by Retha Powers
“Another question: When we’re out together do you think about the fact that I’m black?”
Charlie looked at her. She looked back. Up front, on the darkened stage, James Taylor’s voice rang out. “No, of course not,” Charlie said. She couldn’t tell whether the tremor in his voice was shock or deception. “Do you think about the fact that I’m white?”
“All the time,” she said.
Afterward he drove her home and asked if he could come in to use the bathroom. While he was occupied, she rushed around her apartment, picking up stray dishes, hiding clothes, dimming the light. She popped a John Coltrane CD on the stereo and remembered, with horror, the jar of hair grease lurking on the bathroom sink. She imagined Charlie lifting the great green container in bafflement, sniffing it. What the hell is this? Some kind of exotic sexual lubricant? Picturing his confused expression, Faith began to laugh. White people weren’t that naive. Were they?
He exited the bathroom with a sheepish smile and said yes to the nightcap she offered. They sat on the couch and talked and talked and talked and she had no real sense of what was being said. Her tipsy brain kept focusing attention on his mouth, his lips, the sly red snake of his tongue. He trained his eyes on her, lowered his voice, ran his thumb lightly up and down her arm until she thought she might, like fine crystal, begin to hum.
“Whoa,” she said, standing with great effort. “I think we better call it a night.”
“Sure.” He stood, too, and took her face into his hands. She sighed audibly and leaned into the kiss. She was a sucker for a guy who touched her face. A guy who touched your face was really looking at you—not just clutching a pair of breasts or groping a butt. At least that was the way it felt to Faith.
He ran his hands over her neck and down to her breasts, then followed with his lips. She molded herself against him, felt her heated flesh like kneaded dough to be rolled and pressed and formed into shape. She heard him moan and noticed the music had ended. He moaned again and came back to her lips, pulled one into his mouth. “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered.
“Mmmm,” she said.
They moved into the bedroom, dropping clothes as they went. She felt as verdant and lush as a rain forest and she wanted him, but still part of her held back, watching. She was waiting for a slip. A word. A whispered sentence that would tumble from his mouth and fracture the ground beneath her feet. She waited while he peeled off their clothes and eased them onto the bed. She waited while he circled her nipple with his tongue. She waited while he nibbled and kissed and stroked until, against her will, her hips loosened and her back arched to meet him. She waited while her body danced and Charlie moved on top of her, eyes squeezed so tight the fine blue veins in his eyelids stood out like the spine of a leaf. She waited while he eased himself inside her, while he tensed and moaned, while be began, slowly, to gallop her, while he moved faster and faster, while he cried, “Oh!” and then her name, while he came with a shudder and cry and collapsed onto her breasts, while he panted and reached out his hand to touch her face. She waited. His skin glowed blue white in the light from the security lamp outside her window. She stroked the moistness from his back.
After a few minutes he moved to her side and took her hand for a kiss.
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t wait.”
“It’s okay. I never come on the first time with a guy. It takes me a while.”
“Something for me to look forward to.”
“To work forward to.” She laughed and turned onto her stomach. He leaned over her and kissed her neck.
“I love your skin,” he said. He ran his tongue down her back. “It’s so smooth. It’s like chocolate.”
“Chocolate?” She tensed. “What do you mean by that?”
“Just that it’s smooth and delicious. Don’t you like chocolate?” Charlie tapped her butt and chuckled and lay his lips against her neck. “Did that bother you? What I just said, about the chocolate? I mean, it was a stupid thing to say, it slipped out. I hope I didn’t offend you or anything.”
Faith pulled him into her arms and kissed his face, then picked up his hand and kissed it, too. It was, she noticed, the same color on both sides, the color of bread dough. She wrapped her own two-toned hand around his, wrapped her long, sable legs around his pale ones, and thought they looked like a brotherhood poster there on her bed, cobbled together, side by side, ebony and ivory together. Faith thought about saying this to Charlie, but his eyes were closed and so she closed her own and smiled to herself and floated, becalmed.
