by Lisa Tuttle
The rot had started in their relationship, and although each incremental change was tiny — hardly noticeable to someone less sensitive than she — they soon demolished her notion of being in control.
She was not in control. She had no power. She lived for her nights with him; she needed him. But what if he didn’t need her? What if one night he no longer wanted her?
It could happen. He’d started to criticize, his fingers pinching the excess flesh which had grown back, with her greed, on her stomach and thighs, and she could tell by the gingerly way he handled her newly expanded breasts and ass that he didn’t like the way they jiggled. When he broke off a kiss too quickly she knew it was because he didn’t like the garlic or the onions on her breath. The unspoken threat was always there: one night he might not kiss her at all. One night he might just stay under the bed.
She didn’t think she could bear that. Having known sex, she was now just like all those people she’d found so incomprehensible in books and movies: she had to keep on having it. And she knew no other partner would satisfy her. She’d been spoiled by her food man for anyone else.
She began to diet. But it was different this time. Once not eating had been pleasurable and easy; now it was impossibly difficult. She no longer liked being hungry; it made her feel weak and cranky, not powerful at all, not at all the way she’d used to feel. This time she wasn’t starving to please herself and spite the world, but to please someone else. She went on doing it only because she decided she preferred sex to food; she could give up one if allowed to keep the other. And by promising herself sex, rewarding herself with explicit, graphic, sensual memories every time she said no to something to eat, she managed to continue starving herself back to desirability.
This suffering wouldn’t be forever. Once she’d reached her — or his — ideal weight, she hoped to maintain it with sufficient exercise and ordinary meals.
But the sex that she was starving herself for was no longer all that great. She was so hungry it was hard to concentrate. His smell kept reminding her of food instead of the sex they were engaged in. Except when she was on the very brink of orgasm, she just couldn’t seem to stop thinking about food.
And as time went on, and she still wasn’t quite thin enough to please him, not quite thin enough to stop her killing diet, she began to wonder why she was doing it. What was so great about sex, anyway? She could give herself an orgasm any time she wanted, all by herself. Maybe they weren’t so intense, maybe they were over quicker, but so what? When they were over she used to fall asleep contented, like someone with a full stomach, instead of lying awake, sated in one sense but just beginning to remember how hungry she still was for food. As for arousal — what was so great about arousal? It was too much like hunger. It was fine in retrospect, when it had been satisfied, but while it was going on it was just like hunger, an endless need, going on and painfully on.
She didn’t know how much longer she could bear it. And then, one night, she went from not knowing to not being able. When her lover climbed into bed with her, swinging one leg across her, holding her down as he so often did now, keeping her in her place, the smell of him made her feel quite giddy with desire, and her mouth filled with saliva.
As his soft, warm, odorous face descended to hers she bit into it, and it was just like a dinner roll freshly baked. She even, as her teeth sank into his nose, tasted the salty tang of butter.
He did not cry out — he never had made a sound in all the nights she had known him — nor did he try to escape or fight back as she bit and tore away a great chunk of his face and greedily chewed and swallowed it. She felt a tension in him, a general stiffening, and then, as, unable to resist, she took a second bite, she recognized what he was feeling. It was sexual excitement. It was desire. He wanted to be eaten. This was what he had wanted from the very first night, when he had pressed himself, first his face and then all the other parts of his body in turn, against her mouth — only she had misunderstood. But this was what he was for.
She ate him.
It was the best ever, better by far than their first night together, which had seemed to her at that time so wonderful. That had been only sex. This was food and sex together, life and death.
When she had finished she felt enormous. Sprawling on the bed, she took up the whole of it and her arms and legs dangled off the sides. She was sure she must be at least twice her usual size. And the curious thing was that although she felt satisfied, she did not feel at all full. She was still hungry.
Well, maybe hungry wasn’t exactly the right word. Of course she wasn’t hungry. But she still had space for something more. She still wanted something more.
The springs groaned as she sat up, and her feet hit the floor much sooner than she’d expected. She was bigger than usual; not only fatter, but taller, too. She had to duck to get through her own bedroom door.
She stood for a moment in the hall, enjoying her enormous new size and the sense of power it gave her. This, not starving herself and not having secret sex, was true power. Food and eating and strength and size. She knew she wanted to eat something more, maybe a lot of something more before the night was over. There was a smell in the air which had her moist and salivating with desire. She licked her lips and looked around, her fingers flexing, but there wasn’t much of interest in the hallway. A framed studio portrait of the family hung above the only piece of furniture, a small table with a wobbly leg. On the table was a telephone, a pad of yellow Post-it notes, and a gnawed wooden pencil. The taste of the pencil was as immediately familiar to her as the salty tang of her own dandruff and sloughed skin cells beneath a nibbled fingernail, and did about as much to satisfy her hunger. The shiny, dark chocolate colored telephone wasn’t as easy to eat as the pencil had been, but she persevered, and had crunched her way through more than half of it before the unpleasant lack of taste, and the discomfort of eating shards of plastic, really registered. She finished it anyway — it was all fuel — and then sniffed the air.
