Cunt, Ass, Cock, and It's Not about Fucking

Two mornings before I gave him my cash offering I asked Garth, as I frowned at myself in the foyer's sliding door mirror, “Do you think my clothes suit me? Lisa says I should take more pride in how I dress, but what she doesn’t understand is I wear my muscles. The covering is irrelevant.”
“She’s right.”
“She is? What’s wrong with the way I dress?”
“You don’t dress in a way that suits you. You’re one of those women who look best naked.”
“Well, that’s alright then.”
“Women fuss so much about what they wear,” he said. “The truth is men don’t care. They look at a woman and imagine her without her clothes.”
“Really? You mean all that time, not to mention hard cash?”
“Look, I’m in a bit of a rush here,” he said.
And that was alright because I’d gotten what I needed, some attention and a compliment alongside. The way to sidle up to Garth is by serving him a plate of hot, spicy negatives.
The night before he left, Garth told me I’d miss his penis. “You have to admit you’re going to miss sucking me off,” he said.
“I’ll have to make that sacrifice,” I said.

After Garth Left

I send a moderately erotic tinged-with-romance e-card to Robbie, the ex-con from New York City, that he might not feel neglected and subsequently vacate. I thrive, still, with this one’s attentions, compliments, and pleasure with my words.

Garth must not find out. He would be too sad. And I would lose him. I am afraid of life without this big man. Every day he calls me. Why did I betray him, he says, bringing Lisa and Nefar into his home, over-running his house with enemies? I ask him about Sharon and Georgia. He says Georgia is fat. “That didn’t stop you before,” I say. “And what about the woman at gym, the one with curly hair.” He says either I make excuses or gather up any accusation lying around and hurl it at him.” When we talk, I cry and my throat aches. I am online, turned on by my mind, wandering through it awestruck the way I did with my Chapel Hill professor at the AGO exhibit, something about impressionists and light. Lean and cool he was, like those slouching clothes rich people wear, like a cashmere scarf wrapped and casually flung back, talking technique and history, drawing me into the canvas and then stepping back. Let’s be a live installation, my Lenny and I, I thought, a fucking example of performance art.

Fuck lives in my mind. Moved in, leather valises, some heavy-duty orange (green reeking of evictions and hard times) garbage bags crammed with souvenirs, rare antiques, a few newfangled gadgets. Just moved right in, a squatter grabbing vacant space and then some. I could fall in love with any floor; I see a sprawling space and I’m flat on it, masturbating my way through life, but then I have these flaring arms needing a man to fling around, hold my hand and warm this heart. I bait the lure with literary sex, cast out, wait, and reel in, reel in. Garth must not find out.

Garth says one of Georgia’s failings was she wouldn’t go on all fours. She didn’t know who the man was. I’m reading Malcolm X, Cleaver, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Fannon, Alice Walker, Norma Zeale Thurston, W.E.B. Dubois. Not Dubois, although on Wilder Avenue his book waited for me on my walk-in closet book shelf and kept me company on my bed’s headboard. Still, I mention Dubois because I have felt the texture of his words, my palm grazing over his book’s cover. My ex-con read Dostoevsky in prison and quotes passages in a voice so low and hushed I strain to hear the words. And when I look in the bathroom mirror with its row of dressing room lights across the top, I’m dismayed to see a white middle-aged woman staring back at me. Garth is right—I haven’t walked the walk. But I am shifting inside. I think a black woman would not play a slave game during sex, is that male/female thing separate from life, history, and politics, and is that why Garth has a white woman on her knees?

“I can’t be your mother,” I say. I tell him he can’t rewrite history, his mother on all fours as he knifes her with her cock. This last part I don’t say.

I worry about cash, counting off houses the way I used to list off my boys and men—“Soissons, Wilder, Cote St. Luc, Bourret, Highway 6, Edinburough Road, Rural Route 8 . . .” And this book, my book that loves me late at night, early morning, mid-day with words “cunt, ass, cock, dick, clit,” is about fucking, and also not, even with cocks ramming and ramming, cunt-, ass-, and mouth-up. It’s a story. Of a woman still a child and lost in this world.

“Question for you,” Garth says in one of his untimely calls (Caroline having supper, Lisa searching for clothes, and I hovering, split in parts—hands in the galley kitchen, one foot in living room, the other in front of the stackable washer-dryer tucked behind the foyer's slat doors).
“Yes,” I say, smoothing my voice and drawing out the “s” so he might think I’m with him, my body parts briefly linked.
“If I’m at a bookstore and pick up your book, will I be surprised?”
“What do you mean?” I say, one foot sweeping in from under the dining room desk and the other from the storage closet beside the front door, now side by side, shifting weight one to the other.
“I mean will I be surprised? Is there anything I should know, now, before?”
“Oh, that’s what you mean. Well, I mean, it’s all there, you know. I’m writing about everything, you know.”
“Yes, but, is there anything I should know?”
“Oh. Well, no. Except you’re in it. You are it. Except of course there’s me. But you should know you’re exposed. Your cock, the color of your pubic hair, your spreading balls, how you like to ass-fuck. Everything. I mean you’ll walk down the street and people will know.”
“Great,” he says. “That’s what I’m afraid of.” Although I know it’s not. But his voice is lighter and I know he’s smiling, showing his disproportionate little teeth.