Lust III
“See, there just aren’t that many kinds of sex,” she said, offering, as proof, a kink consent worksheet she’d been sent by a friend, an Excel document with a comprehensive list of erotic acts beside one column marked “giving/receiving” and another marked “yes/no/maybe.” Ninety-six acts in total, from “spanking” to “homage with tongue (non-sexual).” I suppose this assignment gets transacted over email, but I prefer to imagine potential “play partners” meeting at a café, where they fill out, exchange, and then read the other’s form with bated breath, as if it were the world’s most complicated lottery ticket. Homage with tongue…he’s a…maybe! The letter that marks the other’s willingness becomes, in that moment, a manifestation of the act itself. Proof that it could happen is proof that it did. One feels richer having won the lottery, well before the money comes in. Money is, by definition, fungible, which makes it, by definition, boring. One would do better to study the face of the person as they fill out the form. To study the form is, if you’ll forgive a vulgar transposition in service of a pun, to put la carte before the whores.
Y. told me that when she watched sadomasochistic pornography, she preferred the victims to be men, not out of a gendered sexual preference, but because she felt that the pain the men were put through was both more extreme and more genuinely suffered. Z. told me that sometimes she would go on brief sprees of one-night stands, where she enjoyed both orchestrating these encounters and making the orchestration provocatively apparent to the men she slept with—she loved watching their helplessness and discomfort at how easily she undid their fingers and took their desire from their hands. There’s something dark, then comic, and finally dark again about how often and how correctly you can say of a man: he was asking for it.
The owner knew that her hotel was in a bad location, too far to be easily walkable to the center, too near to offer any fantasy of breeze and greenery. The guests she received were usually interminable complainers, the kind of people who still believed, after many years of life, that they could find real joy in the saving of twenty dollars. But an article that she read online gave her an idea: she created profiles on various dating apps using photos of attractive girls she found online, matched with men, the traveling businessmen in particular, and convinced them (not that it required so much work) to book a room at this perfectly neither-here-nor-there hotel for their tryst. I suppose there are interesting narrative turns this story could have taken. She might have found herself unexpectedly piqued by the messages she received from one of her marks. She might have become interested in these men as a group, begun categorizing them, those who sat quietly in the room, those who paced the street, those who asked after their non-existent Nancy with tangled euphemisms at the front desk, those who left a soiled tissue on the bedstand, a slammed door on their way out, a bad review about a breakfast they had not tasted. She might have lain afterwards in the room whose walls had soaked in so many disappointments that their gravity was drawing out her own, feelings that she managed to keep at bay with nihilism until, one day, a furtive couple really did shack up in her hotel, starting a torrid weeklong affair that she had to fuel and abet through endless acts of room service, the profits from which left her cold. But none of this happened. Her bolstered accounts allowed her to sell the hotel, and buy a smaller one in a better location. It’s important to remember that some people just don’t care that much about sex.
After the party, the host, who had known the family since its inception, and who otherwise had only platitudes to say about the previous evening, offered one barb about the daughter: “Well, at least this time she didn’t whine about the food.” During the event, the girl had helped set out plates, made a few innocuous jokes, and otherwise, as befit her position as the ambassador of youth, spent the evening scrolling through her phone. What mattered more, I suspect, is that in each of these activities she looked incomparably striking. Did the instinct to denigrate evolve as a ward against lust? The beasts of the forest lack acid tongues, and perhaps it is to their detriment.
“As I get older the idea of jamming my genitals into other people’s genitals just isn’t all that titillating anymore,” he said, falling in love with half the women he saw on the street. People want to be worthy of fucking more than they want to fuck. Worthy of respect, worthy of attention, worthy of forgiveness, whatever other plaques they think they can fashion out of the wrack of sex-making. It’s good to keep your numbers up, she said. I’m an “intellectual,” so it’s not the ole conquering-by-penetration I’m after, it’s something way more sophisticated, like, you know, learning their secrets and making them come. You’re right, it’s a poverty of imagination. When you have a hammer every cloud looks like it ought to be nailed to the sky.
Her therapist told her to go ahead and sleep with him. What the client didn’t know was that the therapist had guessed who the guy was, and was in fact friends with him. The therapist thought that her client was repressed, and would benefit from some experience with a safe, skilled, and generous man. The man, of course, loved this role, guiding her hand as she checked the boxes down a list of lesser-known virginities. But when every box was thoroughly filled in, his job was done, and he lost interest in her; she, on the other hand, did not lose interest in him. I wonder if in the end she was grateful to her therapist, if she was having a more satisfying sex life post factum. I suspect there can be no volunteer tutors in bed. To introduce someone to their own pleasure is too fraught a task. The therapist would have done better by encouraging her client to also pay the man for his services.
“That part lasted all of thirty seconds,” I said, telling the story later, and he replied, “Long enough to enjoy it in your memory.” Which is how it works, if only for certain casts of mind: the pleasure extracted from recalling a certain encounter eventually outpaces the pleasure derived during the encounter itself. I seek novelty, but novel experiences always have the quality of first drafts: the pacing is off, the characters are hazy, and metaphors outnumber concrete acts. When I reopen them in my fantasy, I always fixate on the moments when I could have asked for something, but didn’t, could have pushed some boundary, but didn’t, could have extended some game, but chose to let it go; in my fantasy (where I sometimes retreat even mid-coitus), I can correct my words, straighten my posture, act with the august patience becoming of an erectio aeterna. Does that mean that sex is just the accumulation of regrets? In a way. Not quite. My attitude toward sex is like my attitude toward life: I’m glad to be invited to its great scenes from time to time, I regret (and adore, and have come to fondly anticipate) the frailty of mind and body necessary to experience them.