Читать книгу My Body Is a Book of Rules - Elissa Washuta - Страница 17

Imagine a vise, Martin says, in which you are both the thing being held and what holds it in place, metal grinding on metal, that shining embrace.

ENID SHOMER, “MY FRIEND WHO SINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST”

Only penetration counts. I never let them stretch me for good, I remain virginally tight. Of course I keep a tally. Each addition proves that I am not afraid to repeat my mistakes until one of my decisions happens to be good. Counting backwards is a must.

#24. You might be a hologram. I might be psychotic, conjuring up the deep wells above your clavicle, your lips ten times softer than the skin inside my wrists, your hair the color of the gold that hangs from my neck and ears when I want to gleam. I never even asked for you. I would not have known what to ask for, could not have imagined the strong arch of your eyebrows. I don’t even have to ask you to take it slow. “How am I so lucky?” you ask. “How am I so lucky?” I ask. People want to know whether you’re my boyfriend, officially. I want to know whether you’re real.

You’re not. Two months in, we break up in my car. I draw a graph in the air: my affection started down here and went up, but you started at the same place and plummeted down; I end with my index fingers in the air, pointing at nothing. I cry for two days. Two weeks later, sitting with good friends on rocky Alki Beach in West Seattle, I take pictures of my pastel high-tops. In the bright sunlight we’re finally seeing lately, I see every pore on the lavender leather, and I see my shiny shin pores, and I know that I’ll start to forget you soon, but I couldn’t dump myself if I tried.

#23. My best friend broke up with you months ago. She has granted me permission to add you to my list. Months after you two stop being civil, I go over to your apartment and step around the jumble of the possessions you aim to sell before migrating south.

You say you cannot wait for the rebellion, that MDA is ecstasy’s prettier cousin, that Bill Murray makes a better Hunter S. Thompson than Johnny Depp does, that you’re really into this Native resistance in my blood, that my breasts are a nine point five out of ten. You want to know about her new boyfriend.

The sex is fine. The hugs are excellent, exactly what I was looking for, what I bartered access to my insides for. We are alike, unsure of ourselves but inflated by the blustery notions we stuff inside our chests to keep us from caving in. You define your identity by what you are counter to; I define mine by my voids.

Long after you’ve left town, my friend and I drunkenly conduct a year-in-review of what we’ve been up to and how our tallies have swelled. Astonished that we didn’t mind sharing dick, she says, “We’re kinda like Mormon wives now.”

#22. I want you more than I have ever wanted any bartender. I see you twice a week at karaoke. Your Acqua di Gio, cologne of choice of frat boys, pokes into my scent memory. We flirt for weeks while I watch you charm the customers; we have a couple of platonic-feeling dinners that I wish were real dates, and I learn that you hate the bar, hate flirting with men for tips, but the unspoken truth is that you’re not skilled at much and your body is compact and hard. I tell you I’m going to teach you about how to write essays for your community college class, but instead, we get trashed, and you take me home. You do me for five hours. We only rest when you go outside in your boxer-briefs and piss on your neighbors’ house. You keep doing me long after my vadge turns to baguette crust. When you slur that you love me, I tell you to shut up and come.

I tell you I am taking your studded belt, and if you want it back, you will come to my place soon. All the bar patrons have seen the belt circling your waist like Saturn’s rings. This trophy lies on my bedroom floor while you tell me, twelve hours later, via text, that you made a mistake that we should never speak of again; while I drive around at night, wishing I had never been born; while I give you my order at the bar and pretend, for your sake, that we have never met.

In a few months we are pals again. On the bar’s anniversary night, I pass by as the fleet of bartenders and bar-backs gather on the sidewalk for a photo. You wear cross-trainers with your tux, like a boy going to prom, and for the first time, all my attraction is gone, and I almost love you like a sister would.

When you tell me that you got so mad at your girlfriend that if you were gay and she were a dude you would have hit her for sure, I have to stop with the love.

#21-18. During my first long Seattle winter, you men come and go like customers at the café where I work. None of you have last names. You have Prince Albert piercings and shaved body parts. You crumple my dress into a ball, try to tear it off me, or lay it over an end table. You buy me drinks and steal my credit card. You dwell in trashy bars and sometimes my quiet bedroom. You leave suck marks, bruises, and scratches on my body; shriveled condoms on my floor. Your faces blend together like melted plastic. I meet you without well-formed expectations, giving you nothing to rise to.

