Triptych, An Erotic Adventure

SHORTLISTED, BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR (AUSTRALIAN

BOOK INDUSTRY AWARDS) 2010

SHORTLISTED, QUEENSLAND PREMIER’S LITERARY

AWARD FOR NON-FICTION 2010

‘Both sexy and beautifully written,
Affection
is a moving portrait and an absorbing read. This is a memoir written in a voice that is powerful, honest and poetic. An unforgettable book.’

James Frey

‘Krissy Kneen explores life in terms of her abundant and raucous sexuality. To focus on the prurient aspects of this memoir, however, is to miss its gorgeous heart.…
Affection
is lushly written, a vivid and unabashed account of a woman coming to terms with her body.’
Courier-Mail

‘A rare feat…All of creation radiates an erotic energy in her narrative…Beneath the surface sexuality,
Affection’s
triumph is that of an assured novelist of any genre.’
Sunday Age

‘A lyrical gem. Kneen has a rare gift for constructing the most exquisite architectures of narrative and meaning from simple and elegant prose. Sometimes confronting, sometimes hilarious, and always amazingly honest.’ John Birmingham

‘Astonishing…Powerfully and voyeuristically erotic…An extraordinary debut.’ Matthew Condon

‘Beautifully written, painfully honest…
Affection
is not just sensuous in relation to writing about the erotic; her childhood recollections are steeped in smells, colours and textures. This is an assured debut.’
Big Issue

‘Affection’s
real subject is self-acceptance. Kneen’s is hard-earned and bitter-sweet; her account of getting there is sexy, sad and deeply satisfying.’ Emily Maguire,
Age

‘It takes extraordinary courage to air one’s sex life in public.

To do so without self-aggrandisement and confessing to even the most unflattering of experiences indicates an impressive generosity.’
Sun Herald

‘Offbeat and outrageous…Seems like an authentic expression of feminine salaciousness, rather than one a woman thinks may be enjoyed by a man.’
Australian Literary Review

‘A well-written tale, often very amusing…and likely to provoke a good deal of thought about the differences between physical sex and the variety involving the mind.’
Otago Daily Times

‘The sexual confession is hardly a new literary genre…[but] not many self-confessed perverts can write as well as Krissy Kneen…what could end up as slapstick or cheap tragedy in the hands of a lesser writer becomes unimaginably potent in Kneen’s work.’
Rave Magazine

‘The devilishness is in the detail. The delight is in the writing…
Affection
is that rare beast; a sexual memoir that is not only uniquely interesting and daringly explicit but is also poetic, offbeat, confronting and funny.’ Linda Jaivin,
Weekend Australian

For Katherine Lyall-Watson

Cover Page

Praise for Krissy Kneen and Affection

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Susanna

The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife

Romulus & Remus

Acknowledgments

S
usanna had a talent for words. This fact came to her as a surprise because for the most part her life had been shrouded in silence. Her first language was Auslan, one of the hand-signal languages invented to communicate with the deaf. Her tiny baby’s hands pulled rhythmically on invisible teats when she was hungry, milking the air. Her mother, a silent beauty smelling of milk and lavender, responded to her call by lifting one swollen breast out of her floral dress.

Spoken words were useless in Susanna’s home. Her parents’ hands could shout out commands, punish her naughtiness or soothe her into sleep with stories of little girls in the forest and big bad wolves made of hooked claw-fingers. Her name was a collection of letters spelled out on her fingertips.

It was a difficult word for a little girl to pronounce without the benefit of sound. She could spell it clumsily at first, but her mother pointed to the framed painting hung above her bed,
Susanna and the Elders
by Artemisia Gentileschi.

‘Susanna,’ her mother spelled out, her fingers graceful. She pointed to her daughter, ‘Susanna.’ The painting and the girl. Later, Susanna peered at the painting, the naked young woman illuminated by the spill from the moon. The girl in the painting held a flimsy bed sheet to cover her nakedness. Two clothed men stared at her and, although they seemed more thoughtful than lustful, something about the way they looked at her was unsettling. Susanna held her own bed sheet up, covering one of her own small breasts. The other was exposed to the moonlight. She imagined the two men hiding in the shadows and a delicious thrill, half fear, half pleasure, began to warm her stomach. She pulled the blanket up over her naked skin and closed her eyes tight, but whenever she peeked up at the painting, Susanna was always there. Naked, exposed.

She entered the world of spoken words hesitantly, her silence often misinterpreted as shyness. While the other children screamed and shouted, Susanna sat quietly, watching. The world of school was a barrage of noise. She sat through each day longing for the silent relief of home.

