A New Way to Want

The boy I bring home from the bar is named Will. Narrow hips and broad shoulders, a bit of swagger to compensate for his shy eyes. He asks if he can buy me a drink, and I let him. We both know where this is going. We agree without words to get there as fast as we can. 

I used to worry about bringing them to my place. A calculated risk, better than the alternative. Dangers are involved either way, but I’d rather control the playing ground. Soon I realized it wasn’t an issue. They may know where I live, but I’ve never had anyone come back to haunt me. By the time we’re done, they never want to see me again. In this we are perfectly aligned.

When we get there, there’s the customary awkwardness. Hesitation grows as the pivotal moment draws near. I pour a nightcap to ease the tension. He asks me questions about myself, and I want to tell him this isn’t necessary. Maybe we’re not playing the same game after all. I’ve been here so many times. The words we speak are just cover, they don’t matter. The real communication is concealed beneath this small talk, in the subtle, specific messages our bodies are sending out. Question, confirmation, escalation, repeat. It’s a delicate balance, laying the groundwork. Making him believe he’s in control. I have to make him hate me a little. Or give him permission to feel what he already does. Tenderness isn’t what I’m after. Tenderness was never the point. 

Maybe once. But that was a long time ago, a memory so far away it might have happened to someone else. A story about love, sweet words and hopeful promises. No use thinking that way anymore.

Will’s dick is long and thick and it swerves to the left. My left, so actually his right. Funny how two people can never see precisely the same thing. 

He uses his dick like a weapon, like a machine gun—in short, punishing bursts. I could say it feels like absolution, but that would invoke that dreary old hierarchy, sin and shame and suffering for redemption. Instead I’ll say it feels like benediction, because it does. I barely exist right now, as far as he’s concerned, and this is what I’m after. A gathering pleasure that is pure and flat and blank fills up my mind and my body til there’s nowhere left to go but out, out, out. Not urgent or irresistible, like it was in the beginning. Now I have to search for it. Still, it’s always there.

Sometimes I think I have reached the end of this way of wanting, but I have not yet found a new way to want.

My name is Mirela. People always want to know what kind of name that is. I tell them the truth: one my mother made up. My mother’s name is Susan. She didn’t want to condemn her only daughter to a boring, pedestrian name. A daughter is an attempt to rewrite the past. To do it over again, maybe this time get it right.

People guess Spanish, Italian, sometimes Portuguese. But I am none of these things. It’s just that I don’t look like anything they’ve seen before. A missing puzzle piece, a variable they don’t know how to solve for. They want to make sense of me, reduce me to something familiar. An instinct I can understand.

Most people call me Miri. But not Letty. Letty called me Lala, sometimes just La. Lulled me with all those lush, lavish L sounds. Love, lust, last, lost.  

Letty’s the one who told me what my name means in Spanish: look at her. Ironic, she said, but she didn’t say why. 

She didn’t have to. Letty knew me like that.

Like I said, it was a long time ago. What was she like? A dark wave rising. Roses and stone fruit and palo santo. Chavela Vargas singing about the simple things. Coffee with too much cream on a cold winter day. We flowed into each other like a river joining the ocean. And when she touched me, I believed heaven was more than a word.  

These days I barely remember her softness. I’ve worked hard to erase it, overlaid her gentle touch with the roughness of so many others. Drank and fucked like it was my job to forget. Nothing wounds like tenderness. When she left, I knew I had to remake myself, become inviolable. I had to become the girl with the most dick. 

It’s important to have goals, an organizing principle. So this is mine. Most days, I’d say it’s worked out alright.

What I do during the day, for money, isn’t important. It’s more or less like what anyone does. Something I’m reasonably good at, a closed system of small frustrations and smaller triumphs. No one there knows what I do in my own time, in the nighttime. Prowling the streets of this city like an animal in a too-small cage. I want to be swallowed up, but there’s not enough space here. I’ve developed a rotation to ensure I rarely see the same face twice. One thing about this town, there’s no shortage of bars. 

So it’s a surprise when Will appears at my side asking to buy me a drink. I watch the corners of his mouth twitch with a barely suppressed grin. His eyes have lost some of their shyness. But I say yes, inevitably. Will is a known quantity. There are worse ways the night could go. 

Like most people, like you probably, this isn’t where I thought I’d end up. I thought I would do something important, leave a mark on this world. Something to remember me by. And then like most people, like you probably, I realized that’s easier said than done. Easier by far to leave a mark on yourself—a testament to abnegation, to endurance. To power and control. 

