You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

  “I’m going to go to the bathroom,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I didn’t know what she was going to do there, and I didn’t really care. I picked at a loose thread on my comforter to pass the time. I felt light on the inside, like a balloon, and I was incredibly sleepy. When Kandy Kat appears on two television screens at once, does he split in two? Two bodies with two minds pointed out at identical cartoon scenes? Two bodies responding identically, like twin machines? Or is there still one cartoon body, ribby and drained, with a doubled hunger for its double image? I needed some air. I walked to the door and stepped outside. When I looked back, I had a clear view into the bathroom: B had left the door wide open, and even from a distance I could see her standing there in front of the mirror, brushing her fingertips gently against the skin of her nose, cheeks, chin, tracing it with reverence, caressing it like an infant, newly born.

  I crossed the lawn in the dark, drawing closer to the house across the street, darkened and uninviting and empty. I looked back behind me, but nobody in the neighborhood was watching, not even B through the skinny kitchen window where she usually stood when I left the house. Nobody was watching me, nobody was thinking about me, I was truly alone. I pushed my way through the unclosed door using my shoulder instead of my hands, arms wrapped around myself like someone with a stomachache or someone who had just been punched in the gut. The door swung slowly back in, shutting out most of the light.

  Inside the house across the street it was soundless and clean, free of dust and voices. Everywhere was white with draped cloth, and the moon shone down on the muffled things and gave them an incredibly lonely color. There was a living room to my right filled with hulking white mounds that must once have been a sofa, love seat, armchair, upright piano. To my left was a dining room with three shrouded white chairs and a shrouded white table. From the lumps on its surface, nobody had bothered to clear away dinner before covering it over. I poked at one of the lumps through the pallid sheeting, and it gave way beneath my fingertip with a squish.

  There was no family. There was no dog. There weren’t even any insects that had crept in through the open door, the door that released a soft squeal behind me as the wind blew through our street. What had once been a family’s life, still vaguely life shaped, now resembled an arctic scene: white and smooth and cold to the eye. The sofa and love seat vague under sheeting, the obscure shapes of hidden toys. I stood there waiting for something to happen, but nothing was going to happen. It was like watching the body at a wake. My breath slowed and I felt like I might lie down and never get up.

  I realized that I was feeling happy.

  In the stillness of this dead house, I felt a sudden sense of belonging. It was partial, but still better than nothing. I belonged to this family whom I didn’t know and who didn’t know me either. This family that had left me behind. And though they didn’t know they were missing me, I knew. And that was something. I could still come in here and spend time, conjure them into their domestic spaces, miss them, remember all the things we never did together. I could imagine their voices, imagine finding those voices familiar. I felt as if I knew the entire layout of this house, knew exactly what was under each of these crisp white sheets, even though I didn’t.

  Outside, sparse crickets called back and forth. I went into the living room and sat down on the floor behind the ghosted couch. I stared at their white wall and then I lay down on my side. I lay there not thinking about B or C or my job or my parents. I didn’t think about how I looked or how good my skin was today. I didn’t think about food or water or the things that had happened. My breathing slowed. This house with its weird white covers over everything was telling me to do Nothing, and I knew exactly how to do that. I felt like snow, I thought, like snow feels: cold and quiet and close to vanishing. A temporary covering on a small piece of ground. I lay like snow for a long while, as occasionally a car drove past and made the white briefly whiter.

  Then I realized that if I stayed here too long, B might try to find me. I stood up and left right away. I closed the front door behind me but left it unlocked.

  BACK IN MY BEDROOM, THE television was telling me about a new edible beauty cream. A beautiful woman with black hair is smiling at a midsize jar that she holds in her hands, turning it slightly from right to left as if to admire its label. The woman is already so beautiful that it’s hard to see what she could possibly need inside that jar. Nevertheless she is so excited to open it up, the smile on her face just gets larger and larger as she unscrews the lid, tilts the jar delicately toward her, and then gasps in surprise. A white dove is struggling its way out of the smallish jar, straining its neck against the rim, trying to use its neck and beak as a lever to wrench its downy white breast through the opening. It tries to unfurl a wing, but it’s still too much trapped within the jar, so it looks left and right and then pecks at the parts of the jar that are within its reach. In terms of its experience as an animal, the dove is obviously distressed. Its black beady eyes are still, but its head jerks back and forth, back and forth. As a part of the commercial, however, the dove looks elegant and soft, its feathers fluffy as it twists around, trying to free its wings.

