That Thing You Do With Your Mouth: The Sexual Autobiography of Samantha Matthews as Told to David Shields (9 page)

I loved the first part of Anne Enright's
The Forgotten Waltz
; I literally laughed out loud and cried at the same
time. She hits a nerve for me when she talks about sex, adultery, alcohol, guilt. She writes what I think but never say (publicly).

Why am I hiding all the time?

Ani DiFranco:

       
We don't say everything that we could

       
So that we can say later

       
Oh, you misunderstood

       
…

       
We lose sight of everything

       
When we have to keep checking our backs

       
I think we should all just smile

       
Come clean

       
And relax

I work best when there's no tiptoeing around, so I appreciate that you haven't held back. It focuses me and strips away everything superfluous. Shut up and get to the fucking point.

When I was twelve, I was told I was going to have to wear a back brace. (I know you've had your own back issues.) I can remember the doctor's visit—a numbed-out, bass-less heartbeat in my ears, like a speaker with the volume turned all the way up but no music coming out, just that raspily whispered
ehhhhhh
sound. If someone were to press play, the sound would blow everyone out of their seats. I heard the doctor give me the diagnosis, the fuzzy-speaker noise over his gibberish keeping me a safe distance away from what he was saying.

I wore my brace religiously; it never occurred to me to do any different. I'd been sentenced. I accepted it and adapted. Making me wear a brace was just another thing someone else decided to do to my body. Something else to paralyze me.

I have a need to scream almost all the time.

My body and thoughts curl into one another again and again and again. A constant figure eight; there's no end to the circularity. My spine's trying to hug itself. It's a snake trapped mid-slither, squirming its way out of the pain.

Will I ever look at anything as not sick? It's fucking exhausting. I'm fucking exhausted.

In graduate school we were asked to do a life-or-death improv in which the end result would be you naked onstage. People chose situations like gas chambers in concentration camps, or there's a fire in your house and you suddenly have the brilliant idea to take all your clothes off, tie the pieces together to make a rope, and escape out the window, etc., etc. The exercise wasn't optional. Our acting professor was quite intimidating, and you just did what he said. This was part of being an actor—being able to be naked onstage—and we better be prepared for that. Of course I, particularly, was terrified.

We all started saying we just weren't comfortable doing this; the exercise should definitely be optional; it was a little weird and maybe even a little creepy, etc., etc. And then it went sensationalist Puritanical American. Now it was a
violation.
Everything is in America: it's dangerous, it's scary; people kidnap you, they rape you. There's always an underlying agenda, and even if there isn't, you should always be wary. This is how our thinking evolved about this exercise we'd been asked to do. Next thing you know, the sexual-harassment committee on campus was contacted (actually, I think my socially minded boyfriend was the one who made the call), and the committee asked for a meeting with all the students and faculty of the grad program. Our acting professors, who'd been put
in an incredibly uncomfortable position, called off the assignment, probably fearing they'd lose their jobs. Phew. No one was going to do it. I was saved. But then suddenly everyone felt awkward. We remembered we were in drama school, not business school. After all, standard social conventions don't apply in The Theater. Were we just scared and using this committee to get out of it?

Now that it wasn't mandatory, the group suddenly craved the challenge and decided to organize a special class outside of class, and whoever wanted to participate in the exercise could. My socially minded boyfriend who made the call to the committee was the first one to say he was in. What the fuck? I was trapped again. I was going to have to do it. I had to do it—not as an acting exercise but because I couldn't bear the thought of him being naked in front of everyone and me not being there. I couldn't handle the thought of him seeing the other girls naked. And I didn't want to miss out on the taboo experience as a viewer. He wasn't allowed to have an intimate experience without me. We got in a huge fight about it. I pretended I wanted to do the exercise when, deep down, I felt sick about having to expose my body to the other classmates—well, to the men. My private parts were incredibly private; if they saw them, my classmates would know what had happened to me.

In
Code 46
, a girl has a virus that makes her physically repulsed by the man she loves. She asks him to make love to her when all the while her body is thrashing around, violently rejecting his. For me, each piece of clothing I removed during that exercise was an act of violation. My body, my guts were screaming
no
, but the virus inside me “wanted” to do it.

We all went out for a drink afterward to talk about it. I was in a sort of shock state. Everyone thought it had been a revolutionary, cathartic experience, whereas I'd just publicly humiliated myself. I wished the life-or-death improv would have killed me with all my clothes on.

The whole time America has believed it's under “constant threat of attack” for its choice to be “free,” I haven't lived there.

I went to a photo shoot with a friend, Elena, who was one of the models, and there were a couple guys who were assisting the photographer. I'd met both of them in a bar with Elena a few weeks before the shoot and they seemed accessible and warm, intelligent; we had some candid but “normal” conversations. She already knew
them, so conversation went to a more intimate level, as she tends to talk to people that way as well.

The photographer started shooting her, and one of the guys sat next to me on one of the couches and started making really derogatory remarks, saying we were all going to do a
Playboy
photo shoot together. There was a gang-rape tone to the way these two guys were getting excited and talking about us: “Hey, ooh yeah, this is gonna be a fun shoot today” sort of remarks, that all-knowing “You like that, don't you?” kind of laugh.

