I can see the humor: "I'm going to take all your husband's attention and hurt your scalp." I could tell a joke like that. But all the party-goers were that way. 
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March 22, 2001
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Under the Table
March 22, 2001
"I felt Liz's leg at breakfast," Dave said, and I became very still. We were in our living room doing a post-party wrap-up, and it was a noisy, happy affair like gossip always is — right up until this. I probably turned white or purple or maybe yellow.
"At breakfast," I said finally.
Dave nodded. He looked scared. "I thought you'd be proud of me."
"You really can't blame him," said Ari, who had no reason to look scared, but he did. "These open relationships are always confusing."
"Oh, I can blame him," I said. "I can blame him for interpreting, 'My feelings are hurt, I changed my mind, stop pursuing her' as, 'Grope her thigh at breakfast.'"
"You have all these rules, Leese," Dave said, stronger now with Ari on his side, "and you think they make sense, but they make no sense at all. And they change all the time."
"That one's obvious though, Dave," Rachel weighed in. "Groping thighs in broad daylight while your wife chews on an omelet is just plain revolting."
Dave decided to go to the bathroom, his head hung low, and Ari revealed in a whisper that he'd gotten an erection over our squabble — he liked how Dave's voice shook and dragged when he told me the bad thing he'd done.
"Aw, baby, I was just trying to do what you wanted. I didn't know," Dave said when I followed him into the bathroom, and then he told me how pretty I am. A former choirboy, Dave mistakes himself for a mercenary or maybe that insane guy that Dracula hypnotized — he awaits commands. "He's so blank," is how Ari put it, reverently. Dave lurks in the basement and no matter what he does when he's above ground, he claims he thought that was what I wanted. He always gets it wrong, and then I start crying and he gets a hard-on. He had one in the bathroom, and I suddenly got the thought that maybe he's not so blank after all. Maybe he arranges these things, he even arranges me to think I'm arranging, so that he can keep doing wrong things and I'll keep crying and he can have a perpetual hard-on. I'm probably just paranoid, but then why is it that when I told Dave he could do something with Liz, he didn't, and when I told him he couldn't, that's when he did?
I know things get confusing when they're sexy — and I know I encourage states of confusion (I'd left the bathroom door ajar when I went in there to hiss at Dave because I thought Ari would like it). Liz does the same thing — she gets people and motives and desires they don't even know they have all tangled up in each other. She boasted to me that she'd pulled my hair at the party — she told me how I'd spun around and there were so many people crowded on the stairs that I didn't know who'd done it.
My step-grandpa was a bad man with a great boat. He'd take me and my mom out on the boat, and I could sleep inside the movement, unattached to the land, unattached to the possibility of accomplishing something. That's how I felt at the party. In the middle of a sea of schemers, what could I do? I was just happy and oblivious. Apparently, Grant was at third base with someone named Moonchild while I yapped away to him through a beaded curtain, unaware. And at breakfast, I didn't note that I hadn't seen Dave's right hand above the table for twenty minutes.
Our friends pity Dave — they think he's a good-natured victim of my whims. Even Rachel defends him: "You're testing Dave over and over, but there's no way for him to win." I have no right to be jealous, they tell me, as if once you open the door in a relationship, you should expect your partner to jump out the window instead, and knock over your things on the sill. Admittedly, one (long) thigh-grope and two meals shared is not a lot compared to fucking a transvestite up the ass or getting jerked off by a six-foot-tall black woman in a bikini, and those things didn't upset me at all. But this time Dave kept a secret. He lied, saying the pasta he got for Liz was for him, and then he didn't tell me about the thigh till six hours later, and might never have mentioned it if not for the peer pressure of everyone confessing everything.
He fed her in the night and in the morning . . . the pasta and then that guacamole thing he had for breakfast. Food is really important to Dave, in the way it is to all dreamers. I've always liked action, I could never comprehend the subtleties of decorations or clothes or food. I was a bread and water kind of woman when Dave met me. I would have been happy going off to war. In our courtship, when my Weltanschauung was weakened by having sex all the time, Dave convinced me to try new things. Pleasure had always looked dangerous — an interruption in work. And food was the drippiest of pleasures. But I let him drag me all over the city, getting a hot-dog doughnut, a broiled peppers ball an hour's drive away, and so on until the whole day was gone. It's the only time he held the reins. I started dreaming about food, and thinking about it when I woke up. When you're concentrated on by somebody, it makes mundane things esoteric. It sticks secrets into bowls of pasta, and they taste better. To see him feeding someone else, it was like we were apes and he'd broken the hierarchy. I was happy with the hierarchy. How can my friends think they know what's right — Dave and I have concocted our delicate ape rules, they look like nothing but frowns and inane gestures, but that is our love.
