by Lisa Tuttle
But it didn’t. If we were caught in the throes of passion on the couch in the middle of watching the late-night movie, we had to pause for contraception, and given a pause, the skins would insert themselves. I could have protested, of course, made a joking or a serious request to leave them out of it. But I guess I wanted it to come from Fred. I was afraid of finding out that the skins meant more to him than I did.
Every night Fred would slip into his skin at bedtime, the way that I might have inserted my diaphragm, just in case. But there was no “just in case” about it, because once he’d put the manskin on, I seemed to feel a yearning from the womanskin which would have been cruel to ignore. I couldn’t just be myself when Fred had on the manskin; I had to be her.
They were no good on their own, the skins. It was as Fred had told me, they were a couple, made for a couple. One morning I had the notion of wearing the womanskin out into the world, of going to work in it and seeing how other people would react. But I couldn’t do it. The skin which clasped me so close whenever I was alone with Fred simply refused to stay on; it would not be worn under clothes or without sexual intent.
I don’t mean to imply that the skins dominated our lives. The skins were only for sex, and when we weren’t wearing them, or about to, even the memory of them seemed to slip away, at least from me. There’s always more to life than sex, even in the most passionate relationship. Fred and I began to spend all our spare time together. Although I still, cautiously, continued to pay rent on my single room, and left my out-of-season clothes hanging in the wardrobe there, I was effectively living with him. I met his friends and he met mine, we cooked for each other and went shopping together, joked and argued and shared a life. It should have been perfect — the sex could not have been better — yet I felt there was something missing. I wanted a greater closeness. Fred didn’t know what I meant. How could we be closer? We did everything together and the sex, every night, was great. I thought maybe we should talk more about ourselves. Fred didn’t, but he did his best to oblige, answering my questions about his past, or what he felt about something, even when I could tell he found them annoying or unimportant or intrusive.
I couldn’t explain what was wrong, what was missing, but something was. After a while I became obsessed with the notion that the skins were coming between us, and that the intimacy I craved would be ours only if we made love without them.
Of course, I should have said something about how I was feeling, but our love was still too new: I didn’t want him to think I was dissatisfied, or to make him unhappy. So, in time-honored female fashion, I resorted to trickery.
We were on our way to the cinema, a route which took us right past the house where I rented a room, when I suddenly expressed a need for a particular sweater I’d left there. Obligingly he went along with me, and as soon as we were together behind the closed door of my room I faked an overwhelming passion to get us onto my single bed. But even before all our clothes were off he’d revealed that, alongside the emergency condom I already knew he carried in his wallet, he also carried both the skins.
“They fold down to nothing at all, you must have noticed,” he said. “I don’t always carry them with me, but this morning I just thought I’d see if they’d fit … lucky chance, huh?”
I burst into tears and confessed. He was astonished. Why hadn’t I said?
Now, too late, I tried to make light of my desire. I hadn’t asked because I hadn’t wanted to make it seem important. It wasn’t important. Our relationship, most particularly the sexual side of it, was wonderful. Only, now and then I wondered if we might not be even closer if we made love without the skins. Hadn’t he ever wondered about that, about how it would feel?
He said he had not. He said he couldn’t imagine being any closer to anyone than he already was to me. He said that sex with me, in the skins, was the best he’d ever known and, that being so, why should he want anything different? But now that he knew what I wanted …
Now that he knew what I wanted, we had to do it there and then, the skins folded back into his wallet. Was it their presence, like uninvited ghosts, which made what followed so unsatisfactory? Or was it my guilt at having tried to deceive him? How could I complain we weren’t close enough when I kept my own feelings hidden? It was a pretty wretched coupling, all told. I’d seldom felt less like having sex, and it was easy to imagine the pressures on Fred struggling to satisfy me unaided. No wonder that we ended up farther apart, more alone than ever. No wonder it was such a relief to put the skins on again later that night and feel ourselves drawn back together. In my imagination the skins had been coming between us, blocking a more perfect understanding, but now I could see it was the skins which saved us from our differences. Without the skins we were only ordinary. With them we were special.
We soon took great sex for granted, as our right. We were spoiled by the skins which made sex instant and easy and completely detached from the rest of life. It still made me uneasy because it was so unnatural. We were in the unlikely situation of being in a sexual relationship in which the sexual part was completely unaffected by the relationship.
The sex was magic, but the sex belonged to the skins. It didn’t matter if we’d just been arguing about whose turn it was to clean the bathroom; or whether someone who voted Conservative could be, in any sense of the word, a good person; it didn’t matter if he was tired or I had a hangover — whatever our moods, whatever our differences, if we put on the skins we were instantly ready for love. The skins took us into another world, their world, where only one thing mattered. Tiredness, anger, irritation, menstrual cramps either vanished or stopped mattering for a little while. Yet it was the same if I was feeling particularly loving toward Fred for some reason, or if I was already aroused by some fantasy I’d been having — none of it mattered, nothing made any difference, positive or negative, in the realm of the skins. Fred and I were involved in a sexual relationship, but it was not our own.
