Fucking Daphne Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  ENOUGH ABOUT ME, WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT ME?

  CHASING DEAD DOGS

  SCHOOL BUS

  ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS

  WHAT IT’S LIKE IN SAN FRANCISCO

  NEW FRIEND

  ADVENTURES IN ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION

  PRETTY MONSTER

  DEAR RACHEL, PLEASE READ

  DANCING FOR DAPHNE

  GLOBALIZATION: A FUCK STORY

  WHY THINGS HOP

  THE MEOW

  SHAKEN, STIRRED

  TIME STARTS AGAIN HERE.

  LET’S GO. WE’LL WRITE THE STORY.

  WANT A TASTE OF RELIGION?

  ANJA, 2007

  WHAT MAKES YOU THINK ANY OF THIS HAS TO DO WITH YOUR MOTHER?

  SHE’S NOT MY TYPE.

  ANJA, 2007

  SOMETHING THAT STANDS FOR SOMETHING ELSE, A CODE LIKE AN “X” STANDING FOR HISTORY.

  AFTER A FEW DRINKS, IT’S TIME TO SPEAK MOROSE CODE.

  WHAT DID HE WANT?

  ANJA, 2007

  WHEN YOU SOLVE FOR “X,” IT DROPS OUT.

  WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU WERE HAPPY?

  MERGE

  WORDLESS: A LOVE LETTER

  FIVE NOUNS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  OF THE TANTRUM I ALMOST THREW

  ANOTHER NIGHT, ANOTHER PILLOW

  COLIN ON COLIN

  THE SUBJECT WAS SEX

  HERETICAL SESTINA FOR D

  WHAT DAPHNE THINKS ABOUT IN BED

  KISS AND TELL

  MY FIRST DATEWITH DAPHNE

  ANOTHER DATE WITH DAPHNE

  DAPHNE TAKES ME TO A PARTY

  I WALK DAPHNE TO HER CAR

  I TAKE DAPHNE TO A PARTY

  STOOD UP BY DAPHNE

  DAPHNE MAKES A MISTAKE

  DAPHNE AND I KISS

  DAPHNE AND I IN THE DARK

  CODA

  UPPERCASING

  SEXUAL HELIUM

  EARTHBOUND

  BOXER’S FRACTURE

  DON’T MIND DYIN’

  AFTERWORD: WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT FUCKING DAPHNE

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  CREDITS

  SELECTED TITLES FROM SEAL PRESS

  Copyright Page

  ENOUGH ABOUT ME, WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT ME?

  (FOREPLAY AS INTRODUCTION)

  Daphne Gottlieb

  When the phone rings and I’m told I’m going to be in Best American Erotica, I’m delighted—I don’t write erotica, but this is exciting nonetheless. The thrill is gone when I’m told my writing’s not in the book. I’m a character in someone else’s story.

  I’ve been moneyshot with my own gun. I’ve poached other people’s personal lives for years for big game, and now someone’s got me over the barrel. And under it. In some story, some girl with my name is doing nasty things to some boy and the whole world can read it. With one hand, if they want. This story is very similar to something that I did, something that happened to me, a secret. It’s in print. It must be true.

  Another phone call comes a month or two later, when I’m eating unheated Kung Pao chicken out of the carton. It’s a writer I used to date, asking if I want to vet a story before it gets published—there’s something about me in there. There certainly is. Everything about me, it seems, except my underwear and my modesty.

  My stomach goes cold. When reading it, someone might think the girl in the story is me. They can’t see that she can’t be me—I am not that kind of girl. And I want everyone to know it’s me, that the character was inspired by me, that someone sees me like that. She’s nothing like me. Is that how you see me? There I am.

  There I am, checking my email, and a writer I know is asking if I remember a smartass remark I made about going to the Love Parade dressed as a bondage bunny. I do. He’s written a story about my being that bunny. It’s in print.

  I start reading differently. I start picking up sexy magazines, surfing the more literate of the erotic websites. That girl in that piece—is that me? Was she meant to be? I’m being remade in bits and pieces of other people’s words.

  I don’t kiss and tell. I don’t need to. Now other people are doing it for me.

  Suddenly, I am a character in a dirty story. And you’d never believe what happens to me . . .

  As a writer, I’m discreet. I slip intimate references into love poems, and no one’s the wiser. I change names, I change places, I distort, I lie—that’s why I write, really: because it’s the one arena in which people expect you to lie about yourself to reveal something true about all of us.

  So these stories, they never happened. Some woman made this story up and now, for a second, the writer and I could touch. I could have her. She wrote that story because she was pissed at me and wanted revenge. She wrote the story about someone else and just changed the name and the haircut. It’s all true and that’s just how it happened. I’m a heartbreaker/a whore/a prude/a minx/a mess/a shrew/a whatever-you-want-me-to-be when you put your fingers on the keyboard, provided you’ve got a little control. The stories tell all, just how it happened, except when it never did.

