Ghosts and Other Lovers (23 page)

It did continue, and grew more strenuous as her strength, her curiosity, her imagination, all her appetites increased. She no longer feared getting fat; on the contrary, she was eager to gain weight. She wanted to be stronger, and she needed more weight for muscle. More flesh was not to be sneered at, now that she knew how flesh could be caressed and aroused. She ate the meals that were prepared for her, and more. She no longer had to be obsessive about controlling her intake of food because it was no longer the one area of her life she felt she had some control over. Now she controlled the creature under her bed, and their passionate nights together were the secret which made the daytime rule of parents, teachers, and rules, bearable.

Her nights were much more important than her days, and during the night she was in complete control. Or so she thought, until the night her creature did something she didn't like.

It was no big deal, really; he just happened to trap her in an uncomfortable position when he got on top of her, and he didn't immediately respond to her attempts to get him to move. It was something anyone might have done, inadvertently, unaware of her feelings -- but he was not "anyone" and he'd never been less than totally aware of her every sensation and slightest desire. Either he'd been aware that he was hurting her because he'd intended it, or he'd been unaware because he was no longer so much hers as he'd been in the beginning, because he was becoming someone else. She wasn't sure which prospect she found the more frightening.

The rot had started in their relationship, and although each incremental change was tiny -- hardly noticeable to someone less sensitive than she -- they soon demolished her notion of being in control.

She was not in control. She had no power. She lived for her nights with him; she needed him. But what if he didn't need her? What if one night he no longer wanted her?

It could happen. He'd started to criticize, his fingers pinching the excess flesh which had grown back, with her greed, on her stomach and thighs, and she could tell by the gingerly way he handled her newly expanded breasts and ass that he didn't like the way they jiggled. When he broke off a kiss too quickly she knew it was because he didn't like the garlic or the onions on her breath. The unspoken threat was always there: one night he might not kiss her at all. One night he might just stay under the bed.

She didn't think she could bear that. Having known sex, she was now just like all those people she'd found so incomprehensible in books and movies: she had to keep on having it. And she knew no other partner would satisfy her. She'd been spoiled by her food man for anyone else.

She began to diet. But it was different this time. Once not eating had been pleasurable and easy; now it was impossibly difficult. She no longer liked being hungry; it made her feel weak and cranky, not powerful at all, not at all the way she'd used to feel. This time she wasn't starving to please herself and spite the world, but to please someone else. She went on doing it only because she decided she preferred sex to food; she could give up one if allowed to keep the other. And by promising herself sex, rewarding herself with explicit, graphic, sensual memories every time she said no to something to eat, she managed to continue starving herself back to desirability.

This suffering wouldn't be forever. Once she'd reached her -- or his -- ideal weight, she hoped to maintain it with sufficient exercise and ordinary meals.

But the sex that she was starving herself for was no longer all that great. She was so hungry it was hard to concentrate. His smell kept reminding her of food instead of the sex they were engaged in. Except when she was on the very brink of orgasm, she just couldn't seem to stop thinking about food.

And as time went on, and she still wasn't quite thin enough to please him, not quite thin enough to stop her killing diet, she began to wonder why she was doing it. What was so great about sex, anyway? She could give herself an orgasm any time she wanted, all by herself. Maybe they weren't so intense, maybe they were over quicker, but so what? When they were over she used to fall asleep contented, like someone with a full stomach, instead of lying awake, sated in one sense but just beginning to remember how hungry she still was for food. As for arousal -- what was so great about arousal? It was too much like hunger. It was fine in retrospect, when it had been satisfied, but while it was going on it was just like hunger, an endless need, going on and painfully on.

She didn't know how much longer she could bear it. And then, one night, she went from not knowing to not being able. When her lover climbed into bed with her, swinging one leg across her, holding her down as he so often did now, keeping her in her place, the smell of him made her feel quite giddy with desire, and her mouth filled with saliva.

