I sleep so heavily this afternoon. No longer is it customary for me to take long afternoon naps now that I work more; I’ve been camming five days a week, sometimes six, I’ve been running and climbing less. The hard practicality of a sex worker, the urgency of the whole ordeal, feels more masculine and heroic than the languor of the student who has time to embark on difficult physical activities. But there are these soft memories which aid me in the hard labor.
My hamstrings are sore, particularly when I extend the left one forward. It’s less about the kicking back motion than the breaking of the forward motion. I’ve never run so hard before; a 5K race that left me feeling nauseous, and then I started to sneeze incessantly for several days.
These days I’m reading East of Eden. I’m curious about evil incarnate, Cathy Ames, who insists on being a whore, not a wife, and later a brothel owner. She’s so vicious, she chomps down on a man’s hand and the wound gets infected. She shoots her husband in the shoulder before abandoning her children. As a child, she frames two boys for tying her up and molesting her.
In less than a week I’m going to be in California again, but this time I’ll be at Stanford. I will see some of the most sublime old views, the places where I used to run when I first got into it. Alpine Road, Portola Valley, the nursery of Brookside Orchids. I am going to be with David in his home again and he’ll probably visit me on the campus too before or after we see the orchids.
I was last in California two weeks ago. I keep on thinking about it and attempting to write about it, but it takes on for me the quality of a secret after a while, and I don’t know that I can share what I’ve written. There’s something about the shower I took in the morning, before dawn, before leaving the house. The shower is in the black-tiled bathroom, which I had first seen over video, when he had given me a tour of his house using the Cam2Cam feature on Chaturbate.
I liked that the encounter was to be a secret in certain ways, and that it was entirely shareable in others. He sent me a photo of my hairs on the white upholstery of his Tesla. He told me he told his wife I was there, that I was a friend from Cornell whose flight had been delayed. The towel I used had two textures: circular depressions in the terry cloth, in which the weave of the fabric was flatter. I liked the soap in the bathroom, it was brown with little dark exfoliating bits.
It was a strange comfort to shower in California. I enjoyed the hot water, such a relief from the coldness of the nights and mornings, a coldness that came from the forbidding Pacific. It was a relief from the humidity and heat of New York too, but it’s cooled down since and I can’t say I feel compelled to take showers here. I felt dirtier in California, maybe because it’s cleaner there. I’d walk home from Lighthaven after a long day of talking to the men and women of Slutcon and on occasion with the bittersweet satisfaction of having been touched well, and sometimes longing for that boy named Josh who turned out to be from New Jersey. I’d go to sleep unwashed, and in the morning I’d shower in the nice cottage in the backyard of the artist who makes iPad drawings of dogs, who had installed a mezuzah on the green doorframe.
When I had returned to New York, I wrote a sprawling and detailed account of all that had occurred. I couldn’t write about the sex though, so I started imagining how the residues of wetness from the shower I had taken might remain on the tiles, about how smudges or even fingerprints might be more apparent against the glossy black. I don’t know if this is true or not, but I suppose I’ll have a second chance to check. Then I thought of how the blackness of the bathroom tiles might hide the shed hairs and make them harder to see in advance and more susceptible thus to being discovered later on. The previous night I had emptied my menstrual cup in the toilet bowl and been amazed by the degree to which its blackness obscured the dark red of the endometrium; only some fringes of brighter red flickered out towards the top of the water. It felt so nice thinking of this image, of the black toilet blurring out the redness.
A university instructor of mine has invited me to come to Stanford to participate in a panel discussion on how the arts have continued to be important to alumni post-graduation. The department is flying me back to California in a week and they are paying for my airfare and lodging. I suppose the university is spending a little over a thousand dollars on this trip of mine; I feel some intense desire to really give them their money’s worth, whatever that means.
I know somehow that becoming a psychoanalyst and becoming a sex worker are the same for me, the work is entirely different but surely aspects of my education in the arts led me to where I am; surely the excitement I’m feeling around my affair with the married man are part of this arc.
