In Which Carnita Attempts Writing Fiction for the First Time in Years

The Web

I have loved him hopelessly ever since the moment he said to me, I will only leave this place with you tonight if we are going to fuck.

I felt then one of the last weak twinges of indignation about the raw facts of sexual difference. Loving him has since cleansed me of it, blasted it right out of me. Before and right then and after then, every hard little truth he let fall onto my head, like a peach plopping thunk into a bushel basket, would make my neck stiffen slightly with the struggle to make the load balance, but each time it got easier and I would regain my composure and feel strong and beautiful in my ability to keep walking. Keep walking. Keep meeting his gaze with dignity and dogged love. And it was very heavy, and I loved him more every time.

I would sometimes imagine myself as a single point in a glistening web of women that waved all around him. Each delicate juncture of filament had a name, a fond memory or two, and a number of shining orgasmic non-moments attached to it.

I imagined that I could walk up and touch every one of them, each little point of convergence yielding to the gentle pressure of my outstretched finger, that I could see with blinding clarity the shape of the woman there. She was still somewhere, going about her business, firing her clay pots or bringing food to a customer's table or dreaming about wild horses. She was a part of many other webs, but I loved her because she shared this particular one with me. Coming to know each one of the women helped me understand my own place, or my relational value, which can only ever be defined by difference.

This is what it means to be a woman: to have an essence as light as an empty Dixie cup, without weight or mass, decipherable only by the shape of the spaces between us.

He had forgotten some of their names, their memories left behind in other cities and past lives, so I would try to read the rippling motions for a sign that would indicate what to call her. If I couldn't make anything out, if the years had made this particular she recede too far for his memory to catch again, I would make up a name for her.

I'd say, Tell me about her.

He would think for a minute, his forehead wrinkling with the effort, and come up with a picture in his head: She was tall and sortof gawky, with no extra flesh anywhere, pelvic bones and knees sticking out all over the place. Fucking her was like falling into a pile of raw lumber. She made sounds in her throat like a choking cat. Her cunt always smelled faintly of biscuits, which made me hungry.

She sounds like a Miranda...

And I would be overwhelmed with love for her. The next time we fucked, I would whisper, Miranda, Miranda, Miranda into the space above his head where I saw her, leaning and watching us blankly, her nakedness made up of all joints and concave angles. Each time I conjured one of them, she would appear closer to us, until I was able, in the last days of the relationship, to tangle my fingers up in her hair and look deeply into her eyes right at the moment when I came.

At the moments of orgasm, we all dissolved into each other, into him, and became the same empty, unwavering center-point.

Now that he is out of my reach, I find myself wishing that all men made it so easy. I wish that every one carried around them such a vivid projection of their histories of love that they had no choice in the matter, that it would be as obvious as their external genitalia, that all I had to do was flick a light switch and see every Janie, Cassandra, Erin, Layna, and Valerie standing right in front of me.

But men no longer understand how to carry themselves on the outside. It seems that most of them retreat inwards in search of a place that is supposed to be an empty womb but never will be. Men are, on the whole, quite lost inside their own bodies.

That is why I have not loved another man since him.