Affection

by Krissy Kneen

  “It’s a double act,” she cooed, her bedroom voice tickling his already attentive scrotum.

  “All things are up for negotiation.” He grinned. Leered.

  She was nodding, but I was already shaking my head. I had my hand on her elbow, my fingers pressing into the soft skin. The audition was well and truly over.

  At home in the lounge room, slipping off our shoes, I told her that I didn’t want to work for the pimple-faced boy and she told me that she already knew it. I didn’t really want to be a sex worker at all, even if it was just touching her with other people watching. She said that she had an audition at a strip club where she would wait on tables in her underwear.

  “Make a cup of tea and bring it into my room?” she said to me.

  I watched her slump off barefoot and heartbreakingly beautiful, up the stairs and into her bedroom.

  Lying side by side without touching, I asked her if I smelled bad, like a wild animal, a bat, or a possum. She giggled and shifted so that her fragrant hair fanned out over her pillow the way I liked it.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, which wasn’t really an answer.

  “You only hold hands with me in public because you think that men find you more sexy if you’re a lesbian,” I said, not expecting an answer.

  “You can sleep in here tonight. I don’t mind. Go to sleep now,” she said.

  And eventually I did.

  BRIAN AGAIN

  Brian’s car was parked out in front of our house and I found that I was angry. I wasn’t sure how he’d found me, but Brisbane’s a small town and someone told someone who told someone else and here was his car parked outside, a little askew, all of his bedding folded neatly on the back seat the way he liked it.

  I wanted him to go away. I wanted to walk round the block once and come back and see that his car was gone. I thought about setting off, but it felt like the kind of pacing I associated with my dark times. Restless, a little off center. This was our house now. My house. I fitted the key in the lock and walked straight inside.

  He was there at the table with her and she had one of her legs propped up on the edge of the chair and I could see she wasn’t wearing underwear. Probably he could see that, too. She was laughing at something he had just said, giggling. Her flirtatious little laugh.

  Have him. I thought, harshly, but I didn’t think she would have him, really, not in that way. She didn’t seem to sleep with anyone except her boyfriend unless she could pretend that they were sleeping with me and she was just close by, accidentally falling into the action, letting them worship at her flesh.

  He turned when I entered the kitchen and I remembered his shiny eyes, all puppy-dog attention, the pretense of warmth.

  “Back?” I asked him.

  “It would seem so.”

  “How are you?”

  “Thirsty.”

  I poured myself a vodka and put an olive into it. I felt like a martini but I knew we didn’t have any vermouth. I measured the vodka left in the bottle against the light from the window—about an inch—and settled it back on the windowsill.

  “I’ve brought a bottle of wine.”

  I nodded.

  I wasn’t going to drink his wine. I might if I finished the vodka, which seemed likely.

  “Brian hasn’t got anywhere to stay,” Jessica told me. I already knew it.

  “I said he could stay here if it’s all right with you.”

  I thought about her boyfriend’s brother; the man in the vacant lot who had wanted to sleep with her more than with me. I took a large sip of my vodka.

  “If that’s okay with you,” he said to me. “I can sleep in my car if you like.”

  I shook my head.

  “You can sleep in my room,” I said.

  I should have said no. I should have told him to sleep in his car. But if Jessica had told me to walk off a cliff I have no doubt I would have done it.

  So he moved into my room, and I lost my skin. He slept with me that night and for many nights after and he listed my failings one by one.

  “You still rely on that vibrator for an orgasm? The girls I like are fully in the moment. I’ll teach you how to do it. Just be patient. Don’t rush at sex like that. Women who are feminine know how to be patient, to wait, to time it. You know nothing about foreplay. Has anyone ever taught you about foreplay? Let me teach you about foreplay.”

  I watched him at the dinner table, entranced by her. I knew that he would trade beds in a second; I would, too. I still wanted her and I could see how obvious she was, how everybody wanted her.