David seems to me to be so careful. He’s so careful with his hands and he’s only been with three women, four if you include me. I’ve been with nearly thirty men and women and only two or three have been so careful with their hands. I’ve never been with a married man before.
Will I ever graduate from the form of address I employ on this website? Each account of a sexual encounter is meant to elicit the dread of cuckoldry, or to gratify the narcissism of the reader. I only let people who have slept with me read these texts, it’s not accidental.
My analyst, whose first language is not English, asked me to define the word “cuckold,” and I somehow found myself explaining to her that the word came from the sound the bird makes. “Cucu” is another way of saying it. “Cucu” sounds like something I’d say for no reason other than to move my mouth in a satisfying way. Sometimes I say things just to discharge some libidinal current, but I try to make those things have no meaning so as not to mislead others.
I like cuckoldry. Since the primary rejection, I’ve taken sweet pleasure in the image of those tremors of anxiety I might induce in someone else’s heart when they read about their girl having sex with another. I sympathize; I spent a lot of time thinking of my beloved having sex with others. I saw the love poems he wrote for someone else’s birthday while I was being “ghosted” for a while. It felt horrifying to me at the time, but it was the kind of pain that becomes piquant.
But I think there must be some gratification in the cuckoldry. There must be some sweetness in knowing that I am still thinking of you, because I am always comparing the new object to its point of origin, or realizing how strongly drawn I am to that originary point or trauma. There must be some muted pride in recognizing something of what I have once found attractive in you in my accounts of the new object of discussion. It is an oddly thwarted feeling to have: the realization that he or she loves someone similar to you. Maybe you have become replaceable, or maybe she is trying to maintain you. Maybe she can’t help but maintain your memory this way.
I am like a cat bringing in a dead mouse, knowing or not knowing that the human will not eat it. You will appreciate it, but you will not eat it. You will understand the intention or the instinct behind the act and find it somewhat adorable, that the cat continues to insist on the gift you cannot truly be satisfied by in a practical sense, but that only makes the gift more true.
My own narcissism takes the shape of wanting to represent myself as evil incarnate (Christian) or maternally annoying (Jewish) or simply excessively harsh (Chinese). The cat is simply a figure for all three, domesticated in the form of a faultless animal, though I’ve never liked cats since realizing how readily they kill reptiles. In ideal form, I’d be something like Erika Kohut from The Piano Teacher or Cathy Ames from East of Eden, each capable of the most insane acts of violence: mutilating a piano student’s hands by shaking glass shards into her coat pockets; clamping down on a man’s hand so hard that it looks like a “wolf bit him”; shooting her husband in the shoulder before abandoning her twins with him and going off to become a whore and later the brothel-owner. In reality, I am an online sex worker, a psychoanalyst, I have feelings for some people which go beyond their use-value; I’m concerned with how to live an ethical life.
My notion of an ethical life is built through experience, and with others. It cannot be theoretical, it cannot be learned in books. His dripping cock, my wet cunt, dripping with so much cyprine. He made such a large wet spot, bigger than my wet spot even. His pants were made of linen and I touched the linen to confirm that it was linen. Only one of my former male lovers made such wetness before ejaculation. My library of men and women constitutes an ethical education.
His fingers felt like nothing almost, like a gossamer thread, like spider silk. And there was hardly a moment when I felt I understood what he felt. I couldn’t see the signs of desire. I only felt in his receptivity to my gradual movements towards him and in the dripping from his penis when I finally grasped it a kind of affirmation that we liked each other, and that that was enough.
How much of the pleasure is mine? How much of it is his? How much of it is yours?
