The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (48 page)

We were in bed, holding each other.

“Are we getting very serious?” Zina said.

“It feels like it,” I said.

“Is this OK with you?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “You?”

“Yes,” she said. “Very,” she said.

“I have something,” Zina said, standing naked before me.

“Yeah?”

“Something I want you to use on me,” she said.

She went to her closet, and produced a cat o’nine tails. I’d seen such a flogging device in magazines, in movies.

“Where’d you get that?” I asked.

“I’ve had it a while,” Zina said. “I want you to use it on me,” she said.

It was black and ominous. She handed it to me. She lay on her stomach, on the bed. “Use it on my back,” she told me, “use it on my ass, my legs.”

I did so, lightly, uncertain.

“It’s OK to start off soft,” she said, “but increase your strength. Gradually. I want you to get to a point where you could almost make me bleed.”

I did this. I hit her with the cat o’nine tails, just as she said: her back, her ass, her legs. She seemed to like it best on her ass. I started to get into it. I started hitting her
harder, the smack of leather against flesh. Harder. She began to cry out with each blow. Tears in her eyes. She wanted more. Welts were beginning to form on her ass, the back of her legs. I
concentrated on her back, till welts formed there.

“OK,” she said. “
Stop
.”

I stopped. I, too, was almost out of breath.

“Now get on me,” she said, “fuck me: I can’t stand it, fuck me!”

I entered her from behind, I reached over to choke her. We fucked for a bit, then she turned around. She put her legs on my shoulders.

“Slap me,” she said.

I raised a hand.

“Slap me.”

Fucking her, I slapped her, hard, across the face.

She just looked at me, some blood on her lip. “Not that hard,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, reaching down and licking the blood away.

“Slap me again,” she said.

I did, but not as hard.

Zina bought toys several days a week, usually at thrift stores, sometimes at the toy store. She loved her children’s toys, and so did Moby Dick.

She had adult toys hidden under her bed, and it wasn’t until a month after we’d been seeing each other that she brought them all out, and wanted to share them with me.

Anal beads, large double-sided black dildos, a dog collar, other assorted rubber penetrating devices. While Zina liked the beads or my fingers in her ass, she didn’t care for anal sex all
that much. She wasn’t into ass-licking, pissing, or even swallowing my come. She liked pain, she liked to whack her clit off, she liked me to choke her. It was easy to get into what she
enjoyed, as I got into any woman’s pleasure, however alien it was to me. I adapted well.

“Once,” Zina told me, in the dark, in bed, “I was so full of myself, I wanted to colonize my own psyche; I wanted to chase the message owl across fields
unfamiliar. I wanted to fly because I was born with wings and I was angry at God for not allowing me to fly.”

Being with a poet can sometimes shed new light on pretension.

Zina didn’t like to hang out at the bar with McGinnis and his crowd. She didn’t think McGinnis cared for her, and she didn’t care all that much for him,
either. “All those people are from fiction,” she said. “I’m from poetry.” Only now did I start recognizing the split in the English Department within genres,
especially those in comparative literature, rhetoric and writing. All the time I’d been attending this school and only now was I noticing the petty in-fights, jealousies, the mini soap
operas. “Do you know what kind of reputation McGinnis has?” Zina said.

“He’s well known,” I said.

“As a womanizer, as an iconoclast. He’s not classical in his approach.”

“But his books!”

“They don’t make sense.”

“He’s helped me,” I said.

“I know he has,” Zina said, taking my face in her hands. “He’s your friend.”

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you,” she said.

I’m not sure how it started; it wasn’t even talked about. Zina said something like, “It’s silly for you to be paying rent on your place when
you’re always over here.” Gradually, my possessions began making their way to her apartment. I gave her money for rent. We bought groceries together. We went to bed at the same time,
and got up together. She cooked breakfast and we had breakfast together.

I knew it was over, the night I got really drunk: we had this fight. I don’t know what the fight was about. We were fighting more and more, and I was drinking more.

My car was in the downstairs garage. I went into the garage door, got into my car, and floored it, going in reverse. I forgot the main door was down. I smashed right into it. I sat there in the
car, in the alley, and thought: shit, I just ruined the garage door.

