“Slower,” I said, to give myself time to get into it.
He teased me over my underpants for a second. Then he put his fingers inside and started fingering me. My lips kept getting caught and rubbing against his fingers in an irritated way. I felt like they were puffing up like balloons. I kept trying to ask him questions. I wanted to hear that he wanted me.
“What do you think of the lingerie?”
“Hot, baby.”
“The garters?”
“So sexy.”
I guess he could feel that I wasn’t super wet, because he got down on his knees in front of the sink where I was spread-eagle, pushed the undies to the side, and started to lick my clit. I moaned some more, not altogether fake, because I enjoyed hearing myself. But fake in the sense that I knew I was suddenly too self-conscious to be aroused.
I slid down off the sink and got down on my knees. Then I unzipped his pants and started to suck his dick. His dick was long and skinny. I felt like it could stab me. Usually I very much enjoy dick sucking and I’m pretty intuitive at it. I like to lick it first and tease it—really prepare the dick before I suck. But he was impatient. He grabbed the back of my hair and pushed my head closer to his body, as I’ve seen people do in porn. I gagged a little on his dick, pulled back, then continued, my mouth super wet. He moaned and it was hot. Just hearing the moan come up from the depth of his belly, looking up and seeing that jaw I liked, made me feel wetter. My juices stung my irritated labia. He grabbed the back of my hair and pushed his dick into the back of my throat again, then palmed my forehead away.
“Get up here,” he said.
My bra and underwear were still on when he hoisted me by the waist back up onto the sink. Then he ripped open a condom wrapper with his teeth and fumbled to put it on. He pulled off my underwear and spread my legs. I gasped when he put his cock in and began to thrust. It felt good, but also too much, like he was hitting a wall in the back of my vagina. Like a muscle ache. My thighs were chafing on the counter. My back banged against the faucet and I kept getting caught on the sink bowl.
Next, with his dick still inside me, pants around his ankles, he lifted me up and turned around, carrying me back down onto the floor. My back was on Steve’s coat. He thrust a few times in a missionary-type position, then commanded me to turn over. I flipped over onto my hands and knees and he began fucking me doggy-style. I could feel his dick up by my belly button. It hurt every time he thrust and now I just wanted for him to come, for it to be over. As hip as the hotel was, the music was terrible. Someone had chosen a range of sad ’80s and ’90s classic rock ballads: Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill,” Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven.” I was fucking on a bathroom floor to “Tears in Heaven.” Sorry, but no. What did it even mean to be alive? I started laughing.
“Rub your clit,” he commanded.
I obeyed. I could feel him spread my cheeks wider and begin to rub my asshole. He spit on his finger, then put it in. I could feel it. It felt like I had to shit, like there was something in there that needed to come out. I fucked him harder, trying to make him come already. Every moan I gave was out of pain. I wanted to fuck his finger out of me. But he put a second one in, then a third. I could tell he was trying to stretch my asshole.
He pulled his dick out of my vagina. I felt it bang against my cheeks, then my asshole. He pushed a few times. I felt a searing pain: like a giant hemorrhoid was trying to make its way inside me.
I turned around and looked at him. I was sweating.
“Is it in?” I asked.
“Wait a minute,” he said.
He pushed some more. I felt his dick get softer and collapse a little. I imagined it forming a U-shape and going right back into him. I imagined him fucking his own belly button.
“No,” he said. “It’s too tight. I’m just going to fuck your pussy.”
That was fine with me.
He fucked me for maybe a minute or two, then came. I wondered how he could come so quickly when he wasn’t even totally hard.
“Sorry, baby. Want me to eat you some more?” he asked.
I looked at Steve’s jacket on the floor. It was covered in dirt, and also a blob of semen. The strap of my new bra had ripped by the cup and frayed.
“No, that’s okay,” I said. “That was really great. Really hot.”
He tapped me on the ass.
