Instead I text you with the name and address of yet another motel, and a time to arrive. I mention nothing of the test, of my contaminated state.
And so I wait: naked, ass facing the door. You have texted back, to let me know you are on your way, and in what position you desire to find me. Waves of fear and arousal roil through me, starting at my core and rolling outward in both directions. Electric sparks shoot down my legs; my body feels plugged into an outlet. The curtains are drawn, blocking out spring sunlight. My phone lies next to me on the bed but I already know you will not text to signal your actual arrival: you will want to catch me unaware. I don’t know what will touch me first: your hand, your belt, your cock, your tongue. What you don’t know: I’m gyrating my hips uncontrollably, like something in heat, even before you’re in the room. Later, you will think I’m doing this for your benefit, you will give a throaty laugh and say, “Mmm, very nice, do that again,” but the truth is my body is already beyond performing, is a thing outside my control. I keep lowering my face to the scratchy bedspread, shy, exquisitely, intimately humiliated. Gooseflesh crawls on my skin. My stomach drops miles on a rotation of every few seconds. I feel hyperaware of air touching my splayed-open parts. A lump keeps rising in my throat. Wild, unrestrained joy.
Are there things I’m not supposed to want anymore? Am I supposed to be fixed, cured, healed? That’s not what this is about. That’s a punch line that isn’t coming. I don’t want to live in a world with those borders. It would hurt me if you couldn’t bear to hurt me, I whispered to you, the first night I whipped you and showed you how a blow could feel like a caress. You had never liked pain. You didn’t spend your childhood burning and cutting yourself like I did, and floating away on the sweet endorphin release. Pain was not your first morphine. You had always been “curious” but afraid. You had submissive fantasies, but not masochistic ones. The borders of sensation, though, are less neatly delineated than most people believe. The first time I saw you fall away from yourself into subspace, I felt like some combination of playground pusher and heart surgeon and god. You were smiling, no longer twitching from each strike, a quiet laugh rolling low inside you that sounded like a purr.
Am I supposed to stop needing what I need, just because I no longer need Bebe?
There are parts of every story that don’t fit. The loose threads of a psyche, of a body, that won’t pull taut. Here is the truth: I didn’t tell you about the BRCA gene not because I had some nefarious plan (I had, I promise you Nick, no nefarious plan . . . not yet), but because I was afraid that if I told you I was radically predisposed to cancer—that I might even at that moment be “sick”—you wouldn’t fuck me the same way anymore. I was afraid of your pity. I was afraid of Us turning into some sanitized, sad thing where you would make haltingly gentle love to me and your tears would drop down onto my face; I was afraid of doctors’ offices and holding hands in waiting rooms; I was afraid—more than anything else—that you would hear this almost comedically hideous news and cut your losses and run, and here in this hotel room, that is the goddamn opposite of what I need from you.
I need you to take me outside of myself. I am a barn door you didn’t open but cannot shut. It’s more than that, too. I love you, which has both nothing and everything to do with this. With love, everything old is new again, the human heart so perilously capable of perpetual renewal. Every tree once eaten from fails to preclude a new tree never seen before, bearing new fruit. I wait for you. Your key card, your hand on the door, your skin like warm electric silk, your belt. Hurry. Arrive. Touch me. Thrill me. Hurt me. See me. Save me. Please, now, please.
A word about desire: there are no words about desire.
Later, I don’t want Bebe to hear me making the call, so I park outside the apartment, my body still vibrating and rolling with you, and look up Ezme’s number on my phone. I’m hoping for voicemail, though fuck knows what I think I would say to voicemail in a situation like this. Instead I get Ezme herself, businesslike and chirpy, near the end of her workday. I say things like, “How’s your mom?” and listen to her answers: “Two weeks until she’s done with chemo as long as her white blood cell count is high enough on Friday to get treated,” and, “She had to have a blood transfusion last week before they’d give her chemo again,” and, “She’s on track for remission—if she can just get two more treatments on schedule, her CA 125 numbers are basically cutting in half after every treatment, and she’ll be there.” I don’t say that, statistically, “there” only lasts a couple of years, tops. I don’t say that the chances of Isabel living another five years are practically nil. Ezme isn’t Eddie. She knows that.
