Affection (28 page)

I heard his car at three in the morning. I had been pacing, painting, reading, pacing some more. I left the apartment briefly and set out for a walk, realized it would be pointless, and let myself back in again. I dressed and undressed and dressed and undressed.

I settled on a T-shirt and sat at the canvas, making white fingerprints on it. I didn't like the image that was emerging, a woman, shrouded in what looked like bandages, seen from above, mostly white, a light shading of blue, the eyes upward gazing and rimmed in red.

I looked at the painting and knew I was still furious.

When I heard his car I leaped into bed and rolled onto my side. I might have been asleep.

He removed his shoes. He removed his socks. He removed his clothes, and the sag of his body shuffled into bed beside me. He warmed his hands on my hips.

“I like your friends,” he said. “They are fun.”

I wanted to pretend that I was still sleeping, but I was a fist and he could feel the tension in my body and so I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. “You think they are beautiful.”

“Yes.”

“More beautiful than me.”

“Yes. All of them are so much more beautiful than you.” Here came the list. I rolled my eyes as he began it. “More warm. More feminine. More giving. More compassionate. More understanding.”

He rolled onto me then, he was hard, but I didn't want to. I wanted him to go back to the party. I wanted him to sleep with all the beautiful women who were more beautiful than me. I was angry because I knew it was true and I hated him for saying it.

“I don't,” I said. “I don't want to do this.”

But he wanted to. He held my hands in his fist and he raised them above my head and I tried to slip out from under him but he was heavy and I had no skin left at all. It might be easier to let him do it, I thought. Get it over with. After all, I had never said no to sex before. I tried to remove my hands from his fists and it seemed to be his weight that pinned me but of course it wasn't. I was powerless because he told me with each thrust that I was hideous, and with each thrust I believed him.

“I'd be fucking her if I could,” he said. “You are nothing in comparison. Easy ride. Not the same class of woman.”

And I found myself unable to argue, unable to struggle my hands out from the place where he held them above my head. I wondered what had once held me together, because now I was dispersing, falling into pieces on the bed.

I had never said no. This is what I came to when he pushed himself inside me and made the angry thrusts with his hips. I could hear him talking. I knew the list was continuing. I was not the girlfriend kind, I was less than all of them in very fundamental ways. And I agreed with him. I completely agreed with him, but I was focused on the sudden
realization that I had never ever said no to anyone. The other girls, the girlfriend kind of girls, they all said no at one time or another.

I refocused my eyes. He was sweating over me. He was red faced. He might have had a heart attack from the effort it took to have sex with me when I refused to cooperate.

“No,” I tried out the word. He did not hear me. “No. Stop. I want you to stop.”

He hadn't paused to put on a condom. He knew I wouldn't have sex without a condom and here he was, ejaculating into me without one.

He rolled off me. He was still angry, I could tell, but it was tempered now by the exhaustion that follows climax.

I could feel the sticky juices of him dripping out of me. I would have to get the morning after pill. I thought this and I remembered my first time. My very first time. All the blood and pain and negotiation.

“I didn't like that,” I said, and he said nothing, but I knew he had heard me. “I didn't like that at all.”

I rolled over and I felt the sticky mess of him dripping out of me, staining the sheets. The morning after pill would make me sick. I had vomited last time. I had been sick as a dog for hours after. It felt like the flu. I closed my eyes, stepping through the trip I would make to the doctor in the morning, the interminable wait in the foyer with all the sick and dying people. I should get tested for STDs, too, although I would have to wait three months to find out what I had picked up from this evening's entertainment. I thought all of this
through, dispassionately, and although I thought I might never sleep it was midmorning when I found myself awake again.

He bought me a dozen red roses and told me he had never bought anybody flowers before, and I thanked him for it. This terrible double-crossing of myself. This is what I regret more than anything.

 

 

He left in the middle of the night when I wasn't expecting it. I woke up and he was gone, and I started to cry although I was sure I must be happy that he was gone. I cried for the whole day, rocking back and forth, his list playing on a loop in my head. I am ugly. I am crass. I am coarse. I am unfeminine. I am too harsh. I am too honest. I have no secrets. I am too obvious. I am too sexual. I am too aggressively sexual. I am like a man. I am not like a girlfriend. I am unlovable. I am. I am. I am.

