Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

Women who write about the failure of feminism for glossy magazines would use my experience as proof of the depravity of hookup culture, which turns girls into desperate sluts and boys into ruthless ejaculating machines. Women who write about the triumphs of feminism for glossy magazines would use my experience as proof that free love depends upon reverence for the vagina, that I was dissatisfied by my hookups because the heartless boys were degrading my inner goddess. I suppose it would be a relief to have such ethical clarity. All I have are clear memories of strong feelings. Lust, rage, lust, rage.

“But they weren’t trying to come in two minutes and not make you feel good,” Jared said when I explained this series of feelings to him. He had just come with no warning when I was most aroused, causing me to roll onto my stomach and mew into a pillow until he took me by the shoulders and told me I better explain what I was so upset about. “That’s exactly what they were trying to do!” I protested. “I can only think of one guy who felt genuinely bad that he came quickly. The rest of them were so fucking relaxed afterward, it was like they weren’t even in the room with me.”

“Well, most guys don’t care about chicks until they find the one they want,” he said. He parted my legs roughly, licked me until I came and then came again. And so, gradually, my body stopped believing there was a finite amount of pleasure in the world, for which I had to fight like a wounded cat over a scrap of moldy bread, needing the scrap all the more for the knowledge that it would not heal my wounds. Jared didn’t care about wounds or healing or scraps. He just gave and took. Sometimes they were the same thing, sometimes not.

CARPINTERIA

After two years of ghostwriting obituaries, I started to worry that transcribing people’s sloppily expressed memories at a small-town paper would become my life. In my calm moments, I told myself to accept the job as enough — work I enjoyed; who had that? But when my days were a mess because I got to the office hours late, spent on alcohol and sex with a man I knew I could not marry, then my job felt like one more shameful thing.

One night I was running down the middle of the street, away from some bad thing Drunk Jared had done: slapping a random girl’s ass; telling another girl she had porcelain skin on a night when I had a raised, sore pimple on my chin; telling me such-and-such chick was totally into some seriously kinky shit; telling me I would look hot in lipstick; buying drinks for other girls and leaving me to buy my own — any of dozens of inanities I am pained to remember not because of any inherent cruelty on Jared’s part but because of my willingness to be made heartsick and livid by the same scenario played out again and again with only minor variations. I planted my high-heel sandals in one square of yellow after another. I turned back and saw that Jared was no longer following me. He was bumming a cigarette from a woman on the sidewalk. Her earrings glittered against her long neck. I was seized by full-body panic, as if I were in acute physical danger. “Can you get me a cigarette, too, my love?” I called out, fingernails digging into my scalp. “You fucking prick!” The woman laughed nervously and headed into the bar. I sat down in the middle of the street. Jared exhaled smoke in a slow, even stream and started marching toward me, enjoying the clank of his boots on the concrete. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Get out of the goddamn road, woman.” I knew his face without seeing it: furrowed brow, downturned lips. He was a man in a play who is supposed to act put out and angry. One beer too many and he forgot that his actions had any effect; his only job was to distract the audience from the mediocrity unfolding. I was yelling words I didn’t hear. Jared stepped off the sidewalk and walked toward me. I quieted. His hands were under my armpits, lifting me up. My breathing slowed. Tonight would be an okay night. A middle-aged couple shrunk into each other as they watched Jared pull me to a standing position. “He did this to me,” I called out. “He made me this way.” This wasn’t untrue. But it was also true that I’d chosen him because he did this to me. He was my excuse.

I don’t remember how we got back to my apartment, but once we did, his hand was around my neck and he was banging my head against the metal door. The clichéd depravity of the motion made sense to me. I liked it. He dropped his hand and walked toward the refrigerator. Despair pooled into the place in me that had opened at his touch.

“Just kill me,” I said. “I’m ready to go. I’m too much of a coward to do it myself, but you could do it so easily. Do it now. Come on.”

He pulled his upper body out of the fridge, took a long swig of my roommate’s Miller Lite, walked toward me, his face following the stage direction: Firm resolve tinged with sadness.

“You’re sure now?” His hand rested on my throat. “Because I will do it.”

I nodded. He looked into my eyes and read out the lines, “Soon you shall suffer no more.” He tightened his grip. I counted to seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. My hands flew to his. I clawed at his wrist. He let go, walked back to his beer.

“I’m serious!” I stamped one foot. “I want you to do it.”

“Later,” he said, and belched so loudly and for so long that we both burst out laughing.

—

On the mornings after our bad nights, I would wake up wet and swollen between my legs, my body begging us to fuck our way out of this dark, lonely rage. But if we reached for each other in the usual way — kissing on the mouth and grabbing each other’s hips — the pattern of damage we were doing to ourselves through each other was too clear. So we had to approach each other in new ways — tonguing foreheads or pawing shoulder bones. Once we were aroused enough that arousal erased that other, all-consuming state, I came again and again, Jared giving me orgasms without seeming to notice. We had to leave each other alone with our sensations or else our personalities would rush back in.

After we had more orgasms than want or need prescribed, we went out for breakfast, locked in our private world of sex and hatred. I was afraid of the other diners, convinced they knew how we spent our time. I had been so certain the night before that my life could not bear any more contact with him. And then: We were making love and eating eggs, a little hungover, normal people raging against normalcy. “If you don’t cut it out, you are not going to Melissa’s party or any party, I swear to god,” a father said to his daughter at the table next to us. “Now, Herb,” the mother said. Jared and I were fighting because that’s what humans did.

Alone in my apartment later, I would be tense and edgy, jumping at every noise, double-checking the locks on my windows and doors. There was no way to be safe.

PARIS

My year in Paris had slaughtered me. I was still trying to come back to life. I had gone to France planning to stay — go to school there or become a translator or a bilingual tour guide at some great museum. I thought I was that smart and interesting. But Paris told me I was the same nothing as everyone else, with the same stupid dream of every aimless American who goes to Paris, thinking they can make it because they’ve read a couple of novels in French.

After I began studying French in seventh grade, I found myself repeating the new words in my head to calm myself before sleep or bolster myself against the inevitable embarrassments of gym class. Au-dessus meant above and au-dessous meant below? The class groaned. I placed my hand over my mouth to cover my smile, in love with the clarity of this absurdity: A word’s meaning could be reversed by a centimeter’s pucker of the lips.