I was pinned. Impaled like a butterfly. Study me, I thought. Push me. Pink gauze fell over my mind and strange soft pants came from my mouth. He drew my blouse over my head and I lifted up my arms like a child. My breasts, freed from their bra, were one-eyed fish, pink and dumb. He unzipped my jeans. I reached out and undid his belt, and he yanked down my underwear.
Then he had me by the neck, bending me forward. Then he was gliding into me. My head was nearly in the hutch. There was no condom, we were definitely not using a condom, but what the fuck, who did he fuck anyway? Lacie? I’d take that risk.
Fuck me with the same cock, I thought. Just try to knock me up. Just try. If these ancient eggs get whammed off a one-night stand, I’ll dress up as the goddess of fertility with corn sheaves next Halloween.
“We should use,” he said, “a condom,” and then he scooped me up, carried me to the bed, and poured me out so he could stuff his cock into my mouth. It was that kind of night. He fed his fingers into my mouth. He fed his asshole into my mouth. I tongued it like I was getting a grade. It tasted peppery and dry. Later I sat on his face, and his fingers dug into my hips as he worked me over with his soft, marvelous tongue, his genius tongue, and I moaned until I caught sight of myself moaning in the mirror on his closet door, my tiny belly swelling out, my cheeks flushed. I looked beautiful. His fingers dug deep into the flesh of my hips, and his face was lost between my thighs. “Do you see yourself?” he hissed from somewhere deep in my cunt. “Do you see what I’m doing to you?”
Later, when we were fucking again—with a condom—we stared deep into each other, and he looked so old to me. His eyes were deep and sunken, with fine lines around them, and his face kept wavering between human and idol. A stone god. I sensed the evil in him.
When it was over I curled up with my head on his shoulder. I wanted to tell him that I had felt his spirit, that I knew it was not entirely benevolent, but I couldn’t find the words. Finally I said, “You’re very masculine.”
“Yeah.” He sounded neither flattered nor surprised. “I’ve got a lot of dude energy.”
I thought of him walking across his canvas or standing in the doorway of the kitchen in the Barn. Watching me. Watching me from the shore.
“I tend to be drawn to really feminine women,” he added. “I don’t know what it’s about exactly.” He was talking up to the darkness above his head.
“What does that mean, ‘feminine’?” I said. “What’s feminine?”
“You know.”
But I didn’t. Was feminine pliant, was it docile, was it passive? I was sure he meant something good, but everything I remembered from Hinduism and yoga sounded lame. “Do you think I’m feminine?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He stroked my eyebrows. “You’re very feminine.”
* * *
—
So began a period of fucking. Fantastic fucking. We still talked—I’ll get to the talking—but conversation was no longer the point. The point was me naked in his bed. The point was him opening my knees like a book. Devoting himself to my cervix, pounding it with three curled fingers, refusing to touch my clit no matter how I begged, until his blunt force spread me into shivery, crumbly coming.
What he liked was to push me just past where I could stand it. Past enjoyment, where my mind went blank and my body limp, and strange words like no and stop came out of my mouth. “You don’t mean them, do you?” he asked, and I said I didn’t, though sometimes when we were fucking hard I’d wish desperately for it to end.
Sometimes, too, when his face was between my legs, I would skim below the lip of an orgasm, that elusive short-circuiting so close but sealed away. To reach it, I’d think of Lacie: her breasts, her sprawled out before me, her offering herself up. I’d imagine doing to Lacie what Ian was doing to me.
Later in the night, sitting on the toilet to pee, I’d remember what I’d wanted, and it would rise up before me, garish and obscene. I had never thought of other women this way. I didn’t want to date her. I just thought of fucking her. And then, only when Ian was fucking me.
* * *
—
“You’re like this strange combination,” he said one night. “You get very shy, like this little girl who’s never seen a cock before, and then you go crazy, you can’t get enough. You’re actually so sexual. You have these really strong orgasms.”
