Sex Still Spoken Here: An Anthology (27 page)

“Baby. It’s okay. No apologies.”

“I—” He blinked. He looked so surprised. “The character’s too repressed and fucked up. I’m getting too into it. I feel real-life ashamed.” “No worries, Bambino.” I pulled him into my arms. “You’re so sweet. Honey, you’re so good.” But what I most wanted, in that moment, was to be told those things myself.

***

I started calling him Bambino after I saw
Murmur
of
the
Heart
for the first time. It’s the Louis Malle film about the adventures of a precocious—sexually, intellectually, otherwise—fourteen-year-old boy named Laurent. It’s most famous for its frank but somehow uncreepy depiction of incest. The boy has sex with his mother at the end, consensually. He said the boy in the movie was a big influence on him, made an impression when he was first coming into s/m and wanted to cultivate a boy persona. So I felt like I was learning as much about him as I was about the movie when I watched it over salad and pizza one night after class.

“I’m making this movie out to be supererotic,” he’d said, “But it’s probably not that sexy. I think I just get off on the cocky rich French boy thing.” From the first moment, the opening wail of Charlie Parker, where towheaded Laurent and his friend are out on the cobblestoned French
streets scamming tourists out of their pocket change by pretending to collect for the Red Cross, I was just riveted. I could not take my eyes off the screen. The boy is called Laurent by his French family, but Venzino by his Italian mother, a gorgeous, doe-eyed woman from a meager background. I read her as a sex worker, even though I’m not sure if that’s what Malle intends. She’s not whoring in the film, but you get the distinct sense that she married the boy’s father for money. That they met under less than proper circumstances. It’s a story full of sex and jazz and the intense push/pull between love and resentment. Venzino has a lot of homoerotic encounters with his brothers—not quite sex, and not quite sexy, so they are somehow less shocking than when he and his mother touch each other, but it is still surprising. The sex scene with his mother at the end is so bizarrely normal that you almost forget that it’s an incest scene. Except that that’s also what gives it a charge, a spark—that they are fundamentally not supposed to desire each other this way, mother and son, teenage boy and middle-aged woman, but they do.

In the movie, Laurent’s mother calls him “Venzino” as a pet name, a kind of sweet Italian diminutive of his French name. And it occurred to me that my boy should have a pet name, and for some reason, it was “Bambino.” It just was. It’s Italian for “baby boy,” which seemed perfect. Growing up, it was the nickname I heard my Calabrese grandmother and great-aunts bestow upon all my boy cousins. It also refers to manifestations of the Baby Jesus, which was less perfect. But I liked it, and I started calling him that, casually. “Bambino, how are you?” “Bambino, fetch that for me.”

It took him a while to ask me what it meant. I’d been calling him Bambino for a couple weeks, and he finally said “Whoa! I just looked up this thing you’re calling me. Are you calling me the little baby Jesus?!!!” This was over an instant message conversation. He put three exclamation points at the end of the sentence, he was that taken aback. “No, no. Sweetie, it’s Italian for ‘little boy.’ I’m calling you a little boy.” And he sent me back a smileyface.

***

He started to change, curled up in my arms. I could feel the desire returning to him—whatever demon he’d wrestled with was floating away. “I want to keep going,” he said. “Maybe we could do something lighter? Just jerk off together? But be the same characters?”

“Of course, honey.”

“No, or maybe. I mean.” He was talking fast, now, I could see the wheels in his head spinning. “I mean, do you want me to fuck you?”

“I … I mean, if you want to, I’d love that.”

“Okay. Maybe we can do that, as long as you’re running it, showing me how.” He smiled big. “I really want to, Mama.”

“Mmm.” I kissed his eyelids. “You want to touch me?” He kissed my neck. “Yes.”

“You want to show me how you touch yourself?” And the minute I said it, I regretted it. Fuck. That’s what hurt him before. How could I be so dumb?

But he was reaching for his fly again, saying, “Yes.” He got his jeans down over his hips and ass. Then he crumpled.

“Fuck. I’m sorry. I need to stop.”

“I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry. I fucked up. Shit.”

So we held each other for the rest of the night. Read each other stories. Ate ice cream. Went to sleep curled up in each other’s arms.

***

We woke up that morning curled around each other like kittens. I

started stroking his hair, absentminded, half-asleep; he stroked my face, and suddenly, everything felt electric again. My hands were all over him in a flash. He rolled over onto his belly, grinding his hips into my sheets and sighing as I raked my nails over his back. “I—you really wanna do this?” I was still gun-shy from the night before. I couldn’t believe I was back-pedaling out of sex with someone I was so hot for, but I wanted to make sure. “Honestly, I didn’t intend to be Evil Molesting Mommy and fuck you awake …”

“No, it’s my favorite way to wake up. Please don’t stop.”

I didn’t need to be told twice. “Do you want me in the back or the front hole?”

“The front, please.”

“Do you want my hands or my cock?”

“Your cock,
please
.” That edge in his voice, so full of desire it was hoarse, guttural.

