Black Silk (18 page)

Ten minutes later we were butt naked and in my bed creating our own song. Told Stevie Wonder he was a liar and deemed Eric
Benet a coward. The passion between us made our relationship make sense. Terry looked at me just before he entered. The pulse
of his dick thumped against my thigh. I smiled. He smiled. Allowed me to put the condom on. He entered. Smooth. Quick. With
care. I sighed. Thrusted against him. Created a new rhythm. His body caved around mine. Sweat formed between our abdomens.
Party goers laughed outside in the night. He rose up. Looked at us. Looked at himself inside me. Watched as his stick, covered
and strong, moved in and out, solid against the caverns of my vagina. The friction made me tingle inside. The quicker he moved
his hips, the better I began to feel. He closed his eyes, lifted his head toward the ceiling, gripped his hands beneath my
buttocks, and shifted me closer. The friction sent that electric feeling through me. I squeezed him in. Suffocated his movements.
Grooved with him until the power of my climax overwhelmed me. I became the wild woman he thought me to be. The woman he needed.
The woman every man needed, sometimes. He called out my name. My first name. Called it like he was falling and needed to be
saved. Another strong thrust. Insanity and laughter rose in my chest. He gritted his teeth. I tried to hold my breath. Quick
short immediate strokes. I yelled out affirmations.

We rammed each other. Laughed separate laughs. Grunted. Begged each other for forgiveness and climaxed simultaneously. I’d
never come with a man. He withdrew and I became disturbed. It’d been too long. He fell on me. Delirious. Panting. Clutching
my hair. Breathing against my neck. Too close. His skin invaded my space. I wasn’t used to having a warm body against mine
after I climaxed. It had been ten months. I had become accustomed to curling up in my own space. Stroking myself into a peaceful
slumber. I was used to letting the spirit dwell over me.

“Get up,” I said. It was in my throat. Barely audible. Not sure it wanted to be heard. “Terry, get up.” This time louder.
Stronger.

He didn’t stir.

“You have to leave.”

He looked up. Eyes barely opened. “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know, but you have to leave.”

He frowned. Rose without further argument. “Are you okay?”

“No. I’m not okay. I’m sorry but... I just need to be alone.”

He stroked my pubic hairs. Stared me in the eyes.

“I hope you’re not offended. It’s not you.” I tried to comfort him, but the comfort wasn’t in my voice.

“No, I’m fine. I’m happy. If you want me to leave, then I will.”

I sat up. Looked around the room. Looked at him. “I think I’ve been masturbating too long.”

He smiled. “You know, it’s possible that you have. The way you turned over afterward indicated your lack of human touch.”

“I masturbated last night and this morning,” I confessed. Smirked. Enjoyed the thought. Ignored his comment. I was in my own
world already.

“Tell you what,” he said as he cascaded downstairs to get his pants. “Take a break from it. Discipline yourself. Keep your
hands from between your legs for as long as possible and when you can’t stand it anymore, then call me.”

I frowned as I followed him. I was still naked. “This is not something I need you to conquer. I’m happy before and after I
masturbate.”

“Baby, I understand your plight,” he replied. “There’s one thing that masturbation can’t give you.”

I asked, “What’s that?”

He walked over. Hugged me. Squeezed tightly. Kissed my cheek. Told me he enjoyed being with me. Stroked my skin. Irritated
me.

I felt crowded. Overused. Like I was being put in a straitjacket. I didn’t care for being kissed, stroked, or ego-boosted
after sex. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to cum and go the hell to sleep without the closeness of someone else. I’d learned
to live without the affection. Had been forced through poor selection to live without the affection. I’d learned that the
climax is the goal; everything else was like having seventy clowns at one birthday party with four children. It was too much
for a casual experience between the sheets.

“It just dawned on me that my fantasy world is what I like about me,” I replied. “I can be whatever I want and sex whoever
I want in my mind without having to worry about stamina, performance, snuggling, or even body odor.” My revelation brought
out a sigh in me. A sigh that made me feel safe. “I like having that without human intrusion.”

