Affection (13 page)

There was blood ; I peeled down my pajama pants and there
was so much blood there on my thighs. Somehow when I slipped I had caught the edge of the speaker box in my crotch. My vulva was horribly torn, my clitoris swollen to the size of a small orange.

My first panicked thought was of sex. I had destroyed the possibility of pleasure. I thought about life without the relief of an orgasm and knew I would rather be dead. I wondered if I could somehow develop the ability to have nonclitoral orgasms, the fabled vaginal ones that I had read about. I wondered about reconstructions, plastic surgery, a stitching-up of ruined flesh and the softer skin taken from the back of my neck or my elbow.

I lay awake in the pain for what seemed like a mess of days. Somehow, eventually, I would have to move; and so I did. I dragged myself along the carpet as though it were an assault course. I kamikaze-crawled. I butted up against the door and there it was like a mountain, something to be conquered. Somehow I managed to drag myself to my knees without fainting. I stretched for the door handle and miraculously it was in my hand, and the door was open. I was sprawled in the corridor and there was no one about and there was the lift at the other end and I had to crawl to it. I imagined ants dragging twigs hundreds of times larger than themselves. I thought of maggots, hatched and wriggling, seemingly on the spot, babies burning their skin on carpet, grunting their frustration, edging toward tears.

The elevator doors opened and the girl inside screamed. It must have looked as if I had been stabbed. She saw the blood and she shrieked.
Then she pulled me into the elevator and I relaxed into her panicked care. We were somehow in the lobby. I was kneeled beside, I was tended to. I sank into the hurt and the embarrassment of it all. They asked me what happened and I was not sure how to say that I was sleeping in the top of a cupboard without sounding like a freak. I was a freak. The ambulance drivers glanced at each other and I knew that it must be bad. I was thinking—I will never have sex ever again. I will never have an orgasm. I will die now. Must die. They gave me painkillers and I became drowsy and it still hurt, but I was distanced from it.

In the hospital the doctors came in packs and looked but didn't touch. The swelling had grown to the size of a baseball, a purple black canker.

The same question: “How did this happen?”

I invented a complex story about spring-cleaning, the same fall described in detail but with a different prologue. I knew that they could feel the lie. I was unused to lying. This invention, this half truth, was a new thing for me. They knew there was something amiss and so they held me, feeding me painkillers, trooping through the ward and asking me to keep my legs spread (as if I could have clamped them together in my present state). It occurred to me that they believed I had been abused. One nurse asked me about my living situation, my boyfriend. I had no boyfriend, or no one currently in the same city as myself. I thought about James, the boy from Gladstone, who wrote to me and told me he would wait for me. He would always love me.

“I fell out of a cupboard,” I told them again and again, and it must have sounded like “I ran into the door,” or “I slipped down the stairs.” It was a lie in its unlikeliness.

When a week was up they released me into the world. I had enough money for a cab fare but I would have no money for phone calls home or bus fares or food when I got there.

I hobbled to the hostel on crutches. I slept in the bottom of the cupboard with the speaker box murmuring a classical lullaby. Bach. I had a sudden longing for my grandfather and his piano and I took the tape out of the machine and replaced it with a mix tape, songs of sadness and longing. Love is a stranger of a different kind, ground control to Major Tom, Heathcliffe, it's me, I'm Cathy, I've come home.

 

 

The bruising faded, the swelling eased back to a kind of normalcy. After a time I began to masturbate, carefully, in my cupboard nest. No response at first, but slowly my body responded to my touch. A gentle climax. A slow return to form. The orgasms eased the loneliness a little. I abandoned the crutches. I found myself restless in the evenings and I left the confines of my student prison to wander the streets of Spring Hill.

The houses were beautiful. The beautiful people in them had city lives full of excitement and families and friends. Everyone was busy doing something of importance, it seemed. I glimpsed them through half-drawn curtains. I passed them spilling out from the doorways
of pubs. I came to know the streetwalkers by sight. I ventured to the edges of parks. I stood under the glow of streetlights and was bathed in otherworldliness. There were mad people pacing and talking to themselves and wandering in endless circles down streets, up streets, around streets. I passed the same man several times and suddenly realized that from his perspective it might have been me who was mad and aimless. I sat in my lonely gray room with the flowers sagging under the weight of days, petals dropping in time to the rhythmless strains of early Pink Floyd. I became restless quickly and I was back to walking. Time passed and passed and passed some more.

My brother-in-law pulls a photograph out of his wallet. It is a picture of a girl in a bikini. She is pretty in a glossy-magazine kind of way. Long legs, blond hair cascading down a perfectly tanned back. No cellulite anywhere on her body, no stretchmarks, a breezy summer face. He shows the photograph to the boys, his brothers. My husband leans over and takes the photo out of his hand. They are alike in some ways, the three brothers. They are tall and share strong features, chiseled jaws, long bones. En masse they are impressive, like young stags, sparring, locking horns, showing off. The three of them nod at his photograph, and his other brother rummages in his own wallet. Another photograph, another swimsuit model, this one his own. I glance at the pictures, their beautiful leggy girlfriends, and I feel sad
for my husband. No photograph in his wallet, his chubby dark-haired wife slouching back toward the couch where her book is waiting.

