Silence and the Word (4 page)

Holes

Patrick alone. Patrick alone on the seashore
with the sand in his shoes because he will not take them off
because that is what she would have done, she would have run
barefoot or even naked down the moonlit stretch of sand, she would
have dived into the icy water and mocked him for remaining on the
shore until he joined her, stripped and ran and dived in, freezing
cold and so very happy… .

Patrick crosses the same fifty feet of beach,
over and over, with the sand in his shoes and a warm coat buttoned
tight and his hands in his pockets. He is warm. He is warm and he
does not care. His feet hurt. His fingernails dig into his palms,
leaving marks, perhaps even drawing blood, muffled there, deep in
his warm pockets.

Patrick remembers. She slept like a cat in
the afternoons, curled in the sunlight, naked. He has not slept in
the bed since, and the last depression is still there, the pit, the
hole where she slept. He remembers the O of her mouth, the shocked
opening as he, before he, after he slapped her. Not hard. And she
came at him with claws outstretched, she dug into him, she was
fierce and pitiless and when she was done he was punctured,
pointless. She had shredded him and left nothing but the frame, the
stick figure that could only walk, endless on a beach. No room for
a heart. Nowhere to put it.

Patrick so very alone.

There are no stars tonight. The sky is dark
and empty. The sky is full of black holes, and the stars have
fallen through, dying.

Patrick deciding.

This is a true story.

In the dark, there’s a woman in bed. Her
lover’s hand is between her thighs, and he is rubbing what he
thinks is her clit, but in fact he’s almost an inch off, and she
doesn’t know what to do. She wants to tell him, somehow, but it’s
not an easy thing to communicate. She tries raising her hips a
little, hoping that he will figure it out and slide his finger down
that crucial inch, but instead he just rubs harder, undoubtedly
thinking he is exciting her. She makes little sounds of
frustration, but he doesn’t understand what they mean. She knows
that she should just say something—even if it’s only “lower,” but
the word has gotten caught in her throat; it’s buried down
somewhere deep. She can only say it in her head, over and over like
a mantra: “lower lower lower lower… . ” She doesn’t know why she’s
doing it. It’s not as if he can hear her thoughts, but she wishes
he could, because, while it might cause problems, it would be
easier than this. Finally, he gives up on getting her off this way
and slides his finger inside her instead, gliding over her clit,
accidentally, in the process. She gasps, but he thinks it’s because
of the finger inside her, and she doesn’t know how to tell him what
he’s missing.

That’s me.

At the San Francisco Barnes & Noble
store, a woman is reading an erotic short story called “A Jewel of
a Woman.” She hasn’t read this story out loud before, and it’s a
little more explicit than she remembered. “I once tried that trick
you read about, where you stuff a bunch of pearls deep into your
pussy and then pull the strand out slowly, one by one. It felt so
good, so fucking good as those pearls came out, grinding against my
clit one by one… . ” She thinks about dropping her voice a little
when she says “pussy” or “fucking” or “clit,” especially since the
children’s section is just a few steps away. But the managers must
have known what they were letting themselves in for when they
scheduled an erotica reading, right? And they gave her a mike
anyway. So what the hell! Instead of getting quieter, she gets
louder, and sexier; she licks her lips and pauses before the
forbidden words; she draws them out— she does her damnedest to
seduce the people sitting in the metal folding chairs, seduce them
with her voice and swaying body, and by the end of the story people
are halted in the aisles across the store, listening, people who
hustle away, embarrassed, when she stops. She doesn’t care because
she knows that, for a few minutes, she had them. They were
hers.

That’s me too.

