That Thing You Do With Your Mouth: The Sexual Autobiography of Samantha Matthews as Told to David Shields (6 page)

“I'm getting lonely being with you. The more I'm with you the lonelier I get. That's not a good sign. If I were
older and wiser, I'd take a walk. I'd go home, watch
Miami Vice
and feel good about myself. I'd remind myself how good I live without a man. I'd regain my equilibrium. Ever since I met you, my life's been imbalanced, it tips in the love and sex direction. I look at your skin and think I'm gonna have a nervous breakdown if I'm not allowed to touch that man's skin. I meet 10 billion other men a day but I see you, my heart has a little heart attack, I get wet down there”—monologue from Wendy MacLeod's
Apocalyptic Butterflies
, which I did in grad school. Total foreshadowing of my relationship with William.

I'm still attracted to women and probably always will be. I'm lucky I feel comfortable with that, but it turns out I happened to find a man. I don't feel I'm missing out by not being with women, since I tried it out with many partners and explored it for a reasonable amount of time. And to be perfectly honest, the sexual act feels to me more complete with a man.

I definitely don't want to shut down
The Samantha & David Show
. I just think you should ask every question you want to ask, and I should answer every question I want to answer. Good?

I hate feeling invisible. When I asked an ex what he liked about me, he said, “I don't know. I can't really say there's something specific. I just kinda feel your presence [gesturing to the side and slightly behind him] right here.” Thanks. Like this antique mirror I had in my apartment, ornately carved cherry wood. When I moved everything out of that apartment and did the last dummy check, there it was. I was so used to seeing it I didn't see it anymore. How could I have not seen it? Is this what always happens in relationships?

I always take mental pictures of my lovers—specific parts of their anatomy, drawing the lines in my mind—to remember them by. I want that look from William we had when we first met. I still have it for him. Why doesn't he have it for me? Almost daily I see him again and again and again and again for the first time. The invisibility sends me into self-loathing.

My mom constantly warns me that Jaume and I need to be really careful in how we handle our divorce. Despite how well Jaume and I are dealing with things, she sends me an article about “parental alienation.” I don't know how many times she's made me feel guilty, imagining a
sadness in Roc and Ava. I have to console
her—her
grief over
my
divorce. She often tells me how much Ava needs me. I don't see her every day now because of shared custody, so I have supposedly made a selfish decision and the kids are now going to feel abandoned by me.

When I started babysitting at twelve years old, I would look in the mirror at myself and the baby resting her sleeping head on my shoulder. I knew how to comfort her, make her feel safe. I pretended she was mine and took pride in knowing I could look after her. She trusted me. I was there no matter what. If the baby got a diaper rash, I was terrified the parents would think I was sexually abusing her.

I once did a short film in which the mother threw me out of the house for teaching her kid about Jesus; to get into the scene emotionally, I imagined the scenario of an accusation of sexual abuse—one place where I could constructively use my pain and confusion.

Good morning, Miss. I'm the minister's wife. I was wondering if I could come in and give you some information about our church.

No, no, I'm not interested.

I think you'll really like what I have to show you.

No really, I'm not interested.

But you don't know what you're missing. It's really interesting. Come on, just give me five minutes.

Well, okay, but only five minutes.

You won't regret it.

I'm doing it again (again). I can't say no. I feel sorry for Milo. I like to be around him and I feel burdened by him. He's leaving in two days and really needs my help. He's newly married and has a newborn baby; he's splitting his time between Barcelona and Ukraine—his ex-wife is in Ukraine. She has the other two daughters to take care of and has cancer. He has no money. He stays out probably once a week, doing coke, drinking gallons of spirits, and “networking.” He's 6'4”. Just like Jesse. Jesse would like to look like him. Jesse was 6'4” and obese. Milo's not. Milo's kinda hot. He has Carl's aloofness and says completely “inappropriate” things. He's Jesse and Carl combined. Soft and vulnerable, troubled, then hard and selfish and mean and sexy. He makes everyone feel uncomfortable and that weirdly comforts me. It means I can do the same.

On the film set he told me it looks like I work out a lot and have a good body. (I don't know if he actually said that second part; I intuited it.) He then said I didn't have any tits—in other words,
lástima
. His current wife has massive melons. He obviously likes that look better. Carl also liked to point out what was wrong with my body while coming on to me. Milo can pick me up with one hand. I like that. I don't feel fat then.

Another time on the set, after we'd broken for the night, he got me to smoke a joint. I hate smoking pot. It scares me; I've always found it brain-scramblingly numbing. I did it anyway, 'cause I wanted him to like me. He has a way of making me feel a little invisible, even boring, then he hugs me and makes me feel special—without looking at me, though. He's lived through war. I wouldn't know the first thing about how that might change a person. Maybe that's why he's tough and selfish. I don't want to have coffee and listen to his oneman show. I know he wants to meet me so he can use my studio. He's downstairs and I answer the phone after two missed calls from him: “Come down, come on, just come down.” I go down, watch him smoke eight cigarettes in twenty minutes, and listen to him talk while he intermittently shoots cookie-monster voices out at his newborn son in the baby buggy next to us. He asks
me how I am, then continues on about the disgraces in his life—entertaining stories that have the word
fuckin'
dropped in there every other word. I listen. I feel bad. I feel drained.

