Second Best Fantasy (9 page)

Cindy leaned over into my ear, “This is for you, isn’t it?”

I just smiled, embarrassed. But something else struck me, something sad, something that knew she was a part of me now, and I was a part of her. I knew that, despite what might be genuine love, Janine and I were both tragic figures, and tragic figures always come to tragic ends.

* * * *

There comes a time in every bi girl’s life when she will come across a bold lesbian who will introduce her to taboo 56

matters of sex. On a crisp, clean, October morning, I drank my first cup of coffee and decided Janine had arrived at the summit, and I would approach the topic that evening. We had been seeing each other for about five months.

I watched her pick at my freshly made gumbo and flip through the day’s Billboard charts from across her dining room table. Behind her a bay window overlooked the Promenade, I could see couples in swarms out to see the view, walking dogs, contemplating, professing love, all with the rhythmic soundtrack of the traffic on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway just below.

There was no way to begin coyly, I thought, I might as well just spit it out.

“Janine?”

“Yes, baby?” she said, glancing up from her charts.

“Um, the women you’ve been with in the past, did you ever, um…have you ever tried…eh…”

“Just ask, sugar. What is it?”

“Janine, have you ever had sex with a strap-on?”

She choked on her gumbo and dropped her fork, splattering rice across the blue cyan linoleum as it hit.

“Oh, Christ, wait a minute.”

She stood up so fast I was surprised the chair was left standing in her wake. I understood this reaction to be a “no.”

While she rinsed off her fork after wiping up the mess with a paper towel, she looked over her shoulder at me, “Well, why? Do you want me to?”

“Yes. But if you don’t want to, I’ll understand. And I’ll never bring it up again.”

“Well, I just, I mean, what’s wrong with the sex we have now?”

“Nothing at all. I’m perfectly content. I’ve just been thinking about it is all.”

As she passed me back to her chair, I grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her onto my lap. I had embarrassed her, and myself. I’d mistakenly assumed she was adventurous enough to have tried it at least once.

I brushed her hair away from her eyes. She started to say, 57

“I just don’t understand what the big deal is,” but I stopped her at

“the.”

“Shut up honey,” I said and kissed her. I held onto her, and continued to kiss her until I felt her pulse quicken and heard her breathing become more rapid.

She said, “I’ve never been with anyone who kisses me the way you do.”

“I’ve never kissed another woman the way I kiss you,” I said, which was partly true since I had never met a woman like her.

“I guess I just don’t get the appeal. I mean, I’ve played with toys and stuff, but, you know, not actually attached to someone else’s body.”

“Janine, think about what it would be like to have me kiss you like that and make you feel that way and have me inside you at the same time.”

“Maggie,” she said, and placed her hand on my crotch,

“but
you
wouldn’t be inside me.”

“I would be…in spirit. I would be…in a way.”

She thought for a few minutes. “This means more to you than something sexual, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. Some women use them all the time, as a preferred sexual method. Some even wear them on a day to day basis, like a pair of socks.” She didn’t seem surprised. She wasn’t so naive as to not know about the bull dykes who were “packing” in the crowded bars on the lower east side.

“I’ve only ever had sex that way with women I…” I stopped myself short on the word “loved.” Instead I said, “…have been involved with somewhat seriously.” My extended pause did not go unnoticed. I imagined she took a mental inventory of my long list of exes, trying to guess who had qualified. In truth, there had only been three. I assumed she figured a higher number, and for some reason that made me feel bad.

She was still sitting on my lap with a hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t know baby, it’s sort of weird to me.” She turned to meet my eyes and asked, “Would you want me to do it to you that way?”

I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

58

“Well, you know, sure…if you wanted to.” With the weight of her on my lap and her other hand on my inner thigh, I was flushed and my loins were hot just thinking about it.

“Well, do you think I could take something the first time?

Like a Valium or something? I may need to work my way up to this.”

The fact she’d said “first time” implied there would be a second time, and that elated me so much it was all I could do to refrain from giggling like a little girl.

