Can't Think Straight:. Kiri Blakeley
sexual relationships, and how lucky men were that they were capable of it—hadn’t Aaron said his hookups were just sex while I was love?
I thought about ending it with Rahil. Before I got attached. Before he hurt me.
Day 28 Rahil is to come over to my apartment tonight. My idea. He’d originally suggested going to see a movie, but I’d found that a little off the mark. Going to a movie, buying popcorn, sitting together, and holding hands? What, what, what was the point? So he would come over.
As I’m waiting, the phone rings.
“It’s me.” Aaron. I can’t believe he’s calling. “What are you doing?”
“What am I doing?” I squeak.
“Yes.”
He’d said he would leave the calling up to me because he didn’t want to press a relationship I might not want. He sounds down. Is he going to tell me he misses me, this is all a mistake, he isn’t gay anymore? No, I’m not that stupid.
“I’m waiting for a guy to come over,” I say. I get a little thrill out of it. “Oh.”
“Is something wrong?” I ask.
“No. I’ve just gotten used to our Wednesday nights.”
“Our” Wednesday nights consisted of two Wednesdays in a row, both tearful and fairly torturous. Why on earth would he be hankering for another? My guess is this was the first night Aaron didn’t have plans with his bar buddies, or soccer practice, or band rehearsal, or some other thing to distract him from the fact that he was no longer part of a couple. Craigslist, I supposed, was good for the cock, but not necessarily for the soul.
“You’re lonely, huh?”
“Maybe.”
“Yeah, I know, Aaron. I’ve had plenty of nights where I sat here in shock that you wouldn’t be walking in the door any minute.”
“I’m sorry if I ruined your night.”
Rahil’s cabbie gets lost so it’s half an hour before he makes it to the apartment. He bounds up the stairs, kisses me, hyper as ever. I show him the gift I’d gotten for him the day before. It’s a copy of a photo from my decade-ago nude modeling days: hair obscuring my face, one tiny boob popping out of a little black dress. Rahil is as excited as a kid at Christmas.
“This changes the whole tenor of the evening!”
I show him the whole nudie portfolio. He oohs and aahs over each shot of my nipples. It’s the kind of caveman behavior that Aaron always lacked. “We have to kiss some now,” he insists.
Making out soon leads to petting on the couch. At my request, he gets a little “rough” with me, pinning my arms above my head and yanking my pants down to my knees. Unfortunately, he keeps up a frenzied whipping motion with his fingers, when I tend to like a slower, more deliberate caress, and rather than tell him to slow down, I just fake an orgasm. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because he’s trying so hard. Maybe it’s because I’d told him I preferred it slow on a previous night, and he obviously didn’t remember, and I didn’t feel like repeating myself.
We finish off in the bedroom and by that time I’m ready to smoke a cigarette and order in something to eat. The whole thing had been a little pedestrian. The kissing had lost some of its spark. About five years into my relationship with Aaron, I’d felt as if I were kissing my brother. This is creeping in with Rahil after only four weeks.
Also, by now, the fantasy is dissolving. I knew Rahil had grown up in a small manufacturing town outside of Bombay. I knew he had a brother and a slew of cousins. I knew he’d thought about becoming an actor, a writer, anything creative, but that just wasn’t done in his town or family, and so he went into finance. I knew too much.
“People get mad when I say this,” he says, “but my goal is to have a full relationship with five different women at the same time.”
“A full relationship? Not just fuck buddies?”
“A full, real relationship.”
“You better move to Utah.”
“People always say that,” he sighs. “Or Saudi Arabia.”
I challenge him on whether he’ll have enough time for this kind of thing. He admits that maybe three women would be more time manageable.
“Well, good luck with that.”
Now I definitely knew too much.
“This booty call thing is kind of weird,” I say. “I don’t know the ground rules.”
“Do whatever you want to do. Just make sure to keep your feelings in check.”
I’m unexpectedly stung.
“Rahil, there’s a reason you got this job. You seem like a great guy. You are a great guy. But I couldn’t fall in love with you.”
Yet I’m dully aware that I’m only half believing what I’m saying. It’s clear that my wiring is kerflooey—mouth, brain, heart, and pussy all working different sides of the room.
A friend of mine tells me she’s tested positive for HPV (human papillomavirus), a strain of venereal disease that puts her at high risk for cervical cancer. She feels horrible, like a slut, even though she’s only had sex with five men in her entire life and used a condom with each one, every time. Her doctor tells her she could’ve gotten the virus just from petting or from the base of the penis, which the condom doesn’t cover. Because the virus could’ve lain dormant, undetectable for many years, until now, she doesn’t even know which guy to blame it on.
This news sends me into a slight state of panic. Here I am having sex—”protected” sex, but that hadn’t helped her—with a guy I hardly knew anything about. One who’d surely had many, many sexual partners. And then there was Aaron, who’d taken it upon himself to blow and fondle strange men, who were no doubt blowing and fondling other strange men, and women too, who knows.
In the morning, I call Aaron at work and tell him about my friend. I demand that he get me the results of his AIDS test in writing. He’d already told me he’d tested negative. I’d already tested negative. But I needed to see it. He emails it to me later in the day. Negative.
My friend’s diagnosis is a kick in the head. I realize that no matter how careful you are, you still take a risk every time you have sex. Whether it’s with one person or twenty. My unformed idea of taking one year to “explore” my sexuality, to have sexual relationships with more than one man, maybe several men, quickly begins to lose its appeal. But I’m not ready for a boyfriend either.
So what to do? Wrap myself in Saran wrap? Demand a detailed doctor’s note from every sexual prospect? Stay celibate, so that the first guy I wanted to fuck, I did invent some emotional attachment where none existed so I could justify making him my boyfriend?
No guarantees. You could use a condom every time you had sex, and still get a sexually transmitted disease. You could be seven years old and die of a cancerous brain tumor. You could pick the guy all the relationship books tell you to pick—good, stable, loving, committed, one who makes you feel safe and cherished. And he could turn out to be gay.
Earlier in the evening, before my friend called, I’d stopped off at Last Exit, the bar Aaron and I had always hung out at. I knew Aaron wouldn’t be there because he was at band rehearsal. I’d touched on the situation with a few of the regulars there. They were basically Aaron’s friends, all of them. Only one had bothered to email me after the break to ask how I was doing. I wasn’t even sure why I was there, except for the lack of other plans, and maybe the enjoyment the shock value of my appearance would cause.
“He’s not evil,” a regular informs me. “He’s not