I was rereading a travel log from my Bs As summer in '08. Found a couple of unfinished stories. Wish I'd known where I'd been planning to go. Original fragments reworked now 2019.
The Demon in Her Eyes
I haven’t always had the best life. For the most part, it’s all good, but every once in a while it wears through.
Hold up. This isn’t supposed to be about me. It was gonna be about her, not me. Her and me. But to understand her… well, my vision of her, I am at least a bit relevant. Still, let's start with her.
We met etc. Within seconds of pleasant conversation, I found my body surging with curiosities about hers. How would the round of her head fit against the center of my palm? How would her hair scrunch between the webs of my fingers and would it tickle or scratch my finger tips How would that solid crown compare to the thick jelly of her breasts in my same palm? Would her nose find a knotch above my clavical or would mine in hers? How would my belly curve against the transition between the small of her back to the acme of her ass? Which finger would fit just-right in her cupid’s bow? How would my arm fit against her waist?
My earlobe wanted to investigate the nape of her neck. My lips wanted to drag across the fuzz of her earlobe. My fingers to trace the little crinkles that flashed about her eyes when she smiled. My forehead craved to compare pores with hers. My skin everywhere wanted to know the relative temperature and humidity of her breath. My inner ear wondered if that crystal laugh would acquire more gutteral intonations in moments of abandon. My nose wanted to catalog and map her scentscape in endless atlases of anatomy. My arm hairs stretched to tangle in hers.
You get the gist. All of me wanted all of her. It was mutual. Very good start.
But now, I really should add a little back story.
I had a shit family. And consequently a shit childhood. I dealt in my youth with a priggish moral rectitude to shame Jesus. I rose above it all, the white sheep in the pig sty. If there was a moral resume builder to be found, I probably ran it by my teens. Man did my farts ever smell great. You know the type.
This is where it gets melodramatic, so I’m gonna rev up and rush through it. Kid turned up dead one night and not a pretty death. Foster brother. Long story, but I was nice to him despite his unacceptably glaring "queerness" (not ok in my particular town). Misinterpretations of "kindness" flourished way before the foul play. It got worse after, and I got dragged into months of investigation accusation and complete repudiation from all those virtuous character building institutions. Thank god for DNA and... well that's another story and not really the point.
I rose out of it like a battered phoenix and flipped the bird homeward, before settling into a far more comfortable goodish-enough moral stance. I came out of it alright, I’d say. Glad for the pecadillos my last rigid stance allows me.
Yeah, I had a crap beginning, but it’s been good from there. I have my jobs. I have my friends. My hobbies. Aside from a tendency to strike people just a little wrong, I’m pretty much just “normal” to industrious. Though I won't let the world forget what I've mucked through and how solidly I have. I guess sometimes people are just unlucky, and I take a fair but of pride in my survival of that condition.
I have just made myself more interesting than her. Sorry. It’s a thing I do. If we’re being honest - which lord knows we might not be being - I don’t know enough about her to make her independently interesting. I mean she was interesting, but that can get drowned out in the proximity to self. Sure a few things: She had a laugh that fluttered at your ear a bit like a dragonfly’s wings - first thing I noticed - and a surprisingly sharp tongue to cut through that syrup. She was never phased by me, which felt like a challenge. And there was always a sense she wasn't telling something vitally important. I liked that. And hated it. And, well, let’s just admit this was about me all along.
It's just that every once in a rare while, I start wondering if the luck isn’t random. If I’m not really an evil person, polluting everything he touches and sets about to care for. These usually set on me after half a bottle of whiskey, but sometimes the premonition of these thoughts is what made the whiskey appeal. Something some asshole parent whispered in my crib no doubt. And fuck ‘em for being so uncreative.
The point being it’s a rare and quarantined side of me, my whiskey soaked demon. Most people know my early life sucked, but all they see is a happy enough guy who probably pisses them off and they can’t say quite why.
So this is about her: she was an exception. Circumstances partially to blame.
Midway through our first date (I still indulge in these niceties, call me old fashioned), shit changed. We ran into a particularly hostile relation of my old friend “the dead gay kid.” Things got heated and loud. We’re talking “escort off the premises” kind of hostility.
