by AnonYMous
* * *
Isaac and I had dinner with my father about four times a year. Those were the years when I wore baggy clothes and no makeup around my father; I didn’t put effort into my hair, I wore flat shoes. I tried to be as undesirable as possible. I wanted to get all the sex out of us. Each time we saw him—Isaac pointed out to me afterward on our way home—my father mentioned child rape or pedophilia. No matter what the conversation was about, my father found a way to bring up child rape. As a joke, or an accusation of someone, just bringing it up. I hadn’t noticed this until it was pointed out to me. I remember one time walking on our way to a Greek restaurant. As we passed a big church, my father said to us, “And this is where they rape children.”
After my divorce, I met Carl. I don’t know what made Carl guess that my father had molested me. I had never said a word about my father or my childhood to him. It was the first time I ever saw Carl drunk. He wanted to know what my father did to me. He was angry. I said that I would tell him the following day, that I didn’t want to have a conversation like that when it was late, when he was drunk and I was tired. But he insisted and I gave in. We went to a bar so I could get drunk, too. I told him that my father had raped me. I didn’t tell him any more than that. We went back to his place and he wanted to fuck me. He wasn’t fucking me, though, he was fucking me as a little girl.
He poured champagne on my tits and told me I was forbidden to ever cry about my father again—as I had just done—because from now on he wanted to be the only man to make me cry.
* * *
I don’t like pain, but I desire pain from Carl. I like it when he pushes on my wounds. It makes them feel better. I like it when Carl hits me. I like it when he bites me. I like it when he holds me down and I squirm, which makes him fuck me harder. And if I cry, harder still. I like it when I have marks from him. Marks I carry around with me, like badges on my body. I want him to abuse me. I like it when I can’t tell the difference between sexual pleasure and sexual pain—when they are the same. The fact that my father raped me makes him want me more. When I told him about my father tying me up and putting me in the closet, Carl said that was his now, he owned all of it. Carl tied me up and put me in the closet. He let me out and face-fucked me. How could I not love the man who set me free?
We are most who we are in bed, Carl said.
* * *
Out in the world, Carl is charming, soft-spoken. Sometimes Carl is even shy. When we first met, my friends thought Carl was calm and gentle. The man with the holes in the elbows of his gray cardigans. At the beginning, that’s what I thought, too. I thought he was too gentle. For months after we met, even after we became friends, I thought sex with him would be boring.
But the first time that I saw his penis—full of blood after we had taken a nap together on a twin bed in his mother’s summer cottage—I knew he was the one. I fell in love with his cock. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.
That afternoon when I first saw his penis in the daylight, Carl made me a whitefish sandwich, which I ate on the porch while he read Kleist to me. Carl sipped bourbon and took two cigarette breaks. I couldn’t stop thinking about his cock. The size, the shape, the pink of the head. Just like my father’s.
* * *
I pull down art books from his bookcases. I look at the carnivals in Ensor, the contorted pink and yellow faces, his fat pope, the death mask. I look at a breastfeeding Byzantine virgin with her long, stretched-out nipple between her baby’s lips. I look at Velázquez’s old woman with the spoon, at the egg in the boiling water. I look at the overwhelmingly gorgeous Saint John the Baptists—Andrea del Sarto’s and Caravaggio’s. Fede Galizia’s cherries, her pears, figs, rabbit, sliced-open melon. Piet Mondrian’s sharp and pure country drawings. Morandi’s bottles and vases and jars.
Carl is a tall man like Morandi. He has stinky feet from wearing Italian loafers with no socks in the summer. He eats grapes with a fork. Sometimes he runs a fork over my back, writing words that I can’t recognize. There are times when I’m not afraid of him at all. Times when all I want is to bring him back to life when he is joyless. Sometimes the only thing that makes him feel good about himself is to overpower me.
* * *
I used to go inside my father. I wanted to be the man who hurts girls. Now I go inside Carl. I fantasize about Carl finding women in the streets, fucking them without knowing their names, smashing his hand over their eyes while he fucks them, licking one’s pussy while he fucks another, while I’m tied up in the corner watching it all. I go inside Carl when I’m bound and gagged and my face is slapped and I’m told to be a good girl. I want to be a good girl. And I’m the man with the whip.