A bruise, a gash, a slit, a scar. Nothing lasts forever. Even time runs out.

There were no boys before Letty. They simply didn’t exist. 

Not true, technically. I remember brute, clumsy fumbling, always working at cross purposes. Boys bounced off me, leaving no impression. What did they get out of it? I suppose it was enough. 

It took Letty to open me up. Before her I was impervious, could not feel and thus could not be hurt. An old story. A state of grace, a fall, the impossibility of return. But I committed myself to the project. Building up scar tissue, a protective covering. No weak spots, no seams.

I still remember the first boy I had after. Not his name, or his face. I remember the rupture, the violence. What was I expecting? Not this. The shock of penetration, a sudden realignment. A world contained in this sensation, everything and nothing. This hurt I could feel forever. This hurt I would take again and again.

You’d think it would be easier, the second time with Will. A known quantity, less pressure—seems logical enough. Instead, it’s the opposite. A repeat performance isn’t something I’m used to these days. I feel knocked off balance. And he knows this, I think. 

To my relief, the second act is much like the first. His dick still veers left, still elicits a gasp. Only this time he keeps going off-script, asking tiresome questions: do you like that, does it feel good? He asks if he’s hurting me. I close my eyes to escape his gaze. Where are you, he says. Come back. Cross purposes, again. Then he kisses me, hard. An inward swell, a tremor I don’t have to reach for. 

Falling. There you are, he says.

When I wake up, he’s still there. I don’t know how it happened, I was too drunk, I guess. I’m not sure how to deal with this problem. I don’t wake up with men in my bed. Men, or anyone else.

But I have to admit it doesn’t feel awful, waking up with his arm snug around my waist. His arm is lightly freckled, mossed with fine, translucent hair. His smell of sweat and sour milk stirs something inside me. Something I don’t want, can’t own. I feel his chest expanding and deflating against my back. He doesn’t snore, but I can hear his breath. Rhythmic and circular, a gentle lapping, like the ocean. Raindrops make soft plopping sounds against the roof. 

If I get up right now, if I tell him to leave, it’s possible I could get away clean. But it seems like a good day to stay in bed. 

Later on, when he wakes up, he says, I’d like to know you a little.

I decide it wouldn’t be the worst thing. I decide to tell him the truth.

The truth is, there’s a volcano under my skin.

The truth is, he’s not really my type.

The truth is, I’m not afraid of getting hurt. 

The truth is, I’m never lonely.

The truth is, I never wanted anything I couldn’t have.

The truth is, I’ve never been in love.

The truth is, I always knew she would leave.

The truth is, I don’t even miss her.

What went wrong? An old story. She wanted something I couldn’t give her. Something someone else would. 

I see her around sometimes—at the coffee shop, or the grocery store. Her little girl is beautiful, she looks just like Letty. I wonder what her name is. I can’t bring myself to ask.

Things I know about him:

His middle name is Theodore.

He works at a nursery (plants, not babies).

He has a cat named Seymour.

His favorite movie is Chinatown (we argue about Polanski).

He doesn’t like Thai food.

His sister is two years older than him (two years younger than me).

He has a mole on the inside of his right thigh (my right, his left).

When I was a kid, my mother was big on gardening. These days she lives in a one-bedroom apartment, all she grows is leggy, indifferent basil in terra cotta pots on her tiny balcony. She says she doesn’t miss it, but I know better. I remember the pride she took in her irises, her tulips and daffodils. I remember the tenacity with which she dug out seedlings that took root in the wrong spot. Volunteers, she called them. Things that grew where they weren’t wanted.

My mother did the best she could for us. That meant growing up in rough neighborhoods, places we would never belong. I remember low skies and hot concrete, blank stares and sullen faces. Brutality lurking just beneath the surface, a fist waiting to explode. I couldn’t blame them, brutality was all they’d ever known. Before long I came to hate being looked at. Where I grew up, being singled out could only ever be a bad thing. There was safety in numbers, in conformity, in blending in.

It was different for my brother. Boys like my brother will always get along. But I was marked out by my body, that traitor, before I knew what was happening. I started wearing a bra in fourth grade. I suppose my rosebud breasts were volunteers, too. Only I couldn’t dig them out, couldn’t transplant or suppress them. No matter what I did, they continued to grow.

The first lesson every girl learns is how to be afraid. I was taught by voices yelling out of car windows, by lewd gestures when I had to run laps in PE. By boys on bicycles following me as I walked home. They went slow, never caught up with me. But I could hear them snicker behind me, letting out the occasional low, throaty moan. 

They never did anything. They just wanted me to know they saw me. They wanted me to know they were there. 