I kept composure with a tight smile throughout, but something in me felt the crumple. I hadn’t expected it then. We're a long way from home. I had no idea anyone had followed me here. My defenses were diverted towards sparkling badinage and I recovered too slowly.
Shaken and already healthily inebriated I gradually shared “the story” with her.
“The story” itself is no big deal. Honestly, you would be surprised at just how well it gets a guy laid - pity and drama make potent aphrodisiacs. Did I mention the kid was all roughed up because my foster dad like to drink a little much and go to town on him? And me? True story. But I just laughed at him as he did.
The “big deal” was a little of that darker mood - the one that doesn’t think all this crap comes by chance, and sees its origins in yours truly - slipped out. Not the parody I affix to persona in time of great lust, but the demon itself.
At first the whole thing was mortifying, but then delicious. And then back and forth between the two off into the sunset.
Her reaction was hard to describe. Most women experience one or both of two reactions: (1) they recoil, as I’ve just taken myself off the eligible list and into the land of red flags, (2) they want to fix me, save me, and mend all the cruelties of the world through me.
The latter, as I’ve implied, has been a great boon to my sex life.
She seemed simply unsurprised. As if I were relating that the newspaper hadn’t been delivered on time. I don’t want to paint this reaction as cold or unsympathetic. Merely that it came across that all this was perfectly natural. Perhaps I simply couldn’t see her real reaction past some studied composure. I doubt it. In this lay profound relief and a rare sense of intimacy.
Like puss from a boil, I let that side drain out in her unphased presence. The story expanded, bringing in more and more detail from birth to present. Talking almost to fill the space that she held without flinching or soliciting. Binding us together with tendrils of tenderness and terror. When the tears had dried and the comfort been applied with a surgical precision and a nurse’s attention, we consecrated this bond with our own catharses.
Things were back to a good start. My body got its answers and raised new questions. Always new ones. Infinite arroyos and mesas to query. Infinite little folds to discover. A full language of breath. An endless subtlety of blushes. In a different universe, I would have written book after book, tirelessly forging further.
The side effect of all that open space and intimacy being - unfortunately - that this side became more and more connected to her and essentially associated with her. To become the happy regular person I really am, it felt urgent to flee. In this was the mortification. The more I confided, the I feared. The more resentment I felt for what she saw and drew out of me. But the more that side riled, the more it needed to be bled. Dependence and disgust set in in tandem.
If she hadn’t seen. If only. We would have had such fun. We still did. But there was a half-life to it. She confided nothing in me, yet gifted me with staggering vulnerability anyways. I recoiled from my own by caring for her. Little rescues. Little attentions. gentlemanly things that she accepted graciously but also without surprise. Always without surprise.
It would go well. So well. Bodies fitting in bodies in novel origami. Sometimes exciting. Sometimes languorous. Sometimes silly. Soft and innocent. Like precocious children washed of original sin in one healing bath of laughter and affection. So it would start.
Then it would go… well… poorly. We don’t have to get into that. I’m not a saint, obviously. Broad strokes, I’d panic to see my demon reflected in her eyes. I’d vanish. I’d lash out. She’d lay out her needs soberly. I’d decline. We’d shrug and resolve to part. Then: Tears. Recriminations. Space. Mourning.
And then some lonely night, a little alcohol, and a joke that only she would get. One more little question from my body of hers. The sole of her foot again my calf? The palm of her hand… how had it fit just so against my jawline. The flutter of her eyelashes against my cheek bone versus her lashes against my neck. That little gasp she took before a kiss: what key had that been in?
A joke. A question. A dialogue. A moment. And again the dance.
***
"I'm not the girl you'd have taken home, anyways," she slurred one bubbly sotten night of reconciliation/seduction "I'm a phase. Maybe I'll kick start some inspiration and remind you of your passions. Maybe I'll remind you how much you miss home or how you've longed to save the fucking turtles in the galapagos. Beautiful revelations and off you'll go again. I'm prolly the one before The One...but I like you an awful lot anyhow."