  These stories I saw about “me”—or someone with my hair and style who is a poet in a small, gorgeous city—they weren’t love stories. Or most of them weren’t. And they weren’t about me at all. Again and again, they were about the story’s writer. I felt like a photo of a naked girl. And the girl looked like me.

  I emailed a few writers I knew. Hey, I said. I’ve Got a Project for You.

  The girl in the photo looks a lot like me. In fact, it is me—under professionally done makeup with the right lighting. It’s the promotional photo for my last book, and it looks a little like me. It only looks a little like me. I am the same girl and I am every story about me and still I am more. And less. I cannot be conjured just by these words.

  There is another writer with the same name as mine. She lives in another country. She’s an academic, and if you search for my books online, you will also find hers, in another field altogether. Her books are about labor relations. I hope she will not get in trouble for all the things I have done, haven’t done; I hope she will not get in trouble for being Daphne Gottlieb, whoever she is, that girl in the book who isn’t the other Daphne Gottlieb; the girl who isn’t even me. Except when she is. Reading between the lines, eating cold Kung Pao chicken in the kitchen, writing to you in pajamas, cat on my lap, knowing exactly what I’m doing and wondering what people might say about it.

  I don’t kiss and tell. I let others do that for me now.

  CHASING DEAD DOGS

  Eric Spitznagel

  “You still don’t recognize me, do you?”

  It probably wasn’t the best time to start asking questions. My hands were cradling both of Daphne’s breasts, and until I’d decided to get all talkative, my mouth had been wrapped around one of her nipples. Now, I’m not usually one to brag, but my tongue was doing things that surprised even me. It wasn’t the same “housepainting” technique (brush to the left, brush to the right, up and down and down and up) that’d served me so well over the years. No, this was something altogether different. My tongue was darting and flicking at a dizzying pace, as if trying to work out a complicated calculus problem. My mouth moved from breast to breast, latching on with enough ferocity to form an airtight seal. I must’ve looked like an asthmatic, frantically sucking out every last drop of oxygen from an inhaler t
hat just so happened to resemble a pair of supple, perfectly formed tits.

  Trust me, it was a lot sexier than it sounds. You kinda had to be there.

  I guess I had something to prove. I wanted Daphne to remember this. Or rather, to remember me.

  From the moment our casual flirtation evolved into full-on carnal gymnastics, I’d made a point of maintaining eye contact with her. Usually, the sight of a naked woman’s body is enough to distract me. But this wasn’t the first time I’d seen her naked, and I hoped it wouldn’t be the last. As we tore off each other’s clothes and our hands began roaming, exploring every inch of exposed flesh, I kept my gaze squarely on her face.

  Look at me! My eyes were practically screaming. Just stop what you’re doing for one goddamn minute and look at me! You’ll figure it out. It’ll all come back to you. But you have to look at me!

  No luck. Daphne wasn’t paying attention, at least not to what I wanted her to notice. Her head was rolled back, her long dreadlocks almost touching the brown grass below us. She held the back of my head with one hand, and used the other to steady herself on the tombstone. I could feel her slipping, her ass cheeks nudging ever closer to the edge, and it seemed that at any moment we might both go tumbling to the ground.

  The graveyard was my idea. It seemed gothy and sinister. But more than that, I thought taking her here would speed things along. Surely she’d make the connection eventually, right?

  Apparently not.

  It became obvious that she wasn’t going to return my stare. I pulled away, letting my mouth hover an inch or two away from her breasts, promising more if she’d stop with the theatrics already and just glance down at me. But her stomach was still writhing, her breasts still heaving, her head still tilted back like she was preparing to do a backward somersault.

  “Seriously?” I asked, growing more incredulous. “You really don’t remember me at all?”

  We’d been together for most of the night, without so much as a glimmer of recognition in her face. But I was hoping that maybe, in this intimate context, she’d put the pieces together and realize why I looked so familiar. Maybe she’d notice how my eyes shifted from green to blue whenever I got excited, or catch a glimpse of the scar on my right shoulder blade and wonder why it looked so much like her own teeth marks. And then it’d all come rushing back to her, her eyes would well up with tears, and she’d say something about how much I’d changed; that’s why she didn’t know it was me. We’d spend a few minutes reminiscing, and she’d promise that this time would be different. Now that she’d found me, she’d say, she had no intention of losing me ever again.

  And then we could fuck like vampires in a graveyard.

  Daphne leaned forward and dug her nails into the back of my neck, trying to push my face back onto her breasts. But I was having none of it.

  “We’ve met before,” I said more insistently, pushing her away.

  “No kidding?” Even her sarcasm sounded impatient. “You mean we didn’t just run into each other out in the cemetery and decide to fuck?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  She rolled her eyes. I had the distinct impression that if I didn’t stop yammering soon, she intended to punch me. “You want to play gravekeeper. Is that what this is about?” she asked, her voice growing suddenly gruff. “Okay, fine, you sick fuck. I’m dead and you get to have your way with me before you put me in the ground. You want some necrophilia with a hot piece of corpse ass? Come and get it.”

