She looks interested. She smiles, looking down as she slowly strokes me, and remarks, “I want you to say ‘please’ so many times that you get angry.”
I say, "Please."
I say, "Please."
A certain rage rises in me, a deep fear inside, a storm. There is a rage in my cunt like from someone starving. I have read about starving children and how they’ll snatch food from the others, even from the ill and the dying. There is nothing they care about more than that. Am I going to get what I need? Tears leak from my eyes as she makes me turn over and slips into my cunt from behind. I don’t know how many fingers she has in me. But however many, they are so welcome that it is surprising I have ever not wanted this, have ever not wanted Gemma to put whatever she wants to put inside me. Whenever she wants to. That I have ever not needed to be fucked elementally, at all costs. If someone asked me to hurt a child or old person now or risk not getting fucked by Gemma, I think that I would hurt them.
She fulfills my needs, apparently.
No one else has.
I feel like some secret flower-maiden someone has locked in a closet, getting it, getting the bee to come. It’s astonishing that you can get the bee to come.
For 24 hours a day, not just when she’s with me, I’m in heaven. That is not a figure of speech. I live with God.
Gemma doesn’t let me make love to her at all after she’s started fucking me this way. After the first time with her I’m not allowed to touch, or even see, her secret body. And I like it that way.
All I can ever even graze with my hands is her arm above me, her bright head clamping me to the wall.
But this is no problem. Not one. Not even a little problem, a tiny issue. Not a negligible one. Actually, not touching her is one of the best parts—because I love, love, love being the only one who’s given to.
My mother always told me I was selfish. It is, apparently, absolutely true. But Gemma seems to take it as some sort of talent that I have. “You’re so selfish,” she repeats my word smiling, punishing me and praising for me for it all at once by stroking the very center of my clit, the unbearable flesh bit, again and again and again. “So selfish.”
The thing is, I really, truly am selfish. I don’t give to charity, never give to beggars. I have never in my life been tempted to sponsor a Third World child for nineteen cents a day. I always turn the page. Little Frida will never send me her thanks, with a picture of her in her now-clean, third-hand dress. When people ask me for publishing advice, I never give any. I don’t want to lift up a budding writer who might in time compete with me. If I give contacts and helpful hints I might give away points I ought to keep for myself.
How can I give anything away, I who have so little?
When I was at the Village Voice, I never gave my interns tasks that could conceivably help them become professional writers. I just made each and every one of them rearrange my files.
G. stimulates me always, at every second, even when it becomes horrible, even when I’ve had way beyond what anyone would ever like. Paradise is nothing more than being fed like this, surely.
Maybe the third time we have gotten together Gemma gazes intensely at me on her way out the door and says, “I think you’re becoming a threat to my family.”
I’m surprised. But ecstatic. No one’s ever thought I was important enough to be a threat before. Certainly not in my role as a lover. I beam, a bright patch of sun on my night hallway.
She frowns. “You think this is good news?”
Of course I do. In my understanding, a threat is always the best thing possible, the most exciting, most important. Threats are what (and who) I love.
If I am a threat to Gemma’s family, she must love me.
Also: I hate families.
She looks at me strangely for a moment and says “I’m so crazy about you.” And her voice is ragged. Then she throws me up against the door and kisses me.
The rest of my life has been eclipsed by having sex with Gemma. Nothing is of significance, really, except things that relate to our sexual interplay, mind to mind or in person. Our constant emails to each other burn—I can’t sleep some nights because my brain is boiling over with new sentences to send her—but Gemma says our intercourse is literally mind to mind, too, that she can feel me throughout the day with her body, can tell what sensations I feel at every moment, senses all of my experiences as they happen.
Gemma is surprisingly mystical for a libertine. She also felt her babies singing to her in the womb, and will never be able to contemplate having an abortion. (Though she would go to the barricades for any other woman’s right to do so.) Gemma believes in mysterious forces, things beyond human control. She is a rigorous historian who believes in voices from beyond the grave and stirrings in the blood that cannot be denied. I think that is why I love her.
