Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angel’s
Orders? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed
in his more potent being. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure,
and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying.
(First Duino Elegy, trans. Edward Snow)
Studious little whore. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are the days of her week. Rarely at home, more promiscuous than ever, and still she feels this need to burrow deep inside the tunnel of writing that constitutes the core of her being. When she begins to burrow, she realizes how little strength she has, which only inflames her further, until she collapses, preferrably under someone else.
I am currently in my room at 144 Kenilworth Place in Brooklyn, New York. It is November 22, 4:22 PM, and we have some of the darkest, wettest weather of the fall. I believe I am shark, crocodile. I’d like to cut, bite, murder. These acts substitute for a deeper lust which I cannot handle. God save me. Help me designate to myself crimes, works, tasks. Tell me what to study, what to write. Hystericize me to the full extent of the law. In about an hour, I’m going to take the train to Manhattan to meet with Chris.
I don’t know if I’m in love, or if I’m merely terrified of the spectre of love. I tell Chris that I’m actually in love with someone and that, no we cannot do ecstasy or sleep together, not tonight. Chris is dissatisfied, and apparently, after we part, furious, maybe less so about the fact of the rejection than about the form of it. Did I really need to ask him out on a date only to tell him this? He says, over text, not long after we’ve parted, that he finds women who fail to acknowledge their cruelty incredibly boring. I tell him that this isn’t an interesting scenario. Not “situation,” but “scenario.” I go to sleep early that night, quite uneasily.
I stand in Moynihan train hall waiting for boarding to begin, and think of all the worst moments of loneliness and abandonment compressed into a moment, and that compressed moment multiplied over the vast plain of the rest of my future life. Is this a desirable state of being? If it is, I’d rather lose whatever dimension of my brain is capable of feeling this form of lust, this form of desire, this actual terror, this inflamed sadness.
I don’t think anything crazy has happened, in reality. And it’s nice to observe with cool interest what’s happening for me on the page as I write about this, and reading Rilke calms me down. The person I claim to be in love with is just one among the various people in my life, but he just happens to be particularly beautiful, and receptive to talking with me, and he enjoys fucking me, evidently, enough to do it again.
I lay on the couch for the first time with Aleksandra 22 hours ago. It was a little less than an hour after having parted with Sam. I had trouble beginning. I croaked out something about how beautiful the Financial District is, while brushing away some slow-oozing tears. “Why” was the question. “Why is it so beautiful here?”
I had been depressed about the fact that I was completely frigid during my third date with Sam; he had become even more beautiful and lovely that night, and yet I was extremely distant from feeling sexual pleasure. At one point I stopped our sex and said it felt like we were dancing: someone could be standing there looking at us and nothing would strike them as inappropriate about the act. What’s actual sex, he asked, and I said something about friction, maybe, but in essence, that it would be unwatchable.
Was I, in fact, jealous, confused, possessive, having heard about Sam’s own ventures into the lands of casual sex? He had been married for six years, he had fucked the same woman for thirteen years, and still enjoyed it, would still do it, were it not for the problem: she wanted a child from him, and he couldn’t commit to that.
Aleksandra commented, threw out the joke, that perhaps the women who had ended dates with him in 2 minutes, upon learning that he was only looking for something casual, had found him so beautiful that they could not, absolutely not, entertain something casual with him. These were women who had put “looking for short-term” in their profiles, but who manifested an entirely different expectation while on the date. I liked Aleksandra’s joke, which seemed illustrative of what has happened to me, though I am still firmly in the position of the studious little whore, at least in his eyes, and I maintain privately that I can pour water on the flames of my lust by writing about it. Writing, thought, corrodes so much, beautifully, beautifully.
