Emptying My Pockets

When it’s good, you don’t feel the time passing. That’s something you want in personal sex, too, isn’t it? Saying it that way seems sad—why wouldn’t you want to feel every minute?—but it’s not. Or rather it’s no more or less sad than any other way of life. I remember talking with one client about his brother, who had taken a radically different path. “Do you think he’s jealous of you?” I asked. “In the same way I’m jealous of him,” he responded. I don’t know a single word for that, the tragedy inherent in every choice.
I had to apologize to him later for the blood, my legs trembling. That’s the curious effect I never get used to when I’m with endowed men, the way an oversized cock sets my whole body quivering. It’s more diffuse than an orgasm, more satisfying because it involves no satisfaction. There’s brutality, there’s writhing. Writhing is the sexiest verb I know. It’s so full of suffering.

I still dream about it, no matter how much I’m getting. I let my mind at night tell me when I might be horny since it’s hardly a feeling that comes over me anymore. But I know something is happening if I dream about almost coming. I know some sunken part of me still wants it. A lost anchor shifting in the sand.
“I barely had any sex last week,” I said to my boyfriend, weeks ago. “I had what, three partners? I was practically celibate.” So I had dreams about a heavy man with a fat cock fucking me and coming inside me without a condom. I tried to scramble off of it while he was still ejaculating. I didn’t stop him sooner because I’d been close to coming myself. I dreamed about a thin man stroking his long cock on a bed crowded with women and I knew his perfect erection was for me.

“Do you ever start having feelings for any of your clients?” He asked me. “Have you ever had to stop seeing someone?”
He was frustrated by my answers, partly because I was being a little obtuse, partly because he wasn’t asking me what he really wanted to know. I don’t think many people are sadder than the American men who start seeing prostitutes in their thirties. They often have erectile problems. They seem completely baffled by the circumstances of their life and the world at large. Usually they’re good people but only in the easy ways—that goes for most of us, I guess. They seem ineffectual in every way. They read political blogs and have impotent political opinions they hide from all their colleagues. They make money in jobs they don’t care about, doing work they outright despise, married to women they don’t talk to. No judgment. It just isn’t sexy.
That’s how I see it in my meaner moments, anyway, and if it’s mean, it might not be true. One of my most frequent dates has a gruffness about him when we’re in public. It may be nerves but it comes out towards me oppressively, with a touch of disrespect. Once I found myself thinking something cruel about the way he walked as I followed him down the hall to his room. “Be nice to him,” I admonished myself. “You’ve had sex with this man.”

He thinks about everything with the same intensity that I do, but with a different mind. I like that about him. “I want to be your best client,” he used to tell me. Then finally, he told me he already was. I probably laughed at that. (Once he recalled asking me if I were comfortable while going down on him. And according to him I said, “oh yes, this is very sustainable.” “I did not!” I shouted, laughing, appalled. “I did not say that!” “You did.” He said. “I thought it was wonderful.”)
“I’ll tell you why I’m your best client,” he went on. “Because I don’t want you to be anyone other than who you are. I’m sure most people you meet want you to be different. But I don’t desire or hope or expect for anything more from you than what you are It’s all a gift. The way you reveal yourself and the way you don’t reveal yourself. It’s all a gift.”
He says things like this often. I lose track of them. I hold them, I let them go. I keep them in a pocket with loose seams. All the things I’ve forgotten over the past few months, all the moments I didn’t want to write down or maybe didn’t want to remember.
Once, when I was with a couple, I tied the man’s condom in a knot after sliding it off of him and he seemed impressed. “I can do that,” his partner said with a hint of anger. “You’ve never seen anyone do that before?”

It’s only through working that I’ve met the sort who like to check in. They’ll ask “are you okay?” right in the middle. Usually, confused, I will return the question to them. Once when this happened, when I asked a man how he was doing, he said, “I’m an old man on top of a young woman, with good intentions,” and rolled to the side. I’ve been carrying that one for a while.

It was our first date and he invented a reason to know my real name. “Let’s let it be a surprise,” I said, knowing he was wrong about the scenario and that it wouldn’t come up. I think that hurt him but it couldn’t be helped. “You make me feel like I’m home,” he said as he lay sprawled out after. He reached for my hand. “It’s not a quality that can be taught.”
Which is not the same as a quality that can’t be learned.

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