Melting

“Open your eyes,” he instructed. “Open your eyes. Look at me.” He held my face in his hands as I rocked over him. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever fucked.”

I don’t know how he expected me to respond but I had the distinct impression he was saying it primarily to elicit a reaction. He told me the same thing earlier too, when he wasn’t inside of me. The elegant way to deflect these lines is to turn them into a compliment for the giver rather than a put down of yourself.

“Oh, I find that hard to believe,” I’d said then. “I’m sure you’ve been with lots of attractive women.” Thinking to myself, with rude pleasure, that I was referring to other women he’d paid.

“I don’t think you understand how attractive you are,” he replied, like he was really on to something, like he’d stumbled upon a secret I wanted to keep hidden. All of this made me lose respect for him—that he was underestimating me enough to think I would enjoy or be flattered by this game. So it was strange later when he said, “You keep your intellect in a cage because otherwise it would scare away men like me. Thank you. Thank you for humoring me.”

But he had his cute moments. “If you ever feel like something isn’t working out right just tell me, ‘baby, you left me hanging,’ and I’ll say ‘baby, I’ll take care of it! Tell me what I need to do!’” He was talking about money. He wanted to know if I’d been with someone else earlier that morning and was hoping yes. More and more the men I meet savor my sluttishness.

I knew he wanted something to make him feel dirty, so I told him the truth, about laying in bed for an hour and fantasizing about a man I hadn’t seen in years while I got very wet, and I saved that wetness for him because our date was only a few hours away.

“What happened?” he asked. “Why don’t you see each other anymore?”

“He begged me not to reply to his emails. So I didn’t. He wrote me a few times and I never wrote back. He told me whenever we corresponded he couldn’t function—” I stopped myself. It sounded too dramatic. “He couldn’t think about anything else except us being together, and he was supposed to be married soon.”

“Because you’re haunting,” my client said immediately. “You know that, right? He was haunted by you. You’re hard to forget. I bet that happens a lot.”

“It’s happened like that one other time,” I admitted, though there’s nothing to be proud about. I don’t remember if I told the client that I’d also emailed this second man that morning too, and the second man replied almost instantly. He explicitly said he was afraid to see me again. He wanted, and still wants, to lay down his life for me. Not his breathing, heart-beating life—I mean everything he’s built around himself. Should I make it more ugly? He wants to lay down his family for me. I told him two things. One, I would not do the same for him. And two, if he needed to give it up, if he needed to get out of a bad marriage, I would be his excuse. But if he was happy, I didn’t want to interfere with that.

“Thank you for giving me the best fuck of my life,” the client said. We were doing it over and over again. Sex somersaults—in various positions so he could get the best views in the wall mirror. Me on my knees and tilting my pussy so he could see it while I went down on him. I suggested he come on my face, which is safer to do if it’s their second or third time. He wouldn’t quit. “My god, you’re so beautiful. Look at you.” Pulling my hair back from my face and looking rapturously. Working so hard to convince at least one of us. That night I’d get back into my bed and stare at my reflection in the wall mirror while I ate, watching my face as I chewed. It felt like having a staring contest with another person, but a curious one rather than an angry one. And there was no winner.

“I remember this from last time,” he said while I was on top, half curled up on him like a child. I didn’t. He asked me to put my head on his chest to recreate it. Then I got my feet under me and sat up, riding him in a squat. Before he left he said, “You’re looking into a fogged mirror. You might sometimes think ‘oh I look skinny, I look cute’—you have no idea. And my job is to wipe it”—he made a motion like swiping glass with his sleeve—”clean.”

I scrawled it down afterwards. Seeing words on paper helps me decide if they mean anything. It still feels hollow. “No one appreciates you like me,” he said, and that made me a little angry. He has no idea the competition he’s up again. He doesn’t know this is something other men say and he doesn’t know how things men say run together like rivulets in melting ice. “Do I make you feel ravished?” he asked, when he was inside me again, from behind. Whose benefit all this is for—that’s usually transparent.

Over Christmas my father, the rabid conservative, laughed about being approached by prostitutes in Vegas and declared it should be legal. I love him but not in the way I’ve ever loved anyone else and it’s so cluttered up I don’t know what to do with it. I want us to be able to spend time with each other but I don’t want to have to talk about the past or excavate our anger. He made me come upstairs and he played a song for me on his guitar and asked if I remembered being a child and laughing when I first heard the line about the fire engine being a clean machine. Of course I remembered. It’s the first thing I think of when I think of us, though he played it on the piano then. I’d never been confronted with someone’s love like that, never had an offering that naked. There was no way to respond, no plug for connecting with each other in any way more than an uncomfortable smile and “yeah, I remember.” We’re not supposed to be so explicit in this family. We don’t cry in front of each other. We don’t touch.

My mother almost confronted me over the phone. She told me I should just tell everyone I’m not a sex worker, just like that: “I am not a sex worker.” We unintentionally screamed at each other a little before it escalated into a hang up and I contemplated what it would be like to be severed from my family. I thought I could deal with it. I guess I could, everyone survives things that seem impossible. Now that I’m raw from a visit home I can see how armored I would have been by my work in order to think that, how deeply burrowed.

I don’t know if everyone else ricochets like this.  I’ve always had it in me, though, that complete coldness. If people demand too much, I’ll get rid of them. One of my friends mentioned that she felt she couldn’t defend taking the money of married men. Usually it seems to me an action that needs no defending. I realized I primarily only experience guilt if I’ve impacted another in a way in which I have no stake. I mean if I stood up someone for lunch because I confused the date, I would feel terrible. But if I bailed out last minute for lunch because there was something else I wanted to do, I would feel nothing. And if my lunch date became angry with me I would come back at them ten times angrier, thinking, I sent you a text a half hour before, how much more do you want from me?

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