Affection
Page 20
Name. Krissy Kneen. Kris, really, but everyone called me Krissy, and Kneen was not the name I was born with but it was my grandfather’s name and that was fine. I could choose to use my father’s name instead, or my grandmother’s because it was my grandmother I longed for when I had a headache or when I was lonely. My grandmother who would say, “There is no try, only do or do not do,” like some ancient Eastern European Yoda figure. My grandmother who would say, “Don’t be silly, you are not homeless at all. You are in between your houses,” as if I would rummage and find a key in the bottom of my bag along with the stones and seeds and poetry-laden scraps of paper.
What is the current balance of your bank account? “You are not broke,” my grandmother’s voice told me. She was in my head. She watched through my eyes as I wrote $4.00 and she was shaking her head. “Not broke, fashionably fancy free.”
Broke. I answered her back and I should never answer her back. She would never tolerate this kind of disrespect. Broke and homeless and in need of some assistance. Some help. I tipped my head forward so that the tears bypassed my cheeks and fell neatly onto the page. When my eyes were dry I saw the saltwater had smudged the form. My last name could be Kneen or Knoon; even Know. I blotted the page with my sleeve and blew on it till it was dry. I carefully filled in the double “e.” Kneen. Kris Kneen. I brushed the surface of the page clean and continued to fill in the form.
CHAPTER FORTY
Brisbane 2008
Beauty is all about symmetry, they say. Some perfect form of balance. My own eye seems to slide off the things that others consider beautiful. Symmetry does not capture my attention; I am more drawn to the person who feels misplaced. The loners, the overlooked, the undervalued. I like my houses tumbledown and my bookshelves a patchwork of spines at a lean.
Perhaps it should be no surprise to me, then, that I woke up this morning and found that I was beautiful. Not pretty. Not like the girls who turn heads and who earn free cocktails just by bestowing their symmetry on others. Not like Jessica or even Laura or Katherine or any of those girls I have wanted or wanted to become. I woke, and did not need to look in a mirror to know that somehow I had overlooked the obvious.
I am my own tumbledown building. I am the joyful expanse of my own flesh with the marks of age and a life of pleasure worn proudly like any graffiti-strewn alley. I like my own taste, admire it even. I like who I am. I am strangely surprised by this. I like what my body does when I am touching it. I like the skill with which I bring myself to orgasm. I like the way I orgasm, contained and yet abandoned to the pleasure of it. I like that I can find pleasure in the slightest disturbance of the air.
I like myself. How could this be? I barely recognize my relationship to myself. Gone is the stress and worry, my constant assessing and reassessing of my own behavior. I try on clothes and face a mirror fearlessly for perhaps the first time in my life. I am short and large and odd looking. My face is not pretty and my body is certainly not something to be reproduced endlessly like a photograph of a model or a parade of catwalk beauties each one so similar to the next. I am myself and I am beautiful in my own very particular way. This self-liking makes me uneasy, but I am fine with that as well. It is the kind of uneasiness that I can love.
So I walk past the Story Bridge and there is my iPod and the Pixies, and I pick the kind of grass with the gray pink tufts that I love so much and there is the Story Bridge that I think perhaps I might jump off, but I know probably I won’t. I listen to the Pixies and I think I might listen to the Pixies again tomorrow, on my fortieth birthday.
Instantly and overnight it is different. This is how the change has occurred. I am new in my skin. I am a quiet strength. I have been clinging to my younger self like a life jacket, comforted by the whistle and the toggles and the little light. For a moment that lasted twenty years I had forgotten about my own natural buoyancy. Now that the fall is behind me I can feel the pleasure of the slap of waves and the little nipping of fish that share the water with me. I know about sharks that lurk and the possible dangers they bring with them, but I am a wily creature. I look back on my life so far and I know that it is true. I have swum through hoops, slick as a dolphin, and all this play has been good training for my sudden transition. From the paddling pool to the lap pool—and now this high-diving act has brought me to the ocean. The dangerous, glorious ocean, replete with the possibility of whales.
ST. JAMES STREET
Brisbane 1990
I could live there. This small room with its single bed. A single bed. I thought I could perhaps drag my king-size futon from under Laura’s house and lay it out on all the available floor space. The edge of it would butt up against the sink but I could be careful with my washing up. Or I could roll the futon up during the day, or I could stick with the single bed. A single bed and the celibacy it implied.
A man shuffled out into the corridor to stare at me. They were all men. I could smell them, the horror of unwashed socks and stained underwear, old-man’s long johns hidden under flannel shirts. The man was older than me, but not so old. Maybe in his fifties, probably not too much older than Brian. I clutched my bag, suddenly aware of the low swing of my shirt and my breasts swelling out of it. The man stared with the kind of unabashed curiosity that we must grow into, all shyness abandoned after hard years of practice. I stepped back into the room that might be mine. A sink, a bed, a tiny desk, a stove and an oven that may or may not have worked. It was affordable and I could live there.
The caretaker shook his head at me.
“I won’t rent it to you.”
