by Robin St. John
(03/29/06)

Tonight, Claire, whose mother sent her a five-hundred dollar check for her birthday, is taking me out for sushi. We are going to a restaurant that I haven't been to in ten years, but once went to often, with Leah. We would go there, sit at the bar and eat sushi, carefully breaking boiled soybeans into our mouths, talking cautiously so as not to say anything terribly important to each other. We drank hot sake, got mildly drunk, then went home and read on our opposite sides of the bed, never touching.

We stopped going there after the sushi chef was murdered one night as he was working late in the kitchen after the restaurant closed. We didn't stop going because of the murder, though. We stopped going because the things we wanted had become too divergent, irreconcilable; because being slightly drunk on hot sake and filled with that rich and blatantly sexual food was too evocative, in different ways, for each of us. It was not something we could do together anymore.

Tonight, I will go there with Claire. There will be a new sushi chef; in the interim, no doubt, there have been many. Perhaps the decor will have changed. Maybe, sitting there eating sushi with Claire, I will remember Leah. Almost certainly I will. I hope the remembering will not make me sad, wistful, render me silent, strange. I want to eat sushi, to relax and enjoy the time with Claire in a way that was never possible with Leah.

Claire likes to joke, "Feed me, fuck me!" She jokes, but she is serious, too. I laugh, but I am also serious. It is a good thing to laugh and to be serious at the same time.

The other night, after fucking for hours, after lying in bed holding each other, talking, and then fucking some more, when we were both exhausted, her hair damp, my legs shaking and weak, her chilled, me flushed and warm, the two of us smelling like sex, like sweat, she made us cups of tea, hot and sweet, and we sat in her darkened living room, our shoulders together as if we were propping each other up, sipping. We were propping each other up. I stroked her hair, inhaled her scent, our mingled scents. She rested against me like a child; soft, loose, yielding.

I found out later, because she told me, that the tea reminded her of a former lover, the only person, she told me, that she ever said I love you to.

I am careful, these days, not to say I love you to anyone. I used to say it to people all the time because I thought it was expected, that it would buy me something, that it was a required purchase price for something that I thought I needed to be, or have. Maybe it was only that I wanted to feel loved, thought it would buy me that. Possibly, I just wanted someone to say it back and mean it in some way that made sense to me.

Now, I am deeply suspicious of I love you. If anyone says it to me, conversation stops. I look askance at them; I am likely to make no response. I am likely to stop calling. I love you is a box that contains too many things. It contains many things, but still, it is a box. I love you has always, before, taken me to places I would eventually find I did not want to be and nearly died escaping from.

I am happy, right now, with "Feed me, fuck me." It is refreshing and simple. It is honest, pure, clear and uncluttered. It is elemental, primal, primary. Claire confessed, early, to feeling guilty, because some of the things she wanted to do in bed were, she said -- or might be -- politically incorrect. I laughed at her, astounded. I looked around the room. "There's no one else here," I said, reaching for her, pulling her close.

I made her a birthday present, a small collage of cut paper. It was a flower, a stylized and mildly abstract cunt-flower, bright red and yellow against a deep purple background with a gold border all around. I cut out letters like for a ransom note, and pasted them on up and down the sides of the flower, spelling "Politically Incorrect." It is our joke, now. We have known each other for only a few weeks, and already we have a little collection of shared jokes; it is a small piece of real estate that we occupy together. It is, I suppose, a kind of intimacy.

The first time we had sex, she'd invited me over to see a movie, but we couldn't watch in the living room, because the sun poured through the skylight in her ceiling onto the TV screen, washing it out with a blinding glare. "I have a TV in the bedroom," she said. "Can we watch in there?" I said. We arrayed ourselves across her soft red spread, pillows stacked behind us; I took off my shoes, put my feet up, got comfortable. We sat through one movie, through another. Sometimes, her little dog climbed over us, licking our faces, lodging herself between us firmly like a chaperone.