I should have rolled my eyes, but all I said was, “Really?” I liked him telling me what he thought of me. It was like peering into a mirror usually hidden. “You mean stronger than other women?”
“Yeah. I feel your pulse. It’s like, Wham! Wham! Your whole body shakes. And afterward you’re all soft and compliant.” Tenderly he touched my face. “It really gets to me.”
He did always want to fuck me right after I came. Sometimes I pushed him away—I wanted to be with the waves echoing through my body—but my feeble resistance only brought him on more.
“Good,” I told him. “I want to get to you.”
Meanwhile, Lacie and I played a round of psychological warfare so excruciatingly subtle it resembled in all essential details normal life. She went to work, I went to work, and in the evenings we cooked large sprawling vegetarian meals with too much oil and cheese. Over kale and squash we offered up precise observations about the subway: the “rapey” vibe of the tunnel between the F and L at Fourteenth Street, the crowded Union Square platform, the smell of wet coats in a humid car.
Sometimes, talking to her, I would remember how I had thought of her, and I would blush or look away. Eating her salad, or some of her fresh-baked sourdough, I’d feel creepy and ashamed. The memory of my fantasies seemed to have nothing to do with our life together. Disconnected from reality, the images floated in the air between us, untethered, extreme.
But it helped that Lacie never stirred when I came home late from Ian’s. She never pushed when I said I had been out with friends, though she knew I knew almost no one in the city. She didn’t ask whether I had met someone, which made it easier to split off these two parts of myself.
Basically we didn’t talk about our dating lives, so the fact that our dating lives involved the same man became irrelevant. We contented ourselves with sly cultural observations and self-conscious rants; we risked nothing; we essentially did stand-up comedy for each other, there on the fourth floor of the only apartment building on Albemarle Road. Did this count as normal? I couldn’t decide. The only normal we had ever had was when we were ten years old, infinite and bound to each other. Everything since then had been an attempt to recover our Edenic past.
* * *
—
Ian and I started going to Applewood, a small farm-to-table joint with painted green tables, wide-planked floors, and silvery photographs of Vermont sheep. A fire crackled in the fireplace, and servers in white cotton aprons circled. Applewood was not exactly fashionable, but the meat was humane, the cocktails seasonal, and the mood genteel.
Ian always wanted to meet late. It took me a while to figure out this was because he waited each night to hear from Lacie first. I was his backup. I didn’t care. We’d sit at the roughhewn bar and order drinks from a man dressed as a Mennonite. Ian always had whiskey, and I a cocktail. Once the bartender started recognizing us, he gave us pours from the top shelf, mostly scotch that tasted like dirt. Peat, we said knowingly, and kept sipping, until we tasted not dirt but green hills and cold mornings, wool sweaters and wood fires. We sipped and talked of warm places. The yellow slippers he wore came from Morocco. He said, “You’ll see, the souks there are insane,” and I thought I’d nearly die from the promise inside you’ll see.
Our Mennonite comped us olives, crostini, and once a liver pâté. Dense flavor bombs, food not to satiate but enthrall. The bill came handwritten, always shockingly large, and sometimes Ian paid and sometimes I did. I sensed it was easier for him, but I never minded slapping down my card. It felt powerful to pay. To
spend to the point where it scared me.
We talked about the next day’s work, what he hoped to do in the studio, what I hoped would happen at the desk. We talked about art. We talked about philosophy. We talked about Aristotle, and kink, and will to power; we talked about tattoos and vegetarianism and UFOs. We built a little life together, a rhythm. I didn’t ask him any more questions about Lacie, and he didn’t tell me any more answers. We didn’t have to say her name anymore. Simply being together invoked her.
“You’ve got your dish? Okay. Let me give you one more hug.”
The gentle clang of ceramics against coat buttons.
“Okay, good night, lady.”
“See you Thursday.”
Ding of elevator, slam of door. Sophie, the last guest, gone. Another Shabbat dinner done.
