Fucking Daphne (36 page)

My back was against the seat of the cab we were taking to Brooklyn, where she was staying. I was half in the world, half out of it. My whole book had been cast into relief: the trapeze, the whooshing sounds, the water, the way the air can transform someone, the way a body can slice through it. Her tongue in my mouth and my hands on her skin, my palms running up and down her arms. The tattoos. The thick ropes of her hair in my face, tapping my arms and shoulders. I was sure she was right there on the surface, transparent. I held on
to her, clutched her, wanted to be her and to move into her and to break her and to be broken, put back together.

Daphne was above me, my hands on her breasts, my mouth open against her neck, tasting her sweat and skin, her flying body, her hands inside me, opening me, releasing me from the earth. I pressed myself into her. I opened my legs as wide as I could, my knees knocking against the seat, and I would have let her run right through me if I could have. I didn't care if the driver could hear me come. All I wanted was to be destroyed. It is this, sometimes, that I feel I am holding back. I came on her fingers, near tears. She rubbed her hand on my face. I could barely breathe.

“What does this mean?” I asked after, kissing the inside of her bicep, the foreign words tangling over her skin.

“What?” I could taste myself on her fingers as she traced my mouth.

“These words here.”

She laughed. “Beauty will be convulsive or not at all.”

I felt like I was underwater. As I opened up my hand inside her, I could see the ropes and lines of the Brooklyn Bridge stretching up through the taxicab window.

Her friend had a garden that was lush and tangled, filled with vines and torches. Daphne made me a pot of tea and we sat outside, the darkening yard lit by the white lights strung along the fence.

It was already over, this thing that had passed through me. She was calmer than I was. I had a feeling that that was how she lived all the time, releasing herself into air. For me, coming back to earth is
always hard, always bound up in grief. It's like I've clawed open my chest, my heart, and then it folds back up like a pair of wings, leaving a trail of blood.

You make me remember my own skin,
I thought,
the edges of my body.

I thought of the trapeze. These moments that can't ever be more than what they are, that reach toward other worlds and other selves.
This is what it would be like,
I thought. Grabbing the bar, hurtling through the air. It would be like grasping a stranger, a strange woman with long hair and tattoos down her arm maybe, releasing yourself to her, taking her in. There would always be grief in that, I realized, grief and beauty. At least for me, and for the girl I was writing.

Daphne smiled, stretched out her hand to me. Her bracelet dangled from her wrist, glittered in the faded light.

There was no way for me to tell her this, any of it. I could not believe that we did not have more words. That I felt broken, saved, everything. That I always forgot we were surrounded by water.

 

 

I
t seemed impossible that I wasn't dead. I'd be struck by the puzzle of it, that I could be in so much pain and still move my legs, still make words, still go out and have a drink. Those were the nights when I would lie awake, making sure that my heart didn't stop beating, and that I didn't stop breathing. When I talk about it now and tell people that it nearly killed me, they smile and nod with understanding because they think I'm talking in metaphor again. But I'm serious—it almost killed me.

Somewhere before the beginning of this almost-death there was a newly minted boy with scars on his chest and stubble where everything used to be smooth. He was changing so quickly that I could hardly see him anymore. He was ready to leave and we fought over it. Please stay with me, I'd tell him. It can still be beautiful here. Whatever you've done, I still see us at the end of it.

He couldn't, and maybe he was right. By then, as I remember it now, I think my eyes had already stopped working. Even so, I begged him with my whole body.

“You're broken,” he said, and that's how he dismissed me.

My right hand flew away from me like a ghost and I punched the refrigerator next to his head. I didn't know when he had become a fortune-teller, but he was right: I was broken. The refrigerator hardly flinched.

The last truly tender thing he ever did for me was to hold a bag of frozen peas to my hand to stop the swelling. It seems mean to remove him from this story, as I've just introduced him, but it's the best way I know to describe him to you. He was there, he changed me, and then he was gone. I want you to feel the hole of that.

It's odd to me that they can pin your bones back together, give you something for the pain, but do nothing for a broken heart. Would it even show up on an X-ray? My heart, that stupid, selfish thing, was the only thing I felt. It stole the blood from the rest of my body and at first I felt only the numbness, and then I felt nothing. My body was becoming dead to me, but I kept it breathing and moving because those were the only things I could think to do with it.

