A massage therapist I see a few times a year settles me face down, tucks a towel into my underwear. With firm hands, she thumbs my neck, shoulders, hips.
“Usually,” she says, “your shoulders are tight. But today, your hips. Why?”
My shoulders get tight because childhood gymnastics left my spine flexible but weak, over time causing crystals of lactic acid to calcify around my scapulae. They also get tight because I hike them, unthinkingly, bracing against nothing.
“My hips?” I say, my face squished by the cradle. “I don’t know.”
But I do know. I recall lying beneath N, my thighs wide open around her body.
With excruciating exactitude, the massage therapist elbows my glutes. When I grimace, she chuckles. Then she bends so close I feel her lips by my ears.
“Good girl,” she whispers.
Later, I tell N about the massage. We’re in bed, heads sharing a pillow the yellow of dandelions.
“Wow,” N laughs. “That masseuse is a bit of a domme, huh? You know, since I started doing kink, I see power everywhere. Little moments of body language or eye contact.”
“It’s like Foucault’s idea, the microphysics of power,” I say.
She props herself on her elbow, kisses me.
“I like that,” she says. “Tell me more.”
“Just that power isn’t like, top-down—rulers and subjects. It’s diffuse, it’s in relationships.”
“Been dating?” a friend asks me at brunch.
“I’ve been seeing someone,” I smile. “A poet. But she’s only here on sabbatical.”
“Show me,” my friend says, and I flash a photo from the dating app where we met.
“A hot butch in a button-down,” they say, grinning. “Does she just top the fuck out of you?”
I laugh. She does but we, too, have microphysics. N, who is ten years older than me, has a house and a tenure-track job. N wears the strap and wields the crop. But she’s shorter than me and softer-spoken and also has smaller hands—although her hands, as I told her one morning, our fingers twined, are just the right size. I stared into her eyes as I said so, and the insinuation—all knuckled bliss—or the memory, made her look away, and my power to do that, to fluster her, too, is part of what lets me yield.
On the subway, I reread texts from N. I do this to distract myself as I pass through the tunnel, the long stretch between Brooklyn and Manhattan, which I fear so intensely that I avoid the 4 train, though it is the line my nearest my apartment.
I avoid the 4 because its underwater crossing lasts three minutes and forty-five seconds—to the A’s two minutes and the F’s ninety seconds—and also because it was an overcrowded 4 train that shrieked violently to a stop beneath the East River one morning two years ago, leaving me trapped under all that water—with no updates or instructions—for forty horrifying minutes. Crushed in a carriage of commuters, I felt so sure I was doomed, so sure water would breach the tunnel, that now, years later, I cannot ride between the boroughs without both reliving the terror and conjuring the image of my bloated, bobbing corpse.
N is all I can think about, all I want to discuss. But there aren’t always words. A once-close friend, a man I lived with one summer in my twenties—through which I diligently scheduled date after date with man after man, all the while wearing flouncing pastel sundresses, breasts perkily secured with tape—enquires about my dating life. I tell him briefly about N. The morning after my next date with her, he texts me, asking whether the date went well.
I don’t reply.
My answer—and the word yes—cannot capture how, minutes after I arrived at her studio sublet, she had her hand inside me and made me come as she told me to tense around her; cannot capture how we walked, pressed together beneath her umbrella, to dinner, where at a dim corner table, over tea lights and Tempranillo, we considered, voices shaky, what we’d do when she moved home, a seven-hour drive from Brooklyn; cannot capture how, back at her apartment, I made her come with her cock in my mouth and again as I rode her; or how in the middle of the night she read aloud the poem she had written about me, about us, about making blood-orange negronis on our previous date, her hands juicing the fruit.
Yes cannot capture how, in the morning, when I asked, “What would make you feel good?” surprise gleamed in her teal eyes and she replied, “I don’t usually like this, but I think I want your mouth,” so I lowered myself to her for the first time without her cock. Yes cannot capture how I haven’t gone an hour since that morning without reliving the prickling intimacy of our eye contact as I moved in the space she made for me.
I float through Washington Square Park on my way to teach. To the eleven undergraduates in my creative writing class, I have assigned a braided essay by Lidia Yuknavitch about how violence echoes through time. It is an essay I love, but in the classroom’s sallow fluorescence, I cannot subdue my mind. I toss out questions—What do fragments do? How does form mirror content?—but soon my attention yields to the memory of N’s reverberant Ohhh as she’d clenched around my fingers, wetness pooling in my palm.
I marvel at my want. N is not the first woman I’ve been with. There have been others, over the year since my husband—though I don’t like that word, all petticoats and sanctimony—and I resolved to try non-monogamy. Opening our marriage was a yielding to my queerness, something I had less discovered than exhumed, since I knew it when I was young, when I was twelve and thirteen, until I stopped wanting what I wanted and instead acquiesced to what was wanted from me.
But when I’m beneath N, the desire that conscripts me is entirely new. So is the fact that when she makes me come, it is not my mind doing the work but my body. So is the fact that I stay there with her through all the moaning mess of it instead of floating away.
I did not know I had this capacity for pleasure. I did not know there was this much to feel. I am thirty-two, and I understand something now.
Because avoiding the 4 almost doubles the length of each trip into Manhattan, I begin Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy (EMDR), a modality considered effective for treating phobias.
In our first session, the therapist asks about my early life.
I grew up in London, I tell her, and moved to the United States for graduate school a decade ago, when I was twenty-two. Until very recently, I explain, I believed that my childhood was essentially good. Sure, Dad was violent, and sure, when I was three, I told my parents that Grandma sometimes touched me in bad ways, but how much could those things have mattered since I did what I was supposed to do, since I went to college and then graduate school and married a kind man, and since Dad is pretty nice now and since I don’t really remember the feel of Grandma’s fingers?
The therapist nods, waits.
But lately, I say, I guess I have started to wonder whether those things were connected to all those later years of starving and purging; to my abiding inability to discern or meet my appetites. Maybe they were connected, too, to the years of hypochondria, to the MRIs and ultrasounds and biopsies and mammograms I demanded; to the unyielding certainty there was something wrong with me, something wrong with my body.
“Well,” the therapist says. “Connections are important to think about.”
My husband and I share what feels like a singular connection, one that has only deepened despite Eros’s long retreat. Every day, we laugh until our bodies hurt as we draw from our well of references, shorthand, and jokes. Wordlessly, we grasp one another’s thoughts through glances and gestures.
There is such safety in the witnessing.
I dress up for N.