by Kate Trainor
(2/9/00)

I hope you lied to me when you gave me your name. When you approached me at the gallery opening, with your not quite handsome face and your understated suede jacket, I thought you looked like a man with possibilities. Good-humored, but a little haunted. We discussed the installation we were viewing. We discussed other things: video technique and camera angles, medieval jewelry and airplane black boxes. You said you wanted to see me again.

You asked me my name. You insisted on names. You resisted my suggestion that names weren't necessary, only a time and a place to meet, a time and a place I'd be happy to provide on the spot. You were skeptical, but not completely adamant. I sensed a certain flexibility, and desire. That's when I said, "What would you like to call me?" That's when you said, "Alyssa. I'd like to call you Alyssa. And you can call me Gerald."

I hope you lied to me. It's not that I dislike the name Gerald, it's innocuous enough as men's names go, it's just that I can't be sure that you got my point. So I hope that Gerald isn't the name you go by. I hope it's the name of your alter ego, or your best friend's dog, or your high school geometry teacher, or better yet, plucked out of the buzzing perfumed air of the gallery. It makes things so much easier for both of us.

Real names aren't important; there's too much baggage packed in your own name, all the nicknames, the insults, the endearments. Even so, we didn't use names much, not in that room where we met. The room with one large uncurtained window, a flat weave gray carpet on the floor, and a single bed. I know you think it's my room, but it isn't. It's Alyssa's room; you gave me the name and Alyssa chose the room from all the possibilities I made available to her. Would it matter if you knew the real story, that it belongs to Drew Vernon, a friend of mine who is living abroad this year and told me to use it whenever?

You were a little surprised by the room, I think, the first time you saw it. Surprised by the cool gray marble of the bathroom, the stainless steel kitchen, and the cool gray sparseness of the room itself. What did you expect? Crimson velvet? Pink chintz? Turquoise leather? Whips? Chains? If you wanted any of those items you should have called me by another name: Francine or Vanessa or Crystal or Mistress Zoe.

You were a little surprised by my initial silence, too, and by the fact that there was nothing available to drink but tap water and no glasses to drink it from. I told you: this isn't a lounge or a hotel. This is the room where we meet and get to discover something about ourselves, something we may have only suspected but never knew for sure. You liked the way I was dressed, though, very much as I was dressed the night we met. Alyssa is a cashmere slut: short knit dress not too clingy, expensive high-heeled pumps, dark stockings. I watched your eyes giving me the 3-D once over, trying to figure out what I was wearing underneath the dress.

I let you do most of the talking that first afternoon, even though I did interrupt you from time to time. "Don't give me the specifics, the names and dates and places. That's not what interests me." You got the hang of it. I think you understood quite quickly the fragile nature of our experiment, how it could collapse under details and chains of association and acquaintance. I did laugh when you asked me if this was about money. "No," I said, "this isn't about money. The transactions that take place between us, here in this room, or in your memory, or in your anticipation won't cost you a nickel. You just have to be willing to follow the rules. I'll let you know when I'll be here. If you show up, fine. If you don't, fine. We'll have two hours together, and then we leave. During the time we're here, we improvise, make offers to one another, and say 'yes' to the offers." You were eager to proceed.

The first afternoon we sat cross-legged at opposite ends of the bed, dressed in identical gray silk robes. I pulled them out of my bag and gave you one and I watched you as you undressed. I noticed how you folded your clothes and stacked them beside the bed. I noticed that you tried to turn away as you pulled off your shorts so that I wouldn't see your partial erection. I noticed that while you appear thin when clothed you have plackets of flab on your torso. It made you seem vulnerable, I thought. Then I let you watch Alyssa undress: first the high heels, removed one at a time and tossed in the corner; then the dress pulled over the head. I remember how the cashmere knit kissed my bare breasts. You found out what I was wearing underneath the dress: a black garter belt and the dark stockings, which I left on under the robe.

"Tell me about Alyssa," I said, and you got the idea, slowly. "Tell me what Gerald wants from Alyssa." That first afternoon you were hesitant. You only wanted her to remove her silk stockings, slowly, one at a time, and rub them against your face and your arms and your legs and your cock. You liked it when I tied one of them around your balls like a leash and walked you around the room. You liked it so much that you took hold of yourself and stroked your own cock until you came. I liked your self-sufficiency.

You didn't like being near the uncurtained window, though, even though it is twenty floors up with an unimpeded view of the harbor. You told me you weren't afraid of heights. I believed you. You told me that you didn't like skyscapes, that they were too empty. Maybe that's why you needed Alyssa; to help you learn to love the blank screen, the empty canvas, the suspension in mid-air between who you are and who you might be.