I tell friends half-truths about being stable now that I am in Seattle and on the right meds. I say I have some issues left to work out. I do not usually say that this entails straddling strangers.

In my East Coast circles, random sex was never really random, and nobody ever used the word anonymous, but in Seattle, I can absorb every one-night stand into my body and keep it there. Once I bring you into my home or cautiously enter yours, then exit, I can avoid seeing you ever again, having failed to get what I was looking for. What do I get out of this? I don’t know. If I knew, I would find somewhere else to get it.

#17. For my twenty-third birthday, two days after Thanksgiving, most of my friends are out of town and unavailable to celebrate, so I decide to settle for a one-night stand and a back rub. A friend and I go to a hipster bar where sombreros and fake flowers decorate the ceiling. Over dinner earlier, she told me I am good at making sultry eyes, so I practice this tonight. I catch your attention. You buy me a drink, and I invite you home. I have condoms and lube beside my bed, and you say I am very well prepared. After my back rub, we have quick missionary sex. Afterward, in the bathroom, I find blood on the toilet paper, blood on the condom, just a little. This is not my period. Not since my first time have I bled like this.

At seven, you ask for directions to the bus stop. We avoid exchanging numbers. We don’t kiss goodbye. We smile and say, “See you later,” even though we won’t. All day I feel strange about how good the downstairs door sounded when it shut behind you, and how much I believed your kind goodbye smile. In my apartment, there is no trace of you but the shriveled, reddened condom; you never existed.

#16. Saturday morning, Halloween weekend, I stroll through the farmers’ market on your arm, dressed in a naughty nurse costume, a winter coat, and a pair of Nikes. In the car I point out the mountains, now snow-capped, and you tell me about being a toddler in Siberia and tunneling through deep snow. You are an electrical engineering graduate student, a member of a research group; you are the first man I have slept with who has his shit together. When I realize this, I feel silly and cheap, and in the skimpy nurse costume, I am. You tell me you will see me again, but not during the week because you cannot afford the distraction. I wish I had a change of clothes. I wonder whether I should be hopeful when you hold my hand; I wonder whether my neck is covered in bite marks from last night. As it turns out, I shouldn’t be hopeful; you never left a mark.

#15. On our third date I summon the courage to ask your last name, but I still do not ask your age. You say you walk with your hips forward because it makes walking easier. When I first saw you stacking glasses behind the bar at the Crescent, I was quite sure I would never rip off all your clothes. I was right: we strip separately, me, then you.

When you end it, you admit that you are thirty-four, as though it’s nothing that you are twelve years my senior. In the months after, we see each other a few times around Seattle and pretend we never met. When I see you on a bus, I sit across the aisle from you, never turning my head to look. My peripheral vision provides glances of your leather sneaker on your knee, your green knit cap, but no explanations of what I was lacking, what in me could make you turn to stone when you look back at me.

Months later, I will duck into a used video game store near the University and see you behind the counter. While I browse in silence, I think of your dump of a place, your college-hippie-chic tapestry covering your bedroom’s French doors to offer privacy from your roommate, your mattress on the floor. There was no lack in me; there was nothing more than my tendency to choose the grit-coated seraphs out of whom I had no business trying to force love.

I leave without buying anything, say, “Thank you,” and never see you again.

#14. We meet at a Melvins show downtown, and you kiss me too much, too publicly. I have a yeast infection but a girl cannot tell a boy she has a yeast infection, so I let every thrust hurt badly. When I drive you home to the other side of Seattle, you point at the broad, white horizon and say, “The mountains are out.”

#13. My friend tells me that while I am in New Jersey, staying with my parents during the month before my move to Seattle, I have a mission to give you relief from your cunt of a girlfriend. I accept this. I have seen no photos of her, and you never mention her, so to me she does not exist. I try to put myself in her place, but I have never been in her place, so I do not try very hard.

You have hips like a lady and treat me like a girlfriend. You keep telling me you are old, twenty-six, as though I’m still hanging from a placenta at age twenty-two. If we go downstairs to my purse for a condom, your parents will wake up, but you swear to God, swear to God you’re clean. I figure I am probably clean too, but you never ask.

You used to work at a pharmacy. In bed I tell you about my medications. A month ago, I started on antipsychotics for my bipolar disorder, but the drug is causing akathi-sia, a cocktail of anxiety, restlessness, and dread. There is something I can take, you say, but I do not believe that I will ever feel right again. This is my sixth psych drug, and it has stabilized me; chemical torture is the trade-off.