A month later, he wants to meet again. I don't have time to record a voice-over job for him, because I have my own deadlines and kids to take care of that day, but I do it, anyway. As he leaves, he asks me when we're going to party again, picking me up and lifting me way above the ground in a very affectionate hug. I hug him back and call him “sweetheart,” like I really care about him. I know he's just using me and pretend I don't notice. I still want him to like me. These kinds of people are magnets. They get me every time.

Not sure what I think about the Robert Stoller quote you sent me: “The major traumas and frustrations of early life are reproduced in the fantasies and behaviors that make up adult erotism, but the story now ends happily. This time, we win. In other words, the adult erotic behavior contains the early trauma. The two fit: the details of the adult script tell what happened to the child.”

I don't know if I feel that happy ending in my sexual experiences. Somehow, the trauma taints everything
one way or another. I completely agree with you about avoiding the “I was abused and never escaped” moan session, but it has formatted me—it's a filter I have—and right now I find it impossible to not see everything linked to it. Would be great to find some revelation that is cycle-breaking.

I feel like I've spent half my life in therapy.

My mother had, and has, a need to know absolutely everything about what I'm thinking, doing, etc., probably stemming from her own mother's distance. Vivian was married to another man before Errol and had a child, my mom, with that other man at nineteen. They divorced shortly after having my mom, who had to be hidden—sort of the bastard child. Vivian sent my mother to live with her parents from age two to five, and when Vivian married Errol, my mother wasn't allowed at the wedding.

She was told her birth father was a bad man and she wasn't allowed to see him. (He'd come back shell-shocked from World War II and Vivian had no patience with his languor, although he wound up being far more successful in business than Errol ever was.) My mother has a vague
sense that some sort of sexual abuse may have occurred, or someone may have suggested to her that it happened, but she could never confirm this.

I remember one morning—I must have been around three—cuddling up to my mom, spooning her and lightly patting her bottom, to comfort her, to show affection, as she'd always done to me. It seemed to me an extension of a hug. Two pats in, she almost jumped from the bed.

She says she was made to feel guilty—by her mother—on the two or three occasions when, as a child, she saw her birth father. They were reunited about ten years ago and continued to have a relationship until he died recently.

Just like her mom, at nineteen my mom had a daughter, whom she gave up for adoption. (Vivian and Errol sent my mom to a pregnancy home in Kentucky to hide herself/it.) This half sister of mine, Sallie, found my mother about eight years ago. They have a relationship now, seeing each other when my mom goes to Detroit, and she's come to Seattle to visit. I think they speak about once a month—probably more than my mom and I do. Sallie wants to meet me. Not interested. That probably sounds really cold, but I'm just not.

I think my mother felt that Errol never loved her. In fact, about twenty years ago she discovered that even
though Errol adopted her, she wasn't in Errol and Vivian's will; only Sarah and Eleanor were. I believe there was a confrontation and that was changed; I'm not sure.

Starting when I was around nine—to get my mom to stop drinking—I'd imitate her drinking and vomiting episodes from the night before. Tucking me in at night, she'd be drunk, alcohol on her breath, her dead weight next to me. I'd tell her to brush her teeth. Didn't matter. She wasn't there…

After a week of drugging herself to near death in her room last summer when I was visiting, she appeared one morning with smeared lipstick on her mouth, a wild, high look in her eyes, and a crazed smile on her face, saying, “Hi! Good morning, everyone!” She was
fine
, so
happy
, so
joyous
, and was letting me know with that smile that nothing was going on and nothing had been going on over the past five days. I can still hear it in her voice over the phone and don't trust that she's ever really going to come off her pain meds.

I'm jealous of people who have no need or desire to blot things out. (You really never drink more than one glass of wine with dinner? That's so weird, David!) I've taught
myself how to not feel unpleasant things. I've suffered from horrible panic attacks since, really, forever. As a young child I didn't know what they were. I just thought I was dying all the time. For years and years I've been trying to reprogram myself to feel things, pleasurable things. I used drinking, and still do, as a way to calm the negative noise and go into a celebratory mood:
Look how lucky I am to be where I am despite it all. Life is great!
(I'm sober right now, by the way.)

January is No Vices month for William and me. No coffee, no cigarettes, no booze. My skin is all broken out, and I look like hell. I feel hyperactively awake, nervy. I feel super-sharp mentally, which I really like, but sometimes it's just too loud in my head. My normal state is like a person on speed. I drink to calm that down. I've been exercising and that just gives me even more energy. I long to feel fucking
tired
. I'm just never relaxed.

So how long have you been in the business?

About three years.

Do you enjoy your work?

Definitely.

Do you like it more with men or women?

Oh, men, of course.

Do you prefer vaginal or anal sex?

Vaginal. If I can avoid anal, all the better.

Do you like being peed on?

I don't get into any of that—S&M, domination, anything that deals with pain. That's just really not my thing. And I won't do it.

Have you ever done any of these things we're talking about?

Yes.

What happened?

I just don't get excited by those things. I enjoy sex a lot, just not that way.

Have you always enjoyed sex?

I lost my virginity when I was twelve and I've always really liked sex. It's just something that comes naturally to me.

Are there certain people you like working with?

It's great when you get to work with someone you have a good connection with. I usually get to choose my partners.

The men always seem to have orgasms, but you can never really tell if the woman does. Do you fake your orgasms?

Well, sometimes, you know, for the film. Even though you may not feel excited, it's important that the person watching the film thinks you are, but I've had orgasms. Really. Lots of
times. If you're with someone you like working with, it can happen.

What would you say is your sexual fantasy?

I've always wanted to have sex with a complete stranger in a bathroom at a gas station.