Lust II
Initially he put himself as “heteroflexible” on the app, then changed it to “pansexual,” and finally, with the relief of slipping into familiar sweatpants, designated himself “straight.” What these words failed to capture (because reality itself could not capture it) was the phenomenon whereby, if he dove to the benthic depths of his consciousness in search of the idealized object of his desire, the closer he drew to her, the more he found his hands touching not her, but him, that is, himself—past a certain point he could no longer see the fantasy woman, but became her, and saw instead the desiring man. Thus he explained why he could sooner imagine giving a blowjob than receiving one from a guy—seeing the vision of his own satisfied desire on a face that could be his struck him as more readily appealing than partaking in the brute mechanics of physical pleasure bereft of fantasy.
The root of the word “host,” as in the holy sacrament, is the Latin for “sacrificial victim,” a phrase that makes sense in the context of animals bled on pagan altars, but which becomes uncanny when applied to the bread-it-is-my-body, because the sacrificed body in Catholicism is in no way consumed—Christ remains remote, immaterial, and whole. I wonder if this paradox can help put a finger on how she felt having sex when she was younger, the sense of alienation from her body so complete that touch did not touch her. To this day, she admitted, she sometimes experienced intercourse as a party that she must throw for others, pinning up decorations, offering delectables, but otherwise keeping clear, the unobtrusive host.
She was the only one of her siblings, and at an advanced age at that, who managed to swim far enough to where the sands of desire were shallow enough for wading, where they could be grasped and pounded and dripped over the body. Their parents were, in the parlance of stereotype, conservative, and perhaps you imagine them as austere, prudish, taciturn, touch-shy, and severe, as you might impute if I said they were uncomfortable with her and her first boyfriend, in the early bloom of middle-age, sharing a bed when they visited for Christmas. But no: the mother wore pink tennis skirts around the house, and the father, who allegedly took steroids to maintain the hew of his biceps, winked at his wife from on stage when he and his office band played their racier numbers. As parents, they were exceptionally loving. My theory is that wires get crossed when the possibility of carnal knowledge is denied to the child but manifest too obviously, too solely, in the parents. Of those two outcomes, children find it easier to resent the latter. Policing is simpler than comprehension. When my parents mentioned they were going to see Pulp Fiction, I had already jumped to certain conclusions about the film’s content based on its poster, in which Uma Thurman poses seductively on ruffled bedding. Instead of what seems to me the natural response (begging to be allowed to come with), I said something accusatory—how could you go watch something like that? Did I even know what that was? And then there’s Kafka, who as a teenager, hoping to threaten his parents (one wishes, for some reason, to threaten the parents), boasted that he had more experience in that field than they imagined, and who knows what scandal his unbridled urges might bring home, only to be horrified, indeed traumatized, by the business-like casualness with which his father suggested that he prevent any such drama by visiting prostitutes instead.
To put it simply: two blowjobs were taking place before a small spectating crowd. One was a rousing success, the platonic pornographic ideal. The other faltered—both parties involved were putting up a valiant fight, but it just wasn’t working. What I found interesting, however, was that the man at the receiving end of the triumphant fellatio spent the whole time observing not the maneuvers creating his pleasure, but rather the routed army to his left. All that interests some people are the potentialities of ulterior blowjobs.
A skilled samurai might wish to never see a drop of blood, and she, for her part, would have happily done away with sex altogether, the constant tidal action of desire, the salty stings of unfulfillable needs. If it had any utility for her, it was as a counterweight—she said that if, for example, she consented to any degradations during sex, it was only to balance out the dominance she felt over the relationship’s primary emotional currents. This struck me as wrong, not in the spirit of things, even incomprehensible, although now I wonder if my own inclination to grant certain freedoms to my partners stems from the same anxiety, that if I’m not made to suffer enough the whole business is doomed.
Eye contact curdles. The first smiling glance exchanged on the dancefloor opens a crystal trickle of unadulterated desire, the second swells the trickle into a stream, but by the fifth or seventh the smile is gone and what flows are stones. Hesitation reveals the lie of calculation in pursuing desire, just as, for better or worse, it pleasingly hides the truth of the desire pursued. These roles are not fixed, they can suddenly switch, but still they must be played, and if they are played bravely, fidgeting reality can be transmuted, step-by-step, into riskless spectacle. The culmination of this process is that absurd rhetorical question sometimes posed and always implied during sex: You like that?