The Best American Essays 2014 (8 page)

There was a red armchair in the corner of the living room, and some days it was as far from the bed as I could get. The first few times I sat in the red chair it was just a comfortable place to think and cry. Then I would find myself in it for whole afternoons. I began to eye the chair, to tell myself not to sit in it. Then I'd tell myself I was just going to sit in it for a little bit. Then hours later the chair would still have me. The cats would sit a few feet from the chair and watch me warily—concerned, but mainly, I believed, judging me. One day when I left for work, I got only to the subway platform and turned back, and the second day, only to the street corner. I told the man about it, and the third day he walked me out and went down in the elevator with me and out the front door, but as soon as he was out of sight I snuck back upstairs to sit in the chair. I remember that for months I could not drive a car, but I cannot remember why I could not drive a car.

I do remember the shape of the sentences that were running through my head while I was in the red chair, though not the words that were in them. They all went something like this: Is it this or that. Is it my job or my marriage. Is it my marriage or my mind. Is it him or is it me. It was him or me, him this or him that, and then always, But what if it's me this, me that. The sentences were all made of impossible twos. Knowing that the dilemmas did not make sense only made it worse; there was not even the smallest movement of my mind I could trust.

 

It took several years to get out of the red chair, and to do it I had to leave the loft, the man, and the cats too. I moved into another loft and took very little furniture with me. Soon I met a man at the bar across the street. He was gentle with me but angry at the world's rules. He made what little money he needed by less-than-legal means, and owned only five short-sleeved T-shirts, four long-sleeved T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, and a pair of Converse with holes in the soles. We saw other people and talked all about it, which made for a rare kind of understanding between us. The first woman he and I slept with together was tall and thin with long, expensive black hair. When we laid her down on the floor of my new loft and undressed her, we found, tattooed across her abdomen, just above her neatly waxed pussy, the word
Freedom.

I'd found Freedom on a South Williamsburg street corner at two in the morning, unlocking her bicycle from a lamppost. She was in a filmy white blouse over shorts and thigh-high stockings, and when I said hello, she started kissing me. I said would you like to meet my boyfriend; do you have a problem with facial hair. He was not really my boyfriend at the time, but that's how it was clearer to talk in certain circumstances. She locked up her bicycle and walked inside the bar to meet him, and she didn't mind the beard. I said do you want to go home with us and she said yes. We walked up the six flights of factory stairs to my loft. We undressed one another and all ended up on the floor rather than on any comfortable piece of furniture. She and I were making out and he was kind of stroking his beard and watching us. And then he moved in and started eating her pussy, at which point she started saying these two sentences: “I want to steal you. I'm gonna steal you and take you home. I want to steal you. I'm gonna steal you and take you home.” I was stroking her hair and kissing her neck and when she started saying that I said, “No, you're not gonna steal him, no you're not, just relax and let him make you come.” And I held her so he could.

Actually, he didn't make Freedom come; I did. I reached inside her and did what I've only ever done before in secret, that is, away from the world of men, and he watched me. He'd never seen this, the way women can fuck each other; it is quite something to have a man who loves you watch you do it.

The next morning he and I ate egg-and-biscuit sandwiches, drank coffee, and went over the details of the previous night and morning. Then we talked about our childhoods, our dead parents, and other people we were seeing at the time. He was obsessed with a Mississippi girl who had trouble coming, and I offered some strategies. I told him about something sad that had happened to a man I was seeing. We moved on to discussing which of our friends were fighting, or having problems with love or sex, or depressed.

This man had also spent time in a chair, in a dark room, staring at a wall. We tried to remember how it happens, the giving up: how the mind turns on itself and pinions the body to furniture and then convinces you that it is the furniture that has pinioned your mind. The furniture, or the girlfriend, or the husband, with their supernatural ability to cause your feelings. But it is so hard to remember the demonic logic of the place. For our friends we should remember, when they think they're stuck with sadness forever and we're trying to shine some small light on the way out. But mainly it is a blank, like women with babies say labor was.

At one point we stepped outside for cigarettes and were quiet for a moment. It was spring and a new sun was shifting light across the brick buildings on every corner of the intersection. The air felt kind and the neighborhood good, down under the Williamsburg Bridge, just across the river from Manhattan. But it was more than just a nice day: there was a peace immanent and tangible as a body, some kind of giant embrace in the air, and it was most definitely not coming from my mind. I didn't tell him about it or ask him if he felt it. Because I knew this presence, or I'd known it before. It was the one I'd been wondering about, and we'd made it ourselves, but it didn't belong to us, any more than we belonged to each other. Between us, on days like this one, there began to be a very strong sense, quite often, that anything might happen next, a feeling like the opposite of anxiety, the opposite of a panic attack, whatever you would call that.

 

The second woman who came home with us had only four sentences, but she said them over and over again. The first one was to me: “You're so beautiful. You're so beautiful.” Eventually she started kissing me. After a while she broke away from me and said, “You guys are strange. You guys are strange.” She was from another country, and the limited sentences were in part because of this, but it was also as if she were, in the very process of seducing us, passing back and forth between two worlds. When she was in one, she would forget about the other. I said, “Do you want to be here, what do you want?” And she looked at me, quiet, and then, with the ferocity of a small puppy, leaned in to kiss me again for a while, and began to undress me. Then she stopped and leaned back and said, “You guys are strange,” and I said, “But you decided to be here.” This went on for a while. Later, in the middle of things, she started asking me, “Do you really like me or are you just doing this for him?” And I'd say, “I really like you.” She'd suck his cock or I'd eat her pussy and then she'd turn to me and say, “Do you really like me or are you just doing this for him?” And I'd be like, “I really like you.” And then, hours later, she started saying to me, “You're a boy. You're a boy. You're a boy.” And I'd say, “No I'm not, sweetie.” And he would say, “No she's not,” and point out various parts of my body. “You've been all up in there.” And she'd be quiet for a moment, and then say it again: “You're a boy.” And I'd say, “No I'm not. I'm a girl.”