When I left the house—and I had to leave the house because I couldn't live in all the spaces where he used to be—I wore a corset to keep my guts from falling out. I wore impossible shoes to help me concentrate on where I was putting my feet. I drank a lot and smelled like sulfur because I already had one foot in Hades. I wore a cast on my right hand and my wedding ring on my left and I didn't feel a thing except for the hole of him in my chest.

That's how Daphne found me. Everyone else looked right through me, but Daphne saw me. She has a gift for seeing ghosts. I attached myself to her and haunted her because she was the only one in the world who would let me. I barely knew her, but when I saw her I'd curl my hand into hers and leave it there all night until it was time to go home and put myself away again. She'd drag me behind her from one place to another like I was her phantom limb.

Other people will tell you how hard Daphne is. They'll tell you about her sharp edges and the strength of her that can knock you to the floor and kick you in the throat. I didn't see any of that. If it really existed, then I was safe inside the eye of it. For me, Daphne was only brutal tenderness. I have a gift for seeing ghosts, too. Daphne and I are a lot alike.

I'd stay close to Daphne and whisper things into her shoulder so that no one else around us could hear. She always had an immediate answer for me and didn't lie. I can't imagine what it would look like for Daphne to lie.

“How long am I going to hurt like this?” I'd ask.

“For a very long time,” she'd say.

“Does it ever get any better?” I'd ask.

“It never does,” she'd say.

“What's the purpose of hurting so much?” I'd ask.

“Because it's possible,” she'd say.

Asking her these things was like shouting down a hallway and waiting for the answer to come echoing back. The answers always came from her, but the voice sounded like mine.

“I can't feel my body,” I told her one night, and it was true. We were in a club where it was loud and crowded and I was forgetting
how to keep myself breathing. I was forgetting how to make my heart keep going.

This time she didn't tell me the answer. She pulled me out of the club and into a cab and then from the cab into her bedroom and out of my clothes because I could do none of this for myself. I stood in a puddle of shoes and corset and gauze and armor until she put me gently into her bed. She crawled on top of me and wrapped her body around me like the warmth of it would keep me alive, and it did. Everywhere she kissed me tingled like pins and needles as the blood came back. I told her what was happening and she didn't stop kissing me. I was surprised by this. She kissed me everywhere, even the places I hadn't felt for years. She kissed my hand through the cast. She kissed my wedding ring. She was giving me my body back by the mouthful.

I lay there like the dead, flat on my back, arms at my sides. Her hands gripped and pinched, slapped the life back into my skin. She moved around me like a nurse over a trauma victim, checking my body for damage, doing what was necessary, inflicting that kindness on me, asking me only once, “Does it hurt when I do this?” I told her that it did, and I asked her not to stop. Her teeth came through her kisses, scraping against the edges of me, overlapping me, blurring the lines. All the places she put her mouth, everywhere she touched, I couldn't point them out to you on the map of me. Maybe she created those places. Maybe they didn't exist before. I don't know.

Somehow, impossibly, my legs were parted and her hand was there, cupping me roughly and curling her fingers inside of me like I was something she had to get a grip on. I want to tell you about the softness of that, this little bit of pain that she gave me and the gift
of actually feeling it, but I can't do it right. I can tell you that when she put her fist inside of me, she used her other to hold me down so that I wouldn't slip off the world. That is what someone who loves you will do for you.

I cried when I came, in that way that takes the dead by surprise. I came and cried until I couldn't breathe and the feeling of it was like being scrubbed by steel wool on my insides and my outsides. I came until my skin fell off and grew back again. I cried with her fist inside of me, sitting up and doubling over onto myself, clutching for her and pulling her half onto me, her arm at odd angles, her hand still inside of me. I cried until it was all over. I came and I cried and I didn't think that was possible, but it was. I came and I cried because it was possible, and that's what Daphne gave me, this possibility.

She pulled out of me when we were done. She snuggled in behind me and curled me into her little spoon. I lay there breathing, my heart still beating, everything about me still tingling from being brought back from the dead. I lay there slightly alive.

“Daphne,” I whispered to her later. I thought she was sleeping. “I don't know how I'm going to live again tomorrow.”

“You just will,” she said. She was right.