Our relationship did not influence the sex, but the sex definitely influenced our relationship. It’s hard to share several hours of physical bliss with someone and not feel, at the very least, warm toward them the next day. Kitchen and bathroom foibles, odd and even disgusting personal habits are easily forgiven in the afterglow, differences forgotten because unimportant. I don’t know what sort of lovers we would have been without the skins; neither of us was eager to find out, unwilling to spoil what we did have. And yet there were times when I was with Fred when I felt lonelier than I’d ever felt on my own. I put it down to hormones.
I still don’t know why I put on the manskin one night. Opportunity, I suppose, and curiosity. I had never examined it; I don’t think I’d ever even touched it except when Fred was wearing it. We’d just been getting ready for bed when the telephone rang and he went out of the room to answer it, leaving his skin lying on the bed.
Wondering how different it was to mine, I picked it up, and, because I was naked already, put it on.
I didn’t expect it to fit. My skin fit me, as his fit him, as if they’d been specially tailored to our proportions, and Fred was nearly six inches taller than I was, with broader shoulders and longer arms. Yet the manskin settled onto my nakedness like my own skin. Looking down at myself, I thought there’d been some mix-up: his skin couldn’t possibly fit me so tightly and comfortably. This must be a woman’s skin.
But I knew it wasn’t mine. Fred had been wearing this skin; it was unmistakably his. Something of his essence still clung to it the way that a smell, perfume, or body odor will cling to much-worn, unwashed clothes. This wasn’t a smell, though; it was emotion, it was personality, it was cast of mind, a sort of echo of Fred himself, which I recognized as surely as I recognized his voice on an answering machine, his arms around me in a dark room.
It was almost like being Fred, knowing what he knew, feeling what he felt. It was intimacy beyond anything I’d ever experienced, a way of knowing what I’d only struggled to imagine, before, and the knowledge overwhelmed me w
ith love.
Fred came back into the room and I tossed him my skin. “Put it on,” I said. “Quickly!”
I don’t think he understood what I had done until he had put it on. I saw the astonishment on his face, the melting into love, in the minute or so before we came together to make love.
It was the best ever. In the past I’d sometimes felt more like a passenger than a participant, aware that it could be someone else, anyone else, inside without making any difference to what was happening between manskin and womanskin. Great sex, yet somehow anonymous.
This could not have been less anonymous. I was engulfed by Fred himself, by the sensual, sensory memories of the man. I was in his skin, and yet I was myself, making love to him, the man I felt with every part of me, in my skin. Words can’t explain or do it justice. I’m not even sure I can really remember it now, not the way it really was, but one thing is certain: it was the high point of our love affair.
The problem with heights is that once you’ve reached the highest there is nowhere to go but down. The next few nights afterward we made love the old way: Fred in the manskin, I in the womanskin, until I began to grow restless and want something more.
When I suggested we swap skins, Fred was adamantly opposed. I didn’t quite believe his opposition — it had been so wonderful, how could he not want it again? I teased and pressed and pestered for a reason.
“It’s not right, that’s why. It’s not natural.”
“Oh, and the skins are?”
“Of course they are!” He glared at me. “I can understand curiosity, once, but you should be satisfied now. Aren’t you satisfied with being a woman?”
“But it’s not about being a woman! I’m still a woman, with the skin or without it — whichever skin I wear. It doesn’t make any difference.”
“If it doesn’t make any difference, why do you want to wear the manskin?”
“It’s not about being a man or a woman, it’s about being you. Well, feeling you, knowing you better than — Knowing you from the inside. That’s what it’s like; that’s why I liked it. Not because it was a manskin — really, I couldn’t tell any difference between them — but because it was yours. Didn’t you like being in my skin?”
“It’s not your skin, it’s just something I let you wear. And no, I didn’t like it particularly. I don’t like feeling like a woman. I’m a man.”
I was suddenly frightened, aware that I was on dangerous ground. All at once the skins were his and I was — who was I, what was I, to him?
“Of course you’re a man. It’s because you are a man, and I’m not, and it’s because I love you, that I want to know you in every way there is. I want to get closer to you, I don’t want to take anything away from you—”
“Then you shouldn’t try. Loving me isn’t wanting to be me; it isn’t wanting to turn me into a woman. If you really loved me you’d want to be even more of a woman, to make me feel more of a man. That’s what the skins are all about.”
“I’m sorry.” It was hard for me to accept the truth, that what had been for me a high point of intimacy and understanding had been no such thing for him. Instead of feeling closer to me in my skin he had simply felt, unhappily, like a woman. Any woman, I guess, with me as any man. I gave up trying to explain it to him. If he didn’t want to be inside my skin I wasn’t going to try to force him.
After that we made love less often. His aversion to wearing the womanskin created an ambivalence in me, an insecurity. Was the woman he had encountered traces of in the skin so unlovable? Who did he imagine that I was? We made love a few times without the skins in pursuit of our old closeness but it was never satisfactory. We tried very hard for a time and then we gave up trying.
