Authors: Rick Moody
something he hadn’t told me, a certain charcoal secret, a lost cat in the fringed outback of his psychology, and he said,
Think of human sexuality as a continuum with inertia at one end of it and satiety at the other, two ends that meet somewhere
we
can’t see,
please not the language of the department office right now, could we try to keep this in the Vulgate, he ignored me: he was
just a kid, scrawny, homely, no good at ballgames of any kind, last to be chosen when choosing up sides, happened to be friends
with this one girl, the beauty of the middle school, theirs was the profane friendship destined to be crushed in the imposition
of social order, something like that, when the mists of childhood receded once and for all she would have nothing to do with
him, but in the meantime the two of them ate Twinkies in the lunchroom, traded secrets, as all these athletes and student
councilors came by to talk to her, ignoring him, unless to inquire about aspects of algebra or geometry likely to turn up
on an examination or pop quiz,
would it be all right if they copied from him,
they were ambling by in order to impress Sapphira with the fruits of their boyish masculinity, they would perhaps say hello
to him then, and then later in the halls it was if he were masked or cloaked or otherwise concealed, outside of the radiating
force of Sapphira, no longer her satellite, moon to her great Jovian significance, her efflorescent girlhood, she would telephone
him for forty-five minutes after the bus ride home and speak of how Kevin or Tom or Lenny had tried to get her to agree to
this or that
home breast exam,
or the like, and then one afternoon when her parents were vacationing or on business, in autumn, leaves the colors of unrestored
frescoes, Sapphira invited him over, arranged in hushed tones to meet, and once inside the door,
I
have an idea for you, you are so wonderful, you are my best girlfriend, you are my one and only, and I want you to be just
like me, come on in, girlfriend, sister of mine,
and next he knew they were in her room, and she was helping him off with his
jeans, helping him off with his T-shirt, and helping him
on
with her white underpants, and then her trainer bra, and then her plaid, pleated field hockey skirt, her eyelet camisole,
and then they were in her parents’ bathroom, with the vanity mirror, turning him, as on a Lazy Susan, to appreciate all angles,
scattering widely upon the glass table the pencils and brushes of her trade, and,
God, here is the difficult part, I was so aroused, I have never felt so passive and so aroused, as she ringed my eyes with
her lavender eyeliner, as she brushed on the mascara, as she rouged me, covered my actual physical blushing with her Kabuki
cultural blushing, as her hands danced all around me with delicate embraces, it was as though she had a hundred arms, like
she was Hindu statuary, I had never been so loved as I was loved now that I was a girl, I had never been so esteemed,
and she even had a wig, which was sort of a bow-headed thing that a cheerleader might want to wear, with short bangs, and
Sapphira herself had been a cheerleader so she ought to have known, even if she was only wearing chinos and sandals and a
sweatshirt that afternoon,
And she even painted my toenails in a red-umber, the color of menstrual efflux, and it was true, as I lay upon her bed with
the fringe skirt, and she hugged me and called me her rag doll, that I had never felt so scorched as I felt then, and I knew,
I knew, I knew, I knew what I was, so outrageous in my elevated state that I had to run into the bathroom to gaze on myself
all over again, feeling a racing in myself that I had never felt before, the teleology of desire, the bound and cauterized
site of the feminine, that’s how it was, and I was so ashamed, and so ashamed that she knew, and she knew that I knew, and
she visited upon me a knowing smile, and it was that smile that did it, that toppled the care
fully erected façade, and I began demanding, Get this stuff off of me, Get this stuff off me, even as I knew now what she
was to those guys, to Kevin or Tom or Lenny, she was no different from what I was then, I could have provided for their needs
as well as she, could have provided the trophy, the object, the ravishment they desired, I had become Americas delightful
exotic doll;
this was a heartfelt display to be sure, and obviously it would not have been polite for me to turn away this difficult and
generous admission, but I was still
upset,
you know, I was still
deterritorialized,
and if he tried to explain that this assumption of the clothes of
the slut from up the street
gave him access to femininity, I was going to have to get shrill, I was going to swallow a hunk of him, with my vagina, if