I don’t feel an out-of-body interface to Gemma but I believe her when she tells me it is there. She is certainly present in all I do, see, take in, think about. I do manage to work on a little writing in this time period that is not a love letter to her, but all of it might as well be. Being fucked by Gemma somehow floods me with creativity, which I cannot remember happening with anyone else. Words are tumbling out of me about pleasure and hatred and unbearable sensations, about paradise, about loathing God because the pleasure that he gives me is too much.
God is “like a tree that has somehow gotten inside me,” I write, inside my cunt is what I mean, God is torturing me sexually by “touching me constantly every moment like a scratchy and unbearably soft knit sweater that cannot be removed.” I like it. But I hate it. But I don’t mean that I hate being touched by Gemma.
In my new writing I go so far as to claim that I have some unique talent for sex, as though I were agolem sculpted by some secret porno-rabbi, programmed only for sensation. I write—and very painfully, I increasingly am also feeling—that this “talent” is also a unique wound, and I am a walking 5-foot-2 vagina. I have no skin. Or I am all skin. What is outside is always, also, in.
What I am writing about—and some of what Gemma is doing to my pussy—is scary, but it also partakes of my new beauty, my beatification if you like. Like I said, this is the first time I have ever felt beautiful, and some of my beauty lies in my selfish need, my childish need, my uncontrollable ability to feel sex.
I have to give a speech at the Jewish Community Center about being a Jewish Lesbian Writer. So I write the kind of speech I’ve never given before, about how I have never felt particularly Jewish or lesbian. I identify much more, I say, as a sort of sexy, holy kid on a motorcycle. The kid may be male. He’s an effeminate boy with long hair. I think he has pork remnants on his fingers. (Or perhaps in is just the smell of cunt.) He loves women but also loves being passed around by men. He has been at the back of my mind, with a couple other secret identities, forever. I also often feel, and tell the bewildered audience, like a 19th century English Romantic poet.
I expect God to strike me down for saying that I think I’m sexy. Or for “feeling” even a little bit like Keats or Shelley.
God does nothing, but the other two lesbian writers on the panel attack me. One of them is really mad that I said I was attracted to men, too.
I propose a “sexual food column” to an important magazine, in which I will cover, among other things, our “Oedipal” pleasure in milkfat (the root, I am convinced, of the orgasms women get from eating cheesecake), and the sadistic joy of eating the tiny endangered French bird called the ortolan, which you eat with a bag over your head (to capture all the bird’s odors, I am not making this up), crunching it down feathers, bones, and all.
I feel free, in a way I’ve never felt before. And I rock.
Gemma sometimes cancels our dates. She doesn’t show up the night of my Jewish Community Center speech, after telling me how good it will be to sit in the audience hearing me and then take me home and fuck me. The kid may rock, but I am bereft.
Next she calls suddenly to cancel because it is time for her
shift at the food coop. I go out to the park to deal with all the energy I suddenly have in my body; I have to shake and roll, all over the snow hills. When I get back, there’s another message from Gemma, calling from the Cheese Department just to try and reach me in person, to connect. I can’t forgive myself for having missed her call, but it is also romantic to have been stood up on a 0-degree day in the snow.
Next time she comes to my house Gemma says, “You’re in a bad position. I have all the cards. You have none.”
I am dumbfounded.
“I have all the power,” she announces. “I don’t blame you at all if you think you have a raw deal.” I do not have a raw deal. Not at all. Or if I have one, it’s like Zeus’s lover who gets to see him in his fatal glory, having a raw deal.
I reply, a bit angrily, that she’s wrong. Gemma doesn’t have all the power. I’m actually right, kind of. In sex she does nothing to me that I don’t want. I could be the original Cosmo girl, the archetypal fully-choosing-and-consenting Virginia Slims woman. In fact, I can trust Gemma more in bed than any partner before. The one time she even uses language I don’t want—“Be a good girl, just like your mother wants you to be”—she backtracks immediately when I say no. (The only time I do.) “No, no, forget that ... Uh, just like I want you to be.”
