yes, it’s about sex
Monday 30 January 2006 | I like a cookie
I’ve never written anything like this before, but I aim to try.
After dinner at the sushi place where I’ve taken so many of my loves (The Physicist, Mandarin, Voldemort, various priest girls, et alia) I cheerfully invited myself back to the Brujo’s place. He lives out on Agua Fria down a rutted dirt road reminiscent of the one leading to the Beautiful Trench, only mercifully infinitely shorter. It was bitterly cold, as it has been every day for weeks, so when we arrived and he took a beside-herself-with-joy Fionnula (the 13-year-old black Lab, goofy and googly and addlepated, thrusting cold wet nose into my crotch exuberantly and hobbling around gamely) for a pee, I stayed inside, studying his William Blake tarot deck and poking around the bathroom, heating water for tea in a beat-up Revere Ware pan without a lid. I stood staring at the cupboard shelves waiting for the water to boil: absolutely bare, except for a couple of mugs and some seriously dusty, ancient-looking tea boxes. I can see why he eats out, I thought; and I thought of how I stopped cooking, somehow stopped knowing how to cook, when I came back from South Texas. Strange. It’s always been a thing I could do without too much thinking, and yet I remember at least two meals made in the casita that Voldemort and I had literally to throw away and go out for pizza.
By the time the Brujo came back in, though, I’d found an unopened packet of Celestial Seasonings something, ginseng I think, and taking our cups in our cold hands we drifted naturally enough toward the bedroom, that being the only place really to sit down. Also that’s where the books live—not his, which are all in boxes (he showed me the boxes, with an Indian tabla set and an Irish tabor perched precariously on top—”I don’t know how to play either one,” he said apologetically) but those belonging to the people who actually own the flat and are letting him crash there until March. Finny plopped onto her bed, a doubled-over queen-sized futon on the floor, and began gnawing at herself noisily the way elderly dogs do.
Inevitably I joined the Brujo on the bed, and we stared up at the skylight set in the wood-beamed ceiling. The moon is waning from full but the sky’s overcast, so the light seeping down was kind of a faint misty silvery lavender, barely enough to see by when combined with the light we’d left on in the kitchen. I curled gratefully into his right side, my head cradled on his shoulder in that peculiarly comfortable way women fit into men no matter, weirdly, what their size—it’s worked equally well for me with the Republican (six-four and 200 lbs) and M. (six feet and 125) and Voldemort (five-six and 140). I thought about this and how unfairly heterocentrist it was of me to be thinking that. We talked.
I gave him what I began by introducing as a syllogism, but then corrected myself partway through and confessed it was probably a sorites, as follows:
a) I love sex.
b) If I’m not already in love, I tend to fall in love with those with whom I have sex.
c) Historically I’ve fallen in love with some not-so-good-for-me men (and girls, if you count the Parisienne and the Painter, which of course one should).
d) Historically also I’ve not always been able to tell when I’m attracted to someone or when it’s just that someone’s attracted to me.
e) Mandarin noted correctly that once the bra comes off, the rest usually follows.
The Brujo laughed uproariously at this part. Ha ha ha, I said; and, I really need for my bra not to come off while we’re still working in the same office. I didn’t even touch on the part where I’m still some species of heart-thuddingly in love with Voldemort, and whenever I let myself be still for three minutes or even three seconds (if they’re certain seconds) I’m riven with grief.
(This is where it starts to get tough for me. But I have to include it anyway, or therefore.)
All this I said over the course of maybe half an hour or an hour, interrupted with lots of kissing and rolling around and taking turns rubbing backs and necks and shoulders. He’s a little taller than me, probably five-eight or thereabouts and beautifully slender, not skinny-skinny like M. but not a small linebacker like Voldemort either. (For all my passion for the latter, I could never deceive myself; the man’s built like Harvey Keitel who is, as I once noted in a review, shaped like a fireplug.) (And Christ, how I didn’t care, how beautiful I thought him—)
The Brujo is in his mid-forties, and I’ve never gotten it on with anyone as old, strange to say. I guess the oldest person I’ve ever been with was a health-food café waiter in Colorado one summer—he was in his mid-thirties then, I was 26 I think, and even M., officially now my ex-husband, hasn’t caught up to that age. The Brujo’s mousy brown hair is freaked with silver, strikingly soft, and those very pale blue eyes, the iris almost silver too. Alco-Celtic skin, also surprisingly, incredibly soft, especially on his neck down below the character-laden crinkles and wrinkles, such beautiful crow’s feet, and a lovely sharpish nose. Observe/describe, observe/describe—but every detail, everything I notice, only says one thing to me, loudly, blaringly, like a pounding pulse or a blaring klaxon: This isn’t him. This isn’t him. This isn’t him—over and over and over and over and over.
