And then again begin.
In unending waves.
I don’t know where my thoughts went. I only know for the first time in my life I felt everything about a body. Every day. There was nothing we didn’t do, and I felt every moment of it in shuddering pleasure. More and more my stupid tumor of a life receded.
One night he put a blanket on the floor and told me to wait and when he came back he was a big 10 years younger than me beautiful man carrying a cello.
“Jesus,” I said. “You play cello?”
He played Bach. The sixth suite.
I cried. Possibly the puniest sentence I’ve ever written.
I cried for the force and strength of his body brought to the brink of tender in his fingers straddling the strings. I cried for the violence of hitting as it fell away into the tremor of holding a note. I cried for the man of him-the size and shape of my father — the brutality of muscle and artistic drive — brought to the cusp of such beauty. Bach. But mostly I cried because I could feel something. All over my body. Like my skin suddenly had nerve endings and synaptic firings and … pulse.
On my birthday he bought me a Beretta 9mm FS and took me out to the desert to shoot. It’s the first time in my life I experienced “glee.” Shooting — I liked it. I liked the kickback going up my arm and shoulder. I liked the sound, drowning out thought. I liked aiming at a target — that could be anything. I shot and shot.
When Andy Mingo entered my life, I’d walk around at my job or the grocery store or the beach or bars or parties kind of wanting to tug on someone’s shirt and say, “Um, I need to say something about men. Turns out? I was wrong. There’s something … I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something sort of … vital about them. Doesn’t that beat all?” Or I’d be mid-lecture or mid-mouthful of food or mid swim lap and think “Hey — somebody — I want to note that I’m feeling something. It feels a little like my heart is breaking. Like breaking open. Do I need medical attention? Is there a pill? What should I do?” Or I’d be in medias res lovemaking, I mean mind blowing lovewaves with this … this … man creature from another planet and think “I really, really need to go get a different degree to understand this mutual respect and compassion and fleshheartmind hunger business. A Ph.D. just doesn’t cut it. I’m quite clearly under educated. Can I speak to someone in charge?”
The one thing I didn’t think? Drink it away. Possibly the only strong thing I’ve ever not thought.
That’s why I say I didn’t get god. Everything I ever loved about books and music and art and beauty all became recollected in the body of the man I met who hit the bag and played the cello.
After that we started arranging rendezvous all over town. Hungry. Frenzied.
Did I mention he was married?
Yeah. Well. What did you expect? I’m still me, after all.
We met on benches at the ends of piers in San Diego where he’d make me cum with his hands down my pants at the end of a pier while tourists and seagulls and fishermen stretched out behind us. We met on the beach with the surf pounding and the sunset cliffs and one night even when I finished coming and sang my siren song a bunch of hippies in the cliff shadows put down their spliffs and gave me a standing ovation. We met in bars where we sat next to each other on red leather stools and pressed knees and shoulders and mouths together so hard I’d find bruises in the morning. With my fancy job money I bought us weekends back in Portland or San Francisco with rich people hotel rooms and room service and porn channels and 300 thread count sheets that we soiled and soiled. He said “Sometimes love is messy.”
It’s true his almost not anymore wife chased me in her O.J. white Ford Bronco. But our lovers story isn’t the only story. Though our affair was epic. And sordid. Narrative and passion have that in common.
There’s a story under that one.
In addition to loaning me his car, he began driving me to and from my communist re-education drunk driver courses every night for eight weeks. Bringing me a bottle of wine or vodka on the floor of the car when he picked me up. You know, kind of like a best friend would do. A kind, sly one.
He also drove me to and from my exhausting road crew days for eight weeks. Cooking me pasta when I couldn’t lift my arms. He went to my mandatory AA meetings with me and sat through the 12 steps and nodded and smiled in his black leather jacket all the way up until we’d get home and I’d rage rage rage at god and fathers and male authority and he’d dismantle my rage with funny jokes about jesus and monkeys.
He treated this thing I’d done — this DUI — the dead baby- the failed marriages — the rehab — the little scars at my collar bone — myvodka — my scarred as shit past and body- as chapters of a book he wanted to hold in his hands and finish.
But there’s even a story deeper than that. After he moved out of his wifehouse and into my little one bedroom seahouse a block from the sunset cliffs in Ocean Beach, after he finished his MFA and I filed divorce papers and he filed divorce papers, after I had to go into the English Department Chair’s office and lie like a rug because his wife went in and spilled the shit, after we both bit the bullet and said the “L” word out loud, something better than sexual and emotional zenith happened. I didn’t know that was possible.
Night. Ocean sound. In my tiny seahouse. On the sofa. Both of us scotch handed. Mazzy Star playing all night all night all night. We’d been admiring his Karma Sutra book and he’d been explaining the Tibetan Book of the Dead to me. Sexuality and death. Home run.
He put his hand on my heart. I could feel the heat of his skin diving down into the well of me. He stared so deeply into me my breath jackknifed. I began shaking. Just from that. Then he said, knowing everything I’d told him about myself, he said, out of the blue, “I want to have a child with you.”
.
?
.
Well you can imagine how many ways I tried to say “No.” I wanted to pick up a phone. “Um, hello, human race? Can you connect me to the dreaded relationship department? I need to say something. I’ve got this man thing over here, and well, bless his heart, this man is confused. He’s clearly mistaken me for someone else, and he needs rerouting. Different area code. Different address. Different woman. Is there a special number to call? I know. It’s crazy. He thinks he wants to have a family. Yeah. With me. Nuts, huh? So can you just, you know, give me the number to relocate him? He may need prescription medication. I can stall him for awhile, but you may want to send someone out.”
His argument against all my fluttering resistance? One sentence. One sentence up against the mass of my crappy life mess.
“I can see the mother in you. There is more to your story than you think.”
The Scarlett Letter
FOR A GOOD SIX MONTHS BEFORE I WAS FIRED AS THE Visiting Writer at SDSU, my belly grew.
Listen. Happiness? It just looks different on people like me.
My belly grew in the halls of the English Department while colleagues tried not to look at or smell my ever enormous tits and belly bulge when they spoke to me about Cultural Studies or Gender Studies or Women’s Studies. Then they stopped speaking to me at all, and simply nodded or half smiled as they passed me, like you might a mooing cow.
My belly grew when The Chair signed a paper saying I could never work there again, and I had to sign it too, and while I signed it, instead of looking at the paper, I looked straight into her motherfucking eyes. Old bag I thought. She coughed.