 
|
 |
I'd like to talk to you about Bill Clinton. There's a picture of him in a People Magazine
from about seven years ago: he was on the campaign trail with his saucy wife, his running mate Al,
and Al's Aryan centerfold Tipper Gore. This photo catches them, with the tyranny of all spontaneous
photos, in a misleading yet deeply revealing moment of giddiness. On the left side of the photo sit
Hillary and Bill on a bench, side by side. Hilly is laughing her head off, almost literally; the
width of her face, already endless, is too narrow for her smile. Sitting across from them on the
camper bus are Al, with a grin on his face that looks like a wince, as if lizards were biting his
buttocks, and Tipper in his lap, her head thrown back with a schoolgirl's abandon. Her dress, in all
this hilarity, has risen perilously up on her ample thighs, and, had the light been better, her
womanhood would have belonged to all of us. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton is not laughing; it isn't funny.
At all. His eyes are effulgent, they have the focus of a whole campaign and all its magnificent
pretensions, a greed and hunger, a whole constellation of scam and idealism. The weight of his
aching testicles is in his eyes, the white heat of desire, and they are fixed on Tipper's body. I'm
telling you, ladies and gentlemen: He wants her.
The beauty of this man is, he wants all of us. He'll do it with anyone. And that means me. And he takes sex very seriously. Just like me. Monica Lewinsky's Jewish. Me too! He's a sex addict. I've heard of that. My passion for Bill Clinton is as old as his national public life. Clearly, the fact that we haven't come together is just because I haven't been in the right place at the right time. Here's a man who'll do it with anyone; I just can't get invited to the right parties. I took that picture, cut out Tipper's face, put in my own, and wept. At night, none of this matters. I am the Everywoman that Clinton wants. I am her. Let me tell you how our encounter goes. And why. It's a scenario, complete in every episode. It's the only newspaper that brings out the same issue every day and still reads like a dream and is full of surprises. Let me tell you how it goes. It begins without beginning. Everything does. I'm nineteen. I'm in that flush and burst of sexual life, which also begins without beginning. I can barely walk, though I walk quickly and with grace; I am in love with myself, with my own form and insinuation; when I look down at my own breasts, my 
blood rushes inside to fill them to bursting and my mind rushes outside to objectify and ache for
them: I am paralyzed with the twin forces, being and desiring; the cups of my lace bra are like a
lover's hands, and the ecstasy caused by their slightly painful touch on my nipples could cause a
plane to crash. I am drowning in the beauty of my own body. Often I have to duck into a bathroom or
an alleyway to release these warring forces, to render them briefly irrelevant; one touch and I
explode utterly, and then pull down my dress and walk away from the one-night stand with this woman
I am and am in love with.
I've lived in Maryland, been raised there, and now, between my sophomore and junior years at whatever that prestigious college is down there, I've landed a White House internship of some sort. I've landed it because I have big tits, and I feel that's justice. I'm a political science major with a minor in Women's Studies. Very minor. And now, after a few interviews in tight shirts and a couple of security questions regarding my arrest record, I'm in. I get my first glimpse of him the very first day, after lunch. No one's looking into my eyes, and I know why; I've already met senators, secretaries, reporters, security personnel, and they all look eighteen inches below my eyes when shaking my hand, but with him, it's immediate, and it's full eye contact. I'm in one of the executive antechambers, being shown an elaborate computer filing system by a plain woman in a skirt and blazer, when all of a sudden I feel a jolt of energy, like a quick change of weather by the shore, a sudden wind and sound and voltage. I look up, and I see he's come in the room, followed and surrounded by a dozen or so men, all talking urgently; they remind me of a swarm of bees suddenly disturbed in a hive. His back is to me, his head is turned, and I catch his profile; then, he senses it. He senses snatch. He's got eyes all over his body, he turns full-on towards me, and gives it to me right in the eyes. Our eyes lock; it makes a sound, a mechanical sound, a loud click, it's audible, I know it. He knows it too, we both quickly look around to see if anyone's heard it. It's always like that; when we fall into carnal love, we worry not that we'll be seen, but that we'll be heard. Vision doesn't tell the lover half enough. It's sound in love, pure music. The way someone breathes, the way they murmur, the way they come. Saxophone, he plays the saxophone, Jesus Christ. We hold eyes that way for what seems like years, and then our eyes fall 
onto each other, hungry. He bursts out laughing at something one of the wonks has said, and his eyes
twinkle, they have left my eyes and are roving the landscape of me. They don't get far; he's
smiling, still talking, he's staring at my breasts, adorned as they are by the lovely feminine
hieroglyph my collarbones make above them. His hands twitch, in his mind he's touching me already. I
am frozen, suspended; the file woman is still talking to me, I can't hear her, I'm in a prison of
adrenaline, estrogen, panic.