  The jar topples over and the dove kind of spills out, taking flight gracefully. As it flies, the voice-over tells us what sorts of things are in TruBeauty’s new interior-exterior skin-perfecting cream. Some of the things are vitamins, antioxidants, moisturizers. The dove is looking great with its wings flapping in slow motion and therefore appearing extra glamorous. When it completes one lap around the room, it circles back toward the beautiful woman, her mouth open in amazement, and it heads straight for her mouth, full throttle. The impact makes a soft thwack sound, and then it’s just the back half of the dove that’s visible sticking out of her mouth and trying hard to wriggle its whole body inside. The voice-over speaks: Most beauty creams stop at the epidermal level, treating only those minor flaws and imperfections that are the easiest to reach. Competing treatments only go skin deep. As it forces itself down her throat, she tilts her chin up gracefully and you can see some muscles at the sides of her neck clenching and releasing, working to help the dove get itself swallowed. When the last claw-tipped foot goes down, she tilts her chin low and smiles radiantly for the camera. Only one beauty cream attacks signs of aging and damage from the inside and out, making sure that threats to your beauty have no place to hide. The beautiful woman dips a spoon into the now dove-free jar of cream and lifts out a creamy mouthful. She dabs a little on her face, and brings the rest of the spoonful to her lips, thrusting it inside luxuriantly. It looks like yogurt, but it’s not. She licks the front and then the back, and then she reclines, closing her eyes and smiling in the sunny glow of her beautiful living room. And the voice-over says: Trust TruBeauty. We know that true beauty begins on the inside.

  I curled up on my side and I tried to smile the beautiful woman’s glowing, contented smile. I pretended I felt full and warm and that I had a whole living dove in my belly, looking elegant and soft. The dove was in there, but I wouldn’t hurt it—just hold it, keep it safe inside me. I pretended C was next to me, watching over my body, making certain that nobody could steal my face for as long as he was looking at it. I remembered B’s eye pointed up beneath my gaze, small and immobile and unprotected, with the lid slid all the way back. It was about the size of a thumb, from nail to first joint. My hand twitched. I was digging my two thumbs into the middle of a Kandy Kake, deep into the dark, oily center and pulling it apart. Soon the center would be surface, quivering under air. I could feel myself falling asleep, the sort of sleep you fall backward into, a sleep that feels like water rising higher and higher inside your head until it pushes at the backs of your eyes and the inside of your temples. A Kandy Kake is just like an eye, I thought, and that was the last thing I thought before I was asleep.

  In the middle of the night I woke up to a soft hand stroking my hair, but I was hollowed out, exhausted, and I fell back asleep before I could ask
who it was.

  A MOUTH WAS A MEANS into a person, but it also offered one of the neatest ways out. Whatever entered that slick passage immediately began pushing through to the other side, emerging unrecognizable and many steps removed from itself. A mouth glistened with saliva, ninety-eight percent water and two percent suspended particles, which made it slick, odorous, corrosive. In my saliva and my boyfriend’s rested enzymes that would break carbohydrates into sugars and fats as soon as food touched the inner walls of the oral cavity. Digestion begins inside the oral cavity, read the biology textbook I used in high school, in a section titled “How Do You Eat Meat?” What this meant was: Even if C loved me, even if he cared for me, even if he saw me as an equal and wanted only the best for me in my life, when he kissed me a part of him worked blindly to undo my body. When I put my own mouth on him, the material in my body sized up the material in his, checked to see if it was food or something other, something indigestible that would never truly penetrate.