After the second movie, we went out to the kitchen and she made pad thai noodles, and we sat at her table and ate, drank plum wine and beer. We went back to bed for another movie.

Somewhere in the middle of the third movie, I grew restless. I wanted to reach over, touch her, but I didn't. I wasn't sure where this was going, any of it. I wasn't sure where I wanted it to go, or where she did. I wished I could crawl inside her head, know what she was thinking. I wished she would tell me.

She came over once, for dinner, and I wanted to wear a leather vest I had, with coiled silver snakes on the front, a hawk in flight on the back. I e-mailed her before she came over, half-kidding, said I didn't know what to wear under a leather vest. She e-mailed back, and said, "Nipple clamps!" She inserted a smiley, a little devil face. Then she answered my question seriously, said a black shirt would be fine, something like that. I wore a sage-green shirt of soft cloth like suede. I teased her then, among the other guests, about the nipple clamps, told the story over pie, and we all laughed. Later, she e-mailed me again, thanked me for dinner, said my choice of shirts had been a good one.

The third movie finished, and we lay there on her bed in the darkening room in the late afternoon as if we were twelve and having a slumber party, talking, the dog shifting restlessly between us, barking sometimes at the noises outside, below the window. Our shoulders might have been touching, we might have relaxed by then, might have carelessly leaned over into each other a little, as if gravity had finally taken over and we could not resist it, or did not want to.

"So," I said, smiling in the dark. "Do you actually own nipple clamps?"

"I do," she said. She slid open a drawer in a small table on her side of the bed. I heard a chain rattling in the darkness. She put it into my hand. I held it up in the dim light from the window, the blue glow from the now-silent TV screen. "Interesting," I said. I felt its length, its weight, explored with my fingers its curious mechanism. I raised my shirt, put a clamp on my left nipple to see how it felt. I moved the slider to make it tighter, then looser, and tighter again. She lay there next to me, listening, watching.

We were both listening very hard, for something, some sound. I tugged the chain. I couldn't feel anything much, really. She reached over, tugged the chain, and I felt the pull of it then, the pull of her, like something sudden, charged. But she didn't touch me, only the chain.

I took the clamp off, pushed my shirt back down, coiled the chain into my hand, gave it back to her. She raised her own shirt, exposed her breasts, placed the clamp on her right nipple, the one furthest from me. I don't remember what the dog was doing at that moment. She fiddled with the clamp, and I took hold of the chain, pulled. I reached over, then, to feel. I moved my fingers up the chain to the clamp, found it, found her nipple, touched it lightly as it lay in the clamp. I kept touching, rubbing, squeezing the clamp. I was gentle, but I didn't want to let go, didn't let go. She didn't say anything.

"How does it feel?" I asked her, half-whispering. She didn't answer, but her breath had quickened in the darkness, and so had mine. I leaned over her, found her mouth, her tongue, cupped my whole hand around her breast. The direction of everything changed then, in that moment.

Later, we would talk more, between our jokes, over other meals, about political correctness, about submissiveness, about many things. I would try, always, to say something intelligent, to pretend insight, but really all that would come to mind was how it felt to have her hands pinning my wrists against the sheets in that darkened room, how strong and unequivocal the motion was, how sure, how electric, how stunning. And, how unexpected my own response, as if by being constrained, held, something in me was released, let loose, surged outward, came to life, astonishing me. There are so many things to be surprised by.

I don't know what this means, any of it. I am tired of always having to look for the deep meaning in things, of the idea that it is there and it is my job to find it. I know that I am looking forward to eating sushi with Claire tonight and I am also looking forward to whatever happens after the sushi. I am looking forward to going back to her apartment, which is colorful and interesting and always slightly chilly. I will look around the space, see things I have not noticed before -- there is so much to see! -- and because it is how I am, because I cannot help myself, I will try to see what these things say about her, try to see her in them. I am still looking for her. Maybe, eventually, I will find her, or myself. Maybe I will find both of us, see us clearly. Maybe not.

I look for meaning in everything, despite myself, despite my own best intentions.

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