Sex and sensibility
Seven months
It is hard for me to remember a time of men before Rusty.
It is not for a lack of suitors, because there were many. What I mean to say is that it is difficult for me to imagine the person I was - with regards to men and sex - before I met Rusty. After all that we had been through, it is without hesitation that I say in the final months leading to his death, Rusty and I had become each other; we survive, even today, because we carry a part of ourselves as we go on - for him, in death; for me - in life.
Perhaps I also mean to say it is difficult for me to imagine the man I am now, what with so little of Rusty left.
On hindsight, the string of men I kept - and my experience of them - were episodic, vignettes of bodies and easy conversation. I learned the game well. I sought each person out. I derived pleasure from the heaviness of our bodies held only together by the very lightness of our devotion. Our affairs reached as far as the walls that enclosed us. It would not be inaccurate to describe my proclivities as lascivious, though it was not that no man satisfied me, but that no one man could. I had just come out, and sexual liberation for me did not stop at owning my orientation; it extended to understanding what power I wielded as a sexual being. I was determined to command my sexuality as I would a knife - deftly, skillfully and with practice.
I selected my lovers with care. The first man I made love to was a slender Iranian architect who kept only eggs and bottled water in his fridge. After him, there was a muscular Spanish lawyer who worked on weekends as a personal trainer. The Italian model who liked to watch MTV while he was being serviced. The myopic Swiss entrepreneur I trapped and kissed in a phone booth; the Brazilian professional basketball player whose touch felt like old leather on my skin.
Man after man, I checked off continents, cultures, determined the language of love on different tongues and in different hands. I was a deviant will-o’-wisp, dipping into men like bees into honey. I could never have predicted then that the one man to stump my wings would be an American electronics consultant who grew up on a farm.
Since I met Rusty, my impressions of the men I slept with have faded; since his death, the men who have come into my bed leave faceless and without imprint. What they leave behind, their scent on my body, is washed away. What the walls enclose now, what bodily heaviness it observes, is not without the same emotional lightness.
But there is one difference. In the same room, there will always be one other: that lingering absence of love.
Two days ago marked the seventh month since Rusty’s death. It was then - and after I moved out of our apartment - that it occurred suddenly to me that I was now single again. The idea struck me with an inexplicable, oblique force. I had never considered myself “single” until then. I was grateful that the word came to me when it did. It meant another part of me had woken. In the company of men, being newly single, I tested my body and discovered unexpectedly what power remained in the languor of my legs, the firmness of my bottom, the delicacy of my fingers.
Again, the knife in my hands.
December 6th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
I can’t tell you how much I relate to you. If a few minor things would’ve gone differently for me- if the doctor would’ve said in June that the cancer was all over me, the way they had told me there was a 99% chance it would be, then my Bobby would be going through what you’re going through. Does any of that make sense? And yet, when you write, it’s like I am in your position. Like it was him who died, instead of me.
I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this, except that you and I are similar creatures, and everything that you are doing I would do in your position. I don’t know how I know that, except that maybe it’s because I was so close to death. And the love I have with Bobby is so much like that which you describe with Jesse.
Thank you so much for your blog, and please keep writing.
-MM