But I am attached to sex. I get this from my father, who left my mother and younger sister and me twenty-odd years ago because we were seriously impacting his social life with his graduate students. Children can be such a drag, don’t you think?
My sister, Maggie, and I would stay with him every summer in some rented house near the university hosting whatever writing program he was running that year, and try not to think too much about who he was or what he was doing while he was out with some nineteen-year-old, screwing up her head for the rest of her life. He would neatly stack a few twenties for us on the counter before he left for the night, enough to keep us occupied. Sometimes we would go to the movies; sometimes we would buy and eat so much ice cream—all kinds, Creamsicles and King Cones and Popsicles with gum balls at the center—our bellies would ache; and then sometimes we would keep the twenties and hang out and play backgammon. We never made any new friends (our father never bothered to encourage it; he didn’t really have any friends either), it was just Maggie and me, entertaining ourselves and each other.
This was fine for a few years, and then suddenly it was not fine at all, at least not for me. (Maggie always loved those twenty-dollar bills. They were an adequate love substitute, like how some people feel about Equal in their coffee, ignoring any sort of long-term damage, like to brain cells or psyches. She even went so far as to marry a very rich, very chatty, very boring man, but she’s since come to her senses and left him last year. Now she’s shacked up in Oregon with a quiet man who makes beer for a living.) The last summer I stayed with my dad I screamed at him one night, blocked him from leaving, blocked all entries and exits with the sound of my voice: Why do you do this? Why? And he said, “When you’re older, you’ll understand.”
I understand now. Because even when it feels bad, it still feels good.
It started slowly, this late-night sex life. It was after a bad date, one of many, they all blend together after a while. I went home, logged on to the dating site (I was using just one then; I’ve since cast a larger net), hovered my mouse around my profile, and then clicked “Play” in the list of romantic interests. I’d always just had “Dating” and “Serious Relationship” (never “Friends”—who needs any more friends?), and it had never occurred to me before to select anything else. But this seemed right, too, perhaps more right. Sure, I had slept with plenty of guys on the first date, but to connect with someone for just an hour, late at night, it was beyond slutty. By clicking on “Play,” I was admitting that I was a complete deviant, that I just wanted to fuck. It wasn’t about pleasure. It was about feeding very base and gritty needs. It was about being starved, being ravenous, and taking whatever I could get to eat. About wanting to consume. But there was no pleasure. I was required to do it, by what or whom I don’t know. It was an uncontrollable urge. I had been bitten.
THERE IS A BLAST of noise through the walls, a thump of overturned furniture, perhaps a table, followed by the high tinkle of glass shattering. Then a body slams against the wall that faces my front door. Grunted cursing, and then loud squabbling, like chickens fighting over feed. Someone yells, “Enough!”
Yes, indeed. Enough.
Onto the couch, legs up, glass of chardonnay on the floor next to me. My living room is small (I’ve been meaning to find a new apartment since the day I moved in), and my couch is large. This is where I have the sex. All my life I wanted a couch like this, a buttery soft black leather couch, big enough to lie almost side by side with someone, wrap your legs around them. Sink into it. This couch makes me happy. It reminds me of making out with my first boyfriend in high school. He had a black leather couch in the basement of his father’s house. There was a tear in it. Sometimes I would finger the tear while he was in the bathroom or changing the music on the stereo. (The Smiths, always the Smiths. He would have traded me in for Morrissey in a second.) I would slip my finger inside of the couch. It felt soft in there. I swore someday I would have a couch like that, and now I do, but I rarely sit on it, just fuck on it.