Fucking Daphne (37 page)

 

 

New Orleans is where it actually feels like home. I am told I can never go home again, but damn, it feels like it sometimes, just for a few moments, an hour, one whole night until the sun comes up.

I can go home in the bathroom of a bar, with my tongue flicking at the nexus of desire resting on the edge of Daphne's boots, lapping at the fucking bottom of them, the tender pink meeting with her dirty day, my open mouth saying,
I give you everything and therefore expect to become nothing for just one moment.
Rock bottom under that boot, my cock fucking hard, and all the fags in that bar watching:
What the fuck are they doing?

Under the shadow of a van, my shirt rucked up around my shoulders and my jeans around my ankles, her giant fucking fist inside of me—no lube, just gravel and the stars overhead invisible, broken
glass digging into my ass and people passing on the sidewalk just a few feet away, the scrub brush dew-wet and New Orleans skanky. The specter of I-10 hung over us, and the thought in the back of my head was,
Oh lord, religion in the strangest places and we have a party to go to, and this city I've loved, this city I've loved!

The party, when we finally got there, tattooed a beat inside me, the skeleton drum corps banging away and everyone dancing, sweating that familiar New Orleans ooze. No matter what happens to me eventually, there will always be something in that time that I will think of as home.

There was no need to take a breath that night. There were angels carrying me, my toes hardly scraping the banged-up steps when we walked upstairs, arm in arm. How many words to describe:
I'm home with you right now; even if it goes away tomorrow, I'm
home
right now.
And at that party, fucking her in what used to be a bordello, out on a rickety balcony, the makeshift bar below, I imagined the hurricane that would one day take that city back to the sea. There was I, in the grave I'll one day go to, and
I do mind/I don't mind/I do mind/dyin'.

 

 

“I
'm bringing Daphne Gottlieb to campus.”

Will stares at me across the table at El Burro Rosa. I like the way my statement sounds out loud. I like its suggestive overtones—
bringing Daphne Gottlieb to campus—
so physical, like I am bringing her to orgasm, bringing her breakfast in bed. The associations are available to anyone sitting at the table, because I have made my announcement in response to Will's dismissal of my lesbian inclinations. I told him it was my girl year, that I was going gay. He looks sideways at Emily, the resident lesbian at our university, and shares a wry smile.

“Good luck,” he says.

I bristle. Like I can't find a girl to kiss in Myrtle Beach who isn't clad in the clichés of plaid flannel and buzz cuts. I say these stupid things—“It's my girl year”; “I'm bringing Daphne Gottlieb
to campus”; “I'm flying in cool lesbians from California on the university's dime to supplement my sex life”—because I can't say the truth. I can't say, “I'm in love with Emily.” I can't say, “My lesbian street cred is solid.” I can't say, “I already fucked her twice today.”

“Wait till you see Daphne,” I offer instead. “She has dreads.”

I am feeding the misconceptions about me, about what turns me on, about what draws me to someone. I know it, hate it, but I can't stop. I am throwing him off the scent, even as I long to break the silence surrounding my secret affair with Emily.

Who knows?
I think to myself.
Maybe I
will
have sex with Daphne.

Stranger things have happened.

I see her sitting in the waiting area by the luggage carousels. I run from the revolving doors into her arms like a long-separated lover.

“Daphne!”

Her hands are shaking like she needs a cigarette, but really it's an email jones. She immediately asks if I have Internet access. I don't, so she asks if we can stop by campus on the way.

“No problem.” I live to serve.

In my office, I straighten the stacks on my desk while Daphne giggles and moons at the computer screen. I put pieces of paper in my recycling bin under the desk, lean down beside her left arm while she scrolls with her right. I could brush her skin with my lips my breast my arm. I could do it lightly to see if she is into it. I could ask her straight out, “Do you want to fuck in my office?” But I already know
nothing is going to happen. The electricity of sexual attraction is not there for either of us. Daphne is in a relationship and, even though she is polyamorous, she allows for the romantic tunnel vision that comes at the beginning of a new connection.

That's cool. I get that.

