by Saskia Vogel
‘I have a housemate,’ she said. ‘He’s been setting up the place for me while I’ve been on the road, but it’s been too much travel. If I have to spend one more hour with a suit in D.C.…’ She giggled. ‘I can’t wait to set up shop at home, but it’s still such a mess.’
‘A few unpacked boxes aren’t what I’d call a mess.’
‘Sure, but it’s not good enough. Lonnie’s settling into something new, too, so I probably shouldn’t be too hard on him.’
‘Lonnie,’ I said. ‘I thought maybe he was your…’
‘Boyfriend? Uh-uh,’ she said softly and seemed far away when she added: ‘But our relationship is the longest I’ve had with any man.’
‘How long?’
‘A decade, maybe.’
I didn’t have any real friends I’d known that long.
‘You have a lot of visitors,’ I said. I was afraid I was giving away that I’d been keeping an eye on her house. She probably already thought I was weird. Fuck it, I thought.
She laughed. ‘They’re my clients.’
‘What kind?’
Orly tilted her head and as though I should have already known, she said: ‘I’m a dominatrix.’
My mind went blank. ‘Oh,’ I replied. ‘Cool.’ I did think it was cool, at least interesting, but it didn’t seem like enough of a response. Maybe she thought I might judge her or cause trouble, but if so she wouldn’t have trusted me with this information. I wanted her to think we had a lot in common, so I said: ‘I work with my body, too.’ I wasn’t thinking about acting then, but art modelling, which felt like a lie. Having done something once doesn’t really count as something you do. ‘I work at the art centre as an art model. I thought all I’d be doing was getting paid for showing up and standing around however they wanted me to, but actually…’ This occurred to me as I spoke: ‘Being naked in front of all those people is sort of a relief. When the teacher and the sculptors are looking at me, there is no too thin or not thin enough, too weak or too old. No “They went in a different direction”, “They loved your performance but they were looking for someone more conventionally attractive.” They don’t want any more than what I am giving them. I’m something to behold. It’s a break from…’ I nodded toward where Jordy had been sitting. ‘I’m inviting them to look, and they can do what they like with the image.’ I paused. I thought of Dr. Moradi’s sculpture, that deformity he’d wrapped in damp rags to keep the clay soft for the next class. ‘But it’s not always pretty.’
Orly’s silence and the way she was looking at me, calm and searching, made me think I’d struck a chord.
She said, ‘No, it’s not. It’s not always pretty. It can be draining if you don’t have a balance between give and take. To get there you have to have fun with it. Play. The hard part is most people don’t know how to ask for what they want. They don’t think they’re allowed.’
Her words hung in the air. Orly had a way of making me feel seen and, in being seen, feel indecent. She could see how much I wanted, and how I was trying to push that want down.
As she was about to speak, her phone buzzed, and she excused herself to check a message. Her expression became mischievous as she engaged in a short text exchange. When she was done, she put the phone screen-down on the table. She said, laughing: ‘The poor guy doesn’t understand yet that sodomy won’t resolve his self-loathing.’
My toast had gone cold. The phone buzzed again and she gave it a pat as if to calm it down.
Back at her house, she took out the eighth she’d bought from Jordy. We smoked on her sofa, side by side, looking out at the ocean. The night felt cold after the long hot day, and I pulled a throw blanket around me. When the smoke began to carve channels of silence between our words, I mumbled that I was happy we were neighbours, and I think she said, It must be fate. She smoothed the blanket over me, not touching me, but touching around me, tracing my shape, a touch I told myself to think nothing of, but which made me feel happy and queasy. I blamed it on Jordy’s pot. It was a good strain, not like what I’d found in my closet. It made the world soft and quiet. Everything was murmur. Even her housemate leaving in the morning. I looked up from under my blanket on the sofa, still half-asleep, and saw the petite man, Lonnie, hurry out of the house in a white button-down shirt and jeans. Housemate, I thought and smiled. I closed my eyes again and listened to his car drive away, her house sounds, sensing the difference in the angles of the light at my house and here. As I drifted off again, I thought this is how it would feel like to be done grieving. It would no longer hurt to be awake, reconciling a reality in which Dad was alive and well with the one in which he was gone and I was looking for him in every other man. I ventured a thought in that direction, recoiled immediately, and focused instead on being in her home. Here, where it was soft and safe. Where men were put in their place. Where there was no dad or Daddy, just a housemate. And I could still be anyone with her.