She had drifted off when she felt Charlie disengaging himself. She opened her eyes to see him rising from the bed.
“I better go home,” he said, beginning to dress. “I’ve got to work early tomorrow.”
“Oh yeah. Okay.” She had hoped he would stay the night. “Me, too.”
Faith put on a robe and walked him to her door.
“I had a great time,” he said.
“Me, too.”
“Thanks.”
Faith laughed. “You don’t have to thank me. It’s not like I fixed your car or something.”
“I just meant for the wonderful evening. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
After he left she climbed into bed, tired but exultant. She felt as if she had tiptoed her way through a minefield and made it out the other side and now she could sink into her pillows and relax. Her breathing slowed. Her mind wandered off, dancing on snowy white clouds to the sugary beat of a Paul McCartney song.
Charlie went to Chicago for ten days. While he was gone he called her twice, and though he seemed distracted both times Faith thought the calls were themselves a good sign. She left a teasing message on his answering machine on the day he was due back in town, inviting him to dinner. When he returned the call his voice was warm and seductive, as though his ardor had been only temporarily cooled by the Chicago wind.
They ate Italian that night, barely able to choke down their pasta for the tension pulling them across the table toward each other. Afterward, back at her apartment, they kissed and licked and sucked on the couch for half an hour, until Faith pulled away, breathless, and stood up and took Charlie’s hand and pulled him toward the bedroom. Charlie winced.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s my shoulder. I think I pulled a muscle yesterday at the gym.” He stood in the doorway to her bedroom, rubbing his shoulder, his eyes wide in surprise at the pain like a child.
“Poor baby. Here, lie down and let me massage it for you.”
Charlie lay on his stomach. Faith straddled his butt and leaned forward to knead his back. He purred under her hands.
“That feels good,” he said. Then a moment later, “Would you really like to do something to make me feel better?” His voice sounded hesitant. Faith laughed. They were half naked on her bed. He didn’t have to ask.
“Of course,” she said leaned down to kiss him. But Charlie swung her onto her back and caught her face in his hands.
“Let me tie you up,” Charlie whispered. His normally pale face had flushed pink, but then he leaned down to kiss her hard against her mouth and when he pulled away there was a tiny white circle around his lips from the pressure. Faith thought: White people are always changing colors.
Charlie’s voice was thick. “Or you can do it to me. Tie me up and whip me.”
For a moment she heard only the inconstant sounds of the apartment dwellers around her, the noise of human beings packed into too small a space: conga music from next door, the nine-year-old upstairs as he thumped across the ceiling like a monster eager to break in. Her mind raced, in search of a reference point, and, finding none, came back to search his face. Charlie lay above her, staring down at her from a great height, as if she had fallen into a well and he did not know what to do. His face struck her as comic and so she giggled. Faith giggled and then she laughed, harder and harder. Her laughter rolled her away from Charlie on the bed.
She noticed Charlie staring across the bed at her, a smile dimming
on his face. The longer she laughed the dimmer the smile, until it faded back into his skin.
“Are you okay?” he asked, finally. He had moved to the edge of the bed and sat with his legs drooped over the side, his back to her. He twisted his head around to face her as she settled down.
“Yeah! Yeah!” She gasped for air, trying to calm herself. “Must be the wine!”
“I had no idea I was this funny,” Charlie muttered. “I should be a comedian.”
“I’m sorry.” Faith panted through her chuckles, as if she were giving birth. “It just hit me wrong.”
“It wasn’t a joke,” Charlie said.
“I know.” She began to giggle again.
“I was serious.”
“I know.”
The giggles started; at the same time Charlie lurched across the bed to kiss her, hoping, she could tell, to head off a second round. “I want you,” he whispered, but the tickle of his breath on her face was hilarious. It set her off.
“Sorry!” She convulsed with laughter, curling away from him on the bed. He sat up and crossed his arms.
