In the Nighttime II
I think of calling Tara, but think better of it. Jenny could answer. This is the holidays and I’m not supposed to make demands on Tara’s time when I know she’s got responsibilities at home. Jenny takes off for Michigan tomorrow morning for a couple of days, so I’ll get to see Tara tomorrow night. I sit, trying to decide if I actually miss her, or if I don’t want to be alone tonight. I settle on a little of both.
Tara does not, I’m pretty sure, love me. She loves me, but doesn’t love me. We’re friends. I could very easily, and may already have, fallen in love with Tara—but I’m not sure how much of that is because I know it’s doomed.
Tara and Jenny have been together awhile, but there’s a problem and I’m Tara’s short-term solution to the problem. I’m safe. We go way back. Know each other from art school, when I thought I was going to be a director, and she was going to be a fine-art photographer.
Which she is.
And Jenny and Tara have their problems—I don’t ask much and Tara doesn’t tell much. I’m the last guy she slept with before she started sleeping with women, and I seem to have gotten grandfathered in. She’s a lesbian, more or less, but still sleeps with me.
Tara calls herself a sexual thrill seeker, an adventurer. Sex is her Mount Everest, her marathon. She lives for the endorphin kick of pain and exhaustion during sex. She likes to be out of control and she likes to be hurt. She’s asked me to use alligator clips on her nipples, on her labia, while I went down on her. She’s had me whip her ass with everything from a hairbrush to various-size riding crops. Most of what she asks for I do, even if it bothers me, even if it feels like something you shouldn’t be doing to someone you love, because it’s something you do for someone you love if it makes them happy and you shouldn’t be listening to anyone else, anyway.
Last week, we were at a doughnut shop on Seventh Street called Angel Food Donuts, because Tara needed to take a picture of the sign for this book she’s putting together on signs that are in the shape of the product they’re selling. Mimetic architecture. She’s doing this for fun, but I figure it could sell. Fortunes have been made with less of an idea in the world, but that’s not where she’s going with it. She just loves signs that are in the shape of their products and wants to go crosscountry taking pictures of them. She likes to interview the owners and they talk, they talk a surprising amount, about their signs, and she takes notes. They love her, these sign owners, but most people do. She has that knack.
The Angel Food Donut sign is in the shape of a doughnut on a twenty-foot pole. The pole is white and the doughnut is shit brown and Tara’s kind of upset because the paint job is new and before it was all rusted and covered in bird shit that made it look glazed. One side reads: ANGEL FOOD DONUTS.
The other side reads: ANGEL FOOD DO-NUTS.
Tara’s bending down taking pictures from a few angles. I ask her how many signs she has now and she tells me twenty-seven.
“In L.A. County?” I say.
She takes a picture. “Yup. I’m thinking of limiting the book to California.”
“Sounds good.”
She shakes her head. “But then I’ll lose Vegas,” she says. “Lot of great signs in Vegas. Plus, the Arizona sections of Route 66.”
“Save them for a sequel,” I say.
She takes another picture and says she’s done. We go inside and ask to talk to the owner about the sign and the counter boy, who looks to be about twelve, says that the owner isn’t there.
“What do you think of the sign outside?” Tara says.
“What do you mean?” the kid says.
“The do-nut sign,” she says. “What do you think?”
The kid looks overwhelmed. This is a face reserved for high school physics. He looks pained, like he had no idea that the world could be this confusing outside a classroom. He says, “We sell doughnuts.”
Tara thanks him and buys a dozen, she always buys something from a place she’s photographing, and when we get to her car I ask her if she eats doughnuts and she tells me she feeds them to the birds on the beach.
Once, I asked her why she likes pain so much.
“It gets me somewhere,” she said. She seemed mildly put off. She said, “People test their bodies all the time—bodybuilders. Triathletes. Nobody calls them freaks.”
“Everybody calls them freaks,” I said, and smiled.
“But people admire them in a way. Like that woman who swam the English Channel—she gets greased down in gobs of white lard. She swims in forty-degree water for days. She gets stung by poisonous sea creatures. And she gets in the papers, talks to Mary Gross on NPR—it’s endurance—it pushes the limits of what humans can do.” She took a drink. “It’s ennobling.”
“So that’s you—you’re the woman who swims the English Channel?” I said.
“All she did was go from France to England,” she said. “I get multiple orgasms.”
This is our agreement, though we don’t talk about it much. She tells me her fantasies, and we end up, sooner or later, playing them out. She usually writes me a story. She does it at work, and it’s on L.A. County Parole stationery, or in an e-mail, but she writes me a story that turns her on and the way it’s developed is that we end up acting her stories out. Sometimes they’re about her being tied down. Lately some of them involve her tying me down. Trust me, she says, I’d never really hurt you, and she smiles the sweetest smile I’ve ever seen. Being with Tara has taught me I’d do anything she wanted, just to be with her, and think I get the better end of the deal.
After the Angel Food Do-nut sign, we got back to my place and I asked her what she wanted for Christmas.
“Nothing,” she says.
“Really?”
She pauses and looked out the window. “You’ll think it’s sick.”
“Sick?” I say. “What’s sick?”
She pauses. “Even I think this one’s sick. And it’s my fantasy.”
I kiss her cheek and she leans away, but lets me. “Sick-away. Sick-appalooza.”
“I’m serious,” she says. She tells me about this thing she’s read where you eat a bunch of laxatives the night before. Sleep on it. Empty yourself out in the morning. Then give yourself a series of enemas the next day until you’re really empty and what comes out is pretty much what went in. Then you keep giving yourself enemas one after the other until your body clicks into some reverse and you convulse and vomit out your mouth what you just put in your ass.
“It’s supposed to be incredible,” she says. “Multiple orgasms. Total loss of control. Total pleasure breakdown.”
“You read about this?” I say.
“Yes.”
“There’s a place to read about this?”
She looks mildly hurt. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Sorry,” I say. “We’ll do whatever you want.”
“I’d do it myself, but I could pass out. You can’t be in control and lose control.”
“No problem,” I say. “It’ll be fun.”
“You’re just saying that,” she says. “It’s not fun for me if you’re just doing it to be nice.”
“Really,” I say. “If you’ll enjoy it, it’ll be fun for me.”
“I’d do it myself—but it’s better if I’m forced to go through it.”
“I’m forcing you?”
Tara says, “In my fantasy, someone’s forcing me.”
The “someone” hits me sour. I know if Jenny’d do this, I’d be alone. “Forced it is.”
She kissed me and left the next morning before I got up. There was an envelope on my desk. Inside was a note that read, “Thank you so much. You don’t know what this means” and a $700 check with a list of things to buy:
Five 2-liter enema bags
A Kiddie Pool
2 liters of lemon juice
PVC Straitjacket—small
Video Camera
I thought the $700 was a lot, that I’d have money left over to give back to her. I got a nice video camera from this guy who sells stuff out of his trunk and figured there’d be plenty left. But kiddie pools and straitjackets are both more than I’d ever figured. But, still—I got it and it’s waiting for her.
Tara and I have one rule. I don’t tell her I love her and/or bring up her leaving Jenny. In return, she doesn’t ask me to quit drinking and make something of myself. But it nags me that if I did quit drinking and try to make something of myself, maybe then I could break that rule and ask her to leave Jenny and be with me.