A mutual friend introduced us, and we first got to know each other through letters. It wasn’t difficult to forewarn him about my pregnancy. Even though my, I calculated, seven-month belly was now showing, I let him know it was a psychological pregnancy. I knew somatization was the only way to explain to other people why the pregnancy was lasting so many years: I had gotten myself pregnant. I’d already read about similar cases. A woman in Austria insisted and made her husband believe that she was pregnant with triplets for nine months, her belly had grown so large. When the birth was overdue, they finally discovered that the only thing in her uterus was a giant balloon of unfulfilled desire. It made me so sad to read how they had to return all the gifts they’d received, not for one child but for three, and how they sealed the room so as not to have to confront the loss of their babies every day, because however imaginary the pregnancy was, it was also real. I used these cases as justifications, subjecting myself once again to the academic to be moderately accepted.
Meeting him in a public space was more problematic; it brought into relief my bruised state of mind. To skirt that obstacle, pleading shyness, I suggested a dark place, a movie theater, as the site of our first date. I planned everything in a way that would help me feel as relaxed as possible. A movie theater was just the spot, a dark, enclosed space. I arranged the hour, the row, and the seat. He would get there first. I would enter only once the lights had been dimmed. I would look for the seat and settle in beside him. I cautioned that I would be nervous, a normal reaction given the buildup of desire spread throughout the letters I had written him. And that’s how everything went that day. I was so nervous that I sat down without even checking to see if it was him, as if I were some random spectator. I stared at the screen in front of me, and wished I had that cubist eye, the one in my left temple that would allow me to see his complete profile and the screen all at once, without his detecting my furtive glances. I needed to calm down, I thought, he must be nervous too, but for a different reason: he was a lot older than me. I had already said in a letter that I thought age was meaningless. I could have told him that Jim had been several years older than me too. But instead I wrote that life is too short, why should I limit myself to loving someone who just so happened to have been born in the same decade as me? I count like the French, and if he had been eighty years old, I would have said, “Oh, how nice. Four times twenty.” That’s what I was thinking when he turned to me and we greeted each other in whispers. It all happened slowly, with a measured beginning, very deliberate, as in the verse: “not exposed, but behind a veil / are breasts desirable.” I left before the lights came back on, as we had arranged. And so our first date took place between two illuminations. Grateful for the gift of blindness, unfettered by the sense of sight, I gave him four more senses to employ, following a recipe I’d sent in writing beforehand, which he obeyed step by step, delicately, affectionately, while the movie lasted. This was my recipe:
MAIN INGREDIENT:
1 pound of abstraction (repeat six times: “The only two people in this room are her and me.”)
FOR SMELL:
Look to the right of your seat. I will be there. Place your mouth at the highest tip of my ear, on the exterior, right at what is called the helix (look it up for greater precision). No tongue. Bite it, or better yet, lightly press your teeth on the nerves three or four times.
Then quickly drop your nose along my neck. My excitement will continue downward at the same pace, and when your nose reaches my cleavage, the smell will already be there. But keep in mind that it’s not just my smell. It’s ours.
FOR SOUND:
Suck a few of your fingers and slip your hand under my sweater to reach my sternum. It’s important to do it quickly because your fingers should be wet. Apply them to my skin as if they were electrodes. The wetness will conduct electricity, which accelerates the pulse. Use the pads of your fingers as if they were ears and listen to the pulse.
FOR TOUCH:
Place a bread crumb, which I will give you, in your mouth. Warm it up until it begins to disintegrate, some ten seconds. Look for my belly button and place the little mush there. Let it sit for a minute until I can feel the ball of salivated bread in my scar. Remove it and feel the texture. It’s a texture similar to what you may appreciate tomorrow when we lie naked and share our bodies’ liquors. It will be the kingdom of heaven. The place where a woman sprinkled yeast, hiding it in three measures of flour, and the world arose.
FOR TASTE:
Place your tongue on my tongue. Stir it around and pour out the pound of abstraction all at once: “The only two people in this room are her and me.” Repeat it three times to yourself: “The only two people in this room are her and me.”
Now that I felt a little surer of myself, we had our second date in a lighted place. We arranged to meet in the pub in front of my house, where I arrived having to overcome the customary obstacle of those few yards that to me were like quicksand. It was spacious enough, with huge wooden tables and long wooden benches on which people would randomly take a seat as they came in. I remember what I had on because it was the first time I’d made myself up in a while. I was wearing a very simple red shirt with a plunging neckline, dark pants, and heels, and I wore my hair down—black, long, natural. My new hair, newly born, quickly became my sterling feature, and I was so proud of it. It let me believe I’d been cured of that latent disease, radioactivity, I’d been afraid of triggering all these years and am still in wait for.
HE WAS ALREADY THERE when I arrived. So I asked for a beer to settle my nerves. I hadn’t drunk alcohol in a very long time, and I think I am intolerant to ethanol, which modern science has shown often has a strong effect on people of Asian origin. So a single beer launched me into a state of euphoria that made me react eagerly to Irrational Number’s hands on my thighs. We had barely seen each other’s faces, and yet there I was sitting on his lap. What attracted me most was his size, not because I felt any special attraction to large men, but because it reminded me of Jim. When I sat on his legs and later, when he got up to ask for another beer, I could see other people respected him for the mere fact that he was so tall and robust, even were tolerant of our public show of affection, which was usually reserved for the private sphere at a time and especially in a place as reserved and puritan as that was. But his mind was as troubled as mine was, and though on that second date neither of us could have imagined it, the way we clutched each other, the immediate connection we experienced, the feeling that we completed each other (almost always false), the hunger we felt not for a day but for an entire lifetime beside a relative stranger—all these were signs that something was off, that we were both hollow and needed to be filled. Unfortunately no man, no woman, no child, no friend, no army can fill someone else’s loneliness. The only way to appease loneliness is by embracing it, accommodating it in some nonthreatening place. Just leave it alone, let it live in peace, breathe; don’t fight with it or try to deploy things outside its territory like loves, friendships, companionships, since the kingdom of loneliness abides, and any attempt to fight against it will only turn it back against you.
Irrational Number and I made love that night. I didn’t have to explain the peculiarities of my vagina. He just entered me, and I thought if that man, who was born in one of the most racist enclaves of the entire planet, was capable of allying himself precisely with the people he had been educated against, then he’d also know how to connect with my sexual difference, a minority in the vaginal universe. And that’s how it went. He entered me, saw me, and was unperturbed. He got up later and I watched him, a Viking, over six and a half feet tall. So white. So blond. His build wasn’t perfect, but it was so commanding it was impossible not to admire the energy nature had invested in constructing him. He came back a minute later with four beers. He put my head on his chest and told me to sleep, that he just wanted to look at me as he drank. Admittedly, I can’t remember other moments more peaceful than that; I wasn’t accustomed to that pleasant feeling of having a man admire my body that way.