That Thing You Do With Your Mouth: The Sexual Autobiography of Samantha Matthews as Told to David Shields (3 page)

She was raised to get married and be taken care of, as most women of her generation were, and she remained loyal to that idea/ideal, so she resents my father for not having delivered on it. She's angry and ashamed and very, very hurt. I know she loves me, but she loves me as her teddy bear. She loves me needily. She probably thought I'd be the one who would love her always. I do. And I will. But now with distance. Her dishonesty has pushed
me away. I'm tired of pretending she's fine. The sad thing is, underneath all of that there's a very loving, intelligent, funny woman. Wickedly funny. A drop of liquor and her quick wit and lashing tongue fire out at my dad, making everyone laugh at his expense. She's just lost and trying to pretend she's not. I'm lost and trying to admit I am.

As University of Washington undergraduates, Jake and I were the love interests in a play about the suffrage movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. He had a straight, sandy-blond ponytail that went down to the middle of his back—didn't really work for the time period we were depicting, but oh well. He put it in a low bun. I remember thinking that wasn't very sexy. He wasn't the best actor, but he'd known and survived “real life.” I was twenty and couldn't imagine how I was going to be able to support myself with a real job. He was twenty-six, had gravity, was gentle, raced bicycles (and as a result, had very muscular, shaved legs). I'd started messing around with girls before dating him. He made out with one of my best gay male friends at a gay club—a big, open-mouthed, face-engulfing kiss—to show he was open to homosexuality. That was bad acting and it bugged me.

He had that serious, intense look Carl had and pouty, square lips, which reminded me of my great grandpa (a little weird). Similar square hands, movements. I could imagine his lips turning into the lips my great grandfather had at ninety, from a pout to a sag—a little bit of drool on the sides. That grossed me out, too.

He didn't tell me he had a girlfriend. He invited me over one Saturday morning to his studio apartment to “rehearse” outside of rehearsals. We rehearsed how we were going to have sex later. We would have sex after he told his girlfriend he didn't want to be with her anymore. She was in the audience directly across from us the same evening, and she wasn't very happy to see her boyfriend with a date later that night. I thought the whole thing was a little sketchy: he had to try me out first, then he could leave her. Still, I understood.

We started dating, and I started seeing a psychologist. I'd come back from my weekly therapy sessions and Jake would ask me how they went and then we would talk about everything I'd said and he'd analyze everything I'd just analyzed. He started to get inside my brain, question every sigh, every smile, every movement. I let him. I became his patient. I needed all the help I could get but couldn't handle the brain invasion. I had no space for myself anymore. He was always either sleeping with me,
eating with me, or looking at me very closely. Another thing he did that bugged me: when he made tuna sandwiches, he slowly and meticulously scraped every last teeny-tiny bit of tuna out of the tin can.

He was the manager for a building of tiny studio apartments with Murphy beds. On Capitol Hill—slightly dumpy verging on ghetto. He hired me as his assistant for ten bucks an hour to help renovate apartments when the weirdos moved out. (One tenant went to jail and had a collection of girls' driver's licenses in his greasy kitchen drawer. He worked in the morgue, would go and collect the dead bodies from crime scenes, and kept a collection of the girls' ID cards. Shiver. We had to cut his sofa in half with a chain saw to get it out of the apartment.) I had my first doggy-style orgasm with Jake on the floor of one of those nasty places.

He was an avid hiker-camper-outdoorsman. We went camping in areas where there were bears. He knew how to do all that stuff and made me feel safe about it.

One day I asked him how many girls he'd slept with and he said approximately five hundred. What?! He said the best way to get to know someone is to sleep with them. The more quickly the better. Direct entry past their persona. In my head, my mom called him a sleaze-ball sex addict. How could he just sleep with anyone?
Did he have no criteria? Did he care only about fucking? I was so mad. Surely he was going to fuck somebody else while fucking me. He clearly couldn't control himself. I wanted him to want only me, even though I didn't even really want him that much in the first place. I had no power over him. I wanted to possess him. Or did I? What was I to him? A body? How could he possibly be attracted to that many people?
That was sick
, I thought to myself.
That was wrong. He had a problem. I wasn't allowed to do what he did.
I was fucking jealous!

He told me he'd fucked this red-headed Goth lighting designer (who looked to me like a horse—she probably was reasonably attractive, but I was mad and wanted to see her that way) while he was with the girlfriend he left for me. When I broke up with him, I called his ex and we met for coffee. I apologized to her for running off with him, then told her he'd fucked the red-headed Goth girl behind her back. The two girls were friends. Boy, did I fuck him up for all of his promiscuity. My mom was on my side. He shall not sin. Especially if I can't.

Years after we broke up, he was attacked by a grizzly bear when he got between the mother and her cubs. He survived by hiking five miles to safety with a crushed skull. A couple of years ago I heard he fell from a cliff while camping alone and died.

RRRRRRAARR!

Oh yeah, baby, I love it when you growl. You tiger! You animal!

RRRRRRRAAAAAAARRRR!

Oh, yeah, one more time. Come on—it turns me on.

(Louder) RRRRAAAARR!

(In ecstasy) YYYYYeah! Whew!

You like that, huh?

Fuck yeah!

In grad school I went through a “lesbian phase,” as my mother puts it. The Christmas I got engaged to Jaume, my parents came to visit me in Barcelona; we went out for dinner and I decided to tell them about my ex-girlfriends. I wanted to explain to them how positive these experiences had been, how they'd given me my power back. Surely it would be nice for them to know I didn't see all sexual relationships as negative: I was “healthy” and not as damaged as I'd thought I was by my past. After all, my mom had told me to always be open with her about how I was dealing with everything, including especially the abuse.