I think Alyssa inspired you, opened a door to an erotic imagination you didn't know you possessed. Remember the afternoon of the raspberries. You said they looked so good at the fruit stand that you had to buy four boxes. You began to eat them greedily as soon as you entered the room. I asked you to slow down and we undressed and began to play. The raspberries were large and looked like rouged nipples. You began by feeding them to me one by one. Then you began placing them on my body: a necklace, a navel jewel, a breastplate. You ate them delicately at first, savoring each one as you licked it from my flesh. With a jeweler's hand you replaced the first ones with new designs, then began to crush them under the heel of your hand, smearing the juices on my thighs and my labia, drinking the mingled juices with all the desperation of a fallen angel guzzling from a grail. I placed my hand on your head and thrust myself upward and upward into your hunger until I exploded and dissolved.

One day we met later than usual and the sky outside the bare window was an orgy of clouds and colors. The russet light painted our bodies. As I held a coppery colored vibrator to my clit, I asked you to tell me a story that you saw in the clouds. You described a golden woman, larger than life, full-breasted and full-hipped. She floated in through the window. She began licking my breasts, sucking on them as though they were rich pastries made of cream and butter and sugar. She lowered her head between my thighs and caressed me with her tongue. I increased the oscillations of the vibrator. The golden woman began to insert her fingers inside me, one by one, licking her fingers as though they were covered with meringue. When her entire hand was inside of me she shook it and turned it until all three of us were screaming: you, me, and the golden woman who disappeared into bruised sunset sky.

We could have continued for quite some time, I thought. We had barely scratched our surfaces. Then, this week, you wanted something I couldn't give you. To be more precise, I could and did give it to you, but never will again. We began straightforwardly with a classic fuck: your male body stretched over my female one like a patterned rug tossed over a chair. And then you began to talk. I had to put my hand over your mouth to keep you from telling me your real name. I put my hands over my ears and reminded you that only stories were acceptable.

You agreed. You told me a story. But, Gerald, I am afraid it was your true-true story. Your tears told me that. I listened as you told me something, something not particularly lurid or exceptional, but something that made you cry. Something that wasn't about sex, something that was about grief and longing. Your tears demanded an open heart, and I believe I gave you a reasonable facsimile. I held you in my arms and rocked you. You nuzzled my breasts and sucked on my nipples and I crooned to you for an hour. I washed your face, as tenderly as any mother, and I helped you dress. When you left I sat here by the uncurtained window for a long time. I sat there until it became dark and the window became a mirror and though you were long gone I could see the shadow of your hunched and sobbing body crumpled on the bed. I let myself sail on the river of your tears into a place I had forgotten.

I don't like melodramatic personal scenes. That's why next week when you enter this room, I won't be here. You will wait for a while, puzzled. Or maybe you will see the note right away, lying on the kitchen counter. "Dear Gerald," you'll read, "I won't be coming here today. I won't be meeting you in this room ever again. Don't think of me as heartless. It is precisely because I am not, that we have to end. This ending makes me very sad. I was surprised by the tenderness I felt for you, the tenderness I will always feel for you. Thank you. Alyssa."

I don't know how you'll react. Maybe with anger. Maybe with surprise. Maybe with relief. I do know that you will crave an explanation of who I am and why I did this, but I can't see that the specifics would enhance the experience. Would it make our encounters any more real if you knew something about what you would call the real me? What if I told you I am a conceptual artist named Barbara Frank and that our meetings were my art? What if I told you that I was a lawyer named Felice Napier with an unpredictable schedule who didn't have time for a full-time lover? Or a waitress named Suzanne Blanford who owns two cats, one black, one white, a waitress who works at nights and likes to experiment? Or a bored trophy wife named Cecile Warren who was looking for something other than charity fashion shows to occupy her afternoons? Or a software consultant named Andrea DiNapoli in this city on a two-month assignment, a married woman who e-mailed descriptions of what went on in the room to her husband half way around the world? Or a psychiatrist named Madeline Fox who has a few kinks of her own? Or a private detective named Miranda Wade who was hired by your estranged wife to gather evidence? You see, don't you, that all those details --- the allergies, the alma maters, the pets, the make model and year of the car, the job description --- don't make a difference.

I am only sorry that we had to cut things short. That our adventure lasted only four weeks. I had hoped that this plain room with its uncurtained window could hold us, not forever, but for a long, long time, in a hammock of lust and imagination, twenty stories above the earth, suspended in mid-air.