We sat on my front steps and made out. “I’d like to invite you in,” I said, “but it would be too much like that guy—I meet you at a party, bring you home.” I shrugged.
She nodded solemnly, looked away, looked back and smiled. “So? I thought you said nothing happened anyway.”
“He made out with me and I sucked his dick, and then he acted like he didn’t want me.”
“That’s sort of harsh.”
“Yeah. He acted like he was being nice, and I believed him, but then when I saw him again, he acted like a weird prick.”
She embraced me sideways. “That sort of turns me on,” she said. She nuzzled my neck, and the feminine delicacy of her lips and eye-lashes was like a startling burst of gold vein in a broken piece of rock. I slid my hands under her shirt. She had small, muscular breasts and freakishly long nipples, and there was faint, sweet down all along her low back.
I invited her in. She entered the living room with a tense, mercurial swagger that pierced my heart. We sat on the couch. “So,” she said. “Do I get to be the bad boy? Are you gonna suck my cock?”
“Don’t,” I said. “He hurt my feelings.”
“Awww.” She knelt between my legs, with her hands on my thighs. Her fingers were blunt and spatulate, with little gnawed nails. “If I say something wrong, it’s because I’m not sure what to do. I’m not used to this. I want to please you, but you also make me want to . . . I don’t even know.”
“I’m not sure what I want, either,” I said. “I think there might be something wrong with me.”
She held my face in her hands. “Let me make it better,” she said. She looked at me, and her expression seemed to fracture. Abruptly, she struck me across the face, backhanded me and then struck me with her palm again. She checked my reaction. “Open your mouth,” she said. “Stick out your tongue.” I did. She started to unzip her pants, then faltered. “Um,” she said, “Susan? Is this cool?”
“Yeah.”
When we were finished, I walked her out the door onto the porch. Using her ballpoint, we wrote our numbers on scraps of paper torn from a flyer that had been placed on my doormat to remind me to fight AIDS. She held my face and kissed my cheek and left.
When I woke the next day I didn’t think of her but I felt her, and I wasn’t sure what she felt like to me. I was acutely aware of the artificiality of our experience. It felt like a dollhouse with tiny plastic furniture and false windows looking out on mechanically painted meadows and cloud-dotted skies. It felt both safe and cruelly stifling, and both feelings appealed to me. More simply, I felt as if some habitual pain had shifted position slightly, allowing me to breathe more easily. As the day went on, I thought of her, but gingerly. The thought was like a smell that is both endearing and faintly embarrassing. I remembered how she had knelt and said, “I’m not sure what to do,” and I remembered her reckless blow to my face. She seemed split in two, and the memory split me in two. But when she called me, I was happy; I realized that I had not expected to hear from her.
“I would’ve called earlier,” she said. “But last night was intense for me and I had to process. Like I said, I usually bottom.”
Her voice was bright and optimistic, but there was something else in it. It was as if she’d made an agreement with somebody to supply all the optimism required on a general basis for the rest of her life, and the strain of it had become almost anguishing. But when she opened the door of her house to greet me, it was with brash, striding movement, and she was elegant and beautiful in a sleek suit.
We went to a Thai restaurant for dinner. It was a cheap place that maintained its dignity with orderly arrangement and dim lighting. Little statuettes and vases invoked foreignness unctuously yet honorably. The other diners seemed grateful to be in such an unassuming place, where all they had to do was talk to each other and eat. Erin pulled out my chair for me.
A waitress, vibrant with purpose, poured us water in a harried rattle of ice. We ordered sweet drinks and dainty, greasy dishes. Erin’s smile burst off her face in a wild curlicue. I imagined her unsmiling, wearing lipstick, with her hair upswept, in a hat with a little veil; she would’ve been formidable and very beautiful. Her jaw was strong but also suggestive of intense female sensitivity and erotic suppleness. Then under that was a rigidity that made me think of something trapped. I reached across the table and took her hand. We were both sweating slightly.
“I haven’t been involved with a woman for a long time,” I said. “Mostly I’m with men. Although I haven’t been involved with men lately, either.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “Basically I’m a dyke, but I like sex with men sometimes so I can understand.”
I asked her if she always needed to role-play in sex. I said I was trying not to relate to people in such a structured way. “I mean, I can do that kind of sex, um, obviously, and I can like it. It gets me off and everything. But it’s a mechanical response. It’s not deep.”
“Well,” she said, “I hope you didn’t feel like what we did was mechanical, because it wasn’t for me. I hardly ever top anybody, so it was really new.” She drank her sweet iced coffee with ingenuous relish.
“It wasn’t really mechanical, because I could feel you under the fantasy. But I’ve done those fantasies all my life, and I want to try to be more genuine and direct, so whatever we do, it’ll really be us. Emotionally, I mean.”
“I can respect that,” she said. Her voice was like that of a little girl trying to be good for her mother. It gave me a strange, sad pleasure. It made me want to pretend to be her mother, just like another little girl.
Erin was from Kansas. She used to be an Evangelical Christian. She wasn’t raised a Christian, but she had converted on her own initiative when she was fourteen. Her parents had separated when she was ten, and her mother had to work brutal night shifts that made her more disappointed with life than she already was. Erin spent most of her time with ardent Christian boys, with whom she went to religious meetings. She was occasionally moved to give bouquets of hand-picked flowers to various bewildered girls, but it wasn’t until prom night that it hit her that her repeated day-dreams about the elaborate scorn of a certain beautiful brat were actually erotic in nature. She made a successful pass at a drunk, pretty little mouse in the rest room and never wore a dress again—although she valiantly tried to be a queer Evangelical well after she realized it would never work.
I pictured her standing alone in plain, neat clothes in a landscape of dry sunlight and parched yellow earth. Vague shapes were present in the distance, but I couldn’t see what they were. She was extending her arm to offer a bunch of flowers to someone who wasn’t there. The expression on her face was humble, stoic, and tenaciously expectant, as if she was waiting for something she had never seen yet chose to believe would someday appear. It was the expression she had on her face while she was talking to me. She was telling me that when she told her mother she was gay, her mother said, “I could just shit,” and went into the next room to watch TV
She had other expressions too. When we talked about the ongoing rape trial of a pop star, I made predictable sarcastic comments about people who said that the girl had probably brought it on herself. Erin first agreed with me, then reversed herself to say that maybe the girl had asked for it. Her expression when she said that was rambunctious, with a sensual shade of silly meanness—but mostly it was the expression of a kid with her hands in Play-Doh, squishing around and making fun shapes.