With women, I felt adored and open, unafraid. It was virgin territory—innocent, clean. I felt a strength and a femininity emerging from me that I'd always hidden.
I didn't need to protect myself from them. In general, girlfriends (I'm talking about nonsexual relationships) always tell you the things guys don't—what they specifically like about your body, your mind; they listen to you and are sincerely interested (or they're really good at faking it). That, combined with a lover, was exceptional, almost otherworldly.

I didn't go into much detail that night with my family. My dad just said he wanted me to be happy, and if that's what it was, well, then so be it. My mother completely shut down, saying that was something she was very uncomfortable with. She didn't like it, didn't agree with it, and simply couldn't share in my happiness about it. I saw that look of panic in her eyes: the devil was inside her daughter. Her look was,
Oh god, she's been brainwashed
. We fought about it for years—my frustration with her not being able to accept it, her rigidity with the subject. I think deep down inside there's a part of her that's like me, and that scares the shit out of her.

Starting with my first boyfriend, when I was thirteen, at least five of my boyfriends have been not-nice. Another at fifteen, Scott, then Cameron, and I would say even William falls into that category. He and I have a vulnerability
together I didn't have with the other four, but we're very volatile. He can be quite cutting, dismissive. My first boyfriend dumped me and I remember thinking,
I'm never gonna let that happen again
.

Cameron was tall, pale, and very slight, gangly; I could never make out the shape of his body under his baggy clothes—I spent many days trying to imagine it. He was always hunched over, sitting in a chair and spinning his hair around his index and middle fingers, intensely looking at you as though you were a lab experiment. A very intellectual college student who was trying to be an actor but completely blocked by his demons. His sexuality was nonexistent, and he was little-boyishly pretty. This unidentifiable sexuality was fascinating to me. I couldn't imagine him having sex at all. Grrrrrrrr.

He cast me in a play he wrote, and I made him laugh really hard. I was a clown and saw I could crack him a little. One night at a party I'd had a few drinks, was happily confident, and told a friend I thought Cameron (who was there that night) was sexy. She warned me off, telling me to be careful because he was known for being a total womanizer, slept with everyone—her two best friends and both of them at the same time. She thought he might
break my heart; I was insulted. How about him being worried I might break his? This became a game, a dare. I was going to be the next one, make him fall in love with me, then dump him.

His then-girlfriend left the party and he and I made out on the front lawn. Two weeks later, he left his girlfriend and had practically moved in to my apartment. At first he was amazingly open and direct, loving, even worried he might not be able to get an erection, because that's always what happened to him at the beginning of relationships, when he was falling in love. His respect for the other, his vulnerability (according to his mom!) made it difficult for him to get it up at first. That happened once and never again. Actually, it never happened. He just worried it would. He went from falling in love to in lust and then one night I awoke to his hand on my face holding me down and within two seconds he was fucking me, or someone in his dreams.

We used every sex toy ever made. He tied me up, shaved himself and me, handcuffed me, threw me around, upside down, had me in positions I didn't know were even possible. We didn't make love. It was always dirty. He fucked me, sometimes looking me in the eyes, or on other days putting a pillow over my head a couple minutes before he came. That was borderline weird/
scary. (Oooh, did I actually feel a boundary there?) He was dangerous and perverse. Maybe it opened up that little-girl-doing-something-naughty side of me. I liked it and hated it, started to learn I could get pleasure out of it and not feel guilty about it, either, but there was no real connection between us other than when we had sex. He let a vulnerable fox out in our sexland, then hid in his
New Republic
articles the rest of the time. I wanted the part of him that came out during sex to be there when we weren't having sex—the beginning of my intimacy-junkieness. He told me to leave him alone. That's how he was and he wasn't going to share that side of himself anywhere else.

His constant need to have sex became an unbearable lashing. I felt like a dead horse. Two months went by without us having sex, according to him, and he began angrily jerking off to porno magazines while lying next to me. It disgusted me. But before it disgusted me it thrilled me.

Two years into the relationship, on a cross-country road trip, I found myself bent over naked in a divey hotel room with a paper bag over my head, my hands bound together, and him photographing me with our Polaroid camera. A memory of me. Of someone. A body. I threw all the photos away. My mom didn't even have
to say anything; I knew I'd done something really fucked up—letting him photograph me like a whore. Who knew where those pictures could have ended up?

A year later I dumped him over the phone. He threw the phone across the room in a rage, screaming, “No one will ever love you the way I love you!”

He was right.

I've been watching you all night and I think you're incredible.

Thank you.

I'm a painter and I'd like to paint your portrait.

Oh really?

Yes. Come to my room: 507.

Oh I don't know.

I'll pay you.

Uh—

You're so gorgeous I have to have you on canvas.

Well, okay.

God, you're beautiful. Can you just spread your legs a little more?

Like this? Mmhh.

That's it. Yeaaah. I've got to get to know my subjects more personally, you know, before I can paint them.

Oh yeah?

Why don't you take off that pretty little dress of yours?

Okay. Is that better?

My movement teacher in the acting program at Ohio State would lead us through physical exercises that sometimes would evoke unpleasant sensations. He challenged us to look at the new sensations as simply different—things we'd never felt before. “Different” didn't have to be scary. With repetition, the different sensations became part of our sensory vocabulary.

After a month doing a one-woman show off-off-Broadway, I returned to my grad program and a big night out with my classmates at a club. I was feeling high, free, excited to be alive, hopeful, and very happy to have been paid (very little) to do theater in New York—my future acting career ahead of me. On the dance floor with my classmates, all of whom I'd been in boot camp with for the past year and a half, I felt safe and powerful. I turned my head and saw this beautiful smile on a gorgeous, playful face. She had sexy eyes. I swear there was a spotlight on her.