  I reveled in his ugliness. I made love to him and in my head I repeated, mantralike, “You are ugly and you are old and no one wants you except me and that makes me special.”

  I found a temporary gig at a restaurant but I was confused too easily. I miscounted tables, delivered the wrong meals to the wrong people. The bosses were kind to me but I knew I couldn’t do the job effectively. Didn’t want the job. I had to finish my thesis. I had to at least graduate from honors. I had to work out what I wanted to do with my life.

  I had a key cut for him.

  “One key,” he said. “One key.”

  But by then I knew it was a line he had stolen from a movie and I made him take it anyway.

  “I’ll be up at the computer labs at uni,” I told him. “You’ll have to let yourself in.”

  “Jessica will let me in.”

  I didn’t like him saying her name out loud.

  “I’m still angry that you left last time without saying goodbye.”

  “You can’t own a person,” he said. “Everyone in the universe is free to move their energy where they please.”

  I knew then that he had been to the Living Game. He had been there with Jessica.

  Sometimes at dinner I watched the two of them. Him watching her, her lowering her eyes shyly and giggling. I wondered if something had happened between them while I was in the computer lab. Perhaps at one of their sex seminars before he moved back in with me.

  He went with me to a party. It was something a friend from university had organized, and although I rarely mixed my home life and my university life, I decided I would go and that I would bring him with me. We fought in the car on the way to the party. He closed his eyes and put his foot on the accelerator and said he would kill us then and there.

  “For fuck’s sake get it over with. Kill us, go on, kill us.” He had been staying with me for weeks and it had begun to fall into a familiar pattern.

  At the party, I sat in a corner and watched Brian making friends with all the beautiful girls from university. I knew I could never compete. I drank quietly by myself and when anyone came to sit with me I let them, and I nodded politely and answered in one-word sentences.

  “I’m ready to go,” I said at some point in the evening.

  He had been flirting with a beautiful girl from the honors course, a girl I was quite fond of. He was filling her drink and engaging her in conversation. She was smart and sharp and they were deep in their banter.

  “I’m not ready to go yet,” he told me.

  “All right. I’ll walk home.”

  “All right,” he said, although he knew it would take me an hour at least.

  I liked walking in the dark. I liked the night. I liked the cool quiet of it. I liked the way the walking calmed me. I had been furious, I realized, as I turned into our own street. I wondered how long this anger had been percolating inside me. I was certain it had been longer than I would have admitted; I was furious still.

  I can’t afford this house, I thought as I walked toward it. Jessica made enough money dancing on tables and bending over groups of drunk men in her underwear with trays of overpriced drinks. I was flat out struggling with the rent every week. I spent hours at the markets, selling paintings I whipped up in minutes. I waited tables. I gathered my last few Austudy payments and waited for the day when I wouldn’t be able to withdraw enough for my rent.

  I let myself in quietly. Jessica
was awake. I could hear her music drifting ethereally down the stairs. She might be alone; I could have climbed the stairs and said hello and made us a cup of tea, but these would not be the actions of a furious person. I slipped into my room and shut the door and lay down. There was no sleep anywhere. I stood up and I paced. It was eleven o’clock. I had left the party just before ten. I wondered what Brian would be doing. I wondered what Brian had done. Specifically I wondered what Brian had done with Jessica. If she had done anything with him it would be because he wanted her and because he was sleeping with me. I imagined that she wanted to prove that she could win in everything. I remembered her thing with her boyfriend’s brother and no matter what I had done, I would never do that.

  I heard his car at three in the morning. I had been pacing, painting, reading, pacing some more. I left the apartment briefly and set out for a walk, realized it would be pointless, and let myself back in again. I dressed and undressed and dressed and undressed.

  I settled on a T-shirt and sat at the canvas, making white fingerprints on it. I didn’t like the image that was emerging, a woman, shrouded in what looked like bandages, seen from above, mostly white, a light shading of blue, the eyes upward gazing and rimmed in red.

  I looked at the painting and knew I was still furious.