He likes to choke me with my embroidered pillowcases. So hard sometimes I see stars. He tells me that the more pain I feel, the more I know he loves me.
* * *
Carl likes it when he comes home and I’m waiting for him, on my knees with my mouth open. He likes that I’m desperately excited being tied naked to a tree, waiting for him, then untied and bent over to be fucked by him. He likes watching me truss the chicken after I stuff the cavity with shallots and lemon for him. He likes how I walk. He likes my awkwardness. He says he sees something very innocent in me, even now.
I read that you can tell a history of violence in how people walk. I think I walk with assurance, but maybe Carl sees something else. Maybe I can never hide it. It’s in how my body moves. My gestures, how I talk.
When Carl once asked me how many men I’d been with, I lied and said five. The truth is I’m not quite sure. But it was more than five. One man had long hair and cowboy boots. I was at a bar waiting for friends; I was in college at the time. He asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I told him that I was going to have my stories in The New Yorker. He told me I looked like a girl who had been molested by her father. I thought that he must have had some divine power to know that. I’m sure it was just a sick line, but no one in my life would talk about it, and here was a man who knew it without me saying it and he wanted me to talk about it. He said he could see it in my eyes. I was amazed that he could see that in my eyes. He was staying at a hotel. He told me I had three choices: he could make sweet love to me, fuck my brains out, or we could just talk for a while. I chose just talking for a while, but I was already in his hotel room at that point and I didn’t know that meant I had also said yes to the other two options. He left huge hickeys on my neck. I haven’t told Carl about that man.
I haven’t told Carl about the economist who liked my pubic hair full, a full bush to rub his face in. And the carpenter who asked me to sit on his counter naked in blue high heels while he sipped vodka and cooked me dinner. I haven’t told Carl about having sex with my childhood crush, Katherine Huntington’s nephew—when we were teenagers—on a sofa in his family’s living room, under a duvet, only feet away from his cousins playing cards. We thought we were so sneaky and clever and that no one could tell, since we moved so very slowly and so quietly with our hands clamped over each other’s sweaty mouths. But when we emerged with our hair staticky from being under the blanket, the room had emptied.
I haven’t told Carl about how long it went on with my father. I haven’t told Carl about how I smell strawberries when I think about fucking my father, or how I see black, shiny ants devouring my girl corpse when I remember fucking my father. I haven’t told Carl that remembering these things, and remembering my father’s open mouth when he was about to come, makes me smell and taste sweet strawberry shortcake.
* * *
I pick up Woodcutters from Carl’s bedside table, and he is using a photo of me as a young girl for his bookmark. I ask him where he found that photograph. He said he went through my things while I was out and found it in my box of stationery and paper clips. He says he likes to look at that little girl and think about defiling her.
He tells me that he imagines me as a little girl when he has sex with me. He told me that he mas
turbates to that photo of me standing on the beach on the island. In the photograph, I am about nine years old, wearing my black-and-white bathing suit. Your thighs, he says, your little-girl thighs.
* * *
I feel myself hot and light. I feel frozen. I have no mind, no body, and I am all mind and all body. I feel him thrusting and moaning while he fucks my little face. He puts his hand around my throat. He squeezes. I go up to the top of the sky and I sit on a cloud. He’s choking me. I’m a six-year-old in my frilly white Easter dress. My vision is getting blurry. I’m flying up over the sea and into the stars.
Doesn’t it taste good? It’s all mine when it’s in my mouth. I remember the taste of the milk chocolate Easter eggs and the yeasty taste of his genitals. I think about Jesus’ body in the tomb with the heavy gray stone. Soon the stone will be moved by angels, and very soon he will be released and set free to live forever. I look down at the green field from the clouds while I’m tied to this chair.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Author’s Note
Begin Reading
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2017 by the author
All rights reserved
First edition, 2017
The mouse study cited is from the book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), page 31.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Title: The incest diary.
Description: First edition. | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016041339 | ISBN 9780374175559 (hardback) | ISBN 9780374716493 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Incest victims—Biography. | Sexually abused girls—Biography. | Sexually abused children—Biography. | Incest—Case studies. | Incest—Psychological aspects—Case studies. | Attachment behavior—Case studies. | Fathers and daughters—Case studies. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Abuse / Child Abuse.
Classification: LCC RC560.I53 I52 2017 | DDC 618.92/858360092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041339
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