Troika (14 page)

For reasons that not even my doctor can fully explain (maybe psychological, maybe neurological, maybe a bit of both), my ears have developed a sensitivity to touch, but not hearing, so extreme that I am convinced my nerve endings are raw, exposed to the air, dangling and thrashing like the translucent tentacles of a jellyfish. They pick up everything, my ears, every contact—a wayward strand of hair, the otherwise indiscernible texture on a fine cotton pillow, a drop of rain. The sensations are, unlike those generated in my breasts, not entirely pleasant. I am grateful for them, as any sensation for me is now a luxury, but sometimes it is too much to bear.

I’ve read books about spinal cord injuries that talk of nonvaginal orgasms, nonclitoral orgasms—the stroking of the breast or some other part of the body causing something either identical to or
remarkably similar to an orgasm. That has not been my experience. I get intense sensation, arousal even. I get those moments that used to lead up to orgasm: the slow, steady increase in pleasure, the anticipation of climax, the fear, sometimes a primal terror, that for any number of reasons climax will not be achieved. I get all of that, but I never get the climax. I get that sneezy flutter in my chest, in my brain, without the release, without the closure. I get a big tease that reminds me what I do not have—the nasty prom queen flashing a cruel wink after she steals my boyfriend.

Norma lifts my breasts and slides the warm sponge underneath. As the sponge touches my flesh, there is a feeling of excitement, a tingling, soft and warm, first on the outer layers of my skin, then, as if it is burrowing, deep into the core of my breasts—then down into my chest, where it seems to coalesce and concentrate. The feeling is not quite sexual, but it is, rather, a pleasurable and welcome sensual experience, one that far exceeds the sensation I felt in my breasts prior to the accident. Here it is, I think, the brain remapping, rewiring, creating neurons and receptors where they once didn’t exist, or if they did exist, were not so finely tuned. Norma now moves up to my neck, under my chin and carefully dabs the skin on my face, making sure that the soapy water does not enter my mouth, my nose, eyes, the canals of my ears.

Norma moves to my hair. She fills a pot with water and pours it over my head, shielding my eyes with her hand. Into my scalp, she massages a lavender shampoo from France—for years, my favorite. I love the feeling of her strong fingers pressing into my scalp, stroking my hair, stimulating the points at which each shaft of hair enters my scalp. She finishes, and I ask her to keep going a little longer. Norma obliges.

She then refills the pot and washes the shampoo from my hair.
She lifts two towels off the electric warmer. She wraps one around my wet hair and drapes the other over my body, from my neck down to my shins. As if she is kneading bread, she pushes and folds the towel on my body and thus both lifts the water from my skin and accelerates the flow of blood.

Once I’m dry, Norma removes from my dresser drawer the lingerie that Julian bought me last Christmas, and which I have not yet worn. It’s a beautiful, plum-colored ensemble from one of those old shops on Madison that sells sexy stuff even though it’s been around for fifty years: bra, panties and a baby-doll top. Norma lowers the rail on the shower bed and slides me back on to the mattress, propping me up so that my back is upright and pressed against the tufted headboard.

She arranges my legs before me. From this angle, I have observed my legs many times over the years—and they have taken numerous forms. There was the time Julian and I traveled to the Cayman Islands, when he wheeled me out on to the beach and laid me out on a chaise, placed a straw hat on my head and a silk scarf over my legs. I recall waiting for Julian to fully immerse himself in the sea before pulling the scarf off my legs, revealing them to the blazing sun, watching them for a half hour as they turned from deathly gray to a salmon pink. At least there is some part of these legs, I thought, that still works.

Before we put on the lingerie, though, there is the matter of lubrication that needs to be addressed. For despite my young age—thirty-eight—my vagina is as dry as an octogenarian’s. The paralysis has somehow impacted this part of my physiology as well. It is as if the body is telling me that I am not to even think about reproducing. And while there is almost nothing too intimate for Norma when it comes to matters of the body, matters of
my
body, this is
where she and I both agree that the task is mine. Norma hands me a bottle of lubricant. She turns her back, pretending to arrange socks in the dresser drawer.