Again and again tears come to my eyes and I prick them back. My hand on his chest, I can feel chest hair underneath the three mountain-town layers, wiry and crisp. I’ve never been with a guy who had chest hair, and he seems to intuit this and keeps asking me if it’s okay (but what would he do if it weren’t?). And then he wants to know things about me, and I want to tell him, hoping in a way that saying things will bring me to a place of feeling connection rather than disconnect, anguish, this place of feeling like all the cells of my skin and bone and hair and teeth and muscles and flesh are screaming out for something they can’t ever have again—
So we talk. He says, actually I’m already starting to fall in love with you. That’s a wild thing to say but there it is. He says, you’re so beautiful. He says, I’m crazy fond of you. He says—but I hardly hear anything, I’m so attuned to the physical experience, trying to make sense of it.
As with M., I find myself again and again on top, raised on one elbow, initiating, insisting, intensifying. He kisses firmly but evenly, no savagery or desperation or mindless shaking need. But what, I think, what kind of person am I who wants those things? I shove it out of my mind, try again. Resolve to fall back and wait to see what will happen. Lie down, wait to see what he’ll do. He rolls over on his side so we’re facing each other in the dark. I find myself closing my eyes. I can’t bring myself to look at his face. It’s a pleasant, human, intelligent face, there’s nothing wrong with it, but I don’t know it yet. I don’t love it yet. He has a little moustache and bit of beard, which is also a first for me, but on his face they make sense, and he’d probably look odd without them (which I think he probably also realized at some point, and thus acquired them). We talk more, about music, about poetry. About divorce and having your heart speared on a pike and set up in the village square for people to gawk over (”oh God, if I were a man I would eat his heart in the marketplace,” I say, pace Beatrice). About his ex, about mine. Again and again he reaches for me, holds me, kisses me. Not weakly—his arms are strong around me—but the kisses are slow and gentle.
And not even slow in the way Voldemort could undo me totally by being deliberate, intentionally choosing a lower register so there’d be somewhere to go dynamically. I rein in my tongue, my teeth, I literally retract them somehow; his tongue stays put where God made it, doesn’t come over to find me. I wonder how to ask in a way that’s polite and not weird: Hey, what’s with your tongue? Are you, like, afraid of germs, or do you just not want to French me—is it too intimate or do you think it’s gross? I think of Voldemort’s mouth on mine, demanding, knee-weakening, as in the silly romances I read as a teenager. Somehow intuiting, our bodies reading each other on a microscopic level and responding, somehow knowing when to do what where.
I’m in pain. I hurt every time I hear the Brujo’s breath start to come faster. He slips one hand underneath my grey and white layered tissue t-shirts, running his palm along my lower back and groaning softly. I close my eyes, I try to be where I am and not somewhere else, please, just be here, nowhere else; no one else.
Eventually there’s a pause, and I decide that now is the best time to tell him the scary thing about myself I’ve been thinking of telling him. I don’t know how it will sound, because I’ve only ever said it to Mandarin and Persephone…I’ve never ever said it to the DBT. I take deep breaths, fortify my face by burying it in his armpit for several long moments. Finally I say: Okay. So things got weird with Voldemort in the end, and it’s been so hard, because he wasn’t just my boyfriend. Long, long pause as I struggle for composure and to find the least-offensive or confusing words. He lies absolutely still, doesn’t move, waits, knowing this is hard for me. He was my dom. And toward the end, things got, um, kind of weird.
He still doesn’t move. I don’t know much about that lifestyle, he says softly, eventually, running his hand up and down my arm, a light firm pressure, cautious, gentle; but I’m sorry you got hurt. Maybe you can keep telling me more about it when you’re ready. I’d like to listen, to whatever you want to tell me.
All the tension suddenly rushes out of me because of course I’ve been holding my breath waiting for him to react. I melt into his side again, limp with relief that he’s not judgmental or revolted (which was of course the flip side of life with Voldemort). We lie without saying anything for a long time, just wrapped around each other, holding.