Terry was fully dressed. He stared at me longingly. I felt sorry for him and for me. Remembered how much I used to want him.
How I still do, in my mind. Still would like to place my mouth on his penis every now and then, but no longer wanted him or
anyone else inside of me if they couldn’t be happy living upstairs on the left side of my brain.

“Don’t forget to open your present,” he said. “I got it especially for you.” He grabbed his keys, hugged me as friends do,
and left.

It was a few minutes till midnight. I turned off the lights downstairs and headed up to my room, gift in hand. I sat on my
bed. Leaned down and smelled me and Terry on the sheets. Smiled a grateful smile. Missed his voice. I opened the present,
awed. In my hands was a framed photo of me and Terry. It was taken when we first met. On the grass watching an Al Jarreau
concert. Hugging. Looking like fuck friends. The best of friends. I fell on the bed and rested the picture beside me. Tomorrow
I would place it downstairs on my bookshelf for any visitor to see. I lifted my knees and positioned my legs as if Terry was
between them. As if Brklyn Brotha was between them. As if a female was between them. As if Reginald was between them. I fingered
my clit and caressed my vagina, sticking my finger in it as far as I could, wiggling it around and withdrawing. Added pressure…
resigned… then again. Felt the wetness ooze from me. I was glistening. I rotated my hips in slow motions against the pressure.
Created friction. Party whistles, excited yells, and fireworks went off in the night somewhere outside. A new era had arrived.
Like Indiana Jones, I journeyed my ocean of pinkness surrounded by coconut-shell-colored mountains of flesh with dark wispy
adult pubic hair. Tasting who I had almost become at fifteen, who I liked being at twenty-seven, without the aid of a hand
mirror. Liberated. Disobeying Mama by opening my legs. I was the something solid I’d been hunching to discover. Me between
my own.

_________________

by Kim McLarin

The first time they slept together everything was normal, and afterward Faith laughed at the worries she had nursed. Charlie
was only the second white man she had ever dated. The first was in high school: During her senior year she fooled around with
a British exchange student out of curiosity and boredom and because he asked and mostly to scandalize Mother. But Faith didn’t
sleep with that guy. She kissed him a few times and pressed against him in the dark but she never let him run his clammy hands
over her breasts and she never, ever thought about touching his penis, although he was nice enough and very funny, with weak
green eyes and wild brown hair and lips like thin slivers of raw fish. That’s what Faith used to think about when he kissed
her: the catfish her mother bought whole and cleaned at the kitchen sink. It was Faith’s job to wrap the heads in newspaper
and carry them out to the garbage can. She always imagined she could feel those cloudy fish eyes staring at her in reproach.

Charlie’s lips were thin, too, but Faith liked them. She liked most things about Charlie, his smile, his slippery blond hair.
She liked the way he looked at her, the way his gray eyes ranged over her face. She liked that he played guitar (she had never
learned an instrument but always wanted to) and that he spoke French, as she aspired to do, and that he loved Ellison and
Hemingway and that he had no interest in football or beer. Most of all Faith liked the easily discernible fact that Charlie
found her both extraordinary and not. She loved that; it drew her to him like a serious piece of mojo working. Charlie thought
her beautiful and talented, and appreciated what she had to say about things, unlike Jerry, her last boyfriend, who had been
inordinately concerned about the state of her fingernails and the length of her thick and bushy hair. At the same time, Charlie
didn’t treat her like some of the white people she knew at work, the ones who clapped her on the back and cried genius every
time she wrote a sentence in which the noun and verb agreed. Charlie seemed both impressed and unimpressed.

She had met him at a book-signing party in West Philadelphia and been frighteningly riveted. They stalked one another across
the floor all night, avoiding eyes, sneaking glances, until finally she saw him toss back his drink and lope her way, his
tail twitching to and fro like a hopeful puppy dog.

He asked for a date. Faith hesitated; and when she saw the effect of her hesitation she hesitated some more. Finally she agreed.
She gave him her number. He telephoned almost immediately. They took in a movie—she couldn’t remember which—then dined at
a Thai restaurant on Eighth Street near Chinatown. They talked and laughed so loud and so long Faith forgot to wonder what
all the people around them must think. He drove her home to the sounds of John Coltrane, walked her to her door, kissed her
gently, promised to call.