She shrugged in just such a way that my entire body spewed novels of questions about the slope of her shoulders and the tilt of her neck. "So what are you failing to work out that you're back again?" Eyebrow arched in just such a way that I wanted to compare her upper eyelid to my cheekbone.
A salty bitterment to her syrupy tone that teased my taste buds, before burbles of giggle teemed out and the mood changed again.
What was left to work out? I was certain at that moment that it was the exact curve equation of her upper lip. Perhaps what undiscovered ecstasies lay in her third left knuckle. The lunulas of her pinkies.
***
This cycle re-perpetuated itself as many times as we were both willing to allow. We must have known better. At first, I’d tell myself I’d make it up this time as a lover or - since that never worked - a friend. It always started well.
And when it didn’t end so well, it bothered me endlessly to imagine she was out there hating me, disgusted, or - so much worse - just forgetting me and all the little matryoshka ways our bodies and words interlocked. Leaving the demon with me alone again. That fear bonded me to her more deeply than all her fluttering lashes and tinkling laughter.
It always went the same, albeit in rapidly accelerating cycles: reconciliation, seduction, confusion, and bloody retreat. There were variations, but this pattern was never much revolutionized.
The seduction - if you give such a fancy term to something more akin to falling-back-into-configuration - became a see-saw of hysterical outbursts that I usually started. Typically, it began with my loneliness and ended with hers.
***
In a pique of hyberbole, sometimes I'd tell her I loved her. I still remember the jolt her flinch sent through my body. The way she'd look away, new railroad maps across her forehead, and close her eyes. Not surprised. Saying nothing.
Sometimes - as cycles wound down - I'd tell her no matter what, she'd always be a part of me.Things of that general nature. Things that felt true to me, and how she never left my mind. Sometimes it felt like she'd peeled back a layer of my skin and added a layer of her own. It stung. It itched. It was never settled. I wanted her to understand that. That she was never fully absent even when we were apart.
I remember her looking at me - unsurprised but deeply non-plussed. "Why keep coming around then if you have me so neatly packed up?"
I was usually sober enough to recognize a rhetorical question. Occasionally not.
Sometimes she'd add that when I left her that night - for a few hours or a few weeks, who could guess - she wouldn't be swimming around in my bloodstream like the booze I'd brought. She'd be there in her room brushing her teeth. Shaving her legs. Blowing her f-ing nose. And otherwise being a boring animate human being with some deep hurt and a nice side of self loathing. Whatever else I imagined. She'd cry or sneer depending on the prevalent hostility levels. Sometimes both.
Around that time, my hand would grow curious what sting it'd feel colliding with her cheek. Palm or back of hand? Both? Other queries grew up around this, before imploding into a heap of more generalized lust and loneliness.
I'd cry, she'd cry or continue to. We'd end up tangled in each other's arm. Part comfort. Part rebuke. Never sure what flurry of delusions would last the night. Always a small bit willing to give it another shot.
***
There were exceptions. The first time barely nicked the skin. She understood. Wrong time. Wrong place. When opportunity arose to reconnect, she let that flow as well. It was beautiful, really. How I would have wanted it from the start. I was exactly what I wish I could have been the first time. In control. She melted into me and I tasted such concoctions of self and sudor.
But it wasn’t a clean reboot. The little demon was home in her arms, peeking from my solar plexus to suckle at her bosom while we slept. Domestic bliss possessed. When it fell apart, she didn’t seem surprised, a small sting in that fact.
The second required more than a few laughs, some apologies, and a rescue involving lost apartment keys after a late night out. New job. Stress. And again. Understandable. It got more tenuous. More ritualized. More… alcoholic from there. Never surprising. Always predictable. Almost scrawled in iambic pentameter.
Then there was that time so many months later. Different than usual. It felt dissociative. More of a reflex than an emotional act. Our bodies taking their inventories, finding their nooks and crannies. Our minds clamped down in a steely silence, too tired to engage in the same endless scripts.
As I was leaving that time, she smiled sardonically in a way that made my gut flip. Softening her eyes if not her lips, she declared that we were friends and there were no expectations. Neither of these statements was remotely true, though I wished they could have been. I agreed solemnly before wandering away. I felt tired, then, and cheated of her expectations, though I’d trampled every right to expectations in ways she had yet to discover.
