My mind is hot and glowing and orange and muscular.

Today I biked to a bakery in Midwood, and meekly bought sufganiyot, one filled with jelly and the other with chocolate-hazelnut cream, the cashier might’ve been Uzbeki, and I briefly noticing an Orthodox Jewish man look at me; he was tall and had longish curly blond hair, then I went to the Pomegranate market grocery store and bought chicken back bones, came home and made a soup with Haitian lalo, thought about how the soup was delicious. It was schmaltzy, I had removed none of the chicken fat, the sufganiyot were very chewy, maybe made of flour with a high protein content, someone on Google said they were more like a soft bagel than a doughnut, and that this was good. After leaving Jerry’s place this past Saturday, an Orthodox Jewish woman doored me while exiting a cab in Borough Park, and I had meekly apologized for having been hit, and said I was fine, and rode away a little scraped and bruised, I contemplate having been fucked over in Borough Park, but not badly, I felt light, bouncing off that car door, in a way that was nearly sexual, and I think about how I enjoy biking through on Shabbat, when driving isn’t allowed, and how it had been a Sunday when I got doored, such busy streets in comparison. I like the idea of Shabbat, an independent day of rest, unlike Sunday, which feels so much like a day of preparation for the work week, I like that Sam dislikes so little but avowedly dislikes Christianity, I like how every non-Jewish man I’ve told about my preference for the Jews takes a stab at bringing the Jews down a notch, I provoke and enjoy the casual anti-semitism which makes me all the more philosemitic, I get off on the confidence inherent in the act of fetishizing an ethnicity, and feel a firm handshake being made between me and those who notice in themselves a preference for “asian girls.”

In anticipation of the holidays, I feel such great comfort in recognizing how I have fallen into the Jewish science of psychoanalysis, and I think about how Alex, Adam, and Sam, with their cute, expressive surnames—Feinberg, Holzman, Strassman—have been so kind and good and stimulating and generous. When will I, on the other hand, recognize or research this alliance, in more rigorous terms? What will I do to honor it, beyond the nominal recognition of my preference, and my desire to hear more about each man’s upbringing, family, and ideas about the future? Perhaps part of the solution lies in reflecting on my fascination with the new man, who isn’t Jewish, and who causes me to wonder a bit about what it means to be an exception to the rule.

I only assented to meet Jerry, who I had confirmed in advance is not Jewish, because he had messaged me about Thomas Bernhard; he’s reading Yes. I haven’t read that novel, or anything by Bernhard in four years, but there was something arbitrarily pure about his message, and I figured that maybe I did want to have some more reader friends. Everything else in his profile and our earlier messages had been promising, and he was much more attractive than most of the men I see. Jerry, as it turns out, is from a sort of working class family; he grew up in Throggs Neck, his mom is a public middle school art teacher and his dad was a cop, who died of his fifth heart attack twelve years ago. He was a line cook and went to four different CUNY colleges before finishing a degree in physics, at the age of 30, and now works on the software that’s used for making page layouts and diagrams for the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Sunset Park, a neighborhood I like, because it feels like it’s on the edge of things, and because I like seeing the sharks and the bullfrogs and the eels and the snow crabs and the geoducks and the mantis shrimps in the Chinese seafood markets on 8th Avenue.

We ate dinner awkwardly on Cortelyou Road, at an Italian restaurant called Lea. He had an unexpected voice, a bit quiet and tinged with a kind of non-standard dialect, I don’t know if it’s a form of a Bronx accent or something much more idiosyncratic, an example of “foreign accent syndrome,” which he had mentioned to me, not attributing it to himself. I had trouble speaking openly or at length, being so uncertain if it made sense for me to get to know someone new after having just met Sam, and also aware that something about my dislike of the suburban white quality of Cortelyou Road’s restaurants was blunting me, and so after about two hours we moved, and went into Highbury Pub, a dive bar around the corner, and sitting at right angles against the corner of a wall, we nestled close, and he took my hand into his. I kneaded, crushed his hand between my fingers, or wanted to. I reached into his sleeve, grasping his wrist. We spoke about the colors we were wearing, the fact that he was wearing a lot of red. I had been feeling so neturalized, in part by his strangeness, in part by his shyness, in part by the fact that I had been so excited about Sam, but I liked the texture of his hand, his arm, I could smell him and I liked his scent, and I realized that I might enjoy the vague sense of criminality I sniffed out when I wondered if I should in fact bring him to my house, ten minutes away by bike. I described to him my fear of women, that “my roommates know I’m often not at home, so they know I’m promiscuous, but I’ve never brought anyone local here.” But I looked at him, thinking that if there was anyone I’d bring back it would be someone pleasing to look at like him, and texted my roommates to announce the guest, with a “sorry for the short notice.” Then, to Jerry, “let’s go!”

