I had just moved from a small city to a big one. The small city had been no good for me. I found myself getting into extreme and ridiculous conflicts. The woman who considered me her protégé called me up drunk one night, hungry for flirtation, and grew furious when I didn’t reciprocate. I nearly came to blows with my landlord. People reacted to me somewhat too strongly. Frequently they would ask: “Are you from New York?”
The big city was better. The people dressed sharper and spoke quickly. They had a sense of distraction, which kept bullshit to a minimum. The theaters got all the movies. The buskers didn’t suck.
The night I left the small city, my friend Pam told me to look up her friend who had just moved to the big city. She showed me a photo, a half-profile shot, and from this photo I could see that Ling was Chinese and that she had nice legs. She was leaning back in a chair, smoking a cigarette. She looked to be assuming a posture of cool.
I thought: I would like to fuck her.
Whenever I see a photo of a desirable woman, even a reasonably desirable woman, even a woman not so especially desirable but in possession of one desirable quality, I think about fucking her. Sometimes I don’t even need a photo. Sometimes just a description, or a name, and I start to think: Yes, Monique, what would it be like with Monique? I think about fucking Jane Pauley. I think about fucking Princess Diana (or did). I thought once, briefly, about fucking Julia Child. Most men run women through this imaginative combine. If they are honest, they admit to these impulses. And if they are decent, they do not act on them.
My fantasies are rarely specific. Please don’t get that idea. I don’t see laced limbs or trembly snatch. I envision a more general sense. Could I convince her to have me? Run my fingers over her palest skin? What is she like naked? What sounds would she make? Like that. What would this be like, the intimacy, the security? Probably it has something to do with possession.
I’d come for the job, which involved teaching composition to eighteen-year-olds. I was thirty-four then. My friends were all married. Most had kids. I would call them on weekends and listen to the happy chaos in the background. I was a godfather three times.
I had started to pay inordinate attention to my hairline. There was some careful combing going on. Not a combover. Nothing that sad or drastic. But some combing down, to obscure a creeping widow’s peak. I would thumb through the fancy magazines and stare at the ads for stomach flatteners and heed their grave warnings about gut displacement. I knew this concept to exist. It had been some time since I was able to button my trousers without discomfort.
I did not do much socializing. This is one of my weaknesses. I have always been maladaptive when it comes to moving, though, oddly, I have moved eleven times since college. I’m not exactly sure how one meets people, if not through work. Bars and personal ads—no. These call for a marriage of bravado and innocence I can never swing.
About two weeks in, I called Ling. She had a deep voice, kind of mannish, which I hadn’t expected. She spoke quickly, with an air of nonchalance. She used various kinds of slang. She told me she was from San Francisco, but when I pressed the point she admitted that she had left there at six. She had grown up in Southern California—bingo, I thought—though she understood this to be a point of indictment, mitigated by the fact that she had gone to college and worked, briefly, in northern California. She was twenty-two years old.
Ling’s apartment was at the end of a small alley, on the top floor of an old house. The place smelled of wet carpet and rotting wood. It was cozy. Low ceiling, futon couch, CDs in a milk crate, some fancy new appliances her mother had bought for her. Her features were broad and sort of gummy. Her nose looked like a lump of clay that had been flattened by someone’s thumb. Her ass, though, was impressively shelfed, not a trace of that flat Asian business. She wore thin corduroy pants and a top that made visible a band of skin along her lower back.
On the way to the movie we passed a young couple studded with piercings.
“I know a girl with vertical bars through her nipples,” Ling said.
“Bars?”
“They increase the sensation.”
“Wouldn’t you worry about them ripping?”
“I wouldn’t,” Ling said. “No.”
Ling was a grad student in mechanical engineering. She seemed determined not to let this dampen her self-image, which was that of a reprobate hipster. She was sexually frank. She smoked. She drank and talked excessively of drinking. She listened to bands with names like Pavement and Loaf, whose appeal was predicated on a desire not to express much effort. Behind this posed sangfroid, of course, was the inner panic nurtured by ambitious immigrant families. But Ling, an early grade skipper, learned how to get along among her elders—the necessary tamping of neurotic impulses. She was a hard worker who liked to appear careless. She worked hard at appearing careless.