I was - and remain - aware that her actual expectations involved some clauses I had failed. She’d expected I’d tell her if I wasn’t single anymore. When I was seeing somebody seriously. A somebody who knew enough and no more. And a somebody who most definitely expected things of me, fidelity in particular. I’m sure she would have expected me, given my previous declarations of principle, to give some effort to resist temptation if just a warning. I knew that had mattered to her. I knew she expected that. I’d known the last several times. Some things flow so easily. Others… not all demons were so bold to show themselves I suppose.
***
I didn’t necessarily know that my "someone" could be traced a few degrees to my “her.” That we’d be introduced with all the cringeworthy formalities at a party less than a week later. I can’t forget the exact configuration of teeny facial muscles that formed her expression when we locked eyes. The blankness about the pupils. As if the mirror I’d seen in her eyes suddenly flipped inwards and she finally saw it too. Or maybe she saw herself in some distorted fun mirror of my creation. I don’t quite know. Maybe us both.
Finally, I’d surprised her, and in such a terribly unoriginal way at that.
And that sudden overwhelming throb of shameful curiosity to know how her body would give and fold under that image came rushing over me in ways I am not proud to admit. Though it brings me still a burning pleasure to recall how it did; that night, at that party. With no remaining semblance of amicability or tenderness; only insatiable curiosity and fire. The speechless way her body begged to feel and feed back the hurt of her psyche: it fed into an unhinged libidinous violence of mine. It was jagged edges and nail marks and stinging fingers on flesh. A colonization where there had been tender exploration. The frenzy of what I can only describe as exorcism. No words exchanged. No apologies offered. No hope of redemption.
And then she was gone - without a word, without a glance,and finally quite truly free of expectation. The world was still. I was empty to the depths of my core. The space. The silence. I will never forget that either. Free. Purged. Empty.
***
I want you to understand, I’m no philanderer. If I'm in a relationship - and I take those seriously enough not to be in them often - then I know the terms and I follow them.. I’m no cheater. The odd lapse was always a “swept away in the moment” uncalculated kind of nothing soaked in booze. And I’ve always atoned. Almost always. There are different ways to atone.
There’s always an exception to the rule. That addictive something that can’t be treated with anything short of hexes or heroin. That little avatar on my phone waiting for a sensory twinge. A question I’d never meant to ask. A justification I needed to share. And I always thought it would just be a moment. An epilogue. A "one last thing!" Sometimes thought that.
I’d like to say I returned from that party stirred to reformation having worked out whatever thing she seemed to think I had needed to. I'd like to think that was a full exorcism and a full return of skin to skin.
She changed her number. But I never did go by her house, which I could have. Not while she was home anyways. Not up to her door. I thought better of it at some point.
I have no idea if new cycles might have continued. How would they have looked after that last reveal? Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes fantasize. Guiltily. Which heightens the fantasy. Cycles all their own.
I miss the tenderness, though, too. The Garden of Eden her figure's longitudes and latitudes somehow conjured. Before the apple's Eureeka moments. Before the shame. Before the snake. But there never was a before the snake. It was always there munching at every fruit tree, and watching patiently.
So I'm a bastard. But an average entitled prick bastard. This isn't caused by any shattered bit of past. Just a stirring of loins and a certain kind of self-negating erotic compulsion that's existed long before there was music to set it to song.
I'm not excusing myself. While I have always enjoyed a surplus of undeserved trust with minimal pangs of guilt, I know it will and should out somehow. The world is only so large. And well, I rub people the wrong way. I have crap luck. It’s only a matter of time before the good I’ve scraped together blows up again.
Before that self I saw in her eyes, fully realized that last night, emerges and finds itself in other eyes. This is why I’m not thrilled to have people out there with dirt on me, no matter how benign. Maybe not her, but somebody else she knew. Though it’s reassuring to remember how agonizingly discrete she was about every little thing.
But I’d like you to understand. I’d like somebody to understand and look me in the eye and show me what they see.
I’ve changed since then, I think. I hope. I wish I could show her that. And remind myself of the exact angle and approach of her arm across my back, her head against my shoulder.
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