We were drifting apart. The term implies a gradualness, and it was certainly not abrupt, yet it happened very quickly once it began. Both of us became busy with things that kept us out of the house and out of each other’s way. I went back to my room more often, and even spent the night there, especially if I was going out with friends after work or if he said he would be out late.
Yet it wasn’t easy, giving up on Fred. I’d always liked being part of a couple, and I’d never entered a relationship without intending it to last forever. And I missed him. Memories of the early days of our romance haunted me, memories of intimacy, wordless feelings I would never have again.
Neither of us said anything about what was happening, reluctant to bring it to a formal, final close. We spent two or three nights a week together, and although I had been gradually, unobtrusively shifting my things back to my own room, I still had my own key to his house.
One evening which we had planned to spend together I happened to get there first. I took my bottle of wine into the kitchen, and then went down the hall to the bathroom.
The skins, both of them, were hanging from the hooks on the back of the door. It gave me quite a start to see them, for Fred had long been in the habit of folding his carefully away after use. When it wasn’t in his wallet he kept it in a small, round, leather stud-box on the bedroom dresser. I had tended to leave the womanskin hung on the back of the door where I’d first found it, but after feeling his disapproval of “picking up after me” a few times, I’d found a Chinese red silk purse and used that faithfully. I was sure that I’d folded it away after the last time; certainly the skins had not been hanging in the bathroom when I left on Sunday night.
Then I noticed that they were moving. It was only the faintest of gentle waving motions, as if they stirred in a breeze, but there was no breeze in the closed room, and if there had been, it would have impelled the skins to move both in the same direction not, as I could plainly see, in gentle flutterings toward each other.
What I saw, and I knew it, was pure yearning. They longed for each other all the time, but only by human intervention could they come together. We could live without them, but they needed us.
I lifted them down from their hooks, took them into the bedroom, and lay them flat on the bed, one on top of the other. I watched for a little while but there was no visible movement — maybe, for them, no movement was necessary now they were so close. Then, feeling embarrassed by my own curiosity, I left the room, turning out the light when I went.
Fred and I had dinner in — a take-away from the local Indian restaurant — and then watched a production of Don Giovanni on television. Opera is not really my sort of thing; and he had offered to tape it and watch it by himself later, but I was getting the prickly sensation that Fred had decided it was time at last for our serious talk, and I was grateful for anything that would postpone it. Our relationship was nearly over, but I was determined it should last long enough for us to make love once more.
When we went into the bedroom together he looked startled at the sight of the skins on the bed.
“Oh, maybe not,” he said. “Maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea tonight — I’ve been meaning to talk to you—”
“Later. Don’t say anything now. We’ll put on the skins — we could be any man, any woman — we can talk tomorrow.”
Hastily I stripped off my clothes, knowing that once I was in the skin he wouldn’t argue with me, he would feel the yearning, too, and the compulsion to satisfy it.
Then I was in the skin and — it wasn’t mine anymore. All at once I was suffocatingly close to, intimate with, a complete stranger. It was like waking up in the middle of a rape, and the worst part about it was the hot, heavy desire all around. I felt it as if it was mine, and it was directed at Fred — but I knew it belonged to somebody else. I wanted to scream but I couldn’t. Somehow I managed to peel the thing off me, and then I stood naked, trembling, staring outraged at my lover.
“You’ve had someone else here — you’ve been making love with someone else!”
“I was going to tell you — I tried—”
“You were going to tell me! And that makes it all right?”
“Oh — please. Don’t go all — as if I’d broken your heart. You know perfectly well tha
t things were already all but finished between us.” His calm, weary, rational tone made me aware that I was playing a role lifted from a soap opera, but I couldn’t seem to stop.
“All but, yes. All but. But not completely finished. It would have been nice if you could at least have waited, instead of ending it like this, humiliating me, and — and why did you have to bring her here? Why did you have to use the skins?”
He stopped looking defensive.
“You know why,” he said quietly. “You know perfectly well why. The same reason you dragged me in here and tore off all your clothes ten minutes ago. Nothing to do with love for me. Nothing much to do with you, either.”
Anger and hurt rushed out of me like air from a pricked balloon, leaving me limp. I began to put my clothes back on. “I wasn’t the first, was I.”
He sighed and shook his head. “But it felt like the first time with you, it really did. That’s all I meant. I didn’t want you thinking it was routine, or old hat, or — Because it really was special with you, like the very first time.”
“Did you really find them in your garden?”
“Different garden. Down in Suffolk. Years ago — the night I lost my virginity. Some fifty-odd women ago.”
I was all dressed now. I looked at my watch, saw that the underground would still be running. I could go home. “Well — good luck. I hope you’re happy. Maybe she’ll be the one.”
He smiled a little, mocking my conventional expectations. “That’s not what it’s about. I don’t need one.”
Turning Thirty
I walked into the pub off the Gray’s Inn Road and saw him slouching at the bar, and it was as if no time had passed.
The pub was one where we’d often met, and which I’d not visited since. I went in there today because I wanted a drink. It wasn’t nostalgia or anything; to tell the truth, I’d hardly taken in where I was. The pub just happened to be the one I was passing at the moment I realized I really could not face the tube just then without a little lubricant.