His hands. I fall upon his hands. I remember reading once that the hands and heart of a developing fetus are formed at exactly the same instant. I have never seen anything so beautiful, so annunciatory, so articulate, so rapacious as his hands. They're huge, just immense. He uses them the way a painter uses color. They're exquisitely hewn, they make me wonder where they've been, they make me want to smell them. I've never seen anything so ravishing. I want his fingers under my dress. I know that he could put his two hands all the way around my waist and touch his own fingers; I know that he will. He's a terror. I'm completely in love with him. A moment later, he's gone. The next ten days are a blur of accidents and coincidences. We happen to run into each other in the hall, he accidentally brushes my arm with the small of his back. He suddenly has endless business in the dull green, windowless room I've been assigned. And then one day, it's over. No more accidents. I'm typing one day, I've got classified documents on my desk concerning the adultery of an army general and the homosexuality of one of his commanding officers, and I'm opening a file, I'm typing in commands, when there before me, there before my downcast visage, I see the hand, the left hand. I can't tell you of its beauty any better: it makes a mockery of the shape of Michigan, it redefines desire, it renders the shovel nugatory. The left hand, laid down on my desk like a gauntlet. I don't look up. I can't; there's no point, no possibility. I don't know how much time passes in this explosive stillness; I pick the hand up and bring it to my lips. Then I move it far enough away to see it again. It's lying in my two hands, obscuring them completely; I look like an amputee. I consider this hand. On the fourth finger is a huge gold wedding band, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Reaching up with my trembling right hand, I turn the ring slowly on the massive finger, once, twice, three times, I can count the rotations it makes by the reappearance again and 
again of a scratch on the band that looks like teethmarks, like someone tried to bite it off. I pick
the hand up again, it's weightless this time; I bring it to my lips again. Holding it by the ring, I
slip the fourth finger all the way into my mouth, my eyes fall shut and can't open; I'm biting it,
I'm trying to cause pain, trying to cause the pain I feel, I feel the full length of it, I slide it
between my gum and my upper lip, I bite it hard; he winces, moans. I hear the Commander of the Free
World moaning.