Bringing him to my cute, virginal room, I was able to show him my stuffed animals and other animal figurines, the little crab on my desk, the white rabbit, the red aomori apple-headed man, the pink snail with horns and whiskers, as well as my tarantula. How cute. He smelled good to me. I hit him with my hands, on the chest, on the face. I hit him on the ass with a belt. He had those nice lines on his shoulders, those creases which mark the boundary between the groups of muscles, which I first discovered in Sam. I liked all this clothes, his layers of red, the heavy shirt-jacket, the thicker brick-colored shell, his belt made of different woven fibers, blue and white I think, making me think of fishing and sailboats. He fucked me in a way that felt thoughtlessly good, and I almost came, and I’ve been horny since he left. I’m going to see Sam and Jerry and Adam then. I started writing my dissertation again. I’m going to finish my dissertation. I’m going to use Sam and Jerry and Adam to help me finish my dissertation. I’m going to read more poetry and more fiction. I’m rereading The Golden Bowl. I’m rereading Women in Love. My mind is hot and glowing and orange and muscular.

Jerry’s last name is Muzsik, which means “man” or “peasant.” I realize I’m collecting a certain kind of man now: confused, strange, submissive. The disconnect between hitting someone and seeing how they react is wonderful; I love watching a beautiful man flinch, I love knowing that I don’t know what he feels, I love looking at the redness appear on his buttocks around the white of where the belt hit the skin. Like Sam, Jerry was chosen on the basis of his looks. I wouldn’t want to hit someone I didn’t deem beautiful. But Jerry’s also confusing to me, very confusing. When I see him I don’t know quite what I want to share, or what I want to ask. The parameters for exchange haven’t been set, all I know is that I want him to come and fuck me again, and the only reason I’m writing this post instead of reading more for my dissertation is that I’m so horny, and to be clear I’m not so sure Sam can consummate this want of release, there’s a kind of gelid layer between us, like a numinous glass lens through which I seek knowledge of his pulchritude. Or, as I see him more, is it less the pulchritude than the fascination of conversation that creates this barrier, Sam who crafts the most searching inquiries, Sam who inspires a kind of lilting Brownian motion in thought.

Sam reminds me of this passage from the Golden Bowl, in praise of Edgar Allan Poe’s “story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further toward the North Pole—or was it the South?—than anyone had ever done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of milk or of snow.”

I’ve seen Sam twice more since I wrote that, and managed to orgasm twice, and I’ve very much enjoyed him, his speech, his body. But now that I’m home alone, I’m curiously incurious about him, uninterested in marveling at our connection. I have no discernable anxiety around his availability, as he’s continued to date other women, but perhaps this means I’ve repressed some desire for a more pointed closeness. I feel I can put my memories with him in the freezer and reheat them later. Maybe later he’ll ask for me to return. My mind returns instead to a mounting restless interest in Jerry, around the facts of what I did with him, and around the question of whether I forgot, or rather, entirely failed to see this or that detail. Both of them elicit in me a sense of fascination, but the better I learn to communicate with Sam in words, the less of this sense of wonderment persists, whereas with Jerry, I’m feeling greater wonderment at a version of me that draws close to him with whimpers and no words. A set of questions: Why am I so turned on by him? Why do I want to rest with him in bed until the end of life? A separate question: why do I find such pleasure in looking at his bookshelf, or lying on his bed, a shikifuton which rests on raised tatami mats? And wasn’t it nice going with him to the Chinese bakery around the corner, where the woman at the counter recognizes him as a regular, and apparently looked at him as if to communicate that he saw me and him together, associating us, “a new item”? Wasn’t it nice when he sat on my bike at the top of Sunset Park, as I held his hands to my chest, inside my jacket, to warm his hands, as he told me to tell Sam, whom I’d see later that day, that we had stood their hugging for six hours? We didn’t stand there hugging for six hours, but it was a marvelous fiction.

Then I went off to Flatbush, then to FiDi, meeting Sam there to go up to the Natural History museum, where we looked at insects, specimens both dead and alive, having nice, stimulating conversation with him all the while. He asked me again if I’d like to visit his office sometime, and I said yes, but not this Friday, because I’m seeing Meredith. I felt gratified when he asked me what Jerry looked like, and when he said he liked Jerry based just on the photo I provided. I saw a picture of Clara, a woman he’s gone on two dates with, and felt both a bit gratified and a bit jealous when he said that she was one of his favorites so far, that she has interesting, unusual perspectives on certain things, but that on the broader axis of unusual, she wasn’t as unusual as me. I’ve started to fantasize about celebrating my birthday with all three: Adam, Sam, Jerry, and analogously, a day when I meet all of Sam’s women, or Jerry’s, if he decides to date other women, too.