Orly wouldn’t let us leave for the beach until we’d found sunscreen for me. ‘We don’t want you to burn,’ she said. It took her a few tries to find the cabinet with the towels, which were in the laundry room, and the sunscreen, which was in the guest bathroom. Every cabinet was meticulously organized. ‘Sometimes he tries too hard,’ Orly said of Lonnie. ‘But when he sticks to doing what he’s asked to do, he’s perfect.’ At first, sharing her gripes about her housemate felt like intimacy, but then it felt like a warning. How easily she could be displeased. How much I wanted to please her, and be praised after doing as I was told. At the beach, I watched the ocean. Sailboats, surfers, swimmers, dolphin, no dolphin. Planes dragging banners through the sky. Our legs in the sun. I caught her looking as we talked, and was aware of how thick mine were. I wondered if she liked them or thought they were an indication of my lack of discipline. I told her, ‘My dad said that if I ever needed to talk to him, he’d be here.’
‘Have you tried talking to him?’
I shook my head and wiped the tears away with the back of my hand, but didn’t realize it was sandy, and so suddenly I was holding open my eye while Orly poured bottled water into it. We couldn’t stop giggling, and I saw Orly smile at someone as she kneeled over me, holding my head still against her toasted skin. Two men came over and Orly played with her wild hair and laughed at their simple jokes. She didn’t tell them about her job. If only they knew, I thought. Orly told them her name was Coco, and I said mine was Lola. They wanted to get drinks with us, so we walked to a bar with greasy hamburgers, pool tables, and men who lived on boats. The man who was for me and I beat the other two at pool. It wasn’t that kind of place, but Orly and I convinced the bartender to make us rum drinks adorned with candied cherries and slices of pineapple and dusty cocktail umbrellas he found behind the register. After sunset, she left with her man. When she hugged me goodbye, she whispered, ‘Enjoy.’ I wanted to tell her to drive away with me instead, but I watched her leave and watched mine go swimming. I could have told him about the hurricanes offshore, but what did it matter? I counted the seconds that he was underwater, trying not to think about what else was in there with him. One breath, two breaths, three and hold. Holding his breath so long it could have been his last. An organism, panicked, then limp. Pulled into an eddy.
We stayed on the beach long after dark. I hid my tears in the salt on his skin, and kissed them away again, kissed him as I would kiss her, loving his body as I would hers. The towels were wet and thick with sand when I was through with him. As I drove home, sore from the sun, I thought maybe one day Orly and I wouldn’t need a proxy.
WEDNESDAY’S CLASS ROLLED around, and the artists tried to find me in their wet clay. I returned to my stillness, to my breath, radiating with thoughts of Orly, and found myself scaling the cliffs. Down on the shore, woman atop woman. The wind flipping through their salt-stiff pages; from their rustling rose my song.
Under Fumiko’s watchful eye, the students scraped and pressed and shaped and cut in tune. I emerged, radiant in the logic of their architecture.
But no matter how hard Dr. Moradi tried, his sculpture stooped, lifeless, a sad tumble of clay. He was deaf to me.
After class, I saw him crying in the parking lot. Squatting against the stone wall of the room that housed the kiln. I pretended not to notice as I walked past.
‘You fucked her up,’ he said. And I froze.
The man was rumpled, seething. He stood, walked toward me. Stopped when he was already too near, poking my chest with his finger. I backed into a parked car. Red. Sporty. Familiar.
‘I always knew you were trouble, but when I saw you, you two. I mean, look at you, look at what’s become of you.’
You’re here, too, I wanted to say, but there was no time. I tried to lunge away from the car, expecting him to move, but he stood his ground and pinned me to the driver-side door. I couldn’t reach my car keys, what I’d always thought of as a weapon to hand, my arms flailing around his body, the long seconds, go limp, go limp, go limp, I told myself, but his body was holding me in place, and I let myself hang under his weight, his arm at my throat, and went a different kind of limp, the praying kind. I shut my eyes.