She is eager to please, in her way.
And she thinks I’m brilliant. I’m not kidding. My writing knocks Gemma’s socks off.
Right off her feet!
There’s something else. Whenever she fucks me she tells me I am “sweet and innocent.” And “good.” It is a fetish, sure. But it is also true.
I am pretty when I see her, not sluttish. One evening I am wearing a sleeveless top of white lace and a maroon velvet skirt, not too short. I could go to a party with important funders, in this outfit. “You look so nice,” she says. “And I am so sloppy, tonight.”
Gemma could never really be sloppy. She’s too good-looking for that. But she is wearing undistinguished clothes. Gemma can never have worn sweatpants, but in my memory she is wearing something that might be a cross between sweatpants and black jeans. Perhaps they are old karate pants.
She is her unvarnished self, and I am freshly showered and talced.
She pushes me in the bedroom, lifts my skirt. I want desperately for her to touch my breasts, which she hardly ever does. But I want her to get what she wants, not me to get what I want. I don’t care what I want. Gemma always turns me into a girl. A very sweet, young girl. “Can I take this off?” I whisper, about my top.
“No,” she says, pleased. “I like you imprisoned in lace." I am frustrated so badly I can’t see straight. But I’m so turned on.
I like to be imprisoned. By her. Even her partnership with Ann feels like a chain around my arms and legs, my mouth, my middle that allows me to be free.
One night I have my period but Gemma doesn’t realize until she is about to leave. There is blood all over the pants that she must wear going home to Ann. Gemma laughs ruefully and wears the pants turned inside out. “I’m hoping she won’t notice.”
But there are other signs of me, apparently, on my lover. Gemma tells me Ann has warned her, “You’re not being very discreet about Donna,” even though Gemma has lied repeatedly and claimed that we are only friends. “This is the first time I’ve ever lied to her,” Gemma says somberly. She strokes my hair. “I’ve lied!” They are allowed to fuck, but supposed to keep it under wraps enough that the other one doesn’t notice. When asked directly, though, they are supposed to be honest. Secretly, I am so glad the Gemma feels the need to dissemble, that Ann can’t help but be aware of me. And I’m openly delighted that my lover must go home to Ann with my blood all over her.
I collect the signs of me on Gemma, too. One sign is Gemma get extremely emotional during sex with me. “Do you realize that I’m coming, just from this?” and she sounds like she is crying. “Do you realize that I come from touching you?”
And she looks at me sometimes like I am a pool she wants to lap forever.
Perhaps because of this, it takes me a while to realize that their marriage is not as open as I think it is. I imagine our affair has the potential to grow into a lifelong passionate relationship, that Ann and Gemma and I and the children will spend tasteful but wild Christmases together at our Transylvanian-modeled mountain chalet, roasting free-range turkeys in an ecstatic kitchen lined in wine-dark velvet. We could be from a romance novel called Three-way Sweet Storm.
I have the capacity, perhaps because of the holy kid on a motorcycle, not to notice anything I do not want to notice. The kid has an extraordinary power to focus on one thing, like a woman’s wet vaginal love for him, to the exclusion of all others. Like him, I have an enormous ability not to be aware. Perhaps I am in a trance state half the time.
Say that I’m drugged by the world, and have an addict’s parched-mouthed need to get high on anything beautiful. So when Gemma mentions her and Ann’s discretion-contract the third or so time we have sex, I don’t say that I hate it. That I didn’t expect it. (Why didn’t I expect it?) That I was imagining the chalet in the mountains. But I try not to notice that she told me. I don’t notice anything she does that troubles me, or might demean me in some way, or hurts.