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Lisa Carver and Nerve.com, Inc. | |||||
Commentarium (17 Comments)
Lisa, This is really beautiful. I like your writing best when you deal with these instances when it is not clear who the victim is. You work well within that confusion. I'd love to help you exact some revenge.
The real problem is one of context. Guys prefer rules
that can be applied in *every* situation. They don't like
rules that apply at a party which are different from rules
that apply at breakfast. They *really* don't like rules
that can't be written down and objectively checked (like
`you can have sex with Liz when it is ok with me') Guys
*need* everything spelled out in detail. (Hey, when you
think with your penis, you have to keep things simple.)
Women, on the other hand, are more interested in the
*intent* of the rules, not the *letter*. For them, it
doesn't matter who, when, or what you sleep with, as much
as whether you `ought to' be doing it, whether you enjoyed
it, whether you are open about it or sneaky, and how they
feel about it. Yeah, these are stereotypes and don't
apply to everyone.
You nailed it, runs. That is exactly the difference between men and women. It's why women generally get hurt more by emotional cheating and guys get hurt by physical cheating. The first is amorphous and intangible and the second is painfully factual and irrefutible. It's completely about intent with women. It's why my wife got furious at me for exchanging emails with some chick and didn't care when I made out with some chick at a party. (Yes, we had similar rules, Lisa) And it's absolutely infuriating for both of us, which is why we gave it up. Sure, it was sexy as hell at times. You're right Lisa, confusion is sexy because it twists normal goings on into highly charged exchanges. If it's all clearly allowed and out in the open, than it's not as exciting. But for a long term, committed relationship, it's fucking hard to sustain. I think people have to eventually decide whether they are comfortable in the inevitable stasis that such a relationship resides in or not. In my view, open relationships are merely syptoms of fear, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Of course, clinging to somebody is also borne out of fear, so who the fuck knows.
JDV, oh my, did you say it perfectly - who the fuck knows. I wonder if there's one single relationship out there not based on fear of some sort. Maybe Dr. Ruth - is she married?
Otto Weininger -- a Jew-hating Jew and a woman-hating homosexual who killed himself at 23 -- claimed that only man can be a genius, because only man can remove himself (ie., see the facts). While woman, he claims "is always living in a condition of fusion with all the human beings she knows, even when she is alone. Women have no definite individual limits." I really don't know, gentlemen, if I believe this "woman is sensitive and has sixth sense; poor menfolk can't figure it out" bit -- which is possibly just Weininger's theory turned on its head. Rules are rules, gentlemen. It's not Dave's gender that caused him to break them. It is his VERY BADNESS.
"His Very Badness." Wasn't that Prince's nickname or something? Anyway, I guess what I meant was that your rules are based on the situation, so they change. Us cavemen want simple rules that apply in all situations. And Dave is one passive aggressive mofo. He balks when you say it's OK because it scares him to think you are secure enough to allow that kind of freedom. Also, it may seem to him that you don't care, and that scares him as well. But when you say no, then he feels secure enough in your relationship to do something and still be with you, if that makes sense. He wants to explore, oh yes, but he also wants the security of your relationship. Of course, this is all speculation on my part. I've never even met the guy.
"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are." -Brillat-Savarin. Kudos to Dave for understanding that the way to a woman's heart is through her stomach. My dual observations: 1. Dave succumbed to the oldest contradiction in the world. Being told you can't have something makes it more desirable than it really is. Until this concept is fully grasped, his judgement will be clouded. 2. Look at Savarin's quote above. Lisa, the food you used to describe yourself is food given to prisoners whom society is trying to punish. Lilfuzzyg
That Otto Weininger sounds like a fun guy. --- I'm not
trying to be an apologist for Dave, or for the male
gender. I'm just pointing out that it is often the case
that men and women have different expectations even
about the expectations themselves. So it often
appears that men and women are on different wavelengths
as far as rules go.
Deliberately misinterpreting the rules, or simply
refusing to attempt to look at them from your partners
viewpoint isn't excusable. I'm not going to try to judge
whether Dave is being a jerk or just being a clueless guy.
