“Yeah.” He stroked my eyebrows. “You’re very feminine.”
* * *
—
So began a period of fucking. Fantastic fucking. We still talked—I’ll get to the talking—but conversation was no longer the point. The point was me naked in his bed. The point was him opening my knees like a book. Devoting himself to my cervix, pounding it with three curled fingers, refusing to touch my clit no matter how I begged, until his blunt force spread me into shivery, crumbly coming.
What he liked was to push me just past where I could stand it. Past enjoyment, where my mind went blank and my body limp, and strange words like no and stop came out of my mouth. “You don’t mean them, do you?” he asked, and I said I didn’t, though sometimes when we were fucking hard I’d wish desperately for it to end.
Sometimes, too, when his face was between my legs, I would skim below the lip of an orgasm, that elusive short-circuiting so close but sealed away. To reach it, I’d think of Lacie: her breasts, her sprawled out before me, her offering herself up. I’d imagine doing to Lacie what Ian was doing to me.
Later in the night, sitting on the toilet to pee, I’d remember what I’d wanted, and it would rise up before me, garish and obscene. I had never thought of other women this way. I didn’t want to date her. I just thought of fucking her. And then, only when Ian was fucking me.
* * *
—
“You’re like this strange combination,” he said one night. “You get very shy, like this little girl who’s never seen a cock before, and then you go crazy, you can’t get enough. You’re actually so sexual. You have these really strong orgasms.”
I should have rolled my eyes, but all I said was, “Really?” I liked him telling me what he thought of me. It was like peering into a mirror usually hidden. “You mean stronger than other women?”
“Yeah. I feel your pulse. It’s like, Wham! Wham! Your whole body shakes. And afterward you’re all soft and compliant.” Tenderly he touched my face. “It really gets to me.”
He did always want to fuck me right after I came. Sometimes I pushed him away—I wanted to be with the waves echoing through my body—but my feeble resistance only brought him on more.
“Good,” I told him. “I want to get to you.”
Meanwhile, Lacie and I played a round of psychological warfare so excruciatingly subtle it resembled in all essential details normal life. She went to work, I went to work, and in the evenings we cooked large sprawling vegetarian meals with too much oil and cheese. Over kale and squash we offered up precise observations about the subway: the “rapey” vibe of the tunnel between the F and L at Fourteenth Street, the crowded Union Square platform, the smell of wet coats in a humid car.
Sometimes, talking to her, I would remember how I had thought of her, and I would blush or look away. Eating her salad, or some of her fresh-baked sourdough, I’d feel creepy and ashamed. The memory of my fantasies seemed to have nothing to do with our life together. Disconnected from reality, the images floated in the air between us, untethered, extreme.
But it helped that Lacie never stirred when I came home late from Ian’s. She never pushed when I said I had been out with friends, though she knew I knew almost no one in the city. She didn’t ask whether I had met someone, which made it easier to split off these two parts of myself.
Basically we didn’t talk about our dating lives, so the fact that our dating lives involved the same man became irrelevant. We contented ourselves with sly cultural observations and self-conscious rants; we risked nothing; we essentially did stand-up comedy for each other, there on the fourth floor of the only apartment building on Albemarle Road. Did this count as normal? I couldn’t decide. The only normal we had ever had was when we were ten years old, infinite and bound to each other. Everything since then had been an attempt to recover our Edenic past.
* * *
—
Ian and I started going to Applewood, a small farm-to-table joint with painted green tables, wide-planked floors, and silvery photographs of Vermont sheep. A fire crackled in the fireplace, and servers in white cotton aprons circled. Applewood was not exactly fashionable, but the meat was humane, the cocktails seasonal, and the mood genteel.
Ian always wanted to meet late. It took me a while to figure out this was because he waited each night to hear from Lacie first. I was his backup. I didn’t care. We’d sit at the roughhewn bar and order drinks from a man dressed as a Mennonite. Ian always had whiskey, and I a cocktail. Once the bartender started recognizing us, he gave us pours from the top shelf, mostly scotch that tasted like dirt. Peat, we said knowingly, and kept sipping, until we tasted not dirt but green hills and cold mornings, wool sweaters and wood fires. We sipped and talked of warm places. The yellow slippers he wore came from Morocco. He said, “You’ll see, the souks there are insane,” and I thought I’d nearly die from the promise inside you’ll see.
Our Mennonite comped us olives, crostini, and once a liver pâté. Dense flavor bombs, food not to satiate but enthrall. The bill came handwritten, always shockingly large, and sometimes Ian paid and sometimes I did. I sensed it was easier for him, but I never minded slapping down my card. It felt powerful to pay. To spend to the point where it scared me.
We talked about the next day’s work, what he hoped to do in the studio, what I hoped would happen at the desk. We talked about art. We talked about philosophy. We talked about Aristotle, and kink, and will to power; we talked about tattoos and vegetarianism and UFOs. We built a little life together, a rhythm. I didn’t ask him any more questions about Lacie, and he didn’t tell me any more answers. We didn’t have to say her name anymore. Simply being together invoked her.
“You’ve got your dish? Okay. Let me give you one more hug.”
The gentle clang of ceramics against coat buttons.
“Okay, good night, lady.”
“See you Thursday.”
Ding of elevator, slam of door. Sophie, the last guest, gone. Another Shabbat dinner done.
I had come to love these nights, the one stretch where I let what I was doing with Ian drop away. The rest of the week I held myself rigid, ready for a trap, my wrongness a foul skin around me, but when the light on Friday afternoon grew long and mournful, and Lacie began to race around, stirring the soup pot, setting the table, and I trailed after her, helplessly repeating, “Just tell me what to do…” the world beyond the windows dissolved. Ian faded to abstraction. There were prayers and candles and eating, the easy, ready laughter of women who plainly adored Lacie and so wrapped me in their affection, thought I was worthy of their attention simply because I knew her. No: because she had chosen me. Assistant mistress of Shabbat.