Incomplete

All of it will sound strange because it was. He dressed as though he were going to help a friend paint. He wore huge, ridiculous black gloves, like something he’d found in someone else’s house, and one front tooth was slightly chipped, a different color than the rest. He asked if I had change for the parking meter. It shouldn’t have been a big deal but it was. Once we sat down I asked him what his sheaf of papers was and I saw as I was asking, under the torn corner of one, my foot. He’d printed out my pictures.
“You don’t look happy,” he said.
“I don’t think….I think I…”
To his credit he understood. We shook hands and he got in his car and drove away and I stood on the street corner trying not to cry, waiting for a cab to approach. You have to realize, it never starts like that. The men I see are gentlemen. They at least have the air of having lived and functioned in the world for a long time. He’d cashed in a bunch of stocks, he told me that much. I won’t even say what type of car he drove. I’m never this much of a snob. I never have to be.

“I am experiencing regret,” he texted me. And he called, but I didn’t answer. He sent me an email. (“What was it? I went home and I had everything ready and I really wanted to be with you.”) It occurred to me that maybe he knew who I was—I mean he knew about this site. He had that way about him, a writer’s way: sincere, awkward, caught up in his own scattered brain. I wanted the year to be over. I agreed to meet him again and it was horrible. The restaurant was crowded, which was a surprise.
“Do you have the envelope?” I asked him, when I started to sense the rapid slide downhill. I never have to ask that.
“It’s a bank envelope,” he said.
“Ok, well, you can still slide it over to me.” Not giving a fuck. Angry. I have an anger in me. It’s rare that I let it come out around clients.
“It’s XXXX dollars,” he said. I just kept looking at him. “Do you want it?”
I flashed my eyes at him. Who cared. Let him see my greed. “Yes.”
“Then are you going to come back with me?” He whisper-hissed, leaning towards me.
“No,” I said. “Not today.”
“But maybe later?”
“I’ll think about it…” Meaning no.
We’d been together for ten minutes and he said he was going to leave. I said he should do whatever makes him comfortable. He said I wasn’t being open to him. We fought about what had gone wrong, misunderstanding each other.
Finally I couldn’t help it, I started thinking about the table of tourists next to us, and how obvious our conversation was, how obvious our arrangement. I started smiling and he thought it was for something he’d said.
“That’s the first smile you’ve ever given me,” he said.
“That’s not true,” I said. “I was really trying yesterday.”
“You’re a hard woman,” he said. “A hard fucking woman. I won’t lie. It’s kind of hot.” We started smiling at each other, laughing a little at ourselves.
“I’ll give you XXXX to come back to my place right now for one hour,” he said.

And his house was just like it would be, of course—wood paneling, an old family home. His family’s old home. Great cold spaces because no one but him had been inside for some time. Full of emptiness. It felt almost abandoned, like a mausoleum holding the bedroom of a friend from my adolescence.
I took off my underwear and tights in the bathroom and stood before him on the rust colored carpet. We kissed. I got wet. I usually get wet with a first time. But this was very wet. He felt me with his fingers and laid me down on his bed. I clung to him. “I don’t want to come,” he said. “Don’t,” I said, clinging like a barnacle, like a monkey to its mother. I didn’t want either of us to come. I wanted it to last and last. He repositioned me with pillows underneath. He pressed my face flat to the side with his palm full on my cheek. He wrapped his arms completely around me while I lay on my stomach, saying things I didn’t hear into my hair. It was so good. Luminous. Inexplicable. One thick gold smear. His stomach was firm with give, full but lean. I noticed his body when he got up to adjust the floor heater. Unintentional. Just right. At one point he’d tried to distract himself, to stall by talking to me while inside me. “When was the last time you cried?” was one of his questions.
I didn’t want to admit it had been the day before, so I said, “recently.”

We saw each other the following week. It was much like it had been before but not as good. That’s predictable. It’s too hard to recreate a very good first time on the second time though it might be better than the first by the fourth or fifth. Still, I was incredibly wet and I still wanted it to last, and when he came I wanted him to fuck me a second time—I’d never come with him, I was saving it like it was a battery that needed to be charged more, and I’d been so close many times—but he didn’t, maybe to try to prove some point about what he wanted me there for. I said something about the ladies hanging on his wall. They were funny rectangular pieces of porcelain with ghostly women painted on them, each about the size of a TV remote. He told me about all the time he’d spent writing in that corner, and how he remembered the light in the room, and some of the songs he listened to, and those ladies. The first time we were together he accidentally put the ancient clock radio on a station I soon realized was Christian rock. “What’s your favorite Elton John song?” he asked me in his car.

