Affection (5 page)

I watch Christopher work and I am overwhelmed by my affection for him. He is tall and gentle-faced and when he bends to child-height there is nothing but affection as he takes the book out of the toddler's hand and waits patiently for the release of coins from his sweaty palms.

It is impossible to separate the urgency of this feeling from the urgency that fills me in the moments before an orgasm. It is all liquid pleasure and, dare I say it, love. I might be in love. I might be falling in love. I have somehow overstepped my vow of friendship and fallen into a place where my hard shell has dissolved. I am all soft-bodied mollusc. I am oyster and in this moment I would lay myself in his palm to be swallowed whole.

This is a pattern that I recognize. There is always someone
who can charm me out of my brittle protection, always a friend for whom I have unconditional love.

Just one friend at any one time, a kind of monogamous extramarital obsession. There is no language for me to explain the way I feel for Christopher as he wraps the book in a paper bag and passes it to the boy, solemn, respectful. I fall in love a little bit even though I said I wouldn't do that anymore. I can't help noticing his quiet dignity, his kindness. His subtle humor and, forced to stand so close in such a cramped workspace, there is the flesh as well, constantly brushing against mine. I try to love without lust but there is always lust. So, lust then, and a great heaped serving of love. Now there is this melancholy brew for me to drink down, slowly, on a day drawn out.

I am certain that this is only a fleeting wave of lust and soon, in a matter of days or weeks or months, I will transfer this affection to someone new. I am reminded of my conversation with Paul the other night on the Internet, the sudden intimacy, the wave of familial love, and something else, some unnameable emotion.

Sex addiction. Katherine was right. This is all about sex, because on top of the lust there is still the love I feel and will feel for him that will go on, even when this unwanted desire has moved off and onto someone new.

“You have to stop falling in love with your friends,” my husband tells me. He has been watching me hop from one obsession to another for the eighteen years of our relationship.

“If I am a tap, and you are a sink,” I tell him, “it is like I am locked on. A full-force gush of emotion and you are filled up with it, but there is too much. It is spilling out onto the floor. It is like I need to hold one bucket after another under the overflow. When the bucket is full I exchange it with another bucket.”

I am pleased with my metaphor but he just shakes his head. “Well, you should stop falling in love with your friends. You'll chase them away,” he tells me, voice of reason that he has always been.

 

 

“I am not monogamous and I am not heterosexual,” I told my husband on the night we met.

I was sitting in a girl's lap. I liked her well enough. I had slept with her before in that easy way I used to enjoy. I would have slept with her again that night if I hadn't noticed Anthony. He was sitting on the floor, leaning against a wall. His deep green sweater was the exact color of the ocean at dusk. I noticed how blue his eyes were. His long hair pulled back and tied in a ponytail, the chiseled perfection of his cheeks.

I stopped kissing the girl. I switched from vodka to water. There was another drug present in the room and I felt myself turn toward it. I basked in the glow of potential sex. I hopped from one group to another, chatting briefly, moving ever closer to my target. Anthony was alone. He sat with a beer warming between his fists and smiled quietly, watching the crowd grow drunk and bleary-eyed.
He was beautiful. I had never before seen anyone quite as beautiful. I sat beside him quickly, before I could change my mind, and clicked my glass against his beer bottle as if we were old friends. I breathed through the erratic thudding of my heart, the exquisite tumble-turns low in my belly. I caught a whiff of his aftershave and a hint of soap. We talked about mutual friends, films, documentaries we had both enjoyed. We talked until we were amongst the last to leave. Maybe I would stay, sleep in a corner on the floor. Maybe he would stay, too, or maybe he would leave. Yes, I should leave. I said that I would walk home and so he offered me a lift.

“I am not heterosexual or monogamous,” I told him, the sun climbing up over the silhouette of the city.

“You will be both of those things when you are with me.” His prediction. And up until now I have proved him right with the slow torture of my abstinence, squirming with the fleeting possibility of other entanglements, struggling to contain the force of my love for one friend after another.

At the end of Christopher's shift we say goodbye and barely glance at each other. My heart breaks just a little for the string of people I have lusted after in this slow, sad way, love danced in time to the monotonous beat of the daily grind. Everything in its right place, except this little fragment of misplaced emotion that I have picked up like lint and curled into my hand with no place to rest it.

My sister gave me a book by Marion Zimmer Bradley for my birthday. It was set on a distant world, in a place far, far away, just like in a fairytale. I liked her books very much; I had been wanting to read this one for months. It would complete my collection, the collected works of Marion Zimmer Bradley.

There was a cake my grandmother had made and a little Princess Leia figure on top of it, her white robe sinking into the icing. There were thirteen candles, one of which had been placed too close to the action figure, and I watched as her face began to blister and blacken. My mother smothered the plastic girl in white icing and I washed her and vowed to love her more because of her disfigurement.