My essential problem, a symptom, anyway, of my essential problem at that time, was that I had grown to crave sex, the release and congress, the awkward pungent business of bodies in extremis. Sexual ideation dominated my thoughts. I masturbated up to four times a day, and did so mainly to eliminate the distraction, so I could get my work done.
What I wanted was a body, a female body, lifted off its feet and set down again, an entirely new back and chest and ass and ribs. But I was uniquely unqualified to find one. I spent my days lecturing toothsome and pimpled teenagers and my evenings alone, grading papers, taking on the editing necessary to make adjunct work sustainable. And masturbating.
There were no sparks or colors when I hung out with Ling, not even the trill of an exercised pulse. There were, instead, indications. Indications of a possible arrangement.
* * *
“Beyond Seven,” Ling said. “Those are the best.”
“Never heard of them,” I said.
“They’re the best,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“How do you think?”
“That makes a difference, does it?”
Ling laughed in a way suggesting my pitiful ignorance. Not for the first time in dealing with her, I felt the gap in our ages. She had grown up in late Reagan America and come of age sexually at the height of the AIDS epidemic. To her, the protocol of condoms was second nature, assumed. I still viewed them as somehow illicit.
“Of course it does. It’s inside you, David. It’s right up against you.”
Ling took a drag on her cigarette. She was a vegetarian on moral grounds but smoked Camel Lights, because they had the most taste. Her lips were fat but nicely shaped. They sat on her face like rain-puffed blossoms.
There was the night of the Scrabble and of the Jack Daniels, which she brought over to my place. We had exchanged emails regarding drinking rules. Any word over 50 points earned a shot, a seven-letter word meant two shots, and so on. These were unnecessary. We were both eager to drink and be drunk and then she was on the floor with her back turned, looking at one of my CDs, that band of perfectly hairless skin visible. My hands moved to her shoulders.
There is that moment of suspense—will the pass be turned away?—and then, once that is over, there is the delicious question of how undressing will proceed. It was she who let out a little noise, a guttural sound, and said, “Let’s go lie down.”
From the beginning our sexual coupling was marked by a ferocious intensity and endurance. That first night we screwed for an hour, stopped, started again. This went on until morning. We moved with such ardor that we had to pause to catch our breath. First with her on top, sliding down and nodding quickly as I clutched the meat of her hips. Then flipping, her knees holstering my hips, and a long testing of angles, velocities. She hoisted her legs up and flopped on her belly. In the course of all this tangling, we stumbled on to a position in which we scissored our legs, our pelvises swung into unhindered union. We were both stunned and, afterwards, lay together trying to make sense of this force, thinking and sometimes saying things like woof and dang. Giggling.
I am not speaking here of any unusual prowess. It was only a stunning alignment of nerve endings and needs. I had met someone, at last, as purely greedy for sensation, as gluttonous for attainable pleasure. Woof.
On Thanksgiving our friend Pam visited, with some other friends. Ling advised that we say nothing about our arrangement. There was no reason, she said. We both knew what this was. Telling Pam would only complicate things. I agreed. “It’s not like we make each other weak in the knees,” she said, and I ignored the edge of contempt in her tone.
Oh, we thought we were such sly dogs, teasing each other with gropes and lecherous gestures, acting out a formality that amused us, made us feel empowered by our naughty secret. When all the guests cleared out, we tore at one another. Afterward, naked and tingling and briny-smelling, we pretended that Pam stood in the doorway.
“It slipped in,” I said and Ling said “a few hundred times” and I said “it just slipped—you know how things slip?” and Ling said “it kept slipping harder and harder” and I said “you didn’t tell me Ling was such a wet girl” and she said, “you should have mentioned David’s condition” and I said, “do all your friends suck like that?” and she said “it’s all I can do to get him to soften up for a minute” and I said “are all your friends so multiply orgasmic?” and she said “slippage, major-league slippage” and I began to hum “Slip Slidin’ Away.”
As I moved into her, Ling would suck at one of my lips. She told me she felt the urge to bite. She liked rough behavior, liked me to grab her breasts and squeeze hard enough to leave bruises. Her nipples budded out from a chest that was nearly flat. They were keenly sensitive, and slightly larger at the tip than the base, like Frankenstein’s bolts. She enjoyed having them bitten at. She liked for me to slam into her at unpredicted intervals, liked the aggression, the jolt, maybe even the sense of violation, and sometimes braced her hands against the wall above her head. She wanted to be rubbed, every place and hard. Anything was just fine, really, though she favored positions that allowed her mouth to suck and bite at mine.
