Lust I
It’s two things at least, linked but distinct, one the physical need, the carnal insistence, resembling the hollowness that forms in the mouth when one chews one’s food for too long without swallowing, and two the tentacular workings of the imagination (arguably this is the chewing), which rubs images, sounds, and textures together like tinder-sticks to see sparks, and which can lead me to repeatedly note the erotic possibilities of, say, a particular lampshade. But then there is also something more, the attempts to manifest and test these internal states in and against reality, which is its own separate thing, because it reveals that lust-in-action is more than aligning your private crosshairs with an external target and pulling the trigger in time; it is not something sated, but a terrain that can only be educed and explored while holding someone else’s hand. Some shy away from this requirement, others resent it. L. would meet men through the apps, pleasure them, and then, refusing reciprocity, return to jerk off in the solitude of his own home, the only place where he felt comfortable standing on the newly exposed landscape, even if in fact he was only standing on its map.
What he desired was to be pulled under by the strength of a woman’s concupiscence. The sexiest thing he could imagine being told, he told me, was, “You’re not what I want, but for some reason I find you irresistible.” I doubt this would do much for me. When I’ve felt that overwhelming desire from another, I’ve found it too large, too smooth—I don’t know where to grip. You lack subtlety, I’ve thought, but never said. I’ve said, I want to make you uncomfortable, and she smiled and told me I couldn’t. Once you realize these are games to play, not plays to orchestrate, you can get on to the interesting work of learning how to lose with temerity.
One doesn’t want to be stupid. One doesn’t want to click on and then, holding control and the scroll wheel, enlarge those profile pics that feel too recalcitrant with their pixels. One doesn’t want to vote with the hordes that have made the first suggested refinement to the Google search term “[first name] [last name]” inevitably be “[first name] [last name] girlfriend”. One doesn’t want to gaze at youth as if it were wisdom. All the playboys I know confess to a painful emptiness that invades them after the deed, as if this overwhelming desire they’d felt were not theirs, as if they were merely an epigonic puppet through whose threadbare cloth a thousand hard-coded grandfathers thrust their collective desiccated member. If such acts must be carried out without the complicity of love, the only quantity that will shame the slathering ancestors, let them be done in a temple, a trench, a nightclub, somewhere surrounded by others. It’s terrible to have sex alone.
One doesn’t want to be stupid, but it’s in the word. Infatuation, to make fatuous, to make obnoxiously idiotic. The word’s seeming innocence pleasantly muddles the senses of love and lust, just as the name Proust does. One assumes, because he’s French, flowery, and melodramatic, that he will write about love, but all Marcel ever feels is the itchiness of his hairsuit of lust and the cold apathy that follows ripping it off. He even realizes it, but it doesn’t matter. Like a learnèd bull, we know that the flag being waved before our eyes is red, but we physically can’t bring ourselves to see it; only the spectators can do that. If we charge, we’re dumb beasts, but if we don’t, we ruin the show. Let’s rephrase then the tired line: everything is about sex, except sex, which is about having stories to tell your friends. It’s maybe not the best way to live, to live, that is, for them, but it might be the most honest.
Riverdale. West 200-something Street, 200 streets north of my neighborhoods at least. On the bottom bunk, though I don’t remember her as having a sibling, but I can remember the cramped space under the slats and mattress. She reached distractedly, à la “passionately,” under my jeans, and I arched my back to the roof, trying to make a cave of my hips. We were 15, and it was unlike my unrebellious self to risk visiting her at home alone (verboten, on both sides), but it was part of same martyrdom: to be where she wanted me, to refuse the pleasure I thought she thought she owed me for it. I’ve always feared the world was impatient with my enjoyment, and it was easier to prove myself worthy of it than to actually accept it. Later, when I wanted to change this, it turned out to be harder than just saying yes—I did not realize that to arouse others was not necessarily to arouse them how I wanted them to be aroused. The selfishness I went to reclaim had been gathering interest. I admit I envy those for whom giving feels like taking and taking like giving. My accounts balance these days, but like one of those old-fashioned merchant’s scales with large quavering plates, whose equilibrium seems liable to a mustard seed. Two years in I was told, “You’re amazing at it, the best, but I had to get used to how…professional you were about it.”
He was engrossed, enchanted, when she led him down to the basement of an adult cinema, before the beatifically surprised eyes of the lowlifes and the truckers in the once bright cushioned seats now puced and scabbed by time and spunk, and onto the stage, where she let him fuck her. And yet things ended soon after that: having lunch the next day, he found himself disgusted by her slovenly way of devouring a shawarma. It’s not enough to chalk this up to a Madonna–döner complex. The pharmacist of Bitola (which, to give the desultory evening some charm, I decided would make a good name for a Chekhov story) annoyed me by claiming that modernity forced men to reign in their masculine instincts, but then (because annoyance is sadly no obstacle), at the end of the night, she was in a position to request that I do just that. There’s no contradiction. We resort to simplifications to make our desires seem less greedy, but the dance we like has steps both priggish and slatternly, and we only recognize our pleasure outside ourselves by seeing it in constant motion.