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October 4, 2001
| FICTION |
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| After Sammy and May broke up, he was left with the whip. He thought of throwing it away but kept it on the windowsill in his bedroom. There were little grains of soot he noticed every time he looked at it, but he didn't dust the area. The shade he pulled down partly obscured the black crop, with its flap of leather at the end, shaped like the head of a cobra, but he knew it was there. The times he thought about himself and May, he saw an unwashed teapot left on a counter. When he lifted the lid, there was fuzzy mold pluming on sodden leaves and an odor that was acrid and sweet. When he went after her, he hadn't known a whip would come into his life, but in another way he had. He attended a performance of hers and approached her after the show, inviting her to a wine bar on Ludlow Street. He wasn't surprised she said yes. He had an effect on women that he'd cultivated, a way of seeming interested in them — almost enraptured — while giving them space. He was interested in May: in her life as an artist and the manner she had of not needing to please people. He taught literature to inner city college kids, packaging the Western canon in Marxist theory. He didn't think he belonged in academe, though he'd spent his life there.  Every day he worked out until pain: lifting weights until his muscles failed, rowing until his calluses bled, running stadium stairs until his mind went bleary and he felt like a speck on a windowsill. He could feel hope and sadness rise off May. He could feel her. It was uncomfortable. The bar they went to was dark, lit mostly by candles. They drank red wine and ate spicy rice crackers from a bowl. They talked about Shakespeare. She had been offered the part of Titania in Midsummer Night's Dream. "Do it," he said. "You see me falling in love with an ass"? "I see you playing someone not you." "I don't like Shakespeare." "Then, you're an idiot," he said, making it sound like, "You're adorable." He liked the way they were arguing. It reminded him of his brother, Jules, the only person he loved, now that his father was dead. When their family left Morocco and settled in upstate New York, they'd been the only ones around with dark skin. Jules hadn't been taunted, but Sammy had been treated horribly, and it had been a shock going to school, because at home, with his mother and aunts, he'd been adored. "I like Shakespeare's view of love," he said. "People are interchangeable. You love the one you're with. Sex happens in moonlight. It's random. Passion is the thing that can ruin you, the way it does Marc Antony." Sammy'd had scads of girlfriends. He'd lost count. "Power's what matters in Shakespeare." May sat up. "I don't think people are interchangeable. That's why we can keep doing the same things with each one, over and over, and it doesn't feel like repeating." He wondered about the things May did "over and over." He'd followed her career. In her monologues, she talked about sex casually, making teasing references to power games and something called "edge play." It struck him that it was similar to what he did to his body in sports, pushing it to extremes of pain and then pressing past to  an altered state. He liked pornography with Victorian settings — lace knickers, disobedient students, riding crops — but he'd never experimented. He thought he might like to with May — that her larky manner would ease him. He was uncertain how much of women he wanted to explore. He'd shot up tall in high school and started lifting weights. Girls looked at him. He was a reader, and he would find a way to talk to the smartest girls, provided they were pretty. May wasn't as attractive as the woman he was currently dating, Candace, a professor in the psychology department. May had a sense of style, though, and he found her sexy, not just her worldliness but her combination of containment and an air of having no secrets. He was willing to let go of Candace. It felt natural. May ate crackers and asked about his life. His answers were wry and self-deprecating. He could see her mind ticking away. She was like a journalist, and he liked being investigated. Raking fingers through her ragged bob, she asked about his history with women. He was honest about the revolving door, seeing it as something of an accomplishment. She cocked her head to the side and extended her hand, and as he slipped his broad palm into her small mitt, she said, "Nice knowing you. I won't be seeing you again." He laughed. "Why not?" "You're an arrested case." He gulped, a little stung, though it was enjoyable. "Can't we be friends?" The thought appealed to him. He would have liked her as a friend, someone to tell his tales of loving and leaving other women. He could imagine May browbeating him and slamming the door in his face. The women he dumped never did that. They left the door open, and he sent them Christmas cards and sometimes called them on Sunday nights. May narrowed her eyes. "Why would I want you as a friend if I don't want you as a lover?" "I'm good as a friend. It's as a boyfriend I stink." She seemed amused by his bragging. "I love people I don't know. People in developing countries with fascist governments supported by the CIA. Someone with a houseboat that burns down. The boat contains that person's earthly possessions. I get an email from a friend to send a check, and I'm right there." He leaned in close. He could smell hot pepper on her breath and smoky perfume on her neck, like tree bark. He covered her hand and pressed down. She didn't try to wriggle away, and he felt his chest expand. He felt suspended, the closest thing he knew to happiness. She slapped a ten-dollar bill on the bar and walked out the door. |
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Commentarium (14 Comments)
I thought this was a beautiful piece. Thank you.