I had come to love these nights, the one stretch where I let what I was doing with Ian drop away. The rest of the week I held myself rigid, ready for a trap, my wrongness a foul skin around me, but when the light on Friday afternoon grew long and mournful, and Lacie began to race around, stirring the soup pot, setting the table, and I trailed after her, helplessly repeating, “Just tell me what to do…” the world beyond the windows dissolved. Ian faded to abstraction. There were prayers and candles and eating, the easy, ready laughter of women who plainly adored Lacie and so wrapped me in their affection, thought I was worthy of their attention simply because I knew her. No: because she had chosen me. Assistant mistress of Shabbat.
And as much as I loved the dinners, I loved afterward almost as much, when Lacie would return from escorting the last guest out and collapse onto the couch. I’d get the wine from the table, and we’d sit around, lazily trading tidbits from the night.
Tonight we sat in contemplative silence for a bit, until Lacie chuckled softly to herself. “Well, you’ve got to hand it to Sophie. First she was bored with her husband, now she’s bored with her boyfriend.”
“Wait, what are you talking about?”
Lacie leaned forward to scoot her glass onto a paperback. “I know, right? It’s crazy. I probably shouldn’t talk about it, but yeah, basically Sophie’s been having an affair for years.”
“An ‘affair’?” I hadn’t known we were old enough to have affairs. I hadn’t known our generation believed in affairs. Wasn’t the idea that you were supposed to file for nonmonogamy in a procedure that I had always vaguely conflated with filing for bankruptcy? You were supposed to talk about it, at least. We were the talk-about-it generation. “It’s been going on for years?”
“Well, Aaron’s really bad at sex. He’s totally hung up on his mother.”
“Wait, this has to do with his mother?” She sounded so cavalier.
“Don’t you remember? How Sophie said there was some thing?”
It took me a moment, but once I did, the memory came back like a chill, Sophie saying, “You can feel this old way of being haunting them,” and Lacie and I ashamed, avoiding each other’s eyes.
“Oh, right,” I said now. “But does Sophie think he’s like, literally in love with his mother?”
“Something like that. He’s just not that into sex. Who knows. Don’t repeat this, by the way. I mean, lots of people know, but it’s supposedly a secret.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God.” I was shaking my head like a stunned idiot. “And here I was, thinking that her life was basically perfect. I was envying it.”
Her life sure looked perfect. She was tiny like a doll. She worked at The New Yorker. Regularly she moderated panels and interviewed intellectuals and wrote wry, precise blog posts. Three years ago, she had married the son of a famous Conceptual Minimalist, and together they had bought a two-bedroom and filled it—or so I imagined—with books and limited-edition prints and strange liquors in beautiful bottles from distant lands. To envy her showed no imagination. It was stupid. I tried not to do it, but I couldn’t help envying Lacie for how much Sophie liked her, how clearly Sophie enjoyed being her friend. Especially given that Sophie had basically rejected me.
Lacie cocked her head at me. “Maybe it is perfect.”
“She’s having an affair!”
Lacie shrugged. “Well, people do the best with the lives they have. Sophie gets to have her needs met,” Lacie used air quotes, “or whatever, and Aaron gets to have this beautiful wife who adores him. It’s not ideal, but under the circumstances, I think it’s fine. I mean, it sounds like Aaron is just not a very sexual person. For whatever reason.”
I tried to imagine what Aaron looked like. I pictured him moist around the mouth, with dark hair that fell into gelled ridges. Finally I said, “I don’t know if I believe in someone just not being a sexual person.”
“What do you mean? You don’t think that’s a thing?”
“Not really. Not unless there’s been some kind of damage. Which it sounds like maybe there was.”
“Like, anyone who’s not super into sex must be kind of messed up?”
There was something wrong with Lacie tonight; she was wound up. But I stuck to my guns: “It sounds awful, but yeah. I don’t think someone’s just born without a sex drive. I don’t buy it.”
“I don’t really like it,” she whispered.
