Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

Jared and I both liked having anal sex. I felt relaxed and protected, lying on my stomach with my face hidden, his mouth so close to my ear that I felt the tiniest shifts of his breath, the sound of his need for me; his movements small and slow, so precise that I could imagine my way into Jared’s experience of them. I was all alone, with someone else. Once we were having sex that way in the early morning, when I was still dreamy and calm. Every time Jared pulled back he left me completely and waited for a few seconds before pushing back inside, so that every time he entered me it was like the first time, and I was counting the first times with animal concentration and there were no worries about what I was giving myself up to. I just gave. It was all right. I pressed my pelvis against the mattress. A groan vibrated in my throat. Jared stopped moving. He raised himself off my back. He jumped out of bed and ran into the bathroom. I reached behind me and touched between my legs. Very wet, very brown. I felt myself tumbling into a well, the sound of rushing blackness. After I cleaned myself and put on lace panties and a silk nightgown, I lay down on the very edge of the bed, as far as possible from Jared, terrified of his thoughts about my body. I wanted to let the moment disappear, but my voice intruded, dry and loud. “I feel disgusting.”

Nothing I say aloud is what I really want to be saying.

What I meant was, Is it necessary for me to feel disgusting? For us to be distant and ashamed because a sex act didn’t go the way we wanted it to? Must we pretend my ass exists solely as an erotic portal?

In the lady’s sex book about surrendering to anal sex, one chapter was devoted to hygiene, another to attire. It was easy for me to mock the writer as I consumed her small, punchy treatise during my lunch breaks. (So you’re telling me female liberation requires anal douching and silk thongs and stilettos? And why exactly should I hope to liberate womankind with my sex life anyway? I don’t know about you, toots, but I have sex to feel good.) Yet I also eroticize ideas of myself. I never fantasize about receiving pleasure. I always come at the instant of the imagined man’s climax. But I am not a man, so my own orgasm abruptly splits away from the fantasy I’ve been lost in. I want to feel as Jared seemed to during anal sex, so consumed by the actual sensation of the actual moment that he could not help but release. Whereas I can only come when imagining something different from the current moment, even if the current moment later becomes what I imagine.

One time was different. Jared was licking me and the usual imagery came to mind — man’s penis, woman’s mouth, he was going to come so hard — and then I was back in the room and it was me, not an imaginary brute, who was going to come so hard. I felt the sensation in my groin pulsing outward through my body, until I was clutching the headboard, every muscle tensed, engaged, ready to release all claims to itself, and then the sensation barreled me down and I was gone for a little while, aware only of the complete release of complete contraction, instead of the sensation just being something that happened to me while I thought about something else. A pure moment. I want it back. I want it now.

I flip through the book Manuela gave me until I come to an underlined passage, which I read with a shock of recognition, as if someone has made sense of years of thoughts I didn’t realize I was having. “It is not desire that is wrong, but its narrowness and smallness. Increase and widen your desires until nothing but reality can fulfill them. Transform desire into love. All you want is to be happy.” Before he became the Buddha, Prince Siddhartha lived in a palace filled with concubines at his beck and call. Some teachers say it was the experience of orgasm that opened him to the possibility of living that freedom in every moment. But he left the palace and sat in a cave for eight years because he understood that the desire to ejaculate inside a different woman every night is the very essence of suffering. He wanted to receive all of life with that openness, that presence. Of course I’m using the Buddha to stand in for my own ideals. I’ve never had an experience of sexual pleasure that compares to the expansiveness I’ve felt at times during meditation. Which does not mean I’m about to give up sex. But it helps to be reminded of what I want more.

—

An hour after translating the final sentence of Fifi, I’m sitting in front of a computer at an empty Internet café, shouting nervous nervous nervous in my head. My father once told me that if you know how you feel, your body calms down. He also told me to manifest what I want — picture myself having it, trust that I will get it, feel grateful for having it even before it arrives. So I visualize the content of the publisher’s email before I open it. Dear Ms. Elsie Shore , it will read. We would be honored and delighted to publish your translation of Fifi.

Deep breath. Click.

“We greatly appreciate the opportunity to consider your work. We’re afraid Fifi is not a good fit for us…happy to consider more work in the future…best of luck…” I wipe my hands on my skirt, close my eyes until I can feel the pause between heartbeats.

Well, it’s only one publisher. I should look up other publishers and literary journals, go back to submitting cold, tossing pebbles at a wall in the hope that it might crumble. But how dull Fifi has become to me, in the course of translating it. So then I should translate another book, a better one. But even if I work quickly, that’s a years-long undertaking, and then I’d have to go through the dismal submissions process again and even if by some miracle I were able to get one book translated, what then? I don’t want to spend another decade just hoping to become this particular thing. If I stop imagining the way my life looks from the outside, I don’t even care about being a translator.

The rest of my inbox is filled with Jared’s name, offering email after mercifully distracting email of pornographic yearning (“i love how you’re this smart and well read and independent woman and then i get you in bed and you become my trembling fawn. come back, beautiful girl. i need your pussy around my cock”), words Jared created by jamming down computer keys with his index fingers, typing as he walked and ate and spoke: with ludicrous insistence, a hedge against the suspicion of weakness.

“got in some trouble baby,” Jared wrote me seven hours ago. “some assholes from the city of angels my face is pitch fucking black it hurts so bad i feel like such a loser gonna give this work up for real a buddy says he can hook me up with a job at the firehouse don’t even have to take the emt test come back i’ll be good for you if you come back you’re my dream girl i need you.” I run my fingers over my lips. Longing rears. Anger strangles it. How has this become my life? That my most appealing future prospect is to live with a philandering, alcoholic drug dealer-cum-fraudulent fireman?

The phrase would make Jared laugh. It would be so good to hear his laugh right now.

I ask the Internet owner if I can use his phone to make an international call. He rises from his desk, gestures to the giant phone atop it, and goes outside to smoke a cigarette. I punch digits. The phone rings against my ear. How easy it is to reach him, all the way from here.

“Mornin’. Jared Desiderius Hart speaking.” This is his given name, spoken in his social voice, surrounded by the din of many disparate conversations.

“Jared. It’s me.”

“Well, hell. Say that again, beautiful girl.”

“Jared. It’s me.”

“Damn. That sounds good.”

“Are you okay? You sound like you’ve been crying.”