Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

I push off the ground and swing toward the far wall, where drawings hang suspended from a wire with clothespins. Several of them feature Christmas trees of increasing precision, neon green and covered in sparkles. “ Buon Natale! ” is written in red and green block letters. I ask who drew them.

“Emil. My son.” Manuela stands and tucks her book under her arm. “Take care walking to your cabana. I don’t have the ground lights on.” From the darkness beyond the patio, she asks me to forgive her, she never asked my name.

—

I dream of a middle-age man wearing a dirty sweat suit, carrying a cane. His belly droops over the exhausted stumps of his legs. His few hairs are slicked against his sweaty scalp. I’m lying on the edge of a bare mattress. His wide hips hold my knees apart. He puts the unlit end of a candle inside me. Even my dreaming self is ashamed for conjuring this cliché grotesquery. But once he moves my underwear to the side and sticks his thing in me, I no longer see the man. I think only of his thoughtless, greedy enjoyment. I come in my sleep, my legs clenched around my hand.

Immateriality gives way to the material — the soft sheet sticking to my sweaty shoulder, roosters crowing outside, interrupting the susurration of broom on stone. It’s soothing to have a grotesque fantasy in a sweet setting. Maybe the particulars of my desire don’t matter much at all. Maybe it’s not so bad that all of my fantasies involve women being degraded. It would be less morally confusing, of course, if another kind of sexiness were possible, but I don’t think it is, not for me. To express love explicitly through the physical — hands clutched overhead, eyes locked, murmured “I love you’s,” mutual orgasms in which I felt like a sweet little bird soaring over a waterfall — how unerotic it seems. I used to worry that I’d been broken by bad casual sex and online porn, which I started watching during the gray, gray Paris winter, alone in my tiny maid’s room on the attic floor with a two-euro bottle of wine and a couple of chocolate croissants, convinced the world owed me whatever inkling of pleasure I could wring from it. I would cover the worn, fake-tanned faces of the girls on my computer screen so I wouldn’t have to see the way their eyes and mouths floated, detached and vacant, in the midst of the fucking. I just wanted to see fucking, humans making themselves feel so good they lost all control. But the guys went on talking and talking, calmly planning to make their sex partners drink gallons of cum or stretch out their assholes or destroy their pussies with their huge cocks. The scenes made me queasy and upset but they also got me wet (a self-protective evolutionary adaptation, I told myself later), so I’d go from video to video in search of something I could conscionably get off to. Finally I’d just stick my hand down my pants and start coming almost instantly and the orgasm was hard and tiny like a pebble and then I was all alone with the gross porn thing that had made me come, feeling now that its eroticism was really rage at the inaccessible things we could not keep ourselves from wanting and the unreasonable demands the grown-up world placed on us. Some of the girls seemed genuinely turned on by the violence done to their orifices—“Pound that pussy! Stretch that asshole!”—as if their bodies belonged to some hateful stranger. Every ejaculation would only increase their willingness to be used like this again and again, just as my porn-inflicted orgasms felt good only insofar as they briefly relieved an incessant itch. The videos are addictive because they do not satisfy; each offers only the shallowest consolation for the inaccessibility of satisfaction.

A man gives orders to a girl on her knees, speaking as if he were ordering a hamburger. “Look at the camera. Open your mouth wide.” He jerks off and ejaculates without sound or expression, the dumb enactment of an image — man’s semen, woman’s face. I once heard a radio interview with a porn star promoting her memoir. Her advice to the numerous male callers who wanted to get involved in the industry: If you can masturbate in a crowded room and stay hard for an hour and then ejaculate the instant someone tells you to, congratulations; you’ve got what it takes. And that’s the classy, official stuff. The free, amateur videos have no rules at all: A woman being asphyxiated and whipped while her asshole is simultaneously fisted and fucked. Vaginas being electrocuted. REAL LIVE RAPES captured on film! A black woman in a hotel room into which more and more white men keep entering, laughing, wagging their cocks in her wide-eyed face, their own faces obscured to protect their identities, the woman turning in circles like a cat cornered by coyotes. A group of blobby, laughing men fucking a woman with a champagne bottle. If it broke, it would puncture her organs, her bowels would stop functioning, she would need a colostomy bag for life like that character in that David Foster Wallace story — stop, please stop. These are a few of the scenes I stumbled on while trying to find a video of two people fucking. How to forgive myself for being an ordinary human? How to forgive the world that ordinary humans made?

I tried watching feminist porn a few times, but it only left me unsettled. The loving looks, the tonguey kissing, the focus on cunnilingus (depressing that the clinical Latin term is less unappealing than the slang — carpet-munching, muff-diving — which I cannot even write without laughing). I should have desired these images but did not. Jared told me to stop worrying about it. “You’re not blowing some fat fuck on camera because your daddy didn’t love you,” he said. “You’re blowing me.” He took my jaw in his hand and pulled my lips apart. I reached for his belt buckle. We had sex and I came twice, imagining a group of overweight men ejaculating into the various orifices of an underage ballerina. Or some other scenario that I pray never happens to anyone in real life.

A therapist might say that my fantasies are a sublimation of my distress over the pervasive portrait of sex as ruthless masculine aggression, the way a rape survivor may fantasize about rape to reclaim the experience, make it a means to sexual pleasure instead of an obstruction. The therapist would probably be right, and maybe I would be a more balanced person if I had agreed to see one, as Brian wanted me to. But I don’t want to subject my mind to someone else’s idea of a good life. I want to do my own research. God knows I have the time.

—

I have barred myself from checking email until I finish the translation. A kind of superstition: If I pretend that the publisher wants to buy it, he will buy it. I force myself to work for two hours before lunch, efficace et machinal , waiting for my real day to begin.

Every meal at Manuela’s is mango and bananas and spicy cashews and dhal and thick slabs of coarse bread. In the afternoons, we drink tea and then read, cocooned inside hammocks. I borrow books from the shelf on the patio. A few are in French, romantic and frivolous. It’s good to engage with French besides my translation. I adopt Manuela’s easy dress — tank top, loose skirt, no bra. I cover myself when the boys come to clear palm leaves or fix the plumbing in one of the cabanas, but they hardly seem to register my presence. In the late afternoons, I walk on the beach, clambering over rock embankments that separate one cove from the next. The dogs are giddy companions, sprinting and digging and burrowing and wiping their sandy snouts against my skirt. I stand atop the rocks and watch the coming waves. Their whitecaps mist and froth as they gather force and speed until they lose control of their own momentum, hurl themselves against the rocks, explode upward like geysers, spritzing me in saltwater.