You ask me to leave silently. When I drive back to my parents’ house, my temporary home between moves, and I roll down the window to ruffle your smoke out of my short hair, I become a disobedient child again. You live farther into the state than I’ve ever driven, deep in a patch of woods, and as I drive, I realize I know nothing about what you do with yourself out here, who you see, how you make the time pass between trips to the diner and household chores.

I have a long trip ahead of me. I speed; I am home by two.

A year later, I call you to say hello after too much red wine. You tell me that you tried to kill yourself: Xanax, Valium, codeine, and a bottle of red wine. It didn’t work. I know about these things. I tell you how I would’ve done it.

#12. All my friends are drinking because I am about to leave Maryland for good. In the woods behind the party, you kiss me through a spider web. I am obsessed with the gap in your teeth. You have whiskey dick in my bed and say the feeling of my fingernails is inconsequential. I keep saying, “You’re so hot, you’re so hot,” because I don’t know how else to say that I don’t even care about sex—I just want to stare at that gap in your teeth and listen to your voice rumbling over it. Once you get it up, I feel too bad to put a condom on it.

Two days later, I load my boxes into my dad’s truck and unload them in New Jersey. In the month before my move, I separate proper adult clothes from ho gear and put the latter in boxes in the attic. Now I am an adult. I take Klonopin every night to sleep. Soon I will shed my old life like a cicada’s brittle shell.

#11. You tell me it has been weeks since you smoked the last of your weed, smoked the resin you scraped off the bowl, and now that you have been laid off, you’re too broke to get more. I will only see you because you aren’t high tonight. When you are high, your limbs are everywhere, your words move faster than your heart can beat. In your basement bedroom, there is almost no room to move because of the two beds, one full-sized and one twin. You make the bed for me. It could be day or night. We never sleep; we emerge from under the earth to sit in your backyard swing and share cigarettes at twilight. Later, when I see you at a bar, I pretend there is nothing between us, and thinking of your mostly empty beds makes me hurt.

In the month before my move from Maryland, you attempt to make yourself a fixture so that I will have to keep thinking of you when I’m on the other side of the continent. I remain noncommittal. You put me in a bath when I drink so much my blood turns to liqueur. Later, after I move to Seattle and you move to L.A., we meet by the Pacific Ocean, kiss on beaches as bleached as I had imagined I’d find in somewhere called Malibu, and rub aloe on each other’s sun-singed bodies. We decide to become a couple. A few months later, you visit Seattle and leave string cheese wrappers around my apartment. When you bring me to visit your rich relatives, who live in town, I flirt with your well-adjusted sixteen-year-old cousin, who keeps Strunk & White’s Elements of Style next to his bed. He makes eyes at me over the dinner table like a grown man. With enough money, perhaps any child can seem like an adult. You’re too old to be reformed from your full-mouthed chortling. While I watch you enjoy yourself, I wish I could raise you right.

I become a huge bitch. For much of your visit, I spend the hot July days out on my balcony, refusing to speak, while you paint at the dining room table in your blue-splattered boxers. You say you want to understand my bipolar disorder, but you are lying: you seem to be confusing “want to understand” with “want me to understand that I can will it away with some positive thinking.” When we fuck, it hurts so much that my abdomen sobs, while my eyes betray nothing. Even my vagina has had enough of you. I don’t know which is more terrifying: being loved or being asked to love.

We agree that we can’t make it long-distance, an amicable split that keeps my smoky moods from smashing into your kaleidoscopic crayon-box brain. We’ve been out of touch for months when your mother calls to tell me she had you committed. She gives me the number for the mental health ward and the best hours to call. Over the phone, you tell me you don’t believe the doctor when he says you’re bipolar, like me; and you don’t see why everyone is so upset that you’ve been expressing yourself by throwing books; and you just want everyone to let you be homeless. I tell you to take your meds and I realize how hard it must be to love me. The painting you made that week we sweated our skins off remains hidden in my closet. You’re too broken with reality to want to talk about anything but the fact that all of this is perfectly normal, and even though I want to cradle your crazy brain in my arms and try to heal you with all the everyday magic I’ve conjured up since my own diagnosis, I must remind myself that you’re far away, you’re in good hands, and because I regularly exhaust my powers keeping myself on the outside of the institutional wall, I have to let myself off the hook.

#10. On your couch, you lean in close, take my hand, and pull my fingers so hard they might come out of their sockets. One by one, my knuckles crack. Your friend is lying on the floor; he cracks my toes, and then passes out.