“Has your mother,” I begin—your mother, your mother—“talked to you about being tested for the BRCA gene?”
I don’t know what I expect, actually. She could say, “What’s that?” or she could say in a patronizing tone of voice that of course she knew and that she thought her mother would have told me by now. What I don’t expect is for her to say, “Oh. I’m sorry, it’s just my mother didn’t think you would need to worry about that since your genetics only overlap by half.”
“What?” I ask.
“Just, you know, because of only being her half sister.”
“I . . .”
“She said that since nobody on Abuela’s side of the family has ever had cancer, it had to be from her father’s side, but Abuela had already left him when you were conceived. She said you knew that, that it wasn’t a secret or anything.”
I hold the phone away from my face for a moment, staring at it. I’m parked on Ravenswood, where there’s not much traffic, warehouses lining the east end of the street and train tracks lining the west end. “Let me get this straight,” I say to my clandestine younger sister. “Isabel says that since Mami was whoring around at the time of my conception, it was just fine to risk my possibly dying of ovarian cancer. Am I understanding this correctly?”
“Look,” Ezme says, her voice perfect ice and poise, “My mother would never say that. She doesn’t talk that way about people. I’m sorry you’re offended, but this is between the two of you.”
“Oh, it’s between the two of us, all right.”
“I’ve already been tested,” Ezme says. “If you want to know, I didn’t think she was making the right decision not to tell you, but it wasn’t my business.”
“I’m none of your business. I’m nothing to you so why should you get involved.”
“I can see you’re very upset, so I should really go.”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask why I should be upset that my actual whore of a mother is trying to pass my fake mother off as a whore, but instead I blurt out, “Wait! Ezme, wait. You got tested. Are you okay?”
“I tested positively for the gene,” she says, calmly. “But it isn’t really a big deal. I’ll wait until I have children, and then I’ll have a hysterectomy in my thirties. It really isn’t an issue. I apologize for this awkward situation.”
Our mother’s memorial service will be the last time I ever see her.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, Pablo Neruda wrote in his “Sonnet XVII,” in secret, between the shadow and the soul. This was one of my favorite poems even before I met you, Nick. I wanted to be the object of the poem, the way every woman wants to be Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne or Bob Dylan’s Sara. Later, I imagined that you and I might get matching XVII tattoos, or even between the shadow and the soul inked into our flesh, someday, when we were together officially. It didn’t occur to me that if we were living in the light, I wouldn’t be your “dark thing” anymore. I didn’t let myself acknowledge that everything we did “in secret” was at Emily’s expense. Or, fuck it, that’s a lie—the truth is that I felt special in my darkness. I believed darkness more worthy of passion. This belief predated you, as though I conjured you into being with the force of it. If anything, after my genetic testing came back, this sense of darkness as privileged only amplified—made me the doomed heroine, while Emily—bland, breeder, blond Emily�
�was somewhere offscreen on her monotonous bed rest, languishing as boring saints do, never reaching the heights of experience reserved for those like us.
That you will wish I could have changed places with her by the time I’m done with this seems self-evident, so why fight it?
Something reckless sets in.
Is it the fact that I am secretly in the countdown to my surgery—the preventative hysterectomy that will take place sometime after the Community Baby is born and everything has settled down? I am keeping my breasts for now—Isabel’s cancer hasn’t spread there, so I’m telling myself this affords me time. The hysterectomy itself, though, will bring on premature menopause. I will no longer menstruate; I will become the target market for personal lubricants instead of being so perpetually wet since we began that I can drench your eyes in me until you cannot see. I will never have a baby. Would I want a baby? Although I am positively geriatric by the standards of my family’s childbearing timeline, in my own adult tribe I am young—why would I have to decide such a thing right now? Bebe seems in a vague way to find maternal behavior an affront to feminism, but watch her go on to parent with her next girlfriend—isn’t that how this always works? Watch her settle down into alternative family bliss with some nice stripper who happens to be a doula on the side.