“Can’t say I’ve ever had this reaction before.”
“Sorry!”
“Maybe I should leave,” he said. She could tell from the pout in his voice he wanted her to stop him, to beg him to stay. But she couldn’t stop giggling.
“Maybe you should.”
He grabbed his clothes in a huff. “Don’t hurt yourself,” he said roughly and left the room.
The front door slammed and her giggles died.
Faith needed to talk to someone. Under normal circumstances she’d talk to Pauline, but Pauline wasn’t crazy about Charlie. To say she hated him would not be too strong a term, though the two had never met. Pauline was deadly opposed to crossing the color line. If she heard about this little incident it would only confirm her feelings. She’d say, “I told you so,” then get in a cab and hunt Charlie down. No, Faith couldn’t talk to Pauline. And she couldn’t talk to her mother, of course, and she couldn’t talk to any of her male friends. What she needed was a white girlfriend to ask. A white woman could put Charlie’s request into perspective. A white woman could tell her if white guys all went in for this kind of freaky shit.
He wanted to tie her up. And he wanted to be whipped. The idea, the image rolled around her mind all the next day, bumping into things, shattering her concentration, boggling her. She was alternately angry, disgusted, amused. Most of all she was perplexed. No man had ever—ever—asked her before to do such a thing. Why would Charlie ask now? Was there something about him, or something about her? Had she said something, done something to suggest she was into that stuff?
Faith tried to imagine her last boyfriend, Jerry, stretched out on her bed and trussed up like a pig. Jerry was six foot two, substantial, as thick around the middle as a tree. He was a newspaper photographer whose oft-announced goal was to quit his job and open his own studio, to escape from the soul-sucking pressure of working for the man. He pitched himself as a black prince looking for his queen, but he got antsy when he found out Faith made more money than him, and he didn’t like her to say too much at parties. He’d even bought her a copy of that book, that “guide to the black woman,” that thinly disguised piece of misogynistic crap. As a joke, he said.
She tried to imagine Jerry shackled to her bed like a slave, begging for a little humiliation while she stood over him with a whip. The image made her laugh it was so absurd; Jerry would rather eat bricks than do something like that.
On the other hand, Jerry had his own sexual tics. He was a wonderful lover, slow but not too slow, gentle but not too gentle, and from the beginning he found her turn-on points. But during one of the first few times they made love, just as she was starting to climax, Jerry grabbed a pillow and put it over her face. In her surprise and panic she kneed him in the balls; that was the end of that little party trick.
Jerry also had an annoying way of always referring to his penis as himself, in the third person. “Please take Jerry in your mouth,” he’d say as they sat making out on the couch. Or “Jerry’s hard. He wants your hand around him.” Or “Jerry wants to be inside you, baby, right now.” This kind of body-part animation wasn’t unusual for guys, she knew, but it irritated her nonetheless. Toward the end, when everything but the sex was bad, she started pointing out that these things were not literally possible, that she could not take Jerry into her mouth, he was too big. She did it just to piss him off. It worked; Jerry took Jerry and left.
But Jerry had never asked her to do something so sick, so humiliating. Nor Charles, nor Garret, nor any other black man she knew. Only Charlie. Only the second white guy she ever let near herself. She knew what she should do. She knew what Pauline would say: Cut him loose. The only problem was she liked him. She liked him a lot.
Still, by the time Charlie called, creaky-voiced and repentant, she had resolved to cut him loose.
“I miss you,” he said. “Have dinner with me.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. But she’d forgotten how alluring was the sound of his voice.
“Please. I’ve been thinking about you nonstop; I can’t get you out of my mind.”
“How unfortunate for you,” she said. But she was weakening.
“Faith,” he said. Just her name, just like that. “Faith.”
“I don’t know.”
“At least let me come over and explain,” he asked.
She let the silence build for a while, then said, “I guess I can spare a few minutes tonight.”
He arrived bearing wine and red roses and a shopping bag that smelled of lemongrass. She stood in her living room, arms folded, face set like a stone.
