Hungry for the World (16 page)

When I looked at David sitting next to me, this is what I saw: a man who knew what I knew, whose senses responded to the same smells and sounds, the same tastes I had known all my life. He seemed to embody everything I had treasured and lost, yet there was more to him than anything I had left
behind: he was both recognizable and strange, comfort and compulsion. He was the projection of myself, a masculine reflection of my own codes and inspirations.

The distance that remained between us puzzled me. David still hadn’t touched me that I can remember, and I think that I would. But if I can’t remember what came before that evening, I will never forget what came after.

We were sitting on his couch, watching an HBO special. I was a little light-headed from my glass of wine, yet very aware of his presence beside me, he at one end of the sofa, I at the other. Each time he reached to adjust the volume or pour more wine, I felt my breath catch, the heat that came between us.

Las Vegas was on the screen, showgirls with their feathers and bare breasts. I watched with embarrassment, both at the display and at my being bashful about it. (HBO was the underground in Lewiston, Idaho, 1978; in another few years MTV would blow us away.) It was the first time I’d seen nudity onscreen. Once again I felt David watching me, gauging my reaction.

It would be a lie to say I wasn’t aroused, less by the show than by his eyes on me. The eyes not of a lecher but of a discerner, a practiced and particular intelligence. What excited me had to do with unspeakable possibility. Whatever rules had governed me fell away in his presence because this was his game, and my first time at his table. I was waiting, for what I wasn’t sure. But now I could feel it about to happen, each minute drawing me nearer to the knowing.

David began to speak to me then, in a way that was more direct, more intense than he had before. Had I ever looked at pornography? he asked. Yes, I answered, but I did not tell
him of the books Les and I had found in our uncle’s room. What I mentioned instead were John’s occasional
Playboy
, a single, tattered
Playgirl
a friend had gotten at her wedding shower. He smiled. No, not that kind. He went into his bedroom and came back with magazines, women splayed and rouged, tipped up for the camera, tipped back for the men who held their knees.

A page, a level at a time, he took me down, until what I saw before me bore no resemblance to the airbrushed depictions of Ivy League girls gone bad for the weekend. What I remember are the colors—smoky black, lacquered red.

As I thumbed through the magazines, David told me of the topless dancers and prostitutes in Seattle he had met and befriended during the twelve-hour layovers of his truck route. He made me understand that they waited for his arrival, that what he gave to them overshadowed anything they might offer. I was intrigued. Why would this man court me as he had, so modestly, if he were the Don Juan of Puget Sound? Why would he want
me?

He pulled me from the couch and led me to his bedroom. I felt his hands for the first time, gentle, he said, because this was the beginning and there would be more, but gentle for now so that I would learn how much I must trust him.

T
HIS IS WHAT
I
KNOW
of seduction: it can be flowered and perfumed, or it can spring from sweat and darkness; it can come sweet and slow, or fast and hard like birth. It can find you at work or at home, awake or asleep. It can begin with a kiss or the withholding of a kiss. It’s a flower that opens, a bruise that spreads.

For each of us, there exists the possibility of being seduced, and for each of us, two kinds of seduction. The first is romantic and hoped for; the second is perhaps the truer, its shape less familiar, its tenets less defined. When in it, we don’t know where we’re headed, what to protest, how to protect ourselves. It’s like being led blind down a dark corridor, yet when you stop to push against the walls, they disappear, and you are free. Can’t you see? Free.

T
HE MYSTERIOUSNESS, THE HIDDEN
store of knowledge—I believed that physical intimacy was David’s way of allowing me entrance into his life. Although he still said little about his family and his past, he began to speak openly about his former lovers, and I saw that sharing his bed allowed me to share his confidence. As I listened to his detailed stories of marathon lovemaking, jealous husbands, risky rendezvous, I sensed that he was gauging my response, watching me for signs of jealousy or possessiveness. I sensed, too, that such response would not please him.