Forgive the third person—it’s easier than
saying “I”. If I had to say “I couldn’t say that” or “I did this,”
then I’m not sure I’d be able to write this at all. But maybe I
could—that’s what’s so odd. It’s a lot easier to write this stuff
down than to say it out loud. I’ve been writing erotica for seven
years now, and it still surprises me how easy it is to write, “She
wanted to fuck him silly, until his eyes were bugging out… . ” or
even “I took his thick cock in my mouth, licking it up and down…
.“

Maybe it’s because erotica is fiction. That
would be one explanation—that even though there’s a little of
myself in all my characters (even the gay men), it’s never quite
me. My characters can often say and do things that would terrify me
in real life; I can use them to explore all sorts of possibilities.
They can have sex with strangers, or with their best friends. They
can be blindfolded and beaten. They can do desperate, crazy things
for love, or for a really good fuck. They’re just characters.

Even when I’m reading my stories out loud, my
audience doesn’t know which ones, which parts are really me. Even
if I tell them, “This one is autobiographical,” they can’t really
know
where autobiography ends and fiction begins.

It’s different at night, in the dark, in
bed.

He is kissing her, her cheeks, her neck, her
throat. It feels good, but something is bothering her, something is
making her more quiet than usual, not as responsive. He notices. He
stops and asks, “What’s wrong?” She shakes her head. She wants to
answer, to ask for something, a small thing, but she can’t. She is
afraid of the words, and doesn’t know why. She is afraid of his
answer to her simple request. She is a little reluctant to say
anything at first. Then her silence makes this seem more important
than it should be, and it becomes even more difficult to talk, to
say the words. She feels paralyzed. He has dealt with this before.
Silence, and the stillness of her body that signals distress. They
have sometimes played twenty questions—him asking the questions,
trying to guess what is bothering her. She can manage to nod or
shake her head, but, too often, he can’t even come close to asking
the right questions. Tonight, though, he has a new idea. He gets
up, walks naked to the living room, gets a pencil and paper and
brings them back. Turns on the nightstand light, hands her the
paper and pencil, turns away while she scribbles a few sentences on
the paper. She feels ridiculous, and almost doesn’t have the nerve
to give him the paper, but she does. She buries her face in his
chest while he reads her request. He doesn’t laugh. He reaches out,
shuts off the light, turns back and tilts up her head and starts to
kiss her again. This time, on her lips. He kisses her for a long
time. He doesn’t say anything, and she is grateful.

See—it’s not just that fiction is easier to
write than nonfiction. Writing it down is easier than speaking it.
The writing lets me distance myself. The hand moving across the
page is further away from the heart of me than the air in my
throat, struggling to form words. If you read this, and then we
meet some day, you will know these things about me, these things
that I have written, that I have told you. Probably I’ll be
embarrassed, but it will be an embarrassment I can live with. It
will be so much easier than having said the words out loud.

She feels so silly having him get a pencil
and paper that she tries to teach him the sign alphabet. It is all
she knows of sign language—the shapes of letters, A, B, C—but it is
enough to make small sentences, with patience. In bed, in the
moonlight, she can spell out: W I L L Y O U G O D O W N O N M E?
She usually doesn’t even have to spell out the whole thing; he
figures it out around the D and takes her hand in his to still it
and then smiles and slides his mouth down her body. What is
funniest is that sometimes he forgets what letter a shape means,
especially when she hasn’t done this for him in a while. Then she
ends up sounding out half the letters as she says them, so that she
feels like a grownup talking over the head of a little kid,
spelling out the letters of words she doesn’t want her to hear.
It’s silly, it’s ridiculous—but it’s working. It’s better than
pencil and paper. It’s much better than nothing.

My lovers are always startled when they
realize how much trouble I have talking in bed. They’re mostly
quiet themselves—I like the quiet types, and so lovemaking tends
not to be too talkative. For most things, body language and muffled
sounds do well enough. Sometimes we go weeks before they figure it
out. When they do, they almost always say the same thing—”But you
write
this stuff!”

“It’s not the same,” I explain. After a
while, they believe me, especially after they see me trying, and
failing, to talk. Sometimes they accept it as yet another of my
strange quirks. One or two have really wanted to know why. I’ve
gotten frustrated enough with the whole business that I’ve tried to
figure it out too.

