A Good Student Ch. 05

We skipped down the stairs and out into the street and I wanted to take her across the street to Long Viet which is this tiny hole-in-the-wall place I've always dreamed of taking a girl to, pitch black on the inside and as wide as a closet with a tiny porthole for window and lit only by the blue neon sign, a ridiculously narrow mirrored bar in the back like a sliver of glass, makes it feel like an aquarium.

Down on the street we ran into Jimmy again, this time he was with Uncle Stanley, a little, round-headed, sloe-eyed guy I didn't know very well, and Ricky Sun, who I did know and liked. Ricky'd been in the poetry course I'd taught at Truman College which was just a few blocks down and was a funny kid with bleached blond hair combed into a sculptural brush that gave him an unfortunate resemblance to Beavis or Butthead. It was unfortunate because I think Ricky did it intentionally out of the mistaken belief that people thought Beavis and Butthead were cool, which they did, but not in the way that Ricky thought.

"Conner, Conner, it's an honor!"

The other thing about Ricky is that he wrote poetry by lifting strings of words out of the rhyming dictionary.

I smiled. "You guys still around?"

"Where we supposed to go, Conner?" Rickey smiled.

Emma stepped out where they could see her and the boys, taken by surprise, stood up a bit taller and gave her polite little bows, I introduced her around and they all shook hands, and I was touched to see this sweet formality and Jimmy's showing off as he told the others, "Oh, we've already met, haven't we Emma?"

I gave her my arm as we crossed the street and she took it. I hadn't felt so fucking proud in years. As I pushed open the door of Long Viet I looked back across the street and saw Jimmy and Uncle Stanley smiling at me, their heads almost touching, and Ricky Sun with eyes wide giving me both thumbs up.

*****

It was time for us to talk and there were things I wanted to tell her, but they were confused things and only half clear and I'd hoped for better than that. At my age and for where I thought I'd be in terms of maturity and knowing my own mind, I'd really hoped for better than that. But sitting there in that dark and intimate place with Emma right across from me and almost waiting for me to say something, it seemed impossible to start, and so we sat and ordered food and talked about this and that and I never did say what I should have said.

But what I should have said was this:

I'm a writer, Emma, and a bad poet, and I'll never have the money your David does. I don't know what I've gotten myself into here. I started an affair with you because I wanted your body. I wanted to fuck you and do terrible things to you and I thought that's all I wanted. Now I seem to have fallen in love with you and I don't understand how and I don't know what to do about it.

I don't even know you very well, and I'm almost afraid to know you better. Maybe I love you because I don't know you. Maybe if I knew what you were really like and what you wanted out of life and what you think is important I wouldn't care for you at all and that would be the end of this. You're a lot younger than me and we see things differently. Things matter a lot more to you—material things—and I gave up on those a long time ago, probably because I know I'll never have them, but also because I think I found something more important in my writing.

I don't talk about this much because I feel silly when I do, but when I write, I feel like the most important man in the world, because when I write, I give meaning to things. I create significance, and I create meaning, and as hard as that may for you to believe, that's really even more important than life and death.

You're sitting here with me now, and we were just up at my flat and I was holding you and making you come in my arms, and what does all this mean? We're both here now telling ourselves stories, trying to find the one we like best to describe what's going on. Are we just playing with each other sexually? Are we in love? You're wondering if I'm just using you, if I think you're just a whore. I'm wondering if I'm just some cheap thrill you know you can string along and then dump before you settle down with your boyfriend. We're writing this story, Emma. Everyone's a writer. We all write our own lives and the lives of those around us. It's just that I do it all the time and I think about how I do it more than most people. I do it large. I'm aware of it.

There are stories within stories within stories, Emma. We live in a sea of stories and meanings and symbols. When I first fucked you in that cold empty lecture hall, don't you think I knew what that meant? The echoing emptiness of that auditorium, a place where students gather to learn from a teacher; your aloneness in the dark as I touched you, as you wordlessly begged to be touched? It was cold in there and dark. It was hard. I wasn't kind. Do you know why it had such an effect on you?