“You don’t?”
She winced. “Is that horrible to say? It’s fine. But it’s just—it gets a little boring. I feel like we’re all supposed to be these enlightened women who are totally sexually fulfilled, but sometimes I just think, Eh. Couldn’t we just read a little? Or go to sleep?”
As someone who had endured several periods of involuntary celibacy, Lacie’s attitude was incomprehensible to me. She sighed. “I mean honestly, sometimes I just wish Ian would be more chill.”
“You mean about sex?”
“Yeah, kind of. Is that terrible?”
“No. Wait, what’s he like?”
Did she suspect? Hesitation played over her face. Primly she said, “I’m sure he wishes we were having sex more often. But sometimes I just don’t want to be touched.”
A weird triumph snaked through me. Lacie was bad in bed. All my life I’d envied her coolness, the way she never chased men. But—I thought, astonished at the simplicity of it—it’s because she doesn’t need it. A million bucks said she just lies there, her big gray eyes wandering around the room. No wonder my appetite drove Ian mad. No wonder we couldn’t stop.
“I get that,” I said slowly. “Sometimes you want your space.”
“Yeah, and I mean, maybe eventually he’ll go fuck someone else, but whatever. I don’t really care. I feel kind of European about it.”
“You feel kind of European about it,” I repeated slowly.
“Yeah, I mean, it’s not like I would want to know. But we haven’t really talked about exclusivity. It’s just obvious that what’s happening between us is very intense. It feels big.” She looked at me urgently, with that razored stare that she unleashed sometimes, a laser beam shooting out from her usual vagueness.
Probably—I realize now—she only wanted to see if I understood what she meant. But in that moment all her words doubled and stretched. What was she trying to tell me? That she knew? That she didn’t mind? Lacie had always worked by implication and discretion, high-stakes negotiations conveyed through metaphor. By her usual standards, this was downright direct.
“It feels big, but you don’t care if he’s dating someone else.” I had to be sure. I held all the muscles in my face absolutely still.
“Well, not dating.” She frowned. “But sleeping with, sure. It’s just, obviously we’re significant to each other. It’s not like the occasional fuck is going to change that. Whatever’s happening between us, it’s big.” A girlish smile played on her lips.
“You like him.” In my voice, accusation. What about all those times she had complained about him? What about the way he never came over? How big could it be, especially if she didn’t
mind “someone else” sleeping with him?
“Yeah.” She shook her head, still marveling. “I guess I really like him.”
You like that, Ian said. You stupid slut, you like that. You look so good with a cock in your mouth. That’s what my best friend’s boyfriend was saying to me. So I bought a bottle of water, and hummus in a tiny tub. I ordered takeout, with plastic silverware, then got some murdered mammal at Applewood. Meanwhile, kids all over this city were taught to the test. Meanwhile, kids all over this city got private tutoring. You like to be bossed, don’t you? You like to be told what to do. At parties plastic cups with crenulated edges were thrown away, bleached napkins smeared with inky wine were thrown away, books were purchased to be thrown away. Meanwhile, Ervin West was writing generous checks to politicians who would further wreck the earth and his daughter’s body, and the feeling he had in the midst of all this wreckage—I would bet money on it—was I wish I had more control.
Sometimes, while walking, Ian would slip his hand around the nape of my neck, and squeeze and grip my head there, and I would feel myself completely under his control, as simply as a dog belongs to its master. A great billowing weakness would blow up from my stomach, a wave of sexual feeling so strong I would often stumble and he would catch me by the grip of his five fingers. I was enthralled then, a cat humming, its spine arched against a human hand; I desired him, because I could feel how much he desired me; I was thrown deliciously, girlishly back against myself.
* * *
—
I began to feel—I suppose the word is paranoia, but it felt more like an acceleration of reality, as if my life were a toy top, spinning so fast that even knocking the floor or bumping a wall did not slow it down.
Everyone Knows How Much I Love You Page 17