Eli and I had come from a Spanish lunch, where each of us had had a couple glasses of wine. One of the guys started telling me he could smell alcohol on my breath and somehow found himself right behind me, rubbing my shoulders as if to prep me for his idea of how this photo shoot should go. I felt paralyzed; he made me feel like a prostitute who'd just shown up, and he was going to have his way with me. First he would put me down, to make me feel weak, vulnerable. I tried to go with the flow, as I do in these situations. If you react strongly, he might get violent, so better pretend a shoulder massage is totally normal when it's not. I unparalyzed myself after a couple minutes of his shoulder-rubbing. His body was way too close to mine, and I moved across to the other side of the room, shaking, and sat silently
behind the photographer. I left feeling like I'd been violated.

Eli left horrified as well, but whenever we ran into him in the neighborhood, she didn't seem to give it much importance and would just strike up a conversation with him, as though nothing had happened. Did I feel a violation that wasn't there? Did his words and actions penetrate me and not her? I was incapable of looking at him and hated him. A rage seared up inside me for months for not having responded to him—for not having told him to get off me.

Last week I went to a barbecue and there he was, the masseur. I immediately felt the space close in on me. I quietly pointed him out to William, who said, “Okay, relax, I was just talking to him and he seemed like a completely normal guy. You don't have to talk to him, and you don't have to be scared, either. I'm here. Also, people can change. This is your past talking here, sensing danger, the abuser, when there isn't one.”

Rather than ignoring him, after an hour or so, I went up and introduced myself again to him. He pretended he didn't know who I was. I didn't need to make things right with him. He should have been the one to do that. I needed to control the situation and make him human again, not a threat. Rather than holding my ground, I went to him.
Just like I wanted to tell my brother everything was okay. To protect the abuser. That. Is. So. Fucked. Up.

I can feel when I'm weak, and the loonies on the street sense it. I get approached, they talk to me, try to engage and get in there, to that soft, vulnerable place, fuck around with it, and I'm always shocked, even though I know it's going to happen before it does. There is this sixth sense, this magnet to darkness, and I find myself frozen, terrified for my life, again and again and again. To be honest, this doesn't happen so often anymore, but for most of my adult life, I've felt like burned on my forehead was a sign:
INVADE HER—IT
'
S YOUR RIGHT
.

Sound of a gunshot… Forcing a smile, as “you are your thoughts and expressions”… Still here, though… Feeling much better now after starting in a flat place and pushing through… Don't want to fizzle out toward the end…

I saw Milo again today. For the last few months I haven't picked up the phone when he calls, so he sent me an SMS: a smiley-face-and-tongue-hanging-out-of-the-mouth invite for a “girls' night out!” I tried something new and responded unapologetically with “I'm on kid lockdown mode—can't.” “Can't you sell them?” he
asked, to which I didn't reply. So, you know, in accordance with my new tactics, I actually flagged him down today as he rode his bike down the street, this guy, this flash, dashing monster on wheels. Guilty, addicted, like a moth to flame—there must be another expression. I emphatically suggested lunch next week. Not dinner. I'm getting better. Right?

It's been building for a while now and yesterday William and I directly discussed it: we're in the process of deciding whether we can be together. I'm just trying to get through each day with work and kids.

Heading to the cinema now to clear my head and/or fill it with things that have nothing to do with all this…

Watching actors in a film, I watch their backs/shoulders when they're listening to the other actor who has the close-up. I watch to see if I can see them breathing, how quickly or slowly, or the pulse in their neck—makes them real. On airplanes or buses or Metros, same thing: I'm constantly checking to see if I can see someone's pulse and the
rise and fall of their chest. I don't know why. Maybe to see if they're truly alive. It's an intimacy thing. It's something you hear and see only with your lovers. The heartbeat, the sound of the breath. I can sense a vulnerability if I can see the heartbeat in the neck, see what's really going on in there. I've always felt that the whole world is playing a joke on me, that I'm the only human/nonhuman. Perhaps I'm looking for clues in their vital signs.

When I was six on the playground, I looked down at the shadow my hand was making on the pebbled concrete and had a sudden, overwhelming feeling of not understanding how I got into this body. It was so constricting. I had the feeling that my energy was limitless and was now in a cage. Is my soul trying to connect to something formidably beautiful and larger and feeling frustrated by this physical construct of a human body? Maybe what feels almost spiritual is actually just the manic side of me. Maybe I'm
tocada
(“ill”). In the eyes during sex, I see/feel that same expansive energy I felt at six on the playground. It grows during orgasm and almost leaves the body—the waves of pleasure from head to toe, limitless, infinite. Right now I'm apart from William, but I can sense him, almost be him for a
moment, feel him, feel his nose, his mouth as though they were mine. I am him.

We're all star matter, right?

Maybe I should write Hallmark cards.

In grad school we were taught to always make your performance about the other person in the scene with you. Your actions were there only to get something from someone else. It's not about tone or emotion or read or facial expression or posture but desire to make someone else feel something in order to get what you want. In theory, through that approach, something deeper and more honest would always be achieved in the interpretation. You were to forget about yourself. When you forgot about yourself and were focused only on the other person, some very honest things could happen.

I say this so often: “I hear you”…

In an OCD sort of way, I still find myself staring at crowds of people—in a stadium, on a crowded bus, on a pedestrian-jammed street, all rubbing/chafing up against one
another—and I think,
They're all here because two people had sex
. All these people. Then I imagine the parents of one person and the parents of another, and then another, all of them passing through their mother's vagina, the most forbidden place on a woman's body. And we're not allowed to talk about that, or look at that, and most definitely not touch that. Especially your mother's, even though we did when we were born. Well, that's how I was raised: to feel shameful about something that, in reality, there is no getting around, or we all simply wouldn't be here. Sex is everything.