Growing up with Emma,
who had been in my class at CHS, wasn’t like growing up with Roberta. It wasn’t
like anything. Emma, a lanky blonde with long, lank blonde hair, a chiseled,
cat-like face, and long limbs, looked like a stunt double for Trish, and had
been merely an acquaintance. She was quiet, and kept to herself. Her friends
were among the geeks of the class. Why and how Emma knew to show up now, in the
midst of all this turbulence with Trish, I have no idea, but she did. I laughed
because she so resembled Trish, but I was also aroused. I liked the idea, past
N and Roberta, of a real hook-up within my class, even ten years after the
fact. She was there, at the Last Drop, on a succession of key summer days, in a
sleeveless white blouse. After all these years, her cat-face grew on me as
enchanting, compelling, suggestive of something her whole presence insinuated—
she identified heavily with Trish, and had a female impulse to demarcate turf
which could also be hers. Whether she’d been stalking us or just heard what was
happening with us from the suburbs, I still don’t know. I knew she was
commuting to Center City from somewhere. What she wanted was just one night
with me, I later concluded. When, on the one late afternoon I made my way with
her back to Logan Square, we were ensconced, she took out a bottle of
Robitussin as though it were an aperitif, and she were Trixie Belle. She
wanted, as she said, a Robo-trip. It was part of the magic of that night that
Emma wound up encapsulating for me so many different partners at once,
including partners merely being anticipated. I found it easy to begin making
love to her, because she made it easy. Her equation was interesting, about
female levels of awareness— everything about her physiology screamed, you
always wanted me the most, but you just didn’t know it. You’re a man— you don’t
know these things. I have delivered myself to you because you need me now, and
I need you. Now you may begin to learn who you are. And we made love with great
fluidity and rapidity, and then we made love again. Her fluidity was like
Heather’s would be, and the sense of being lulled into a trance of perpetual,
high-intensity intercourse, on the bed, then on the living room floor, on the
couch in the living room, from the front, from the back, was like Jena. We each
gave the other a show-stopping performance, manifesting (as was odd, and as I
was not too dumb and callow to notice) an inversion of our years of starving
for each other. The absolute ecstasy of several mutual orgasms was the tactile
insignia, as it might’ve been with Roberta and N, of an eternity of denial
overcome. This, even as what was built into us both had been noticed only by
her. Why, in sex equations, women usually hold the cards: women are receptive
to sensory data on a deeper level than men, and have a primordial understanding
of physiology, of bodies and more bodies, which men do not. When bodies speak,
women listen more. Emma and I shared a home, but only she registered what our
bodies shared, what was in them. When Trish showed up, it was a red flag from
nature that it would be Emma’s time to show up too. Even if it proved to be the
cosmic design that after one night, I would never see Emma again.
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