I could do anything with him. I could sit on him. I could walk on him if I was careful. I could put my heels in the nape of his neck and grip his arms at the elbows and pull until he gave a groan of pleasure that was absolutely specific. There isn’t just one all-purpose groan of pleasure, as we assume. His back acclimated to me. There was something about being able to manhandle a male body without having to treat the experience as foreplay. I wasn’t rough with him. In fact it became very domestic. He was suddenly sleeping wonderfully, he told me. I didn’t mind this man. I gave myself to his back. Gratitude is a drug.
But what I do resent, still, is Denoon for trivializing the experience when I told him about it and he, in one of his litanies about the normalization of the bizarre in the U.S., asked if I knew that in sex tabloids there were ads from women making themselves available to men for wrestling purposes, no penetration involved. It seems men with a taste for being bested by big, strapping women had been allowed, through the magic of late capitalism, to constitute themselves as one market among others. I hadn’t heard about it. But it was worse when he tried to get away with the canard that what I had been doing was nothing more than soft core SM whether I knew it or not. And was I aware of some famous datum showing that the largest vocational category resorting to SM-specialized prostitutes was law enforcement personalities, not excluding the judiciary? I pointed out that Z had had nothing to do with law enforcement that I knew of, but Denoon insisted — out of jealousy, no question — that spies were in the same ballpark. I mocked him into retracting that, finally, as beneath him. I said something like I revere the level of argument you impose on others and now you come up with something like this? His real problem was that he thought my ministrations to him along the same lines were a pale reflection of what I had depicted myself as doing for Z. He was right, which I never denied. You are a different moment, I told him. Your back is fine, for one thing.
Denoon couldn’t understand that there was a feel almost of paradise about being absorbed so completely in a project of personal alleviation. This may be a strictly female view. And it is not the same as saying it wouldn’t be boring as a lifetime repetitive vocation. One difference between women and men is that women really want paradise. Men say they do, but what they mean by it is absolute security, which they can obtain only through utter domination of the near and dear and the environment as far as the eye can see, how else? Most men. In any case, aside from the exertion involved, which ultimately I was able to think of simply as good exercise, I liked the ordeal, down to the details — perspiration, flesh smells, towels all over, his rather charred breath, insects banging incessantly into the window screens.
It began to bother him that there was apparently nothing he could do for me in return. We had even stopped eating out, so that we could have longer sessions. He was grateful across the board. He was cutting back on his smoking, he noticed. It was a byproduct of feeling better and was something he had wanted to do for a long time. My merest hints were helping him. I’d advised him to stop his housekeeper from picking up vegetables at the prison garden, beautiful as they were, because night soil was used in cultivating them and he was running definite gastrointestinal dangers in eating them. Whatever his original interest in me had been, I had blasted it into nothingness with my attentions. Martin Wade never came up once.
I did accept one gift, a beautiful ethereal blue and white yakuta. I couldn’t believe it was cotton. But this was a bagatelle to him, and as I pounded and wrenched he would lie there free associating on my virtues and uniqueness and how hurtful it was that I was refusing his generosity.
As to secrets, I had more than I wanted on the personal side but nothing that counted from his professional side, yet.
Tell Me Something I’m Not Supposed to Know
I was liking Z. His improvement made him cheerful. We had certain things in common, such as both being natural mimics. After one particularly acute but cutting impersonation of his, I said Remind me to warn my daughter about going with someone who’s a good mimic, because they aren’t necessarily the kindest, as in my case. Ah, do you have a daughter, then? And I said No, I mean when I do, someday. And then he said So it wouldn’t be a good idea for two mimics to marry, would it? Even through his carotene I could tell he was blushing. I was touched. We both were.
I remember I was sitting on the back of his legs, resting, when I decided it was time to shorten the game. My Martin Wade fantasies were fading. I decided to be a little reckless.
You’re unique, he was saying, apropos his having come to the conviction that I could tell people’s nationality at a distance at a glance. Recently there had been a couple of lucky shots in the dark doing that. And then, at a tea the day before, he had asked what the nationality was of a rather Syrian-looking woman who was new in town and new to me. I’d said Oh, British, flooring him. But it had been easy because I’d overheard her say arvacado for avocado earlier, unbeknownst to him.
You’re unique, he said. No woman in my life has done for me half what you have, and yet you’ve asked nothing. Please, what can I do for you?
Really nothing. I enjoyed this. Nothing, unless you wanted to satisfy my curiosity about something.
Anything. What?
I don’t know. Tell me something I’m not supposed to know.
He got tense instantly. I said Now don’t do that and ruin our work. Let’s drop it.
But what did I mean?
I began kneading him while I vamped. I said I know this will seem perverse to you. But in a way — and I understand it has to be this way, don’t think I don’t — in a way there’s something in you I can’t reach and never will and probably it can’t be helped, but it’s a hindrance, really. I know how involuted this sounds. But you are obviously some kind of spy or operative, which is all right, but you are. I happen to know about it. But of course life puts us in the position where you have to deny this to my face, so feel free. But you know what I am and I can’t know what you are, which I accept, because your mission is to playact the commercial attaché for me and what is resulting is false consciousness, inevitably.
He got very upset. We had to talk. I had to get off him and we both had to dress and talk properly. He wanted a drink.
We sat at the kitchen table after he had washed his face twice and made me look around to see if perchance there were any cigarettes about.
He didn’t immediately deny being a spy but took a line which I didn’t honor with a reply. He wanted to know where on earth I had gotten such an idea, and from whom.
Then he did deny it, to which I said Fine, but I know otherwise for a fact, and you might consider admitting something just for the sake of our relationship.
How did I mean? Did I mean he couldn’t see me, all this couldn’t continue, if he didn’t confirm what I was saying?
Then we circled around my assertion that of course I was not saying anything like that and of course we could go on, however imperfectly. And then of course I invited him to reassure himself any way he liked that there was nothing clandestine going on with me, no tape recorders or surveillance cameras, which he dismissed curtly, saying I know who you are.