Our Wives Under the Sea (25)

In the sea, in the dark, there isn’t time—not in the way you would ordinarily perceive it. It can be hard to force your body into working order, hard to recognize the natural breaks between awake and asleep, aware and unconscious. Of course, there are typically ways to combat this, protocols that submariners follow: maintaining a twenty-four-hour watch schedule, operating a light system that cycles through various stages of brightness and dimness, dependent on time of day. Without this kind of assurance, the circadian rhythms can swiftly begin to break down. A few days can be all it takes. As we were now, without power in our sunken craft, it would become very hard, very quickly, to keep things from going awry.

I sat with Jelka and looked at the silhouette of the saint where it sat against the torchlight. At some point I must have slept, though I’m unclear as to exactly when this started.





MIRI


I didn’t date as a teenager, missed the boat due in part to an excess of panic. At the age of thirteen I became obsessed with venereal diseases, misunderstood my way into a locked box from which I then spent the rest of my teens attempting to extract myself. At some point, I had come to understand that somewhere at the core of sex as an activity lay the possibility not only of illness but specifically of bodily harm, and this conviction, once formed, proved difficult to shake.

My school years consisted predominantly of sweating through my shirts and obsessing over physical contact. I spent hours mentally constructing the pressure of a hand on my knee, pressed the crease of my thumb and forefinger into the side of my neck to simulate kissing, comprehensively failed to learn how to masturbate. I thought confusedly and often of a girl who sat in front of me in Geography, imagined us becoming close friends, so close that everyone else in our year was jealous. I neglected to deal with the hair on my upper lip while ritualistically waxing my underarms upward of six times a month. I thought a lot about the men from the movies I enjoyed but mostly in the context of their being eaten by sharks or falling from high buildings or otherwise breaking apart. At the age of eighteen, for reasons unknown to me now, I allowed a boy named Jeremy Fox to kiss me at an end-of-term party and afterward spent several weeks imagining him biting my arm until the blood came, which of course he hadn’t done. At the age of twenty-two, I kissed a boy at a university bar whose name I forget but whose methods I still remember: strong yank to the back of my neck and all his teeth at once, as though he were using me to floss with. The men I kissed were typically of middle height, dark haired, and gently anodyne. I worked my way up to the giving of occasional hand jobs and even more occasional blow jobs and panicked for weeks afterward about what I might have caught. I refused to have penetrative sex with any of them, imagined sex as a kind of battering, and after a while they went away with little in the way of hard feelings. At the age of twenty-four, I went on an internet date with a man who kissed me hard against the railing of a bridge and told me conversationally that he was a dom, but then grew upset when I told him to stop pulling my hair. I don’t feel safe with you, he said and didn’t call me again. When I told this story to Leah, years later, she told me he couldn’t have been the right kind of dom. They can be difficult to find, she said, took the inside of my wrist and kissed it, then smiled when I told her I thought I’d said to keep her arms above her head. Maybe he was just sensing that the two of you weren’t compatible.

Sex with Leah was a key and a lock, an opening up of something I had assumed impassable, like a door warped shut by the heat. Joy in the fact of pleasure, in the fact of my own relief. When we fucked, I felt myself distinct from my previous versions: the frenzied me, the panicked me, the me who had imagined herself poisoned by something she had never even done. I don’t think, Leah said to me once, that the problem was really you. She was lying beneath me—her light hair, her strong chin, the way she had of widening her eyes when I came too close, as if to encompass the whole of me better—and when I made a questioning noise she kissed the side of my face. I just mean, she said, that being afraid of sex isn’t typically anyone’s fault, it’s just a question of circumstance.

The last time before she went away (the last time full stop), I pushed her into the mattress and held her there, pressed my palm into the indent of her throat and then released, and then pressed again. (Hold my throat when I come, she had said to me once, that way you can feel the noises before I make them.) It was light still—forgetful afternoon, charmed hour before the coming on of evening. The going-away party was scheduled for the next night. Shall we pretend I’m going to war, she said, and I laughed and bit the insides of her thighs the way she liked me to and later on she kissed me and crooked her fingers inside me, twisted them around almost 180 degrees, the way we had discovered, through trial and error, was the only way that worked. I remember her legs, the smudge of green bruises, synthetic citrus smell of her underarms. I remember the way that her hair rose static from the crown and then fell again. I remember the way that she looked at me, the open surge of her gaze, like I was something she’d invented, brought to life by the powers of electricity and set down there, in the last of the light.



* * *



Carmen is eating toast, tells me I should see somebody about that look on my face.

“Chronic bitch face is naturally distinct from resting bitch face, you know. It’s like a whole different ball game when you can’t turn it off.”