As if I am resuscitating the engine of some rusted Model T, a tremendous amount of lubrication is required for me to have intercourse. I’ve got to slather the labia, inside and out, the clitoris, the first couple of inches of the vagina. But even that is not adequate to prevent tearing, so I squeeze several globs of lubricant into a plastic applicator—causing a mess in the process. I feel around for my vagina and insert the applicator. I push down deep, so that my entire canal is drenched in goo. And that’s still not the end of it, because Julian’s got to put it on his dick too.

“Okay, Norma,” I call out. “I’m wet as a twenty-year-old.”

Norma closes the drawer and turns around. “At least one of us is.”

With a soft towel, Norma wipes the excess lubricant from my hands, my upper thighs. She lifts my right leg and guides my foot through one hole of the panties. When she gets it up to my knee, she does the same thing with the left foot and, when she reaches knee level on that side too, pulls the panties up to my waist. She takes a step back, and we both stare at the panties, at the contrast between the silk’s deep purple and my pale skin. I nod, and Norma lifts the bra with two hands, spreads it out so we both can see it. “Mum, this wouldn’t even hold
one
of my titties,” she says. “Maybe half a tittie.”

I laugh as Norma reaches for my shoulder and pulls me forward, away from the headboard. “Arms up,” she says, and I comply with some difficulty. She drops the bra around my outstretched hands and then, after I lower my arms, she wraps her own around me—her huge breasts pressed up against my face—and fastens the bra in back.

“Stay right there,” she says, reaching for the silk baby-doll top. She drapes it over my head and pulls it down over my shoulders,
over my arms, down to my waist. She takes a step back to admire me. “Time for your hair,” she says, plugging the blow-dryer into the socket. For ten minutes, Norma works my hair like she is arranging flowers—with numerous permutations, angles, shadows. Finally, she settles on something feral, wanton and holds up a mirror for me to see.

“Not even when I could walk,” I say, “did I ever wear my hair like that. You directing a porn video tonight?”

The final part of the ritual is the perfume. Norma walks over to the dresser on which a dozen bottles sit on a sterling tray. “Which one do you want, Mum?” There are so many beautiful scents, and the bottles too are gorgeous.

“Anything,” I say, “I like them all.” Norma hands me a bottle, frosted and smooth, that I have not touched in months. I examine the top to make sure that it is pointed in the right direction and shoot one test spray into the air. I inhale the bergamot, saffron, nutmeg. I spray twice between my breasts. The atomized perfume settles on my skin and triggers a surge in anticipation. Careful to avoid my ears, I spray once on my neck and then a quick wave that sends a fine spray over my upper thighs.

After returning the bottle to the dresser, Norma lifts my left leg and crosses it over my right at the calf. She pulls down the baby-doll so that my cleavage is revealed, then pushes the shower bed into the corner and turns to leave. “Thank you, Norma,” I say.

“An honor, Mum. Now you give that man a ride.”

A minute or two passes and Julian knocks on the door. He, too, has embraced the formality of knocking before entering, but for different reasons than Norma. For Julian, his consideration is necessitated by an awareness of my self-consciousness, a diffident state that plagued me in my adolescence, caused me to cast my gaze to the floor, cover my body in baggy pants and thick sweaters, but that
lifted soon after Julian broke my uncle’s nose, a brave and principled act that awakened in me a confidence in my body, my curves, the possibility that justice exists—only to return the moment I awoke in the hospital and learned that I could no longer walk.

And even though Julian has seen everything when it comes to my physical degradation—the feces, the vomit, the urine, the necrotic skin, the bed sores—I just can’t bear for him to see me when my hair is a mess, my lipstick smeared, crust in the corner of my eye. Despite all that has happened, I still want to look like a lady for him.

Julian enters, wearing nothing but his boxers. When he sees me dressed up in my beautiful lingerie, bathed in the soft light of the candles, he stops and smiles, shakes his head. “You’re a hot piece of ass, you know.”

I loved Julian’s sweet vulgarity when we first began to date, and I’m grateful that he has not given up. “Still?” I ask.

“Still.”

