You don’t wake up one day a charted country, it happens slowly, in parts. But suddenly you notice that the once all-compelling mystery of your deepest holes has already been explored. The maddening desire and titillation you felt at being bared, licked, prodded where no one had ever been (or where many had been but where none had understood the significance of being) fades, leaving you only the ethnographer’s notes: wrinkled, already mapped. Nudity becomes cloaked in nonchalance, and the parting of folds of flesh to reveal moisture and heat no longer warrants the trembling of longing or fear. You need more, a higher high, a more taboo path along which to crawl. He senses this, the comfort in your naked skin, the lack of a tremor when he opens your legs, parts your cheeks, unfolds your arms to reveal the marks he has made on your breasts. He misses the shaking, the desperate way you closed your eyes, too exposed to bear looking at him any longer. He wants to bring it back.
Though he seemed to know this route by heart, it’s evident to me now that there was a tentativeness in these early explorations. At every stage, around each new corner, there was an opportunity for me to say, No, OK, this is as far as it goes. In hindsight simple things betray his uncertainty. A pause after a command. A week of straight, almost tender lovemaking after the first time he took me from behind and spilled my blood on white, crinkled sheets. Making me laugh while I lay handcuffed and burnt on his bed, wet from the chilling water drying on my swelling skin. Early on he discovered that laughter could ease my shame, and he used this knowledge sparingly. Later, when shame became the object, I feared that humor would disappear entirely and a deadly seriousness would ensue. But even then there was always a moment of respite, a sudden wry, ironic crack that would send me dissolving into giggles amid my screams. Always that moment in which I might have said, No, no more, no. And he would have backed away, one step down the road, and we both would have thought, OK, there are limits, and there would have been some semblance of control. But I never spoke, just gritted my teeth harder until I had to get a night guard from his dentist, and I learned that sometimes I had to give in and cry. But I never said stop, never said no. He never said, All right, I think I’ve done enough. So we just kept on.
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The beatings and burnings do not become more frequent, but their intensity increases with a steady and alarming speed. There are still periods of several weeks in which your body can heal. In which you are strong enough to take daily dance classes, in which the two of you go to dinner and laugh over his clients or your audition fiascoes. Sometimes he even calls you on the weekends, after his daughter is asleep, just to ask you a question, or read you a ridiculous passage from the romance novel she’s reading. Things like “his broad vermilion sheath” and “ride me like a wild stallion.” When he does this, you laugh and quip that you ought to write those kinds of novels yourself, that maybe then you could actually make a living. You do not tell him about the itching on your back where the skin has peeled and the burns are healing. You masturbate with him on the phone at 4 AM, forgetting with the urgency of amnesia your early meeting with a temp agency. Breathing heavily afterward, he says, You know, sometimes I see clearly that this is a bad idea and we should back off. How are you feeling about us, really? You say, Jesus, Michael. Call me when you get a backbone. And hang up, knowing this was better than saying, Fine.
He does not bring it up again. And I am afraid then, frightened because even though I am none too sure of his boundaries, I am even less sure of my own. Frightened because there is a part of me that wants him to say, Look, I know what you are doing and you are going to kill yourself, so just stop it right now. But if he said that I would laugh in his face. I would say, Look, you are a dime a dozen and if you can’t handle it someone else will. I want him to tell me, Don’t you know I don’t want to really hurt you? But instead, since I will let him, he does hurt me, bad. I want him to say, I am not going to let you do this to yourself, I am not going to do it to you. But the way he comes so hard when I am sobbing, when I am screaming like an animal, is terrifying and lets me know that this is never going to happen, and the only way to stop it is to do it myself. But I can’t. He touches me and I am willing to let him take me anywhere, do anything to me. I tell myself I want to stop it but I can’t. I can’t.
One day, I see Michael’s daughter on the street. I am coming out of the Urban Outfitters on Clark, and she is on the sidewalk, talking with a friend her age. They have the clear skin of athletic 12-year-olds and are dressed not very differently than I. She doesn’t look at me because she has no idea who I am, but I baby-sat her when she was two years old, have seen enough photos of her since. I want to go up to her and say hello. To introduce myself and say, I don’t mean you any harm. I was fucked up by my father too, and I know that having a dad who thinks the world revolves around his cock has got to be almost as bad as what I went through. I want to say, You’ll probably never think you’re good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, tough or weak enough to hold a man’s interest, and you’ll think those who want to stick around must be defunct. But I don’t say any of this, just walk by, which is probably good since, from what Michael says, his daughter is much more easygoing than either of us and probably wouldn’t know what I was talking about at all.
Always. The comment silences us both immediately. He looks away, not wanting to acknowledge the word he has spoken, the voice he has given to the truth: that neither of us knows of any way out. I shift uncomfortably on the futon, smooth my skirt down over my thighs. He puts a hand on mine. Says, Hey.
