The bus was crowded. Lucky, I slid into a front facing two-seater bench. It lacked the small half wall. Knowing how to balance within the bumps and lurches was a critical quality I still possessed. At least I wasn’t standing and could read, the book taking the same jolts as I did. I swiveled my bag to the aisle and pulled out my book. If any bored commuters thought to guess my issues, a quick glance at the titles proved more than revealing. Frequently I read some Jungian self-help book for women wounded by abusive fathers or neglectful mothers; various takes on sexuality, either academic or trendy such as The Ethical Slut. Today’s fare was Patrick Carnes’ Sexual Anorexia. Easy enough. I wanted sex. I wasn’t getting any. I was wounded. It was my own fault. I was going to fix it.
I was sweating profusely before I got on that bus. Everyone was. Damp and musky, suit jackets slung carelessly over forearms and bags held as far from bodies as possible. Rank as one huge armpit, I was now sitting on a seat sticky as half-melted gum for a forty-minute ride. Following this I faced an even-less desirable twenty-minute walk breathing exhaust and side-stepping bird shit uphill from Third to the crest of First Hill.
I could hardly wait until I got home to peel off one façade before putting on another. My daughter, in high-school, could entertain herself and I could write poems about my husband. Those poems were the closest I ever got to him. My paper-thin connection. Conflicted words splayed, easily denied, easily burned. He’d be out, as usual, jamming, blustering over beer, a bombastic show of bravado for any woman who would listen. He snuffed out my glimmering adoration years ago.
My bus bench partner was a long-haired, attractive-enough man I’d put at ten years younger than me. I was coming on fast to forty, and he looked, maybe thirty? On the border between fit and fat, he wore cargo shorts and a muted Hawaiian-print shirt. “Like vacation” I thought. “What happens in Paradise, stays in Paradise.” For a moment, I savored interludes I’d never have courage to initiate.
I wore a knee length dress without panty-hose, and our bare calves touched as the bus flew over another crack in the freeway. I liked it. A lot. I buried my face and a titillated, half-sneer into my book. I never looked over at him again, though his presence, the musk, the skin on skin, it overwhelmed any attention I could have marshalled for reading.
The bus bumped over broken and poorly-repaired concrete at fifty-five to sixty-five miles an hour. Under pretext of bracing myself, I pressed my calf against his calf, where they adhered as much by our sweat as my intention. His calf muscles tightened and relaxed as he balanced during the jolts, and in the moments after we were airborne, calves disconnecting, they rejoined. Although they did not need to rejoin, my own leg placement assured they did. Oh, the withering soft hair, that muscle, like feeling the stone inside a succulent peach. With each flex, I caught my breath and held myself from visibly shuddering. For a moment or two I thought of myself as a wanton hussy, then shrugged that off.
There was no eye contact. I didn’t even look at his face. I searched out and found his masculinity, offered my femininity wordlessly through kisses of skin on skin. It had been eons, I felt, and no full-on fuck with my husband raised this kind of burn. A slow, delicious anticipation, an exploration. That’s what I wanted. Not a perfunctory, sleep-inducing coupling that took place only because we were chained to each other, because we were too lazy or depleted to find what we truly wanted—someone else. Adultery would rip from me the last vestiges of an identity of being a good wife, and of an unsatisfying marriage that I couldn’t quite admit needed to be torn. Perhaps after all, I wasn’t so much sexually anorexic as just plain disappointed. Maybe I wasn’t the one who needed fixing.
This willful touch was significant. It was sexual. Later I would wonder if this could be classified as frottage. But no, I wasn’t rubbing “my genitals against the victim’s thighs and buttocks…” I wasn’t “fantasizing an exclusive, caring relationship with the victim”. The problem with the DSM IV is that sometimes the disorder definitions are too narrow, sometimes too broad. The problem with me is that I think too much.
That man had room enough in front of him to inch his leg away from mine, he didn’t. Better to just accept this un-rejected thrall of lust. I don’t assume he enjoyed it, don’t assume he craved my furtive caress. I don’t even know if he was aware that I smooshed my calf against his on purpose. Once off the bus I wouldn’t recognize him in any situation. More than likely the pleasure was all mine.
This is what I told myself, that this type of thing happens all the time. Like when my general practitioner offered gynecological exams that I didn’t need and suspect he wasn’t trained to provide; he hid his dejection well. Like when my actual gynecologist lubed up his gloves and demonstrated how my husband should rub me to maximize lubrication. I was surprised and compliant at both his casualness and the inappropriate two-fingered massage. Clinical. Yet not. Like men on the bus who fall asleep on my shoulder, snoring gently into my ear, and once an arm that shot around me. The sly smile and half-apology when they awaken. Like when my husband reaches up and brushes back another woman’s hair, or flicks crumbs from her lap. When I am bumped on the street I don’t always think it is my wallet they are after.
This type of thing, all the time, and here I am, joining in of my own volition. Today I am forgiving us all. Busloads of people wanting to know and be known. Intimacy a rare and troubling act. Sometimes you have to grab it where you find it.
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