I thought he was going to hit me, but instead he grabbed me and slammed me against the car, winding me; my eyes opened in shock to see him red and wet, lips slick and trembling, his skin’s oily sheen. Even his hairline seemed agitated. Tears mixed with his sweat. He hiccupped.
‘She won’t talk to me because of th-this,’ he whispered, his free hand fumbling, groping, his sour breath on my cheek. I watched his face change, his short eyelashes stuck together, the deep frown lines. His pain. He had suffered her loss, too.
He looked at me with disgust. And then seemed to become aware of how our bodies were pressed together, a flicker of distress, what he might do next.
‘You’re a disease,’ he said, and let me drop to the ground, pushing me out of the way with his foot. Maybe he could feel me wanting. Maybe this is what I get. The thoughts came unbidden. I didn’t want them to belong to me.
He took the driveway too fast and at the wrong angle, first banging, then scraping the chassis. And drove off. Back to that house, I guess. A father who was not mine was driving home.
The parking lot was empty but for my car, and the sky was filled with stars. The breeze that rolled over those hills rolled on. The night was dark, and everything seemed as it should be, this pretty place with the salted air as it always was, no matter what happens between two people. I picked myself up off the asphalt, rubbed bits of gravel off the back of my thighs, in a parking lot in the part of town where once I had felt at home. The emptiness was large, the darkness a threat, yet the stars barely flickered. Burn brighter, stars! Rain fire, stars! Shaking. My keys. The door. The sound of the lock brought comfort. Curled up in the front seat. Trying to breathe. It was just me.
But then a door opened, light spilled out. I peered through my window, trying to keep out of sight. Fumiko was locking up the studio. It never occurred to me that she might take the bus. Or someone might be coming for her. Someone kind. Slender, slight Fumiko, who had not been slammed against a hard surface that night, who was not trying to remember how to breathe, stop shaking, Fumiko who might hold me, might tell me it will be OK, her clay-caked hands. If she discovered me, still here, stained, and asked if everything was OK, what would I say? What would she say when she saw me? I wanted to go back to where I belonged, to my own apartment, far away from here.
I turned the key, the machine smooth, efficient, fast. Sweet machine, dear machine. In the rear-view mirror, I saw her watching me go. She lifted a hand as if to wave, I raised mine as though everything were normal. I turned onto a residential street to avoid the red light.
The radio was playing an old but familiar song.
DO YOU REMEMBER THAT SONG? The one where the pop princess said she was not a girl and not yet a woman? The singer was stuck between the two states of being and thought she needed to take some time for herself, in order to become the woman she knew was inside her, waiting to emerge.
I liked that song, most every girl my age did. We loved the pop singer. Her bangin’ body and rhinestone-coated jeans, flaunting a flat belly that could be made round. She was pretty, blond, and talented enough. A shining example of what a girl can achieve with hard work, tenacity, and luck. And she was all flaunt, no action: pure. It was crucial that we understood no matter how sexy her persona, she was still a virgin: not a girl, but not yet a woman.
The song reminded me of the power I had sensed as a preteen with budding breasts, before the invisible boundary lines were drawn between me and Ana. Only pretending not to notice the looks I was getting. It was strange to feel my body speaking when it was met by those gazes, without me ever opening my mouth. What was my body making of me? Was it a liability or an asset? I was unprepared. And yet I aspired to be a woman, not thinking of what that meant.
For Orly the song was a kind of anthem. The song was released the year she started working as a domme. Whenever she heard it, she felt a certain schadenfreude. As long as songs like this were hits, she said, she’d never go out of business. Hers was a healing practice, she said, and by creating a compassionate space, she was helping people to avoid unnecessary pain.
Orly had a theory. She laid it out the day we spent on the beach. It was her version of Men Are From Mars – an idea pieced together from stories of blood countesses, drawing down the moon, the is-to-be of a certain kind of sorcery, and doses of science, both soft and hard.