The nearest I can come to figuring it out is
that it has to do with being naked. Not just physically naked,
though that’s part of it (I have no problems talking about sex
while sitting on the couch, fully clothed, using sufficiently dry
and clinical terms).

When I talk about sex in bed with a lover, I
am physically and emotionally naked, open and vulnerable to someone
whom I am inviting past the barriers, the boundaries, someone who
has seen and touched all my private spaces. It’s intense, and
scary. To put my real desires, my most intimate thoughts, into
words, and to say them out loud in a private space where there is
no possibility that I can pretend that I was just joking, reciting,
performing—that’s just plain terrifying. It’s the most naked act I
know.

It’s a lot easier to run away and hide.

She has been with him for years. She knows
how to translate his code words; speech doesn’t always come easily
to him either. So when he finishes, and asks her, “Are you okay?”
she knows that he is really asking if she is satisfied, if that was
enough, or if she’d like him to do something else. He is even
trying to make it easy for her—all she has to say is, “No,” and he
will try to satisfy her. Sometimes when she needs to, she manages
to say it, but this time, the thought of the conversation they
might get into (as he tries to find out exactly what she wants)
exhausts her. So she says “I’m fine,” and pretends to herself that
she’s answering another question entirely, because while she’s not
really satisfied, not sated, she’s not really thrumming with
tension either—she’s okay, she’s fine. It’s true enough, isn’t
it?

You see, I was raised to be polite. I’m not
someone who swears easily—it takes a real crisis to get “fuck!” or
even “dammit!” out of my mouth. When upset, I am more likely to cry
or be silent than shout. Being polite means not saying things, a
lot of the time. Not saying things that might upset someone else,
things that might make someone uncomfortable. I can hide my
powerful naked emotions behind a sheltering, softening cloak of
politeness; and that’s how I was raised—that’s how most of us are
raised. That’s how you get along with people.

If I ask a lover for something, and he
doesn’t really want to give it to me, we are both in an awkward
position. Does he refuse, and deal with my disappointment? Does he
agree, and do something he doesn’t really want to do? If he thinks
my request is ridiculous, or disgusting, won’t we both just be
embarrassed? It’s easier not to ask.

Yet I’m not sure that silence is ever a real
solution. It’s just easier than speaking. But in the end, I don’t
want to just be “polite” with my lover.

She has bought a copy of Exhibitionism for
the Shy, though she has always distrusted self-help books. She is
on the first exercise, where you stand alone in a room and say the
forbidden words out loud. Just the words at first,
disassociated.

Fuck. Cock. Pussy. Cunt.

Once she has practiced that for a while (it’s
not so hard), she moves to the next step—owning the words.

My pussy. My cunt.

I like fucking.

This part is difficult. She almost gives up
right here. But she is tired of not being able to say what she
wants to say. She is tired of resorting to pieces of paper and
letters hand-spelled out in dim light. It would be so much better
to just be able to say it. She feels silly, stupid, ridiculous all
over again, saying these words to an empty room—but she says them.
It does get easier with practice.

I want you to lick me.

I want you to fuck my pussy, my cunt.

So why are
those
words so particularly
difficult? There are lots of things I could ask for, lots of things
that a lover might say no to, that might be upsetting or
disappointing—yet they’re rarely as difficult to say as “Will you
kiss my breasts?” (Try it. Go alone into the bathroom; close the
door, and try saying the words out loud. I hope you have an easier
time of it than I do.)

Is it because we’re not supposed to like sex?
Is that a spectre of my mother, hovering in the background,
listening as I say those scary words? Am I hearing the echoes of
all those years of “don’t look, don’t touch, don’t do… .“ Whether
said or unsaid, the message was clear; just don’t. So that if I do,
I do it quietly in secret, in the dark, under the covers,
soundlessly. Or, if overcome by passion, I might scream, and
there’s an excuse, isn’t there? “I couldn’t help myself… . ” So
whimpering and moaning might be okay; that’s just my body taking
over.