Together we found a limit: I wanted more and more inside of me, and he put forth that he couldn’t continue with the conjunction of bodies that is normally achieved most rapidly in other situations when marriage and adultery aren’t on the table. I stared at him and felt paralyzed with desire which turned into kindness, I was happy for him to have articulated this boundary around our encounter. It’s so nice when a man says no the first time, I want to tell the kids, just as you did the first time I visited you in November, and I couldn’t understand. I slept on the floor so parched in the throat and couldn’t sleep because I was so aroused, I was burning with my own body heat. I had touched your penis for the first time and it was wet, and I was wet, and maybe you touched my wetness too. I didn’t learn any of this in undergrad because I was too occupied with the coursework you might be spurning in order to pursue pussy or cock or affection.
So I learned later, and by now I know well how much I like being deprived of satisfaction.
There is no better education in the art of love than what you will find from an intellectual one. I think in the coldness of study, and even the narcissism of recognizing your own skill and ability in the field of writing, you will learn far more than there is to learn from “playing the field.”
I made sure not to touch him as I left to get off at Millbrae. Only our eye-beams crossed, and then I beamed through the AirTrain, the landscapes through the windows still admirable and worthy of long contemplation, though I wasn’t really looking at them carefully. I was feeling more than looking, remembering and not remembering. There are so many skies and clouds to be looked at in the bay area. The continuous long sheets of clouds rolling over.
I thought of how I had mounted him after the sun rose, suddenly and chastely sitting on his lap, suggesting with my grin that there was some desire that could be far more violent brewing. And as quickly as I got on his lap and pressed my face to his I got off. I announced it was time to walk down the hill, so we did. I suppose I couldn’t stand the temptation of more touch.
The train ticket inspector volleyed at me a flirtatious remark; he asked me if I was sleepy. I had yawned without noticing that I had been noticed yawning. I wondered if the remark was meant to keep me on alert about the fact that he could have checked my ticket, but didn’t, or if he was signaling some interest in the fact that I was next to David. David subsequently remarked that this ticket inspector knew him, was familiar with the fact that he had a monthly pass, and therefore only checked his ticket status once a month. Was he also familiar with David’s hands, and the numerous rings he’d wear, including the ones that marked him as married?
On our walk down to the the hill to the Caltrain station, he pointed out various areas where he’d typically see deer, and my suitcase made a rumbling noise as he dragged it along. I looked out for cars on the bendy turns of the road, not knowing their frequency, and some neighbors walked by. There was apparently one neighbor who was quite nosy, she was the realtor who had sold the house to them. But she wasn’t there, and clearly David didn’t care that much if she saw us.
I’m still thinking of how wet I got before he even touched me. That scene which is so difficult for me to write is governed by an abstract feeling, far more abstract than the tangible details of what happened in sequential order. The main thing is that I didn’t know if he wanted me to touch him, or if he wanted to touch me. And I was observing to see if this opacity might shift. But as I waited, I became aware that I wanted to touch him. It didn’t matter if he wanted to touch me.
Somehow I managed to put my hand on the back of his neck and then I was nuzzling against him with my face as if we were cows without language. I love feeling in me the dumbness of a dog driven by instinct, who is nevertheless held back by some recognition of the structures of power. A good dog wouldn’t dare touch a married man like that, but I was deliberate in taking what I wanted, or in testing him to see how he’d react. I suppose I was both afraid and unafraid.
Prior to this, I had streamed from my lodgings in Berkeley, and he had claimed that seeing my image on screen no longer made him horny. I had an angularity in person that was effaced by the camera, and he preferred the detail of the skin on the face as seen in real sunlight.
He remarked that he could see more freckles on my face in person, and complained that the video feed flattened me, made me smooth. David enjoys details, he likes to look at hands. Once he told me that he would sometimes zoom in to a woman’s face on CB until he could see all the pores in the skin, that he could stare at this for ages, that this was more pleasurable to him.
Many times before he had described to me a kind of face blindness, a difficulty in recollecting faces when they weren’t in front of him. I had registered this with a feeling of offense; how could it be the case that he didn’t remember what I looked like when I wasn’t there?