The face becomes new in sex. A face like Ling’s, which was flat, a bit bland, takes on a wondrous animation. The Asian face appears less expressive to Caucasians because it has fewer angles and hollows and shadows. Less drama. But, of course, it is no less expressive.
Ling’s cheeks were plump and squarish. Her large jaw operated at a slight underbite, which made her look fish-mouthed. Her eyes were set shallow, and half hidden by folds of skin. Her eyebrows were rectangular and poorly defined. Even her ears were ungainly; they looked chewed on and oversized—the ears of an old man mistakenly latched onto a young woman’s skull.
But the transformation of this face: Her eyes widened and blurred. The tiny patch of skin between her eyebrows knit. Her lips pooched seductively. Blood worked to the surface of her clammy skin and crept up her neck and across her cheeks in red swaths. Sometimes, I would catch sight of her nose, from below, and marvel at the perfect roundness of her nostrils. The entirety of her face conveyed tremendous concentration, a determined labor toward surrender. In these moments, everything blunt and indelicate became preciously unhinged. She looked like a very young girl, overcome by the capabilities of her body, simultaneously thrilled and terrified, her wide mouth made panicky. I could not listen to her noises without losing control of my heartbeat, just as I cannot think of them at this moment without growing hard and lonesome.
Ling’s entire physique suggested a dichotomy, a dull beauty and its more alluring underside. Her hair was thick and long and coarse in the way of Asians. It hung wild and helped feminize her, certainly, and was a terrific sexual prop, though it fell out in clumps, and caused little bald spots about which she was disturbingly frank.
She was clumsy. Her waist was slung low and poorly defined; her belly sprawled. Her arms were thick and muscled, her shoulders as broad as my own. But you had only to witness the way she focused this power, torquing furiously, rising and falling, nimble and newly taut, to understand that her body found an almost perfect grace in bed. Her sex, too, was lovely, hidden deep in an intricate, pink-purple pattern that reminded me of the way cream introduces itself to coffee.
It was the imperfections that captured me, finally, because these required some special effort at tolerance, which, after a time, matured into an unexpected and indelible affection. Her pubic hair: patchy, tufted, an undoing of the loveliness below. Her feet: flat and rough, like thin spades. Her fingernails: ragged, bitten, like mine, to the nubs.
Ling called herself “a big aggressive Asian girl” and boasted to me that she could never find clothing that fit when she went to visit her family in China. She burped and cracked her knuckles. She enjoyed getting blotto to the point where she could act on her sloppier impulses. A week after we’d first slept together she called me at one in the morning, from a bar. “Hey,” she said. “Hey.”
I had been sleeping.
“I’m not going home alone,” she said. “Are you going to pick me up?”
And yet, when she was safely in my apartment, the frat-boy swagger dissolved into a hopeful sway. She wanted her lover man, her new lover man, and she wanted her clothes off and tugged at them without much success and when I led her into the bedroom she was shy and grateful.
That night, as on others, there came a moment when we looked at one another, our swollen fulsome bodies, and tried to figure out how it could feel so good and right and natural in this one uncontainable way. We knew we were engaged in an arrangement, that expedience hung around the proceedings. But with our bodies there, negotiating for us, our flags of skin unfurled, a certain holiness took hold, and we had to look away from one another’s faces, and sink our teeth into the cream of necks and shoulders.
What I mean to say is that beneath all the orgasmic pyrotechnics, the calibrated hedonism, there was a tenderness. Sometimes, after we were finished, I would lie atop her, my body incoherent with bliss. In time, her breath grew labored, and I would tense, knowing I was crushing her, and she would lace her arms around me and murmur not quite yet and we would lie there yet a while, touching as much of each other as we could.
But then, always, there was the life beyond the mattress, and the long, uncertain evenings waiting, like children trapped at the grown-up table, till we could be excused to the pursuit of one another’s bodies. We suffered the regular disappointment of facing each other, across some restaurant table, with little to say.