I watched the old man shuffle back into his room. The door rattled closed. Loose paint flaked onto the musty carpet. He would be my neighbor. At night I might hear his pathetic attempts at masturbation. We would share the shower down the hallway. I would find his gray pubic hairs fossilized in the communal soap.
“I can afford it.”
“I won’t.” He swept his arm across the shadowy view of the corridor with its myriad of closed doors. “Old alcoholic men. That’s who live here. And junkies. I’m not renting it to you.”
I took a step back and the floorboards creaked. Outside the clouds were gathering. It would rain again.
He walked me to the front steps. “It’s not for you,” he told me, concerned. “Look love,” and I could have hit him; my hand became a fist, the nails bit into my palm, “there.”
He pointed out toward the overcast sky. I squinted but I couldn’t see anything—just a hill I would have to walk up and houses pressed hip to hip; coming rain.
“Up at the top, near the Fiveways, there’s a block of apartments. Cheap. I know there’s a couple free. You should check that out.”
“I’ve got the deposit,” I told him. “I’ve got it in cash.”
He eased me down the stairs, the flat of his palm in my back. “St. James Street,” he told me. “I don’t know the number.”
Rain spat in my face when I glanced upward. Light rain, but it would get heavier. I breathed in jasmine. Exhaled gardenia. It was a Brisbane summer day and there was rain coming.
There were angels in the garden. White stone creatures perched on dry fountains. There were naked women hoisting stone basins onto their shoulders. There was a house behind these whitewashed figures. The house was perched at a lean, heavier on its top floor than it was below. Threatening to spill bathrooms and lounge rooms down into the weedy garden with its picket fence.
I climbed crumbling steps and knew as soon as I stepped up onto the tumbledown porch that I would live there. A blue heeler lifted its lazy head from its paws, its eyebrows crinkling over sleepy eyes. I smiled and bent and patted its solid head and I smelled its doggy scent on my fingers. This was the room, the one that the dog was guarding.
Beside the dog was a broken couch with a blanket thrown over its spilled stuffing. There was a man asleep on the couch. He was all elbows and knees and his breath caught in a discreet snore that sounded more like the purr of a contented cat. There was paint
on his fingers, red paint. There was paint on his shirt and I noticed his sandals were an abstract work of red and yellow splatters. He smelled like my family. Turpentine, linseed oil, nicotine. His fingers had the yellow stains of a heavy smoker. There was a pouch of tobacco on the couch beside him. Dr. Pat. The same tobacco that I had been smoking. The same tobacco my grandfather used in his pipe.
I was careful not to wake him as I stepped over the dog and slipped the key into the door.
There were two rooms inside. The first was nothing more than a large bay window but it was big enough for my bed and the view was fringed by frangipani flowers and bougainvillea. The floorboards were already dripped with a splatter from the haphazard paint job. The kitchen sink was half aluminum, half rust. No toilet, somewhere there would be a shared toilet and a shower, but there was a gas stovetop and a bar heater on the wall. I would be fed and I would be warm. I suspected I would be happy.
I stepped out onto the porch and the young man was awake and leaning on one hand as he rolled a cigarette with another. He blinked, squinted. He pushed himself up until he was sitting a little unsteadily. There was an odd, unfocused vagueness in his eyes, but he looked straight at me and he grinned as if we were great friends.
“Ah,” he said to me. “You’re home then.”
SEX, LOVE, AND INTIMACY
Brisbane 2008
Of course Paul will leave with this girl. Paul is single and she is pretty and we did not arrive together. There is no reason for him to be anywhere but here, leaning across this dirty café table scorching this young girl in the blaze of his attention. He is charming; I have been charmed. Now it is her turn to be flattered into adoration. He will leave with her, and our other friends will sidle up to their temporary partners and drift off into the dawn.
It is one in the morning and drizzling. Our apartment is less than an hour’s walk away.
I stand and leave the table unnoticed. The rain comes harder when I am at the first set of traffic lights, rivulets finding the contours of my cheeks. No one has seen me leave. This is a game; teams have been selected and I am here at the edge of things, watching for a while, leaving, finding my way home.
At the venue there were bands and I felt like dancing but they don’t seem to dance anymore, this younger cooler generation. A night of sitting quietly in corners, everyone so young and self-aware and beautiful.
The rain is heavier the farther I trudge toward home. My dress clings to my body. The night is reflected in sad, damp puddles that lick at the edges of my shoes.
This is why married women who are forty do not go out to see bands with friends half their age. First there is the odd conversation with the Indian cab driver about the disposal of corpses in which somehow, in the time it takes to slide between one suburb and another, my body shape is likened to that of both a seal and a dugong. Then there is the line-up at the door where everyone is carded except me. Then there is the fact that I have more income than my student friends and it seems morally wrong to let them buy me a drink even though I have already bought them one or two. Then there is this pairing off, this settling into coupledom that will leave me walking home in the rain when they are all settling into cabs, snuggling up beside each other warm and dry in the hug of intimacy.
