Hungry for the World (18 page)

It is this story that I sometimes believe I cannot speak, the darkest moments of my passage. Even now I cloak the truth
of it in vagaries. What is it I mean to tell? How can I define what it is that I longed for, what emotion directed me?

If I tear through the curtain of words, I see
love
, so easily, rend first, then
need, curiosity, desire, lust
. The story is about all these things and none of them—it is about what these words become when they are no longer words but currency on the tongue.

It is not simply the sex that shamed me. I understand how the wondrous exploration of sensual delight can be twisted into something disgraceful, so that even a chaste woman in her marriage bed will cringe in mortification at her body’s sanctified quickening. All the warnings, the broadcast of admonitions concerning carnal pleasure, the insistence on separation of body and soul, the inherent weakness of the clay vessel forever compromising the ethereal spirit—even now I struggle to free myself of the spectral jury, sitting in judgment of my pleasure.

But this is not about sex. It is about confusion bred into fear; it is about the tyranny built on that fear—controlling the body, the mind, the soul of another. It is about being raised to believe that women want to be, must be, dominated. It is about rejecting those beliefs and still being unable to escape them—so wide a river, so many currents to swim through.

I thought I was near the surface when I met David Jenkins. No more father, no more church, no more concerns about what others might think. David was my guide into the new world; by the time I realized I was lost, the last swell of land had fallen away from beneath my feet.

What I mean to say is this: there are rooms in which a girl
with hair the color of caramel licks the thighs of her lover’s lover. Rooms full of people who will bind one another and bite small moons into flesh, and they will do this not out of love or lust but out of a need to reduce by half the pain they themselves are feeling, and to override by half the pain the other is feeling, and it will never be enough. There is a room with a bed on which two people will make a simple love and the one will go home and gag and purge himself with emetics and thrash himself and spend in the lovely rage of his guilt.

And that other: she may sleep and dream; she may wake up charmed. She may crawl thirst-stricken from that bed to the bed of another, believing, even then, that she will not survive the desert of her journey.

T
HERE WERE THOSE WHO WOULD TRY
to save me. John came for me once, walked through the door of David’s apartment, took the stairs two at a time, ignoring the revelers and their beery questions. I was in David’s bed, drunk and sick on tequila, perhaps sedated by the Quaaludes he’d threatened to slip into my drinks. I’d curled myself tight beneath the sheets, the loud music and laughter reaching me in waves as I drifted in and out of sleep.

I recognized John’s touch, the clean smell of him. He was stroking my hair, calling my name. “I’m getting you out of here,” he said, and he pulled the sheet from the bed, wrapping it around me and lifting me to his chest. I felt like I was floating, tethered to his arms by thin bits of cloth as we descended the stairs into the heat and noise, the sweet smoke, the charged air.

The laughter quieted; only the music, the drum and shrill guitar, John’s voice, then David’s. I remember wondering if David would let me go, if he would let John take me. Everyone in that room was afraid of John, his size and the fierceness with which he stared them down, dared them to stand in his way. But something in me welled up then, some impulse to fight my own fight, hold my own ground. I tried to say it strongly, but it came out as a whisper: “Take me back upstairs, John. Please don’t do this to me.”

What is it like to hold a woman in your arms, the whole of her, to move with her easily from one place to the next, while the room of people watches to see you relinquish your possession? Because John did, he did what I begged him to do. He turned and moved back up the stairs slowly, and David followed, waiting as John laid me gently down and covered me again.

What words then passed between them I don’t remember. Sleep was there, and I let its current take me, away from the final sadness on John’s face, away from his lips on mine.

T
HERE IS ANOTHER BOY
, whose lover I was for an hour, no more. He is the one whose face I will remember, whose eyes will bring me back into myself for a single, excruciating moment, while the party roars on and David waits patiently in the next room. He is the one who has been chosen and sent to me, whom I must receive. He comes to where I sit on the cedar bench of the sauna, hesitates when the door behind him closes. He kneels before me, then rests his head in the cleft of my hands, the fingered lap I have made for him.

Long, blond hair falls across his bare shoulders. His eyes
are a delicate blue. He is fair, fine-boned, so fragile as I hold him and wait. He trembles and I lift his chin. I see how it is with him. He is crying. He thinks he must love me.

He is afraid for me. Or of me. How can I soothe him? He is older than I, perhaps twenty-three. I touch his forehead, let my hands slide beneath his arms, pull him toward me. He comes to me easily, he is a child, and I take him and hold him and rock him there, the two of us alone in the mist of the rocks that shush and whisper.

This will be our secret, this moment of nothing. It is our secret and David must not know, for this is an intimacy he cannot give or receive and is a betrayal I must not risk. This is injury, infidelity, treason. Yet, in this other one’s eyes, I have seen myself, the pity and fear, the tender regard, the power I possess and contain.

I hold to him until the heat is too little or too much, until we must rise together and go from that room and say to the man who waits, “We are done.”

A
WARM AFTERNOON IN
S
EATTLE, JUST
outside Pike Place Market, where David and I had gone for a lunch of smoked salmon. We might have been any other couple walking the wharf that day, smiling in the coastal sun, feeding the seagulls our scraps. This was the part of Seattle I loved, the city I’d romanticized as a girl while watching
Here Come the Brides
on my grandmother’s TV, singing along with the theme song: “The bluest skies you’ve ever seen in Seattle.…” I hummed the words as David and I stopped at the import shops, where I bought bamboo baskets and sandalwood incense, willing myself to forget that we had just come from First Avenue and its sex shops, whose wares David preferred over the cheap knickknacks I adored.

