Middlesex

Sometimes when I climbed on top of the Object she would almost wake up. She would move to accommodate me, spreading her legs or throwing an arm around my back. She swam up to the surface of consciousness before diving again. Her eyelids fluttered. A responsiveness entered her body, a flex of abdomen in rhythm with mine, her head thrown back to offer up her throat. I waited for more. I wanted her to acknowledge what we were doing, but I was scared, too. So the sleek dolphin rose, leapt through the ring of my legs, and disappeared again, leaving me bobbing, trying to keep my balance. Everything was wet down there. From me or her I didn’t know. I laid my head on her chest beneath the bunched-up T-shirt. Her underarms smelled like overripe fruit. The hair there was very sparse. “You luck,” I would have said, back in our daytime life. “You don’t even have to shave.” But the nighttime Calliope only stroked the hair, or tasted it. One night, as I was doing this and other things, I noticed a shadow on the wall. I thought it was a moth. But, looking closer, I saw that it was the Object’s hand, raised behind my head. Her hand was completely awake. It clenched and unclenched, siphoning all the ecstasy from her body into its secret flowerings.

What the Object and I did together was played out under these loose rules. We weren’t too scrupulous about the details. What pressed on our attention was that it was happening, sex was happening. That was the great fact. How it happened exactly, what went where, was secondary. Plus, we didn’t have much to compare it to. Nothing but our night in the shack with Rex and Jerome.

As far as the crocus was concerned, it wasn’t so much a piece of me as something we discovered and enjoyed together. Dr. Luce will tell you that female monkeys exhibit mounting behavior when administered male hormones. They seize, they thrust. Not me. Or at least not at first. The blooming of the crocus was an impersonal phenomenon. It was a kind of hook that fastened us together, more a stimulant to the Object’s outer parts than a penetration of her inner. But, apparently, effective enough. Because after the first few nights, she was eager for it. Eager, that is, while ostensibly remaining unconscious. As I hugged her, as we languorously shifted and knotted, the Object’s attitudes of insensibility included favorable positioning. Nothing was made ready or caressed. Nothing was aimed. But practice brought about a fluid gymnastics to our sleep couplings. The Object’s eyes remained closed throughout; her head was often turned slightly away. She moved under me as a sleeping girl might while being ravished by an incubus. She was like somebody having a dirty dream, confusing her pillow for a lover.

Sometimes, before or afterward, I switched on the bedside lamp. I pulled her T-shirt up as far as it would go and slid her underpants down below her knees. And then I lay there, letting my eyes have their fill. What else compares? Gold filings shifted around the magnet of her navel. Her ribs were as thin as candy canes. The spread of her hips, so different from mine, looked like a bowl offering up red fruit. And then there was my favorite spot, the place where her ribcage softened into breast, the smooth, white dune there.

I turned the light off. I pressed against the Object. I took the backs of her thighs in my hands, adjusting her legs around my waist. I reached under her. I brought her up to me. And then my body, like a cathedral, broke out into ringing. The hunchback in the belfry had jumped and was swinging madly on the rope.

Through all this I made no lasting conclusions about myself. I know it’s hard to believe, but that’s the way it works. The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It’s a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison. In the past year the crocus had lengthened considerably. At its most demonstrative it was now about two inches long. Most of this length, however, was concealed by the flaps of skin from which it issued. Then there was the hair. In its quiet state, the crocus was barely noticeable. What I saw looking down at myself was only the dark triangular badge of puberty. When I touched the crocus it expanded, swelling until with a kind of pop it slid free of the pouch it was in. It poked its head up into the air. Not too far, though. No more than an inch past the tree line. What did this mean? I knew from personal experience that the Object had a crocus of her own. It swelled, too, when touched. Mine was just bigger, more effusive in its feelings. My crocus wore its heart on its sleeve.