I slipped into my strap-on so fast I fumbled with it. I fumbled when I fucked him, too—I’m short, and he was tall, and balancing on my knees behind him on the bed was hard. After I slipped out the third time, I couldn’t help it, I started giggling.

“What’s funny?” He moaned.

“My dick keeps slipping out of you from this angle. Can you turn over, pretty? Or can we bend you over the bed?”

“No, I wanna be on my belly.” “Then I need to use my hands.”

“Anything, just don’t stop, please, Mama.”

He came fast around my fingers, snarling and pounding the mattress while I told him how good he was, how hot he was, how much I loved fucking him. I pulled out, pulled the glove off, pulled him close to me. I was so wet; I wanted him to touch me so bad. I leaned in to kiss him, and he stilled. He looked close to crying again.

“I’m sorry. I’m not doing well. I’m sorry. It’s just hard sometimes, getting fucked fucks with my sense of myself, and I feel like less of a boy, and I’m sorry, I want to touch you, but …”

So I held him while he broke again. Fought to urge to say I love you. “Baby. It’s okay.”

***

Sometimes I felt guilty, needy for wanting that affection.
He
says we’re
just
casual
.
Do
I
get
to
want
that
?
He’s
a
big
kid
,
I
can
ask
and
he
can
say
no
,
but
what
if
even
asking
is
too
much
?
Is
that
pressure
?
Pushing
? I’d daydream, and then I’d feel greedy for being daydreamy. I’d want little presents from him, the kind of gifts you buy for someone because you see or hear something and it makes you think of them—a notebook with a pretty cover, a small stuffed snail with pink antennae, a mix CD. Sometimes I wanted big presents, too—a new knife, tickets to see Patti Smith when she came into town that October. Sometimes I wanted the Lloyd Dobler moment—him standing outside my window in the rain, boombox above his head, grinning about me.

And sometimes, I just wanted him near me. I wanted him to come over with popcorn and a movie at 9 o’clock on a Sunday night when I’d had a terrible week. But I didn’t ask. I didn’t ask, because he’d said he needed to cool down and he could only see me once a month and we had to be more casual, because he was overwhelmed, but he’d still text and email me all the time, we’d have phone dates, he’d say, over and over, how honored, privileged, amazed he was to be in my life. Where was I in his life, though? He called himself my friend as well as my lover, but he wasn’t the kind of friend I could rely on when I was having a bad day. He wasn’t the kind of friend I could call and ask to come over the awful day I ran into my rapist at a poetry reading, I came home to a letter that said I didn’t get the big grant I applied for, and then my septic system exploded when I tried to take a hot shower. My close friends could do that for me—my best friend, with a girlfriend and friends and a busy life, she made time to come over that night with ice cream and hugs and an offer to take a bubble bath in her tub. Why couldn’t someone I was ostensibly dating do that, too?

***

We both took showers. Studied at a café together, split a piece of ginger-pear bread while I tried to write a response paper for my evening class, and he worked on his zine. We took a walk to the Mission Library after. I was so pent up, with sadness and lust and this feeling of missing him even though he was right in front of me. “I …” I finally said, “I … still feel really sexual.” Why did it feel so naked, saying what I wanted? I got to want things, right? “I have go home to Oakland,” he said. He looked embarrassed. For himself or for me?

At the library, I borrowed a random DVD of
Arrested
Development
, and he borrowed another Louis Malle movie. We hugged awkwardly at the BART train. My apartment is only a five-minute walk from BART; I was crying before I got through my front door. I collapsed into my bed, sobbing, and eventually reaching for my vibrator. I cried and jerked off and cried while I jerked off, thinking about all the things I wanted to do with him, all the places I wanted him to touch me that he hadn’t.

Thinking about every question that was left hanging on my tongue.
What
did
I
do
?
Why
did
he
go
away
?
Am
I
too
much
?
I
just
want
a
place
in
his
life
.
I
just
want
to
matter
.

I went to my evening class, exhausted, rings around my eyes, questions still ringing in my head. I could barely focus in class, didn’t hear a word anyone said. I couldn’t wait to get home. I thought about calling him the minute I got in the door. I decided to send a text and watch
Arrested
Development
instead. “bambino, i’m feeling a spot of top drop. can you reassure me i’m only evil in good ways?” Of course every minute he didn’t respond made me feel worse than before. Maybe the text wasn’t a good idea.

I put on my pink lights and my softest pajamas, put the DVD on my laptop, and sett back into a cocoon of blankets. I just wanted something silly to take my mind off my day, something to watch while I collapsed. The first episode on the DVD was called “Motherboy XXX”—about a mother/ son bonding dance. I laughed, hard, for the first time all day, but it was the kind of laughter that verged on tears. I didn’t wanna start crying again. I pulled my blankets even tighter around myself as the credits rolled. My cat took pity on me. She let me press my face into her fur like she was a pillow, curled up around my head. She purred even louder and licked my face. Everything I could do to feel held that night, I did.

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“
I love erotica. I love writing erotic scenes. It really exposes the individual. And when I’m writing, I’m not writing just purely for the sake of erotica. There’s something you learn something about the characters through that interaction.”

-
Jerome
Dickey
(
in
conversation
with
Farai
Chideya
)