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It started up with us at the place we went for dinner after leaving his friend's opening at a gallery in Chelsea. I had strained to say something kind, and he had pointed out the flaws in the artist's logic; he criticized the concept as well as its execution, and was not wrong.
His voice, doing so was — sophisticated. It was a young man's voice; it was dignified and persuasive, and made me feel like an accomplice. Under the words, his voice seemed to say "You and I are looking at this together, and we see the same thing." When I could keep up with him, that was true.
We walked easily together; I leaned into him, my head almost to his shoulder.
He continued the analysis over dinner, and as we were finishing, he said, "What if one told every truth! Recorded the most evanescent reactions, every triviality, an unimpeded account of lovers' minute-by-minute feelings about the other person: Why didn't she order the braised beef the way I did? She raved about the sea bass, wrongly. I set my watch three minutes fast; she set it back."
Here he took us into the future — he reached across the table to stroke my hair. "And I'd say, 'What about her hair across the pillow? I had thought it would be finer.'"
His stance was not unlike the one I had proposed to him in my letter, that we observe the Wild West practice: We put our cards on the table.
We moved into what he called "the precincts of possibility," of anything-goes, of nothing undisclosed.
He wanted to hear "cock" and "cunt," but I was more likely to want to show him what the man and woman did to me all those years ago. He had told me to say we did it twelve times. Did what? What we did, well, wouldn't that be up to me? Didn't it have to?
I told him what they did to me the first time, and the second, and the third through the eighth and ninth — some nights I teased him: "That's it. I can't
He wanted to know when the husband was with both of us, whose name did he cry out when he came? |
remember the rest. Sorry. Only remember nine."
But he was persistent, encouraged me to continue, to say more, to remember, to get it right. And when I really could not remember what happened the tenth time, I made something up. I made up something I guessed would be what he wanted. For example, he wanted to know when the husband was with both of us at once, whose name did he cry out when he came? He asked for the tenderest time, the most violent time, the most nonchalant time, the classiest time, the first time and the last time, all twelve times.
"And everyone was the better for it?" he said with admiration. "You were each made to feel more yourselves?"
"Of ourselves," I said.
I was never more myself than when I was lying in this man's arms. But was I ever much of myself in them?
"Don't you ever get jealous?" I asked.
"Of course I do," he said. "I admit to ineluctable jealousy — comparisons, comparisons, real and imagined. And, as it happens, there exists in me — not pathologically, but all too humanly, I think — a species of delight arising from this knowledge. Darling," he said, conspiring, "are these conflicting sentiments and the mystery they point to not at the core of our alliance?"
I was never late.
By eight o'clock, he would already have ordered dinner for us. The sushi would be delivered in an hour, and left by the door.
Some nights we did not make it past the entryway before dinner arrived. Some nights he would close the door and then press me against it, or against a wall, and hold me there until we dropped to the polished wood floor together — we would not have said anything to each other. And we would stay there until we heard the brush of the delivery man outside.
When we finished dinner, he would put on music for us, something he had looped to play over and over again, a piece he had chosen or something he knew I liked, something we both liked to hear behind us.
I kissed him in a way I imagined Katherine might have done. |
Then he would be inside me again so quickly I was, each time, surprised.
Kissing my eyes, he said, "Did Phillip start like this?"
And that night my husband would be Phillip.
The first time I went to see him at the loft, I found something he didn't drink in the kitchen. I didn't like it either, and on subsequent visits I checked to see if the level of juice in the bottle was lower, if the juice-drinker had been to see him. This changed the night I told him about the twelve times. He asked me to come back the next night, and the next. Each time I looked, I saw that the level of juice was the same. That is when the place became a sanctuary for me, and which of us does not need sanctuary all the time?
I tried to remember what I had told him the time before. That Katherine — I was calling the wife "Katherine" — took me home after taking me to lunch at a grimy place in China Basin, a fishermen's supply shop that sold bait next to the coffee and doughnuts you could take out onto a dock and eat while oil tankers got overhauled.
"Did she want you to undress? Or did she want to undress you herself?" he wanted to know. He was twisting my hair as he spoke. He could not braid it with only one hand, so he twirled it around his fingers and let it spring loose again.
"Show me how he kissed you," he said.
I kissed him in a way I imagined Katherine might have done.
He said, "When you kiss me like that, my heart is so stolen."
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