Affection (2 page)

“Teenage boys, perhaps. You are going to be forty this year.”

I shrug.

“How many shrinks does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“Well yes.” She smiles at the old joke that has lasted between us through all the years. “There is the question of whether the lightbulb wants to change.”

I hold her delicate fingers and smile, and I think about how deeply she could reach inside me with those elegant hands. A wriggling fish of thought, fleeting, gone in a second, but there will be another and another, whole schools of thought flashing across my consciousness. The constant distractions of a sexual world as wonderful and varied as the ocean, a world I could drown myself in and die happy.

“I don't think I'm a sex addict.” I check my watch. Just enough time to catch a bus to work.

We stand and hug and there is her willowy body pressed against mine for just a moment. I rarely hug. Hugs are an open doorway to a flaring in my body and I remove myself from these kinds of intimate gestures. No hugging, no kisses on the cheek, no holding hands unless I feel safe enough with the person I am touching.

I hug Katherine, my oldest friend, who has just now pinned me with her observation.

“You take care,” she tells me, and she means it. She always wishes me well. I watch her walking away from me, graceful, slender, the line of her perfect breasts under a tight sweater, and that liquid surge pumps through my brain. I am, of course, not a sex addict, but as I watch her walk away from me, feeding on my lust as if it were a Lindt ball dissolving under my tongue, I pause, and I wonder.

The wonderful thing about felt pictures is the way you can rub them on your upper lip and they feel like comfort. They are simple shapes cut out of bright colors. The felt sticks to itself with a satisfying grab. If you get very close all the colors blend into each other and the shapes disappear. A horse is no longer a horse. A house is not a house.

I have become obsessive about felt pictures. I lie on the scratchy carpet, pushing my body down against the short pile. The television is on,
Playschool
or
Mr. Squiggle
or
Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men
or some other burble of music and rhyme. My hips press against the carpet and the delightful pressure of a full bladder, full of milk no doubt, a lovely innocent pressure and the feel of sunlight burning a window shape on my calves. Red horse, orange horse, yellow, all of a palette. I save the blues and greens for the other corner of the felt board. I
hoard fish and crabs and grass and green houses for the cool color end of things. I am sleepy and the colors blend into each other. They blend into the throb of my bladder and when I cross my legs over each other there is an even greater pleasure. I can hear my mother clattering through the washing up.

Color. I see color. I feel heat and pressure and the edges of everything become indistinct. I hover at the edge of a thought. Perhaps I will fall asleep midhorse. I arrange the horses one next to another next to another. All the orange horses. Perhaps I will just let go, urinate ecstatically on the scratchy carpet. The pressure builds, my eyelids droop, I see orange and red and there is a smell to it, a burnt caramel sweetness and I breathe in deeply, wondering what it could be.

When I fall over the edge I am surprised. Pleased. It is as if I have succumbed to color. I am filled with it, and full of the idea of smell. My skin is burning with all kinds of blue. The down on the back of my neck is sweet as honey. My body pulses in the aftermath of this transformation.

 

 

This was my first orgasm. I can name it now. I can relive it. But back then, at the beginning of things, there was no line between the colors and the heat and the scent. After this moment I fell in love with the process of making pictures with felt. I came back to this activity again and again and again and again. Felt pictures first and then, when
my mother thought I was old enough, oil paints meted out onto the upturned lid of a margarine container.

“Not too much linseed oil.”

The oil thinned the color, made it slick and shiny, thin on the canvas. The oil painting was something we did together, my mother and I. My sister was too fiercely independent to sit and listen to instruction. She was naturally talented. She painted horses and dragons and princesses. She made paper dolls for me to play with and the most elaborate dresses painted on cartridge paper. Little paper tabs to fold over the bare shoulders of the beautiful paper women.

I painted till my body hummed with color. I pressed my knees together and breathed in the heady scent of turpentine till my head began to spin. I didn't know about sex but I knew that I should never tell about the thing the colors did to my body. I lay under a blanket and turned the thick glossy pages of an art book. Chagall blue, my favorite color in the world, and my fist pressed firmly against my pubis. Blue and pleasure, that was all there was to the world until my sister ripped the blanket from my body and left me exposed to the bare gray light of the day.

“I know what you're doing,” she chanted. “I know, I know, I know.”

But I didn't know.

No one spoke to me about masturbation. I didn't know that what I did had anything to do with sex. I didn't know that people
touched each other to make this happen without the smell of paint and the vision of color.

My house was sexless. There were five industrious women, and my grandfather hiding invisible in his room. My grandmother sat above us like a queen bee and the rest of the women listened and obeyed. My father was absent. My sister says I should remember the presence of my father, but it is gone as if the short time he was with me in childhood has been erased. That part of the tape was exposed to a magnet or the sun.

When I discovered the physical way of achieving orgasm, the full knowledge that certain pressures of my fingers would produce such an overwhelmingly pleasurable result, I could not stop doing it. I became an expert at it, finding places that would be private, times when I could sneak away and would not be missed.