As his soft, warm, odorous face descended to hers she bit into it, and it was just like a dinner roll freshly baked. She even, as her teeth sank into his nose, tasted the salty tang of butter.

He did not cry out -- he never had made a sound in all the nights she had known him -- nor did he try to escape or fight back as she bit and tore away a great chunk of his face and greedily chewed and swallowed it. She felt a tension in him, a general stiffening, and then, as, unable to resist, she took a second bite, she recognized what he was feeling. It was sexual excitement. It was desire. He wanted to be eaten. This was what he had wanted from the very first night, when he had pressed himself, first his face and then all the other parts of his body in turn, against her mouth -- only she had misunderstood. But this was what he was for.

She ate him.

It was the best ever, better by far than their first night together, which had seemed to her at that time so wonderful. That had been only sex. This was food and sex together, life and death.

When she had finished she felt enormous. Sprawling on the bed, she took up the whole of it and her arms and legs dangled off the sides. She was sure she must be at least twice her usual size. And the curious thing was that although she felt satisfied, she did not feel at all full. She was still hungry.

Well, maybe hungry wasn't exactly the right word. Of course she wasn't hungry. But she still had space for something more. She still wanted something more.

The springs groaned as she sat up, and her feet hit the floor much sooner than she'd expected. She was bigger than usual; not only fatter, but taller, too. She had to duck to get through her own bedroom door.

She stood for a moment in the hall, enjoying her enormous new size and the sense of power it gave her. This, not starving herself and not having secret sex, was true power. Food and eating and strength and size. She knew she wanted to eat something more, maybe a lot of something more before the night was over. There was a smell in the air which had her moist and salivating with desire. She licked her lips and looked around, her fingers flexing, but there wasn't much of interest in the hallway. A framed studio portrait of the family hung above the only piece of furniture, a small table with a wobbly leg. On the table was a telephone, a pad of yellow Post-it notes, and a gnawed wooden pencil. The taste of the pencil was as immediately familiar to her as the salty tang of her own dandruff and sloughed skin cells beneath a nibbled fingernail, and did about as much to satisfy her hunger. The shiny, dark chocolate colored telephone wasn't as easy to eat as the pencil had been, but she persevered, and had crunched her way through more than half of it before the unpleasant lack of taste, and the discomfort of eating shards of plastic, really registered. She finished it anyway -- it was all fuel -- and then sniffed the air.

From the bedrooms where her brother and her parents slept drifted the rich, strong, disturbing smells of sex and food. Aroused and ravenous, she followed the scent of her next meal.

Manskin, Womanskin

 

H
e said, "I think we'd be more comfortable in the bedroom, don't you?" and I said, "Where's the loo?"

 

It was our first time alone together in his house and we both knew what we were there for. We'd met at a friend's party and had gone out together seven times in three weeks. Although we were still on our best behavior, and I was aware that I still knew very little about him, the urge to get closer was strong, very strong. A lot is made of the loss of virginity as a great moment of decision, as a trauma, even, but the loss of mine had been easy and inevitable, and my first boyfriend and I had been together for nearly eight years. Making up my mind to go to bed with my second boyfriend had been much more difficult, and now I felt that I had taken too long and been overcautious. I'd been so determined not to make a mistake, to be certain that this relationship would last -- and in the end we'd broken up after less than two years. This time, although I still wanted it to be the last first-time, this man my final one-and-only, I'd decided to take a chance and be a little braver about the unknown.

After three weeks of increasing warmth and interest the time was right. I was nervous, but willing. I'd meant to conquer my nervousness by staying close to him, so close that clothed kisses on the sofa would progress without any major break to the naked intimacies in his bed. But when you've gotta go, you've gotta go. So off I went and didn't realize until the door was closed with me inside the little room that the light switch was on the wall outside. But I didn't need light for what I had to do, and if I had, the moonlight sifting dreamily through frosted glass would have been enough.