There is a photograph of the extended family. The parents, the aunts, the three boys with their respective partners. A summery beachside photograph and all of them grinning in their pastel shirts and shoestring straps and boardshorts. I am the odd one out. I am overdressed, in a black gown. I look like I have been transported there from another planet. I am an alien amongst them, the foreigner. We laugh about this photograph. “One of these things is not like the others,” my husband says. I laugh, but I am sad for him, my husband with his attractive family and their attractive extended family, their bikini girlfriends reading their glossy magazines and sunning themselves on deck chairs, and me.

 

 

I am approaching my fortieth birthday. I do so with a sad drag of my feet, walking toward the disappointment of my unmet goals. And then there is the dislocation between my appearance and my actions. I feel like a drag queen, strutting a rampant sexuality that is just an overblown façade. Smoke and mirrors and not particularly thick smoke at that.

In the cruel light of day I really can't bear to look at myself. That is the problem with stopping to think about it all. In the moment of sex there is nothing but forward motion. There is pleasure, the active taking of pleasure and then giving back and everything is in motion.
Now, with the light and the stale sheets still damp, there is a pause and I am left with myself and I am ashamed. This is what other women feel, I am sure of it. I see the signs of it in their eyes as they fail to meet my fierce gaze.

In my own head there are indigestible clues.

I walk past a group of boys who sit spotted and ugly in the drunken gutter. I hear one of them howl like a wolf and yell out, “Dog.” It is only a moment later that I realize he is referring to me. The moment lodges in my brain like a blood clot.

The fetid drunken homeless man shambles past and looks up at me, blurry eyed, his breath a nightmare as he spits out the word “Fat” and moves on. Another clot forms, throbbing in my temple.

The group of men at the pub who point at me and call out, “There's your girlfriend,” and splutter laughter to each other. A hook in my head that could catch fish.

I am unlovely. I am overweight. I am strident and combative. I do not wear matching underwear. I do not wear perfume or makeup or work out in a gym. I have grown older as we all grow older and there are still kids to grow up into that teenage moment of desirability.

I stand amongst the stained sheets wishing it were darker, wishing there was no mirror in the room, wishing there was still flesh pressed up against mine because when it is all kissing and sucking and touching there is no room for looking or pondering over those brainhemorrhaging kernels of derision lodged in my memory.

I chose to study drama because I didn't want to be a journalist and I couldn't think of another course that would teach me to be a novelist. I could have studied literature, I should have. I chose drama because of the musicals and the first kiss and the idea that there might be more stage kisses that might lead to other things. I chose drama because of the idea of sex.

The drama students reminded me of the peacocks we kept at home. Flamboyant. They regaled each other with loud and theatrical stories during breaks. They leaped up on tables. They all seemed to love Shakespeare and quoted scenes from Shakespearean dramas at every opportunity. I watched, entertained but slightly disquieted. They were all so beautiful. The girls were thin and had clear skin and intelligent eyes. The boys were toned and fit with interesting haircuts. I snapped
back into my shell. I was a silent witness to their performances. I was an average student. I couldn't sing my chakras in Voice and Movement like the other students could. I felt silly standing in a circle and feeling the energy of the rest of the group. We all had to leap in the air and say “Ha!” when the energy was right, but I was always a fraction late, responding to the sudden movement of the students rather than some kind of universal force. They spoke about spirituality as if it was a science. They talked about “the muse.” I went back to my lonely flat in the evenings and wrote my stories and my poems as I always had and I suspected that there was no muse, there was just a lot of hard work and persistence. I couldn't say this to them.

One day we were sitting in the refectory and they were talking about sex. I had begun to collect the classic texts, Anaïs Nin, Georges Batailles. I read all the books that would have been banned at home. I had a growing appetite for voyeurism. Sometimes in my night wandering I would look through curtainless windows and see people copulating, and I would stand and watch until it was done. I was learning about sex. There was nobody to practice with, but there was a whole world of information churning in my imagination. If the other drama students could talk about sex then so could I. I suspected I could hold my own.

They giggled as they spoke about head jobs, cunnilingus. The forbidden things that their parents had warned them of but they had discovered were more enjoyable than expected. I felt as if, finally, I
had adult contact, adult conversation. Nothing could be prohibited in such risqué and exciting company.

“I never expected I would actually enjoy giving a head job,” one of them said, blushing slightly but continuing with her bold talk. We were drama students, and sex talk was like that: dramatic and bold.

“Condoms,” said one of them and was treated to a deluge of condom stories.

“Orgasms,” said another and the orgasm stories rained down.

“Anal sex.”

“Oh,” I said, “I haven't tried it with a boy, but I like it. Or I like doing it to myself.” I laughed. At last I could join in with their bawdy talk. “I like the feel of it. It's more exciting, maybe because of the pain. Maybe that focuses the pleasure.” The others just stared at me, in silence. I had overstepped some kind of invisible boundary that I didn't know existed. I needed to back out quickly. “But I haven't tried it with a real person. Only masturbating. Only just a little bit. Not a whole penis, small things, hardly anal sex at all really.”