“Before you say anything, let me talk, okay?” Charlie laid the roses at her feet. “I’m sorry. I apologize. I just got carried away. But if I offended you, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.” He pulled her into his arms, fluttered his lips against her neck. Her knees softened, and she leaned against him. Maybe she’d been too quick to judge. Maybe he hadn’t meant anything, after all. “I just got carried away,” he said. “When a man’s around you he just naturally gets certain thoughts.”
The words pierced her heart like a scalpel. A man just naturally gets certain thoughts.
He felt the change in her body and looked into her face. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
She felt sick. A knot seemed to have formed in her stomach. He was looking at her all wide-eyed and innocence, which only made it worse. She pulled away from him, walked to the other side of the room. “Let me ask you something, Charlie. You ever try to tie up one of your white girlfriends?”
“What?”
“It’s a simple question. Did you ever ask a white woman to do what you asked me to do?”
He stared at her as if she were speaking a language he could not understand. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about why you’re with me, white boy. I know what you think: black women, dirty sex.”
“I do not!”
Faith crossed her arms and smiled, though the tears were pushing up behind her eyes. “Sure, you do. I bet you couldn’t wait to tell all your friends you fucked a black girl once and it was so good. Like eating chocolate, right? You could brag about how she tied you up, how she whipped you and beat you, and then how you did the same, how you played Mr. Charlie and the slave girl all night long!”
Charlie’s face blanched and then reddened. Clear evidence, she thought, of his guilt. White people were always changing colors on you.
He whispered, “I can’t believe you think that.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” She glared at him for long minutes, until he dropped his hands and walked to her couch and collapsed here, shoulders drooping and face down. They were silent then, listening to the salsa music drifting under her door.
When Charlie spoke his voice trembled. “I like you. I like you a lot. Maybe, if I examined my reasons closely enough, it might have something to do with…” He let the thought
trail off, then continued. “I don’t know. Okay, is that what you want to hear? I don’t know. But I do know that I like you. I like you. Isn’t that enough?”
He’d brought carrots and lettuce drenched in sweet vinegar from a favorite Vietnamese restaurant and tangy barbecued ribs from the rib joint down the street and noodles and spring rolls from the Thai place they first visited together, and, most surprising, a whole fish, wrapped in aluminum foil, baked with thyme and lemongrass, from where she did not know. After he left, Faith laid it all out on the dining room table, a cultural feast for two. She opened the wine and took a sip. California red. It was good vintage but tasted bitter in her mouth. She spit it out, looked at the food without appetite. The fish stared back with its cold and colorless eye.
Undoings in Amsterdam
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by Janet McDonald
The square outside Centraal Station is jammed with bodies. Leaning against wood, sitting on concrete, and lying on grass, eating, smoking, staring. Strangers at a picnic. Their guidebooks tout museums and tulips but they have been carried here by the same current that has brought generations to Amsterdam—drugs and sex. Jesse ambles along with the crowd crossing the canal bridge, past marijuana-breathing coffee shops, brightly lit currency exchange offices, souvenir stands, and eateries that exhale falafel and pizza. In the distance beyond the canal, a red glow. The red-light district of shopping window sex workers.
Just ahead, the “World’s Only Sex Museum.” She hurries by, tempted and revolted, the edge of the one feeling sharpening the tension of the other. She glances at the sort of people gathered at the entrance. Tourists. Young. Couples. Innocents, she tells herself, not perverts. A museum, after all, not a sex den. She turns back toward the elaborate porn parlor made safe for dishonest tourists by the word museum. The tight space houses a chaos of paintings and sculptures, postcards and drawings. The body’s pleasured agonies displayed in explicit splendor. Men bent naked over cows, women’s mouths on horses, stiletto heels pressed hard against flesh, nipples and foreskin pierced by silver rings, buxom women with skirts raised above their penises, the fluids of humans and animals running together, flowing, forming little pools.
