Because They Wanted To: Stories (30 page)

“I haven’t been involved with a woman for a long time,” I said. “Mostly I’m with men. Although I haven’t been involved with men lately, either.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “Basically I’m a dyke, but I like sex with men sometimes so I can understand.”

I asked her if she always needed to role-play in sex. I said I was trying not to relate to people in such a structured way. “I mean, I can do that kind of sex, um, obviously, and I can like it. It gets me off and everything. But it’s a mechanical response. It’s not deep.”

“Well,” she said, “I hope you didn’t feel like what we did was mechanical, because it wasn’t for me. I hardly ever top anybody, so it was really new.” She drank her sweet iced coffee with ingenuous relish.

“It wasn’t really mechanical, because I could feel you under the fantasy. But I’ve done those fantasies all my life, and I want to try to be more genuine and direct, so whatever we do, it’ll really be us. Emotionally, I mean.”

“I can respect that,” she said. Her voice was like that of a little girl trying to be good for her mother. It gave me a strange, sad pleasure. It made me want to pretend to be her mother, just like another little girl.

Erin was from Kansas. She used to be an Evangelical Christian. She wasn’t raised a Christian, but she had converted on her own initiative when she was fourteen. Her parents had separated when she was ten, and her mother had to work brutal night shifts that made her more disappointed with life than she already was. Erin spent most of her time with ardent Christian boys, with whom she went to religious meetings. She was occasionally moved to give bouquets of hand-picked flowers to various bewildered girls, but it wasn’t until prom night that it hit her that her repeated day-dreams about the elaborate scorn of a certain beautiful brat were actually erotic in nature. She made a successful pass at a drunk, pretty little mouse in the rest room and never wore a dress again—although she valiantly tried to be a queer Evangelical well after she realized it would never work.

I pictured her standing alone in plain, neat clothes in a landscape of dry sunlight and parched yellow earth. Vague shapes were present in the distance, but I couldn’t see what they were. She was extending her arm to offer a bunch of flowers to someone who wasn’t there. The expression on her face was humble, stoic, and tenaciously expectant, as if she was waiting for something she had never seen yet chose to believe would someday appear. It was the expression she had on her face while she was talking to me. She was telling me that when she told her mother she was gay, her mother said, “I could just shit,” and went into the next room to watch TV

She had other expressions too. When we talked about the ongoing rape trial of a pop star, I made predictable sarcastic comments about people who said that the girl had probably brought it on herself. Erin first agreed with me, then reversed herself to say that maybe the girl
had
asked for it. Her expression when she said that was rambunctious, with a sensual shade of silly meanness—but mostly it was the expression of a kid with her hands in Play-Doh, squishing around and making fun shapes.

After dinner we went to drink. As we walked down the street, we held hands. There was real feeling between us, but it was unstable, as if we had been rewarded with a treat of flavored ice, which we wanted to put off eating for as long as possible so that we could savor it, but which was already melting anyway.

We went to a bar where people in various states of good-natured resignation sat in the dark under crushing disco music. I ordered drinks with lots of amaretto in them. The sweetness gave my mild drunkenness a pleasant miasmic quality.

Erin said she liked what I had said about trying to be more genuine. She said her therapist had recently suggested to her that it might be good for Erin to spend at least a few weeks getting to know women before she had sex with them, and that although she hated the idea on principle, she was considering it.

I reminded her that we’d already had sex.

“But we could start fresh,” she said. “And get to know each other before we do it again.”

I thought of going with her to restaurants and movies. We would
sit and discuss current events, and under all our talk would be the memory of my open mouth and exposed tongue. I moved close to her on the banquette and put my head on her slim, spare shoulder. She held me. Her hair had a tender chemical smell. I pictured her washing it, bent naked over a bathtub, moving her arms with the touching confidence of rote grooming practices.

She walked me to my door and we kissed. Her kiss felt honorable and empty. I asked her in. “We don’t have to have sex,” I said. She came in and we lay on the living room floor with our arms around one another. We touched each other gently and respectfully, but with each caress I felt as if we became more separated. That made me touch her more insistently and more intimately. I felt her neediness rise through her abdomen in a long pulse; we brushed our lips together in a stifled dry kiss and then opened our mouths to feed.