It wasn’t that he forgot, he tried to clarify, what happened was that each time he tried to think of a face the words and thoughts would completely efface its reality. And he could remember me or someone else better by the shape of the hands or the way they walked than by their face.
After I left, he wrote to me to say that he had managed to conjure a clear image of my face!
Actually, it wasn’t an “image” of my face, it was an “impression” of my face.
The next morning he woke up to the notification sound of a message coming in from me, a “short whistle.” Then the “thought” of my face came to him, and he came to the thought.
I asked him if that image or impression came from a specific moment.
Yes, it was the moment when we stopped, or at least stopped for the first time.
It’s cold at night in New York but not cold enough to close the windows. I sleep early and well and have dreams about Josh; I wonder what it’ll be like to see him again some day, which is apparently not next weekend. He wants to go to a music festival in Tennessee with me in April. We spoke on the phone; he described his encounter with his ex’s ex. Sometimes I wonder if he feels I would uniquely understand the strangeness of a certain form of indirect eros, as he’s constantly cucking me. I believe he knows how much I want him, but it still remains an unclear fact, because of the circumstances. I invited him into my room and did not touch him.
He recounted to me over the phone how he hadn’t been able to fit inside his ex. She claimed she didn’t like dick, but later she met another man, who had been able to fit inside of her, and who had thus become the first and perhaps only man she’d been with. Then he met this man in London, leading the service on Yom Kippur. The man spoke to him between services; Josh didn’t seem to know what to make of the experience, but he wanted to tell me the raw facts.
He doesn’t actually want to come to Raga festival, as one in Chicago had already sufficed. I find it a delight to speak with him but I don’t sense much carefree pleasure in his own desires, and I fear my own desire might choke his out if I were to let it free. Thinking about California is somehow healthier, thinking about my identification with Cathy/Kate from East of Eden.
So I imagine Josh, like David, giving me an unnecessarily long tour of his house. I want him to show me all the plants in the kitchen one-by-one, in an almost plodding fashion, standing by each for a long time, looking at each more carefully than I could, composing in his mind a series of images of the plant at different times, allowing me to wait with him through an intensely private experience I have no access to, while I am hungry for actual food and probably for his touch. I want to open the sliding glass door to the deck, and walk down the stairs, as Josh follows me. He would pause in front of the orange tree, and pluck off some of the small flowers, and show me the tomatoes, and the marijuana, and touch their leaves briefly and remarking on the modifications he had made to help them grow better. He’d show me the wildflowers in the planter boxes and we’d reenter the house and he would then comment on the aquarium under the TV and how it tended to grow algae because there was too much light leaking in from the deck doors. He’d mention that he wish he had gotten a chance to clean the tanks in front of me.
I imagine Josh showing me his various objects in a drawer, necklaces and bracelets and rings given to him by his in-laws, since his wife didn’t like to wear jewelry herself. The dull shine of all that gold would remain with me; there is something erotic in its softness, in its muted glint, the limits of concrete materiality obscuring its market value. I’d imagine seeing him wear them out in the sun and air of California, black intercalated with gold moving on real skin. He’d then close the drawer and show me the black-tiled bathroom, a closet with aquarium supplies, a safe he has failed to crack in the bedroom closet, and live food for the guppies in some culture.
Josh would finally show me the home office, the large TV screen on which he had viewed me on the camsite months earlier. There would be a small narrow paludarium on the opposite side of the room, its waters crowned by four small orchids, each growing on mounts hung from a piece of driftwood emerging from the top of the tank. One would be a delicate shaking thing, little, spindly-leaved, with translucent blooms the size of a small woman’s fingernail, blooms which would look much like an assortment of wine-dark clitorises against small white backings.
It would tremble in an almost buzzing fashion as he held its mount in his fingers, and he would stand close enough to me to be brushing against my arm with his as he held the tiny orchid, remarking on how its pseudobulbs grew in just the way to allow for that strange quivering.