Our chain itself, though, is exciting, and the ambiguity of our situation is what drew me in the first place. Nothing is sexier to me. Tenderly touching me Gemma says, “The only two things I’m serious about are sex and family,” and the devastating ambiguity of that statement kills me. “Sex” and “family” are supposedly equal in that statement, but absolutely separate. Her refusal to acknowledge sexual love, refusal to acknowledge the mere fact that sometimes sex makes people feel things about each other, makes them want to be “family” to each other, is what, I think, excites me, brings me home to her, wins my heart forever.
One night she cancels because it is the only time the lawyer can meet with her and Ann to sign their second-parent adoption agreement. Soon after, she cancels the weekend I’m supposed to spend alone with her at their beach house. “I’m afraid of spending a whole weekend with you,” she says. “I don’t know what would happen then.”
Another night Gemma surprises me with an expansion of our time allotment that is, surprisingly, just as unwelcome. Ann has unexpectedly jitneyed off to the beach house with the kids, leaving us with the entire evening and the humongous house on Carroll Street. Gemma wants to meet me for northern Italian food and then sleep in a bed with me, something we’ve never done. It makes me cross. Now Gemma wants to eat yuppie restaurant food with me, like an ordinary lover? I’ve wanted to for months. But we don’t do things like ordinary lovers, as she’s already warned me many times. The saving grace is what we do together isn’t ordinary.
We don’t have time to go to dinner ever, only to fuck. But every time we have a date, I take hours beforehand to prepare myself. Not just physically, but mentally. I ready myself for her. Perhaps I make myself innocent again, each time, so she can dirty me anew. Gemma and I are a myth together, like Penelope’s shroud ripped up every night. My purity is magical. Every morning, like Scheherazade, I am still alive.
Gemma can’t figure out why I’m mad about the suggestion to go out to dinner. I just know, sulkingly, that I must stick to the ritual of preparing myself at home. I scarf a dry peanut butter sandwich—all that young girls like me, the fantasizer inside me feels, should have—and go to Gemma’s house for the first time. As soon as I open the beautiful black cast-iron gates, all my magic is undone. The Carroll Street brownstone is a gorgeous place, a massive bricolage of art and feminism and money that Gemma and Ann have pieced together from Victorian wood walls and leather sofas, radical paintings by now-famous Germans, peonies on most surfaces. On the windowsills are pink vagina sculptures Gemma’s little girls have made. They are all modeled on Gemma’s own, she tells me. All I can make out are big pink folds. In the mommies’ bedroom, shockingly, Gemma weeps. “I’ve never had someone else in our bed before.” But she hate
s monogamy. She fucks people in the people’s beds all the time! Ann apparently does it, too! I can’t tell whether to be moved that Gemma cares about dishonoring Ann’s marriage bed, or furious. I feel rather weepy myself. As Gemma strokes me desultorily on the bed, all I want to do is go home and have hot cocoa and cookies.
Instead, we repair to my apartment. On my bachelor bed, Gemma talks about my vagina in the third person: “She’s so tight and sweet. She’s so sweet and innocent.”
I like the words—I want to be tight for her, so she can feel her aggression stretching me forever. But for the first time since we’ve really done it, the sex doesn’t work.
I don’t care that it didn’t work. I love what she said, remembering it the next day. I love her talking about my vagina as though it were more of a person than me.
“It’s your body I miss,” she emails, “not your mind.” She tells me that in person, too. My body is, appropriately enough for Gemma and me, a properly desirable subordinate girl’s body, slim, curvy, and firm enough to satisfy all the rules for how a slave-girl ought to look.
Theoretically, her wanting only my body should turn me on, but it doesn’t. Good girls, after all, have good minds, too. I want her to savor and torment both. I tell myself that she does, too, like my mind. She’s just having fun with me. After all, she was a big fan of my book. When I tell her, in person, that my mind’s attached to my body she says, “C’mon, please,” and smiles at me. “Let me objectify you.”
On the early morning of our next date Gemma calls to cancel, on a cellphone I didn’t know she had. She can’t see me tonight because she has realized, horribly, going out the door, that “there are no green vegetables in the house.” She can’t fuck me, basically, because her children aren’t getting enough nutrients.
Growing Up Golem Page 12