It happened over and over. It almost never didn't happen. A leave-taking. Furtive slip outside the moment, outside the sphere of grip and mouths and tearing breath and skin-smell. One quick pulse of guilt, then no guilt, then a far, bright floating. Cool moon orbiting a hot planet. Thinking, "Flesh and bone calligraphy." Thinking, "Shadows bruising the hollow of his hip." Thinking, "Outside, sky the bleached-green of luna moths." Even turning the here and now of orgasm -- my own -- into little streams of language, endless conjugations of the verb "to come." Sometimes my words, sometimes someone else's: "I am poured out like water." Metaphor a silver pin through the experience, a way of holding it in place, a way of having it.
I see now that it was at the very least a breach of manners, a failure of generosity. I forgot them, those men. I was simultaneously there and gone, an absence with too much black hair, deft hands and eyes that pretended to pay attention. I don't think it was because I didn't love them, although I often didn't. It was just the way it was. It was that way for a long time, and then it changed.
The night I met my husband, David, I went to bed with him. It was late fall 1989, Charlottesville, Virginia; he had long hair and blue sheets, and I spent the whole night wide awake. I was twenty-three years old, and on this night, I began to live inside my body.
The change wasn't sudden. What began that night was an easing in, a watchful, sometimes tentative process punctuated by bright, ringing moments of pure transubstantiation, the wafer of my body made radiant flesh. And while I use the language of religion here, it would be inaccurate to call it ecstasy. I mean the reverse really, a return to the body, an inhabiting.
* * *
I grew up in a house where no one repaired anything. Large broken things went to the repair shop, small things -- alarm clocks, toasters -- to the garbage. I am watching my lover of six months fix his motorcycle. He is fitting a small piece of motorcycle into a larger one. There is a spring involved, and the smaller piece keeps popping out. He tries it again and again and again. I am amazed at the immensity of his patience, the sheer capability of him. He knows he will make the piece stay where it belongs, and it stays. The motorcycle is Italian. I tell my friends, "His motorcycle is Italian. Motorcycles made in Italy have this quiet muscularity. And they're fast. They're far more subtle than Harleys, which are really so obvious." I know nothing about motorcycles. I imagine the Italian kind to be like shoes: pieces chosen, handled, finely stitched. A man at Moto Guzzi gathers pure curves of gleaming metal, tightens one bolt a hundredth of an inch, leans back to survey his work, black eyes narrowed, lashes long. A sun -- orange, Tuscan -- hangs heavily in a window, slides saffron light into the room where the man is building the motorcycle. I watch David work on his bike and think corny, vivid, improbable thoughts like this. It has to do with the force of his focus, an absolute which begins in his face and runs down through to the ends of his fingers, a fullness he might turn on anything and does. It's a thing I've watched so many times: objects turning precious under his hands.
* * *
When you see tapes of Ella Fitgerald singing or of Mark Doty reading his poetry aloud or of Hakeem Olajuwon's turn-around fade-away baseline in-the-face-of-David-Robinson jump shot, you know that Descartes had it wrong. Mind-body dualism means poverty. The only way to really do something is to do it with everything: fingertips, muscles, cerebrum, breath. This is the way David writes a novel, an essay, a screenplay, listens to music, argues with me about William Blake (the first of my lovers not to defer to me on such subjects), eats, speaks to his grandmother on the phone, runs, presses me hard and suddenly against the wall of the elevator before the doors even shut. He is there. The opposite of distracted.
I am learning this, not easily. When I met David, my campaign to pare my body down to pure geometry -- planes, angles, lines -- was at its peak. Odd combination of self-denial and self-absorption. My body was the bad twin sister whose eyes I never met and hands I never took, although I made a study of all of her parts -- arms, thighs, breasts, face. I arranged them like fruit, choosing colors, knowing how to bring flutes of collarbone into starkest relief. At night, I slept the thin, fitful sleep of the hungry, brain going and going, beating ideas into words, heart beating like a bird's. When I think about myself now, I see that I was pieces -- good pieces mostly -- but loose, moving in different directions.
I'm growing to love my body for its Hooksexup-endings, the places they collect.
* * *
When the Egyptian god Osiris, son of earth-god and sky-goddess, was murdered, his body was torn into pieces and scattered across Egypt. Isis, wife and sister both, mourned him bitterly, her tears causing the long Nile to overflow its banks. After a while, she stopped weeping and, propelled by the longing to keep him, gathered her husband, walking over the damp land, rowing her boat among the upright and tangled reeds to find him, taking up each part in her own hands. When she had found them all, she knit them together and swathed his cold body in white linen bandages. Then, she fanned him with her wings, and Osiris, made whole, lived.
When David and I make love, I remember him and he remembers me; we are both Isis, both Osiris. Remembering, the opposite of dismembering, the opposite of forgetting.