He sits down on the bed next to me. He, too, admires me. And he does so sincerely and without a hint of pity or regret. He pushes a strand of hair off of my forehead. He lifts the baby-doll at the waist and places his hand on my left side, within that transitional band of flesh. He guides the shoulder straps down over my arms and tugs down until the fabric encircles my midsection. Julian leans over me and kisses me on the lips, and when he does so, his chest touches my breasts and an intense sensation ripples through them. I giggle, in part out of the discomfort of so much feeling, of so much
good
feeling, and in part out of shame. My nipples become hard, pushing back into him, bringing me great pleasure. It is a pleasure that, sadly, I know cannot be fully consummated.

Julian kisses me deeply, presses his fingers against my jaw—careful not to touch the finely tuned flesh on my ears. With his left hand, he reaches around my back and deftly opens my bra clasp, and
I enjoy the release that follows, the unpinching of the flesh under my arms, the dropping of my breasts, the slight expansion of the rib cage. When you are as confined as I am, a few centimeters of freedom are pure heaven. Julian lifts my bra, gently kisses my nipples, rubs his chin over them. And there it is, the rapid firing of thousands of stacked receptors; the oil heats, crackles, elates me, terrifies me with its power.

With my right hand, I reach down and tug at his boxers, rub my hand over his dick. I am relieved, flattered to see that Julian is still aroused, almost instantly, by my touch. He groans, pulls his boxers down over his thighs, and I hold him in my hand. I squeeze him tightly, too tightly, and he winces in pain. “Sorry,” I say. “It’s been a while.” There is something adolescent about our foreplay: the awkwardness, the speed, the clumsiness, the mutual concern.

“You sure you want to do this?” he asks.

“After all the work Norma and I had to do, you’re damn right I want to do this.”

Julian nods and looks down to my legs. He stands by the side of the bed. His boxers fall to his ankles. He slips one foot out and, with the other foot, flicks the boxers across the wood floor. I admire his erection. Julian runs his fingers from my hip down to my upper leg. He reaches the knee, taps once, twice, three times, then along the ridge of my shin, to my ankle, which, as if to measure its circumference, he momentarily wraps his hand around and, finally, over my foot. I feel nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Julian moves to my panties. He pinches the side straps and pulls them down over my hips. The panties get stuck under the dead weight of my ass, so Julian slides a hand underneath, lifts me an inch or two off the mattress, and frees the panties. From there, he removes them with ease.

Julian reaches across my body, puts his right hand under my calf
and his left hand under my thigh. Gently, he lifts my right leg, and it is from this perspective that I have a good view of it. My leg is pale—paler than my arms, which are more often exposed to the sun. There is a blotch of red on the kneecap, which is where blood seems to gather. I can see my foot—thin, drooping, curved inward. Julian spreads my leg out to the right, maybe ten or twelve inches from center. He lifts my left leg, the one where I had the bedsores last month, and this time I do not look. I do not want to see. Spreading my left leg out the same distance, he repeats the preparation. I extend my arms to the side, so that they are parallel to my shoulders, and I imagine that from above I might look like some sickly Canon of Proportions, one drawn by a novice art student. Or a surrealist.

Before Julian can ask where the lubricant is, I nod over to the nightstand. He removes the cap and squeezes a large amount into his palm. “You know, we would have needed this in fifty years anyway,” he says.

“That’s all
I
’
ll
need,” I say. “But you’re going to need a whole lot more in fifty years. Like some pills. And a defibrillator.”

“Good point.” Julian rubs the lubricant over his dick, which has retained its tumescence throughout this clinical process. “That should do it.”

I watch as Julian inserts his penis into me, observing not with the trembling anticipation of my youth, but with a curious, almost zoological interest in his insertion—as if I am watching a nature film documenting the curious mating habits of some rare primate. And where Julian inside me once elicited a glorious range of secretions, contractions, spasms, emotions, orgasms, it now offers nothing of the sort. Still, despite the limitations that we now experience, there is some pleasure I get from this, from surrounding Julian with my flesh. Maybe it is the joy of pleasuring another, albeit in an imperfect manner; or the pleasure of being of service to one we love; of
receiving love over the objections of one’s own shame; of re-creating a better past, even though we both know that the re-creation is nothing of the sort—that it is nothing more than nostalgia, a longing for things to be the way they once were.

Because I have no sensation in my vagina, my first inkling that we are having intercourse is when Julian presses his hips into me, drives deep into me and thus moves my body upward, toward the headboard.