From the bedrooms where her brother and her parents slept drifted the rich, strong, disturbing smells of sex and food. Aroused and ravenous, she followed the scent of her next meal.
Manskin, Womanskin
He said, “I think we’d be more comfortable in the bedroom, don’t you?” and I said, “Where’s the loo?”
It was our first time alone together in his house and we both knew what we were there for. We’d met at a friend’s party and had gone out together seven times in three weeks. Although we were still on our best behavior, and I was aware that I still knew very little about him, the urge to get closer was strong, very strong. A lot is made of the loss of virginity as a great moment of decision, as a trauma, even, but the loss of mine had been easy and inevitable, and my first boyfriend and I had been together for nearly eight years. Making up my mind to go to bed with my second boyfriend had been much more difficult, and now I felt that I had taken too long and been overcautious. I’d been so determined not to make a mistake, to be certain that this relationship would last — and in the end we’d broken up after less than two years. This time, although I still wanted it to be the last first-time, this man my final one-and-only, I’d decided to take a chance and be a little braver about the unknown.
After three weeks of increasing warmth and interest the time was right. I was nervous, but willing. I’d meant to conquer my nervousness by staying close to him, so close that clothed kisses on the sofa would progress without any major break to the naked intimacies in his bed. But when you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go. So off I went and didn’t realize until the door was closed with me inside the little room that the light switch was on the wall outside. But I didn’t need light for what I had to do, and if I had, the moonlight sifting dreamily through frosted glass would have been enough.
I wondered, as I sat on the pot, if Fred was as nervous as I was. It seemed unlikely. He was thirty-nine, ten years older than me, and he’d never been married. Although he hadn’t itemized his girlfriends fo
r me, I gathered there had been quite a few. He didn’t seem to have much luck with sustaining relationships, a fact about which he seemed rueful and a bit bewildered. It was obvious to me that he just hadn’t met the right woman. Was I the right woman? I thought of the sense of intimacy and understanding between us already, despite the fact that we’d known each other only three weeks. Was it a false understanding? Sexual attraction was like moonlight, casting a glamour on things that would look terribly ordinary in daylight, like that garment, whatever it was, hanging from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. The moonlight made it look like a cast-off human skin, if humans could cast off their skins.
I remembered a movie I wished I’d never seen, about a psycho who murdered women for their skins, and I jumped up. I felt a little sick. Yet there was nothing grisly or horrible about the thing. When I touched it, it was so cool and fine between my fingertips that it might have been spun from the moonlight itself.
It came down from the hook into my hands as if I wanted it, and the sensation of all that impossibly light mass tumbling into my arms made me dizzy with desire. I just had to put it on.
It was the weirdest sort of garment I’d ever encountered, a full body suit with hands and feet and head. It seemed all of a piece, yet as soon as I looked for an opening it was open in my hands, inviting me out of my clumsy, constricting clothes and inside it. There was no zip or other form of fastening, yet when I pressed the edges of the skin together they bonded fast. It seemed that a light veil had fallen over my face, I could feel something lighter than the finest silk against my skin, yet there was no obstruction. I could breath as freely as ever, open and shut my eyes, even open my mouth and put out my tongue. I thought my vision was slightly affected, as if veiled, yet that may have been the moonlight.
I ran my hands over my naked/not naked body, finding it both familiar and strange. I had changed, the skin had changed me, but I was still myself. For the first time in my life I knew, absolutely, that I was beautiful, and, for the first time since childhood, felt completely at home in my body. No longer nervous, I went out to meet my lover.
He was waiting for me in the bedroom, in the moonlight which streamed through net curtains, as naked as I was. His unexpected handsomeness took my breath away. His body was more impressive than his clothes revealed, and the shadows chiseled what I’d first thought were the fairly ordinary — though very nice — features of his round face into more pleasing, classical proportions. I should have felt utterly intimidated by the sight of this stranger, but instead I was engulfed by a wave of lust that carried all my qualms and hesitancies out to sea, and washed me onto the bed, into his arms.
*
The first time I tried to make bread it was awful. I felt clumsy and irritable, did everything wrong, and in the end I threw the batch out. After that, it was fine. In fact, baking bread is one of my favorite things to do. But my first experience with it sums up my attitude toward first times in bed with someone new: it’ll be awful, but worth it in the long run. Since there’s no way of avoiding the first time, you might as well just be as relaxed as you can about it, get through it, perform the mental equivalent of throwing it out uneaten, and take your reward from the pleasures to come.
Things I’d heard from my friends made me believe it was true for everyone — certainly for all women — but that first time, in the skin, was totally different. Our bodies seemed to recognize each other, our bodies adored each other, and it was impossible to put a hand or a foot or anything else wrong. All, all was mutual delight.
It was the skin, of course, but while I was in it, I thought it was me. A me wonderfully, gloriously changed, but still me.
I fell asleep in the skin. In the morning, I’d forgotten I had it on, but in the bathroom, just as I was about to step into the shower, the skin suddenly fell away from me, running down my body and dropping smooth as water to puddle at my feet.