necessary, some hunk of bicep or quadricep,
Who, then, is this other to whom I am more attached than to myself, since at the heart of my assent to my own identity it
is still he who agitates me?,
I told him we needed to
leave now,
we needed to pay the check, goddammit, for once in our lives we would pay the check without arguing about whose turn it was
to pay, because we needed to leave now, and there was a flurry of settling up and tip-leaving, his hands trembled at the astronomical
sum, his
essential tremor,
and the bottled blonde with the decorated navel didn’t even give him a second look as she swept the six ones and change into
her apron and carried the two twenties back to the register, and we eased between the empty conversations in the Upper West
Side bar, the discussions of cars and shares in the Hamptons and good mutual funds, and I, in my
tempest,
insisted on a cab, though we had in the past argued about whether taxis were an expense that fitted into the extremely narrow
budget that we were trying to observe, and, if truth were a thing that
could be revealed by argument, if truth were some system of layers that you could husk when your relationship had assumed
its permanent shape, then it was true that our pennilessness, our academic poverty surrounded by this Rube Goldberg contraption
of cosmopolitan New York, by the limousines, by the price-gouging restaurants, by the dwindling number of our classmates who
practiced the
life of the mind,
by our undergraduate classmates who were now psychiatrists, or lawyers, or boutique money managers —this academic penury
was wearing us away, sanding us down, burnishing us until like the professors of our own youth, we were hollow mouths, reciting
things we no longer felt or cared at all about, we were the culmination of a genealogy of ghosts, Marx, Freud, Derrida, Lacan,
Nietzsche, Reich, syphilitics and cocaine addicts and income tax evaders, and I asked where in this arrangement was room for
what I had once loved with an enthusiasm dialectical, rhizomatic, interstitial, defiant, the possibility that
thinking
could save lives, as at the moment when I first heard him lecture, back when he was the assistant for
Intro to Film Analysis,
when he paced the proscenium by the blackboard in that room off of 116th, back when he smoked, chain-smoked, barely made
eye contact with those restive kids, how I loved him, back when he said,
Anorexia, the scurvy on the raft in which I embark with the thin virgins,
misquoting it turned out, in order to make a point about Audrey Hepburn in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
he wanted to make a difference and I wanted to make a difference, or a
differance,
a deferral, a deferment, a defacement, I recognized my own image in the eyes of that boy who was recognizing his own image
in me, a flickering in candlelight, candles about to be blown out in the hushed,
sudden interior of a bedroom,
flickering in the pink night of youthful graces,
all that was gone now and we had opened the windows of the taxi because the air was thick as bread, and we said nothing,
and the taxi idled in traffic on Broadway, my stubbly legs crossed one over the other, I needed a shower, and I felt cross
and shameful, unemployable, old, I felt he would leave me for a younger woman, like the barmaid, a trickle of blood at the
corner of her perfect lips, as I pronounced these assessments, these solemn truths about us,
facteur de la verité,
as the taxi with its geometrically increasing fare expelled us on 120th and we paid the cabby a months salary and we walked
past Grant’s Tomb, cromlech, dolmen, barrow, in our necropolis, what it was to be a woman in this afterlife, giving an extra
bit of effort in the going hence of what you once loved, he said nothing, the key turned in the lock, it tumbled the bolts,
as if the idea of the key were the perfection of an ancient ethics, I couldn’t believe that I would have to lose what it seemed
like I was about to lose, what it once seemed like I might
always have,
all the lights in our apartment had burnt out in our absence, he always left the lights on and the bulbs were always blown,
Let’s compromise,
he said, running his hands nervously across his Velcro crewcut, adjusting his eyeglasses,
I’m so tired of fighting,
and I didn’t know what I was going to do until I did it, though there was a certain inevitability to these next moments,
and I slammed the door, and I pulled the metal folding chair from under the kitchen table, situated it at the end of the table,
situated it for spectatorship,
I have a vagina,
I said,
I
have a uterus, I have a cervix,
he nodded wearily, and I said,
Man’s feminine is not woman’s feminine,
