Free The Best American Essays 2014 by Robert Atwan, John Jeremiah Sullivan Page B

felt it. Because I knew this presence, or I’d known it before. It was the one I’d been wondering about, and we’d made it ourselves, but it didn’t belong to us, any more than we belonged to each other. Between us, on days like this one, there began to be a very strong sense, quite often, that anything might happen next, a feeling like the opposite of anxiety, the opposite of a panic attack, whatever you would call that.
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    The second woman who came home with us had only four sentences, but she said them over and over again. The first one was to me: “You’re so beautiful. You’re so beautiful.” Eventually she started kissing me. After a while she broke away from me and said, “You guys are strange. You guys are strange.” She was from another country, and the limited sentences were in part because of this, but it was also as if she were, in the very process of seducing us, passing back and forth between two worlds. When she was in one, she would forget about the other. I said, “Do you want to be here, what do you want?” And she looked at me, quiet, and then, with the ferocity of a small puppy, leaned in to kiss me again for a while, and began to undress me. Then she stopped and leaned back and said, “You guys are strange,” and I said, “But you decided to be here.” This went on for a while. Later, in the middle of things, she started asking me, “Do you really like me or are you just doing this for him?” And I’d say, “I really like you.” She’d suck his cock or I’d eat her pussy and then she’d turn to me and say, “Do you really like me or are you just doing this for him?” And I’d be like, “I really like you.” And then, hours later, she started saying to me, “You’re a boy. You’re a boy. You’re a boy.” And I’d say, “No I’m not, sweetie.” And he would say, “No she’s not,” and point out various parts of my body. “You’ve been all up in there.” And she’d be quiet for a moment, and then say it again: “You’re a boy.” And I’d say, “No I’m not. I’m a girl.”
    I understand the trouble she was having very well. The first threesome I was in, before all this, I kept saying to the guy, over and over, “Your girlfriend is gay.” I really did. The first time you feel yourself actually attracted to two people at the same time, in the same place, something very deep is shaken. You want to name the new thing, but you need new syntax to do it. Then you find yourself saying sentences like “Just relax and let him make you come,” or “Don’t be nervous, I can tell she really likes you, and I’ll help you pick out a wine she’ll love.” The opposite of the red-chair and dark-room sentences. Sentences that in the speaking give you a feeling that is different in kind from ordinary human love, at least ordinary romantic love. If you try to find the word for this thing that is the opposite of jealousy, you end up at cheesy polyamory websites, where it is called
compersion:
when you feel happiness for another’s happiness, even and especially when it doesn’t involve you. Then your friends think you’re delusional or stuck in the seventies, and you’re basically relegated to having “your song” be George Michael’s song “Freedom,” which is why when we undressed the first woman who came home with us and found that word tattooed above her pussy, we looked at each other in wonder and a kind of fear.
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    A few months later, he moved in. The first time I laundered our clothes together I began to gather his underwear, and I didn’t recognize it—it must have always come off in his pants, or we were usually drunk—and I thought, Who is this man. When I brought the clothes back from the laundrymat, as he calls it, hot