I wondered, as I sat on the pot, if Fred was as nervous as I was. It seemed unlikely. He was thirty-nine, ten years older than me, and he'd never been married. Although he hadn't itemized his girlfriends for me, I gathered there had been quite a few. He didn't seem to have much luck with sustaining relationships, a fact about which he seemed rueful and a bit bewildered. It was obvious to me that he just hadn't met the right woman. Was I the right woman? I thought of the sense of intimacy and understanding between us already, despite the fact that we'd known each other only three weeks. Was it a false understanding? Sexual attraction was like moonlight, casting a glamour on things that would look terribly ordinary in daylight, like that garment, whatever it was, hanging from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. The moonlight made it look like a cast-off human skin, if humans could cast off their skins.

I remembered a movie I wished I'd never seen, about a psycho who murdered women for their skins, and I jumped up. I felt a little sick. Yet there was nothing grisly or horrible about the thing. When I touched it, it was so cool and fine between my fingertips that it might have been spun from the moonlight itself.

It came down from the hook into my hands as if I wanted it, and the sensation of all that impossibly light mass tumbling into my arms made me dizzy with desire. I just had to put it on.

It was the weirdest sort of garment I'd ever encountered, a full body suit with hands and feet and head. It seemed all of a piece, yet as soon as I looked for an opening it was open in my hands, inviting me out of my clumsy, constricting clothes and inside it. There was no zip or other form of fastening, yet when I pressed the edges of the skin together they bonded fast. It seemed that a light veil had fallen over my face, I could feel something lighter than the finest silk against my skin, yet there was no obstruction. I could breath as freely as ever, open and shut my eyes, even open my mouth and put out my tongue. I thought my vision was slightly affected, as if veiled, yet that may have been the moonlight.

I ran my hands over my naked/not naked body, finding it both familiar and strange. I had changed, the skin had changed me, but I was still myself. For the first time in my life I knew, absolutely, that I was beautiful, and, for the first time since childhood, felt completely at home in my body. No longer nervous, I went out to meet my lover.

He was waiting for me in the bedroom, in the moonlight which streamed through net curtains, as naked as I was. His unexpected handsomeness took my breath away. His body was more impressive than his clothes revealed, and the shadows chiseled what I'd first thought were the fairly ordinary -- though very nice -- features of his round face into more pleasing, classical proportions. I should have felt utterly intimidated by the sight of this stranger, but instead I was engulfed by a wave of lust that carried all my qualms and hesitancies out to sea, and washed me onto the bed, into his arms.

 

 

The first time I tried to make bread it was awful. I felt clumsy and irritable, did everything wrong, and in the end I threw the batch out. After that, it was fine. In fact, baking bread is one of my favorite things to do. But my first experience with it sums up my attitude toward first times in bed with someone new: it'll be awful, but worth it in the long run. Since there's no way of avoiding the first time, you might as well just be as relaxed as you can about it, get through it, perform the mental equivalent of throwing it out uneaten, and take your reward from the pleasures to come.

 

Things I'd heard from my friends made me believe it was true for everyone -- certainly for all women -- but
that
first time, in the skin, was totally different. Our bodies seemed to recognize each other, our bodies
adored
each other, and it was impossible to put a hand or a foot or anything else wrong. All, all was mutual delight.

It was the skin, of course, but while I was in it, I thought it was me. A me wonderfully, gloriously changed, but still me.

I fell asleep in the skin. In the morning, I'd forgotten I had it on, but in the bathroom, just as I was about to step into the shower, the skin suddenly fell away from me, running down my body and dropping smooth as water to puddle at my feet.

I picked it up and examined it in the dull and murky daylight. It was a silvery no-color, like a snake's shed skin, but without brittleness. Fine, supple, and strong, it had no weight, almost no mass. I crushed it into the palm of my hand, closed my fingers on it until it was invisible and felt like nothing at all. I could carry it in my purse or pocket, keep it with me always, I thought -- then I hung it back on the door where I'd found it.