Every morning I awoke aware that Emily was not there.
It was like that for over a year.
I felt my heart drop. The locus of nowhere had been established.
Every night I wondered what I would do. Every morning, I cursed to be awake. It did not seem to me that I had withdrawn from the world. The world had pulled itself away from me.
I sat at my desk in a cold, fluorescent-lighted loft on Twenty-third Street off Fourth Avenue during the day poring over galleys: translations from the Russian, articles on organic chemistry. I don't know anything about chemistry, organic or inorganic. I didn't have to. I proofread galleys against copy. I had become a machine.
The street offered me nothing. It was crazy to think it could. That did not stop me from prowling around looking, looking and finding defeat.
Anybody who was anybody was at home. No one was wandering around who had anything better to do. Anybody who was anybody was not still looking. Most people who happened to be on the street were there because they were going someplace.
I was coming from no place and going no place. They were in between places. They were going from one place to another. Anybody who was out like me was going nowhere. We were looking for each other, hoping not so much that we could take each other someplace but at least that if we inhabited no place together we might succeed in convincing each other that we were someplace.
It was all pretty grim. I learned to take it and stay with it -- what else could I do? -- until it passed. It always passed. Night turned into morning. Morning passed away and became night again.
I rounded a corner and nothing but a long corridor leading down to the river stretched ahead. It was like a painting by Claude Lazar, a landscape recently deserted or waiting to be peopled.
Night was falling and everything was gray.
Down by the river, it was black. The reflections of amber street lights shimmered on the rain-slick pavement.
I saw a rat slither out of the river and disappear amidst the wooden joists that supported the dock not far down from the one I was standing on. Aside from that, no one was there and nothing was happening. As much as I wished for someone, no one was there.
A brief summer rain was falling. I stood under the overpass until it gave out. Then I walked back to my place, relieved to be home when I got in and slumped in my desk chair in front of my desk and stared at a volume of Shakespeare, opening it, turning the pages at random.
I would read a few pages and then my enthusiasm would flag, my eyes would blur, and I'd start falling asleep over the page. Instead of the words that were printed there, my mind began to read other words that swam into my consciousness like a school of fish and then swerved their way into oblivion.
After work Friday afternoon Andrew asked if I would sit in the park with him across the way for a little while.
Sure, I said.
Andrew is an apprentice typesetter who goes to Columbia part time and says you've got to use your hands as well as your mind. Sometimes they have him read copy with me. It's a small print shop, a boutique print shop, real linotype: with Mergenthalers and wet-ink-rolled-over-type printing.
There was an August breeze in the evening the color of the foliage that we sat under.
I was in love with Andrew. That was my guilty secret. Nobody knew it. But Emily had known it in a general way, even before I had met Andrew.
We were in her loft.
I want you to pose for me, she said with a wicked smile, after we'd cleaned up after dinner.
I took of my clothes and leaned against the wall.
I feel ridiculous, I said.
Here, she said and offered me a joint.
Just smoke, she said with a wicked smile.
I thought I was pretty hot and she began to sketch, and I got hard.
She took me to bed.
I always knew, she said, you wanted to be the girl, she said, as she kissed me like a man and I felt myself surrendering to her.
Admit it, she said.
But I could not admit it. She had broken the spell and I left in the pride of anger. I walked the street nursing a bitter loss that was more my familiar than the thrill I had felt. That was not really mine. I knew it existed. She showed it to me then, only to show me what I could not have.
I hardly knew Andrew. I could not tell him how I liked to look at him, or let myself look openly. It was too...I was terrified of it and I kept away from that terror with a practiced fearfulness. We were friendly, but the chasm between us was a volume of air that kept us in separate places.
I admired Andrew and did not sense that he had a mutual need to admire me.
Andrew was in love with Debra, a girl in the religions seminar he took on Wednesday nights at Columbia. They spoke about Indian mythology, ate chocolate éclairs at a bakery coffee house on Seventy-second Street, and were absorbed in the complex melodrama of whether to restrain or release their sexual passion. How greatly they invested themselves in the self-perpetuating acts of advancing and retreating! When they did make out she took the lead and pampered his sexual passivity, which he called, with pride at his shame for feeling helplessly ashamed of it, his need to be loved.
I was flattered and frustrated that he confided in me.
The nearer we were drawn when he imparted confidences to me, the father apart we were thrown by the substance of the confidences.
When she left him he was a mess, a broken thing.