“You’re hot,” he said. “But we should get going so we don’t get caught.”
“Yeah, as much as I would like to sit on the bathroom floor with you all night…”
I was playing it cool. Look how chill I was. But I felt angry and sad. This wasn’t what I was in this for. I mean, it was something, at least, not just ordinary, hollow life. It was a stab at the nothingness. But I had wanted him to really fall for me, obsess about me. Had I been used? Could you be used if you were also using the other person? Did the one who came automatically become the user? Or was the one who was less attached automatically the user? I tried not to cry as I put on the trench. I felt embarrassed that it was so fucked up, and I didn’t want him to see it, even though it was him who had fucked it up. I wanted to seem untouchable.
“Go out first,” he said. “So we don’t make it obvious. I’ll maybe wait a minute or two?”
“Okay,” I said.
I saw that he had a tote bag with him and a package inside had fallen on the floor. The package said “R. Garrett Campbell.” I wondered what the “R.” stood for. How creative could he be with his dumb dick flopping around and a first initial?
I went over to the bar and ordered a club soda, then applied lipstick. I wanted to look hot for him, collected. I sipped the cold soda through a little straw and pretended to be engaged in my phone so that when he approached the bar I would seem disinterested. Five minutes passed and he didn’t appear. He was really playing it safe. Then ten minutes passed.
you ok in there? I texted
huh? he wrote
Are you going to come out of the bathroom or do you need me to help?
Oh sorry. I left. headed home. That was fun ;)
* * *
—
When I stepped out into the late-afternoon heat I didn’t allow myself to feel sad or angry. In a way I was relieved. If I had come all over his face, then I might have gotten more attached. I would have been disappointed that he didn’t even want to say goodbye outside the bathroom. But his stupid pencil dick, his lack of regard for whether I actually came, the clumsiness, made me want him less. In my fantasies they always are dying to taste it, dying to make me come. They will literally die if they don’t.
Or maybe I did feel sad. Was I angry about the bathroom itself? I wanted him to like me in the same way that I wanted him not to have a girlfriend. Or I wanted him to like me more than the girlfriend, to care a little more. I knew this was not the nature of the one-night stand. I knew that what I wanted was something that couldn’t exist. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t something I wanted.
21.
At home I found a sleeping Dominic.
“Hi,” I said, spooning up against him, my hands wrapped around his warm belly. He snuggled in closer to me as though I had been there all along, sighed a few times, then rolled over onto his back so I could rub him down. Somehow, this small moment felt more intimate than anything I had done with Garrett. I kissed his doggy cheek and he yawned in my face, a long, pronounced yawn showing all of his teeth and the speckled roof of his mouth. He was so completely himself, could not be anything other than himself, and would never understand why I might want to be anything other than me. It would be silly to him, crazy even. We were as we were and that was it.
At sundown I went out to the rocks. The sunset was pink and orange, with the silhouettes of the palms etched into it. Stars were beginning to appear too, between me and the Santa Monica Mountains. I don’t know why but I started singing.
I thought of the Sirens in The Odyssey, their island, how they called the men to them. The men were intoxicated by desire and drowned. What exactly were the Sirens? Were they mermaids? Sea deities connected to death, to be sure, but how did they get the men to do what they wished? Was it only their voices that called men forth or did they have some other kind of power? It seemed manipulative. Maybe they needed group therapy for romantic obsession.
I also thought about Sappho, how her poems were actually songs. How she sang her poems and played the lyre. Most likely it was a sparse accompaniment, though we can only guess what the music sounded like. Theo had been right, it wasn’t really doable to bullshit about Sappho. Just because some historians projected their own garbage onto her, it didn’t mean I had to project mine. What had drawn me to her in the first place was a feeling, the visceral experience of the words, emotion carried by syllables. How the hell had this led me to theory, the opposite of feeling? I suppose I was scared of feeling. Also, you couldn’t get university money for feeling.
