“And that was all right with you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was.”
He stared at me.
We rolled around some more. He felt very different from the way he talked. He felt fragile and tentative, but with a muscular hot streak running up his center. He vacillated between full presence and no presence at all; his present moments were animal and nervous, his absence was like a snake that you can feel, but not see, moving past you. He made me feel submissive and high-handed at the same time. “Man,” I said, “you are so sweet.”
In response, he kissed me, and then pulled back so that my mouth was left open; he moved in again as if he were going to kiss me, and then, when I responded, pulled away again. Through slit eyes I noted his smirk. I recalled that my last boyfriend, who was also in his twenties, had told me that he sometimes liked to pull out of a kiss so that the girl’s tongue would be sticking out and looking funny. Fondly and fairly hard, I bit Frederick’s lips. He sat up and, out of nowhere, began to talk mean shit about a girl who had been at the party.
“She’s nothing but a dog,” he said. “She likes to be ordered around. Like, go into the corner, sit up, stay, wait, beg.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a lot of that going around,” I said. I paused, looking up at him. “How do you know that about her?” I asked. “Did you screw her?”
His smirk wobbled uncertainly. “Uh, no. But that’s what all her performances are about. Didn’t you notice those pictures of her on the wall tonight? With the whips?”
“No. I’m surprised. I would’ve thought emotional pain was more her thing.” I took him by his shoulders and put him on his back again. I wondered if he had brought up this girl’s dogness in order to indirectly implicate me in it. I felt hurt for a second and then decided that I didn’t care; it seemed the evening could sustain some dog influence. “Actually, I don’t know about this whole San Francisco S-M yoga-class crap,” I said. “Like, watch me up on stage getting my butt whipped. I mean, it’s so schematic or something.” I lay on top of him and rubbed my lower lip gently against the grain of his left eyebrow. He stroked my back and my head. He found my lips with his hand and insinuated his finger into my mouth.
I sat up and straddled him. “People are fucking crazy,” I said. “This girl I know once had a thing with this guy through E-mail. Finally, they met, and she went home with him. He made out with her and did all kinds of stuff, and then he just rolled over and went to sleep, except he had a big hard-on. The next night the same thing happened. After that she never heard from him. Then she ran into him and he called her a cunt.”
His expression as I told this story became soft, even humane. He also looked as if I’d called him on something—which perhaps, in some muddled way, I had. He put his hands on my hips and said, “I like you.” He looked into the air with that strange, tender face. “But I’m not sure why.”
“I like you too,” I said, reaching for his belt buckle. “And I know what you mean about not knowing why. Actually, you remind me of a real prick I used to be involved with about ten years ago—not that you’re a prick or anything. He was weird in a lot of ways. He was the only man I’ve ever known who didn’t like blow jobs.”
“I don’t like them much, either,” Frederick said. “Because most girls aren’t any good at them. Except the last girl—and I think that was a guy.”
“What about if you’re in love?” I asked.
“The love thing—that’s different,” he said. “That doesn’t have anything to do with technique.”
“For me it does. If I’m in love, I’m pretty much going to like what the person does. But I guess men are different.” I was beginning to think he might be a prick, but his prickness seemed minor key and strangely weightless; I didn’t think he would hurt me. So I sucked his dick. When I stopped he said he liked my tongue. “It’s a pointy little guy,” I said. “Probably from constantly reaching out for, um, things.”
“Really?” He looked mortified.
“Uh-huh.” I ran one hand down his front, then his thigh. “You’re so frail,” I murmured. “But you have this nice masculine turgor thing happening too.”
“You keep using words I don’t know.”
“Oh, ‘turgor’? I just learned that myself. It means the tension inside plants that gives them form. It’s nice, don’t you think?”
He sat up. “What do you do for a living?”
“I teach at Berkeley. I teach poetry.”
I imagined myself as I would be the next day—sitting at my kitchen table with a headache, reading my students’ ghastly poems. I thought of my students with a sorrowful pang. I imagined them in my living room, watching me as I lay with this too young person. “Look at me,” I would say “This is what I’m really like. I have nothing for you. I’m sorry.” The hell of it was, if such a scene could actually take place, my students would only see it as evidence of my thrilling humanity; it would quite possibly raise me higher in their esteem.
We kissed and rolled some more. My excitement was feverish and needy, but that didn’t make me feel afraid. I felt as if I could bat my excitement back and forth or turn it up and down, and I was delighted to roll and root in the fun of being pulled in so many directions. I felt as if I could have a small, good experience with this boy, and at that moment a small, good experience was more important than anything.
Then he called the direction. “I’m going to go,” he said.
“Please don’t,” I said.
He kissed me, and I felt a deep, squalid bitterness under the first layer of his kiss. For the first time that night, I felt him in earnest, and he felt very familiar. We were now going in the direction broadly labeled “pain.” But of course, pain has many directions too.
I went to the bathroom, and when I came back he was sitting on the couch with his pants on. He said again that he was going to go. I remembered that even pain can be tedious. I wondered if he’d gone through my wallet while I was peeing. I knelt and put my hand on his knee. “Please don’t go,” I said.
He came back down on the floor with me. He pushed at my wig with a soft, childish gesture. I took it off for him. My short brown hair had been badly mashed by the wig; it probably didn’t look very good, but for some reason I didn’t mind showing it to him.
“This suits you more,” he said. “It’s softer.”
“Yeah, well, it’s actual hair.”
He got up on his knees and, putting his hand on top of my head, asked me to go down on him again. Probably he wanted me to get on my hands and knees, but, maybe out of irritation, I merely spread my legs and bent from the waist in a posture that was not very pleasing aesthetically or psychologically. It was also not very comfortable, so I stopped quickly and sat up. He hesitated and then, with a nervous toss of his head, pressed himself against me like a purring cat. I lay down. He lay on top of me. He reached under my skirt, worked his hand down my panty hose and lightly stroked my genitals with the back of his hand. The contempt in the gesture was rich and sensual, and I leaned into it. The numb comfort of humiliation tempted me; I gave him a little mew of encouragement. He answered me with a little mew of his own. He slid his hands under my head and gripped handfuls of my hair and pulled it. Carefully, he placed his prick against my genitals; he rubbed it slowly against me.