I wonder where he’d put his things.
That’s ridiculous. There isn’t a “he,” much less a collection of things that needs storing. Still, the bathroom would be annoying. Another toothbrush. Razor. Whatever he uses on his face. Bottles appearing in the shower that aren’t mine. A wet towel somewhere it shouldn’t be. I would hate the wet towel.
Maybe he wouldn’t leave wet towels around. I’m inventing a man and already criticizing him. Jesus.
Candy would probably like him. That’s assuming Candy liked him, of course. She’d know before I did. Dogs have the advantage of not having to explain why they don’t trust somebody. They just don’t. Or they climb into his lap five minutes after he walks through the door and apparently the matter is settled.
I wonder what she’d do the first night someone stayed over.
Stayed over.
Hmmm…Interesting. Not lived here. Stayed over.
Fine. I like living alone. I do. I can get up when I want, eat when I want, work until whatever hour I want. I can sit at the piano and play the same sixteen measures twenty times because something isn’t right and nobody asks what I’m doing. Nobody interrupts. I can walk through the house in my underwear, or nothing, leave something on the counter because I’ll deal with it tomorrow, stand in front of the refrigerator longer than necessary. There is an enormous amount of freedom in never having to account for your movements.
I don’t miss having someone here.
I should order dog food. I put it in the cart, didn’t I? I think I did. I’ll check later.
The bed would be the strangest part. Not sex. The sleeping. Sex is easy to imagine. Easier, anyway. Bodies make sense when they’re doing something. There are certain expectations. Not rules exactly. A direction, maybe. An objective.
That’s terrible. Very romantic.
But sleeping beside someone is different. Eight hours of another body simply being there. Breathing. Moving. Giving off heat. Rolling toward you, rolling away. Taking up space without needing a reason. Maybe snoring.
God, what if he snores? Yup, separate bedrooms… solved.
Well, that didn’t take long. I haven’t even invented his face, and I’ve moved him down the hall.
I sleep on the same side of the bed every night. There is absolutely no reason for that. I have the whole thing. I could sleep diagonally if I wanted. I could occupy every square inch like some victorious invading army.
I don’t…I leave the other side empty.
You get used to things when nobody is watching you. Maybe watching isn’t the right word. I like not being watched, certainly, but sometimes I really like being watched.
There it is.
Not watched, exactly. Noticed. That’s different.
Men look. I look. Of course I look. A man’s shoulders. His chest. Hair on his legs. The shape of his ass through a pair of jeans. The moment his shirt lifts when he reaches for something. The waistband underneath. Underwear.
Especially underwear.
White briefs still do something to me that I’m not particularly interested in defending. Male, ordinary, familiar. Almost aggressively unremarkable, which somehow makes them anything but.
And that’s hardly the whole list.
No…Keep going.
Why?
Because nobody’s here.
Right.
Sometimes it’s the underwear. Sometimes it’s the man inside it. Sometimes I want to look, and sometimes I really want to know he’s looking at me. Sometimes it’s being exposed, although even thinking that word makes it sound more dramatic than it feels. Sometimes it’s the possibility of being caught looking, or being caught wanting to be looked at.
There are men I want to see naked. Some men are sexier with their clothes on. There are times when another man’s underwear is more erotic to me than his naked body, especially white briefs. I don’t know why those have such a direct line into whatever part of my brain handles this stuff. They just do.
And apparently we’re admitting things now.
I like watching a man piss.
There.
That’s one I probably wouldn’t volunteer over dinner.
Sometimes I like pee on myself. Sometimes in white briefs. Apparently even my stranger impulses have a dress code…Jesus.
There are other things. Of course there are. Things I would have no trouble thinking about and considerably more trouble saying aloud. Things involving looking. Being looked at. Control. Giving some of it away. Things that might be intensely exciting in my head and completely uninteresting if they became real. Things that aren’t really about the thing itself, though explaining that would almost certainly make it worse.
No committee meeting required. No justification. They belong to me and make sense where they are.
Could I actually tell him everything I like?
No.
Man, that answer came quickly.
Because nobody tells anybody everything. That’s not dishonesty. People are entitled to an interior life. Privacy doesn’t cease to exist because you’re sleeping with someone. Thoughts belong to the person thinking them.
There. Perfectly sensible. And yet…
Some things are easy to say because you already know how they’ll sound when they reach the other person. I like this. I don’t like that. Easy. The risk isn’t necessarily in saying what you want. The risk is saying something and then watching his face while he decides what it means about you.
That half second. That’s the part.
The tiny pause between hearing something and answering. Maybe there isn’t even a pause. Maybe I invent it. Maybe I’m watching too closely because I’ve just handed him something I can’t take back and now I’m searching his face for evidence that I’ve changed shape in his mind.
I’d rather he just knew.
Oh…well, that’s convenient!
He gets to know the private geography somehow, without me ever having to explain it. He understands why one thing turns me on, and another doesn’t. He understands that sometimes the thing itself isn’t even the point. He knows which things are playful, which are serious, which are just fantasy, which I might actually want, and which become interesting precisely because they stay in my head.
And I don’t have to watch his face while he learns any of it.
Very efficient.
Maybe I don’t want to be known. Maybe I want to be accurately guessed.
I still don’t like that.
Because there it is again. Someone else does the dangerous part. He notices. He asks. He reaches. He says it first. I get to decide whether he’s right.
That’s control.
I don’t think of myself as controlling…not like that.
I just don’t particularly enjoy handing someone a loaded weapon and explaining where to aim.
Jesus. That’s overly melodramatic.
But not entirely wrong.
The odd thing is that nakedness doesn’t frighten me nearly as much. Bodies are just bodies. Take off enough clothes, and eventually there isn’t much left to hide.