Because of her youth, she relied on a repertoire of stories from her college days, all of which she prefaced with the phrase “Oh, this was so hilarious” and none of which were in fact hilarious, but closer to mundane, often tragically so. (I listened to the story of how she mispronounced the word erogenous during college orientation—she emphasized the third syllable, erogenous—at least four times.)
My own whinging could not have been any less annoying. I was, perhaps, a bit more polished. I didn’t repeat my stories. But the themes were always the same: neurotic screeds against nincompoop supervisors and dim-witted students.
We played at interest, made the necessary talk, joked when we could. In this way we contrived to justify what would happen later.
* * *
In the sack, we outfoxed artifice; our charms and commonalities snuck out. Ling discussed her family, revealing a ridiculous wealth she kept assiduously hidden, the secret decadence of private cooks and exotic fruits, a deep dynastic loyalty. When she spoke Chinese, her mouth widened and her pitch leaped and her tongue moved over the words in butterfly motions.
I read to her in a soft voice and spooned her long body and warmed the caps of her tush with my newly plump belly. Sometimes she set her old man’s ears against my fuzzy chest and listened to me warble like old Bob Dylan until she fell asleep. In the morning, I prepared elaborate breakfasts and brought her tea and honey, and after we had eaten, still naked, our appetites revved, we spent the morning writhing, able to see everything and freshening the bed with new commotions.
But then there would be the drive back to her apartment, during which we would find ourselves sadly reawakened to how little regard we held for one another. She was, again, a trendy, groping young woman. And I, again, an aging pedagogue with a blue streak a mile wide.
Around Christmas Ling had made an abrupt decision: we needed to set a timetable to stop sleeping together. I agreed, not because I agreed but because agreement was required to keep the Good Ship Libido seaworthy. Had I pushed then, had I questioned why limits needed to be set at all, I felt sure Ling would have pulled anchor. The date set for the kiss-off was February 14. I had suggested it, in a moment of mordant whimsy, and Ling ratified immediately. That gave us a month, upon her return from winter break.
* * *
If absence makes the heart grow fonder, ultimatum makes the heart grow feral. In bed, Ling ordered me to hold her arms down, like a captive, and I moved into her so hard I could feel the tendons in my groin strain against her pelvic bone, and sometimes heard, or imagined I heard, an ominous and thrilling snap. And when she lowered herself onto me, she ordered me to smack her lovely behind with increasing vigor, until the sound echoed off the wood beams above my bed and I felt her begin pulsing involuntarily.
The notion of safe sex—a notion she held to reflexively on paper—flew out the window. We licked one another everywhere and transferred with our frantic tongues the sweat and spit and other darkly guarded smells that mix on the sheets and come to stand for sex in our scent memory. Had we looked at this behavior in a sober light … but, you see, that’s not where we were. We were in the other place. For the ten or twelve or fourteen hours in my cavelike bedroom, the only rule was gratification. Sleep was kept to a minimum, not by choice but by the exuberance of our bodies, which could not keep still or apart.
On Valentine’s Day, a Friday, we climbed into bed and did not emerge until the next evening. Ling had her period, her flow unusually heavy. Long after I had driven her home I stood in front of my bathroom mirror and admired the dried blood on my midriff and smelled its sweet metal stink and picked at the clots, quietly adoring the image of a passion that left these marks and later lowering myself into a hot bath, where the water stained an excellent crimson before fading.
* * *
It is never over, and especially when the body has clear motive. We lasted ten days, two weeks, stiff in our new rules, and, when punished sufficiently, we surrendered in a plunge, closer to our loss and ashamed and more voracious than ever.
Or, I should say, Ling seemed more ashamed.
My take on the situation was more forgiving. When you have lived a longer time in your body, and suffered more the loneliness of disuse, gratitude comes cheaper. As I told her, I was only too glad to continue our arrangement, though she seemed nonplussed by this ease. The important thing, we agreed, was that we part ways gracefully, because we had this dear mutual friend, Pam, who was now considering moving to our city. And so we held fast to the bleary notion that what we did to one another sexually could be segued into a low-voltage friendship. If we were careful, considerate.
I was not terribly concerned about Ling. She had a heart from the new school. That is how I understood things to be. I was more concerned at my own behavior, the way rejected longing might cause me to lash out and spoil everything. I did not consider the extent of her feelings. I did not consider the way she occasionally pushed my name into the dark between us—David, David—her voice a wet reed, her eyes turned away, as if to hide or disown.