Now I had to pretend the spaces left blank in her text were intentional. I could theorize this into being, hopefully convincing readers that the poems could be read in this way. It was true, we didn’t want to project our narratives onto her work. Academically, my conceit was interesting enough. But there was no way to deny that something beautiful and magical had once accompanied the poems and now was lost forever. The nothingness had once been full of music.
The surfers began to come in, but there was no sign of Theo. I always wondered where the surfers put their keys, their wallets. Out of all the things they did—choosing a wave, standing up on their boards, staying on their boards, somehow not dying—it seemed the most interesting to me where they put their stuff. Did they have secret compartments in their wet suits? Wouldn’t their phones get ruined? Maybe they didn’t bring their phones. There were definitely a lot of girls waiting to get texted back.
I waited for hours, but Theo never came. He was probably avoiding me. Or maybe he was on land, out with a bunch of other young people. I imagined them drinking beer on a roof somewhere, setting off fireworks. The group laughed in unison, the tinkling of their voices echoing in the brisk Venice air. They didn’t give a fuck about anything. He was at the center of the group, lighting the fireworks and grinning. No, he was sitting over to the side of the group, sullen and mysterious. There were girls in the group—surfer girls with long beach hair, who smelled like vanilla and coconut. They wanted him. They wanted him for his distance. In turns they each came over to him, offering a hit off a joint, or a beer. He could have any of them he wanted. He could kiss them right there, up on the roof, and then lead them by the hand inside the house. But as each girl approached him, he held up his hand, silently. What an asshole, really. Why was he so sullen? Was he thinking about someone else? I pretended he was thinking about me. It made me happy for a moment. Then I felt a flush of shame for being so stupid.
I went back inside and fell asleep cradling Dominic. I had given my power away to Garrett and I didn’t like the feeling. It reminded me of the past year with Jamie, only Garrett was someone much stupider. It was like I had taken that longing for Jamie and transplanted it onto the next closest body. How had I ended up here again?
When I woke up in the middle of the night I had to pee like a motherfucker. I raced to the toilet and sat down, but nothing would come out. I squeezed out a few drops and they burned. Uh oh. I crawled back into bed hoping it wasn’t what I thought it was. But then I had to pee again ten minutes later.
“Jesus fuck, why?” I whimpered, curling up in a fetal position.
Dominic licked my cheek. He seemed to understand that I was hurting. He whined a little. I whined back at him and we whined together.
I wanted to pretend it was just irritation, maybe the dawning of a mild yeast infection, which could be snuffed out with a bit of Monistat. But this was no yeast infection. It was a goddamn urinary tract infection. I hadn’t had one in years, but the feeling was not one you forget. The dull ache in the pelvis, the urgent need to pee, the burning. After my first three UTIs I had learned the secret at my college infirmary: always pee after sex. Pee immediately, within ten minutes, if possible. But I wasn’t about to pee in front of Garrett.
I thought about how I was taught to wipe, as a little girl, after I’d gotten my first UTI.
“From now on you’re going to wipe from front to back,” said the pediatrician. “Do you understand?”
When Garrett tried to stick his dick into my asshole, and then abandoned the mission for my vagina, I did, for a split second, think, This can’t be good. Back to front.
I tried to sleep but it was no use. I knew exactly what I needed: Pyridium to take the pain away and Cipro to kill the bug. I started moaning little things out loud in a deeply self-pitying way, like “Noooooo” and “Why meeeeeeee?” Part of me was reacting to the pain. But another part of me liked being melodramatic, babying myself.
I managed to walk Dominic and then summon a car. The closest hospital was in Marina del Rey, not far.
“Be good,” I said. “Mommy is very, very sick.”
I heard myself talking to the dog, and it reminded me that I existed. Existence always looked like something other than I thought it would.
22.