“Sure. Listen, I’m just going to ask you to think about it.

Don’t do anything on my behalf, it’s a big step.” As soon as the words came off my tongue I heard how idiotic it sounded, ‘a big step.’ There were no 12-step programs for strap-on virgins I was aware of. I decided to be honest.

“Listen to me. I may never have the courage to say this again, so I’m only going to say it once. This way of having sex I consider extremely intimate, it’s only with trepidation I brought it up in the first place. Sometimes I feel so overcome with desire for you I want to crawl inside your skin just to be as close to you as I can get. This is the only way I know how to get closer, to experience a moment with you we can’t get any other way. You don’t know because you haven’t…it’s just different.”

How transparent I must have been to describe the conflicting interests of love in the language of sex. While I was pleading my case for the most intimate kind of lesbian fucking, I couldn’t even tell the truth about my own intimate feelings. I didn’t know what else I could say, and felt I’d said too much already.

“I just wanted…” All desire was vanquished; all I felt was the sadness that accompanies realizing the heart will always win.

I didn’t want to love Janine Jordan, but I did. My heart broke for her in the moment, with her hand in my lap, at her dining room table, on an October late afternoon.

“I know what you want,” she whispered, embracing me with the tenderness of a mother reassuring her child. I closed my eyes and imagined we had been together many years, at a different dining table in a modest bungalow somewhere in the 59

Florida Keys, the billboard charts and tours and concerts and fans long behind us.

She drew away from me, put her fist under my chin, and said, “Did you bring it with you? You did! Can I see it?”

How could I
not
love her? She was always such a good sport about everything.

When the dishes were done, we sat in the middle of her bed examining my little bag of tricks. Casually holding a dildo in one hand and a harness in the other she said, “One thing I never understood, what do you get out of it?”

I pointed to the base of the apparatus where there was a small latex ball for clit stimulation. I didn’t need it. I could come just fantasizing about the things I wanted to do to her.

“Oh. You know, this feels so
real
,” she said, amazed.

“It’s supposed to.”

I took my toys from her and pushed them onto the floor. “It doesn’t have to be today, you know. I’m not going anywhere.” I put my head on her lap and reached up to caress her face. She kissed me upside down, and her hair fell all around my face.

“How about now?”

I giggled. “Can we wait until its dark?”

“Why? Is it somehow better then?” she asked, completely serious.

“No!” I was in a full on giggling fit. Early social conditioning makes us snicker when someone says “penis” or otherwise named genitalia, even as adults. Strap-on sex conditioning, if such a thing exists, makes lesbians lighthearted about their approach to the whole business.

“I feel silly at first walking around with it just hanging there.

I don’t know how guys get through their day. Please, let’s do it later when it’s dark. With the lights out. And the door closed.”

We both broke into hysterics.

We smoked a small bowl of pot to calm our nervousness and watched TV for a while. On one of my trips to the bathroom, I did the deed, and strapped on my latex manhood and put my sweatpants back on. I liked to start out clothed, it just seemed more appropriate for some reason. No other sexual experience 60

is precluded by more awkwardness, no matter how many times you’ve done it.

Janine took one look at my sheepish grin and knew, and another fit of giggling ensued. I went and sat behind her on the couch and tried to focus on the TV. There was a Hitchcock marathon on, and before I got to see the famous
Psycho
shower scene for the 100th something time, I heard the distinct change in Janine’s breathing pattern as she caressed my inner thigh and I kissed the back of her neck. She stood up and took my hand, nearly dragging me back to the bedroom.

I closed the door slowly, leaving a candle on the headboard the only light in the room. There was a giant mansion behind Janine’s brownstone that eclipsed the city lights almost entirely.

I wanted so much to please her I was ready to burst out of my skin. I stood and watched her undress and decided to leave my sweats on for a little while longer. She remained standing, waiting to see how she should position herself for me, an overwhelmingly considerate gesture, I thought. I sat upright, leaning against the headboard with my legs out in front of me.

