Snapshots: Heat and Porcelain

“If one woman were to tell the truth about her life the world would split open.” – Muriel Rukeyser

The Virgin

BLOOD AND COTTON

There it was then. If I hadn’t been robbed of my virginity the first time, then this second time definitely did it. There was blood in my underwear. Blood in the toilet water. I didn’t tell many people about this second time because of the first. What virgin gets raped by two different men in the space of 60 days? I didn’t know about the three sexual assaults against my mother until years later. I had always wondered why I had feared being raped so much when I was a virgin. I hadn’t even had a boyfriend yet. Fear, a type of energy, is most certainly passed along the bloodline, the placenta, the spirit of the mother to the child.

NEXUS

We had been out in the sunshine for hours at the award ceremony. I dont recall now what the award was for. Maybe for something I had written? Maybe for being .5 of one of the 80 black students at an all-white university? No matter. We had eaten the cake and shaken hands with the appropriate people. Now there was a bed in front of us. My bed.

I wore a brown sundress with flowers dappled across it. My cheeks were flushed. I could feel them. We had been dating for awhile but had just started sleeping together recently. It was a battle between sweetness and saliva. We wanted, at once, to hold each other and to break each other in.

The dress wasn’t to come off that afternoon. His hands were there, fingers grasping at the nexus of my thighs and hipbones, dress pushed up to my ass. Once we were finished with the bed, we had our way with the floor. How much more did we want of each other? More importantly, how much more would we take? We answered the first question over and over that day. We never bothered to answer the second.

MURDER ON THE DANCE FLOOR [Excerpt from my handwritten journal]

Andy has to go to Afghanistan in March for eight months to recover corpses. Peter called four times today. He’s a nice guy, but I shouldn’t have told him where I was staying. Peter and Andy work together as carpenters. At 3:30 a.m., I was waiting in the disco to get my coat while others lined up behind me to give their coats.

Scandinavians really never stop to consider what time it is when they live their lives. After all, it is the land of the midnight sun. The man in front of me turns around and takes in the full portrait of my face. Pleased, he declares, “You are so beautiful. I am from Rio. You are so beautiful. Those eyes.”

Before this man, there was another. While Peter was in the washroom, I was watching my lips in a compact mirror as I applied lip gloss with one of those ridiculous little brushes. The man came up behind me, put his hands on my hips and looked over my shoulder at my lips in the mirror. Is it any wonder I wanted sex? But not with any of these men. Peter told me later at the Mongolian barbecue restaurant that he could see sex in my eyes. Idiot. I never wanted to see him again. My need had nothing to do with them.

Camille, Lotta and I went to Chiaro, the nightclub down the street from my hotel. After two minutes upstairs and a full bottle of cactus cider, I was ready for something different. As if being in the heart of winter surrounded by Scandinavian models and drinking cactus cider wasn’t enough.

Once downstairs, I turned around on the dance floor and the one I wanted was staring at me. Waiting for me. I hadn’t seen him before, but I felt his energy from across the room. I felt the need for him before knowing he was there or knowing who he was.

After my initial reticence, the coming weeks were a bathtub filled with twisting, water and orgasms. We were immersed to our necks. We’d have wine, call friends in the middle of the night for condoms and laugh at the funny videos on European MTV. Room service seemed so appropriate with its muffins, champagne and obligatory flower. I’d just gotten an enormous raise and was giddy with all of my adult money. Forget the money. Was sex, especially this sex, free? It felt free. I cried when I left him. He said he’d write me from his residency in Cuba. He gave me prescription sleeping pills for the airplane home.

The Swedish Carpenters. Andy on the left, Peter on the right.

Chiaro billet.

PRETTY LITTLE MASOCHIST

I’m not sure how or when I became aware that I have a penchant for emotional warfare. I met my match years ago and quickly deduced that if I stayed with him, I’d wind up dead or pregnant. Neither was desirable. Usually, I gamble well and come out unscathed.

However, there was one man who crossed the line into emotional annihilation. I like pain as much as the next pretty little masochist, but there are some things that you don’t do or say to someone you claim to love. If you don’t know what they are yet, you will find out if you try them on me. I suggest you don’t.

PORCELAIN

The situation was ridiculous. I was dating someone here in this foreign country named One Happy Island, and my ex-boyfriend was visiting me. We had talked about getting back together when I was done with my assignment, but I wasn’t at ease with him in my new space. It wasn’t so much that I had to be faithful to the man I was dating on the island. He knew my ex was staying with me for the week. He was a boy, really. He was 21. I was 22. I encouraged him to pursue whatever he wanted. I had taken his virginity and I wanted him to use his new carnal knowledge in whatever way he saw fit.

But this ex-boyfriend had obviously come with expectations. As much as I encouraged my neophyte to be free with other women, I couldn’t bring myself to sleep with two men within such a short space of time.

It came down to me, the ex-boyfriend and a porcelain sink. I lived in the guest house of the prime minister’s brother and my shower window looked out over the Caribbean Sea. We were in the bathroom getting ready to go to the beach. I was bent over the sink, brushing my teeth. Before we acknowledged what we were trying to do, my back was against the mirror, my ass was on the sink and my legs were wrapped around his torso. I can’t say we had sex. We stopped. It’s funny how some of the most vivid memories are of things that never happened.

The view from my shower window in Aruba.

THE MEANING OF RESTRAINT

It was New Year’s Day. I got a text message. “You better be good today.” The next message was a picture. I could discern a whip laid out on a bed and not much else.

When I arrived an hour later, he made himself a drink and told me to go upstairs. We weren’t innocent people. We were two people who weren’t having sex and seeing what we could get away with. We didn’t care what the rules were, only that we weren’t having sex. It didn’t cross our minds that we might be defiling each other with our self-imposed innocence.

Him and his drink, downstairs. Me with a closed door behind me. There was a whip laid out on the bed. Two, in fact. A large one and small one. There was a black bra, stockings and a garter – all with the tags still on. A pair of black stilettos I had left behind were next to the bed with a note: “Put these on, have a glass of champagne and bend over.” A few minutes later, he joined me upstairs. He had other presents for me. Leather restraints. A blindfold. He cut the pretty new lingerie off of me and we explored the meaning of restraint together. We successfully evaded that demon, intercourse, for three more months.

HEAT [Excerpt from my handwritten journal, 4/4/06]

I was born to do this. I was born to do this. There will be blood on the paper because this is the only thing I know beyond myself. It is myself.

That’s it. Do you feel the tingling? Someone sitting in another place, doing another thing, is having an impact on your life. The moment before the pendulum repeats its arc. No stopping now. Do it.