I show her the buttons I made to promote her reading, with the “fuck yr heroes/i'm saving myself” tagline from her website merchandise. I wait quietly while she composes a response to her paramour. Then we go to my place, sit in my study, and talk books. “What are you reading? Oh?”

“And you?”

It could have happened.

We shopped for ponygirl porn together. We went to a strip club together. We ate pizza together. We thrift-shopped together. All the elements of an affair were there.

It could have happened.

It could have happened like this: Daphne tells me she is reading
Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir
by Lauren Slater. She holds the book open, and I watch her dark mouth shape the words so that they come out sounding pornographic.

“I think secretly each and every one of us longs to fall. . . . We know this, and that is why we have bad backs and pulled necks and throbbing pain between our shoulder blades. We want to go down, and it hurts to fight the force of gravity.”

I clutch my right shoulder blade with my left hand, feel the tenderness. She flips further into her copy of
Lying
, reading to me, “Our stories are seizures.” Her hands are still shaking, and I walk from my side of the study to hers, take the book from her hand, lay it
down on the table next to her chair. I close my hand around a chunk of her hair, pull it tight in my fist so that her chin rises toward the ceiling. With my other hand pinning her to the chair by the jaw, fit tightly in the V between my thumb and index finger, I . . .

I know what you're thinking:
This would never work.
Daphne is a top. Or, even if she identifies as “switch,” she would never bottom to such a straight-looking, bookish low femme as I.

The point is, I didn't even try. My erotic energy and psychological fixations lay elsewhere. I was using Daphne in a role secondary to that of my primary love interests. She supplied the material for various triangulations. I leveraged her in ways she doesn't even know about.

“Remember when we went out for drinks after the Daphne Gottlieb reading?”

Evan and I are driving to Atlanta together, telling each other about times when we noticed each other, long before we ever kissed. Where our paths crossed, what we were wearing, how the stars were aligned. Standard infatuation routine. What we all do at the beginning of a relationship.

“Oh my god, I had totally forgotten about that.” I really had completely forgotten that I had invited him and his girlfriend to join Daphne and me and a few other students for drinks. I like to put students and authors together in social settings. I feel like I am giving them something special, something they will remember in graduate school, like I remember getting Nikki Giovanni's autograph when
I was an undergrad. But it takes me by surprise to remember that I invited
this
student to
that
event six months ago.

“You told her you wanted to lick the tattoo on her chest.” He smiles at me. “That was hot.”

And it
was
hot. I don't know why I said it, and I hadn't thought about it since then. Maybe I said it to communicate my fangirl appreciation for her work, her kick-ass performance that afternoon, her San Francisco presence in our small Southern town.

Maybe I said it for Evan. Said I wanted to lick Daphne Gottlieb's tattoo for some reason that had nothing to do with Daphne Gottlieb. Something that had to do with my relationship with my students. My attraction to one of them. That would be an interesting way to explain myself, but I don't know if it's true.

More likely it was my chronic social anxiety, my tendency to blurt outlandish things at people to amp up a slow conversation, move things forward. I doubt I thought about Daphne or Evan at all in that moment, weaving my way through the dark woods of my discomfort as host, teacher, event planner. But my comment stayed with Evan, and now he was bringing it up months later, at just the right moment.

My memory of telling Daphne Gottlieb that I wanted to lick the tattoo on her chest is, for this reason, in my Evan memory file instead of in my Daphne memory file. It is a story about how a certain boy saw me in a certain moment, how it sort of distorted me, cast me in a better light than I really lived in, drawing out the fun and interesting elements of the conversation and dropping the anxious, self-loathing parts, or merging them in a generous way, so that the memory could become a fond one for both of us as we deliberately and inaccurately charted the meant-to-be-ness of our connection.

Of course, the Evan thing threw the lesbian thing into confusion.

Was I still a lesbian? my sister's girlfriend wanted to know.

Everyone knows sexual identity is a fiction. A story we tell ourselves about ourselves. All the different ways in which the contributors to
Fucking Daphne
see Daphne, experience Daphne, fuck Daphne, and are fucked by Daphne remind her readers of the postmodern dictum that our selves shift in relation to others', that we are different people when we are with different people. That there is no stable sexual self.