In your bed, we’re surrounded by your high school wrestling trophies. You haven’t been competitive since you were eighteen and skinny. After a ten-minute rest, you want to go again, from behind. I bury my face in the pillow and do not have to look at you while I wonder how we got from friendship to this. I tell you it hurts and you say, just one more minute, almost there. You are wrong. After we finish you crack my knuckles again, and I tell you to stop it, there are no cracks left.

You agree to dose me with an Ambien. I graduated two weeks ago, and have nearly nothing to do with my time until I move, so I am prepared to sleep all day and hope you don’t decide in the middle of the night that you’re ready for more of me.

Weeks later, you want to take me out on a real date. Fancy Chinese dinner, French film, cocktails, strip club. The place is called “Good Guys” and one of the women looks like a racing dog, all ribs, but the others have a little fat on them. I tell you I could strip here and you say I am probably wrong. You give me dollars to wave at them and I already know I have to put out. On the way to my apartment, you order me to stuff my cold Chinese leftovers into your mouth. You lick my fingers clean. In bed, even though I don’t believe in blue-balls, I don’t challenge you.

You talk too much. I put on heavy metal and scratch your back with my fingernails. I attempt some gymnastics and stand over your prostrate body—once the compact form of a wrestler, now fleshy and weak—and my feet pin your elbows to the bed. “How do other guys handle this?” you ask. “How do they handle you?”

“I don’t know,” I reply, then amend it: “They don’t, really.”

#9. You eat me out on the dining room floor of your parents’ house in the Baltimore suburbs while my best friend sleeps on the couch in the next room. You push your tongue into my mouth and say, “This is how you taste,” as though you are the first to teach me this. In the morning, your parents ask you for your sleeping friends’ full names. I am too afraid of them to walk past them to the bathroom, so I hold in my morning piss all the way home. Until I heard your voice cramp as your father gave you the third degree, you had seemed so adult, being a year out of college and much more self-assured than the rest of us, but like your sandy-eyed passengers, you’re somebody’s kid, tethered to the nest.

Early on, you make it clear that we are wrong for each other. You are looking for something, and I am not that thing.

Every time I sleep over, before bed, you fill two shot glasses with saline solution and label them left and right for my contact lenses, a gesture that I keep telling myself is just friendly, not boyfriendly, so that I won’t start growing on you like mold. The nightly ritual is the best thing you ever do for me. The worst comes after you ask, “Wanna try something new?”

#8. I should have known you were bad news when you rolled out of bed, opened your top drawer, and showed off your handgun before you even took the condom off. The gun is in your glove box the night you come to my apartment, crush up my anxiety pills, and snort the powder. When my ex-boyfriend knocks on the window, you get jealous and pull a knife on me. After I throw you out, my friends lament the fact that I will never again ride in that BMW. Only one points out that I shouldn’t have left my fingerprints on that gun.

#7. You finish in less than thirty seconds every time. I count. Afterward, you run to the bathroom and leave me alone for ten times the length of our fucking. You never admit I de-virginized you. You end it after a few weeks. I will miss your visits, our awkward questions about each other’s days and goings-on posed from opposing armchairs before we would stand and work on an embrace. The problem with this, you say, is that I am not Jewish and you cannot marry me. I wonder whether it was the Virgin Mary nightlight and archangel candles in the bathroom that sent you packing. I want to tell you that I didn’t mean it—not the countertop devotion, not the beneath-sheets detachment. I know you don’t get a do-over of your first fuck. All I can do is let you go.

#6. I skip my psychiatrist appointment to go sneaker shopping with you. For weeks we sit on your porch, smoking, and you tell me you can feel your lungs dying. At my apartment, you finger me with a precision I have never known while you talk on the phone. Your best friend wants to know why we aren’t at Starbucks yet, and you tell him, ten minutes. You get a few good thrusts in before you go soft, saying, “I guess I’m not really into girls.” Because you keep your shirt on the whole time, I never really get to know your skin. For months, in my apartment, I see visions of you in the blueness of cloudy days. I see you across the table again, see you in the bathroom rolling off a condom. You stop talking to me; I try hard to stop loving you. The task is so difficult. You are the one who will tell me, “Girl, you need a fucking bottle of Xanax,” who will hang up on my manic calls, and who will say you can’t truly give two fucks because you have no soul. But you do have a soul, and when I look at you from just the right angle, I can see it sweat.

