by Kim Addonizio
(2/16/00)

He asks if I've been tied up before. I tell him yes, and he wants to know for how long. Tell me about it, he says. I feel shy, I don't want to go into details. We're sitting in Vesuvio's at four in the afternoon, drinking gin and tonics. He has his hand on my thigh. I'm madly in love with him; we've known each other three weeks. I'm not ambivalent like I usually am; everything about him seems perfect: his close-cut black hair, the way he puts his tongue down my throat when he kisses me, his blunt, square hands. He's the sexiest man I've ever been with. It scares me I can feel so happy. None of our friends think it will last.

I want to tie you up, he says. I want to do things with you that you've never done with anyone.

A man at the bar is doing card tricks. He holds up the queen of diamonds and shows it to a pale, pretty girl in a black leather minidress, black fishnet tights and heavy black combat boots. The girl looks bored. She glances over at us and sees me watching her. She takes a card from the magician's deck, l ooks at it and sticks it back in.

We get drunk sitting in Vesuvio's. At seven o'clock we're still there, kissing passionately, his hand under my T-shirt squeezing my breast. No one pays any attention to us. The magician is still there, too, talking to another woman. He holds up the queen of hearts. Finally we get hungry and walk around the corner to Brandy Ho's and eat Kung Pao chicken and Szechuan shrimp, sitting next to each other in the red leather booth. I feel like I'm in an alternate universe. Everything looks familiar but it's different than before. The sexual intoxication is overwhelm-ing; I can't function in the real world: I haven't called my friends, paid my bills, read a newspaper since all this started. I don't want it ever to end. I feel vulnerable and it's terrifying; I can't help being in love with him, even if he leaves me or treats me like shit, I can't hold back the way I usually do, I have to give him everything. Then I won't know who I am anymore.

With his glasses on he looks like a different person: shy, slightly studious, younger. It's like he's in disguise; I don't recognize him as the same person I fuck. I like him in his glasses, like the idea that there are things about him no one could ever guess from the way he looks. He takes his glasses off, sets them on my kitchen table.

Take off your clothes and stand against the wall, he says.

I peel off my T-shirt, drop my skirt and underwear, and lean against the wall, facing him. He tells me to put my arms above my head. We've just finished dinner. He pours himself more wine and tips his chair back, drinking the wine, watching me.

Don't move, he says. He leaves the kitchen. I hear him pissing in the bathroom. I'm excited, scared I don't know what's going to happen next. I close my eyes, listen to the stream of piss hitting the water in the bowl. My neighbor in the next apartment starts playing the clarinet. She's just learning so it's all honks and squeaks. The walls are thin, I'm worried someone will hear us, I don't want anyone to hear us. I don't want anyone to know what we do together, what he does to me.

He comes back to the kitchen, zipping his pants. He takes an apple from the bowl of fruit on the table.

Open your mouth.

He shoves the apple against my mouth; my teeth sink into it. I'm gagged. He's not gagging me. I can drop the apple anytime. I want him to dominate me, use me; I want to be his slave. I have to understand submission, why it's so erotic for me; I can't reconcile it with the rest of my life. I've never let myself physically explore how I feel because intellectually I can't accept it. Women are shit, they're only here for men's pleasure, men control everything.

My beautiful slut, he says. Look how wet you are. He puts his middle finger inside me, then in his mouth. He unbuckles his belt and takes it off in one smooth motion.

One Saturday night when we're fucking, the condom breaks. I know I'm ovulating, I don't want to get pregnant. He calls a sex information hotline and asks what we can do, and they tell him there's an abortion pill I can take; I should call a doctor to prescribe it.

I call the advice line at Kaiser and get put on hold. I wait forty-five minutes, then a voice comes on the line and says there's one more call ahead of me. I wait ten more minutes. The woman on the other end tells me she can't help me, I need to talk to Doctor X. I ask her to connect me. She connects me to the wrong extension; the people there tell me to call a different number. I hang up, dial the main hospital and ask for Doctor X.

He's not on tonight.

I explain what's happening. The woman on the other end insists that Doctor X isn't there, and no one else can prescribe the pill. Finally someone else gets on the phone and tells me that Doctor X is being paged. I'm put or hold again. A muzak version of "Light My Fire" plays followed by the Beatles' "Here, There and Everywhere." Twenty minutes later another person gets on the line.

Can I help you?

I think I'm being helped. I don't know. I've been or the phone for an hour and a half, I'm trying to reach Doctor X.

I want to scream at the person on the phone, but she is very nice, it's not her fault, there's nobody to blame, don't want to scream at her. I don't want to have a baby I'm thirty years old, I work at a cafe and never have enough money for art materials. My mother was a painter; she stopped after she had me. I can't be a painter if I have a baby. He doesn't want a baby either. Not this way, he says. Not by accident.