For her final assignment at university she made a silent film, a tribute to the older examples of the craft. In Susanna’s film the women expressed their passion with a fist held to
the breast. The men responded with a widening of the eyes. Her assessors were confused.
No words?
they wrote beside her final grade.
Perhaps you could have at least provided some emotive music.
She left university for the last time stepping out into noisy peak-hour traffic, wondering what exactly she was meant to do.

For a time she helped at a school for hearing-impaired children, breezing from one gloriously quiet classroom to another, distributing cartridge paper and pots of paint. The children were not silent, they clattered and thumped like any children, they grunted and screeched occasionally. But eventually they would settle into a comfortable hush, and Susanna settled with them, completely content.

It was at this school that she met the man who would become her only lover, a deaf man, recently divorced. He had custody of his profoundly deaf son every second week and on the weeks in between Susanna would climb silently into his neatly turned-out bed. They would use their hands to break the silence, making words that were nothing but a dance of the fingers, a barely discernible sliding between the Auslan word for sex and the physical expression of the act itself.

David was a good lover, expressive. His fingers demonstrated to her what he could not say. His mouth, passive through the day, was put to better use in the evenings. His lips formed shapes that spoke to her body as words could not. His tongue found ways to express his desire without the use of vowels and consonants. She learned from him a
language of love that was as utterly different from the general machinations of sex as Auslan is different from English itself.

The affair, Susanna’s first taste of love, stretched out through glorious months into ecstatic years. In this time there was only his body. She knew a little of his working life and shared a proud joy in the academic achievements of his son. But their evenings every second week were reserved almost exclusively for pleasure. It came as some surprise, therefore, when he turned up at her door on an off-week. She glimpsed the sweet purity of his son’s profile in the front seat of the parked car.

What I have with her,
he signed, his mouth moving to form words he could not speak,
is a real relationship.
Susanna watched his lips and remembered what they had done to her body. The silent words mouthed into her most intimate places, the way her body would answer, silently but completely. Lifting and opening to him, readying itself for the conversation with the glistening moisture of anticipation.

What I have with you is sex. The most amazing sex, the most wonderful physical expression one body can give to another. But ultimately I suppose I need more than just sex.

Susanna stood in the entryway to the apartment block. It was a wintery evening and she hadn’t brought a coat. She still held her mobile phone with the words lit up on the screen:
I need to speak with you. I am outside your building. Can you come down?

She remembered the first night with him, the great
unveiling. He had spread her legs and knelt at the side of the bed. She should have felt shy, had been expecting to, but somehow his silence and his gentle pressure, parting her thighs, calmed her and filled her with a rush of desire for him. He was watching her closely and suddenly she felt like that other Susanna, Gentileschi’s Susanna, revealing more of her body to his gaze than she concealed.

He placed his finger at the edge of her hymen and with his touch she felt the wetness flooding past its shut-tight gate. That single finger felt like his whole body pushing into her. The tip of the lips the teeth the tongue and she was slippery as a fish and just as agitated, wriggling her hips to take more of him inside her. Just one finger at first but when it was completely inside she felt stretched to breaking and yet desperate for more.

He seemed amazed by her, amazed by her virginity and her body’s impatience to be rid of it. His face so close to the part of her that no one else had ever seen, watching her. He made the sign for
slow down,
both hands held out as if to measure the surface of something reclining, the right hand tilting up as if to halt her progress.
Slow down, slow down,
but even the act of signing was too much of a pause for her. Susanna lifted her hips, taking the stop sign of his hand and pressing it into herself.

So much slipperiness. So much sensation, the joy and pain of it fused, too much to bear, her blood slick on his fingers, his body quickly pressing forward into the path that
they had just discovered. He shifted; the gorgeous pressure of his pubic bone where only moments before his tongue had been. Blood on her chest where he took her breast in his fist, blood on her face where she kissed him. She opened herself to him in a pact of spilled blood and when he came there was a second tearing, the condom destroyed, the pact sealed with the jet of his seed finding its way into her, a glorious tragedy, and they remained fused like this, slippery with sweat and blood and ejaculate and every movement of his hips fed her hunger again.

She remembered this as she watched him walk back to his car. Their similar faces turning towards her, the innocence of father and son staring at her for a final time. A twin goodbye. And then they were gone.

Her job as a sound assistant suited her well enough. It was because of the silence. Sometimes her only task in a day would be to drive from place to place collecting silences in her microphone. Ambient sound. She wore soft padded headphones that completely obliterated the world and with a flick of the switch she captured the sounds of empty places.