Finally he says, I’m worried that I may not be the way you like. Because I tend if anything to be kind of unassertive. Not that there’s anything to decide tonight, we’re just figuring it out as we go along anyway, but, well, you know. I bite my tongue to keep from blurting out, No really? I never would have guessed. A stab of sorrow. Why am I the way I am. Why couldn’t I have come to the Brujo right after my marriage, before I’d known it could be another way? Why did Voldemort come into my life and my mind and my bed and show me there was something else, get me accustomed to having something vital and fierce and uncompromising, only to take it away? Always Tsvetaeva. You taught me how to live in fire / you threw me there / and then abandoned me on steppes of ice—
I said something about feeling safe with him, safe from being judged or criticized. Well, he says softly, but I’m not so sure you like to feel safe.
I feel despondent, despairing. Can I never be kissed by someone with a cocky grin that says I know you’re going to love what I’m about to do to you so I’m not even going to ask your permission, without also having to suffer the…the what. The abuse? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. I give up, roll on top of him where he’s manoeuvred me anyway a couple of times already, resign myself to kicking things off—thinking that, as with M., if I just kiss him hard enough it will drown out this little whingeing voice in my head, the one finding fault with this man, I can generate enough Aries fire for the both of us, I need lust to obliterate the cavilling inside me…
So I grab his hair at the nape of his neck, much more gently than I would have done with Voldemort, and kiss (gingerly) the (minor) heck out of him. His breathing becomes deeper, more ragged. Slowly he moves his hands across my stomach, my navel ring, bared in the darkness, and up to my breasts. I’m straddling him, bent over very delicately biting his neck (sensing that to bite harder or more or elsewhere would unnerve him), half waiting to see what will happen.
Gradually he works the cotton up over my breasts until the black lace French-cut is visible from below. I have an involuntary, vivid vision of Voldemort laughing and ripping my rose-beige lace knickers and bra off me. They’re still in the closet where I hid them, unable to mend them, throw them away or even look at them without having to stuff my hand in my mouth to stifle a scream. How is he doing it with her, I wonder fleetingly. I can barely—I stop my thoughts, turn my mind.
The Brujo has managed to liberate my left nipple from the black lace. I shiver and can feel it pucker against his palm. His breathing is rough and regular now and in a flash, it feels to me, several things happen at once in my brain and in the world:
He lifts his mouth to my breast—
Jeremy Davies: Did I hurt you?
Maggie Gyllenhaal: No…
—and you’re so beautiful, so beautiful, he breathes. He’s already set up the projection, I think numbly. You’re so beautiful and I adore you—
But I don’t even have time to think about this or to be alarmed because suddenly I am sitting on the floor of Maman’s guest bedroom, the ceiling fan, the novels stacked up on the floor, my fountain pen with green ink, my body in the last effortless summer of fitting into size 2 jeans and shorts, before antidepressants and birth control pills and inertia and sorrow and a desk job all combine to turn me into a squidgy size-6 mushroom who can’t button those shorts which will probably have to be surrendered to Goodwill.
I’m on the phone with Voldemort, who’s in Missouri and returning to the Trench in a few days. He’s telling me animatedly about the Sallie Tisdale book he’s just finished and how disappointed he was in it, as it’s less a social history than a dull memoir. I admit how much I love to talk during sex—not necessarily cock-cunt-pussy-prick, but just talking—continuing the conversation on another level. And I hear him laughing and finishing my sentence—I know, me too; you’re talking and making out and then suddenly it’s like Hey, where’d you go?! and you’re suddenly all alone—
And loss rivets me through like a cold rapier and with no word of explanation or anything I burst into tears. It takes the Brujo a swift moment to figure out what’s going on, disengage from my breast, reclothe it and me, and wrap his arms around me tightly murmuring, It’s all right, it’s fine, it’s just fine. I’m distantly glad it’s fine, because I can’t do anything about it anyway—I just sob, the way you would if someone slapped you in the face.
And I know how you sob if someone slaps you in the face, because this happened with me and Voldemort once, maybe a year ago. He let me know beforehand, I could have safeworded out, but I was as curious as he to see what would happen. And he’d already taken me in so many other ways, dripped candlewax on my bare skin, caressed me with blades of knives (never once hurting me, aroused solely by my willingness to submit, by my trust), tied me with silk so I couldn’t move and touched me until I thought I would faint from pleasure—I really didn’t think being slapped would be that different. He only did it once on each cheek, not hard, calculated in that way he had of knowing exactly how much force to use, enough to startle me and show his passionate interest but not enough to hurt, never hard enough to mark my skin. And to both our surprise and horror I sat for a split second with my head drooping and then I burst into shocked tears. Immediately he had pulled me to his chest. Okay. Okay, now we know. We won’t ever do that again, okay? I promise.
And he had kept that promise. As he’d kept his promise never to leave me, right up until the minute when he stopped.
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