I picked it up and examined it in the dull and murky daylight. It was a silvery no-color, like a snake’s shed skin, but without brittleness. Fine, supple, and strong, it had no weight, almost no mass. I crushed it into the palm of my hand, closed my fingers on it until it was invisible and felt like nothing at all. I could carry it in my purse or pocket, keep it with me always, I thought — then I hung it back on the door where I’d found it.
In the kitchen, amid the smells of coffee and charred toast, Fred looked ordinary again, ordinary and a little shy, and I knew that must be how I looked, too. He didn’t seem to mind, though. He seemed to like looking at me, and he didn’t avoid my eye, rather he caught it, and smiled.
An accidental bump led to a fervent clutch and a kiss and very soon, clutching and groping at each other, we made our way back down the hall to the bedroom. He seemed different in daylight, the whole thing was different, clumsier and sweatier, no less urgent yet somehow scarier, a new first-time. And then he paused and drew back a little. “Shall we … uh, do you want to … ?”
“Of course.” I rolled away from him just enough to reach the box of condoms on the table, but when I looked back I could see that wasn’t what he meant. “No?”
“Oh, yes, that too, but I meant — like last night. In the skins.”
It shocked me to hear him say it. How could I have thought it was my secret when it was his house I’d found it in? Yet, since it had fallen off, the memory of the womanskin had moved into the part of my mind where dreams and sexual fantasies lived, and to have Fred refer to it gave me the creepiest feeling, as if he’d somehow got inside my head.
He misinterpreted the look on my face. “Of course we don’t have to, if you didn’t like it. I thought it was rather special, that’s all …”
“Yes, yes, I did too,” belatedly I twigged. “You were wearing one, too!”
“Yes, of course.”
“Fred, what are they?” I rolled onto my side, propping myself up on an elbow, and he mirrored me.
“I don’t know. A manskin and a womanskin, just what they seem to be. No, honestly, I don’t know any more than you do.”
“You must. Where did they come from?”
“I don’t know. I found them in the garden.”
“In your garden?” I looked at the bedroom window, still curtained in net, at the greenish blur beyond. I hadn’t seen his garden yet, but I was familiar enough with the pocket handkerchief gardens of this neighborhood of London to imagine the narrow, fenced-in rectangle of grass bounded on at least two sides by flower beds or shrubberies, all most unmagical. “You found them in your garden? How? When? Tell me, Fred!”
“Well, did you think I’d bought them in a shop?” He grinned at me. “The garden’s nothing special; I’ll show you later. There’s a little shed down at the bottom, and a compost heap; the skins were lying on the grass in between. It was about a month ago — well, it must have been exactly a month ago because the moon was full, like it was last night. It was about a week before we met — you see, I haven’t had them very long. I was feeling a little lonely and a little restless and I wasn’t quite ready to go to bed, although it was late enough. It wasn’t raining and I could see the moon shining away when I went to draw the curtains, so I thought I’d go out into the garden for a breath of air. That was when I saw something shining like moonlight on the grass. It looked like — you know, quicksilver? That’s what I thought of, quicksilver flowing in the shape of a person. Like a shadow on the grass, but light instead of dark, almost like a concentrated essence of light, shining up from the dark grass. I went over to it and bent down to touch it, and it was as I was hanging it up that it fell apart into two, and I realized I was holding — well, you know.”
“So you just kept them?”
“What would you have done?”
“Did you try them on?”
“Just the manskin,” he said swiftly, so swiftly that the qualification made me wonder. “Once I had it on I knew that it was no good by itself, that they were meant to be a couple, were for a couple.”
“So a few days later
you asked me out.”
“I would have asked you out anyway. It might have taken me a little longer, that’s all. The skin gave me an extra — it gave me courage.”
“And then yesterday you left the womanskin hanging on the back of the bathroom door hoping — what? That I’d just see it and happen to try it on?”
He nodded.
“What if I hadn’t?”
“But you did.” He smiled his sweet, shy smile. “Shall we put them on again?”
I wasn’t feeling the slightest bit sexy, the mood had gone to something else entirely, and I wanted to go on exploring it, exploring him by talking, but I was so moved by his strange story, and by him, that I did what he said, got up and went to the bathroom and slipped into the womanskin. I knew as soon as I returned that he was wearing his — there was nothing to see, but I sensed it, like an aura. As soon as the two skins came into contact they began making love. Of course it was we who did all those things, our two bodies fitting together as if we’d been lovers for years, and of course we experienced the arousal, the growing excitement, the climax, and yet all the while there was some small part of me which remained remote, aware that Fred and I were two strangers, separated by the skins, and that all the passion they generated had nothing really to do with us.
At first, in the beginning days and weeks of our deepening relationship, I didn’t like to say anything about it. Sex in the skins was so reliably wonderful that it seemed sheer perversity to ask to try it without them. And besides, I thought naked sex was bound to happen naturally before long — we’d just get carried away and do it without thinking of the skins.
