Register Now!
Link To: Home
 
featured personal

search articles

media blogs

  • scanner
    scanner
  • screengrab
    screengrab
  • modern materialist
    the modern
    materialist
  • 61 frames per second
    61 frames
    per second
  • the remote island
    the remote
    island
  • date machine
    date
    machine

photo blogs

  • slice
    slice with
    giovanni
    cervantes
  • paper airplane crush
    paper
    airplane crush
  • autumn
    autumn
  • chase
    chase
  • rose & olive
    rose & olive
Rose & Olive
Houston neighbors pull back the curtains and expose each other’s lives.
Scanner
Your daily cup of WTF?
Date Machine
Putting your baggage to good use.
The Modern Materialist
Almost everything you want.
Autumn Sonnichsen
A fashionable L.A. photo editor exploring all manner of hyper-sexual girls down south.
ScreenGrab
The Hooksexup Film Blog
Chase
The creator of Supercult.com poses his pretty posse.
The Remote Island
Hooksexup's TV blog.
61 Frames Per Second
Smarter gaming.
ScreenGrab
The Hooksexup Film Blog
Slice
Each month a new artist; each image a new angle. This month: Giovanni Cervantes.
Paper Airplane Crush
A San Francisco photographer on the eternal search for the girls of summer.

new this week
Miss Information by Erin Bradley
Is my credit-card company policing my perviness? /advice/
Q&A: Thanks for Coming by Nicole Ankowski
Journalist Mara Altman on her quest for sexual satisfaction. /dispatches/
Dating Confessions by You
"I am okay with you dropping me for her. It's a lot better than if you dumped me for another guy."
Horoscopes by the Hooksexup Staff
Your week ahead. /advice/
Dating Advice from . . . Zinesters by Chantal O'Keeffe
Q: Is it wrong to date someone for their craft? A: It's not wrong, just weird. And we're all weird.
A Life in Lips by Elizabeth Manus
Twelve men, twelve kisses. /personal essays/
Screengrab Q&A: In a Dream by Sarah Clyne Sundberg
Jeremiah Zagar wanted to capture his parents’ love affair on film. Then it fell apart. /interviews/
Miss Information by Erin Bradley
How do I know if I'm gay? /advice/
 PERSONAL ESSAYS


What She Hungers For
by David Teague




She was Southern -- at heart more Southern than I. She belonged in the Virginia Tidewater, loved the Civil War Museum and Confederate Historical Society near Manassas, and harbored I think a secret lust for a Confederate soldier who gazed at her from a daguerrotype by the front door.
     Brown legs, brown navel, black hair that glittered, from her mother she'd inherited a hint of the once-fashionable-in-Richmond mouth like a bow. Her flavors were rich and she sent me letters back when she visited her daddy's people in the Philippines. Manila: I'm sure you're familiar with that drowned-star effect of cities seen from a plane at night.
     Sure. I was familiar with it. Of course.
     It's how I imagine the bottom of the ocean looks.
     I saw her first through the eyes of her baby sister, who thought of us as gifts for one another. An object of desire before I ever set eyes on her.
     "She's a poet."
     "She's beautiful."
     "She works in Manhattan."
     "She's different."
     There's a black and white picture of her, perched on a boulder beside the Hudson in a raw-spring slant of sunlight, the gunmetal river before her while she reclines on her elbows -- the legs, the face, the throat accustomed to Virginia sun. Watch her divert that tired old water and all its plangent banana peels.
     She was a poet, the kind from whom you'd like to hear more.
     When I met her, she was a beautiful child. That mouth -- did I mention very like a bow, until she bared her teeth?
     She lived in New York, wrote, drank vodka, ate one apple a day, not much more, made her place in that impossible city. To have her was to have a world I'd never comprehended, growing up in Arkansas, one I'd only glimpsed, maybe, on certain pages of Melville, Fitzgerald, Salinger: language, grace, geography. To have the sun, wind, and water of a hemisphere I'd never seen, along with the glib geometries of New York, that old, cold, solid, and stone-butressed place.
     Her legs . . . and an A-line skirt that twitched when she walked.
     There were other lovers in the picture. One of them, a South African, went around telling people she was a ballet dancer, and the only reason I didn't hunt him down and kill him was that he lied. She didn't dance. She just looked like it to him, the pathetic fucker.
     He wrote her a letter. She called me on the phone, where I abided down in Charlottesville among the deep green magnolia trees. She said, "I've just received a letter that was more like bleeding than any letter I've ever received."
     She gave the impression she'd dance like Maria Tallchief. Her legs, when she walked. Her legs, when she used to wrap them around that poor South African son of a bitch's back, before she moved on to me.
     She'd given it to the sorry bastard bad enough without my pitching in.