I’m in a kind of diffuse mourning I can’t talk about. You have two children. You are married. What am I supposed to say?
“I wish I knew Jay better,” I say instead, and you tell me, “You could spend some time with him, you know—from the outside, we’re practically family.”
Recklessness has overcome us and I don’t know how to tamp it down. Danger and longing electrify the air between us. Every moment feels larger than life. You are practically a single parent since Emily became preeclamptic. She is busy lying on her side, avoiding salt, popping steroids that make her moody and waiting it out until the baby is developed enough to be viable. Today, I am bleeding. I will have, if things go according to plan, three more periods after this one, and then I will be done. No more communists in the funhouse, as they say in Denmark. Sexton’s not a woman quite.
“Jay and I are going to the Nature Museum,” your voice says on the phone. “He loves the butterfly sanctuary.” I don’t know what you are talking about. I have never been to a “nature museum.” This is not the sort of thing my childhood included, if it even existed then. “You could join us,” you say, and I should refuse—I know I should tell you you’re being careless—but I say immediately, “I’d love to.”
The butterfly sanctuary is like a greenhouse, hot as a jungle inside. The air feels thick inside my lungs. At first, it doesn’t seem real—doesn’t seem possible—that so much flight can take place in one confined space. We sit on a bench while butterflies soar all over the glass-encased room, high above us toward the vaulted ceilings, then swooping back through the dense greenery, fluttering, to land on your son’s arms. They are everywhere, mariposas, winged, fragile, wild. When I was younger I identified with the moth, perpetually flying into flames, self-annihilating. I wanted a tattoo of a moth on the inside of my forearm but I worried people might mistake it for a butterfly. Beautiful things annoyed and bored me. Everything I love is ugly, Ani DiFranco sang. Now, the butterfly and the moth seem like essential sides of a coin. Emerging in a new form from a cocoon—reinvention—seems the opposite of boring. I sit inside the sanctuary, our knees occasionally brushing, intoxicated on beauty.
“It would be easier,” you say, “if Emily weren’t such a good, solid person. All she’s ever done is help and support me. I wish I had any justification at all for what I want.”
For no reason anyone has been able to ascertain, your wife is using her body as a selfless vessel. If her life isn’t exactly in danger, it’s close. Emily is the Isabel of this story, saving everyone, but I am still on the outside, never among the rescued. Emily is the one who would throw herself on the pyre, while I’m not sure I have ever done anything altruistic in my life.
“Bebe supported me for years, too,” I say, quietly. “She got me through college—given what I was like back then, she may have saved my life. She may not present as saintly like Emily does, but that doesn’t mean she deserves to be lied to and betrayed.”
You look taken aback. “I wasn’t talking about meritocracy,” you say. “I wasn’t trying to make it a contest. I just meant—I love Emily, she’s great, she’s one of the most competent people I’ve ever met, but kind, too—a good mother. But I’ve never for five minutes felt around her the way I feel around you.”
The thing about you is that your skin is white marble lit from the inside; the thing about you is that your eyes ignite things, and your lips are as crazy beautiful as your old lesbian posse said. The thing about you is that your tenderness toward me was instant and inexplicable, and I would spend these pages explaining it to you except I can’t.
Your son comes over to you. It’s impossible not to notice that, although the sanctuary isn’t crowded, Jay is being covertly followed by the eyes of every child and adult in the room, as though he is on display alongside the butterflies. He seems oblivious, and maybe he is—maybe, being seven, he simply has no concept of what it would be like to move in the world without the eyes of strangers scrutinizing him. You, on the other hand, must be deeply, painfully aware, though your posture and smile give no sign. Jay’s movements are jerky and his legs misshapen as he maneuvers the concrete path, but there is something airless about him, too, as though from his labored movements he might suddenly float away like the mariposas. The bones of his face are feline, sharp and delicate. His skin is poreless, but then so is yours. I am porous next to you both, leaking.
