the whole city on. That’s what I wanted, trying to drip it out on the page when I wrote about fucking, hot enough to sink through your skin like LSD if your fingers touched the words. I wanted to blur the people together into a shimmering electric band of fuck, gleaming across the city the way the Northern Lights color the sky.