I am ugly. I am crass. I am coarse. I am unfeminine. I am too harsh. I am too honest. I have no secrets. I am too obvious. I am too sexual. I am too aggressively sexual. I am like a man. I am not like a girlfriend. I am unlovable. I am ugly. I am crass. I am coarse. I am unfeminine. I am too harsh. I am too honest. I have no secrets. I am too obvious. I am too sexual. I am too aggressively sexual. I am like a man. I am not like a girlfriend. I am unlovable. I am ugly. I am crass. I am coarse. I am unfeminine. I am too harsh. I am too honest. I have no secrets. I am too obvious. I am too sexual. I am too aggressively sexual. I am like a man. I am not like a girlfriend. I am unlovable. I am. I am. I am. I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I.

Jessica held my head in her lap and told me to breathe deeply. People were running inside my chest, big men, hurdling, running and jumping and thumping down on my ribs. I was filled with athletes and my arms were locked and rigid over my chest. She told me to breathe and I managed a halting breath that was half a sob and I smelled her secret musky odor under the sweet floral perfume. It made me even more agitated.

I was the gnarled and gnomic Rumpelstiltskin from the fairytale. I was all spit and struggle. She was a part of the problem offering a solution. She kissed my tears and I could love her or I could hit her; I was bouncing from one state to the next like someone leaping from rock to rock in an ice-capped stream.

“Imagine,” she told me, “that for every breath there is a balloon filling.”

Balloons. She had learned that trick in one of her self-help sessions. I felt my chest tightening. I had lived with her affirmations pinned to the wall in the toilet, tolerating her self-deluding platitudes for the sake of her extraordinary beauty. Now she hugged me and I struggled away from her.

“Release the balloons,” she whispered. “One by one.” Someone else's words from her ripe, overblown mouth. The mouth I had bitten. The mouth that I had pressed my nipple against, that had never sullied itself against my vagina. Her perfect mouth.

The balloons slipped from my fingers one by one.

When they were gone, floating off into the angry pale of the sky, there was nothing left for me to hold onto.

I rolled out of her empty hug and I was gone. I had already left the room.

“That's right,” she told me. “Let go of the balloons, one by one by one.”

One by one by one and it was all gone. I was gone. She was gone. There was nothing left to hold onto and my chest eased out of the vice that had gripped it. I left the room. I left the house. I left that life. And I was gone.

I am buffeted between conflicting states. I am at once wrung out by longing, swelling like dough under a damp cloth into the idea of Paul. It is a strange alchemy that blends smell and flesh into some pheromonal melting pot. I harbor secret glimpses of possible outcomes, which inevitably include climbing into his lap and settling into the hardness there. I imagine hand-holding in libraries or lying on the grass or in the cinema. These random images are thrown up at inappropriate moments, in company, on the bus, at work. I catch my breath so it won't escape in a moan or a little sigh.

It is not the first time I have had this kind of all-consuming crush on someone who is not my husband. It crashes in, and it abates. I am used to the pattern. It is a pattern but I am still surprised by the force of the desire.

At the same time there is a rock solid care for Paul, a familial love, the kind that you would imagine a big sister would have for a beloved brother. I would fight for him, scuff my knees. If he called in the middle of the night he would find me at his side without any subtext. Still, I would eat him if I could. I would carve through his flesh with a spoon and gorge myself on him.

I turn in on myself, wondering what I might do to elicit the same kind of passion from him. And even as I conjure up possibilities, I know. I am not blind. He will never want me. There is my physicality, my age, my erratic nature. I would remake myself into someone else to catch his attention. I wonder if he would love a thinner girl. That pretty blond thing I saw him with, the sunken eyes and skin that looked as if you would bruise it with a glance. I would carve myself up into pieces to have him look at me that way. I would stop eating. I would learn to wear makeup and perfume like a real girl.

When I stopped running I was in a park. Light fell like snow onto the grass. Solid light. This is what I noticed first, the painterly quality of the light. The park was beautiful. The trees were solid patches of darkness. I had somehow run myself out of the world and here I was in a painting by Edward Hopper, an in-between place of flat shapes and silence and all the panic drained out and dissipated. It was a perfect summer evening. My eyes were still red and sore from weeping. My chest was still tight. Behind me was the memory of a storm, not a gentle storm, but the kind that rips the roof off a house and flings cars into a flooded street. Sirens, screaming, bodies ripped from the hands of lovers and raced away into the turmoil of a drowning.