* * *

Back when you were twenty-three, trading tales of pussy over Old Milwaukee, do you remember the occasional young man who'd, sadly, already gotten hitched, the one who hung over your shoulder breathing a little too hard?
     You'd throw out something like:
     "She told me, 'Let's go play in the church basement, they leave it unlocked,' and we went down there, I thought maybe I'd set her ass down on a couple sheets of green construction paper in the Sunday School room and see if I could get some snaps undone, but goddam, she meant it when she said play, and she had my cock down her throat to the bone inside of thirty seconds and she swallowed so much I thought she'd drown, and my fucking feet went numb and I couldn't even walk out of there for ten minutes. And her daddy sitting upstairs writing the sermon for tomorrow morning . . . "
     And then this poor son of a bitch who's married hanging over your shoulder says, "Well, damned if I didn't get some good sex last night myself."
     Everybody turns to listen.
     "With my wife. Yes, sir. All night long. Good. I'm not kidding."
     Because you really just don't ever want to put the words "my wife" in the same story with "ass" or "cock" or "fuck."

* * *

We ate each other alive, unmarried. For several years. To a poet's eye, which was her eye, I suppose Arkansas can look alluring, too, where we all stomp around in black boots with underslung heels, ride motorcycles in our t-shirts in any weather, and are rarely shorter than six feet two.
     I've never quite grasped what she's up to, never got my mind around the apocalyptic tractor-beam of desire she focused on the odd Civil War soldier, the short-haired Sarah Lawrence "girlfriend," the NBA star, her sister, the desert mountain, me, while she devoured all of us. I've just watched her, aware always of how hungry she is.
     I wrote a story in which she played the part of a witch, the good kind, more or less, who kept this big friendly guy salted away in her apartment while she practiced spells on the people who passed by outside her window. Sent it to the New Yorker. Got it back in seven weeks.
     I lay beside her for years while she stared upwards into two a.m., three a.m., four a.m., dawn, rarely sleeping, ravenous, sometimes for me, sometimes for other things, which circled above the bed grinning back at her. Then we got married, and I lay beside her still.
     You desire what is hidden, what is mysterious, what isn't you. You desire what you don't already have.
     What is it that hovers in the air above my bed in the dark of two a.m.?
     You desire what's hidden inside that one, there: her. Or her. Or him. My guess is, you desire these hidden things much more than you desire a cunt or a cock.
     During a thousand nights of staring into the dark, both of us alone in the bed together, I've fallen in love with her too far ever to extricate myself.

* * *

From time to time, an unmarried friend, as he contemplates taking the plunge, will sit me down. Buy me breakfast. Ask:
     "What's it like?"
     "I'm not a fan of eggs, but I'd still say huevos rancheros is the way to go at breakfast."
     He'll say, "No -- knowing you're gonna have to sleep with the same woman the rest of your life? What's that like? Can you do it? Can I do it? Is it what you want? Is that what I want? Should I get married?"
     "Hell, I don't know. Is it possible to come to the end of desire? People do. Stop desiring one another. And if those people are married, I guess they're shit out of luck."

* * *

Who's goddam business is it if I want to drink a bottle of moderately-priced Cabernet, or even an expensive one, out of my wife's navel? If, from time to time I let a trickle slip away . . .

* * *

I lie beside her in bed still. She's gone -- preoccupied with her writing, or her work, or her South Sea heritage, or that Confederate soldier, or even that goddamned South African, for all she's told me, and she won't be back, I know, for a while. A week? Two weeks?
     I can remember from bachelor days that there's a loneliness to sleeping alone. But that loneliness is the pale eighty-nine pound asthmatic third cousin to the loneliness of sleeping alone in bed with the person you love, and will love, for the rest of your life, awaiting her return.
     When she'll re-inhabit her brown skin, brown navel, black hair, legs, hands and mouth and say where she's been, or, better, leave me to guess as I tip her up and disappear into it, whatever it is she's feeling wild for.


For his wife's side of their story, read A Passionate Undertaking by Marisa de los Santos




©1998 David Teague and hooksexup.com

promotion
buzzbox
partner links
The Informers
In Theaters April 24th
Based on the Novel by Brett Easton Ellis
Watch Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno at SundanceChannel.com
Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk
Now in Paperback
See what's under the [book] covers...
VIP Access
This click gets you to the city's hottest barbells.
The Position of The Day Video
Superdeluxe.com
Honesty. Integrity. Ads
The Onion
Cracked.com
Photos, Videos, and More
CollegeHumor.com
Belgian Nun Reprimanded for Dirty Dancing
Fark.com
AskMen.com Presents From The Bar To The Bedroom
Learn the 11 fundamental rules to approaching, scoring and satisfying any woman. Order now!


advertise on Hooksexup | affiliate program | home | photography | personal essays | fiction | dispatches | video | opinions | regulars | search | personals | horoscopes | retroHooksexup | HooksexupShop | about us |

account status
| login | join | TOS | help

©2009 hooksexup.com, Inc.