61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Nerve's videogame blog: Golden Axe dresses down to its skivvies. Plus: Spore takes on evolution, reaches a stalemate, and takes evolution out for a beer.
Dating Confessions by You "There is nothing hotter than a nice, shy guy. Because it's so damn hot to see what he's like underneath it all."
Scanner by Emily Farris Today on Nerve's culture blog: The top five rumors we'd like to start about Sarah Palin, but won't.
PERSONAL ESSAYS
posted 8/6/1998
She was Southern -- at heart more Southern than I. She belonged in the
Virginia Tidewater, loved the Civil War Museum and Confederate Historical
Society near Manassas, and harbored I think a secret lust for a
Confederate soldier who gazed at her from a daguerrotype by the front
door.
Brown legs, brown navel, black hair that glittered, from her mother she'd
inherited a hint of the once-fashionable-in-Richmond mouth like a bow.
Her flavors were rich and she sent me letters back when she visited her
daddy's people in the Philippines. Manila: I'm sure you're familiar
with that drowned-star effect of cities seen from a plane at
night.
Sure. I was familiar with it. Of course.
It's how I imagine the bottom of the ocean looks.
I saw her first through the eyes of her baby sister, who
thought of us as gifts for one another. An object of desire before I ever
set eyes on her.
"She's a poet."
"She's beautiful."
"She works in Manhattan."
"She's different."
There's a black and white picture of her, perched on a boulder
beside the Hudson in a raw-spring slant of sunlight, the gunmetal river
before her while she reclines on her elbows -- the legs, the face, the
throat accustomed to Virginia sun. Watch her divert that tired old water
and all its plangent banana peels.
She was a poet, the kind from whom you'd like to hear more.
When I met her, she was a beautiful child. That mouth -- did I
mention very like a bow, until she bared her teeth?
She lived in New York, wrote, drank vodka, ate one apple a day,
not much more, made her place in that impossible city. To have her was to
have a world I'd never comprehended, growing up in Arkansas, one I'd only
glimpsed, maybe, on certain pages of Melville, Fitzgerald, Salinger:
language, grace, geography. To have the sun, wind, and water of a
hemisphere I'd
never seen, along with the glib geometries of New York, that old, cold,
solid, and stone-butressed place.
Her legs . . . and an A-line skirt that twitched when she walked.
There were other lovers in the picture. One of them, a South
African, went around telling people she was a ballet dancer, and the only
reason I didn't hunt him down and kill him was that he lied. She didn't
dance. She just looked like it to him, the pathetic fucker.
He wrote her a letter. She called me on the phone, where I abided
down in Charlottesville among the deep green magnolia trees. She said,
"I've just received a letter that was more like bleeding than any letter
I've ever received."
She gave the impression she'd dance like Maria Tallchief. Her
legs, when she walked. Her legs, when she used to wrap them around that
poor South African son of a bitch's back, before she moved on to me.
She'd given it to the sorry bastard bad enough without my pitching
in.
* * *
Back when you were twenty-three, trading tales of pussy over Old
Milwaukee, do you remember the occasional young man who'd, sadly, already
gotten hitched, the one who hung over your shoulder breathing a little too
hard?
You'd throw out something like:
"She told me, 'Let's go play in the church basement, they leave it
unlocked,' and we went down there, I thought maybe I'd set her ass down on
a couple sheets of green construction paper in the Sunday
School room and see if I could get some snaps undone, but goddam, she
meant it when she said play, and she had my cock down her throat
to
the bone inside of thirty seconds and she swallowed so much I thought
she'd drown, and my fucking feet went numb and I couldn't even walk out of
there for ten minutes. And her daddy sitting upstairs writing the sermon
for tomorrow morning . . . "
And then this poor son of a bitch who's married hanging over your
shoulder says, "Well, damned if I didn't get some good sex last night
myself."
Everybody turns to listen.
"With my wife. Yes, sir. All night long. Good. I'm not
kidding."
Because you really just don't ever want to put the words "my
wife" in the same story with "ass" or "cock" or "fuck."
* * *
We ate each other alive, unmarried. For several years. To a poet's eye,
which was her eye, I suppose Arkansas can look alluring, too, where we
all stomp around in black boots with underslung heels, ride motorcycles
in our t-shirts in any weather, and are rarely shorter than six feet two.
I've never quite grasped what she's up to, never got my mind
around the apocalyptic tractor-beam of desire she focused on
the odd Civil War soldier, the short-haired Sarah Lawrence "girlfriend,"
the NBA
star, her sister, the desert mountain, me, while she devoured all of us.
I've just watched her, aware always of how hungry she is.
I wrote a story in which she played the part of a witch, the good
kind, more or less, who kept this big friendly guy salted away in her
apartment while she practiced spells on the people who passed by outside
her window. Sent it to the New Yorker. Got it back in seven
weeks.
I lay beside her for years while she stared upwards into two a.m.,
three a.m., four a.m., dawn, rarely sleeping, ravenous, sometimes for me,
sometimes for other things, which circled above the bed grinning back at
her. Then we got married, and I lay beside her still.
You desire what is hidden, what is mysterious, what isn't you.
You desire what you don't already have.
What is it that hovers in the air above my bed in the dark of two
a.m.?
You desire what's hidden inside that one, there: her. Or her.
Or him. My guess is, you desire these hidden things much more than you
desire a cunt or a cock.
During a thousand nights of staring into the dark, both of us
alone in the bed together, I've fallen in love with her too far ever to
extricate myself.
* * *
From time to time, an unmarried friend, as he contemplates taking
the plunge, will sit me down. Buy me breakfast. Ask:
"What's it like?"
"I'm not a fan of eggs, but I'd still say huevos rancheros is the
way to go at breakfast."
He'll say, "No -- knowing you're gonna have to sleep with the same woman
the rest of your life? What's that like? Can you do it? Can I
do it? Is it
what you want? Is that what I want? Should I get married?"
"Hell, I don't know. Is it possible to come to the end of desire?
People do. Stop desiring one another. And if those people are married, I
guess they're shit out of luck."
* * *
Who's goddam business is it if I want to drink a bottle of
moderately-priced Cabernet, or even an expensive one, out of my wife's
navel? If, from time to time I let a trickle slip away . . .
* * *
I lie beside her in bed still. She's gone -- preoccupied with her
writing, or her work, or her South Sea heritage, or that Confederate
soldier, or even that goddamned South African, for all she's told me, and
she won't be back, I know, for a while. A week? Two weeks?
I can remember from bachelor days that there's a loneliness to
sleeping alone. But that loneliness is the pale eighty-nine pound
asthmatic third cousin to the loneliness of sleeping alone in bed with
the person you love, and will love, for the rest of your life,
awaiting her return.
When she'll re-inhabit her brown skin, brown navel, black hair, legs,
hands and mouth and say where she's been, or, better, leave me
to guess as I tip her up and disappear into it, whatever it is she's
feeling wild for.
Society near Manassas, and harbored I think a secret lust for a
Confederate soldier who gazed at her from a daguerrotype by the front
door.
a couple sheets of green construction paper in the Sunday
School room and see if I could get some snaps undone, but goddam, she
meant it when she said play, and she had my cock down her throat
to
the bone inside of thirty seconds and she swallowed so much I thought
she'd drown, and my fucking feet went numb and I couldn't even walk out of
there for ten minutes. And her daddy sitting upstairs writing the sermon
for tomorrow morning . . . "
all stomp around in black boots with underslung heels, ride motorcycles
in our t-shirts in any weather, and are rarely shorter than six feet two.
