by Helen Razer
But there’s a point when you need to cast away all the things that brought you together and just fuck each other as distant objects. I needed to push him towards that detachment.
‘You’re so hard,’ I said into his ear and, yes, of course I am aware that this is the remark of a hack. But, notwithstanding our revulsion for standard speech, the plain fact is, ‘you’re so hard’ continues to be an effective means of making a man forget himself. Follow this with a fairly breathy, ‘So. Fucking. Hard’, and even the policy worker trained in sexual discrimination safeguards will forget to ask you if it’s okay if he can grab your arse and will, finally, just grab your arse.
I kissed the anterior triangle of a neck that I had so recently found creepy. These curiously over-worked muscles no longer signified danger but simply gave me hope that he had sufficient upper body strength to fuck me good and proper. When I had not been imagining edge-play with masked men, I had been thinking that a wholesome missionary thrashing was something I had experienced only so rarely and so very long ago that it would now seem as perverse as a public flogging.
It did.
This straight sex felt so bent to me. I’m pretty sure it didn’t feel at all bent to John, who had smiled untroubled throughout. I didn’t ask for or do anything pushy or peculiar. That is, if we do not count my insistence on rubber-free sex.
Public Service Announcement: There can be no justification at all for the wilful shunning of condoms. Put your love in a glove, etc. Even if, like me, you came to sexual maturity in the nineties when the failure to use a condom was so forbidden, it would remain irresistible to you for years. Perhaps if you hate the stupid franger as much as I do, you should consider devoting the rest of your waking life to prophylactic technologies and produce a material that doesn’t smell of cheap sports stores and doesn’t make a perfectly reasonably cock feel like a polyp. Please. Do this for humanity.
There are those who will say with great confidence that ‘she really knows how to fuck’ or ‘he’s fantastic in bed’. I don’t know what instruments these persons have at their disposal or how they would calibrate them to assess the merits of a particular sexual actor. I do know, however, that I quite enjoyed myself.
I also know that if I had not been so receptive to pleasure this could have been some terrible sex. Which is something, of course, you can say about all sex, but I couldn’t shake the sense that John’s pleasure was entirely contingent on mine.
I know this sounds nice. I know people, most especially female ones, often describe their ideal sexual partner as one who gets off on their other’s delight. But lopsided devotion to my pleasure always makes me feel like a bit of a rapist. I’ve never liked another person’s total eagerness to serve.
Years before, I had lived in a lesbian separatist household. The young women who live in lesbian separatist households are, for reasons of hormones and convenience, very likely to have sex with all the other occupants at some point. So one night I was invited into the bed of a med student called Sherri, who happened to be unspeakably hot.
When I set upon this lovely brown body it lay, mostly, inert. She screwed her eyes up not with elation, but with disgust. When it became clear that I would continue to fail to serve her Sherri began serving me. She said, ‘You’re really enjoying yourself, baby, aren’t you?’ so often that I came very close to not coming.
As I’ve mentioned, such a lapse has rarely occurred. I come often and easily. Even when the object of something close to hatred. But this climax, and the exchange that had preceded it, wasn’t much chop.
After I’d come, she cried. I asked her what was wrong and she said, ‘I’m worried about my Clinical Skills exam,’ which was obvious bullshit. She was, I think, unhappy about giving everything and not getting anything in return. Even though she’d insisted on these terms.
Not that John was crying, and not that he hadn’t quite happily received my second ever full-service blow job. Not that he hadn’t said, at least a dozen times, ‘That was fucking insane.’ Not that he hadn’t gone for seconds and thirds and forgotten to drink Sally’s bad wine for at least half an hour.
But he did seem not only sensitive to my needs but dependent on them. He seemed to have a need for the needy.
It wasn’t too much trouble providing this delusion. I found that whimpering a bit and looking tearful and saying ‘I need your cock’ got him aroused to the point where he was no longer thinking about my needs and went on to develop and fulfil his own.
It was a bit more trouble for me to seem needy in conversation. Which is peculiar because I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so emotionally needy in all my adult life. But no one who talks as much opinionated shit as I do could ever be apprehended as needy. Boring, loud or misguided, perhaps. But never needy.
As we lay awake all night talking opinionated shit, he said a few times that he thought I was very strong. Very independent. Very sure of myself. I did nothing to correct this perception.
He went to smoke a cig out the back, and when he returned to my side he asked if I was an artist.
‘Fuck no, John. I’m a cut-price copywriter. Whatever gave you that idea?’
‘Well, I just saw a lot of art materials out in the back shed.’
‘Oh. Right. Those. They’re not mine.’
‘Oh, okay,’ he said, and even though he would have left it at that, I decided to tell him a truth-lie hybrid because, damn it, I quite liked him now and I certainly didn’t want him suspecting me of found-object sculpture.
‘I have an ex. She left, um, about six months ago and hasn’t moved her shit out yet.’
John worked in politics and had developed a good poker face for the game. But, he was a bit drunk and wearing only his underpants at 4 a.m., so the mask of indifference had dropped a bit.
‘She left,’ he said, and then looked embarrassed when he realised he’d emphasised a word that he shouldn’t. He was surprised, but possibly not aroused, to learn I had been a lezzer.
