Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

They want to be invited in and it’s hard to know how to refuse them, with their earnest smiles pointed right at us. We sit around catching up. C and the exes are talking about their jobs and sharing stories from the different times they dated me, and as I watch them getting along, I feel this tremendous sense of well-being clogging my chest. Emotion swells in my middle and won’t let anything else through. It feels finally like there is no past, just a thick, happy present wrapping it all up, so beautiful that I can hardly breathe. Then all of a sudden we’re all stripping down and fucking, the whole group of us together, very politely. Everyone is respectful of one another’s personal space and nobody is uncomfortable. There are dicks everywhere. In the middle I feel happy and rested and I think to myself: The people I know best now know one another in the same way that I know each of them . I realize that I recognize all of their bodies right down to the placement of body hair and freckles. I know them like I know myself, better than I know myself. The scenario ends there.

The ratio of actual sex to chatting, joking, and eating snacks in this fantasy is about one part to six. Even in the midst of the hard-core stuff we’re chatting casually to one another, remembering different vacations we took or little routines we used to have on the weekends. We’re talking through arguments that were never fully resolved while we were together, and everyone is offering their opinions and support.

I told C about my fantasy one night after he had shared one of his with me, something about five women, five different flavors of peanut butter, and a jungle gym. I thought it was on topic because they both involved a multiplicity of people, I thought we would laugh and compare and maybe even synthesize, but C told me my scenario weirded him out. I told him that in the real world, I wasn’t really interested in any other guys, even if they were my exes, but he said that wasn’t it. What bothered him, what seemed filthy, was the emotional aspect, the way I had dictated the personal. “You need them not only to be doing something for you but also feeling some specific way about it,” C said. A begging quality had entered his voice. C said: “Why can’t you just let people have their own inner lives, as long as they’re doing pretty much what they’re supposed to with their outer lives?” Then he stared away from me hard, thinking about who knows what.

When I watch the porn actors and actresses on TV, the thing that touches me most is their manners. They carry out their tasks with a sort of faraway etiquette, like the cashiers at the grocery store during the lunch rush who say just enough to make you feel that what you’re doing is appropriate and look at you rarely enough that you feel you should move on efficiently. Porn people conduct similarly balanced exchanges: they’ll offer up one way into a person, one of the most literal ways, but no more. And because in their world everything offered is taken up and no proposition is refused, no excess desire is left behind to molder. It may be the only perfect world I’ve ever seen, perfect except for the occasional glimpse of a badly infected wax.

Afterward we sat around on the couch in front of the TV, which was muted: just colors. C sat forward and grabbed at the remote as I put the pillows and cushions back where they used to be. Now it was as if nothing had ever happened. I looked down at the amnesiac material, clean and boring, its nubbly fabric a thrift store plaid. Looking at this couch made me feel like I hadn’t been where I had been or touched any of the things I had touched. Even his body, half-clothed, looked the way that it had: warm with warm folds, soft and vulnerable. But having been there myself for the entire event, I knew that the parts had participated in a whole series of perceivable physical changes, the rise and climax, the resolution. When I considered myself, the account was much hazier. I could barely remember my part having been there since I saw it so rarely over the course of action, and the brief flashes in which it registered offered up the same sign over and over, the lips parted or not, no qualitative or quantitative difference in their appearance. Even now, only a slight soreness indicated that something had taken place. I could feel the part thinking already about the next time it would be filled.

“Are you feeling good?” I asked C, rubbing my cheek against his shoulder.

“Sure,” he said pleasantly, as though I had offered him a cookie. “Why not.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“You know what I mean,” he replied.

SEX USUALLY LEFT ME FEELINGcalm for at least a couple of hours, but I hadn’t been feeling much calmness recently. At least it still distracted me from what was going on at home. Ever since I had gone to the house across the street I had been trying to get back there, but it never felt safe. B with her new face was louder, and more curious, too. She looked at you longer and harder. When I slid my shoes on in my room and B heard the sound of my heels, she’d call out from wherever she was in the apartment. She’d ask me where I was going. She’d ask me what I was going to do. She’d ask me if I wanted to watch some TV. All I could do was slip my shoes off silently and creep back over to my bed, where I’d lie facedown on the mattress and look out across the street, thinking about how much easier it would be to have fewer things to think about, or no things at all.

B seemed so different from the shy girl who had moved in. With the B I had gotten used to, everything you uncovered about her was hard-won, from what she liked to read to whom she had a crush on in grade school. You had to dig it out of her gently, through a combination of offhand questions and calculated fun. But she was different after I started dating C. I had found her waiting for me in the stairwell the morning after the first night I spent at his house. She had been smoking cigarettes, the used-up butts were lined up next to her purposefully. “I was worried about you,” she said as I walked up. I said I was sorry. I was standing there with stringy hair and most of my eyeliner rubbed off, and I smelled funny. I looked like I had been reshelved. B would usually have left it there, waiting for me to suggest something fun to do, but this time she kept looking at me. “No,” she said decisively. “I’m happy that you’re happy. I want to be out there too, I just don’t know how to do it. You’ll show me how,” she said.

Then she stood up suddenly, stubbed her cigarette out on the steps, and placed the longer, half-smoked piece in its proper place within the line. She said she wanted to show me something. I followed her up to the second floor, where the door to our apartment was already open wide. “It’s in my bedroom,” she said, beginning to sound excited. Our apartment smelled like cigarettes and Pine-Sol; the two scents sickeningly blended. B pushed open the door to her room and pointed at something that I couldn’t see from the doorway. I trailed in behind her and saw. What B had pointed at and was pointing at still was a portrait of her ex-boyfriend, painfully detailed and done all in graphite pencil. His face was chiseled and hard, as if there were stone bedded just under the skin. His mouth had a mean shape and a smoothness that made you want to reach out and touch the paper. B had made his face twenty percent larger than it would have been in real life, large enough that even the smallest features of his face, the specks of stubble and small moles, seemed aggressive. His face inflicted itself on you, it was almost too handsome to bear.

“How did you do this?” I said.

“I drew it,” said B. “I had to use memory, we didn’t take any pictures.”

“Did you do this for art class?” I asked.