“I want to do what you said,” she whispered. “I want to just be us.” I took her face in my hands. I wanted to say “my darling girl,” but I hardly knew her. I pulled up my shirt and pulled my bra down. I pulled up her shirt. I knelt over her and rubbed against her chest and belly, just touching. She closed her eyes, and I could feel her waiting in her deep body, wanting me to show her what “ourselves” might be. And I would’ve, except that I didn’t know. I could remember her at the restaurant talking about her mother and religion, expressing her opinions. Again, I imagined her standing alone, offering her flowers to no one. She was very dear and I wanted her, but I could only see her in pornographic snapshots, stripped of her opinions and her past. I unzipped her pants and pulled them down. I turned her over and positioned her. Her breath subtly deepened; she was taut and vibrant and absolutely present. I lightly rubbed my knuckles against her genitals. I felt an impersonal half-cruelty that was more titillating than real cruelty.

But she wanted to be cruel too, or rather to pretend that she was. She would take her artificial debasement to a certain point, and then she would change direction. She would kiss me and I would feel her tender self in a burst of nakedness that stopped my breath—and then she would veer away, immersing herself in some internal personality
that didn’t know or care about me. She was a nasty teenaged boy, she was a silly kid, she was a full, deep woman all the way down to her private organs. She slapped me and she pulled my hair—but she demanded that I beat her between her shoulder blades. And when I did she whispered “thank you,” her face transfigured with sorrow so abject that I was for one violent second absolutely repelled, and then drawn back with equal violence.

Afterward, we lay against my throw pillows, cuddling and drinking chocolate milk. “Well,” I said. “I guess that was us.” She giggled and rubbed her nose on my stomach. My feral kitten crept round the bedroom door and peered at us, her wide eyes wistful, curious, and scared.

Later in the week, we took a nighttime walk. We walked uphill to Noe Valley, talking through strained waves of breath. She talked about a book she wanted to publish, even though the author was a nut who called every day to pester Erin with questions about how best to advance her career. Her stride was long and confident, but the inclination of her head was mechanical and deferential. She asked me if I would ever again dress the way I had dressed when she’d first seen me. I said probably, but not to take uphill walks. She told me that a previous girlfriend, who had been molested by her father when she was little, had liked Erin to pretend to be her father while they were having sex; she asked me if I thought that was creepy. I said it definitely didn’t seem like they were relating directly as their real selves. She laughed and said it sure felt real to her. She pushed me against a car and tried to make me turn around. I snapped at her to cut it out; there was hurt feeling in her retraction, and I put my arm around her.

We walked downhill and came upon the slovenly burghership of Twenty-fourth Street. People dressed in floppy clothing and carrying lumpy handbags walked up and down in complicated states of distraction. Two men were standing on the corner, each with a telescope, offering people the chance to admire the planets for fifty cents. One telescope was labeled “The Moon” and the other “Venus.” A group of children stood around them, looking as if they
were willing to be delighted but weren’t sure that the moon and Venus were quite delightful enough.

“Do you want to look?” asked Erin.

I said yes because I could tell she wanted to. I did enjoy waiting in line with the kids; their hope for enchantment, glimmering just faintly through their premature disaffection, was poignant in its secret tenacity. Their mothers sat drinking cappuccino on the out-door bench of an expensive coffee shop, looking pleased to see their children engaged in such a good, simple activity. The moon was cold and beautiful.

We held hands as we walked back up the hill. The city was sparkling and calm in panorama. Erin told me that she’d fantasized about adopting kids one day, but she knew she needed to “work on” herself before that could happen. She asked if I’d ever wanted to have a family.

“No,” I said, “not for its own sake.” I paused, watching my shoes crease with each steep step. “If, when I was in my twenties, I’d fallen in love with someone and he’d loved me, I would’ve wanted to have children with him. And I probably would’ve loved it. But that didn’t happen, and I’m not going to be running around trying to get pregnant just to do it.”

“It doesn’t make you sad?”

