Fucking Daphne (35 page)

I don't get it.

“Sex between people is a powerful act, but when performed alone it can be just as powerful. The mind tricks the individual into feeling the erotic presence of someone else.”

“I guess I know what you mean.”

“The mind is so powerful that the placebo effect of masturbation can cause women to become pregnant.”

Whoa, baby. This is a new one to me: virgin births caused by an act of the hand. I have to wonder, then, if the progeny are ghost
babies, and whether their mothers know they've had them, and hey, if it's all in the mind, maybe men could have them, too. I wonder and concentrate, but can't hold the thought as my soul becomes lighter and rises up and drifts back out the window. It floats high above the San Francisco skyline in search of Daphne.

I find her at last. She's alone in her car, in an alley off Golden Gate Avenue. I hover high above. I know what to do. Tonight I will haunt her memory the way she's been haunting mine. I will come to her as a ghost.

Other ghostly lovers are beating me to the punch. One and many, they come to her in her car as I watch. They open the Veg-o-Matic's unlocked doors and climb inside. More pile in through the trunk. The heavy breathing of so many parked passengers fogs the windshield. A window rolls down, and feet and elbows spill out as cramped passengers try to make more room for themselves.

I'm not sure how I'll squeeze myself in. Through the backseat window, I see a parting in the dogpile of bodies and I make my headfirst plunge. I find myself face-to-face with Daphne.

“Hiya, Digs,” she says.

It's not really her. “Hiya” is not a word Daphne would ever say. She's never said my name in the plural. This is not her fantasy; it's mine. Suddenly it's over. I quit. I want to be left alone. I want to go home.

My soul reels back to the recreation room, where it finds its way back into my body. Daphne's clothes are still hanging above me, and I am still sitting. I am feeling all whatever, unresolved. My obsession is getting old. I won't get Daphne back.

I turn on the light, pull down two of Daphne's shirts, and tie them together, forming them into a rope. I run the shirts over the
top of the rafter and stand on a kids' stool. I tie the long sleeves of one shirt into a noose and slip it over my head. I undo the fly of my duck trousers and reach inside. I wait for just the right moment to kick the stool out from under myself.

Masturbation is like dying alone, teasing yourself into thinking you are not, pushing yourself to the edge and throwing yourself off, only to find in the end that you haven't gone anywhere. The world is the same as it ever was, and so are you.

The balloon doesn't pop in a single, startling burst. Rather, the air rushes out. The balloon flails all around the room until all the air is exhausted, and then lies limp and unnoticeable in a heap on the recreation room floor.

 

 

H
e led me outside to the water where the rigs rose up and cut across the sky.

“People get addicted to the feeling of being released from gravity,” he said.

The highway was to one side, the Hudson on the other. In the distance, you could see the George Washington Bridge stretching over the water. It's so solid here in New York, each street like its own universe, pressing in. It is easy to forget that there is water on all sides of us.

I was doing research for a novel I was writing. “It's about a girl who is saved by the trapeze,” I had explained when I called the school, asking to be shown around. The girl in my book is all wrong: At barely four feet tall, she is tiny for her age. She has hands as small as plums. She is invisible to her family, and the other kids call her a
freak. Then a librarian comes to town and sees something in the girl that no one else sees. She teaches the girl to read, to love words and stories, and she teaches her the trapeze.

I have her standing up on the platform, covered in rhinestones, looking down at her two glittering-slippered feet, the sawdust-covered ground below. The girl is in the ring for the first time, clutching the bar in her hand, waiting for the lights to flare on and send her hurtling into space. But she is stuck there, suspended.

I needed details to send her on her way—the actual feel of ropes in her palms, the look of the net spreading out below her, the precise ways she'd have to twist her body to make those arcs and circles, what she'd feel and listen for in the air.

The president of the school had agreed to tell me everything I needed to know.

“Why don't you try it?” he asked now.

“No,” I said. “I just want to see. It's enough.”

“You're not going to try it?”

He looked at me like I was crazy. But I couldn't imagine being up there and exposed like that. I'm wedded to the ground. I'm terrified of birds. I hate airplanes. Once, a rich guy flew me to Connecticut for lunch in his Cessna, and I threw up on the seat. But that doesn't mean I can't love all of those things from afar: birds, flight, wings, the air.

“Maybe some other time,” I said, self-conscious. “For now, I just want to take notes.”

He shrugged. “You know, there's another writer here today,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“A poet.”

“A poet?”

“Taking a lesson.” He pointed. “She's a friend of a friend.”

The sun was bright behind her. It took me a second to focus in.

“What's her name?”

“Daphne.”

Daphne. I stared up at her. I knew who she was, I realized. I'd seen her a few years before at a reading she gave at my friend's bar in Brooklyn. I don't usually like readings. I like to feel words in my hands, under my fingers, but my friend had convinced me to make an exception that night. I'd sat back as this woman stalked to the stage and made every word an arrow, a knife she flung out at us. There is much I can do with words on a page, but I can't do that. I use them like rain and mist, to cloak things; this girl used them to shed her own blood.

After, I'd read her poetry:
My body became a secret handshake all the boys knew and i didn't
, she wrote.
i only remember my own skin when i am touched
,
find the edges of my body through your eyes or under your hands.
I wanted to be that raw but I also wanted to be invisible, to write in fine layers that concealed any resemblance to my own heart. I wanted to be like her, to fold myself into a tiny flying girl despite standing almost six feet tall in boots.