When the telephone didn’t ring right away she was disappointed but not worried. She knew the game; the trick was to wait,
to not seem impatient. Sure enough, four days later Charlie called to ask her out. They took in a Brazilian film at the art
museum, then went downstairs for a giddy tango lesson. It was a young, affluent crowd, mostly white, the kind of liberal-thinking
people who in five years would sneak guiltily to the suburbs but for now reveled in the madness of city life. Everyone skidded
and laughed and mugged on the dance floor to the sensuously thick music, and they grinned at each other and mopped their brows
and said out loud what a handsome, tall, muscular couple Faith and Charlie made.

Over the new few weeks Faith came to see that a dating game with a white man was still a dating game. They went out together,
talked wittily, laughed sexily, presented one another their best selves. Then they’d ignore one another for a few days to
prove they could and then go out again. But she was having fun with Charlie. There was something about him, a smell, a look,
that pulled her toward him. At the end of each date she wound up pressing against him in his car, on the sidewalk outside
her apartment building, in the bright but empty hallway outside her door. She even let him into the living room once because
she couldn’t stand it. They ended up on the couch for half an hour, grinding tongues and mouths until her lips were bruised
and they both were moist and panting and it was either kick him out or go to bed. She kicked him out.

She always made men wait before sex; not long, just long enough to weed out the worst ones, the players and scorekeepers.
Just long enough to keep herself from feeling used when and if they disappeared. She made Charlie wait even longer, checked
as she was by meandering midnight thoughts about the forbidden strangeness of sex with a white man. Him and her, skin to skin,
naked and warm and glistening; she couldn’t quite make the picture work. He would not be physically different, of course.
He’d have the same equipment in the same amount in the same places. She did not believe, as her mother did, that white people
smelled like wet dogs or were physically deficient “down there” or possessed gelid skin like the dead. It was her gut that
hesitated, not her body or her mind.

Besides, Charlie made it clear he was still seeing other women.

“I have plans for this weekend and for most of next week, but maybe we could get together after that?” he said early on, when
they seemed to be getting along well.

“Sure, just give me a call,” she said nonchalantly. And when he finally did telephone, she was busy, busy, gone. Which of
course just made her more desirable. He called again; she was busy. He called again and again until finally she was free.

On their fifth date they went to a James Taylor concert in the park. Sitting on the lawn in the dusky evening light, drinking
wine, she felt expansible. She turned to Charlie. “Let me ask you something.” The opening act began clearing the stage. All
around them people swarmed and stood and called out to friends far away. “Ever dated a black woman before?”

“Nope.” Charlie answered as if he had anticipated the question. Then he grinned. “First time.”

The stage lights dimmed and a whisper of anticipation swept through the crowd.

“Another question: When we’re out together do you think about the fact that I’m black?”

Charlie looked at her. She looked back. Up front, on the darkened stage, James Taylor’s voice rang out. “No, of course not,”
Charlie said. She couldn’t tell whether the tremor in his voice was shock or deception. “Do you think about the fact that
I’m white?”

“All the time,” she said.

Afterward he drove her home and asked if he could come in to use the bathroom. While he was occupied, she rushed around her
apartment, picking up stray dishes, hiding clothes, dimming the light. She popped a John Coltrane CD on the stereo and remembered,
with horror, the jar of hair grease lurking on the bathroom sink. She imagined Charlie lifting the great green container in
bafflement, sniffing it.
What the hell is this? Some kind of exotic sexual lubricant?
Picturing his confused expression, Faith began to laugh. White people weren’t that naive. Were they?

He exited the bathroom with a sheepish smile and said yes to the nightcap she offered. They sat on the couch and talked and
talked and talked and she had no real sense of what was being said. Her tipsy brain kept focusing attention on his mouth,
his lips, the sly red snake of his tongue. He trained his eyes on her, lowered his voice, ran his thumb lightly up and down
her arm until she thought she might, like fine crystal, begin to hum.