“I though it must be Luc [on the phone] and that it was no longer so very important. Something was ebbing away from me.
I went back up to my room feeling very alert. The music has finished and I was sorry that I had missed the end of it. I caught sight of myself in the mirror and I saw myself smile. I did nothing to prevent it, I couldn’t anyways. I knew I was alone again. I wanted to say that word over and over to myself. Alone. Alone. So what? I was woman who had loved a man. It was a simple enough story. There was no reason to make a big deal of it.”
– Françoise Sagan, A Certain Smile
I was a woman who had loved a man.
It was the dullness that did it. It comes sometimes and asserts itself like it’s never been away and coats everything outside of myself in a shiny black veneer, as if some giant hand had come in the night and coated it all in a thick goop that hardened but is still soft on the inside, if you dig far or press hard enough.
He appeared on an ordinary day, in a doctor’s office. I only felt his elegance. When I looked directly at it — it disappeared — so I didn’t dare look directly at him. But once I was called in and exited again, I felt a pang of loss to not find him still waiting in the lobby.
An ordinary afternoon. Work, gym, shower, hammam, relentlessly trying to rid myself of the goop and maintain my normal functioning. A stomach before me through the steam. It’s nice, hard, but with some life lived, skin stretched and worn but beneath it it’s intact, not through nature alone but from regular effort, it showed exertion and experience and if that alone wasn’t enough for me when I looked up it was that face, the one that I had tried hard not to look at directly — there it was as if I had willed it.
I was a woman who had loved a man. How did I know? They ask me. Because of the dullness. Because when he looks at me I don’t feel real. Because when he speaks to me I don’t hear what he says. Because now when he speaks to me I want to vomit. Because I hate him.
I hate the way he made me look at myself in the mirror gripping me like I might evaporate at any moment. What was he looking at? What did he want me to look at? What did he see? I hate the way he was always brushing my hair off my shoulders when I spoke to him, just so he could watch himself do it, I’m sure of it.
People don’t see in mirrors what is there, they see what they wish was there. But not me. When I’m alone I’m all too conscious of what’s really there. Yet it’s only when I’m alone that I stop witnessing myself from the outside.
I read and re-read all the notes I have from our encounters and they read like a porno. I feel sick again.
I could find a way to copywrite them all in but it wouldn’t be true. The only way for me to express it is to feel again how it was, to put myself back there, but it floods back too sharply and envelops me and I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to return to that high-rise apartment furnished by some interior design intern at a larger firm with all those pressed suits in the closet and secrets behind the closed doors. Doors never quite closed but left ajar — so secure in their existence knowing that no one would dare to enter where she should not. Though of course not me. Eventually I did my peeked but ultimately nothing drew me further — perhaps this was their security, never showing any cards; not from protectively keeping them close to chest but from long since having abandoned their significance.
I never felt such unrequited love. They say maybe that’s the only real love because love that is shared will eventually be weathered by the elements. I don’t care, I wish it never happened.
Then some days I wake up, and I was just a woman who had loved a man, and there’s no reason to make a big deal of it.
But I want to make a big deal of it. I want to remember every fuck and every gesture and every drink and every cigarette and every kiss and every stroke and every embrace and every time he groped my ass in front of that mirror and every time he managed to make me act differently with all his big little words that he can’t help but drool from his silver tongue and the way his head bobbles ever so slightly when he really focuses on something and his strange way of drawing me in and circling me until the circumference around me gets closer and closer but it’s there that I’m free.
Most of all I want to remember the fever of every scene, living it like it was a storybook we were acting out or a lucid dream I woke up in. There, where after a couple of drinks the dullness can’t reach me, I only laugh at it from the warmth of the white sheets on that low bed.
I want to remember what it felt like sitting nude in the bedroom window frame having a last cigarette and Campari before bed and we sang along to “Nothing Compares 2 U” breathing into each other’s mouths. I want to remember every time I sat in that window frame and he took great care to make sure I wouldn’t fall out — certainly he couldn’t afford the blood on his hands (but who among us really can?) — but not giving a shit who saw us, matching my usual delicately concealed exhibitionist nature. I’d write that I liked to sit there just to make him nervous — an emotion which after meeting him you’d agree is largely alien to him — but regrettably no, I simply have always enjoyed perching naked at precarious heights. Maybe it’s something about being so nonchalantly comfortable and at the same time close to death. On one of the first nights in the early hours of the morning some drunks passing in the street below yelled up at us. Just like me he barely bats an eye and simply comments, “We have admirers.” We wave down to them together.