When I chased you down in that rainy park and took you in the mud like an animal, do you know what that meant? How you were burning to be free yet needed to be captured and ridden to the ground and fucked in that field in the rain and the grass and the mud with no pretense and no apology and nothing but raw animal passion. I nailed you to the dirt with my cock, Emma. Pulled your hair back till the rain was in your face and rode you like a bitch. It was just what you wanted, wasn't it?

Do you see, Emma? This is what I can give you. This is why I brought you here. Because tomorrow, or the next day, or the next, I'm going to take you around the city and I'm going to show you other stories, magical stories, impossible stories and unbelievable stories, and I'm going to show you how they connect to you and to what you feel and how they reach deep and connect us to unimaginable things. Unimaginable things—the emeralds in the gem room at the Field Museum, the Gods of ancient Egypt, the opium dens of colonial China, the Kabalistic Tree of Life, the gold of the Incas in Pizarro's treasure Ships, the magic of the Italian renaissance, the Italian beef sandwiches of Taylor street and the swaying of the willows by Diversey Harbor. They're all linked by erotic imagination and the power of poetry and that's no small stuff. That's the very fire and chains of love right there, Emma, and I'm offering to give it to you. I'm offering to lay all of this at your feet, to bring it to you, bathe you in it. We'll live in it, because that's what I can give to you, Emma. Do you understand?

And just where are we in all of this? In all this meaning and talk and all this thinking and explaining. Do I even have to say it? It's the one thing that's obvious, that I've been saying all along.

I've been saying it all along the only way it can be said. Not even a writer can say it with words, because it has to be felt, and it has to be felt because it's not even an idea, it's a sensation, an emotion, a certainty, Emma, that's what it is—that sheer presence of me in you, of me against you, of me with you, melting into you, possessing you, having you, being you. It's that one certainty that's too important for words.

It's where we start, it's where we end.

This is what I need you to understand, Emma, more than anything, and this is what I can't even say.

When I started this I thought it was some naughty fun—a game about D/s, BDSM, whips and chains. I never knew this would happen to me, that you would open up this floodgate of emotion, break down this dam of passion. You think I'm playing games, and I almost wish that were true, but what I'm feeling is real. It's real and now I don't know how to convince you it's real. You think I'm playing games, and I almost wish that was true. What I'm feeling is real. It's real and now I don't how to convince you it's real -- and if I can, I'm terrified that I might find out it isn't real to you.

You devastate me, Emma. You destroy me with what you give me. I'm supposed to be the master, I know, and yet you make me weak and helpless, fill me with rage and strength, turn me into a man like I've never been before. It's sick, insane, maybe pathological, but I don't know if I can live without it anymore. When you give yourself to me the way you do, you take me apart and put me back together into something new and strong and clean. You empty me of my rage and anguish and take it into yourself and turn it into something beautiful. I don't know how you do it. I've never known anyone like you.

And yet I know how it must be for you too. Maybe I'm wrong but I swear I can feel what you feel, how you seem to swell with this sweetness as if you're going to burst, your breasts and your pussy and your whole body all filled with this languorous heaviness, and forgive me Emma, but what you want then is not more sweetness and gentility but to have that pleasure pulled from you, beaten from you and taken, your body pierced and punctured, crushed and squeezed by the arms of desire, bruised by fevered kisses and punished by passion. You want to know that a man wants you enough to go mad to have you, will kidnap you and tie you and spend himself upon you and batter you both to pieces in his need to possess you.

That 's how it feels, isn't it? Because that's how it feels to me, and I know that when we're together like that, when it's good like that, we're feeling exactly the same thing. Two people don't get any closer than that, Emma. You don't know how rare and precious that is, for that one brief instant to be you and feel your own love

So that's what I know, Emma. That's all that I know. That all of us live most brightly in our lover's hearts, and in mine right now you have a palace.

I can't even make you an offer yet and I don't know what else to say. Just take what I've told you and think about it, but just know that you're much more to me than what you might think, and that this is much more to me than a game.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

That's what I should have said to her at Long Viet as we ate our bowls of pho and our barbecued pork and pot stickers and drank our tiny cups of tea. That's what I should have said, but I didn't. She looked so beautiful as she sucked up the noodles, the ends whipping around and splattering drops of broth before disappearing between her pursed lips. She laughed at the delicious implications.