‘I mean, she left,’ he said. ‘I mean, why would anyone leave you, a citizen gifted of such excellent tits?’
‘I don’t know, John. Possibly something to do with all those forty-something Marxist men I lured into the house, drugged and shipped to Goldman Sachs for economic reprogramming. The bitch was afraid of hard work.’
‘Well, this is embarrassing,’ he said. ‘Here was I thinking you’d be worth a good twenty grand when I sold you off to Chevron to be retrained as a professional corporate apologist for oil spills.’
We talked sleepy bunkum for a while, and when the sun resumed its plan to fade the curtains, he identified all the birdsong we could hear. Then he said, ‘I like you and your cat and your smart mouth a lot,’ and continued to like these things quite well until the end of summer.
When he was here, I refused to sleep, and when he was not, I couldn’t. Damn Rumi for making me confuse sleep-deprivation with affection! There really is quite a difference.
John equals five dates as per my earlier stipulation, therefore thirty-six down and sixty-four dates remaining.
23
Half a season since she left
So Rumi apologised personally. Then Jesus wept and Karl Marx cried from his grave in London when what instruments they had agreed: things are pretty crap for Helen.
Let me try to serve this shit to you quickly enough that you won’t have a chance to say, ‘Bitch, I told you so.’
I learned that John had been seeing several other ladies. Not that he said that he would not, but (a) he hadn’t said that he would, and (b) the condom problem.
After I had been rogering John for a week or so, I got a hold of my ridiculous dolphin and had a grown-up chat with her. I had requested a full sexual health check from my doctor and I had asked John if he would do the same so that we could continue with our ‘unprotected sex’.
Which is a phrase that had always given me the irrits for its insinuation that there could ever be such a thing as ‘protected sex’ which there clearly can�
�t because people just seem to go about destroying the memory of the sex they had with you by making you cry and cry.
Anyhow, John had consented to the test and said that he had received a good report and I had no reason to doubt that his was not an organ uncontaminated until some dirty lady started ‘liking’ all of his posts on Facebook and writing ‘lol’ beneath them.
When I asked, which I did immediately after she’d typed a ‘lol luv u’, he said that he was ‘seeing’ her. And maybe some other lolling internet ladies as well. And, well, yes, he was sorry if he had compromised the integrity of our agreed sexual health defences, but I seemed so strong and independent he didn’t think I’d mind about the actual non-monogamy.
To this I had to say, ‘Well I don’t mind about that part of it at all,’ even though I very much did. And then, like a dick, I demanded to see him. We had sex twice on the cream L-shaped sofa in his lifeless flat, and I cried and I said, ‘We can’t do this again,’ and he said, ‘I know, but I love you.’
I said, ‘I love you, too,’ and I have absolutely no notion how to explain this exchange. Other than to say it reminded me, again, of 1984. Specifically, that part after Julia and Winston have been released from Room 101.
Following their imprisonment, the lovers meet again. They have given each other up to the cruel fascists of Ingsoc after days of torture conditions.
‘I betrayed you,’ she said baldly.
‘I betrayed you,’ he said.
‘I love you’ should probably not feel as though it were coaxed from you by a pack of hungry rats; as though you were tormented into saying it and that now love was itself the betrayal.
We continued making this declaration to each other daily for a month. It never felt particularly good. It felt like a dreadful confession. Once I got nearly as drunk as he was every night by 9 p.m. and I called him and demanded to know ‘What the fuck do you mean, “I love you”?’
He said that it meant he found me very difficult.
I said that he could eat my difficult shit.
He said, after I had been nagging for half an hour or so, ‘It means that I love you so much, I can’t be with you.’
I told him that I had NEVER fucking asked to be with him and he said that THIS was part of the problem.
I don’t think the conversation that followed, which was, you must remember, produced by two vain people inclined to think they can talk in Charles Bukowski stanzas just because they’ve had that much to drink, deserves any further report.
We saw each other once again to ‘work it out’ and we worked nothing out at all, save for his acknowledgement that he was embarrassed by me socially. We had attended a handful of gatherings together, always those of my circle and never his, and, yes, I had told a silly lawyer once that same-sex marriage was not true equality but equality under the law and should be shunned. I had argued with someone else about the futility of awareness ribbons. And I had told an inspiring liberal feminist that she only cared about diversity on boards, not wealth for all the people and, fuck, he agreed with this stuff. He just didn’t want it spoken.
‘You argue with people all the time about politics, Helen.’
‘But you argue with people about politics for a living!’ I said.
‘That’s the point. I’m paid to do it.’
I growled at him about how the revolution was hardly going to happen inside office hours and, ahem, given that his most recent policy project sought to assess all the unpaid labour performed by women, he should start by counting mine.
He told me again that he loved me. I said that I loved him, too.
He had tried to pick up my friend and hairstylist, April, who we’d run into that night at the pub. When I’d got up to buy both of them a drink, he’d said to her, ‘If I can get rid of her, would you like to come back to my place?’