The second time, when he was driving me to the metro, he said something to me and there was a pause, and I asked him about his truck.
“You don’t have to talk,” he said. ” I like your silences.”

I saw someone else later that night, someone very nice, with whom I have much in common. He was candid and engaging. I think he almost cried for a moment, but it’s hard to tell with men. I think their faces slip towards tears sometimes without them even realizing. I laughed at dinner when a snap pea fell from my chopsticks before it could reach my mouth.
“I’m not watching you eat,” he said, interrupting himself.
“That’s too bad,” I said. “Because I’m making it interesting.”
Later he told me he wanted to make sure I enjoyed myself, that that was more important than anything else and I knew it was true, for him. I felt so guilty then about this cruel thought I’d had about his wife. When googling him I’d learned something personal about her, something very personal that she’d made very public and I thought, “no wonder he wants to see prostitutes” and that was so heartless. Maybe it was true, but still so mean. There’s no reason to lay a relationship bare like that, even in your own head, especially not based on skeletal knowledge, especially not when it’s about people you don’t love. I felt ashamed.
It seemed to me he’d had too much to drink. The sex wasn’t very good, and I thought about texting the writer and telling him I wanted to come over. It felt unfinished between us—the moment, the sex, something. And I knew he would let me come over after midnight, not because I have some power over him but because we have power over each other or rather there’s a power acting on both of us that we can be spun up in. I’m not trying to deny responsibility. I’m actually more careful with someone when I can tell it could be out of our control. If you’ve felt it before, you know. There’s no right word. It’s a link that required no forging. It’s like finding a worn path in woods no one has walked. It can only be uncovered. It is already there.
And the un-ended quality was what defined it. So I didn’t send him a message.

Someone wrote me an email a long time ago that I remembered recently while trying to catch up on responses. I didn’t read it again because it was nasty, but from what I remember he accused me of contributing to or exploiting the “sex addiction” of my clients. I was bothered in two ways. Firstly, by its sheer wrongness. On behalf of my clients, who are not addicts, I was offended. I kept thinking of one of my regulars who ejaculated against the side of a bed while going down on me for the first time. I thought about the man who’d not had sex for years. Does it make you an addict to want to have sex once a month? Once a week? Some of them are single, and some tell me they can’t see me once they start dating someone. Many of these men are married and their wives refused their advances until now they don’t even try, which is sad.
Sometimes I’m doing the wives a favor—trust me. I don’t often write about those because I don’t want to think about it, because there’s nothing worth lingering on. I don’t write about the man who doesn’t even think that lips are for kissing, who only holds his lips out of the way so his terrible tongue can move against mine like a fish dying on a dock. I don’t need to tell you that after he came in my mouth I couldn’t stop gagging, coughing in the bathroom with the water running, trying to hide my dry heaves. None of my usual tricks—I don’t breathe through my nose because it makes the smell worse, I try not to think about it at all, to steer my mind completely away from the semen and my own throat—worked. I dragged a wash cloth over my tongue like that would help. And then we said goodbye and he went back to his human rights work. You can’t make this stuff up, or at least I couldn’t.

Secondly, I have a problem with meanness, smugness, lots of things that most of us are re-occuringly guilty of, and I don’t appreciate having them forced upon me by someone I don’t know. If they know me, I can forgive them. Even in high school I said that if a man were ever to hit me, I would probably have had it coming. I’m always testing men in my personal life, baring my teeth. I’m always giving them a taste of the worst of me. With men more so than women, I hide nothing.
I should be better at not thinking about these random aggressions from strangers. But if I ask someone to stop putting their outwardly directed failings in my face and they won’t, I become irate. I know I wrote this guy back and told him that he was wrong, that his assumption disgusted me, that it was an ugly thing to assault someone else with. The “thing” being his own ignorance and small-minded ideas, his delusion in presuming to tell a stranger about her life and the lives of people she knows, people whom, given his own deficit of compassion, he can only conjure up in the crudest, most demeaning terms. He runs a site about meditation, of course. And of course he wrote back in spite of my explicitly asking him not to. Lots of men have behaved this way towards me, me as Nightmarebrunette. I don’t know if it’s because it’s the internet or because I’m a whore or both.

I almost started crying in a bookstore a few days after the second time I saw the writer. It was such a beautiful day, the most perfect weather, and there were lots of people mingling around the shelves. Books move me, just the feeling of them in my hands. I was thinking of how I could never stand to have a job that wouldn’t allow browsing in a bookstore on a weekday afternoon with nowhere to go and no one to answer to. I have a really good life and I’m so bad at being happy.
All I can think to say about 2011 was that I made more money than I probably ever thought I would make, double what I made the year before. I’m not sure I feel richer but I do feel older.

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