I didn't say anything because I was afraid that she really was in it just for the sex, just sowing her wild oats before her marriage to David, and that if I bared my soul to her like that, I'd only make a fool of myself and embarrass us both and lose whatever authority as a Dominant I already had.

But mostly I didn't say anything because I'm such a stupid man.

*****

From Long Viet we went right over to Dee's, one of a chain of weird discount clothing stores scattered around the city and close-in suburbs. I'd discovered Dee's before with a friend but never had an opportunity to shop there myself. They specialized in trendy cut-outs and fashion knock-off stuff that was hot one day and cold the next and ended up selling at Dee's for five dollars for a pair of pants and three for a tee shirt, seven dollars for an entire outfit. They specialized in clothes that were a bit too hip, and had a few too many hanging threads, but every so often my friend said you could find an outrageous bargain, and at those prices you could wear the stuff once and throw it away, which is pretty much what I had in mind.

Dee's was in an over-illuminated over-chromed mini strip mall on Broadway that also contained a blindingly bright fruit market/grocery whose stacks of grapefruits, apples and bananas extended out into the street. Everyone there wore sunglasses. They had to. The mall was frequented by a bunch of pretzel-thin hipless, breastless Asian and Chicano girls who looked faintly green under the powerful fluorescent lights. They made Emma look especially voluptuous, almost meaty.

Thankfully Dee's itself wasn't so bright. Emma had no idea what we were doing there till she rifled through some of the racks and saw the Lurex, velvet, spandex, mesh, vinyl, and then looked at the price tags.

"You've got to be kidding!" she said.

Several of the pretzel girls looked up.

"I know they're kind of flashy, " I said, leaning over a rack of iridescent tops the size of dinner napkins, "But I like flashy. Sue me. I want to buy you some clothes, Emma, my treat. I want to play sugar daddy so you can't say I never got you anything. I know this isn't the highest-end stuff in the world, but still, just for the hell of it. I've got a hundred dollars I don't want to walk out of here with. Okay?"

But Emma's face suddenly got dark and sad, and I realized I'd done something wrong.

"No, Conner. That's okay. couldn't."

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing. It's just... I'd rather not. Is that all right?"

I'm very stupid when it comes to women. Vaguely I sensed something swimming around between us like a fish in the dark again—that same business about what was real and what was a game.

"No, look, Emma," I said, grasping at straws. "It's not like I'm really buying you something. These aren't really clothes. They're props. That's what they are, get it?"

She smiled and shook her head but I think my earnestness must have gotten to her, or she realized she'd hurt my feelings, or something, because she relented.

"Props," I repeated, "And at these prices, I want you to shock me with your lurid and whorish purchases, understand? And check it out—they have underwear too. Behind you."

She looked at me and then looked behind her at a display of demi-bras (my friend had told me their underwear was especially good, their stockings too), and she surrendered: "Well, these bras aren't bad..."

Who was the poet who wanted to be a pair of his lover's panties?

I walked up to the counter and made a show of giving the cashier two fifties. "Don't give these back to me no matter what. I'm an irresponsible madman and will only spend it all on books. Make sure she spends it all. I'll be right back. I have an urgent need for a grapefruit."

I thought Emma might be more motivated if she knew she could surprise me with her purchases, and I secretly liked the corny domesticity of the idea of the woman surprising her mate, so I walked outside and stood in the parking lot and had a cigarette while she spent my money on sexual enhancements.

It was a gorgeous night and I was right where I wanted to be—both satisfied and aching for more. secure and feeling like I was on the edge of a dangerous precipice, almost feeling like I was loved. My failure to tell her how I felt in the Long Viet came back to me. I should tell her, and yet things were going so well. It would be so easy to ruin everything at this point.

Besides, she knew what was going on. We hadn't really made love yet. She knew I hadn't brought her all the way into the city just for a quick shower and a bowl of noodles. She'd seen the hoist and the locked room and now here I was buying her clothes at Dee's and she knew I had something planned. The main event was still to come. There was time.

