Fucking Daphne (23 page)

Daphne rose and went into the bathroom. I heard water raining down in the shower and was thankful for a few minutes to gather my
thoughts. It turned out that sleeping with women wasn't so different from being with men.

You'd think a boy like me would have already known that gender/sex differences exist only in our minds. I've changed my body, yet my ideas of difference still trapped me in that moment. I scrambled over that edge, through the gap between my expectation and my experience.

Lying there in her bed, I heard the shower tap squeak off. Soon there were just two bodies lying in bliss, Daphne sleeping, quiet. I didn't have to ask her if she was satisfied. I knew she'd wake me when she was ready for more. Her pillows were soft against my cheek as I finally let myself relax into sleep next to her.

It was still dark when she gently shook me, smiling. “Want more quiche?” she asked.

 

 

Q
:
So.

A: So.

Q:
The book's called
Fucking Daphne.
Any thoughts
on the
on the subject? Stories you'd like to share?

A: Not particularly. We lived together and had sex. A lot at first, less later on. It was exactly the same as when everyone else has sex. It was good and bad and occasionally great; sometimes awkward, sometimes too familiar.

Q:
No saucy stories you'd like to share? The kids love the saucy stories.

A: Nope. It was a formative relationship for me and, I would guess, for her as well. We shared those incredible times when you're young and on your own and are constantly being amazed by life's unfolding in front of you. Think about that: The riches of life are suddenly
there, suddenly available to you, suddenly right in front of you, spread out as far as the eye can see. Who the hell cares about sex?

Q:
I'm guessing people have already started flipping past this essay, so speak your mind.

A: The sex, it's a fun thing—don't get me wrong. I'm not against sex, or even sexy stories. But it pales in comparison with the excitement of discovering what it means to be alive and under your own power. And the act itself is so empty without all of the human bits around the edges—the seduction, the loneliness, the excitement. So much more interesting than sex.

Anyway, I find people who have sex only to define themselves cripplingly depressing. It's very
Sunset Boulevard.
Or Paris Hilton.

Q:
How very pop cultural of you.

A: It's good to have a lot of sex, and every one should. Get to it. But unless you're there and getting sticky, it's just not an interesting subject. Getting other people to brag about it for you is a different sort of animal—conceptually much more amusing, but still not for me.

Q :
So are you saying Daphne needs to make herself feel better by bragging about her sex life? Are you saying that's her real motive here?

A: Nope. I don't think this whole project is about bragging about her ability to get some action. Writing about it is less interesting than doing it, and on that she has her priorities straight.

I'd like to believe that she saw other people making money off stories about having sex with her and she wanted to cash in. Really I would. But I don't believe it. Honestly—there's no money in the dirty-stories-about-San Francisco-poets subgenre.

Q:
Can't you at least play along a little bit? It only seems fair.

A: Right. There was one time when we were . . . we were having sex, and getting all excited, and . . . I stuck my penis in her ear. The Daphne Character said, “Oh! My! Nobody has ever done that to me before! It's very exciting! And I can hear the ocean!”

Q:
Why are you even bothering?

A: It's a fair question.

Q:
Something about this subject
must
have inspired you to take it on, though. You're going to a lot of effort here. So why? Your love of the pomo dialectic?

A: I'm disappointed by the way people frame everything in a postmodern construct.

Fronting any subject with the knowing wink of postmodern metadiscussion is an easy way to avoid any real connection. Writers don't have to worry about failing to get the work across, and readers don't have to worry about being moved by an experience that touches them somewhere other than the brain. It's an intellectual condom.

I want to like stories that exist as intellectual exercises—where whatever emotions they may evoke are there to be studiously analyzed and broken down. But I'm detached enough in reality, and I'm trying to be less so. And I
like
getting sucked into stories. I don't need to protect myself from the experience, and I don't want other people taking it upon themselves to let me know that it's just a story that they're telling. Art that tries to derive its relevance solely from the viewer's act of viewing it misses the point for me.

So talking about the Daphne Character isn't going to do it for me.

Q:
Aren't you taking this a bit too seriously? This is supposed to be a fun, light, naughty read, not a condemnation of Where Art Went Wrong.

A: This is abook, and a book is a work of art. Art's about the only thing I have in my life, and I'm incapable of not taking it seriously, regardless of the context. It's why I'm such a bummer at parties.

Q:
Speaking of sex, why don't we get back to that subject?

A: A family friend sent me an old photo of my dad, sittinginthe mountains by his camping site, studiously reading a volume from the
Teen Throat Pleasure Books
series.

Q:
Now we're getting somewhere.

A: There was a comely lass on the cover, leaning her head back and posing ever so receptively. In the picture, Dad was young and wild looking and attractive by the standards of the day. He was known as a ladies' man. Eventually, he aged and died of cancer.

Q:
Right. Back to the throat book, though...

A: The novelty's worn off and I don't want to talk about that anymore.

Q:
You've gone well out of your way to establish that you're better than the lowlife matters in the rest of this book, and I can't see this going any further. Final thoughts?

A: Writing things down takes away their magic, and no amount of ironic pomo distance from that will make that okay. Memories are different every day we reflect on them, like people are—every day they mean something else to us. Writing things down forces a definition on memories in our minds, on an electrochemical level, in a way that ruminating doesn't. For all of my other excuses about not
doing what was asked here, it really boils down to the fact that I'd rather leave my past as a rich mulch out of which things can still be drawn, not confine it. I've spent too much of my life understanding and defining things in a structural, Kantian way, and I'm running out of the valuably vague relationships I have with my past. So I can't write about my relationship with Daphne.

And I can't write about the Daphne Character. I don't want to trivialize the actual relationship by locking it up in words, no matter how much they may be shielded by the cloak of fiction. There just aren't avenues I want to explore in there that are worth tainting the reality.

 

 

Daphne
walked up to the door and rang the bell.
She
tried
a window, but couldn't see anything.
She
rang the bell again, and finally, after
she
was about to give up,
Daphne
flung open the door.