I have a pain, he said. Right here: touching his breast over his heart. The Medieval conceit that the winged cupid's arrow wounded you in the heart and that was love is the way it actually is, he said.
I thought it was the eye, but I did not say so.
There will be other girls, I said stupidly.
I don't want other girls. They don't excite me. It's not a physical thing. It was, I don't know, some special energy. The body is inert without its proper spirit. She was my proper spirit.
I was a fool for him. I was a fool. It pained me to hear him talk like that. My desire for him was a spirit straining to be acknowledged that he had no sense of. I needed him to be complete. But he was complete without me. Or he wasn't, but it was because he was without her.
I wanted him to need me. And he did need me...to share with me his need for her. It was a dead end on a treadmill.
I think he knew I was in love with him. It probably annoyed and pleased him. It made it easier for him to use me. It also made him feel contempt for me. He got tired of talking to me. He found another girl. He would always find another girl to satisfy his need to be loved until it was not enough.
Sporadically there had been a moon that night, but banks of clouds kept gathering and slowly steaming away through the sky, continually obscuring it as I walked home. Then it was entirely gone. Few souls were out on the street. I was tired and lonely, and a little resigned to it. I was not looking for anything. There was not even the suggestion of a chance.
The moonlight was bleeding into the cloudy vapor that filled the sky. A man I had never seen before walked towards me. He stopped and did not pass. He was dressed in evening clothes. He said hello and reached out his hand to take mine. I extended it to him, and said hello in return.
You are out late, he said.
I could not sleep, I said.
No one to sleep with, he said.
Something like that, I murmured.
Come home and sleep with me, he said.
You're out late yourself, I said as we walked to his place.
Yes, but I've been somewhere and now I was going home.
I looked hard at him but felt in his return of my gaze a force greater than my own and I dropped my eyes.
He put his arm around me as if to say I was going to go according as he directed me.
He took me in his arms once we were inside his apartment and groped me like he owned me and kissed me at the same time. I went dizzy with surrender.
Hello, he said.
Hello, I answered in a murmur.
He kissed me and drew me into the kiss until I felt completely absorbed in him and happy because of him.
I need a shower, he said, removing his arms from around me and undoing his tie and pulling his shirt tails up out of his trousers. I moved to help him, but he slapped me gently away. He took my hand and lead me to the bathroom.
With his own clothes falling half on half off him, he leaned me against the sink and began to unbutton my shirt, cupping my hard breasts with his strong hands.
Then my shirt was off and I was standing at my full height, stretching and my lips met his above me.
His body was magnificent. He was a living wish fulfillment. I could not get over it. When he smiled, his face was alight with beauty. He was made to hang superlatives on.
In the shower, he soaped me and rinsed me and sculpted me as he shaped the contours of my body with his strong hands.
Once lightening strikes, it keeps going: everything that happens after it has struck seems just like another bolt.
I had grown charisma and everyone was looking at me and suddenly I was getting approached on the street. It made me feel new-made and full of friends. Availability had become my friend.
In fact it became overfriendly and I went home one night with a guy who'd come from Jordan. He was a financial analyst at a big international bank.
There was nothing coercive about it, and I permitted it willingly, but when he handled me and made his way into me, and pushed his way through me, I felt it like a life-threatening intrusion and was glad when it was finished. Everything I had ever suffered through came back to me. Afterwards, we both wanted me to go. I pretended that I had...enjoyed myself, and said good-night. He stood by the door and said he hoped to see me again. The pain was not sharp anymore. It was a terrible after-ache.
The next day I called Daniel, whom I had not seen except that night we met and went back to his house when he got me lost and luminous.
Of course I remember you, he said.
I was trembling.
Daniel's cock inside me was entirely different from the torment of the wrong cock violating me that I had miserably, stupidly endured.
It was perfume and leather and flowers and posing straps, nipple rings and cock rings and powerful lithe bodies overflowing with orgasm passion, with hard-cock passion, with the passion of dying kisses.
You don't need to do that, later he said. I don't want you too. It's a cliché, but still true: You belong to me.
I belong to you? I said.
Yes, he said.
I stayed the night.
In the morning, he showed me where the coffee was and how to brew it. He showed me the wicker fruit hamper on the terrace, full of oranges and grapefruit. We looked out over the Hudson River.
You ought to know how to do this, he said happily. Since you're going to be here many mornings, you ought to know how I like my coffee.
His finger tips played the shaft of my cock as if it were a flute.
I pressed against him and felt his kiss devour me.
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