He pulls me to my feet. Standing thus before him, I have the feeling of having stood before him a thousand times already. I have no strength; he catches me in his arms. He puts his hands around my waist, and his fingers touch. No one's saying anything, doing anything. We're in the eyes again, we've disappeared a little bit into each other's eyes. And then he kisses me. He knows how to do it, it's as if he knows how to do it but doesn't have time, his lips are chapped and his teeth seem to be placed in front instead of behind them. I can taste my own blood, and I can't hear anything anymore, it's because his starched white shirt sleeve is wrapped around my head, all I hear is the slow movement of this opulent linen hissing. The kiss is brief, unsatisfying. He pushes me backwards, guiding my body, I fall backwards onto my desk, my head is resting on my computer keyboard, which miraculously makes a perfect pillow. He's got my skirt up, my panties down. His lips are on the soft swollen skin of my belly, and that hand with the ring, the ring finger itself, is inside me, reshaping my future. Suddenly he pulls me upright, and with a dazzling continuity, places my hand on his manhood while 
reaching under my shirt simultaneously, unhooking my front-fastened brassiere with a fast circular
flick of thumb and forefinger, and sampling the pendulous bait for good and ever. As for his
manhood, well . . . it defies the usual calculus. Of course, size is both a literal and a figurative
thing. It's clear to me right then and there that I'll focus figuratively. And figuratively, he's
ENORMOUS. Oddly cool, full of pulse. Then he picks me up and carries me to the door. The click
sounds like a gunshot. He takes my nipples between his thumb and forefinger, causing me shock, and
he growls: Fuck me. Fuck me. We're on the floor. He's taken it out of his pants, and it's against my
pubic bone, between my breasts, it flickers past my lips, and now it's between my legs, and now it's
breaching my boundary, small but endless, I'm dreaming, I must be dreaming, his teeth are around my
nipple, he's all the way inside me, he's so beautiful, like Achilles he's beautiful, he's murmuring
to me, he's way above me, he's all the way inside me, my cervix is aching from the thrust of him,
his heels are burning the smooth green carpet, and finally I lose vision, I think I'm screaming but
it turns out I've been silent, contracting and expanding around him, my life shattered, my lipstick
still in place, as he uses me for the fullest expression of the most creative aspect of his life as
a man.
Afterwards he's laughing, as if he's finally united with the others in the bus picture in a moment of youthful and sexual mirth. He calls me. Late that week. I know he's in love with me, 
that I have achieved a temporary eternity
in his thoughts, in his groin. I am a slave to my body, to the feelings it inspires in men, in him.
He calls me, and that is all I am. Someone says, "The President would like to speak to you," and I'm
thinking: Duh. And I'm thinking, I want to feel you again, all the way inside me and I'm thinking,
Never, I'm thinking, Never, I'm thinking, I own you completely, I'm thinking, My life is nothing but
cunt and so is yours, how doomed we are, how we've died together, and then I hear his voice. I hate
his voice and I need it. It's breathy, urgent; it's the voice of an addict talking to a dealer, it's
passionate, it's on the verge of hallucination. And all he's said is my name. He says it, he's
looking for me, like a pair of hands, he's seeking me like a blind man reading a bomb warning in
Braille, seeking me, he says my name. I say nothing, I'm seeing the ocean for some reason, he says
my name again. He keeps saying it. He doubts I'm there, and then he says my name again, sensing the
worst, that I am there, and I am, and I'm descending. I will never answer. I begin hanging up, and
it takes an hour, it goes out like a tide in sunset. He's saying my name, and I let the receiver
come to my lips and I stick my tongue in it, and it tastes salty, and then I bring it down to my
breasts and put the speaking end on my left nipple and the listening end on my right, and I feel
like I'm going to come, right then, but I withhold. He's saying my name, in anguish, he's saying it
again and again and I can't hear it, just feel the vibrations of it, now on my lower back, my
stomach, and now it's between my legs, and inside me, and I'm coming, the best come, the final
orgasm I'm to have over him, stimulated by his belittled voice and my own name; he's speaking to my
womb, to the flagella and filth and life and smell of me, and for once he doesn't know it, he
doesn't even know where his lips are, he doesn't know what he's got, and then, after all that time
and feeling, I hang up on him, quietly, like a whisper, like a deep kiss.
Now good for you: you've noticed he's a hypocrite, a liar, a trivial thinker. You feel betrayed after watching him play saxophone blues during his inaugural celebration and then allowing his government to slash arts funding to the bone. You've surmised that he falsified his entire approach to government; you've fumed that he promised an end to military homophobia and gave us Don't Ask, Don't Tell; that he criticized George Bush for failing human rights advocates in China and then walked smiling into Tiananmen Square to be photographed next to a Chinese car; you're shattered that he promised health care for all Americans and has left people dying, without health care, of diseases that could have been cured with the $40 million dollars we've spent to investigate who sucked his dick and in what order. But you know what? That's the truth of the matter, and truth is not what sells. In America, it's sex that sells, and he is an American; he is America, O God, is he ever. And honestly, secretly, after midnight, forever forward, so am I. |