  I stared up into C’s mouth, pink and wet and blackening as it deepened inch by inch into throat. Saliva pooled at the inner rim of his fleshy lower lip. On my back and facing the ceiling, I felt his body settle over me, pressing into my skin like a fist into dough. I was malleable and easily shaped, I was substance all the way through: no pockets of air, no hollow for the soul to fit in. Any lacuna that took a place in me was opened and filled at once by the same thing, so that hunger and its solution occurred simultaneously, barely leaving any sort of gap for desire to take place. I was solid, bounded on all sides, and when I reached for him I felt his own solidity, wider and less bony than my own, larger and different in shape, like a couch or an automobile. I tightened my hand on his shoulder and the skin underneath gave a little. It made little divots under my fingers that I grabbed into more sharply for traction. I slid my hand down. I hooked the thumb into his armpit for a better grip. The way my hand struggled showed me that he was unlike the handle of a hammer or a knife: he was not made for my grasp, not designed with me in mind. It slipped around beneath my palm, it was too large to hold. The repetitive motions of my hips slipped away from me, no longer controlled through thought. It was just like lying down in a boat and staring up, feeling your whole body move with the movement of something else.

  As the music that emanated from the television set grew louder and faster and more robust, C began to take a more decisive attitude toward my body. He grabbed my left leg below the knee and swiveled it around like a massive joystick, trying to push it back toward my ear. He put the heel of his hand on my thighs and leaned in, pushing against the club end where femur met hip.

  “My legs don’t work that way,” I said, trying to find an angle that hurt less.

  “What?” he said with a note of surprise, maybe just surprise that I was talking.

  “It’s not comfortable,” I said.

  He continued to press into me the same way he had before. My leg was a lump of hurt, the joint burned. I tried to wriggle my hips, but I was wedged in. He pried his weight deeper into me, placing a hand flat on my jaw for leverage.

  “They don’t go back at that angle,” I added, trying to explain it more precisely.

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry. I just thought . . .”

  He trailed off, looking over to my left, where the TV was glowing with pornographic scenes that I had forgotten were playing. C removed his hand from my leg and placed it back on the mattress. On-screen, the skinny, beige body of a ponytailed woman lay collapsed like a folding chair. The bright rectangle was filled with the bodies of others, doing the sorts of things we were doing, but under better lighting. Their genitals appeared first attached to their bodies and so small that you could cover them with a fingertip, then grew large enough to fill the entire screen. The oversize organs that were being pictured now had no body attached and therefore were bodies in themselves. Hairless and smooth, they lapped like faces with rudimentary mouths, speaking in a language that lay outside of my hearing. These part-faces had a way of interacting that was gentle and tactile, like the jellyfish I had seen on nature documentaries. The one swallowed the other up again and again, the other pulled away, creating a space between, then closed it again just as quickly. As I watch them draw their invertebrate torsos toward and away from each other, any sexual intent attributed to their motion would have seemed like pure projection.

  When we first met, I hadn’t really understood why C liked to have sex and watch porn at the same time. My first thought was that it was instructional, a sort of hint he was trying to give me. I tried to make sure that I was always in a position where I could see the TV, where I could shadow the woman or women on-screen. I arranged myself the way they did, I tried to move through the positions when they did. But he never seemed to map himself to anyone up there, and when I tried to he’d rearrange me, destroying the resemblance. Then I thought it might be like background music or the radio when you’re cooking dinner, or an attempt to cover up the sounds of our sex with sounds of the sex of strangers. But in the end I decided that it had to do with the thinness of the present. At any given present moment a person was doing one thing, maybe three things. They were lying down, and they were reading a sentence, and possibly they were thinking about what they were doing. Or they were reaching for someone’s shoulder, and noticing a mole on someone’s back, and feeling their own breath leave their chest. Any piece of time is lonely and pale in isolation, and moments resemble other moments, so that sometimes you feel that you are a memory being called to mind by someone else.

  I saw him look to the TV screen as soon as we had spent too long doing the same thing, and I thought I recognized something in him that I had seen in myself. He was thickening the moment by laying fantasy upon reality upon fantasy. Any two people stuck to each other in the present made for a wasteland. He was repopulating the act so that we would not be so alone in it together.