I laughed. It was like something out of a Raymond Carver story, something Bukowski would’ve done in a drunken stupor.

“OK,” I said, “I gotta write a story about this.”

Zina came down, wearing a robe. “What have you done?” she said.

“Oops,” I said.

“You better pay for this,” she said.

Oh, I would.

After she calmed down about the door, I went to her for comfort. I was shaking. I tried to hug her. She was cold. We went to bed. “Tie me up,” she said. I tied her
wrists to the metal railing of the bed, and then her ankles to the other railing. I got out the small black whip (a new toy) and went to work on her flesh. I made her bleed. I fucked her from
behind. I put it in her ass, much to her seeming protest. I choked her, harder than I’ve ever choked her. She was coughing at the end, her face red, her body shaking.

“Why haven’t you ever fucked me like that before?” she wanted to know.

The image I have of her (this image will always stay with me) – and I wanted to tell her this as she sat behind the wheel of her car, driving (I was in her car and she
was driving) – was an image of Zina surrounded by her toys, a milieu of toys, the toys she liked to buy and play with: filling the empty spaces of our apartment with.

Zina was driving and we were going to Los Angeles. I was surprised how little traffic there was on Interstate 5; usually there were many cars clogging, the slow march of machines, especially on
a summer night, so many people coming or going. We were going, Zina and I, but we were not going to the same place. Places have divisions, spaces that are hard to fill, no matter how many toys you
buy from the toy store to make up for some memory or lack thereof.

This is what I knew about her, or this could’ve been mere assumption – and the image of her that sticks like hot glue to the fingertips of my reverie is Zina as I saw her one night,
the night I went to our apartment (when we were going to the same place together and everything was OK and we both seemed happy) and she had bought a bag full of the alphabet ($1 at the thrift
store) with magnets on each letter, the colored letters I seem to recall having played with when I was a very small person. “Look! look!” she said: with glee and like a small person,
and she said, “Help me with them,” an invitation to play. She tore open the plastic bag the colored letters were contained in; they scattered across the floor of her kitchen like stupid
human dreams forever lost in a car crash. She went to her knees, told me to come to her: play, help, fight. She started putting the letters on the white refrigerator, where she had a color print of
a happy smiley face woman with large eyes and the caption
HOME HONEY
,
I
’
M HIGH
and two postcards, one of a brunette
holding a gun and shooting, another of a man with a gun, an image from the movie
Reservoir Dogs
. There was a mixture of delight and anxiety on her face; she looked at me and said,
“Won’t you help me?”

I got to my knees, picked up several letters, started putting them on the fridge with her. The kitchen was hot (like the rest of the apartment) and I felt very sad. She must’ve seen
something on my face because she said, “You think this is silly. You don’t like doing this.”

“No,” I said, “there’s nothing silly about this,” and so we were like two children frantically picking up the alphabet from her floor – letters that I thought
would any moment now get up and dance –
oh, God, a memory
– sticking them to the door of the fridge. Merriment, yes, a small one’s joy on her small triangular face and when
I looked at the kitchen table which had a lot of other toys, used and new, I felt sad again; I knew there was something missing. Something was missing from her past (something was missing from
mine) and something was missing between us, yet another space to be filled, a vacuous interior needing intestines.

“You buy so many toys,” I said. I sat down at the table and played with a dinosaur.

Zina looked at her letters, arranged them in a way she liked better. “Yes, I do,” she said.

She sat in my lap, like she always did, arms around my neck and looking down at me with her dark eyes, dark circles under her eyes – my face pressed against her breasts, the smell of her
now on me, that smell which was not perfume but some men’s cologne I never heard of that mixed well with her skin and gave her the smell I knew I’d forever associate her with, an
invasion of my psyche: my memory of Zina.

She kissed me on the lips, she kissed me on the forehead. “Just think,” she said, “I keep collecting more and more toys; we’ll never have to buy toys for our
children.”

What the hell was she talking about?

I looked at Zina next to me, Zina’s hands on the wheel tonight, going north, going to LA – she to her brother’s, me to a reading I didn’t really want to
do. She wasn’t going to come to the reading with me.