#5. You keep a gallon of lotion next to your bed and need me to keep hand cream next to mine. You insist that I have problems and need to get professional help. From where I’m lying, worn out and hurting, fucked raw, I see all kinds of problems that you don’t. The problem is that I was devastated by someone else; the problem is that I refuse to walk down the block to get a smoothie without changing into a dress and high heels.

When I know we’re nearing the end, I tell you in tears that I’m close to making myself lovable, and could maybe even start loving you, too, but you say I’m so far off. I wish I could tell you that I have even grown fond of the man-tits you’ve always tried to hide and exercise away, an aberration on your skinny frame, and the way your palms fly to your chest when you feel insecure, but now, I see only certainty in your face as you tell me that you’ve had enough.

After you ditch me and tell my secrets to the next girl, I tell everyone about your lotion-hungry dick; you tell the Internet I never get wet.

#4. Your fencing weapon is foil, mine is épée, so we never bout. I collect medals while you fail classes. I mark the number of times we fuck on an envelope full of our condom wrappers, which I keep in an unplugged mini-fridge. We get up to nine—nine nights that I watch for you to walk into my courtyard, nine nights you refuse to sleep beside me—before you drop out of school and leave me to go home to New York. I will wait for you to come back to your studies. You play around with the idea of re-enrolling, but never do. I plead, “I miss you so much, will you ever come back?” and you say, “I miss you too.” My heart is stuck up in a tree, waiting for you to knock it down with a stick. I still quiver when I conjure up memories of my hands moving down the lengths of your muscles, and you still cannot understand why.

Just when I think I’ve convinced you that paradise is in me, you move to Florida, too far away to drive to me or think of me, with your sun-cooked brain trained on learning to fly planes. You finally start getting As and take on a serious girlfriend. In Facebook photos, your sweet tea body, losing the thin layer of baby beluga blubber you needed to keep out the Maryland cold, looks no more real to me than the palm trees that now appear around you in pixelated cell phone photos. I have never been to Florida, and I don’t believe that anyone will turn me on again. My paradise is lost.

#3. You tell me sex is funny, and it’s okay that my boyfriend is knocking on the window. You’ll go.

#2. For twelve months we burrow into your apartment. We keep tallies of our fucking on snow days; we set up a tent on the bed and sweat on each other inside. Later you will bring other girls into the tent, but forever you will know you shouldn’t.

We place one of my épées on the floor, jump over it, and declare ourselves married. You tell me that if I get sick of you, I will have to divorce you.

I am a good wife. When you drink yourself into the hospital, your stomach screaming, I ride in the ambulance because I have no car. The driver is reluctant to let me ride shotgun, but I tell him we have no one else around here, no family nearby, no friends. In the morning, when I am forced to leave the hospital, after you have been given a diagnosis of acute pancreatitis and enough Dilaudid to silence your gut, I take a ride from a stranger. After he drops his son off at school, he says he deals drugs, but not crack. When I shiver, he tells me he’ll warm me up. He says I can do what I want, it’s not like I’m married. . . . I arrive home safe, but you and I know that no matter what could have happened, someone else already ruined me anyway.

When things are good, we sit on the balcony and drink Kool-Aid and Everclear, smoking cigars. When things go badly, you ask me to put out a cigarette on your arm.

Weeks of nausea coincide with a late period and I make you drive me to the drugstore to buy a pregnancy test. I am not pregnant. The nausea stays for months. A radioactive tracer threaded into my veins, and through my gallbladder, tells doctors that the organ has stopped working. After I get it removed, I fall out of love with you; they might as well have excised my heart.

#1. I have given hand jobs, blow jobs. I have been eaten out and fingered. I have tried to fuck, but I was too dry and tight, and my high school boyfriend was too gentle to push. To be a virgin at twenty is to be in danger of being a virgin forever. My vagina feels sealed shut; even using tampons is impossible. So I tell you we have to take it slow. You are the last man to whom I say this.

You stand above me and jack off onto my belly and breasts. You demand that I blow you and that I immediately brush my teeth afterward. You want a naked sleepover. I agree to all these things. I do not agree to what comes after.

I get the morning-after pill at the university clinic. When I cannot stop crying, the doctor says that this boy may have taken advantage of me. I reply that she just doesn’t know the complexities of this exact situation, and I take a handful of free condoms. I bleed all day.

When I get back into the bed that used to be for sleep, I play the scene over in my head, as though I could improve upon it in my thoughts. But still, in every remembering, in the middle of the night you are on top of me. Still, every time, I say no, you say yes, and to you, it is nothing but a difference of opinion.