  In a similar way, I sometimes thought of a specific scenario to fill up the residual mental spaces that the act never seemed fully able to occupy on its own. In this scenario, C and I are together and about to turn on the TV and take all of our clothes off when suddenly there’s a knock on the door. We go over to see who it is, and when we open the door we find all of my ex-boyfriends outside, smiling and greeting us warmly. I recognize every one of them, and they haven’t changed a bit. They’ve all brought gifts: nice bottles of wine or a six-pack, boxes of filled chocolates, peanut brittle, or a fruit basket full of really lovely ripe pears, all russet-blushed green.

  They want to be invited in and it’s hard to know how to refuse them, with their earnest smiles pointed right at us. We sit around catching up. C and the exes are talking about their jobs and sharing stories from the different times they dated me, and as I watch them getting along, I feel this tremendous sense of well-being clogging my chest. Emotion swells in my middle and won’t let anything else through. It feels finally like there is no past, just a thick, happy present wrapping it all up, so beautiful that I can hardly breathe. Then all of a sudden we’re all stripping down and fucking, the whole group of us together, very politely. Everyone is respectful of one another’s personal space and nobody is uncomfortable. There are dicks everywhere. In the middle I feel happy and rested and I think to myself: The people I know best now know one another in the same way that I know each of them. I realize that I recognize all of their bodies right down to the placement of body hair and freckles. I know them like I know myself, better than I know myself. The scenario ends there.

  The ratio of actual sex to chatting, joking, and eating snacks in this fantasy is about one part to six. Even in the midst of the hard-core stuff we’re chatting casually to one another, remembering different vacations we took or little routines we used to have on the weekends. We’re talking through arguments that were never fully resolved while we were together, and everyone is offering their opinions and support.

  I told C about my fantasy one night after he had shared one of his with me, something about five women, five differ
ent flavors of peanut butter, and a jungle gym. I thought it was on topic because they both involved a multiplicity of people, I thought we would laugh and compare and maybe even synthesize, but C told me my scenario weirded him out. I told him that in the real world, I wasn’t really interested in any other guys, even if they were my exes, but he said that wasn’t it. What bothered him, what seemed filthy, was the emotional aspect, the way I had dictated the personal. “You need them not only to be doing something for you but also feeling some specific way about it,” C said. A begging quality had entered his voice. C said: “Why can’t you just let people have their own inner lives, as long as they’re doing pretty much what they’re supposed to with their outer lives?” Then he stared away from me hard, thinking about who knows what.

  When I watch the porn actors and actresses on TV, the thing that touches me most is their manners. They carry out their tasks with a sort of faraway etiquette, like the cashiers at the grocery store during the lunch rush who say just enough to make you feel that what you’re doing is appropriate and look at you rarely enough that you feel you should move on efficiently. Porn people conduct similarly balanced exchanges: they’ll offer up one way into a person, one of the most literal ways, but no more. And because in their world everything offered is taken up and no proposition is refused, no excess desire is left behind to molder. It may be the only perfect world I’ve ever seen, perfect except for the occasional glimpse of a badly infected wax.

  Afterward we sat around on the couch in front of the TV, which was muted: just colors. C sat forward and grabbed at the remote as I put the pillows and cushions back where they used to be. Now it was as if nothing had ever happened. I looked down at the amnesiac material, clean and boring, its nubbly fabric a thrift store plaid. Looking at this couch made me feel like I hadn’t been where I had been or touched any of the things I had touched. Even his body, half-clothed, looked the way that it had: warm with warm folds, soft and vulnerable. But having been there myself for the entire event, I knew that the parts had participated in a whole series of perceivable physical changes, the rise and climax, the resolution. When I considered myself, the account was much hazier. I could barely remember my part having been there since I saw it so rarely over the course of action, and the brief flashes in which it registered offered up the same sign over and over, the lips parted or not, no qualitative or quantitative difference in their appearance. Even now, only a slight soreness indicated that something had taken place. I could feel the part thinking already about the next time it would be filled.