Which is obviously nonsense. There are ways of being naked that don’t expose very much at all.
I should probably not follow that thought.
Anyway…
I don’t sit here every night wishing somebody would rescue me from solitude. I genuinely like my life. My work. Music. Books. Candy. My routines. My house. The ridiculous ease with which I can disappear into something for hours and emerge surprised that the day went somewhere without consulting me. There is peace in that. Real peace. I’ve built something that fits me.
I’m good alone.
People say that as though it is an achievement. Maybe it is. Maybe it’s simply what happens when you live inside your own rhythms long enough that they stop feeling like choices and start feeling like the natural order of things.
I don’t miss having someone here… do I?
The problem is that when I imagine intimacy, I rarely imagine the relationship. I imagine moments. Someone in the kitchen while I’m doing something else. Hearing the shower running. His clothes mixed in with mine. Hearing him taking a leak in the bathroom down the hall. A pair of briefs on the bedroom floor that aren’t mine. Apparently, my subconscious has a wardrobe department!
A hand resting on my chest. Someone walking past and touching my shoulder for no reason. The weight and warmth of another man against me. Being looked at when I haven’t done anything to attract the look.
Being reached for first…that one!
There was a time…
No. Okay, apparently we’re doing this too.
I was standing there doing something. I don’t even remember what. That’s strange because I seem to remember everything else.
He came up behind me and put his arms around me, just like that.
His chest against my back. His arms around me. His chin resting on my shoulder. He didn’t say anything. Neither did I. Probably not very long. Thirty seconds, maybe. Funny that I can still stand inside those thirty seconds. There was no reason for it. That’s what I remember. No reason.
He wasn’t comforting me. I wasn’t upset. It wasn’t leading anywhere. There wasn’t anything to solve. He wasn’t trying to get my attention. He just wanted to hold me. So he did.
No words.
It just…It just was.
I can still feel the particular strangeness of not having to do anything. I didn’t have to decide whether to reach for him. I didn’t have to read his face. I didn’t have to wonder whether I was imagining something that wasn’t there. I didn’t have to translate myself. His arms were already around me. His chin was already on my shoulder.
God.
I had forgotten that.
No, I hadn’t.
I just don’t think about it very often…apparently.
Maybe that’s what being noticed has been doing in this whole ridiculous imaginary relationship. I keep constructing situations in which another person discovers me without requiring me to disclose myself. He notices what I like. He notices when I’m quiet. He notices when quiet means leave me alone and when it means please don’t. He notices what I’m looking at. He notices when I want him to look at me.
That’s an unreasonable amount of noticing. People aren’t mind readers.
Still…It would be nice.
Maybe I’ve spent too much of my life wanting people to notice things I refuse to tell them.
Well! Now, there’s an unpleasant thought.
If I want somebody to notice me without explaining myself, then perhaps I’m not really asking to be understood. I’m asking to be spared the risk of misunderstanding.
No, that’s not quite it. Or maybe it is, and I don’t like how it sounds. Hmmm.
I don’t want another person to know everything. I know that much. I want rooms that remain mine. Thoughts that belong only to me. Fantasies that don’t need to become proposals. Memories that don’t require interpretation. I don’t believe loving someone gives them unrestricted access to the contents of my head.
But then what exactly do I mean when I say I want intimacy?
Sex? Sometimes. Touch? Definitely. Companionship? Yes, although apparently he needs his own bedroom if he snores. Being desired? Yes.
There. That one was easy.
I want a man to look at me and want me. No philosophical architecture required. I like being wanted. And sometimes, to be perfectly clear, I want sex. I’m sixty, not dead.
Actually, leave age out of it.
No. Don’t.
I can want tenderness and still notice the man in white briefs. I can want somebody beside me on an ordinary Tuesday and still want his body simply because I want his body.
And I can want his arms around me for no reason at all. Same man. Same me.
That’s probably more than I meant to say.
Good thing nobody’s listening.
I wonder whether another man could know me well enough that I wouldn’t have to translate myself all the time. Maybe that’s the fantasy. Not sex. Not even love.
Although that’s probably another lie.
It’s the recognition.
Someone who catches the thing before I turn it into the version I know how to say aloud. Someone who sees the pause. Someone who knows when I’m fine means I’m fine and when it very much does not. Someone who knows that I don’t need anybody is technically true.
Technically.
I don’t need anybody… I don’t.
Wanting is different.
And perhaps that’s what I’ve been avoiding, because needing someone gives you an excuse. Wanting them doesn’t. Wanting is voluntary. You can’t blame necessity. You have to admit that this person, specifically, makes your life better simply by being in it.
That seems much more dangerous. I wouldn’t tell anyone that.
I would tell them parts of it. The defensible parts. I’d probably make a joke about white briefs or wet towels. Those are safe in their own strange, strategic way. They don’t ask very much of me.
I wouldn’t tell them that I remember his chin on my shoulder.
I wouldn’t tell them that sometimes I imagine hearing another man moving around my house and knowing he isn’t getting ready to leave. That I like the idea of recognizing his sound. Knowing which footsteps are his. Hearing him in the bathroom, in the kitchen, coming down the hall, and not needing to pay attention because his being there has become ordinary.
That’s the part that gets me… ordinary.
Not the first night. Not some perfect night. Not the night when everything is new and neither of us quite knows what happens next. Six months later. Two years. Some Wednesday when I’ve been working too long, and he’s irritated with me about something. A glass sits where it shouldn’t be. Candy is asleep. I’m at the piano, stuck on the same damned measures again, and from the other room he asks me something I don’t quite hear.
“What?”
He repeats it. I answer.
Nothing important. And he’s still there.
…
I don’t miss having someone here. I really don’t.
I should order the dog food.
…
I wonder which side of the bed he’d take.