Inside my quiet apartment the calm takes me by surprise. The chaos of my day-to-day existence has been cleared away. Books shelved, benches wiped, dishes washed and neatly stacked. The sound of the rain is a gentle lullaby. I have drunk too much but I am not reeling drunk. I am wet but not chilled to the bone, and there in my bed is my own prize. The boy I would have left with if I had met him at the bar—even now, in our harried middle age. I look at his sleeping face and know that I would have spotted him immediately, found some way to share a cab with him or entice him out into the rain.
I peel off my soaked clothing and towel myself dry in the darkness of the bathroom. Our bathroom. Our house. When I slip into our bed he nestles sleepily against me.
“Hello Beautiful.” A dreamy whisper.
“Hi there.”
“It’s raining.”
“I walked home in the rain.”
“You should have caught a cab.”
“No,” I tell him and I touch his dry hair, curling my fingers through it gently. “It was nice, walking in the rain. Like I used to do.”
“How are your little friends?” he asks me, waking a little, grinning.
“Cute,” I tell him. “But you are so much cuter.”
“I know,” he grins and closes his eyes and shuffles closer. “And I know you know it, too.”
“I do. Please never forget that I do.”
I settle next to him. I smell the wonderful warm scent of him, knowing that this will not be the last time I wander home, tipsy and wet and alone; abandoned by all my exciting young friends. Knowing also that my husband will be here for me, sleepy, dry, waiting. The man who I once picked out of a crowd, and who I would pick again and again if I were meeting him anew.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Krissy Kneen is a writer and bookseller. She has written short films and directed documentaries for Australian television. She is the author of a short collection of erotica, Swallow the Sound, and she lives in Brisbane, Australia, with her husband. Affection is her first book.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My writer and bookseller friends are the most supportive people that I know. They have stood by me for so many years and my joy with this book is theirs to share.
In particular I thank: Chris Somerville, Christopher Currie, Katherine Lyall-Watson, Fiona Stager, Nike Bourke, Benjamin Law, Kristina Olsson, Nick Earls, Angela Meyer, Kirsten Reed, Trent Jamieson, Ronnie Scott. Thanks to the crew at QWC and particularly to Kate Eltham. Also to the ever-tolerant team at Avid Reader Bookshop and Café who fed me scotch when I was crying and champagne when I was elated during the writing of this book.
I would also like to thank my family, Wendy, Lotty, Barry, Karen, Peter R., Sheila, Denise, Helen and Peter M.
Thank you also to the friends and lovers who were there with me through my wild days. A special thanks to Elissa Freeman and Bec Harbison: twin pillars of support, and Judith Lukin-Amundsen, a most marvelous mentor.
The biggest thanks to Mandy Brett for the most amazing edit (a tighter, leaner, stronger book because of you), and to the team at Text Publishing. I stand in awe.
Selected Titles from Seal Press
For more than thirty years, Seal Press has published groundbreaking books. By women. For women. Visit our website at www.sealpress.com. Check out the Seal Press blog at www.sealpress.com/blog.
Good Porn: A Woman’s Guide, by Erika Lust. $17.95, 978-1-58005-306-8. Fun, fact-filled, and totally racy, Good Porn is an unapologetic celebration of porn—and a guide both for women who like it and those who don’t know what they’re missing.
Dirty Girls: Erotica for Women, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. $15.95, 978-1-58005-251-1. A collection of tantalizing and steamy stories compiled by prolific erotica writer Rachel Kramer Bussel.
Free Fall: A Late-in-Life Love Affair, by Rae Padilla Francoeur. $16.95, 978-1-58005-304-4. In this erotic memoir, Rae Padilla Francoeur recounts the joys, benefits, and challenges of embarking upon a surprising love affair late in life, and inspires women over 50 to discover their deepest sexual self.
Sex and Bacon: Why I Love Things That Are Very, Very Bad for Me, by Sarah Katherine Lewis. $14.95, 978-1-58005-228-3. A sensual—and sometimes raunchy—book celebrating the intersection of sex and food.
Fucking Daphne: Mostly True Stories and Fictions, edited by Daphne Gottlieb. $15.95, 978-1-58005-235-1. An erotic collection of stories—all centered on the fictional character “Daphne”—that blurs the line between fact and fantasy.
Sweet Charlotte’s Seventh Mistake, Cori Crooks. $18.95, 978-1-58005-249-8. In this stunning visual memoir, Cori Crooks searches for her identity among the old photographs, diary entries, and letters left behind by her delinquent family.
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AFFECTION
an erotic memoir
Copyright © 2010 by Krissy Kneen
Published by
Seal Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
1700 Fourth Street
Berkeley, California
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kneen, Krissy, 1968-
Affection : an erotic memoir / Krissy Kneen.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-580-05385-3
1. Kneen, Krissy, 1968—Sexual behavior. 2. Women—Sexual behavior—Australia. I. Title.
HQ29.K59 2010
306.77092—dc22
[B]
2010014521
In order to protect the identities of those people who were kind enough to share their stories to benefit the reader, many names have been changed.