  When I heard his car I leaped into bed and rolled onto my side. I might have been asleep.

  He removed his shoes. He removed his socks. He removed his clothes, and the sag of his body shuffled into bed beside me. He warmed his hands on my hips.

  “I like your friends,” he said. “They are fun.”

  I wanted to pretend that I was still sleeping, but I was a fist and he could feel the tension in my body and so I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. “You think they are beautiful.”

  “Yes.”

  “More beautiful than me.”

  “Yes. All of them are so much more beautiful than you.” Here came the list. I rolled my eyes as he began it. “More warm. More feminine. More giving. More compassionate. More understanding.”

  He rolled onto me then, he was hard, but I didn’t want to. I wanted him to go back to the party. I wanted him to sleep with all the beautiful women who were more beautiful than me. I was angry because I knew it was true and I hated him for saying it.

  “I don’t,” I said. “I don’t want to do this.”

  But he wanted to. He held my hands in his fist and he raised them above my head and I tried to slip out from under him but he was heavy and I had no skin left at all. It might be easier to let him do it, I thought. Get it over with. After all, I had never said no to sex before. I tried to remove my hands from his fists and it seemed to be his weight that pinned me but of course it wasn’t. I was powerless because he told me with each thrust that I was hideous, and with each thrust I believed him.

  “I’d be fucking her if I could,” he said. “You are nothing in comparison. Easy ride. Not the same class of woman.”

  And I found myself unable to argue, unable to struggle my hands out from the place where he held them above my head. I wondered what had once held me together, because now I was dispersing, falling into pieces on the bed.

  I had never said no. This is what I came to when he pushed himself inside me and made the angry thrusts with his hips. I could hear him talking. I knew the list was continuing. I was not the girlfriend kind, I was less than all of them in very fundamental ways. And I agreed with him. I completely agreed with him, but I was focused on the sudden realization that I had never ever said no to anyone. The other girls, the girlfriend kind of girls, they all said no at one time or another.

  I refocused my eyes. He was sweating over me. He was red faced. He might have had a heart attack from the effort it took to have sex with me when I refused to cooperate.

  “No,” I tried out the word. He did not hear me. “No. Stop. I want you to stop.”

  He hadn’t paused to put on a condom. He knew I wouldn’t have sex without a condom and here he was, ejaculating into me without one.

  He rolled off me. He was still angry, I could tell, but it was tempered now by the exhaustion that follows climax.

  I could feel the sticky juices of him dripping out of me. I would have to get the morning after pill. I thought this and I remembered my first time. My very first time. All the blood and pain and negotiation.

  “I didn’t like that,” I said, and he said nothing, but I knew he had heard me. “I didn’t like that at all.”

  I rolled over and I felt the sticky mess of him dripping out of me, staining the sheets. The morning after pill would make me sick. I had vomited last time. I had been sick as a dog for hours after. It felt like the flu. I closed my eyes, stepping through the trip I would make to the doctor in the morning, the interminable wait in the foyer with all the sick and dying people. I should get tested for STDs, too, although I would have to wait three months to find out what I had picked up from this evening’s entertainment. I thought all of this through, dispassionately, and although I thought I might never sleep it was midmorning when I found myself awake again.

  He bought me a dozen red roses and told me he had never bought anybody flowers before, and I thanked him for it. This terrible double-crossing of myself. This is what I regret more than anything.

  He left in the middle of the night when I wasn’t expecting it. I woke up and he was gone, and I started to cry although I was sure I must be happy that he was gone. I cried for the whole day, rocking back and forth, his list playing on a loop in my head. I am ugly. I am crass. I am coarse. I am unfeminine. I am too harsh. I am too honest. I have no secrets. I am too obvious. I am too sexual. I am too aggressively sexual. I am like a man. I am not like a girlfriend. I am unlovable. I am. I am. I am.

