Comforting arms

Spent the night at J's last night. Dark-eyed, handsome J, who cooks brilliantly, and loves his three daughters so well. This is what I love about him: I can arrive at his house trailing clouds of misery, which dissipate like fog in sunshine in his quiet, compassionate presence. He puts his arms around me. He lifts me up with stories. He makes me laugh. He reads me to sleep in bed.

How lovely it is to be with someone who cares for me. J sees my lonely, aching heart, acknowledges my terrible losses, all of my failings, all of my weaknesses, my drinking too much, my promiscuity, my heaviness, my comings and goings; he accepts it all and still sees the good in me. How could I not love this man? I do.
But there is the penis problem. He tells me that I 'm the only one who finds it inadequate. The size is fine, of course. But it never quite stiffens up to the task. It can be pushed in like an overly soft banana, but then I can't quite feel it in there. And feeling the rod of my beloved's desire for me is, well, rather necessary. I like it. It's kind of key to sexual pleasure. Am I so unusual for wanting this, for needing this?

And yet a hard man is obviously not always good to find. The night before I, weakly, had gone to bed with K, whose equipment works well enough, and whose strong hands arouse and open me adequately. Not spectacularly. I'm fond of him, frequently seduced by him, for he's as charismatic as the devil, but not loved by him. What was I looking for? Certainly not comfort. He never offers that. No, it was something more like achievement, or accomplishment. After all those weeks that we spent together while he spurned me, K had started to tell me that he couldn't get me out of his mind. I had suddenly become the necessary object of his lust. Stil, why did I care? why did I sleep with him?

What was I believing? That I would somehow be recognized, realized? As though I were nothing if not sexy, not even here, not alive if not beautiful and desirable? Is this narcissism? Vanity? Or something much more deeply rooted? What, after all, did my parents and my culture, the movies, the magazines, television shows teach me if not this--that to be worthwhile, to be acceptable, to be lovable, to be wanted, a girl/woman must be sexually attractive. We all dreamed of Jeannie. We all believed that, to love us, they would have to be Bewitched. And the attending negative, right? All women who bewitch are witches, whores, demons in disguise. Necessary but evil.

The morning after this conquest (his or mine?), I fell into the pit. I thought I have given "it" (what?) up too quickly. I knew he cared about me somewhat but didn't love me. There was no emotional connection there--I gave up looking for that intimacy with him months ago. I gave him sex, not myself. I knew now, also, that he'd still be dying to see me had he not already had me. But he is dead--this is the problem. He can't love me. He never makes me feel good. I always feel empty and sad after I've spent time with him. There's so little there there. But he's pretty, and affectionate, if also needy and predictable. I keep hoping that he's be someone else.

I wanted him to want me, to long for me. It would have been easy to continue denying him, to hold him off in a way that would have prolonged his longing. But that would have meant playing the dull game that I've never enjoyed or been very good at. And I wanted to test, to see whether or not he sincerely cared for me.

Why do we do this? Why do we sleep with men whom we know quite well don't care for us the way we want, need, and deserve to be cared for? What are we doing? It is like drowning ourselves in the same lake over and over and over again.

In his bed I had a dream that I think has something to do with this. A group, a family--two sisters, a brother, and a baby-- were traveling. They--we--had seen a film about a man who had either been a part of this group or who had insinuated his way into it. This man had murdered all of them, brutally, with a knife, in a motel room, and then framed the brother (whom he had not killed but mortally wounded) for the crime. Only after the murderer's death did the truth come out. This group WAS that group but alive again. They had seen the movie. And yet they followed all the same steps that they had followed before. They turned into the very same motel on the same empty desert road they had turned into before, checked into the same room. And he murdered them again. This time, I fought back--wrested the knife away and stabbed and stabbed at his face. In futility. He killed us all, the baby first, spraying blood all over the room. I saw it happen again and died again. He framed the brother and got away with it. Again.

Then it was over and I was on a ladder with my sister, pulling what seemed an endless amount of boxes and suitcases and loose items out of a closet. I was holding everyone up. They were waiting in the car and I had to pack up all of this stuff so that I could take it with me. I was up there on the ladder thinking about how junky it all was. Did I really need to keep two incomplete sets of electric rollers that had belonged to my mother? "Do you want one of these?" I asked my sister. I expected her to sneer at the very idea of holding on to such crap and was hoping for the excuse to chuck it. But when she enthusiastically responded in favor the sets suddenly acquired great value. I could remember my mother putting up my hair--into poofy 1950s styles that made me look so lame that no one but the weird boy with the red hair and white shoes would ask me to dance. It came to me: all these broken, worn-out and worthless things that our mother had used once--loose bobby pins, chipped cheap china that she had stored make-up in, stained house slippers--signified not the strength and vitality of our mother but rather the pitifulness of ourselves grasping after her, trying to hold onto what was irrevocably departed. It was our loss that we were commemorating and clinging to, our own pettiness, really, our smallness. We were not remembering that we already owned what she had left to us: our own selves, our lives.

What's the relationship between the first and the second dream? No idea, but for the rest of the day I was preoccupied with loss and disappointment, a sense of having diminished myself. I missed my mother and my son and arrived at J's door in desperation. He took me in without questions, fed me steak and salad, fresh corn and Spanish wine. And when we got up this morning at 5.30, he brought me coffee in bed and mused with me while the sun rose. When I got up to go, he told me that I was beautiful.