I understand the trouble she was having very well. The first threesome I was in, before all this, I kept saying to the guy, over and over, “Your girlfriend is gay.” I really did. The first time you feel yourself actually attracted to two people at the same time, in the same place, something very deep is shaken. You want to name the new thing, but you need new syntax to do it. Then you find yourself saying sentences like “Just relax and let him make you come,” or “Don't be nervous, I can tell she really likes you, and I'll help you pick out a wine she'll love.” The opposite of the red-chair and dark-room sentences. Sentences that in the speaking give you a feeling that is different in kind from ordinary human love, at least ordinary romantic love. If you try to find the word for this thing that is the opposite of jealousy, you end up at cheesy polyamory websites, where it is called
compersion:
when you feel happiness for another's happiness, even and especially when it doesn't involve you. Then your friends think you're delusional or stuck in the seventies, and you're basically relegated to having “your song” be George Michael's song “Freedom,” which is why when we undressed the first woman who came home with us and found that word tattooed above her pussy, we looked at each other in wonder and a kind of fear.

 

A few months later, he moved in. The first time I laundered our clothes together I began to gather his underwear, and I didn't recognize it—it must have always come off in his pants, or we were usually drunk—and I thought, Who is this man. When I brought the clothes back from the laundrymat, as he calls it, hot and smelling of “meadow breeze,” I put them on my bed and began to fold them, two black T-shirts, two navy T-shirts, one red T-shirt, two long-sleeved T-shirts, and two pairs of jeans, and I started sobbing and couldn't stop, as if doing a man's laundry were the most dangerous thing in the world.

The third woman we brought home had taken some care to lay the groundwork with each of us. With me she would talk about open relationships she'd been in, send me links to articles about unusual arrangements she'd heard of, talk to me about how much she understood. Him, she sexted. When we were together on my couch, there was a moment when she was sucking his cock with real enthusiasm and he was entirely absorbed, away from me, but I was stroking her hair and watching her and it would be the thing she talked about afterward, how much she felt I cared about her during that blowjob. There was a moment when I grabbed his hand and put his fingers inside of me and for a while it was just the two of us, together. There was another moment when he turned away and moved on top of her to fuck her and it was only them, but I was there. There is always a time when they turn away from you, together, and you panic, but if you can watch, just on the other side of the panic is a new kind of knowledge. We had come to think that this might be some part of why God forbade eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: eat it and you can no longer believe that your happiness comes from him or me, God or me, him this or her that, or me this or me that. People who are good at monogamy must know these things already.

 

We have structured our most common sacred relations in twos, but we cannot explain the feeling of God without resorting to threes, or at least the religion I grew up in couldn't. God the Father made and ordered the world, watched and evaluated us from afar, and punished. He was, in fact, a trap; he loved you more than anyone ever could, but only if you only loved him and no one else. There was no place to hide from him, except in Jesus, who drew close, in the flesh, to talk about real love, fuck with the Father's rules, suffer to save us, and retreat to heaven, allowing us to figure out for ourselves what we wanted to do. And then the Holy Spirit, who did not judge and didn't seem to care about these sacrificial games, who just pitched a tent in the air around you and filled it with this wild joy. The one who watched, the one who did, the one who felt. The one with power, the one who suffered, the bliss.

 

A few months after I first did his laundry, he left in much the same way he'd come, without really asking. He left his clothes in a dirty pile on my bedroom floor. He'd found a girl he wanted to be with, without me, or I'd begun to feel like giving up, or it's hard to do what we were doing and live under one roof. It was his thirty-third year and he wandered through Brooklyn, sleeping and eating where he could, full of new love, and homeless.

 

People often ask me what it's like to believe in God so completely and then stop. It is like leaving someone you love, or falling in love: when living in one world becomes more difficult than the difficulty of leaving without knowing if the new world will be better, you leave.

I thought about it for years before I did it, but it happened all in a moment. I was sitting in my bed, in my basement room in my college house, and I thought, I have no idea if there's anything else that is true but this can't be true. I closed my eyes and kind of threw myself off a cliff into an empty space. When I opened my eyes, I saw my bookshelf and my rug and my cat and I saw that I had been right. There was a world outside the world I'd known. I have never been so relieved in all my life. And the first thing I wanted to do, but I did not do it, was pray.

FROM
Granta

 

T
HERE IS AN AMERICAN
sitting by a narrow caramel-colored river in South Sudan. His Sudanese friend, ten years his junior, has brought him to the area, and they have been touring around on bicycles, riding on dirt trails. This day, his Sudanese friend wanted to show the American man a town on the other side of the river, and so they rode a few miles to the riverbank, to this spot, where the river was shallow and slow-moving, and the Sudanese friend waded across.

But the American man decided he couldn't wade across the river. He had cut his shin a few days before, and the cut was unbandaged and deep enough that he is concerned that something in the river, some parasite or exotic microbe, will get into his body via this wound, and because they are hours away from any Western medical care, he might get sick and die here. So he's chosen not to wade across the river. He's chosen to sit on the rocks of the riverbed and wait.

The heat is extreme, and he and his Sudanese friend have been biking for hours, on and off, so the American is happy to have some time alone. But soon the American is not alone. There is a tall man wading across the river toward him, a friend of his Sudanese friend. The American fears what news this second friend could be bringing, why his friend hasn't come himself.