  MANTRA

  Brisbane 2008

  I am ugly. I am crass. I am coarse. I am unfeminine. I am too harsh. I am too honest. I have no secrets. I am too obvious. I am too sexual. I am too aggressively sexual. I am like a man. I am not like a girlfriend. I am unlovable. I am ugly. I am crass. I am coarse. I am unfeminine. I am too harsh. I am too honest. I have no secrets. I am too obvious. I am too sexual. I am too aggressively sexual. I am like a man. I am not like a girlfriend. I am unlovable. I am ugly. I am crass. I am coarse. I am unfeminine. I am too harsh. I am too honest. I have no secrets. I am too obvious. I am too sexual. I am too aggressively sexual. I am like a man. I am not like a girlfriend. I am unlovable. I am. I am. I am. I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I.

  BALLOONS

  Brisbane 1990

  Jessica held my head in her lap and told me to breathe deeply. People were running inside my chest, big men, hurdling, running and jumping and thumping down on my ribs. I was filled with athletes and my arms were locked and rigid over my chest. She told me to breathe and I managed a halting breath that was half a sob and I smelled her secret musky odor under the sweet floral perfume. It made me even more agitated.

  I was the gnarled and gnomic Rumpelstiltskin from the fairytale. I was all spit and struggle. She was a part of the problem offering a solution. She kissed my tears and I could love her or I could hit her; I was bouncing from one state to the next like someone leaping from rock to rock in an ice-capped stream.

  “Imagine,” she told me, “that for every breath there is a balloon filling.”

  Balloons. She had learned that trick in one of her self-help sessions. I felt my chest tightening. I had lived with her affirmations pinned to the wall in the toilet, tolerating her self-deluding platitudes for the sake of her extraordinary beauty. Now she hugged me and I struggled away from her.

  “Release the balloons,” she whispered. “One by one.” Someone else’s words from her ripe, overblown mouth. The mouth I had bitten. The mouth that I had pressed my nipple against, that had never sullied itself against my vagina. Her perfect mouth.

  The balloons slipped from my fingers one by one.

  When they were gone, floating off into the ang
ry pale of the sky, there was nothing left for me to hold onto.

  I rolled out of her empty hug and I was gone. I had already left the room.

  “That’s right,” she told me. “Let go of the balloons, one by one by one.”

  One by one by one and it was all gone. I was gone. She was gone. There was nothing left to hold onto and my chest eased out of the vice that had gripped it. I left the room. I left the house. I left that life. And I was gone.

  THE LONGING

  Brisbane 2008

  I am buffeted between conflicting states. I am at once wrung out by longing, swelling like dough under a damp cloth into the idea of Paul. It is a strange alchemy that blends smell and flesh into some pheromonal melting pot. I harbor secret glimpses of possible outcomes, which inevitably include climbing into his lap and settling into the hardness there. I imagine hand-holding in libraries or lying on the grass or in the cinema. These random images are thrown up at inappropriate moments, in company, on the bus, at work. I catch my breath so it won’t escape in a moan or a little sigh.

  It is not the first time I have had this kind of all-consuming crush on someone who is not my husband. It crashes in, and it abates. I am used to the pattern. It is a pattern but I am still surprised by the force of the desire.

  At the same time there is a rock solid care for Paul, a familial love, the kind that you would imagine a big sister would have for a beloved brother. I would fight for him, scuff my knees. If he called in the middle of the night he would find me at his side without any subtext. Still, I would eat him if I could. I would carve through his flesh with a spoon and gorge myself on him.

  I turn in on myself, wondering what I might do to elicit the same kind of passion from him. And even as I conjure up possibilities, I know. I am not blind. He will never want me. There is my physicality, my age, my erratic nature. I would remake myself into someone else to catch his attention. I wonder if he would love a thinner girl. That pretty blond thing I saw him with, the sunken eyes and skin that looked as if you would bruise it with a glance. I would carve myself up into pieces to have him look at me that way. I would stop eating. I would learn to wear makeup and perfume like a real girl.