Please hold, the nice person says. I listen to a few bars of "My Cherie Amor." A minute later Doctor X gets on the line.

You have to come to the Emergency Room to pick it up, he says.

Can't you just call it in to a drugstore?

We have to see you, he says. There are certain risks involved.

He says that if the pills don't work and the fetus is female it could be turned into a boy by the hormones. Masculinized, he says. The fetus might be masculinized, and if you decide to have the baby there could be prob-lems.

I don't want to have the baby, I say. I want the pills. If they don't work I'll have an abortion. Please, I say. Can't you call it in?

You have to come to the Emergency Room, he repeats, sounding annoyed. We have to have a record that we've seen you.

I hang up. It's ten p.m.; we haven't had any dinner. He puts his arms around me.

He says, I hate to see you go through this.

I hate doctors, I say. I hate western medicine. I hate Kaiser, you never see the same doctor twice. Nobody knows you or gives a shit about you, you're a name on a chart. Why can't they just give me the pills?

Let's go eat first, he says. I'll take you someplace nice, we'll forget about this bullshit. The Emergency Room will be open all night.

He takes me to Little Italy. We drink a lot of wine. I start to feel better, now it's an adventure we're having together instead of a lousy experience. We joke about it, he puts his hand over mine on the red-and-white checkered tablecloth. I've never been so in love with anyone. I tell him I don't think I want any children.

I'll get sterilized, I say. I'll make an appointment and get my tube tied. I only have one tube and ovary because I had an infection once and had to have an operation. A gynecologist told me once that if I ever got sterilized it might be major surgery because of the scar tissue from the other operation.

I'll get a vasectomy, he says. It's easier, it's just an office procedure.

What if we break up and you want to have a baby with someone else? As I say this the thought of it makes me jealous and depressed, and I'm sure it will happen.

I can go to a sperm bank, then. Besides we're not going to break up. And you might change your mind. Five years from now we might want a baby, and we could have one.

We get to the Emergency Room a little before mid-night. We sit in the waiting room, and after about half an hour a nurse leads me through a curtain and takes my blood pressure.

I'm only here to pick up a prescription, I tell her.

She ignores me, fastens a yellow plastic ID bracelet with my name and policy number around my wrist. She leads me to an examining room where there's a metal table with stirrups, and lays a blue plastic gown on the table.

Wait here, she says.

I sit down on the only chair. After forty-five minutes a Chinese medical student comes in.

I need to examine you, he says.

No, you don't. I'm not sick, I just need a prescription

I'm supposed to examine you.

I think of him looking at me, my legs spread apart my heels in the cold stirrups; I don't want him to look a me. I start crying and saying I just want the pills, there's nothing wrong with me, I don't want a baby you don't need to examine me, please just give me the pills so I car go home.

He writes something down on his chart, then walks out, muttering something I can't hear. A minute later the nurse says I can go back to the waiting room.

A man with long blond hair is passed out in one of the chairs. Three well-dressed black people are sitting together. The man is doubled over, holding his side, and the two women are on either side of him talking to him and rubbing his shoulders. There's a Toyota commercial on the TV, then an episode of "Miami Vice." The nurse comes out after twenty minutes and tells me that Kaiser's pharmacy doesn't have any more of the pills; there might be some at Mount Zion, she has to call and then send someone there to pick them up.

I lean my head on his shoulder; he strokes my hair. The blond man wakes up and looks around the room. Fuck this shit, he says. He gets up and walks out.

At three a.m. the nurse calls me in behind the curtain and hands me a paper cup of water and another paper cup with three tiny white pills in it. She gives me three more to take in twelve hours.

When we leave, the black people are still sitting there

I have an almost pathological need for other people's approval. If someone criticizes me I fall apart, I feel useless, stupid, insignificant. When I confess this to him he says I need to learn not to internalize other people's negativity. I experience this as a subtle criticism and move to the edge of the bed, away from him.

I used to sleep with men so they would like me. I always had a lot of lovers. Now I only fuck him; he excites me more than anyone. When I masturbate I don't think about strangers fucking me, the way I used to; I think about him looping a rope through a ring screwed into the top of the doorframe, slapping my breasts and cunt. I think about the way he growls low in his throat, the violence of his orgasms. I masturbate imagining he is watching me, and come saying his name over and over. My life before I knew him seems impoverished, a desert. I'm afraid of losing him; he has to keep reassuring me that he loves me and wants me. At parties I'm jealous if he talks with other women. I'm convinced they're more attractive, more desirable than I am.

We're in someone's loft studio; it's too crowded. I feel like I'm suffocating. Everyone is talking to everyone else, huge paintings hang on the walls, the paint laid on layer after layer -- thick dark colors, blues and blacks. I can't find him. No one is talking to me. Someone gave me some mushrooms earlier and now I'm starting to come on to them; I feel jumpy and want to find something to drink to calm me down. I bump into a woman, she stares at me in dislike, turns away. I get through the crowd and pour myself some wine, drink it quickly and pour another one, asking people if they've seen him. No one has. I'm panicked, sure he's met another woman and left with her.