this writing is sensitive and astute. . .it's like walking on the edge of a sharpend knife. Hot, dangerous, exciting and inticing emotion like blood. It made me weep, and remember. Thank You.
a beautiful beautiful piece. i had a bizarre run in with my ex today and reading this piece is making me want to cry--but i'm just too heavy inside. why do things happen? or mustn't we ask?
bravo! it is heartening to read a woman write of a man with affection and insight.
What I especially admire about Stone's piece is the way she handles the point of view. We're virtually inside this man's head, listening to everything he thinks he knows about himself. And all the while we're aware that he doesn't know himself at all. Thus, what appears to be a terse story about a lost love is actually a subtle yet complex exploration of the risks one takes in choosing not to know the self.
fabulous! erotic!
Hey i liked it. I don't relish the thought of a whip against my tender flesh, but this was HOT! When's the next chapter?
Funny, sad, sexy and well-crafted, as always. I liked being inside Sam's confusion and vulnerability, and the sense of immediacy about the story. More Sam and May, or Sam or May, please!
Vintage Stone. Smooth, rutted, polished, hard, soft. As always, she turns you left just when you think you know where you're going and leaves you breathless and defenseless.
I am a fan of S&M, I enjoyed your piece of work. it is different to read something from a male point of view. I like to write, but i am a woman. I appreciate your view. Thank you for writing this piece of art.
I was at once saddened and overjoyed at the realizations brought to the surface in "Souvenir." The notion of how we all carry past relationships with us through new ones is particularly poignant--and the notion that others affect us more than we may realize rings quite clearly. The author's use of the S&M vehicle brings that notion of mentally reliving past relationships to some sort of a physical sensation that evokes many of my own past loves.
Wonderfully fluid writing; simultaneously gentle and powerful.
Ah Laurie,
Reading your story reminds me of meeting you years ago at a book party. (Not yours.) You were still working for the Voice. I was getting ready for the reading of my play that would eventually gain me a seat at the big table. We spoke. Spoke about art, artists, whatever. The unsaid was the thing thou. It was about punishment. Deserved, anticipated. I didnt follow you down. I have often thought what it would have been like if I had. These stories offer a taste.
All I could think about while reading was an ox of a boyfriend I had in college, a great big summer construction worker with a list of women stringing behind him like a tail. And intelligence! He was in love with the human mind- Dostoevsky and Donne and Dickens, and yet could not apply the truths that he found in their writing to his life. He was tortured by his own intellect and his inability to conquer his own blind passion. Of course he cheated on me, and like magic, I knew it, appearing at his house maybe an hour later (after screaming in my room) and telling him I knew and that I hated him. Then, stricken in that dangerous female way by his sorrow and his large, tan hands, I pulled him on top of me.
I still pity his inability to live his life the way he truly thought it should be lived.
I really enjoyed reading "Souvenir". There is something distinctly unsexy about the sexiness - something tired and ancient about the man telling the story. I adore the portion about May weeping: "She had only cried that time in the kitchen, and it had been a torrent. He'd marveled at her ability to show herself that way, wondering how it was possible not to die from such exposure." I have wondered that myself.
Now you say something