“No. Although sometimes, when I hear friends talk about their babies, or other friends talk about how they desperately want to have babies, I wonder if I’m really sad and am just pretending I’m not.” My breath chugged earnestly. “I think I’m sadder that I don’t write poetry anymore. Although I’ve been thinking lately that I might start again. Not now, though. Maybe when I’m old.”

“Cool.” She paused. “I just felt like pushing you up against a car again. But I won’t.”

Erin shared a large flat with a former girlfriend named Jana and Jana’s girlfriend, Paulette. The house had a tiny yard full of saucy flowers. Erin’s two large cats sat on the pavement or bounded and promenaded about the area. I loved coming to Erin’s house. Every time I rounded the corner and saw it, I felt I was approaching a place where tenderness and good humor prevailed.

One night I came unannounced, surprising Erin in her lavender thermal pajamas. We sat together on her bed and enjoyed the garish comfort of her electric fireplace. To entertain me, she brought a large cardboard box out of the closet and showed me what was in it. There were somber albums of family pictures (tiny, troubled Erin in a ruffled swimsuit, handsome Dad looking absently at something outside the frame, towering, pissed-off Mom), a plaque that had been awarded her in a high school photography contest, a track team trophy, a bracelet her brother had made for her in junior high, love letters, an artificial penis made of rubber, an apparatus with which to strap it on, an odd assortment of small plastic animals, and some Polaroids of Erin naked except for a dog collar and leash around her neck. She explained that the pictures had been taken by a heterosexual couple whom she had met when she’d answered their advertisement for a “slave girl.”

“They totally loved me,” she said. “It was great, but I got tired of it before they did. They dragged it out too long. They kept making it a big deal that he was eventually going to fuck me with his cock—the way they went on about it, I just lost interest.”

I looked at the Polaroids. I was slightly discomfited by her thinness; her ribs showed and her eyes looked starved and abnormally luminous.

“I forgot they even took those pictures until they sent them to me a month later.” She put them in a pile and placed them back in the box. She indicated the rubber penis. “I was going to use that on you,” she said. “But it reminds me too much of Jana. You deserve your own cock.”

Maybe because she had told me a story, I told her one about myself. It was something that had happened when, as a teenager, I had tried having sex for money. I told her the story to excite her, and I could see right away that it did. At first it excited me too; I had never told anyone about it before.

“He didn’t want me to take my panty hose off, he just wanted me to bend over and pull them down to about midthigh, which sort of embarrassed me. But I did it, and then I bent over and waited, and he didn’t do anything.”

“Yeah?” We were lying together, Erin up on her elbow, her eyes
dilating slightly as she went into the rigid psychic suspension required by fantasy. She was, I thought, the only person I could tell this story to.

“On one hand, I was embarrassed on account of the panty hose thing, but on the other hand, I was very matter-of-fact—I guess teenagers just naturally are. I said, ‘Um, are you, like, doing some-thing or what?’ And he didn’t say anything, so I said, ‘Well, what
are
you doing?’ And he said, ‘Shut up. I’m doing what I gotta do.’”

“Which was?”

I realized that I was not excited anymore. I was not embarrassed, either. I didn’t know what I felt.

“What did he do?”

I put my face against her chest.

She ruffled my hair. “C’mon.”

I tilted my head up and whispered in her ear.

Erin yelped with glee. “He jerked off on you?” She fell down on her back and roared with laughter. We rolled around laughing, me tickling her, her little chin pointing at the ceiling. Then she grabbed me and held my head against her chest, and I felt, under her quick breath, her radiant tenderness; it was as if some secret part of her had come out to touch me gently and had then drawn back into its hiding place.

The next day I was shopping in a clothing store and daydreaming about Erin, when a pop song on the sound system took my imagination in a facile grab. It was a flimsy love song, sung in a high, caressing register. There was real feeling in it, but the singer had tortured it into deformed and precious shapes that debased his own emotionality with a methodical viciousness that was quite breathtaking and gave the bland song an odd, obscene jolt. It reminded me of Frederick and the artificial civility just veiling his furious contempt. It also reminded me of Erin, offering her flowers to no one. These images seemed opposite each other but at the same time locked together in an electrical stasis, each holding the other in place.