I go into the bathroom and lock the door. I feel sick so I crouch at the toilet but I can't throw up. Sitting down on the floor, my back against the wall, I stare at the post-cards tacked above the toilet. I know I'm seeing images but I can't tell my brain what they are, specifically; they're like abstract paintings, they have no meaning. I feel violated by images, can't help seeing them on billboards, TV, in ads and in movies; they get into me through osmosis and change my thought patterns: what I'm supposed to look like, feel like, be. I close my eyes and see blue snowflakes.

He's pounding on the door, his voice sounds far away I get up and open it. He takes me in his arms.

Please fuck me, I say. Fuck me here, on the floor.

He locks the door and undresses me. I lie down on the floor; it's cold, I start shivering. He takes off his shirt and tucks it under me. He's standing over me, unzipping his black leather pants. I start hallucinating that he's a demon, his eyes are frightening -- dark brown, he's wearing his contacts so there's a yellowish ring around his irises. I realize I don't trust him, I'm afraid he'll hurt me. I want him to hurt me.

Slap me.

He slaps me across the face. I feel myself clench, get wet. My head lolls to the side; he looks in my eyes, I'm naked, I'm begging him to do it again. He takes a condom from his pants pocket and puts it on, then slaps me again and enters me. I start to come almost immediately.

Not yet, he says, and stops moving inside me.

Please, I say, thrusting up at him, I'll go crazy if I don't finish coming. He stays still while I writhe under him; the orgasm goes on and on, I can't seem to stop. After a while he starts fucking me again, faster and faster, he comes with a loud moan and falls all the way on top of me.

I feel secure again feeling his weight, listening to his heart slowing down.

I talk to my friend Simone on the phone; we haven't spoken for weeks. She tells me about her lover, whom she's just broken up with.

At first it was great, she says. We did things sexually we'd never done with anyone else. But then he confessed that he likes to cross-dress. I mean, I just couldn't handle it. He wanted me to pretend he had a cunt; it was too weird.

I don't talk about my sex life to Simone; at least, not the really intimate details. My girlfriends and I discuss the size of our lovers' cocks, tell each other if they're any good in bed; I told Simone about the time I met two guys in North Beach and went to the Holiday Inn with them. Simone likes being tied up, but I don't want to talk about it with her. He and I have our own private world, we spend hours together absorbed in each other, seeing how far we can go. We close the curtains, nothing gets in. I tell Simone I want to marry him.

You're kidding, Simone says. How long have you known this guy?

Ten weeks.

Forget it, Simone says.

No, I mean it. I've been with enough men. I don't want to do that anymore.

The Virtuous Woman, Simone says.

Something like that.

You can't do it. You know how you are -- if you like somebody and he wants you, you let him fuck you.

But I never felt like this about anybody else. And he's the best lover I ever had, I know I couldn't find anybody else who does what he does for me.

It's not about better, Simone says. Sooner or later you'll want something different, something he can't give you, and you'll go out looking for it. And anyway, you're con-fusing sex with love. You're hot for this man so you think you love him.

I wonder why Simone does this to me; she can't be happy for me, she always finds flaws. He says she's just being my friend, trying to protect me. I don't call Simone for weeks because I'm afraid she'll convince me that she's right.

The more I fuck him, the more I want him; I've never had this much sex with anyone before. It's all we do-- sex, work, eat, sleep. Sometimes we don't get around to cooking dinner until midnight, and sometimes we end up at two a.m. eating cheese and olives and pita bread in bed. Simone tells my other friends I'm obsessed. He's late for work all the time; his boss blames it on me. No one understands us. There's a conspiracy against us, to separate us. Romantic love is always tragic; the lovers can't stay together, death or lies or fate separate them. It's dangerous to be erotic, then you aren't so trapped; if you do it in public they look at you and their minds are filthy so they see filth, then they try to put you in jail.

After a few more weeks we quit our jobs and move to a hotel in the Tenderloin where we can be together all the time; between us we have enough money for about four months. I don't know what's going to happen after that and I don't care. I set up my tubes of paints, my chalks and charcoals and brushes, on a table in the corner of the room, and he models for me. We have a small refrigerator with a freezer that keeps tiny ice cubes frozen in plastic trays, a hot plate, an indoor barbecue, a stack of books we've bought over the years meaning to read but that we never got around to; we have a portable cassette player, tapes, potted violets and an aloe plant. We never go farther than the corner grocery half a block away. We cook or eat takeout Vietnamese food from next door. Whatever we need from the outside world, the son of the woman two doors down picks up for us. We fight sometimes. We fall more deeply in love. Underneath everything we're blissfully happy. We know how to live. All we want is for you to go away and leave us the fuck alone.