I wanted to tell her that I’d hoped this time it would be different, she wouldn’t just be another woman to jump into my pool and splash and leave and never come back. I wanted to
tell her what was on my mind, what was in my heart. But, in my heart, I knew it was over between us.

My staring at her was making her feel uncomfortable; she looked at me and said, “What?” then looked back at the freeway.

She put her hand to my face. “My hands are cold, do you feel?”

I grabbed her hand at my face, pressed it to my face hard, then pulled it away and kissed it, holding it. “I don’t want to fight any more,” I said.

She put her hand on my leg and didn’t say anything. She continued to drive. We were on the freeway and there was no stopping now –

Now I didn’t want to go to LA. I wanted to go south, back south, I wanted to go home, I wanted to hide, I wanted to remember when things were nice and soft and good between us.

“Do you know what I feel like?” Zina said.

“What?”

“French fries! Yummy!”

I was hungry, too. “We have to look for a sign post of some fast food place. Why is it you see them all the time except when you really want to get to one?”

She didn’t reply.

“I want that fast food sign,” I said, “high on a post for all to see, in neon glow, advertising food, beseeching me to consume, saying –”

“
Eat me
!”

“I was going to say that.”

“I know. You’re becoming –”

“Predictable?”

“He thinks!” she said. “You got it.”

Her hands were tight on the wheel.

There was something rueful inside me; this didn’t feel right; we shouldn’t be this way; there shouldn’t be this distance like aliens coming to earth. (“Right now I need
my space,” she’d told me, “so this doesn’t mean we won’t get back together. Just, right now, I have to focus. I can’t be in a relationship like this; I have to
be like a monk – monastic living, you know what I mean?” Also: “After a while, you get used to being alone, and you even start to like it.” I think she said something like:
“I’ve never felt I needed someone else to complete me; I’m complete in myself.” I’m a fragment, this I’ve always known, but knew all the more as we drove, as she
drove.)

I looked at her, still feeling the dejection, and she gazed into the rearview, her eyes looking at her own eyes – her reflection – the mirror – playing again “The Whore
for Borges” –

– like when she said she was the votive of Borges, the simulacra that never was. “I’m beginning to appear in people’s dreams,” she told me and, looking at the
mirror on the wall of her bedroom, she said, “I am the mirror, but you can never be.”

This happens to poets who take courses on critical theory. Perhaps this is where things went wrong, when I did want to be her reflection: I wanted to be inside her, know everything; she started
to feel violated, intruded upon.

I went home one evening, the other evening, really, and realized, for the first time, that I did not belong there. I was feeling weak. All day I had this sensation of horror, but all I wanted
was to be with her, to hold her, to have her hold me, to play with her toys, to talk, to have her warm body against mine, to make love, to do anything, anything but be away from her, whip her, slap
her, beat her, choke her. Our apartment was dark, candles were lit all around, flamenco guitar music playing on the CD. She was in the bathroom, hair pinned up, applying make-up in a way she never
did before, looking at herself in the mirror; and when I went into the bathroom, her eyes on me, from the reflection, were eyes of rancor. She seemed angry, like she didn’t want me there; she
seemed evil in the candlelight. I tried to kiss her and she pushed me away. Once, she told me she did a lot of symbolic things, some abstruse and some subtle, and I would have to get used to it.
“Like this band on my wedding finger,” she said, “is to remind me who and what I’m really married to:
myself
,I’m married to myself; and this necklace, these
earrings in the shape of hearts, to remind me to always follow my heart.”

“Why are you here with me?” she asked after we made love the night before. “I don’t understand,” she said.

I grabbed her necklace and said, “I’m just following my heart.”

In the candle-lit apartment, she told me she was having second thoughts, she wasn’t sure if she wanted a partner, someone to tell her to come to bed at four a.m. while she was working on a
poem; someone to tell her to eat; someone to even talk to, to be present, to remind herself of herself. “I’m used to being a hermit,” she said, “I like being a
hermit.” I told her I would go but she grabbed me and said no and we held each other and I smelled her and I was all the more confused. Many times I said I would go, I would just leave, and
be a hermit myself, like I was for five years; but she would say
no
,
stay here with me
, and
now
she was saying she didn’t like having me around . . .