* * *
We are lying in our bed after making love. As always, I am sharp, clear-cut and dazzled, while he is nearly asleep. I begin to describe what orgasm is like for me, that there is a kind of Doppler effect involved. That it isn't being lit like a match, a sudden conflagration, but like watching a hard wind come across a field or a body of water; it flattens the grass or sends a shiver across the lake before it gets to me. I tell him that I love this approach of pleasure almost more than its peaking. He doesn't say anything, then asks me if I was thinking this as it was actually happening. I say that, no, I wasn't; I had just now thought of it. And I had.
* * *
Sometimes, friends ask me about marriage: Why, how, for how long? What makes it work? they want to know, as if it were a clock. Wheels with tiny teeth catching each other, setting each other spinning. I know this: our marriage is a passionate undertaking. Passion, a word I once thought meant helpless, wild-eyed voracity, a kind of spontaneous double-devouring of subject and object. I was mistaken. It is nothing so slight, so ultimately lusterless as that. That kind of obsession doesn't so much burn itself out as get bored with itself. Passion is giving something your undivided attention, is concentrated generosity shot through with wonder, a kindness that is not mild.
* * *
Now, we're making a baby. That's what we call it, "making a baby," as though we are assembling it a little bit at a time, carefully fastening the tiny, pulsing synapses, linking vertebrae one to the other like a bracelet. I am afraid it won't happen and only slightly less afraid that it will.
* * *
After over eight years, his voice, the proximity of his body still act on me like alchemical agents, warming me, settling me into myself. This is inexplicable, has always been true, and doesn't change. He is like bread, whiskey, gulf stream, Nile. He is like nothing so much as himself.
For her husband's side of their story, read What She Hungers For by David Teague.
grip and mouths and tearing breath and skin-smell. One quick pulse of guilt, then no guilt, then a far, bright floating. Cool moon orbiting a hot planet. Thinking, "Flesh and bone calligraphy." Thinking, "Shadows bruising the hollow of his hip." Thinking, "Outside, sky the bleached-green of luna moths." Even turning the here and now of orgasm -- my own -- into little streams of language, endless conjugations of the verb "to come." Sometimes my words, sometimes someone else's: "I am poured out like water." Metaphor a silver pin through the experience, a way of holding it in place, a way of having it.
garbage. I am watching my lover of six months fix his motorcycle. He is fitting a small piece of motorcycle into a larger one. There is a spring involved, and the smaller piece keeps popping out. He tries it again and again and again. I am amazed at the immensity of his patience, the sheer capability of him. He knows he will make the piece stay where it belongs, and it stays. The motorcycle is Italian. I tell my friends, "His motorcycle is Italian. Motorcycles made in Italy have this quiet muscularity. And they're fast. They're far more subtle than Harleys, which are really so obvious." I know nothing about motorcycles. I imagine the Italian kind to be like shoes: pieces chosen, handled, finely stitched. A man at Moto Guzzi gathers pure curves of gleaming metal, tightens one bolt a hundredth of an inch, leans back to survey his work, black eyes narrowed, lashes long. A sun -- orange, Tuscan -- hangs heavily in a window, slides saffron light into the room where the man is building the motorcycle. I watch David work on his bike and think corny, vivid, improbable thoughts like this. It has to do with the force of his focus, an absolute which begins in his face and runs down through to the ends of his fingers, a fullness he might turn on anything and does. It's a thing I've watched so many times: objects turning precious under his hands.
in-the-face-of-David-Robinson jump shot, you know that Descartes had it wrong. Mind-body dualism means poverty. The only way to really do something is to do it with everything: fingertips, muscles, cerebrum, breath. This is the way David writes a novel, an essay, a screenplay, listens to music, argues with me about William Blake (the first of my lovers not to defer to me on such subjects), eats, speaks to his grandmother on the phone, runs, presses me hard and suddenly against the wall of the elevator before the doors even shut. He is there. The opposite of distracted.
wife and sister both, mourned him bitterly, her tears causing the long Nile to overflow its banks. After a while, she stopped weeping and, propelled by the longing to keep him, gathered her husband, walking over the damp land, rowing her boat among the upright and tangled reeds to find him, taking up each part in her own hands. When she had found them all, she knit them together and swathed his cold body in white linen bandages. Then, she fanned him with her wings, and Osiris, made whole, lived.
tiny teeth catching each other, setting each other spinning. I know this: our marriage is a passionate undertaking. Passion, a word I once thought meant helpless, wild-eyed voracity, a kind of spontaneous double-devouring of subject and object. I was mistaken. It is nothing so slight, so ultimately lusterless as that. That kind of obsession doesn't so much burn itself out as get bored with itself. Passion is giving something your undivided attention, is concentrated generosity shot through with wonder, a kindness that is not mild.