I want to remember his stupid Diesel jeans that were far too tight for a man over fifty revealing his slip of sophistication and age — my own little knowing victory I’d never tell. I want to remember what he did to me to make me write “What will he do to me now?” I want to remember the way he would soothe me at a distance saying, “Soon baby.” The way he would remind me every time I left not to walk under the motorway underpass, and not to start Paco de Lucía’s “Entre Dos Aguas” on my headphones until I stepped out of the building, timing it just so that once the six minutes was up, if I walked fast enough, I’d be tapping in the door code to my building.
That’s what we did. We drank Campari, we took off our clothes, we fucked, we watched films, we listened to music, we talked about books. He told me to read Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar. A book where at the end of each chapter it sends you to a new non-chronological location in the book. I still don’t know if I’ve finished it. I stayed up too late many nights reading it until my vision blurred and I’d realize I’d come back to a portion I’d read before, most likely several times, each time not trusting if I remembered correctly or if I had really been there before. I don’t know if it was a glitch in my book but once I circled the same paragraphs enough times I had to ultimately choose to put it down for the last time, content to never know if I had truly finished it. By design or coincidence a book that does all it can to confuse you while giving you creative license to choose your own story.
“But if you had been there that night, as so many other times, then I would have known that the roundabout made sense, while now, on the other hand, I debase my failure by calling it a roundabout.” Page 5.
After months of observing him in the weight section of the gym from the elliptical on dark northern European winter nights, one unsuspecting Saturday evening I see him in the crowd at my new downtown haunt. Where the DJ only spins records from before I was born and when it’s late enough you could be dancing alongside anyone from lost American tourists to regular bohemian day trippers to underground socialites to members of the upper echelons of the European system. There where the towering art nouveau glass doors are the great equalizer of us all — in short, my kind of place.
Without a second thought, or truthfully even a first, I marched straight up to him and said hello as if I owned the establishment and was welcoming him. He returned my greeting matching my tone as though we’d long since known each other. Surprised by his reciprocated candor to my own which threw even me, I asked if he knew who I was. He didn’t, I explained, he assured me then yes indeed he had seen me. I wasn’t convinced, but it didn’t matter now that I had shattered the ice with the mallet of my built-up desire.
Later, when I thought back countless times to the events that proceeded from my boldness that night, the phrase that involuntarily echoes in my mind is “low hanging fruit.” “And there is but one saliva and one flavor of ripe fruit, and I feel you tremble against me like a moon on the water.” Page 33.
He had only to casually extend an arm around my waist and I dropped into his palm. From there we promptly fell into a taxi, where his hands showed no shame, but I didn’t mind because he let me plug both our ears into my Spotify, and he approved of the soundtrack. We tumbled into the elevator, and seeing ourselves reflected back to ourselves in the full length mirror we shared our first taste of us as object apart from our separate islands, now thrice removed — and we approved.
He unlocked the door, and I dropped into his Barcelona chair sat under the full-length mirror, the only signifier marking a bachelor apartment’s foyer. I kicked off my boots and he was on his knees in front of me tugging for more to be released. I didn’t protest but took it in stages. Tights off, now a drink. Champagne in the kitchen, a glass of San Pellegrino. A cigarette in the living room window frame. The awkward intoxicated dance of two strangers fitting their bodies together for the first time.
We make it to the sheepskin rug just beyond the doorway of the bedroom. I’m reading to him of my life, he had asked. As I recount a piece he strokes his hand over me and inside me, adding the breath the story should be read with but I hold my voice steady, only its edges betraying my held-off will to succumb. Again in the window frame he keeps me reading but I’ve grown weary now and stop as I feel his attention waver when I sense he’s started to look beyond me. Then there it was — the head bobble — the icy faded brown eyes, his pupils swimming within them as if in saltwater and piercing right through me. He grabs the flesh on my right arm and says, “It’s all right here.” “It was about that time I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses.” Page 7.
He says it like breaking character. Like slicing through a slice of his Spanish jamón. Like immortalizing a moment. Like meeting me on another plane. Like resurrecting a faded holy scripture. Like that pinch of the skin on my bicep could pause the flow of my blood long enough for me to find the words to express something ineffable we didn’t even know we’d been waiting for. Like crafting together a new universal symbol that once found we would finally come to understand the meaning of all symbols and discard them altogether, once and for all.
“We didn’t love each other, so we would make love with an objective and critical virtuosity, but then we would fall into terrible silences and the foam on the beer glasses would start to look like burlap, getting warm and shriveling up while we looked at each other and figured that this was Time.” Page 11.