Of course, I had never seen Daphne like this: standing on the platform with her arms stretched out in front of her, her face lit up, smiling, her hair swaying down her back. Hooked in, harnessed, ready to jump. She looked like a girl who was always ready to jump. She was tall, broad, ferocious. Her left arm decorated in vines and flowers; her skin smooth and sinewy; her muscled body already
belonging to the air. She leapt then, laughing, and I could hear her laughter, feel it move inside of me, as she hurled herself through space, her dark hair streaming out behind her.

“She's not afraid,” I said.

“No,” he said, and I could see that he, too, admired her. I felt judged, inadequate, earthbound.

Above us, she was laughing as she swung through the air, and as she twisted her legs up over the bar so that she hung from her knees. She let go of the bar, held out her arms toward the net, then swung up to the catcher, who caught her hands in his. He pulled her to the platform opposite the one she'd jumped from, the one right next to where I was standing.

The look on my face must have given me away. The president smiled at me. “You have to talk about how people react when they see someone on the trapeze,” he said. “It does something to people. They're undone. I've seen it over and over again. It's primal, almost. You have to write about that in your novel.”

I blushed. “I'm sure that's true,” I said.

Daphne was climbing down the long ladder that stretched from the platform to the ground. I watched the muscles in her shoulders, the flowers scrolling along her arm, her hair hanging down like snakes.

She jumped off the ladder to the ground.

“How was it?” the president asked.

She stopped. “Pure fucking bliss,” she said, laughing. Radiant.

I had never seen anyone as beautiful, alive, as she was then. I was sure she could jump in the air and soar above us all if she wanted to.

She looked from him to me. Cocked her head, as if she'd just been given a gift and was trying to figure out what it was.

“You're going to become addicted,” he said.

“I already am.” She smiled at him, then looked back at me as she walked past.

I couldn't understand the feeling moving through me. Usually, in me, desire rises up slowly, like a body to the surface of the water. I have to decipher it like some hidden code. For a moment I was without words; it felt like I could string them together only on pages, in whispers, in the dark. I imagined myself breaking open, becoming wild, jumping.

The girl in my story is saved by another woman, one who teaches her the trapeze, who tells her about the circus, who spreads glitter across her face and sees a self in her that no one had thought to see before. I thought about the air. I thought about how much we pattern our lives on our own fictions.

Daphne was bent over, leaning against the fence, slipping on her boots. Looking up at me.

“Excuse me for a moment,” I said. I knew the president was still smiling as I turned and made my way to the bathrooms.
Maybe he sees this all the time,
I thought. I felt exposed, ridiculous, a straight girl going batty over a mad flying woman. It didn't matter to me that she was a woman, or a poet, or anything else. What she seemed like was a streak of light, something inside me laid bare.

I stood and stared at myself in the mirror. My cheeks were red. I filled my palms with cold water, ran them over my face, tried to breathe normally.

I hated being this way. I wished I could keep my feelings wrapped in a box inside me, pull them out as carefully as Christmas ornaments swaddled in tissue paper. My mother used to unwrap the ornaments
every year, bring each one into the light and tell its history. When they were all dangling from the tree at once, the lights and tinsel curling around them, shining and glinting and glittering, it was almost overwhelming.

I feel that way, like if I were to reveal myself, all this inside me, I would overwhelm everyone. At the same time, I want to take the whole world inside of me, stand in front of a room, and hurl words like axes.

My eyes were wild in the mirror. When I cry or become emotional, they turn bright blue. They don't even look real. The door opened. The energy of the room changed when she stepped in. She was all energy, all forward rushing and unfolding wings. The concrete bathroom became a cage then, a set of ribs. My heart pounded so loudly, I was sure she could hear it.

“I know you,” Daphne said, her voice sweeter, raspier than I would have expected. “I recognize you. I think we know some of the same people.”

I looked from my face to hers and back again. Sometimes I am so intent on watching things, taking them in, that I forget I am even there, that people can see me, too. I have to remind myself to speak.

I cleared my throat. “I recognize you, too,” I said.

She came up behind me. I am tall but she towered over me. I watched her face in the mirror—covered in sweat, wide open, her eyes huge and feral. Green. The president had said that it was an addictive, amazing feeling, being in the air. “Nothing makes you feel more alive,” he had said.

The light was angling in through a crack in the door. It hung in the air like salt or snow. From here, I realized, you could smell the raw scent of the river.

“Did you try it?” she asked.

“Try what?”

“Flying,” she said, flapping her arms and laughing.

“I'm just here to write about it,” I said into the mirror.

Daphne leaned down, her chin almost touching my shoulder, and then tilted her lips toward my ear. “It's better than sex,” she said.

I could feel her breath on my earlobe, her voice move under my skin.

I turned before I could think about what I was doing. Her hands snaked around my waist.
Why me?
I wondered. What did she see? I wondered if she saw herself buried, the way the librarian sees herself in the tiny girl. For me, sex is always a pathway to something else. I don't know when it is desire and when it is love, when it's saving someone and when it's not about someone else at all. But as I pressed my face into her neck, opening my mouth against her skin, I felt for once like I didn't need words to ground me.