Men store their own private stock of memories, those visual haunts that remind us, in times of yearning. With a torturing clarity, I can see one old girlfriend, seating and unseating herself on my lap, her bottom blue in the moonlight, roundly swallowing. Another, arching her back, lacing her calves around mine, and gushing. Or Ling, pooled beneath me, having already been worked to the end and back, dragging her fingers down her nose and lips, asking me to come, right here.
Was this degradation, or do the extremes of passion allow for a more supple view? I can say only that I wanted nothing more than this prompt, the chance to stain her, to display what she elicited, to stripe her from cheek to belly. This pleased us, this joyous dirtiness, and we finger-painted her torso, until, with a towel I fetched, she wiped me off.
We were on the way to the airport to pick up Pam when Ling turned to me and said: “I’m seeing someone new.” My heart began a half-time faster. I suffered the inward panic of a man whose good fortune has run out. I stared at the black, rain-slicked highway, at the downtown buildings gilded in light. Quickly, to stanch my confusion, I said, “That’s great. I think that’s great.”
Ling added—in that deep voice of hers, flat as a frozen pond—“I mean, we both know where we are.”
“Right,” I said.
She asked if I might not want to hear a little about the fellow. It was a cruel question, all things considered, but we were playing roles now. That is where we had come to. We were friends now. And friends listened to friends moon over new lovers.
He was a classmate of hers, a fellow engineer. He had built a robotic fish that much impressed her. I had listened to her rave about this fish before, and had wondered out loud as to its purpose. Was it intended for research? Was there some practical application? Did the world especially need a robotic fish? Might a robotic fisherman, all things considered, be a better investment of know-how? That wasn’t the point, Ling had told me. I was missing the point.
That she had decided to end our arrangement on the way to the airport to pick up our mutual friend, dropping it into conversation as an afterthought—this was an act of provocation. Yes. But she was twenty-two years old, in over her head, and no doubt terrified of my reaction. It was inconsiderate. Yet, from an engineering standpoint, sound methodology. She had chosen a time that would ensure minimum recoil.
And so, the business of the airport pick up. Ling stomped along in her ridiculous army boots, telling her stupid stories, while I stumbled about in a red silence. Inside the terminal, I found a bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror, my stupid, combed-forward hair. The guy at the sink next to me said, “You lose your luggage, too?”
When I emerged Pam was there, bright, friendly Pam, who knew nothing of the situation, thought, instead, that she was visiting two pals, who, to her delight, enjoyed a casual friendship. She and Ling spent the trip home gabbing boisterously while I pretended to concentrate on the wet roads.
The next evening Pam and I went to pick up Ling for dinner. We clomped up the stairs to her place. I’d had cocktails in preparation. The lights were on inside but the door was locked. We knocked and shouted, knocked again. A minute or so passed. There was maybe some vague scramble and murmur, and I suppose I had an inkling, somewhere, though I was trusting enough, or vain enough, or fragile enough, to hide this from myself. We figured Ling was in the shower.
Pam pulled out her key and slipped it into the lock and opened the door and before us stood a young man, disheveled and blushing. From the corner of my eye I saw the bathroom door quickly shut. It was, for that long moment, like the revelations delivered in dreams: astonishing yet inevitable. How could she? and Of course. It wasn’t what I saw that was so difficult to bear, but, like the hacks buzzing away on TV always say, it was the cover-up, the way in which they hadn’t been undressed and groping, drunk on one another’s mouths, struggling into clothing.
“You must be John,” Pam said. “I’ve heard all about you.” She ushered him to a seat at Ling’s small kitchen table. “What have you two been up to? Studying? A little study group?” She laughed. “We’re going to dinner, John. Come with us.”
Flushed with sheepish pleasure, as lost to the real action as Pam, John tried to frown. “I’ve got homework to do.”
Homework, I thought. Christ.
“You can do that later,” Pam said. “You’ve got all night.”
I sat down across from John, the Fishboy, studying his face, as if for some indication of why he would make Ling’s knees weak. He had a thick mouth, sleepy eyes, a tangled hedge of brown hair. He was young, as she was. And I was an old man made silly by my affections.