Bath times, quick trips to the toilet, and in the evenings, drowsy from the day.

I shared a room with my sister and I practiced staying awake till I was certain that she would be asleep. I was stealthy as a ninja, one finger rubbing so gently that the bed wouldn't even creak. On the weekend I could sometimes find a quiet spot, private, secluded. There was a crawl space beside the house, overgrown with jasmine and gated by two gardenia bushes pressing their branches together. This was my favorite place, the summer scent, perfumes clamoring, the fat buzz of bees droning sleepy in my ear.

I pulled down my shirt, exposing my shoulders to the scratch of leaves and the finger creep of a lazy breeze. I imagined I was naked. I hadn't even taken my knickers all the way off. I pulled them to one side and they were a damp obstruction to be worked around. There would be grass in my hair, twin plaits, all that wiriness pulled tight. My skirt would suck the damp from the soil. I would be in disarray when I pushed my way back into the world, blinking at the slap of sunlight. There was no other human being in my imaginings. There was just the sense of all the elements settling on my flesh. The scent alone whispered love. White flowers, sharp and sweeter than honey, a drugged haze of scent pulling me down. There was the Chagall blue behind my closed eyelids. When my mother called I was a long way away, drifting toward a precipice without hurry. With the sound of her voice I was rushing, scared by the possibility of discovery. The fear was a kind of excitement, hurrying toward a quick, barely satisfying climax. I dug my fingers into the soil, masking the smell of my juices with earthworm castings and loamy grit.

As I turn the corner my foot slips and I pause. I look down, feeling the furrow along the ridge of my brow deepen. There are breasts on the ground. Someone's abandoned breasts tipped out onto the footpath, and I have unwittingly stepped on the little latex cups.

I take out my phone and clear a space, deleting photographs of rotting fish and weed and the flash of a salmon jumping. I aim the camera and snap them up. Two perfect breasts, nipples kissing the dirty concrete, their lurid pink cups scooping sunlight out of the air.

 

 

I am early for work. Someone has slept on the gay and lesbian street press leaving a nest of paper and a scattering of crumbs in the doorway. There are locks and bolts to open, bending, standing, reaching. My morning workout. There is a new lock for every time the shop has
been burgled. Nothing deters the thieves but we seem to feel safer the more keys we have to carry.

I lock the door behind me and breathe in the dust of five thousand books. I have a habit of checking in with my favorite authors when I arrive. I touch the shelves. O is for Ondaatje, C is for Crace, D is for Delillo and Donovan.

I stash my bag on top of the pile of unidentifiable crap in the cupboard and punch the code for the safe. Money in the tills, lights on, the terrible sinking sensation of another day all set up and ready to begin.

I take my phone out and scroll through the photographs until I find the one I am looking for, a pair of silicone breasts abandoned on the footpath. In the photograph the breasts are upturned, their nipples grazing the pavement. I should have turned them up the other way. It is perhaps a little difficult to identify them in their upturned pose. I am still quite early for work; there is time to rectify the photograph but that would ruin the spontaneity of the thing.

Key in the door. Christopher lifts a hand in greeting. “Morning,” and he lumbers over to the cupboard and throws his backpack onto the top of the pile.

“Sleeping in the doorway again Krissy?”

“As always.”

I read Christopher's story this morning and it was heartbreaking. It was so fine and pure and beautiful that I wanted it to be about me. He has decided to write a story a day and I am quietly jealous of
his commitment and his talent. He is fifteen years younger than me and he has become my hero. I almost hate him for it.

“I stepped on a pair of breasts today,” I tell him and he nods and makes no comment. It has been years since my observations caused any reaction in him. He has settled into the routine of working alongside me, glancing past my outrageous statements and flirtatious manner. He has grown fond of me, but I am taken for granted. This is the story of my life. And it is getting worse. More than ever now I am left to wait at a counter while the shop assistant serves the younger customers, the prettier customers, the taller customers.

Christopher bends toward the safe and I could stop him; I have already removed the money, there is nothing to find there, but I watch him bend, the bottom of his jacket riding up, exposing a soft expanse of creamy flesh that looks almost edible. I think of crème brûlée, custard, something sweet and rich.

“I've got the cash out already.” I tell him this too late. I could have saved him the bend and stretch, but it was a good moment and I savor the quick visual rush. I think about what Katherine has said. An addiction. My day is ripe with little moments like this, morsels of desire measured out through the otherwise empty hours. I snack on my little desires and I am never too full for another bite.

I watch as Christopher struggles back to standing. He is too close and I step back. I feign lazy indifference to his solid height, the
scent of soap and hint of sweat. I am fleetingly appalled at myself. An addiction. But surely I have it under control.

I flip open my phone and scroll down to the photograph. “Look.”

“You really meant it. Breasts.”

I nod.

“I thought you were being metaphorical.”

“How do you metaphorically step on a pair of breasts?”