When Howard and his parents disappeared through the burn ward door, I lost my veil of control. My chest started to lurch as anger and self-pity all came up like vomit, and my damaged throat allowed my breaths to be expelled only as long reedy gasps.
Then the girl Thérèse came to me. It was an incredible, torturous effort for her, and with each suck of air, I could hear her lungs rattle. She was exhausted by the time she reached my bed. She crawled up onto it and took my hand. Not my unburned right hand but my ravaged left one with its finger and a half missing, and she held it as if it were normal. It hurt so much to be touched there and, although I was thankful for the touch despite the pain, I implored her to get away.
“No,” she answered.
My chest was still jumping involuntarily. “Can’t you see what I am?”
“Yes,” she replied. “You’re just like me.”
Her large blue eyes, radiant through the pain, never left my damaged face.
“Leave,” I commanded.
She said she needed to rest a bit before she returned to her own bed, before adding, “You’re beautiful in God’s eyes, you know.”
Her eyes closed and I watched her face as exhaustion pulled her into sleep. Then my own eyes drifted shut, momentarily.
The nurses soon woke me up. Thérèse was there in my bed, her hand still in mine, not breathing.
It only takes an instant.
♦ ♦ ♦
Okay, I admit it: I tried the creative visualization that Gregor had suggested.
I slowed my breathing and concentrated on making my body feel heavy, beginning with my two remaining toes: heavy, heavy. Then my feet, then my ankles. Next I thought about my heavy calves, my heavy knees, and my heavy thighs. All the way up, torso, chest, neck, head … concentrating on my breathing: in, out, in, out, steady, calm …
This is when I started thinking about vaginas. I suppose this was natural, as I’d been inside hundreds. There are those men who would have you believe that all women feel the same, but obviously these men have not been with many women. Each vagina has its own texture, its own depth and moistness: each has its own personality. That’s a fact.
I was very good at sex. It was a hobby as well as a profession. Outside of office hours, my passion was to find women who were the opposite of those with whom I filmed. If you work at a French restaurant, do you want to eat escargot on your day off? Hardly. You’ll step out for something at the neighborhood diner. If you work in television production, you end your day by reading books. And, as a professional fucker of silicone creamgirls, I found it enjoyable to try other types of women. With careful words, not sincerely felt but spoken as if they were, I could lay out the most majestic dreams and well-planned kismet. With this gift of speech, I presented myself with 1001 women, from Scheherazade to Southside Selma.
Intercourse before the camera provides little satisfaction because the set is dressed, the check is in the mail, and where’s the romance? But the feeling I got from taking—from winning—women who were not in the game was an entirely different thing. Satisfaction lay with housewives, policewomen, and secretaries. Book editors. Cowgirls. Track athletes, fisherwomen, tree planters, feminist writers, pro wrestlers, artists, waitresses, bank tellers, Sunday school teachers, dressmakers, and civil servants. Your mother, your sister, your girlfriend. I’d say anything to possess a woman, if even for an hour. I pretended to be left-wing, right-wing, artistic, manly, sensitive, commanding, shy, rich, poor, Catholic, Muslim (only once), pro-choice, pro-life, homophobic, gay (fag hags put out), cynical, wildly optimistic, a Buddhist monk, and a Lutheran minister. Whatever the situation required.
I remember a woman named Michelle. My sex with her was the closest I ever came to perfection in intercourse. She was a waitress with a slight potbelly, who smelled faintly of fried eggs and gravy and sported a scar where her appendix had been removed. I’d watched her and her husband have a furious dispute outside her greasy spoon. The husband left and she sat down on a park bench, determined not to cry. I went over and soon we were talking, soon she was laughing, soon we were back at my place. We had some cocaine and we laughed a little more and then we started to playfully punch each other’s shoulders. When we started to fuck, first there was urgency, and then there was surprise at how good it felt, and then there was moaning. She started to laugh again and so did I, and then she started to cry; she cried all the way through—not from sorrow, but from release.
We went for hours. It seemed that we wandered a precipice where every nerve was awake. She told me about everything that transpired in (and out of) her marriage bed. She told me that she was afraid that she’d never actually loved her husband. She told me about her fantasies of her husband’s sister and how she touched herself in public when she thought—but wasn’t sure—that no one was looking, and she told me that she stole small things from the corner store because it made her horny. She told me that she believed in God and that she liked thinking about Him watching her do these things. I told her that she had been a very busy girl. We never stopped fucking and I found myself crying, too, at the rawness of it all.
My skin will never work like that again, so aware of the other person that I’m unsure where she ends and I begin. Never again. Never again will my skin be a thing that can so perfectly communicate; in losing my skin to the fire, I also lost the opportunity to make it disappear with another person. Mostly I’m glad that I found such physical connection, if only once, but I certainly wish it had been with someone whom I’ve seen since.
Perhaps I was clearly and persistently in the wrong in my many sexual transactions. But, then again, perhaps not. Please consider that I provided considerable comfort to many downhearted women. What does it matter if Wanda Whatshername believed I was a recently divorced, misunderstood painter? Her husband was more interested in drinking beer with the boys than in taking her dancing, so it probably did her a world of good to fuck a stranger. The key to the whole endeavor was that I was able to fold myself instantly into the shape of each woman’s fantasy. To do this, to decode a person so that you can provide her with what she wants and needs, is an art, and I was a fuck artist.
The women didn’t want the real me, and they didn’t want love. They wanted a carnal short story, one that they had already been heating up in the dew of their thighs, to disclose at their book clubs. I was just a physical body—a most singular beauty, too—with which they could realize their true desires.
This is the truth: we all desire to conquer the comely one, because it affirms our own worth. Speaking for the men of the world, we want to own the beauty of the woman we’re fucking. We want to grasp that beauty, tightly in our greedy little fingers, to well and truly possess it, to make it ours. We want to do this as the woman shines her way through an orgasm. That’s perfection. And while I can’t speak for women, I imagine that they—whether they admit it or not—want the same thing: to possess the man, to own his rough handsomeness, if only for a few seconds.
All in all, what difference did my deceptions make? I didn’t have AIDS or herpes, and while it’s true that I’ve taken my share of needles in the ass, who hasn’t? A little penicillin goes a long way. But then again, it’s easy to fondly recall the days of minor genital infections after your penis has been removed.
Creative visualization is probably not for me.
♦ ♦ ♦
Connie, of the morning shift, was the youngest, blondest, and cutest of my three nurses, and she checked my bandages when I awoke. Generally far too perky for my liking, she did have an adorable smile with just slightly crooked teeth and an always genuine “Good morning!” When I asked her once why she was always so gosh-darn nice—a difficult sentence but I got it out of my mouth—Connie answered that she “didn’t want to be mean.” There was great charm in the fact that she couldn’t even imagine why I’d bother to ask such a question in the first place. In her efforts