“Daddy,” he says, “What if all the butterflies are pooping on me but I just can’t see it because it’s too small?”
I start laughing, and Jay’s face blooms into an unbridled grin so like yours that my heart hammers. His fingers reach out to my bare arm, and there, right in the space I once wanted to camouflage with a self-destructive moth, he pokes his small finger into a subcutaneous skin-popping scar.
“What’s this?” he asks.
“A mistake,” I say. My hands brush, over and over, butterfly wings that seek to smooth.
“It’s something Lina gets worried people will judge her for,” you tell your son. “Like your braces.”
“But it’s just little,” Jay says.
For months, I opened the abscess repeatedly, trying to drain it, too ashamed to go to the doctor, or maybe I didn’t care enough to go to the doctor, I don’t really remember now. I just remember that sometimes I could get puss out of it, and other times it was hard and merciless like a stone. I look at you above your son’s head and I see just a flicker of a smile, like you’re trying to tell me it’s okay. And I touch the top of Jay’s soft hand, and I say, “You’re right, it’s tiny—do you think maybe I shouldn’t worry about it?” and he says, his voice suddenly one of I’ve-been-there authority, “My dad says it’s what’s inside that counts, but mean people don’t think that, so if I were you I’d wear long sleeves.”
“You’re smarter than I am,” I say, because it’s the kind of joke adults make to kids for the benefit of other adults, and because he has, already at the age of seven, been through more than I have ever had to face. I think again about choice. Permit myself a self-indulgent moment of letting myself believe at least Jay will never know what it’s like to have chosen his own problems, to be culpable in the things he’s judged for. But that’s just another junkie trick, another symptom of the narcissistic belief that we’re the piece of shit at the center of the universe, that we’re special and different even if it’s by being worse than other people. You know my tricks, and you accept and forgive them, and I know it’s time to do the same but I can’t get out of my own way.
I wonder what your bedridden wife, having a child for my brother, would think of my desire to accept myself.
All around us, butterflies soar.
Days shimmer. We don�
��t know yet what’s coming. We are drunk on one another. I wake up every morning breathless, heart already gripped in a fist of anticipation of the next time I can hear your voice, the next time I can taste you, the next time I see your texts flash across my phone. I am thirty-one years old. I’ve divorced an ex-con who everyone in our old neighborhood feared, but who never caused me to so much as flinch. I’ve dragged my ass through rehab twice and detoxed alone four or five times until it finally stuck. I’ve been institutionalized three times for psychotic episodes and held myself together while people screamed and smeared shit on walls, refusing to succumb to my own hysteria, knowing it could keep me trapped inside longer. I came out as a lesbian to my Baptist family. I’ve been gleefully beaten and burnt and electrocuted in ways that might provoke the government of Singapore to complain of human rights violations. Yet somehow, here in the presence of your son—of you and your son—here in the presence of so much beauty and the lightning-bolt realization that I have not quite yet lost the chance to have a child of my own, I understand danger for the first time.
Your wife is at home, getting sicker by the day, but it’s like we are the only people on some post-apocalyptic planet. We are hiding out inside the asylum, hoping the villagers don’t storm the gate of our monster paradise. I would say, I have never been so happy in my life, but of course I have never been happy much at all, so my barometer for such quantifying is broken. What I know even that day is that our happiness is flourishing in the eye of a storm, and what I don’t know even now is whether that was merely a coincidence, or a condition essential to its existence.
I lean into you as Jay ventures away, murmur into your ear, “What if we just . . . Nick . . . what if we just leave them, no matter how good they are? What if we decide to hold hands and jump off the ledge together into something new?”
It is the most terrifying moment of my life, and the most transcendent moment of my life. I tilt my face to look at you, to scan the reaction in your eyes, but before I can fully take you in, my cell phone vibrates in my back pocket, muffled buzzing against my ass, and I will never know why I reach for it, mindlessly, but I do.
Every Kind of Wanting Page 22