I was worried about leaving her alone so I walked back in. The cashier nodded towards the changing booths in the back and I walked back, and I heard her voice coming from one of the stalls, tight, low, urgent, talking on her cell phone.

"...Well see? That's why I didn't want totell you! If you didn'tknow, then you wouldn'thave to lie! You're the worst liar in the world, Angela, and David knows that too! ...(pause)...Well— Well— Well, just turn itoff! Just don't answer it anymore! Angela—? Angela—?Angela! Would you listen to me—!?"

I turned and walked out, went outside, face burning, dizzy.

Supposedly no one knew where she was. Her roommates didn't know. Her fiancé didn't know. It was our secret affair, private, our own little game, something we shared. If anyone got hurt it would be just us. And now here it was—the tone of her voice, tight, pinched, pleading,manipulative.

Strange how my face burned. Throbbed almost—the part of me I show the world. As if I'd been slapped.

I leaned against a car and watched as Emma came out of the dressing room, putting her phone away. She didn't look at me. She looked at the outfits she'd taken in with her. I tried to see her for who she was.

But was it really so weird, I asked myself? What had I heard? I'd heard her having words with Angela her roommate about David's calling her and that was really all. So Emma had lied to me when she told me her roommates didn't know about us. Was that such a big deal? It kept me from pestering her at home. It kept me from dropping by or trying to make more of this thing than it was. Was that so unreasonable?

Still, the doubt remained. Her tone of voice on the phone wasn't the tone of voice I knew.

She'd stepped out of character and I hated that.

I wasn't sure who she was anymore. The idea that maybe I was playing a part in her game wouldn't leave me, that I was a minor character in the story she was writing featuring her and David wouldn't leave me. The lights in Dee's suddenly seemed too harsh and too flat at the same time, and Emma seemed to pick up some of that green cast to her skin as well.

We paid for her stuff and went back to my place.

"Should I model what I bought or do you just want to—?"

"No, let me see. Let's see it all," I said.

We were back in the bedroom surrounded by the white and black bags from Dee's and I started going through them as if David might be inside. That was my obsession now, that Emma was having this affair with me just to make him jealous and goad him into adopting D/s as if it were nothing more than a lifestyle like yoga or vegetarianism—("Oh, come on, David! You know that Conner Devlin in Chicago did D/s with me and we had a great time! You should really try it!")—that she was making mental notes of what I was doing so she could report to him as if it was a technique he could learn off 3X5 note cards. I felt like my recipes were being stolen.

I started drinking. I was tense and angry and it started to hit me right away.

She'd bought nice things. Fairly conservative, handsome clothes; skirts of fabrics that might not be expensive but still, hung with simplicity, tops of soft and elegant cut. Amidst all the flash and glitter and whorishness at Dee's, Emma had managed to find clothes that remembered a woman's beauty and made me ashamed of the particular kind of hot-pants lust I was looking for, and that only irritated me more.

"That's it? That's as slutty as you could find?"

She looked at me. "I bought more. I was saving them for later."

I picked up a gray skirt. It was some synthetic I suppose, soft, like cashmere. Not unusually tight or short. It wasn't what I'd been expecting. It wasn't what I'd been hoping for.

"Fine. Let's go then. Get dressed. One more place I want to take you and then we can come back and get down to business. I've got some stuff to get ready while you change,"

"Do you want me to wear that skirt?"

"Sure, yeah, whatever. Wear the skirt. No, wait a minute. I got something else you can wear."

I went over to my dresser and opened the top drawer, I'd been saving this for later, but I was a little drunk now and it seemed to me that this was as good a time as ever.

I took a gift-wrapped box and gave it to her and I should have known—I should have seen the look in her eyes that said, "Don't do this to me. Please don't do this to me," and maybe I did. Maybe I saw that look and I gave it to her anyhow because I had the feeling at this point that things were somehow already over and maybe I just wanted to hurt her. But I gave it to her and I made her take it and I stood there while she unwrapped it and tore the paper off and then opened the box.