“We’ll only be about an hour,” I said helpfully.
Fishboy tried again to frown.
“Of course you’ll come,” Pam said.
And now Ling emerged from the bathroom and strode over to Pam and gave her a little hug, and smiled with embarrassed glee. Pam went to take a pee and Ling sat herself at the head of the table, with Fishboy on one side and me on the other.
I thought about Ling’s mouth, wide, fishy, the happy industry of her motions, sweeping her black hair away, her tongue extending, the two surfaces meeting, the intimacy with which she outlined my shape, how hungry she had been and how I needed that hunger and how that mouth would now be fixed on this new body and had been in the moments when Pam and I were rising up the stairs.
“What sort of homework do you have to do?” I asked Fishboy.
He held up a textbook. “Design stuff. Same as Ling.”
“Cool.”
“And you’re a teacher, right?” he said. “Ling told me about you.”
I nodded and fiddled with my key ring. I wanted terribly not to let my feelings show. And, at the same time, I wanted to punch Ling in the face. I wanted to shake her so hard her skull would buckle against the wall.
Pam emerged from the bathroom and some minutes were spent discussing where we might dine. Pam continued to urge Fishboy to come along. I did, as well. What a good sport I was! What a jolly good fellow! He finally begged off. Ling said, “I’ll walk you out” and stumbled after him. They spent a minute in the hallway, groping.
“Were we early?” I asked Pam.
She laughed. “Apparently.”
There is a point at which self-preservation demands pride, no matter how hollow. Ling pretends she has done nothing wrong, and I pretend I am not reeling. This was our dinner, Pam gabbing along idiotically. I looked at Ling only once. A flush of red skin snaked from her neck to the center of her cheek. Sex rash. I was certain if I looked again I would begin to shake.
When you are betrayed to this extent, and in this way, a kind of dissonance prevails. There is the person you knew before, and there is the person you know now. And they are not the same person. So that, when you think about them, it is only as a way of understanding what you have lost, what you will never have again. You become wed to the dross of memory, a person who lies alone in bed and thinks about what has already happened.
We had wanted to end things neatly. That is what we had both vowed, right? But the way things had gone, the way Ling had jury-rigged them, seemed devised to ensure the opposite. My initial sense was that she had felt pressured by me, or frightened, had sensed the bruising loneliness of my life, the way in which I clutched at the world around me, and opted to expulse me from her life in such a manner that no clinging would ensue.
My friends insisted she was terribly angry at me for the way in which I had ravaged her body and dismissed the rest of her. Perhaps she had been more shamed by our relationship than I’d realized, the way it sought a convenient path from isolation. And perhaps, once she had found her own way, I came to represent a desperate past. But then there was the matter of our sexual relationship. And nothing there had ever been fake, or dull, or shameful. If anything, the sensations there had been too real, out of proportion. Perhaps these scared her. Perhaps, as a young woman of twenty-two, she had felt that the only way to exorcise this sexual possession was to stage a public renunciation.
It doesn’t much matter. Most of these feelings were subconscious, nothing she would admit. She would say, only, that she had lost track of time, had made a mistake, but not a terribly large one, because, after all, she had announced an end to our agreement. In the strict terms favored by lawyers, or engineers, she had done nothing wrong.
This discernment of motive did nothing, anyhow, to undo or diminish my pain. It was just something I thought about so I did not have to think about the coming blue, waiting there with its rolling pin, or what Ling—or any of the Lings of this wide world—might be doing, at that late hour, in her cozy apartment across our big city.
When you have spent as long inside yourself as I have you learn a certain humility in the face of hardship. And then you learn it again. It takes years to become as softhearted and hopeful as I am. I had no business dancing with a young woman like that. I should have known better.
The heart is not only a lonely hunter, though it is certainly that. It is a drowning salesman, a bloodied clown, an incurable disease. We pay dearly for its every decision. There are a lucky few, dead in certain vital places, who learn to tame their passions.
But I am certain that you, too, have some episode in your life that lines up against this one, some mad period of transgression in which your body, your foolish foolish body, led you toward tender ruin. And sometimes, at night, you must lie awake and ask yourself: How could I have done this? How ever, in the world, might I have become such a fool? How do I stop? And when? When? When will I have her again?