Anyway, I was frigid, and upset about it, wondering if I was in fact jealous. He had gone out with two women earlier that week and had a great conversation with one, and had sex with another, and was interested in meeting a third, his only qualm lying in the question of whether or not she’d expect something more serious. I was relieved to hear that he had made progress in his exploits, as the previous two weeks he had only gone on dates with women he ultimately hadn’t slept with, and had nothing interesting to report in terms of the conversation. I couldn’t conjure an ounce of conscious jealousy, and if anything felt quite curious about the 42-year-old divorced woman, G, whom he had brought over to the room of his new apartment, on 82 Beaver Street. I felt very little when he touchewd me, and touched him instead, and for the first time, he was consistently hard. He hadn’t been able to get hard with G at first, but they did manage to fuck the next day. In his sweet scientific candor he told me that he believed my touching him was allowing him to relax, and this in turn allowed him to feel arousal. I touched his hips, his belly, his lower back, his ass, his neck, his shoulders, his head. In a sense, no one is truly, absolutely beautiful, but I wanted to puncture his skin, I wanted to bite and suck and leave numerous bruises, but I had to hold back, knowing that he would be seeing other women, but mostly because the part I wanted to disfigure most was his face, especially in the tender, soft skin around the eyes, or the more robust flesh of the cheeks, or the thinner harder skin of the nose.
Perhaps I can compromise next time by hitting his ass with a belt, or by gripping his shoulder blades so hard that I leave a hand mark, the way Margaret Qualley’s character does to Joe Alwyn’s in Stars at Noon. “It’s like fucking a cloud,” because he’s so pale, she says. Sam’s not so pale, but he seems to float above us like a manta ray. He’s aquatic, unconcerned with money or with work or with sex, and 6’2”, towering above me. We walked on or across Beaver, New, Cedar, Pine and Wall Street that night, and I felt like Patrick Bateman with the man who one might suppose to be Patrick Bateman. I have Patrick Bateman’s feminine bloodlust. I watched the film earlier that week upon learning that it was directed by a woman. Sam let loose that, in describing me to a friend, he had said that he had wondered if I’d kill him in his sleep, or that I was the kind of person who would elicit that fear or wonder. I roared with laughter, hearing this, as we walked down Beaver Street, after having eaten at the Uzbeki restaurant nearby, and told him that I liked him enough to fantasize about killing him, but that I wouldn’t. Happy memories. Happy to imagine with him inviting him down to South Brooklyn, a trip to Brighton Beach, more Uzbeki food, Uyghur food, Azerbaijaini food, Georgian food. Learning that Citibike doesn’t have any docks down that far. Learning that he sees his algorithms as “pets,” that the ones which require a lot of maintenance frustrate him, and that he’s started to kill them off in favor of the ones which perform smoothly, which he would like to improve. Learning that he is paying his ex-wife’s rent for the next year, and so he is paying $3000+$5000 in total. That he’d like to work as little as possible for now.
Our first two dates had ended in his uncle’s West Village apartment, packed with books of fiction. There were three copies of Intermezzo. But for the third date, I met him at his new place, a studio on the top floor of the Cocoa Exchange: 1 Wall Street Court / 82 Beaver Street. The lobby has dark wood floors and red carpet and red walls and marble walls and mirrors everywhere. Each hallway has strangely ornate wallpaper, featuring some amalgam of pen drawings of buildings on a parchment background. He said it looked like the Red Room in Twin Peaks. The apartment itself was small, and not beautiful, and nestled close to another building. I looked out and down and saw a woman wrapped in a towel, puttering around her living room, and other scenes, mostly inanimate tableaus of lamps and desks and decorative elements like paintings or figurines.
Why is it so beautiful here? Why do I love FiDi so much? Something about the narrow and strangely angled, short streets with memorable names. Maiden, John, Exchange, Wall, Cedar, Pine, Beaver, Pearl, Nassau…
When I first saw him at Saint Eves I thought he was the most beautiful one there. I didn’t look at anyone else, no one, not a single glance, for the rest of the night. I wanted to get under his skin, I wanted to skin him, I wanted to cut off his head and make jokes about cutting off our heads, weighing them, weighing our brains, that joke came later. I marvelled at my own response to his beauty, as beauty has rarely mattered in the last two years of dating, beauty has always been the exclusive domain of literature and the arts, not of human physiognomy, humans could only be good-looking, good exemplars of a particular style, the way dog breeds are each fascinating and appealing but not exactly sites for the contemplation of the beautiful, even a beautiful saluki is just a beautiful saluki, not beautiful without context or condition. Still, it mattered, that S had these looming eyes, blue and intense, and that he looked both a little weathered and quite ingenuous, that he had dark hair. That his name was Strassman, which he told me meant “street cleaner,” and that he was Jewish, but that his mother had converted, and that his parents were divorced, and that he had a younger brother who had briefly gone insane. That his looks recalled those of Vincent Gallo, whom I’ve started to cite as “my type,” though when I search him up I find myself expecting him to look more like S.