I opened my presents and they were mostly books that I had coveted. I would read them all, but first I would read the book
my sister gave me because I had been longing for the final Marion Zimmer Bradley for so long.

Someone had cut some of the pages out.

My mother saw me notice them and was quick to explain. “Just one bit that is adults only.”

I counted the numbers on the bottom of the pages. I could feel my rage percolating inside me. There was the biley hiss of it just below the boil.

“It doesn't affect the flow of the story. There was just no need for that sex stuff.”

That sex stuff.

I noticed the tight-lipped anger of my sister. This was her present to me and it had been hacked into, desecrated by the censors. I thought of all the books my sister had stolen from the library and passed to me in the dead of night. Banned books, books with love, kissing; sometimes more. I thought about the note I had to take to my English teacher excusing me from reading the set text because of the unsuitable content, and how my sister passed me an illicit copy of
1984
that I read using a flashlight under the covers late at night. An odd parallel between Orwell's world and my own.

We weren't allowed to visit any of our friends at their houses. We weren't allowed to get mail without my mother reading it. My mother was protecting us, I knew this. But I wasn't sure exactly what from.

I read that book late into the night. When I came to the missing
pages I closed the book and imagined things that I had never seen written even in the banned books snuck to me by my sister after dark. I knitted in all the darkest possibilities, casting a spell to bind together the empty fragments of the missing pages. I thought about the worst things possible, the rapes and the ravaging, the fondling of the dead and the dying. I didn't flinch from any possibility in my imagination. I closed my eyes and pulled the covers over my head and I let myself stray into all the forbidden places that were unavailable to me in the sunlight world of my family's fairytale.

It was hot the day of the school swimming carnival, a languid summer day smelling slightly acidic like the juice of an ant squashed between your fingertips, and I was signed up for the 200 meters.

I have always loved to swim. I swim very slowly but I can swim for hours at a time without tiring. I love the breathy rhythm of it, the way the surface of the water creeps above your ears, obliterating the world.

There were whispers about the photograph before anyone had seen it. Apparently the red-haired boy had it in his bag, a photograph of a woman with a carrot in her vagina. I lay on a towel in the sun and thought about how it would be to put a carrot in my vagina. I thought about the candles I sometimes smuggled into my bedroom and used late at night. I knew a carrot would be
essentially the same, but somehow the idea of a vegetable inserted into someone's vagina played on my mind.

I thought that if there was a photo, there would have to have been a photographer. Someone watching the woman insert the carrot into her vagina. I wondered if she had gone into the next room, like an artist's model, and emerged with the carrot inserted, removing the light cotton sheet from around her shoulders, then lying or sitting on the divan with the carrot neatly in place.

My race was next. I had never been in a race before. I had never worn my swimsuit in front of my peers. I wondered suddenly if I should have signed up for the race at all. I still had the usual exemption note from my mother; would it be too late now to table it and have myself scratched?

I was wondering this when someone brought me the photograph. Not a real photograph but a picture of one, torn from a magazine. Sepia. Old. It reminded me of the elegantly posed portraits of our great-grandmothers, only this grandmother was not wearing any clothes and there was a carrot in her vagina.

I needed to take my school dress off. I was wearing my bathing suit underneath. Everybody else had already changed into their suits and lay in the lazy spread of the hot bleachers or flat on their backs with their knees spread to make an even tan.

I could never lie like that.

I folded the photograph into the novel that I had been reading,
even though Wendy Jones was waiting to see it, and stashed it deep inside my schoolbag.

I pulled the sack of check fabric over my head. The corner of it snagged on my glasses. New ones, pink government-issue glasses with little upward curls at each edge. In a few days I would lose them as I always did and it would be six months before I could get a new pair. I wondered when my mother would tire of replacing them. I folded them roughly and shoved them in beside my novel.

I stood at the starting block. The other girls wore bikinis and had sleek flat chests and skinny hips. I was too round. I was aware of my new breasts, which were already so large that you could hold a pencil under them. I had read about this in someone's magazine. Are my breasts too floppy? Answering the multiple-choice questions when no one was looking.

I missed the starting gun but I plummeted anyway, a moment's delay and then the fat slap of water, the bliss of submerged oblivion.

I thought about the woman with the carrot in her vagina. Did the cameraman adjust the carrot, moving it a little this way or that, pushing or pulling? I wondered how these things could be orchestrated. I wondered if the woman had family, if she told her mother about the photographer, if she married him or perhaps had children with him. I wondered if the photographer might have been a woman. Would it be easier to have a woman moving your carrot a little farther in, a little farther out? I wondered about the hundreds of people who had seen this
photograph since then. I thought about that woman with the carrot and her ability to bring a whole new generation of teenagers to orgasm.

I saw the blue-tiled wall approaching. Half the race over. I kicked and my arms windmilled and I reached out for the tiles, felt them beneath my fingers, was about to turn and head for the finish line when I felt a hand on my shoulder.