April is a decent person and so told me this immediately. She is also a polyamorous person but she would never (a) fuck someone who dressed that badly and smelled that much of sausage, and (b) consent to a non-poly invitation, which John’s had been.
If I can get rid of her. This was an invitation to not just fuck but to fuck me up.
I’m certain he did want sex with April. Everyone, including myself, has tried to have sex with April. She has legs as long as an opera and looks like Grace Kelly might have if she’d traded the soft life of a Grimaldi for a punishing program of kettlebells. She is also funny, and once, when explaining her polyamory to me, said, ‘Helen. It’s just that I love that new dick smell.’
I’m absolutely sure he really did want to boff her. Everybody does. But he longed to embarrass me more.
I would like to tell you that at this point I never again spoke with a man who seemed only to tell me that he loved me, and then hear it in return, so he could defile those declarations moments later.
He sent me an official looking letter next day by courier. It had ‘SORRY’ diagonally stamped on it.
When I woke this morning and remembered what I’d done, I was stunned and unbelieving. It could only be the work of some fearful, loathing, intoxicated monster that I didn’t recognise as myself. Now I do.
Fuck.
The fact that my stink contaminated your life; that my degradation violated this wonderful person and her friendship, sickens me. It is unforgivable, but I am asking for your forgiveness.
Why should you provide it? I really don’t know.
I know that that I am not a twat 100 per cent of the time, or that at least some of the time my cuntiness is not observable and harmless. Why do I act that way? I don’t know and I can’t guarantee that it won’t happen again. I think I was improving and I will continue to work on it.
I know that the haughty little two-person club we formed was a useful and fun place to be. I know that your opinions and feelings matter to me. I know you are SOUND. I know this is a pathetic note and about as effective as an official government apology. However, unlike official government apologies, there will be some action to back up the symbolism. Here is a graph showing declining levels of cuntiness over the forecast period.
Gradients of ‘actual, estimated and projected cuntiness’ were shown across a one-year period. These made me laugh and I forgave him, because who doesn’t need a friend who is handy with a line graph?
*
I resumed my dating project. I met an internet man named Ayaan who did not believe in sex before marriage. Thirty-eight down. I saw a chap called Reid who I had met thanks to an associate. He was too hopeful and contented for my taste. Sixty-one to go. We had argued about the effectiveness of Awareness campaigns and ate garlic squid rings, which reminded me to bump up my lady numbers. To that end, I arranged to see an old university girlfriend, Sophie. We agreed about nearly everything and it was fucking awesome to see this super-bright, angry dyke after so long, but she was married, which I’d neglected to ask in advance, but, still, forty down.
I made plans with Ines, the sleepwear designer friend of Maddie’s, and I let John know what I had been doing. I thought how good it was that he had become such a dependable old friend in such a short time. I thought that it was nice that he still sometimes phoned to say that he loved me. It felt fine to say it in return.
He had said the Helen One Hundred was hilarious and asked me to keep him updated. I told him that I was thinking about recording this stuff and that I might write down an account of our Winston/Julia thing, and he said he didn’t mind much.
On my blog, I wrote a long and fairly fawning piece about how hard he had made me come. It wasn’t quite the worst thing I have ever written, but it was certainly the most emotionally senile. Anyhow, this post had revealed a single identifying detail, since removed, to a single reader who contacted me to tell me that she had had a coinstantaneous relationship with John.
We ended up talking on the phone. She said his sort-of cheating hadn’t surprised her. She wasn’t surprised by the fact that he had also broken out the birdsong trick to her the first morning after all-nigh
t sex, either—although she was surprised that a guy who ate so many sausages had so much energy. The thing that was really troubling her was the possibility that he’d told me that he loved me.
I said that he had, but only after we’d broken the stupid thing off. The same thing had happened to her, she said. They were still friends and she really depended on him as the emotional background to her regular life. He wanted regular updates. He said that he loved her, but that he couldn’t be with her because he loved her too much.
Now it may be the case that John genuinely felt this way about several women he had dumped at once. I do understand that it is possible for people to feel this kind of love. But that does not make it endurable to receive.
I rang John at work and I gave him what for and I said that I didn’t care if he had an important meeting about the unpaid work of my gender because if he really wanted to do something for women, he would fucking stop fucking messing with our fucking woman heads.
I went on for an unnecessarily long time. I said that I hoped that I had ruined his day. He said that I had. I said good and I asked him for four hundred dollars. This, I explained, would cover four sessions with Gerard, which were much needed to undo these months of psychological hijinks.
‘But, remember. I only need four,’ I said. ‘You’re a right prick. But you’re the kind of prick I can recover from in four 45-minute sessions. All of which will be with Cheap Gerard. Who is not even particularly good.’
John transferred the sum that day.
I do not know, but I do suspect that John, who honours his debts, did not continue to be a right prick. It was a hot summer and people were going batty left and right. There was a dry and spiteful northerly blowing into town most days and no one of my acquaintance was at rights.
Certainly, the heat had affected the ex. New life was brought to Gerard’s business that terrible season, but the rest of us were just stuck by the heat in old themes.
By the time the weather had cooled she had come by to take most of her stuff. Eleven seemed exhausted, but he had been wearing such a great tabby coat.