We walked back to his car, a subtle membrane of feeling spanning the air between us. With a sudden movement, he took my hand and held it. His palm was fleshy, but it felt brittle anyway. I held it and tried to ease its brittleness. But later, when we stood on my front steps and said good night to each other, he tried to kiss me on the lips and I turned my head. I glimpsed his limpid, bewildered eyes as his mouth lighted on my cheek and then drew back in an open, stifled purse. He coughed and looked away. “I’ll call you again,” he said.
A blurry impress of his eyes and his lips, open and moving away, was still on me when I lay down to sleep, and that may’ve been why I dreamed of kissing a boy I had known when I was thirteen. In life, he had looked down on me because I had been shy and plain, and I, in turn, thought him an empty-headed snot. But in the dream we were in love. We sat together and kissed. Our hands were at our sides, our shoulders just touched. He came near and drew away and nervously played with his honey-colored hair. His T-shirt had a rip under one faintly pungent armpit. He extended his mouth again, stretching his long, supple throat. He brushed his lips against my cheek, and the dream slowly fell into nothing.
I rode to Berkeley in a state of melancholy. The passenger seated sideways in front of me on the BART was a slouching, unhandsome young man with pale-brown hair and a weak, somehow derisive chin. Still, there was something pleasing in the dull brown stubble on his thin white skin and the sardonic loll of his head against the rattling plastic window of the car. He turned, met my eyes, then looked away, and I remembered my dream with a funny rolling sensation, almost as if, half asleep, I had turned over and rubbed my face against an unexpected softness. I remembered Frederick then, and to my embarrassment and mild sadness, it occurred to me that the dream had been at least partly about him. How maudlin, I thought, to have conflated two drunk, unhappy adults who had casually mistreated each other with tender, kissing children. I remembered how Frederick had touched my cheek, his hand sensitive and bare as the paw of a friendly animal. The memory was plain and blameless as a glass of water. It made me remember my fear and shame, also as something plain and blameless. Then it occurred to me that the dream had been, in some less clear way, about Kenneth as well.
Erin decided to stop seeing Dolly, because she had revealed herself as a shallow brat who “jerked people around.” We discussed it over drinks at a crowded boy bar.
“She decides she wants to see other people and we have to have this interminable discussion of it and I’m crying and tearing my hair and finally I agree. Then next week she wants to be monogamous. Then two days later she’s fucking some bitch down the street. Who needs it?”
Her voice was defiant, but her eyes were stunned and fixated, her chest hard and shrunken. She wore black cigarette-leg pants that were too short at the ankles and a black leather shirt that was too short at the waist, and the clothes made her look desiccated, almost ridiculous.
I remembered my glimpse of Dolly, dumping ice down Erin’s shirt; with a slight shock, I intuited her vagina, a rude girl that would’ve stuck out its tongue if it could.
“It’s really painful,” continued Erin, “but I’m trying to work with it in a creative way. I’ve done all these healing rituals with candles and shrines and stuff. I tore up the whole backyard and planted a garden with petunias and snapdragons and, um . . .” She looked into the room, trying to remember what she had planted.
“Is it helping?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I know it’s going to hurt for a while, and I don’t want to wallow in it. But I don’t want to run away from it, either.” She brightened. “Last week I ran a personal ad in the Guardian. I answered a few too. I’m not looking for sex; I feel too vulnerable for that. I just want somebody to hurt me and humiliate me.” She took an enthusiastic drink. “It’s harder to find than you would think,” she said. “I’ve met a few women for coffee dates and they were nice, but I didn’t really want them to do anything to me. I’m supposed to meet a dominatrix from Germany tomorrow. Mainly, she’s into cutting.”
We went to a peep show known for its humane and feminist work environment, where we poured quarters into slots so that a dismal panel of lead would rise, revealing naked girls dancing and showing their genitals behind a thick pane of plastic.
I came home very drunk. I turned off all the lights and lay on the floor, listening to music. I thought of Erin and Frederick and Kenneth. I sang along to the music. I thought of the boyfriend whose death I had learned of the night I met Frederick. He had once shown me a photograph of himself as a baby, held against his father’s shoulder. He rose eagerly out of his father’s arms, grinning like a wolf cub. Everything in him went up and outward in a bright, excited rush. In its raw form, what he’d had was beautiful and good. But it hadn’t helped him. Probably he’d never even known it was there.
Frederick had that fierce upward movement in him, but more muscular, less bright. I had sensed it when I put my hand on his midsection; it had felt angry, and bitterly wounded, but also vigilant, dignified, and determined to preserve its form. He was a lot like me, actually. I thought of a medieval painting I had once seen of a young man holding a torch high over his head, his eyes focused upward into darkness. Frederick had dishonest, petty meanness, but he also had an idea of honor, and if he had put these qualities together in an odd, tacky combination, then that combination must have held some deep, secret sense for him. He was certainly no more odd or tacky than I, a woman who would debase herself trivially, for sport, and yet who sought, in the sheltering darkness of her debasement, passion, depth, and, most ludicrous, even tenderness.
Erin’s image suddenly shimmered through my thoughts, dispersing them. I saw her smiling, radiating her sweet, skewed gold light. Then, more faintly, I saw Kenneth, his face focused and busy, as if bent on the pursuit of his stuff, a pursuit that held some deep, secret sense only he could see.
My young cat approached, sniffed me cautiously, then walked away. I fell asleep on the floor and woke an hour later, disturbed and anxious, with a buzzing head and a dry mouth.
The next day I wrote Frederick a letter. I didn’t try to describe the things I had thought about the night before. I just said I felt bad about our last meeting. I said I knew I had behaved strangely and that I had done so because I had been afraid. I said that even though what happened between us had been uncomfortable, I had felt touched by him and hoped that if we met again, we could be nice to each other.
I didn’t think Frederick would answer my letter, but writing it nonetheless made me feel pleased and relieved. I pictured him reading it. I pictured him reacting to it with uncertainty and maybe even slight agitation, but I also pictured him being secretly pleased and relieved by it as well. I looked in the phone book and found the address of the computer consulting firm that employed him. After I sent the letter, I bought two expensive cookies from the deli next door and sat on my porch steps and ate them.
Erin called, very excited, to tell me about her cutting experience with the dominatrix.
“We took it slow,” she said. “We had a few coffee dates and got to know each other, I explained about being too vulnerable for sex, and she understood. I told her I’d never been cut before, so the first time she took it really easy. Just a little bit on my stomach.”
Her voice was jubilant, even triumphant.
“But last night she made me beg to be cut and stuff. And then she carved this whole elaborate pattern on my butt in the shape of a snake curled into an S—for ‘slave,’ I think. Want to come see it?”
I went to her house and she dropped her pants. The snake had fancy diamonds all up and down its back. Its mouth was open, and a happy little tongue popped out.