She mounted me and we began a slow, rhythmic rocking.

Sometimes, being with a woman who’d been with men had its advantages.

We clung to each other and I knew already whatever reservations she might have had dissolved. She breathed hotly into my ear and whispered, “It’s already different. I haven’t felt like this since our first time together.”

I hadn’t either. I wanted to be more aggressive, but I didn’t want to frighten her. “Do you trust me?”

She nodded. I leaned forward and gently pushed her back onto the bed. Freeing myself from beneath her, I swung my legs over the side and kicked off the sweatpants.

She lay there with her eyes closed, breathing heavily, spread before me like a Thanksgiving feast. I knelt beside her for a few moments in silent worship. I couldn’t recall the last time I had actually gotten something I’d wanted so desperately. It is one of the most erotic memories I have; her face in the 61

candlelight, the sound of a saxophone down the street, a second before an experience that can only happen once.

I fell on top of her and used my hips as she guided me into her. I had planned on going slowly, but we were both beyond that. As I entered her, we both held our breath. I kissed her as I had in the dining room and felt her nails digging into my shoulder blades. For perhaps the first time in my life, I wished I were a man and could love her the way she wanted to be loved. When we came together in our harmonious opera of moans and sighs, I wished only she would take me, as a woman, and let me love her the only way I knew how.

62

I woke up and had no idea where I was. My very first thought was,
I’m an alcoholic
. I’d known for years, of course, but I had never blacked out before. Sure, I’d have patches of foggy memories about any one evening, but not like this. I couldn’t remember anything at all, and that scared me.

There was a soft knock at the door. As I looked around at the décor of the spare bedroom I was in, I realized I was at Dean’s house. Dean was the drummer for the Blue Is, I’d become friendly with all of the band members and their wives and girlfriends, I’d been seeing Janine now for about nine months. Dean was married to Sheila, Bobby (lead guitar) was with Angela, and they’d been together five years. It took a while for them all to get used to me, to see me as something more than Janine’s flavor of the week. She kept inviting me to events and parties, and I guess at some point I’d been recognized often enough that they knew she was serious about me. Or she’d told them. Or both.

“Hello?” Dean’s wife called softly outside the door.

“I’m awake.”

She entered and offered a steaming cup of black coffee.

“How are you feeling?”

“Awful. But this isn’t exactly a new feeling. I’m an—I drink a lot on occasion. Guess I got carried away. I’ll tell ya’ Sheila, I don’t remember anything. Anything at all, that’s never happened to me before. Ever.”

She sat down on the bed next to me. “Maggie, we all like you, Dean, the rest of the guys, Janine obviously cares for you a great deal. But you were…let’s just say you weren’t yourself last night. At least I’ve never seen you like that, and, as far as I could tell, Janine hasn’t either.”

This was terrible. I was so in love, so happy, why did I drink so much last night?

“Do you want to tell me? I really can’t remember Sheil.

Was I an asshole?”

“No, not an asshole. You were sad, very depressed. You 63

kept telling Janine to leave you now because you knew in your heart she would eventually anyway. You were pretty theatrical about it.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. She made sure we put you to bed and she left.”

“I’m so sorry, Sheila. I must have made quite an ass of myself. I know you barely know me, but I’m not like that. And I love Janine, I’m sure you can see it.”

“I understand. We all go a little crazy sometimes. You just drank too much, that’s all.”

But that wasn’t all. Janine and I had both been drinking and using drugs more frequently the longer we were together.

Usually, we had fun. We did coke and went out dancing, or we smoked weed and went to a movie. I had no idea what she did while she was on the road, or even at rehearsal, but I could guess. And she probably guessed as much about my drinking when she was away from me, if she even thought about it at all.

We had never spoken about it. But this…this was problematic.

Worst of all, I don’t remember Janine being drunk last night at all.

Only me.

“She’ll get over it,” Sheila said. “It was very late. We were all a little drunk. By the time you had your meltdown it was just me and Dean, you guys, and Bobby and Angela.”