6

The first time Jésus and I had sex, I felt something slide sideways in me. It was like part of me that had not felt a resolved chord shifted into a major key, and another part fell out of alignment. One vertebra snapped into line, and another one crunched out.

Jésus—and I know what a cliché this is—a poet. He talked about the shape of language in a way I've never really heard before or since. He could feel the flavor of words, and like a master chef, he could feel his way through rich, staggeringly complicated meals, and know to put a drop of balsamic vinegar just so, and there was a sense beyond what you could immediately pick out, that the Right Word had been spoken.

He chose me. He saw me, he wanted me, and he set out to have me. And he knew it, and even admitted it to me that night. We were done, and it had been, for all I knew, spectacular sex. Certainly very different than the kind of ham-handed sex with my high school boyfriend. I mean, I loved Drew, but we were stupid. I was still stupid, maybe, with Jésus. But just as he was actually, in retrospect, amazingly good at sex for a college student, he also had issues.

"You know how there's that moment, right in the middle of sex, where you have everything you could possibly want?" he said, afterwards. "Like that gulp of juice on a hot day."

"It's called orgasm."

It was dark, but I think he blushed. "No! No, I mean, before and around that."

I was silent. I had still kind of been feeling that. Now it was drifting away. He was making me think, making me be his conversation partner again. Not that I minded being his conversation partner. But, "Is it always about you?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I was still enjoying that big glass of water or whatever, and you wanted to talk about it, and now I'm not drinking it so much."

"Sorry."

"Yeah, me too."

"I don't want to want so much. But I do. I want you. It's like I want to eat you up, all of you."

"Just shut up and hold me. Please."

And he did. And I really did love him a lot. I wish, kind of, that I'd been able to be a better friend. I mean, I love my husband and son and life and everything I did because I wasn't Jésus's love forever. We probably would have broken up eventually, but I'm sorry I couldn't help more with learning how to be that person who wasn't so much appetite. I still read his poems. He's a middle-aged guy now, like I'm middle aged. I bought his most recent book. It's pretentious. Still some really lovely bits, but he wanted so much to be a professor with the tweed jacket, and he wanted it like everything else he wanted, with a fierceness and quiet stratagem. He got me, and then I didn't want to stay gotten. He didn't know then how to not get something and maybe be gotten by someone else instead.

When I was in college, one of the presents from the Odd Cabinet was a book of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of flowers. They made Eb weep the first time he saw them, he said, the longing in them. The ache of sensuous desire. He said he thought Mapplethorpe's genius was that he wanted, he desired, but knew he couldn't touch with his hands the way he wanted to—that would just destroy the things, those perfect, gorgeous flowers. And so the eyes, and the fingers on the photographic equipment... the eyes and the tools were how he came to possess and caress those flowers, and leave them just as they were.

What he says reminds me of Jésus. I was loved that way, and then there were actual fingers. And I was still loved that achingly, hungrily, but I couldn't love back quite that way, because of those fingers. I was beautiful to him, and if he was beautiful to me, I wasn't really able to possess him the way he wanted to possess me. And I didn't want to possess him, to own him. Or at least I didn't think that way. Maybe I did and didn't want to let myself be that way.

In any case, the next spring, when I wanted to go to L.A. to visit my mom for spring break, and he had planned to have me be part of Easter with his very Catholic family, and I said no and maybe I said it the wrong way, or maybe I just said it at all, and he just got very weird. Was it jealousy? It didn't occur to be to call it that at the time, but maybe that's what jealousy is: what you want to lay claim to doesn't accept the claim, not as fully as you would like. What you find beautiful wants something unrelated to its beauty to you.

We never spoke again. And the thing that shifted sideways in me... I'm not convinced it ever quite slipped back. Maybe it just slipped back quietly over time, but I think maybe it just became part of who I was. Certainly I have never felt so... possessed, ever again. Which is a relief, I suppose. But there's a part of me that regrets that. I never accepted myself as someone's treasure so fully again.