I had biked there earlier, in a kind of languorous haze, almost lazily, as I had already biked the nine miles from Manhattan down earlier that day, and was a little tired. The route included the barely illuminated, residential Southwest side of the park, dark after sunset. As I locked my bike to a sign post I found myself moving with the slowness of a man, as if tethered to the earth by a gravitational field most palpable between the testicles and the ground. In the enclosure of the bar’s interior he was readily visible, sitting in the corner bench wearing a sweater that was white, which I thought of as smart color to wear at night.
We sat close, at right angles, and our knees touched a few times. I found myself willing to answer his questions, to be called interesting, before I commented on the fact that he seemed to be asking in order to avoid being asked. He said he did enjoy being asked questions, and sometimes felt he was testing to see if the other was curious enough. Satisfied by the acuteness of that pivot-point, I asked, and was pleased by what I learned about him. I found myself appreciating my more fully composed notion of him as clueless and open and delicately satisfied with a life of “epistemic uncertainty.” I learned that he was from Boston, Jamaica Plain, that he had gone to Pomona and studied math, that he knew John, the other man I had seen at that very bar. This particular coincidence felt wonderfully sharp, as John had also been quite handsome, and had a similar penchant for asking fairly precise questions without saying much about himself. John, too, had gotten out of a serious relationship not long before. I learned that he had lived in Geneseo, but never been to Ithaca, and that he had lived in the Munger residence with his ex-wife while she was attending Stanford Law School.
After talking for a while, I went to the bathroom, came back, and saw him looking at a photo from my Feeld profile, a mirror selfie in which I’ve got wet hair and am trying on my almost complete knit shorts, which reveal the contour of my pubic bone. He told me how much he liked the picture. I was pleased that he was looking at it, in front of me, or that he wanted to look at a picture of me in my brief absence. I told him I wanted to touch him. The act of touching him led him to profess his desire to see what having sex with me might be like, and so we left, and because the F/G trains were 17 minutes away, we biked to a different station, he on a Citibike, me on my compact, magenta road bike, and arrived after speaking more about his ex-wife in the West Village, to his uncle’s apartment, which he was staying in for a brief while before moving into his own place. In the mean time we were illuminated in two spookily bright and nearly empty Brooklyn subway stations, where I witnessed how he walked, how he pushed open the emergency exit for me, how he ascended stairs, how he maneuvered the bike next to me, swerving a little.
A long time was spent in bed. First, kissing on the floor, on the harsh jute rug of the living room. Noticing his strikingly lean and muscular torso, him noticing my small breasts, which he expressed a preference for. I think of sea urchins again, now. The only radial symmetry I saw in his body lay in the two blue irises which loom out from the backdrop of the dark of his head, close-cropped dark hair probably composed of tight curls, in the way some Jewish men’s hair can be. His face recalls some of my favorite actors' visages; there’s something theatrical about being with this form of beauty, something about him that makes me think of a puppet on the silver screen. The funny thing about these figures on screens, however, is that you never rotate them: up is up, down is down, unless you’re in certain Gaspar Noé movies like Irreversible, where the image spins.
How satisfying to have him reach across the dinner table and hold my hand, or rather touch it, investigative, marveling, wondering, curious, how satisfying to feel like the only “couple” in a relatively well-known restaurant. How satisfying to have him put his arm around the middle of my back as we walked, holding me lightly, and at a noticeably high position, because of the vast difference in our heights. Our second date was on the eve of his birthday, November 18 and we went to abc v, where I last went for my birthday, on January 9. At the restaurant he described to me a scene of telling his friends about me the previous day. He said that he felt he hadn’t “captured my essence,” but that he had noticed he was “smiling a lot.”
On the train ride there I had been so horny. I was reading Emily Witt’s Health and Safety, and arrived at a moment in the text when she describes falling in love with the boyfriend who would later go crazy. I almost cried seeing the Brooklyn Bridge, the beauty of the lights coming off the suspension cords, the tall buildings with their rectilinear window lights on the other side. On the way to the restaurant, I saw a street vendor selling Chinese dragons made of 3D-printed plastic, in interlocking segments, and bought one.
