STEPS

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The body...

S.

One tried to open me up. What was I, thirty something? He made it only about the physical. No emotional discourse, no ideological exchange. He drew me in with his teasing smile and hooded eyes. Open signs everywhere around him, flashing with shameless intensity. Of course I entered because I recognised the challenge. It had to be tackled one day.

Shame the companion carried on my back so long it had become an invisible hump. My mum has a deformed spine because of osteoporosis and my bloody father throwing her against the back steps. I too found myself adjusting clothes, pulling them down to hide this imaginary hump of shame.

He craved unravelling me, layer by layer, unveiling my sensuality. He believed it was there, believed he could uncover it, without threat or coercion. His continued presence exacting increasing quantities of courage from me; bolder and at times thought-shattering explorations.

The first time I stood naked in the moonlight at a suburban reserve, nearing the end of winter... I didn't feel the cold. I did feel the breeze, marvelling at how it brushed against my skin, circling around my limbs.  

"Trust me," he'd said. "I will be good for you."

Sure it was a triumph, standing before him and witnessing the admiration. But I remained a bystander, outside of myself. When he fucked me, telling me how breathtaking my body was, I heard it, yet it was a film playing on the side.

Oh he compelled me! I allowed it only because I was searching for something else I believed lay in the middle of the unravelling. I suspected he'd detected my physical aversion and sought to help me overcome it, creating situations where I was in control, woman brazen, bold, woman employing her body to gain supremacy.

He stood me on a corner in the red-light district one night. Stilettos and a mini skirt, heart pounding. He was sitting in the car meters away, observing. When someone stopped, God! The terror of those few seconds a memory never forgotten. My thoughts on the men-devils those initial moments, every car cruising by hiding yet another such man-devil, threatening...  

Of course I quoted too much when the pock-marked youth muttered the age-old question.

"Too rich for me," he protested, head shaking, driving away. I turned and grinned. I'd done it?

"Did you feel powerful?" he asked afterwards. "Men cruising by and lusting but only able to look?"

I answered, "I guess so," refusing to explain further. It had been about the courage for me, not the conquest: an attempt to understand why men lust, why women support and find ways to manipulate this lust. The power-play between the hunter and the prey, these roles interchangeable, as I discovered during this brief exercise.

My fantasies laid open, scrutinised, some made real. The sleazy theatre full of men moaning, hands in their laps under coats and newspapers. My eyes looking away from the bodies humping on the screen, focussing on nearby flushed faces, eyes transfixed on the lewdness displayed. All sharing a common place, a common goal yet, curiously apart. Mass masturbation but each participant engaged in a lone, a singular connection with the images on the screen. The few seats separating each from the others serving as physical partitions, enabling an illusionary 'private' space. It intrigued me, this theatre bringing them together yet affording each the delusion of aloneness.

Naked beneath my long black cape, I let it fall open on the way out. He didn't ask me to do it. It was something appropriate, something I did because the situation solicited it. Seeing faces diverted from the screen to me? Another fuck you all moment.

Intensifying encounters. I wanted to remove myself from this escalation, say "Enough, it incites nothing inside me." But I persevered, breaking further boundaries, creating a persona yet again external to myself. I expected some revelation perhaps, a moment when my mind gave way. Aching to feel something, some 'out of mind' experience. The observer in me never ceding however. At home I wrote, recording things I observed. Not lived, not described as something experienced first-hand.

He tried every which way to bring forth, let loose the passion he insisted was within me. "The body is a wonderful thing, nothing to be ashamed of," blah blah. Some part of me agreeing. Understanding the constrictions enforced by society over time. The role religions play, the fluctuating values altering the naturalness of physical bonding, consequently evolving into this present-day confusion. Everything blurred. Right, wrong, decent, indecent, moral, immoral, labels created to provide some order, guidance. Yet the act itself basic, simple: A mere exchange of physicality.

I giggled one time. Luring a young man to the park, he standing there, watching us fuck. His lucky day. I pictured him relating this adventure to his mates later and no one believing him. It amused me because of what it represented: fundamentally a most natural act. Yet what would it become in the re-telling, and in the retention of the memory? Something lewd perhaps, an act outside the bounds of acceptable morality, something coloured by differing interpretations and values...

Still, whatever was meant to be discovered continued to elude me. There was no fervour in any of it, no exultation. My body ogled, marvelled at but my mind! It never stopped recording, analysing. Everything an experiment viewed under the bloody microscope.

The woman he brought along one evening? I consented because there was some part of me wondering whether maybe she might provide an answer. No penis... Softness instead. Maybe the shame I carried needed a woman's gentle touch to disperse it?

No revelation there either. She left me cold, indifferent. Brisk, efficient, she was also too soft, too pliant. I lay unresponsive, eyes closed, the mind ever detached. At least I appreciated the fact I need hardness, muscle, a body strong against mine. If I was going to fuck at least I understood now, it had to be with some guy, a measure of toughness, male potency.

It became superfluous in the end. There was no meaning I could attach to make it worthy. I remained unfolded, my sensuality never laid bare, my inner woman failing to emerge triumphant. It was sex. Transcribed in detail on paper after each occasion, as though one day I'd publish the findings... And a further secret to mull over.

One thing puzzled me. Why I consented, allowing this manifestation. Did I really believe sex was a stepping stone to the other, higher connection I sought? Going through the process, time after time, experience after experience aiming to pass through, to emerge on some other side? Sex the currency I traded in return for the prospect - the merest possibility of finding a higher meaning? A reason to validate my life?

The bodies piling up over the decades. Far too few to label me those names my father threw my way yet one too many to forget. I remember them all. The famous actor who first showed me how to wash properly down there. Oh that was so bloody enlightening! The Richmond footy socks, left on in the rush to enter me - only to immediately climax, teenage hormones a balloon popped in a loud pant. The naked back, as my second husband bent over, rolling a joint. This the only way he could achieve pleasure, his entire living dependent on some drug.

My own passivity incorporated in each memory. Being done to, never instigating. Body sprawled open, body positioned this way, that way. Yet the mind forever suspended above, observing, taking notes, never once merging.

Sure, I craved this abandonment. Release! Mindless, physical immersion. I hoped each time I'd feel some semblance of sensuality; not sensation, curiosity - rather true abandon, the giving over, equal exchange of pleasure. I craved one who would put me back together perhaps, the mind inside, shut down, giving way. Not hovering above, a fucking blinking camera eye I stared at in disgust every occasion.

The only time I came close - the one person who brought me nearest to this illusive wholeness was of course William. Yet this admission too is suspect, related intimately to the utterances between us. I tackled the idea sometimes, returning home to the inevitable frustration. Allowed time, given enough devotion, would he have shut me up, shut me down? If the conversations had continued, if my feeling safe, enfolded, feeling specific to him had endured, could I have reached this liberating moment? Hell. This once in a lifetime bullshit? One person sustaining the other for life? Statistically proven wrong again and again, logically nonsensical. Bothering me though. This being my itch.