She thought, when she retired, if she retired, she might write a book. She imagined soliciting help from her clients, for who else could help her write it? A house full of men typing. I told her about the fantasy I’d had about all the daddies gathering at her home, like schools of fish. She listened and said, ‘We can make that happen.’ Her seriousness was intimidating. It couldn’t be that easy.
Orly said her job was to help heal the rift between the sexes. It wasn’t about flipping the script. Matriarchy wasn’t the answer to our problems. We needed to see the value in the feminine and masculine, and then move beyond the binary, thinking of what unites us. To achieve this, she helped facilitate encounters with the feminine divine. She held the space for her clients and embodied the archetype that served the encounter best. But hers was a daunting task. The order of things was well-established. For women like us, the biggest fight was over control of our blood: how and when and why we bleed. Our blood was its own clockwork, but time was set by man.
With our first period, Orly explained, we stop being girls and the countdown to womanhood begins in earnest. When we bleed at the proper times and in the proper ways, we become women, complicit in reproducing an order imposed on us by men. Nothing we have achieved has rendered this order obsolete.
Lingering in the in-between – single, childless – is suspect and cause for speculation. Throughout the ages, medicine has explored the ‘diseases of virgins,’ women who’ve stayed too long in the in-between, not a girl and not yet a woman. For doctors feared what would happen to us if the blood had nowhere to go. Some thought it would flood our body, flood our lungs, make us yearn for death with a longing usually reserved for lovers, and we would wish to drown. Drowning. A bloodless death. A refusal to shed it.
The Ancient Greeks had a name for each of the blood spells necessary for a girl to become a woman. There was the parthenos, a girl who had begun to menstruate and was still in her father’s care. The nymphê, a wife who has bled in her marriage bed. And last, gynê: woman, mature and reproductive, one who has known the lochial flow. The blood spells chart the path of a woman’s life as moving from the care of one man to the next, never on her own.
I was reminded of the pop singer. She turned her back on the world that had shaped her and shaved her head. Some said she was sick, but she said she was feeling free. Maybe Dr. Moradi wasn’t wrong. If there was a disease, I was not it. It was something I had contracted, born of the science that makes sense of sex through pathology, a patriarchal order that fails not only women, it fails
us all. We weren’t asking for a cure. We were finding ways to give ourselves the permission to be.
P I G G Y
THE HOUSEMATE, LONNIE, who I would soon find out was called ‘Piggy’ for his love of each one of a woman’s ten precious toes, kept hearing you could find anything on the internet. It was 1994. Chat rooms were thriving, connecting people in ways that hadn’t been possible before. He wanted in on that, but for all the people clutching their pearls over the sexual overtures being made in these spaces, he was having no luck finding people of his kind. He had an idea of, but not a language for, what he meant when he said he was looking for sex. Tired of rejection and miscommunication, he started feigning outrage at the slightest impropriety. He draped himself in pearls just so he could clutch those strands in his trembling fists, trusting in the superstition that, to get what you want, you shouldn’t say your wishes out loud. Even this failed to summon them, the people with whom he wanted to commune. The pervs, he concluded, borrowing a word. It made him feel uncomfortable and ashamed, but at least, he thought, there was somewhere he fit in.
Maybe a different keystroke would have changed his luck, but what was a person like him to do? A person without time, privacy, or space. The only computer he could use was at work, but he knew what he was doing online could get him fired. After a day of database administration, he’d stay late at his desk at the university, stealing only as many minutes as he could before he knew his wife would ask questions about the lag between the end of the work day and him trilling, ‘Honey, I’m home.’ Liz, who kept asking about the CDS offering minutes of free internet that had started turning up everywhere, stuck to pizza cartons and in cereal boxes, they even came with their mail-order flash-frozen steaks. He didn’t want to bring his secret home, and the CDS were taunting him, multiplying around him. He was afraid he would be exposed. He could always get another job, but what if his wife found out? He’d never find another woman to love him. This he believed to be true. To Liz the CDS were full of mystery and promise. She wondered: Wouldn’t it be fun, joining America Online?