I tell him this too, in time. I tell him about the boys and men who live in my head, and the ones who came before him. I tell him so many things I never meant to. I even tell him about Letty, though it feels like a betrayal. He listens quietly, taking it all in. I begin to see how naming something takes away its power. It’s the things you can’t name that haunt you, that crowd out everything else in your mind. 

I start to forget her, and it feels like dying. Soon I barely remember how she made my name into music. I let myself forget the labyrinth of lush pleasures in which we lost ourselves again and again. I give myself over to his strength, I claim my own weakness and softness. He makes himself gentle for me, a tenderness more painful than oblivion. He calls me by my name, my full name. It sounds beautiful in his mouth. 

I let myself feel it. Like falling forever, I give myself over to him and only him. I watch it happen, slow as a car crash. I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to.

One month I don’t bleed. I think back, try to remember if we were careful. Finally I take a test. It’s the pass/fail kind, and the results are decisive. Not careful enough.

The law changed last summer. My body is my own, but my choices are not. Maybe my body will take care of it. Or we could drive to another state, to the desert. Where things go to die. I’m thinking in terms of we, but we are not a we yet. Not when it comes to this.

So I grit my teeth and tell him. He says, it wouldn’t be the worst thing. And I am falling again.

This is how I end up in a life I never wanted. And yet I can’t say I didn’t choose it. I become a mother, but I’m no one’s wife. Will is right, it’s not the worst thing. A reordering of existence so complete there’s no basis for comparison. Neither good nor bad, it just is.

I hope for a girl, but it doesn’t work that way. We name him Abel, my little volunteer. When I look into his pale blue eyes, I know I can never stop existing. I know I have left a mark.

We move into a cheerful green house, ours for now but not forever. I have no interest in flowers, but I grow tomatoes and peppers in our scraggly backyard. I let the volunteers grow where they sprout. I tell myself I’m not turning into my mother, though it’s her body I see in the mirror when I forget to look away. I try to love my new mother-body like he does. 

And he does. As often as I will let him, he does.

A new phase of life, a wildness I’ve never known. A mother is a monster waiting to be unleashed. Something witchy, beyond human, in this power to make life from your own body. This ancient instinct to protect it at all costs. I live beneath the skin now, closer to the meat of things. The edge of existence is never far away. Flowing through me always, a pulsating hunger. I can feel a dark magic stirring in my blood. 

I don’t know if it’s hormones or something else, but I am alive in my body like never before. No man could withstand this unmaking and remaking. A fierce gift, this willful lust, this aching pleasure that insists on its existence. I take him til we’re both overflowing, til I wonder if I’m hurting him. He groans softly beneath me, his eyes lit up like stars. 

The last time I was with Letty, she had already left me. We fell into it, just as I was learning to live without her. The scars of her departure were all over the half empty rooms where we had made our life. She dropped by to get some things she’d forgotten. When her eyes snagged on mine, I had to look away. She saw me suffering and offered me her lips. Lala, she said as her fingers traced the path of my tears. An animal urge to feel her inside me. To ride once more the wild dark wave of her, a wave that rose and rose but would not break. 

But when she touched me, I felt how she had become a stranger. My body was numb and heavy, it would no longer sing for her. The treasure she found inside me would not be reached. 

I see her once more, after a long absence. Will and I are standing in line at the bagel shop while Abe throws a tantrum. This is our life now, harried and commonplace. Our faces are careworn, our clothes disheveled, but these things hardly register. A small, sturdy happiness underwrites our days.

Abe flings his Hot Wheels to the ground, and the girl in front of us picks it up. Her face is the mirror image of one I used to know. She smiles shyly as she hands it over, revealing a gap where she’s lost a tooth. When her mother turns around, I think I’m prepared for what I’ll see. What would be worse, to feel everything or nothing? Her face hasn’t changed so much. Softer in the jaw, maybe, more lines around the eyes. Something tender hums inside my chest. It isn’t everything, or nothing. Just a soft, persistent tune.

The kids scurry off to play in the corner. Letty keeps looking at me as Will reaches for my hand. What’s her name, I ask, and she nods, as if she’s been expecting the question. Leila, she says, her name is Leila. 

I can’t find my voice to tell her she’s lovely. My vision has gone blurry, but I can’t look away. What is it I want from her? This life, all that I have, exists because she left. 

The moment strains until it can hold no longer. The line starts to move, and Will squeezes my hand. Mirela, he murmurs, and I remember people are watching. I remember to breathe. I take a step forward, and I watch her turn away.