“Everyone’s life is pleasant at seventeen.”
“It was more than that. Everything was new, now I’m like a junkie, I seem to need more severe doses of experience to feel anything.”
In all our arguments I wanted him to deface Kevin’s memory, to say it had been perverse or that he was emotionally undeveloped, that he preferred women, that he preferred me to Kevin.
Bell was quiet. There were always these moments he receded, felt soulfully misunderstood, above domestic conflict, sullied by interaction with anyone. He crossed his legs, his gaze following the jagged tops of buildings up the hill. He was too beautiful for this world.
I told him he was the devil. I’d said this often and fondly, but now I said it again, burlesquing the way I used to. “You are the devil. I should have left you in the beginning when I saw you dancing with that black boy, putting streamers around his neck, letting him sit on your lap.”
A flush spidered into Bell’s cheeks. “The minister’s daughter speaks.”
Once he started insisting I was prudish, moralistic, crippled by my father, there was no use arguing. He slipped into his extremist mode, called me bourgeois, claiming he was a proletarian, ridiculed my classical education, said he was a student of the streets.
“Look,” he continued. “Everyone would align with the devil if they could.”
“And then they’ll drop the bomb.”
Several seconds passed before he said with perfect dramatic timing, “Pleasure, my dear, does not always equal sin.”
When cornered I sounded wifish and conventional. I was silent.
He was getting agitated, rocking himself on the couch, he spoke with force. “Admit that either of us could go to a bar, pick up a stranger and have better sex with them than we could with each other.”
“That’s because when you’re in love your problems follow you into bed.”
“You’ve told me yourself, you fantasize about strangers, about giving pleasure to several men at once.” He looked me right in the eyes, stood slowly, puffed up, trying to make his point with his body.
“I told you because I thought you would understand. It’s like thinking about murdering someone versus doing it.”
He took my hand, held it palm up, rubbed his fingertips over my lifeline so it tickled. “Just imagine if I were a stranger, if I saw you on the street, noticed you because your hair covered one side of your face and your hips moved in a lazy way that said fuck me.” He put his loose hand above the first one and pulled me toward him slowly as if my arm were a rope. I could feel his breath on my face. “I’d follow you down the street to the steps of your building. Watch your slender thighs beneath your dress disappearing behind the door, thinking how wet you might be, how your breasts would be full and cool to touch. Then I’d follow you up the stairs. The door would open. In the slant of light from the hallway I’d see you nude on the bed.”
He pulled me to him, grabbed a side of my ass in each hand and whispered into my ear. “I’d sit first on the chair near the bed and touch you, trace your neck bones, my fingers rounding your breasts in tiny spirals until I got to the nipple. Then I’d bow my head and suck.”
My face pressed into his hair; smoke, eucalyptus. I could feel myself getting wet and I knew I wouldn’t try to stop him. Even though this was not what I wanted, it was a semblance of it. I convinced myself that him wanting sex meant he wanted me, but it seemed naive and overly hopeful, like a schoolgirl or a dreamy whore.
“I want to fuck,” Bell said, dramatically. Like everything in bed, you pretend; pretend you are inarticulate, more animal, more powerful or weaker than you are. I was flattered he would put this energy into seduction and I allowed him to maneuver me through the room then trip me down onto the bed.
The blinds were up and the tall buildings zoomed high. He moved his tongue over my eyes and into my ears. I put my hands inside his pants, the hair there was moist and his cock was stretched smooth. Bell pulled my shirt up over my head so I couldn’t see. I felt his hand working my bra clasp. Would he leave me like this? I raised my arms and he pulled the shirt off, lapped at my nipples until they stood up hard like nuts. Bell rested his head on my stomach and unlatched my pants. His fingers gentle inside the folds of wet skin. I wiggled my jeans down, getting only one leg free before Bell stopped me, spread my legs, kneeled down between them, put his hands under my ass and lifted up my sex as if he was filling his hands with water to drink.
I felt the bed fall away, and the floor, and the ceiling and the walls, and I had the sensation we were floating out the window. Time lifted too and left us, because when you’re fucking it is impossible to think of the next ten minutes or the next ten years. Because fucking, when it’s good, seems like everything and there is pain in the pleasure when you remember things that are horrible, until you are hardly alive, and so many times good things turn bad that you decide to live the life you fear most, the ordinary one, the one that is easy and hard. But now I think of the other time he made me stand on the chair and pulled down my tights, the way I saw his fingers disappearing inside me. But I don’t want to be a lover like this so my days are spent wandering, phantoms of a tongue, a cock or a finger flaring under my eyelids.
By the way he braced himself, sheets clenched in his fists, and how he tucked his pelvis, tried instinctively for an angle that would put his sperm closer to my cervix I knew he was close. I thought of what I always do . . . putting my ass high, having someone come between my breasts. Then the usual chant to push me over . . . marry me, fuck me, marry me, fuck me, marry me, fuck me. I had a momentary thought that we were feeding on each other. His cock pulsed and there was the sensation of water rising quickly, like in a flood and suddenly I was deaf and dumb with pleasure. He fell on top of me. His chest trapped air, made a sound like a horn. It was a rule between us that we never spoke afterward. He was on the side of gesture, not of words, and accused me of ruining moments by defining them.
He slipped out, rolled over. His breath loosened and I could tell that he was falling asleep. Bell became that precious thing: the sublime sleeping child. What if I didn’t need to recognize all the extra static of our relationships? Maybe everything was O.K., at least for now.
For a long time I couldn’t sleep. I was too conscious of the different textures of the sheet and the pillowcase, the air and the sharp slants of light. The walls, too, with their grainy malevolent shapes. I felt frightened, snuggled back into the cave of Bell’s chest. This is the one I’ve chosen. He makes meaning for me. Not by doing anything particular, but in the way he speaks and moves and how he sleeps abandonedly beside me. Quickly then my mind slipped into dislogic and I saw a random pattern of floating objects: Bell’s slender fingers, my mother’s face, the deflated dye bottle, the woman in the fountain. These strung together like charms on a bracelet and I let them lead me into a silky unconsciousness and then finally into sleep.
CHAPTER TWO
IN THE silence of the BART train on the way to Madam Pig’s, I could only think of last night: how we slept curled close like petals, how at dawn Bell woke to tell me his dream—we were in a driverless taxi following a tennis ball I’d hit hard enough that it still soared above us. We chased the ball down a road surrounded with abandoned factories and tin warehouses, then made a violent turn into a subdivision of burnt-out ranch houses. The last thing he remembered was squatting at the foot of a dolmen of seared wood, the bloodied light at the horizon.
At first I thought the dream seemed a good omen, maybe even a mark of my power. But any contentment with last night wore off like the fading charm of a hit song. I realized the bombed suburbia was his idea of domesticity in general and our future specifically.
It seemed crazy that I stayed. Bell made me feel edgy and hysterical, but at least this way I was alive. Also, I suspected I was close to winning him and if I did he would become a docile and genial lover. But the myth of breaking a man was stupid,