Later that night he said the word “by far,” he said that this was “by far” the fastest he had felt so close to someone. Or was it “the most comfortable” he had become with someone, in such a short time. Of course my fantasy was that the two could not be prised apart, and this was during our second date, after he had fucked me and come. I didn’t answer, so stunned I was with the happiness of correspondence, and then told him that I had in fact been thinking the same thing, or something similar, which might come as a surprise, or seem illogical, or mean something very different, since I had been sleeping around so much. He said it in that beautiful voice of his which is somewhat breathy, somewhat thin like a gay man’s, somewhat ready to crack, but always light, neutral, without nameable emotion. Then he put his nose to my ear and rather than finding the volume of his breath too heavy or loud, I experienced the cold tip of his nose touch a point of skin on my ear first, as the most tender of cold droplets of light and heat and time, or like the corner of a polygon, the vanishing of dimensions. He was falling asleep, I guess, that’s what was going on, but to me he was a corner.
Drop your consciousness into my ears, turn your fingers into pedipalps, lose your eyes and let me cut you open to neatly partitioned clusters of tiny orange eggs. Eat bitter flowers and take me to Palo Alto, to the salt marsh. Become dehydrated, salt-encrusted, mummified fish. The nose, the breath, nestled in me like a new surface upon a new continent and I was invited to feel his breath as waves, as if I were all the sand of the littoral regions of South Brooklyn. Crab, sea urchin, sand dollar, barnacle, mussel, clam, whelk, nudibranch, nurse shark, seahorse, toadfish. This is never going to happen again, I think, I have never had someone fall asleep with their nose to my ear, breathing into it, no one will ever do this again except for Sam. The next night I sleep alone in my room and feel his absence acutely; what a huge difference it makes, being with, and being without. No fantasy, no inventiveness of the mind, will be able to substitute for this satisfaction.
Axiomatic, I think, that sexual attractiveness is what draws people together, not beauty or elegance, not intelligence or tact or any of the stuff that makes us think of a person as a “good catch.” At the same time, I’m thinking of Sam as precisely that: a beautiful fish. He exudes, I think, a kind of prize quality, in part because he is tall and clearly athletic, as someone who used to run across the Brooklyn Bridge from Boerum Hill to FiDi for work. He seems curious, open, probably good at drawing strangers into conversation, probably good at asking the right, reflective, incisive question, probably someone whom his younger colleagues gossip about, which we made subject of conversation after I gave him a hickey on his first night with me—he ended up finding a collared shirt—and also after I gave him his animal gifts. He tells me that his building is open to visitors on Fridays, that I should come sometime, to the HRT office on the 76th floor of 3 World Trade Center. Then I think about the appeal of height again, differently, as a stand in for a “difference in perspective.”
I don’t know where my feeling stands, where this immense anxiety around a future possessiveness that might grip me lies, should I be, in Gen-Z slang, too “down bad” for my love object. Let’s admit that my fantasy is in many ways precisely to use him as subject for writing, as a source of inflammation, like in the video where the Madagascan lemurs rub harrassed millipedes all over their fur. I sent it to him. “This looks great,” he said.
He seems so friendly, the way he responds to what I send. Perhaps it’s true that he’s going to be permanently unromantic, out of reach in a fundamental way, the way he describes his relations with his ex-wife, whom he always wanted to fuck, and whom he continues to want to fuck, and with whom he feels a basic comfort or closeness, but never the yearning flushed desire or glow of love that I seem to experience now.
The glow of friendliness, the quick, immediate, clipped laughs of his text responses, the immediacy with which he holds my hand and kisses me, the ingenuous curiosity with which he asks me about my sexual experiences, or describes his own: maybe this is all I should ever want. Sam might as well be my son, and it’s my duty to let him go eventually. In the mean time, I perform my educative functions, and search for figures for illustration in the form of new victims, new prospects, new members of my “cast.”
Am I able to sustain this inflammation before another, however. Is it not fundamentally a solo activity, true inflammed desire, the desire of a male lyric poet, like Petrarch. I’ve just acquired a yeast infection. I remember leaving Tokyo and having a yeast infection, after I first had sex. I remember having a yeast infection after having sex with Dylan for the first time. Sam is so beautiful he makes me feel like a virgin I guess, he’s changed the microflora of my cunt for the first time since I came to the city and became a slut. And now, nothing excites me more than the idea of having a protégé, a partner in libertinism, approaching from the other side, a man who can dredge out the hardest and slipperiest of sluts and inflame them.