(From Women in Love)

“Gerald,” he said, “I rather hate you.”

“I know you do,” said Gerald. “Why do you?” Birkin mused inscrutably for some minutes.

“I should like to know if you are conscious of hating me,” he said at last. “Do you ever consciously detest me—hate me with mystic hate? There are odd moments when I hate you starrily.”

Gerald was rather taken aback, even a little disconcerted. He did not quite know what to say.

“I may, of course, hate you sometimes,” he said. “But I’m not aware of it—never acutely aware of it, that is.”

“So much the worse,” said Birkin.

Gerald watched him with curious eyes. He could not quite make him out.

“So much the worse, is it?” he repeated.

There was a silence between the two men for some time, as the train ran on. In Birkin’s face was a little irritable tension, a sharp knitting of the brows, keen and difficult. Gerald watched him warily, carefully, rather calculatingly, for he could not decide what he was after.

Suddenly Birkin’s eyes looked straight and overpowering into those of the other man.

“What do you think is the aim and object of your life, Gerald?” he asked.

Again Gerald was taken aback. He could not think what his friend was getting at. Was he poking fun, or not?

“At this moment, I couldn’t say off-hand,” he replied, with faintly ironic humour.

“Do you think love is the be-all and the end-all of life?” Birkin asked, with direct, attentive seriousness.

“Of my own life?” said Gerald.

“Yes.”

There was a really puzzled pause.

“I can’t say,” said Gerald. “It hasn’t been, so far.”

“What has your life been, so far?” “Oh—finding out things for myself—and getting experiencesand making things go.”

Birkin knitted his brows like sharply moulded steel.

“I find,” he said, “that one needs some one really pure single activity—I should call love a single pure activity. But I don’t really love anybody—not now.”

“Have you ever really loved anybody?” asked Gerald.

“Yes and no,” replied Birkin.

“Not finally?” said Gerald.

“Finally—finally—no,” said Birkin.

“Nor I,” said Gerald.

“And do you want to?” said Birkin.

Gerald looked with a long, twinkling, almost sardonic look into the eyes of the other man.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I do—I want to love,” said Birkin.

“You do?” “Yes. I want the finality of love.”

“The finality of love,” repeated Gerald. And he waited for a moment.

“Just one woman?” he added. The evening light, flooding yellow along the fields, lit up Birkin’s face with a tense, abstract steadfastness. Gerald still could not make it out.

“Yes, one woman,” said Birkin.

But to Gerald it sounded as if he were insistent rather than confident.

“I don’t believe a woman, and nothing but a woman, will ever make my life,” said Gerald.

“Not the centre and core of it—the love between you and a woman?” asked Birkin.

Gerald’s eyes narrowed with a queer dangerous smile as he watched the other man.

“I never quite feel it that way,” he said.

“You don’t? Then wherein does life centre, for you?” “I don’t know—that’s what I want somebody to tell me. As far as I can make out, it doesn’t centre at all. It is artificially held together by the social mechanism.”

Birkin pondered as if he would crack something.

“I know,” he said, “it just doesn’t centre. The old ideals are dead as nails—nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman—sort of ultimate marriage—and there isn’t anything else.”

“And you mean if there isn’t the woman, there’s nothing?” said Gerald.

“Pretty well that—seeing there’s no God.”

“Then we’re hard put to it,” said Gerald. And he turned to look out of the window at the flying, golden landscape.

Birkin could not help seeing how beautiful and soldierly his face was, with a certain courage to be indifferent.

“You think its heavy odds against us?” said Birkin.

“If we’ve got to make our life up out of a woman, one woman, woman only, yes, I do,” said Gerald. “I don’t believe I shall ever make up my life, at that rate.”

Birkin watched him almost angrily.

“You are a born unbeliever,” he said.

“I only feel what I feel,” said Gerald. And he looked again at Birkin almost sardonically, with his blue, manly, sharp-lighted eyes. Birkin’s eyes were at the moment full of anger. But swiftly they became troubled, doubtful, then full of a warm, rich affectionateness and laughter.

“It troubles me very much, Gerald,” he said, wrinkling his brows.

“I can see it does,” said Gerald, uncovering his mouth in a manly, quick, soldierly laugh.

Gerald was held unconsciously by the other man. He wanted to be near him, he wanted to be within his sphere of influence. There was something very congenial to him in Birkin. But yet, beyond this, he did not take much notice. He felt that he, himself, Gerald, had harder and more durable truths than any the other man knew. He felt himself older, more knowing. It was the quick-changing warmth and venality and brilliant warm utterance he loved in his friend. It was the rich play of words and quick interchange of feelings he enjoyed. The real content of the words he never really considered: he himself knew better.

(To be continued…)