We talked frankly of sexual experience and technique, and for the first time I was able to express myself openly, candidly. David was not covetous of my past, nor did he respond with juvenile lechery. He listened as calmly and pleasantly as though I were reciting my school lessons, nodding his encouragement. Perhaps we spoke of the ridiculous nature of monogamy, the artificial construct of marriage. Perhaps we agreed on the merits of sexual freedom, some intellectualized form of the
free love
I had romanticized as a teenager, when I’d longed to be with the hippies in Haight-Ashbury. David
was an anarchist, and in my zealous bid for my own social and spiritual emancipation, he seemed a wise and worthy guide, the engine that would carry me toward my destination.

One night he opened the top drawer of his bureau; it was a treasure chest of sex toys, condoms, foams and jellies—a grown-up version of the pediatrician’s trunk of goodies that I was allowed to rummage through after braving my weekly allergy shot.

“What’s your preference?” he asked, but I was too amazed and too shy to risk a response. He laughed, patted the bed beside him. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. We don’t even have to have sex. We can just lie here and talk. It’s up to you.”

I felt enormous relief and gratitude. David’s generosity convinced me that I was on a new and wonderful path. Here was a man with whom I could explore the sexual forest without fear of judgment or reprisal. There were a few times at first when I tested the truth of his words: what would he do if I said no? How many times would he lie beside me with only a light touch of hands between us? But he held steady. His mood, his contentment, seemed to have little to do with me, though I could tell he took pleasure in my company. Perhaps it was his age, his maturity and experience, that accounted for the absence of slavering eagerness. He never mewled or humped or pouted. I felt as though I had been liberated, as though, finally, I was with a man who would not depend upon me to pacify. Liberated, too, from that sense of myself as possession, for David made it clear that he would not ask me to belong only to him.

But who else would I choose to be with? No one held my interest like David; no one offered the kind of possibility that
he did. Yet I didn’t consider “falling in love” with David. Ours was a practical and unencumbered union, and I liked it that way. Although much of our intimate time together revolved around discussion and demonstration of sexual variation, I found that what excited me about David had little to do with the physical. My arousal was intellectual. It was the
knowing
that lured me, that deep current that pulled me farther away from shore. Secrets, things hidden and unspoken, the moon’s shadowed face: I believed that there was nothing that I did not want to observe and understand, no knowledge that I did not yearn to possess. My body was the decoy, my mind the open maw.
Feed me
, I said to David, and he did.

W
HAT
I
FELT
in the beginning, then, was strength, sureness, new power, exalted independence. We hunted and fished, cooked together, read together, entertained each other long into the night and never spoke of the next day or month or year except in terms of activity and destination. If we did not love each other, we loved what we shared together, and I began to wonder if this wasn’t the more blessed state. When my karate lessons conflicted with his nights home, I quit the class, unwilling to miss out on a chance to share David’s company.

Our time in public had about it an air of jubilation. David was a movable feast of hedonistic indulgence. People were
joyful
around him. His was perhaps the truest laugh I have ever heard, and when I picture him, even now, he is that man I first came to know, giddy as a child when something pleases him, his smile so full it wrinkles his eyes and sets him to bouncing with glee.

Our out-on-the-town fun was freewheeling if dangerous: barreling from one bar to the next, meeting friends and drinking tequila slammers—a shot glass of Cuervo and soda banged down on the table, creating a head of foam that we drank in one swallow. It was the incense of marijuana, which I seldom smoked but all those around me clamored for: I loved to be with them in the basements, bathrooms, and backseats as they broke into gales of raucous laughter. It was the dancing, dancing, dancing at our town’s first disco. The lights were everywhere: the floor itself pulsing, the strobes, the mirrored ball hung from the ceiling reflecting it all back in a shower of color. Sometimes we huddled inside the glass sound booth, where the deejay shared with us his tiny vials of amyl nitrate. We closed the place down six nights a week, swaying in line through the Hustle with John Travolta wannabes (bull-necked farm boys jabbing the air), drunk on Pink Cadillacs and Wet Dreams and whatever other mixture of alcohol and syrup the bartender could concoct.