It does sound to me like Dave is less innocent and confused than he would make himself out to be, holding back when he has permission, and forging ahead when he doesn't. The rules seem very clear; why would he think breaking them is doing what you want? The rules can change, but this has to be explicit, and all parties on-side with it. Maybe one of the biggest tests of open relationships is that they can open up wide expanses of desire that bust out of the parameters that the parties have established to make them work. I sense this, but couldn't fairly comment. I only know that in my last relationship, when I was given permission, instead of running and getting busy, I lay back relieved, freed, enjoying my new potentia, which is very decadent and luxuriating, but begs the question of what I actually wanted and how permission fit into it. (What I really wanted was out of that relatioship.) It's a very stereotypical dance with authority, "If I may, I don't have to, if I may not, I must," and is very passive-aggressive, thwarting real choice, real responsibility, the real possibility of really being wrong. It's as though "permission" kick-starts a marvelous game on a high-wire and "stop" stops it, then people can get pissy and petulent and confused, whereas stop is another term from the same high-wire game, and helps keep them from falling off.
I like this much better: Foucalt on how there is no oppressor and oppressed, exactly, but rather "points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network...a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: [some that are] savage, solitary, concerted, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial... [None is] only a reaction or rebound, forming with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat." I think Foucalt is saying that playing or maybe even being ignorant is just as ACTIVE a role as is the instigator.
I had so much to say the entire time that i was reading this. My non-boyfriend was home (300 miles away) for spring break this week, so i started at the beginning, and read all the way through.
I was reading them and thinking in manic circles about how Dave reminds me of the boy i love and about how Lisa is everything i've ever thought of myself and everything i'd ever wanted in/of/from myself.. they got married and i was hopeful for my relationship and i wrote dirty emails to my boy 300 miles away and it made me feel alive and like i had some kind of hope for my fucked up young existance.. i read about their deciding to get a divorce, and i cried and i read about Lyle and i cried again.
I would say something about how this has touched me like nothing else and about how i'm not 'creepy-fan-mail-wierdo', but then, i suppose that i really am like everyone else. and if everyone else loves lisa and somehow gets comforted by her writing everything that she does.. then i suppose it's ok that i'm like everyone else.
thank you for writing this shit all the time--you have no idea how helpful it is to know there's someone who finds (or makes)every aspect of everything and every pain interesting--i felt jealous and amazed reading that, also how no anger shown for liz herself--? all dave and you and i love you
why this would upset you and not the other far more outward sexual things, i think, is the very thing you mentioned when you talked about your past with dave -- courtship. it's okay for him to get a hand job and whatever else you have not been jealous of him getting from others or doing to others. but when it comes to feeding someone and doing something as sublte as carressing their thigh under the table...that is straight out courtship and that is MOST DEFINETLY a good reason to get jealous. dave didn't have to court the transvestite or the tall black lady, to get sexual with them. that's all it was sexual and perhaps being adventourous. which is fine by you, because you love adventure and the adventurous. but these things that you mentioned Dave has done in relations to Liz, especially considering he lied and withheld information for a good while, sounds different and i would be weary about what feelings lurk for her in him. if i were his girl, that is. but i'm glad i'm not, because then i'd be heartbroken.
CRC: Relating to a stranger's sex life and love and troubles (and sometimes disagreeing) is not being a fan -- it's normal friendship, except 1.) you and I haven't met and 2.) I've REALLY been hogging this conversation. No Initials: Exactly. sss: Liz did nothing wrong or untrustworthy. No one told her the light went from green to red, and besides...it's not like her thigh reached up and started molesting Dave's hand. Although I wouldn't put it past Dave to describe it that way.
Hmmm, very good points, ye who is not named. I'll add this: It's probably Dave's MO to "court" people, even if he has nothing in mind but meaningless sex. Some people (myself included) can't operate purely on utilitarian levels. I envy those who can whip up a good fuck with no "courtship". It's not that I need emotional attachment to have sex. I certainly don't and the times I've been attacked by women have been much appreciated, believe me. It's just that I don't have the social ability to attract casual sex partners. And anyway, Lisa, women have it a lot easier in this respect: even in this day and age, women can just put out a vibe and be fairly sure that someone will pick up on it. Men still have to make the obvious effort. So I now understand that when you procure women for Dave, it really is different. He isn't making an effort. But if you leave him to his own devices to get some chick, then how else do you expect him to act? Flirting and little moves like the thigh groping are the bread and butter of our (males) arsenal, if you will. Most of the time, men can't just stand there and look pretty and expect women to come a callin'.
this article is just more proof that Lisa is one of the people out there doing and saying everything that i have ever wanted to but am too afraid. on another note, this one made dave seem like a real jerk.
hey, lisa. is that liz phair? it sure looks like liz phair.
Now you say something