On our way back to the parking lot, in an open, concrete stairway, we came upon a large man beating a hooker; the bitch, he shouted to the gawking crowd, owed him money.

We stood and watched with everyone else as the pimp raised his fists again and again, as the girl slumped against the metal banister, slid down the concrete wall, blood on her face, blood in her hands. I started toward them, thinking I could stop the man from hitting, thinking I could somehow save her.

“Don’t,” David said, and grabbed my arm.

“Why doesn’t someone do something?” I pulled away, saw the pimp wipe his fist in the handkerchief he’d taken from his pocket. People turned their heads, witness to nothing.

“That’s none of our business,” David said. He began walking. I looked at the woman, who lay crying on the landing between stairs. People stepped carefully around her.

“The main thing you’ve got to remember,” David said as we drove back toward the motel, “is that she was a whore. She wasn’t worth it.”

I stared out the window as we passed the King Dome, the Space Needle, the museum with its long lines—thousands waiting to see the sarcophagus of King Tut. It was late, and we needed to pick up our load and head toward home. I was sick with what I had witnessed—both the violence and David’s unwillingness to intervene. I was beginning to understand how carefully David weighed his risks—a skill he’d honed in the jungles of Vietnam. He had survived, come back alive after two tours of duty, the first one because he’d been drafted and forced to go, the second because he had lived through the first and was now good at this game of war. What home offered him was minimum wage and laws he would rather not keep. In ’Nam he had all the drugs he could eat, and the women there did not know the word for love.

“TELL ME WHAT IT WAS LIKE,”
I asked David. “Tell me about Vietnam.” I lay in the dark with my head on his shoulder, listening as he spoke of the long bunkered nights of shelling, how the men lined up cigarette butts, one after another balanced on end, knowing that when they tipped from
the mortars’ concussion it was time to
bug out
. He spoke of the men and the huts they called hooches, of the young, local girls they shared, who did their laundry, swept the dirt clean of straw and leaves, gave the soldiers whatever sex they wanted for a few bucks a month. He remembered their small mouths, their smooth, hairless bodies.

“Was there one who was special?” I asked.

“That wouldn’t work,” David said. “Some would fuck you, then mine the dumps.”

“Then what?”

David let out a slow breath, the smoke rising from his mouth, a dry mist in the light from the street. I waited for his answer but heard only the beat of his heart slowing toward sleep.

T
HE MORE TIME
I
SPENT
with David, the less anything else seemed to matter. What women friends I had left were not friends but partners, caught up in the orbit of David’s pull. We convened at the bars to drink, we gathered in the bathrooms to scrape together our miniature windrows of cocaine, line our numbing lips with ochre and mahogany, brush our cheekbones to a deeper shade of rose. We were in the business of feeling good, looking good, making of the night something sharp, something brilliant, before the music ended.

Even those occasional afternoons I spent with my grandmother, sheltered by her venetian blinds and ruffled curtains, the walls collaged with family photographs, were not enough to pull me back from the edge. Nan would lie on her couch, surrounded by the details of her life: iced tea, tissue,
lotion, nail file, past issues of
Reader’s Digest
, a fluted bowl of hard candies. Always at hand was the small box with its cards of various colors, each citing a biblical verse. As I child, I had loved the morning ritual of closing my eyes, running my fingers across the cards’ stacked ridge, choosing the one piece of Scripture that would guide my day.

Those few hours spent with my grandmother were made fragile by the absence of what had once held between us—the easy habits of cleaning, the endless games of checkers, during which she would fall asleep until I jostled her into her next move. Now we watched television, which demanded nothing of us except attention to its blue-lit box.
Dialing for Dollars, The Price Is Right, Let’s Make a Deal, Jeopardy!:
we encouraged the hesitant, shouted answers at the dumb, berated those who would not take the chance. When I moved to leave, she would beckon me for a kiss, and I would smell the lavender powder, the cologne she touched to her throat each morning, regardless of who might come by. I’d step out into the dull sound of the city, my pockets full of licorice drops and strawberry taffy, and feel like a traitor, a voyeur, a spy, inhabiting one world and stealing from another.

It did not matter which way I drove when I left my grandmother, what structure of wood I chose to call my own. I had built for myself a house without windows. I wanted no one to look in, and I no longer remembered what reason I might have for looking out.

“REMEMBER TO LOCK YOUR DOORS,”
my mother said. “Keep your curtains closed.”

“I will.”

“There’s a lot of meanness in the world.”

I listened, only half hearing the direness of her warnings—I had heard them so many times before.

When I had told her about David, I’d said only that he was a truck driver, that he made good money. When I told her his age, she had made a small noise in the back of her throat. “He’s nearly as old as I am, Kim.”

I did not tell her that his age was the least of it. There was, in fact, little that I
could
tell her, and into my silence she must have read shame. Every word I uttered seemed a lie.

Still, I sensed some relief on her part: at least I was with one man, not the one she would have chosen for me, but someone I might eventually marry and leave my life of sin, someone who could shelter me from the evil lurking outside—a man to protect me from other men.

I said good-bye and hung up the phone. The sudden stillness sucked my breath away. David was in Seattle, and though he seldom called, I hoped that he might think of me, dial my number from the bar or motel. Sometimes he phoned from the strip joints, and I would hear the music and shouts, the voice of a woman urging him away.

I moved to the couch, covered myself with the colorful afghan my mother had knitted, its squares of blue and brown domestic and contained. The television’s picture skittered and jumped, and I closed my eyes, grateful for the voices filling the room.