Or we went to Modern West, a cowboy bar with a slick floor large enough to accommodate a small village of couples engaged in controlled collisions. I mingled in my shiny dress and strappy high heels, smug among the pearl-buttoned cowgirls twirling in their Lady Wranglers. I learned to brace myself against the pull and thrust of Western swing, sore the next morning from being snapped and retrieved by ropey-armed cowboys.

When last call came, we stepped out into the street, benumbed by alcohol and the absence of light, possessed of a sudden and deep unwillingness to do anything but continue what the evening had begun. The word would go out that there was a party, and for a time the party was always at
David’s. He had rented a new and expensive apartment closer to downtown, in an upscale complex, pool and hot tub included.

The crowd was made up of men and women I knew or knew of, whose faces were familiar because I had seen them around town: grocery clerks and lawyers, sales reps and waitresses, some pushing middle age, others too young to be legal. The gatherings had an underground feel to them, as though what brought people to the door—and got them through it—were a secret code, some cryptic tattoo. Uneasy with the pounding music, the cocaine lined out on the bathroom vanity, I’d watch and sip at my gin.

“You’re too tight,” David would tell me, rubbing my back. He didn’t like to see me turn down a good high, he said. “Loosen up, have fun. I’ll take care of you.” I’d smile, assuring him that I wasn’t the drudge, the straightlaced church girl I’d once been.

David introduced me to his male friends with obvious satisfaction, but instead of remaining close by, demonstrating his attachment, he would smile encouragingly, then turn his attention to another cluster of people. I wasn’t used to such autonomy. Tom and John had hovered at my side like guard dogs, fierce and territorial, sniffing the air for rival scent. David’s benign behavior reminded me more of Thane, who had governed me with equanimity and had never been threatened by other men. In fact, David seemed to view me much as Thane had: not as a
girlfriend
, a love interest, but as an affectionate compatriot. I was a good traveling companion, game for adventure, not given to petty grievances and suffocating restrictions. I had succeeded in remaking myself into that hybrid I believed might grant me the greatest access
into the world of men: a masculine spirit and intellect; a feminine body and libido. With my mind, I challenged and prevailed; with my sex, I appeased and confirmed. It was a delicate balance, easily upset should I fail to abide by the rules, and one of those rules was that I would not be like other women; I would demand nothing that might impinge upon the man’s license to live his life free of female imposition.

So that when, one evening, I missed David’s presence at the party and found him standing in the kitchen, sheltered by the refrigerator’s open door, his back to its interior, I did not hesitate when he motioned me forward. There, I watched a girl I’d gone to school with kneel before him, her face damp and eerily blue in the cold light. I did not turn away because I couldn’t: I was mesmerized by what I was seeing, and I knew as well that my presence was linked to David’s pleasure. I also knew that it was not simply the young woman who had tantalized David: it was the proximity of those who might find them, the possibility, the hope of being discovered. My role was to bear witness, even as David kept his eyes on me, for I was the one on whom the perfection of the moment depended.

I watched until I heard a distant voice ask where I was, and when I left the kitchen and entered the larger room of people, I felt dizzy and breathless, as though I’d just stepped off a carnival ride. I knew they were still in there, and that others might find them, and I was both alarmed and exalted by the possibility. When after a time the young woman came from the kitchen, and then David behind her, I lowered my eyes, perhaps out of some residual shame, although the emotions that filled me were too numerous and disparate to
name. I sparked with the charge of negative and positive, the push and pull of learned rejection and curious accommodation. When David made his way to my side, he smiled down at me and nodded as though confirming the delicious secret between us, and I felt my identity shift. I was no longer an artless young woman, a Lewiston girl, a tentative purveyor of light pleasure. I was a coconspirator, a partner in the confederacy of the senses.