Somehow, at five in the morning, there were three families ahead of me in the ER. Did children only get injured at dawn? One of them was a boy with a soccer uniform on and one sneaker off, crying. I didn’t understand why he was playing soccer at four in the morning. Was he playing in his sleep? His mother and father seemed so concerned about him, comforting him and stroking his hair. I wanted someone to stroke my hair. I thought about texting Annika, who would definitely be awake in Europe, but didn’t want to worry her. I didn’t want her to ask how I got the UTI.
Instead I texted Jamie.
Hi
just seeing what you are doing and how you are?
He was an early riser. I saw the dot dot dot of him responding. Then the dots stopped. Nothing. I bet Megan the scientist was in bed with him. Immediately I regretted it.
Then I texted Adam the wolf-monkey. I sent him a picture of my hospital bracelet.
Look where I am…hospitalized!
I needed to feel seen by someone, even someone I barely knew and did not like. I’ve always hated doctors’ offices or anything having to do with medicine, because I’m always afraid they’re going to tell me I’m dying. If I’m going to die, I would rather just die and never know about it in advance. Even at my most suicidal I feared the dying process.
I was exhausted so I lay down in my cloth hospital gown on the little bed. It felt like some kind of surrender, a sweet womb or coma. I curled into a fetal position and rocked myself a bit. Then I felt a little wetness between my thighs and realized I was dribbling pee. My inner thighs felt chafed and irritated, from the sex and from the urine. But everything was going to be fine. I wanted to just lie here forever. I wanted kind nurses to take care of me. Books were nothing in this world. Academia was nothing. Forget about boys swimming up to you in the ocean and graphic designers stabbing at your asshole.
The doctor’s name was Dana Ward. She was blond with a severe ponytail and had definitely never made a mess in her life. I imagined that she went to Cornell and had always been self-contained. She had a nice engagement ring—not gigantic—but big enough that she could flash it and make other women feel shitty. She was a left-hand gesturer. I bet she used the word fiancée.
“Let’s see here,” she said. “It looks like you think you might have a urinary tract infection?”
“Yes, I know for sure that I do. I just need Cipro and Pyridium,” I said.
“I’m going to have you leave a urine sample and that will take some time for us to get tested. In the meantime I can start you on those medicines. Do you get them often?”
“It’s been years.”<
br />
“Anything different that might have caused this?”
I wanted to say, Well, I tried to have anal on the floor of a hotel bathroom. It was not a bathroom in a hotel room—just a bathroom connected to the hotel bar. Also, the guy was a stranger. Also, I’m in a group-therapy program for sex and love addiction. But clearly it’s not working.
“My husband and I have been having a lot more sex. We’re trying to get pregnant. It could just be too much,” I said instead.
I seriously had no idea where that came from.
“Any chance that he could have been exposed to any sexually transmitted diseases?”
Was she implying that my fictitious husband was unfaithful? How dare she!
“Absolutely not.”
I wanted to ask if there was a chance her fiancé had been unfaithful with her.
“You can get the prescriptions filled and start taking the medicines. The Cipro could take up to twenty-four hours to really start working, but the Pyridium should provide you with some relief almost immediately. We will call you with your results later this afternoon. If you don’t test positive for a urinary tract infection I strongly suggest that you come back in and get tested for everything.”
“It’s definitely a urinary tract infection,” I said.
The CVS pharmacist gave me the Pyridium right away but needed time to fill the Cipro, so I lingered in the magazine aisle. I took the Pyridium with apple juice, which I knew I wasn’t going to pay for. It made me feel powerful to steal the juice, drink it casually right there, then stick the bottle behind the magazines. I began to feel some relief from the Pyridium. But I also felt like I had to pee really badly. I figured it was probably just the infection, the illusion of having to pee. While I waited I shifted from foot to foot, reading a magazine about celebrity baby bumps. The whole magazine was dedicated to these bumps, not the babies themselves, just the bumps. If I had a bump, would I be in a better place? Maybe I was wrong for not having one.
The Pisces Page 9