He was a careful one. The kind of carefulness that only comes from touching the darkness through someone else, tapping into it through them like it’s merely a convenient hole you can peer through. Like perusing through an uptown gallery, looking to feel something and indulging yourself by considering a purchase but inevitably returning home empty-handed — satisfied enough with the mere knowledge of having experienced something passively which you could make yours, should the impulse ever last long enough. His mistakes were out of ignorance and entitlement, and his pleasure was born of the same well. Call it what you may but it’s a kind of purity. The kind of purity that can’t hold what’s not its for too long, it doesn’t know what to do with it. But perhaps to his terror or mine, I’m practiced in such dark arts. My favorite place to take them is where even I have never been.
The brown leather couch, I kneel before him. Before he’s even made the first move I feel the transfer of energy, subduing his own to absorb mine. What would have been imperceptible if my current wasn’t so attentive to his. I brush his palms with my fingertips and transfer myself to him as he’s emptying himself out to make space for what he’s taking. That familiar delicious sinking feeling of floating and melting into ether which if you try to grasp causes the opposite reaction, but if you’re expectant and ready for the tide you just breathe into it and let the self — which you recognize isn’t really yours to be — drift away with your control — itself similarly a desperate trick of the mind in the fool’s errand of offering an anchor.
He didn’t do much with it, he only let it linger and seemed to evaluate it. He held it for a while as he gently clasped my wrists together behind my back, keeping them there a short time. He took my will and just observed it as it hung in the emptiness of the desert landscape we created between us. When he released his hands from mine I immediately felt the power transfer back and I drifted my hands up slowly to hold onto his thighs once again. I could have left them behind me where he put them, but I knew it was only a test this time and didn’t want to give him more than he had presumed to extract.
What was he taking? This and other reveries only the nymphs will ever know. “Since he did not love her, since desire would stop (because he did not love, desire would stop), he would have to avoid like the devil any kind of sacred ritualizing of their play.” Page 29. Minutes later, without warning, I had the violent sensation that the wind had been punched out of my lungs. How did I know? They ask me. Because until now, this was the first time I had felt this way despite having played this game countless times.
“Why couldn’t I accept what was happening without trying to explain it, without bringing up ideas of order and disorder, of freedom.” Page 14.
There was one more instance within which he performed such an unforgivable act of intimacy. On the white bed, he is above me and we’re still, he stares at me a long time and then gently pinches and presses his fingers into my face as though testing if I was real. I stare back to confirm I am. He touched my surface like it at once was a sacred portal to the divine and a gelatinous piece of rare mineral — mineable and commodifiable all the same.
These tiny fractures, momentary flickers within which we touch the other side — the side which for me is always a veil away and only after years of confusion, frustration, and abuse, I’ve learned it’s not the same for everyone and I have to turn my back on them all to live in this world, covered in black hardened lava.
What makes a man study a woman like a map and then discard her like a receipt? It was a definitive gesture. Imagine now all the people whose worlds you have witnessed through such moments and all the acts we must pretense in our waking lives to bury under the rug, denying their significance to survive another ordinary day. How many little pieces of all the other worlds we have encountered do we carry with us, day in and day out? How many pieces have we given away? Does there come a point where this end overcomes every means and what once was held significant must be abandoned? Must it all be this perpetual cycle of nights and bodies and soap to wash it off and polished shoes and shined faces in the morning?
“But all of this should have been said in its proper time, except that it was difficult to know what the proper time for things was, and even now, with my elbows on the railing.” Page 5.
How did it end? They ask me. It ended the same way it began, with lies, with indirection, with rotten fruit. With my lip smudge on the mirror above the Barcelona chair — still there months later because the maid never cleans that thoroughly. Painted on one of the first nights when you stood inside me from behind, my knees on the chair and hands on its back, my face pressed against the looking glass, our eyes locked together through it. I couldn’t have planned such marking better if I tried, and I never do. I kissed and rolled my tongue across it like parts of you which at that moment were rendered inaccessible. I sucked and pressed my face against its flat smooth surface as though I could take you whole in one instant. What human tragedy it is that we must be delineated by space-time in such moments of communion. In that act I had looked directly at you, and you disappeared behind me.