and he nodded wearily, and I told him to quit nodding,
and I asked him if he happened to know where his
shoehorn
was, and he shook his head, no, and I said,
Of course, it’s a trick question, but I know where your shoehorn is, because I keep it with mine, as with so many other things
you couldn’t be bothered to think about,
so I walked into the interior of the apartment, which was not so far that he couldn’t hear the emanations of my breath,
Look,
he said,
I
don’t know what I’ve done to cause so much difficulty, but I apologize, I honestly do, let’s let it drop, I love you,
and I could feel my steep decline coming on, as when the low-pressure system moves in and drives off summer filth, yet having
made the decision, I couldn’t let go of it, or maybe it’s more credible to say that it was obvious that I could feel like
subjecting him to this painful scrutiny and at the same time not feel like doing it at all:
I
demand that you deny me that which I offer you,
that sort of thing, a Saturday, a post-structuralist Saturday, the night on which I urged my lover to give me a pelvic examination
on the kitchen table, which he refused, of course,
Oh, the old biology is destiny argument, it doesn’t suit you at all, and don’t you think you’re acting childishly?,
was and wasn’t, in my view, and the torrents of my argument were and were not forceful, and this
was and was not
erotic, this argument, like the arguments that produced that old sweet thing so much gone from us now, and the resolution,
it seemed to me, would be ephemeral, would never be what I suspected it would be, and so I went on with the display nonetheless,
climbing up on the kitchen table now, holding, among other props, the two shoehorns, the one from a Florsheim on 8th street,
plastic shoehorn of imitation cordovan, and the other a shiny metallic stainless steel shoehorn of my own given to me
gratis
when I had bought, on
Madison Avenue, this pair of sandals I was wearing, peeling off the ivory sandals, yanking down my beige nylons and then also
my lingerie, satin and from Victoria’s Secret, and then I hiked up my skirt, a thin, rayon, slightly clingy wrap in a floral
print, cream with navy blossoms thereupon, and I shoved a throw pillow from the sofa under my lumbar region, and I leaned
back such that I was facing him, it facing him is the right term, since, now, he was facing away, having assumed what was
happening, at last, and I readied my shoehorns, greased slightly,
They’re cold, they’re always cold, when they come for you with the speculum it is always cold,
with a splenetic passivity, he mumbled,
Don’t I need a light of some kind,
but I had one of these, a penlight that he himself used when grading papers late at night in our tiny apartment, when he
did not want to wake me, and I embarked on my tour,
Look, look, look, spread wide the external petals at either side,
and I helped him along, as he seemed a little unwilling to commit,
never mind that first trompe I’oeil for now, that little nub, move indoors, where the walls are pink and ridged like when
the sand upon the beach is blown by successive waves, which means that estrogen is present, because when menopause strikes
the rugae will vanish, straight ahead, if you please, the cervix has a different texture, sort of a pearly pink like gums,
dense fibrous, thick, rigid, averages four centimeters across, and the hole is a tiny dark spot, the os, like the hole in
a bagel that swells to threaten its cavity, in a nulliparous woman it’s a hole, if you’ve had children it’s more like the
creases in an old balled feather pillow, then up through there is the uterus, of course, you can’t see, up there, endometrium,
now lined with blood and sludge, the color of ugly seventies wall-to-wall carpeting, my sludge,
after which we head north up into the pear, because its shaped like a pear with a sleeve around it, and at ten and two o’clock
in the pear, little holes, oviducts, and these go around each ovary, like treble clefs, they wrap cursively around each ovary,
each end fimbriated, and in mid-cycle during ovulation, one egg gets primed to be released on one side, sucked into the tube
from the corpus luteum, and then there’s the hydatid of Morgagni, and the Mesosalpinx, and the Epoöphoron, and the Fundus
of the Uterus, and the external abdominal opening, basically open all the way up there, all the way up, unprotected, vulnerable
to the approach of the fleet of chromosomes, the little Navy SEALs coming up the canal here, although you have to wonder at
the fact of it from an evolutionary point of view how a perfect vulnerability makes for the reproduction of a species unless
that ends up being the locution of our biology, of our position in things, or, to put it another way, the victim,