It was not silence really, because in this world there is never a total absence of sound. Instead she heard the location speak to her. Houses laid out their quietly settling floorboards, the tick of sunlight on roofs, the low growl of traffic held off by walls and glass and distance. Outdoor places spoke to her with leaf-rustling and grass-twitching, birds swooped in to
add their comment to the sense of space, insects chirruped and clicked. Water dripped after rain; gurgled, almost mechanical, through a creek bed.

The empty spaces she recorded provided a levelling effect for films. The steady hum of life formed a meditative background against which the action could take place. Sometimes Susanna had to sit through a performance itself, checking the levels on the little VU dial as the actors ran through their scene time after time. It was a job that could be performed just as easily, she thought, by her ex-lover, a job for the eyes. And because of this she would put her big soft headphones on but not plug them into the equipment. She watched the rise and fall of the needles, adjusted the switches accordingly.

‘Did you like that last take?’ The actor who approached her was tall and too well muscled. She blinked at him through a fog of silence, reading his lips rather than listening to his words. She nodded, although she had no opinion either way. The needle twitched in the right manner three quarters of the way up the gauge, just as it had twitched on every other take, therefore all of the performances were similarly acceptable. When the actor tried again to make conversation, Susanna felt cornered. What did he want? She had never learned the truth about her beauty, the thick dark hair, the eyes so pale that they were almost unnerving, the body, rounded in the places where it mattered. She had never had the interest to notice the way men tracked her with their gaze as she walked home, head down, full of purpose.

‘People always say I could do radio. As a soundo, what do you reckon?’ the actor said to her then, and she was forced to slip the headphones off. The sound of the world assaulted her, the actor’s rich, over-trained voice.

‘I need to record the atmos now,’ she told him, and overhearing her, the first assistant director began to hush the milling crowd, giving Susanna the noise-filled silence that she needed to complete her task.

Susanna spoke when spoken to, a necessary exchange of meaningless words. Even the deaf are required to do this much to move around in the world. At home she sometimes played soft melancholy music while preparing careful dinners for one in her tiny kitchen, but mostly she preferred the quiet.

Her talent for words came to Susanna as a surprise, discovered quite by accident at the same time as she discovered the men. She had been thinking of David. She often thought about him. Since his departure she took her pleasure in a precise, solitary manner. She imagined herself back to her initial unravelling, the moment of pure discovery, her body opening to someone else, the rush as he came, a surprise full of excitement and terror.

But on this occasion it occurred to her that she had no photographs of him. It was a simple thing to type his name into her computer; she wondered why she had not thought of it before. A picture of his face would be enough, she expected, to transport her.

Of course it would be impossible to find him. His name was a common one and her browser filtered through every option, hooking on a million events and people that might or might not have had some relationship to the David who was the object of her desire. She chose one at random, a school journal, someone too young and too fresh faced. Another, the sale of a motorbike to someone with the same name but not the same temperament as the one she loved.

The third option was the turning point, as they would have said at work. The moment when the dark heart of the story was revealed, the actors turning on their better natures, chasing some false goal and tripping down the path of adventure or folly, racing towards their ultimate demise.

This third click of her finger brought the world to her in vivid colour. This other David materialised in her room. It was the same name, but certainly not the same man. This David’s body was turning towards fat, and his skin, darker than the love of her life’s, came from a warmer climate, some place equatorial.

Perhaps it was still there, for it was peppered with a glisten of sweat. A fine dusting of dark hair damp against almost-black nipples. And this man’s penis bore no similarity to the only member she had already met. This one was thick and meaty, the slightly flaccid flesh sponging out from short thick fingers, a blanket of skin surrounding it, a fat protective sock that lent the little protrusion inside all the tenderness of a startled animal.

But as she watched, the animal grew bold, thrusting its head out of its hiding place, abandoning its blanket. She stared, transfixed, uncertain if this man with the same name as the gentle lover of her memory was an actor or a phantom of some previous moment, endlessly replayed on the merry-go-round of the world wide web.

His greeting startled her. He leaned forward with his free hand, his left hand, and the misspelled words appeared at the bottom of the screen.

Why dont u take yor shirt off sexxy.

Susanna recoiled from the computer as if stung, remembering the webcam. The little dot in the top centre of the laptop. A device she had never used, assuming that she would have to do something, maybe go into settings, even to turn the thing on. She reached behind her and grabbed the first thing that came to hand, the scarf she had been wearing when she arrived home. She flung it over the computer, capturing the webcam in its folds as she might capture a Christmas beetle to stop it tangling in her hair.