Each time following when I returned I checked if the smudges were still there, my tacky yet accidentally artistic second silent victory won against all the other women who passed through the revolving door of your apartment, a reflection of your refusal to be kept — but don’t you know what you refuse eventually comes to control you? I’m no exception — I know, it’s always easier in theory than in practice. I remember the day you divulged to me of when you decided to mark a line in the sand and no longer be a kept man — not so different from me really — and your head bobbled ever so slightly as you rested naked beside me propped up by your elbow.
But none of it matters to me anymore, not even your pressed suits I loved so much against me. What is a pressed suit anyways? A pressed man.
It’s true I liked your world. The warmth, the height, and the books — but all in Spanish or French and well I’m a colonial English-reading bitch and this bored me a little too much on mornings when you left me alone in bed to take long unexpected work calls — which also bored me too much for me to waste energy listening to attentively. Never before more than in these moments did I wish I had some quantifiable information to extract from you, had I been a spy I could have gathered anything I wanted from you. Save, of course, for yourself.
“Perhaps there is one way out, but that exit ought to be an entrance. Perhaps there is a millenary kingdom, but you don’t storm a fortress by running away from an enemy charge.” Page 379.
His alarm went off. He went to the bathroom quickly. I assumed he was getting ready, liberally dabbing on his Loewe cologne. I went to collect my things. I took the opportunity to check his other rooms, nothing interesting. I went back and he seemed to have been panicked for a moment before I returned.
I walked around the bed and draped my white silk shirt back on. He advanced towards me, embraced me and drew me back onto the bed. Understood — it was only the anxious refusal to part or thinking I already had. We returned to his timeline, resuming the night’s activities, now with the morning light spilling through the sides of the curtains.
He entered me after I’d had him in my mouth, stopping me to fuck me for a short while. He pulled out and came almost on my back, without aim, as if betwixt between choices. For this, I don’t blame him. It’s our modern, programmed dilemma. I was conscious that I would only ever be privy to a few of the choices before him — and here, I don’t pry. Some things each heart has the right to keep private. That face, so taken, no wonder he doesn’t surrender easily. Another token for my conquering heart, to behold a man when he’s in such a state. Those eyes — I don’t know what’s behind them — in those moments they seem so pure, almost in awe, of what, I’ll never know, I wish I did, I wish he’d tell me — if he even knows. The rational part of me doubts it, but the part that kept me coming back still hopes he’ll find it one day.
The hour was getting late so I got dressed quickly and he circles around me in his usual way and prolongs our routine ritual at the mirror in the hallway before I leave. One thing I’ve always been able to sense in the moment is the last time I will experience someone in the same way. My lips on his nipple, his hand on my ass. We watch ourselves, like so many times before. But it was too early, and my face was too red, and that mirror isn’t flattering, and reality always hits me too hard in the morning. “More than once I saw her admire her body in the mirror, cup her breasts in her hands like a small Syrian statue, moving her eyes slowly over her body in a sort of caress.” Page 11.
Finally I pull away and slip on my boots. Empty pleasantries by the door. “You’re around this weekend?” “Yes theoretically.” “You’re gone this weekend?” “Yes theoretically.” Yes theoretically — we live there, it’s what we have in common.
I unlatch the door and run down the stairs.
The art gallery is empty. The exit door from the restaurant is unlocked. The street is damp.
Sometimes I imagine he watches me as I walk away from the window frame. I know he doesn’t, but I like to have a witness for a little longer.
I reach the avenue and turn left out of his sight and depart back to my rhythm. My apartment is just 100m away, but I must take the long way — “don’t walk through the underpass.” I don’t — not out of obedience but because I too have suffered through Irreversible and have no intention of doing so again.
In those extra 100m I return to myself. I realize I’m starving. I decide on impulse to get a pain au chocolat on the corner which marks the halfway distance between us. I bite into it as I exit the boulangerie. It tastes like nothing — just as I prefer.
I walk swiftly and punch in my building’s key code and take the elevator to the third floor. As I turn the key in the lock I hear the cat already calling. Light years away from him now, again, and always. “Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.” Page 20.
I was a woman who had loved a man.
What happens when the entirety of your memories comes back to you and all these scenes that you’ve lived you recognize you were only half there? I used to think of it like inadvertently having burnt your life before it was constructed, living a false reality. I don’t think that anymore. It’s only that I’m destined, or cursed, to mark these moments as they play out before me at the will of something beyond me — to where I hope I will discover one day.
“Everything begins again, there is no absolute. Then there must be feed or feces, everything becomes critical again. Desire every so often, never too different and always something else: a trick of time to create illusions. ‘A love like a fire which burns eternally in the contemplation of Totality.’” Page 36.
Go to page 5.
Solitude and Sex 