If I can imagine it, I often ask myself, does it need to happen or be accomplished, and, do I need to realize it, since fantasies impress upon the senses as much if not more than actualities. I'm in a room in the clapboard hotel near the edge of town, an airy old building, where it's cold inside, and the kitchen helper has sneaked up the stairs, though the reception area is cheerfully free of guards, and in the bedroom, with its inviting white comforter, he and I undress. His skin pleases me, since it didn't yet show the stress and weight of life, except in a few patches where he'd bruised or scratched himself, with a scar or two, the one beneath his chin endemic to kids who ride bikes, but caressing his skin is touching a new velvet, he's almost hairless, like a newt, even more naked in the frigid room, since nakedness never is familiar entirely, not to me, anyway, because the body has its own legislation, yet it's also legislated by individuals, families, governments, and religions who spend a lot of time conspiring to restrict and limit its disorderliness, which attests to nothing being natural in the way human beings use the term, because what could be more natural than a body's excretions, secretions, farts, noises, and hungers that are restrained and suppressed most everywhere. Though many women, like a few in residence, starve themselves and pretend, especially the psoriatic one, to the point of fainting, that they are not hungry, when they are more hungry and have greater appetite than many others, even those who eat and eat and are still not satisfied. Anorexics look hungry, have poor complexions, and are cloying dinner partners, since they refuse to admit their condition as they inflict it upon others in sly, petulant doses, and sitting next to the disconsolate woman at dinner as she haughtily denied herself, cherishing how little she ate and how much everyone else had, is inhibitory. Inhibition is contagious, especially in its righteous versions. Anorexics spend most of their time hiding, especially their bodies, most curiously wearing layer upon layer of clothes to appear heavier than they are, when they want to be perceived as thin, since they know that exposure reveals their fleshless, skeletal bodies, and so they conceal them. Also they are as cold as corpses.
His erection might have been for anyone, democratically hot and hard, and I felt a palpable reversal of positions, for when I was his age I sometimes lay with men many years older, who were supposed to teach me something, as if we were in France, and mostly I wasn't taught-the most unappetizing sex I ever had was with a Frenchman-and the older men were meant to be gentle, but most weren't, only one or two, and, since I was free, supposedly, and strong, even if just a girl in school, who supposedly knew what she wanted, who spoke well and read seriously, it was assumed I could do what I wanted and be what I hoped for, so then I could and should pursue pleasure, part of my birthright, though as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of American women in the 19th century, it was that lone, unique freedom which damned them to unhappy marriages. The American social order, he theorized, was different from the European model, where a society that arranged marriages, which performed the social and economic work they were contracted to do, permitted and expected infidelities, and because they were not manufactured by love, these sensible, loveless marriages granted the partners ex-officio pleasures. But a free American woman, at liberty to choose a love match, paid the highest price. I have made choices, I have loved freely in some way, as I did little Johnny and others, and I have recollections of my lovers, or have retained knowledge of their smell and some unimportant habits. I have left men and been left by them, I have been cruel and made promises lightly, said I would return and didn't, and this is insignificant now except for inevitable remorse. In seclusion, when I honestly compare myself or try to distinguish myself from animals whose love is assumed to be indiscriminate, I apprehend my capacity to love both differently and similarly, since after its demise, I often don't remember the lover, can't comprehend why I had desired the object of my temporary affection, and can't recognize myself in the match. Also memory revamps itself. The temporary is contemporary, flowing in the veins, though humans behave as if permanence beat steadily in every transaction and feeling, in imaginary edifices of lifelong connection, inspired and conceived to deny their limited lifespans. Some love lasts, though. My mother and father were tethered to each other, my mother loved my father more than anyone, my father adored his brother, he didn't give my mother the kind of love she wanted, as her mother and father, whom she never mentions, didn't, so she couldn't know how to love, but then she may have received from her husband what she wanted, since love is perverse and enjoys its opposite, to which it reverts most conveniently. I never understood my father, his sadness and rages, I saw his joy and hope, and his humiliation, too, and when my brother vanished and his brother died, something left my father never to return. My brother might have broken my father's heart and contributed to his death. I should have taken over the business, yet when I was young, I didn't want to, but there is no business now, and also my father taught me too little about it, it wouldn't he the same, anyway, though I can imagine starting over in the American way. One morning, when I was caring for my mother, while she was eating a breakfast of loosely scrambled eggs and a lightly toasted English muffin, which she liked if it was soft enough, though her appetite was erratic, she was lucid. Looking at me, my mother said, "Your father was a very good lover." Stunned, I kept silent, and then my mother peered across the table at the windows to an unimpeded view of the city that included my favorite monument, the Empire State Building, which was constructed in sixteen months during the Great Depression that my mother and father lived through.