  “No, no, no. I mean we’ve met before today. I don’t . . . ” Her hand was tugging at my belt, and I was finding it difficult to concentrate. “You don’t . . . you’re missing the point, I . . . don’t you know who I am?”

  She grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled me close. She looked into my eyes with such intensity, I could almost feel her peering into my brain. This is it, I thought. This is how it’s going to happen. There’s no way she won’t recognize me now. I waited for her to say something, anything to drown out the deafening Congo drumbeat of my own heart.

  “I want you inside of me,” she growled, and her hands disappeared into my pants.

  Okay, fine, the reunion could wait.

  When I first met Daphne, she was by far the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life. I was only seventeen at the time, so I didn’t have much in the way of comparison, but to my young mind, she was sex on a stick with a chewy danger center. She was like a Bond girl, but with more piercings and countercultural sass. She was the black sheep of her family, of her high school, of the entire goddamn south side of Chicago. She was the bad influence who introduced her female friends to things like punk rock, clove cigarettes, and abortions. She was a chipped shoulder mixed with book smarts mixed with an affinity for committing minor felonies, all wrapped up in a mouthwatering, curves-that-went-on-for-days, ripped-jeans-and-a-Dead Kennedys-T-shirt package.

  I was in love the moment I laid eyes on her.

  It took a few years before she even knew my name. I had nothing in common with the bad boys she tended to socialize with. I was, as the S&M folk like to say, vanilla. While she was out in the high school parking lot smoking weed with her friends, I was in band practice, learning a new Sousa march that would ensure my virginity for a while to come. She wore black leather dresses and torn fishnets, and I wore V-neck sweaters and cargo pants without irony. We were members of different tribes.

  For at least one semester, we were in the same history class. Though she sat just a few feet away from me, she never looked my way, even in passing. The fault was mostly my own. I went to great lengths to not be noticed. I said nothing during class. I didn’t even move unless it was absolutely necessary. I was like a baby prairie dog in a teenage boy’s body, and I suspected my classmates might be predators.

  But Daphne shared none of my timidity. When she stood up in front of the class to do her oral reports—which were usually about pirates or ninjas or any other historical vocation that involved brawny men with large swords—I was captivated by her confidence. I’d close my eyes and listen to the words trickle out of her mouth, and pretend that she was sharing a secret with just me. She really liked the word “adventure.” Her reports were peppered with it. I wasn’t yet worldly enough to make the distinction between reality and an active imagination, so I assumed that anybody who spoke with such conviction about adventure must know what they’re talking about.

  How she actually came to realize that I existed is still a mystery to me. Maybe I just struck her as somebody who might be fun to corrupt. I was the son of a pastor, so I might’ve seemed like a worthy challenge. All I know is, one day I was walking alone in the school’s hallway, carrying my trombone as I made my way to the four-fifteen bus, when she appeared out of nowhere and kissed me hard. On the lips. I suppose that’s where a kiss is most likely to happen, especially between two strangers, but to my inexperienced mind, she might as well have kissed my ear or a kneecap. It wouldn’t have been any less surprising or romantic.

  “What are you thinking right now?” she asked me when it was all over.

  “I love you,” I whispered to her, and immediately knew I had taken our relationship too far too soon. If I thought I could’ve gotten away with it, I would have asked her to marry me right then and there. But somehow I knew that with a woman like Daphne, you had to play it cool—start with the kissing and then wait a few days before you bring up in casual conversation that you’re not opposed to the idea of spending the rest of your life with her.

  A few weeks after our first kiss, my father died of a massive heart attack. As the doctors explained it, he had an enlarged heart that had gone undiagnosed for too many years. The cause of death inspired some people, usually well-meaning outsiders, to put a positive spin on our family’s tragedy.

  “He died as he lived,” they’d tell me. “With a big heart.”

  They were just trying to make me feel better, I suppose, but it managed only to piss me off. I didn’t want to be cheered up. My brother and I stopp
ed telling people about the enlarged heart and began announcing that he had, in fact, died from bowel cancer. Try to make a sentimental aphorism out of that.

  “He died as he lived, with irritable, inflamed bowels.”

  We buried him in a small cemetery near our home, and invited only a few close friends and family members to join us. I wanted to invite Daphne, but thought doing so might be a little too clingy and weird. At the burial, nobody knew quite what to say. We just stood there and stared quietly at the grave. Comforting each other seemed pointless. We were angry and numb and nothing would make any of this okay.

  And then a beagle showed up.

  At first we thought it must be somebody’s pet. But he had no tags of any sort, nothing to indicate whom he might belong to. For a stray, he seemed unusually friendly. He moved from person to person, pressing his wet nose against their legs. He took a particular interest in my mother, trying to climb her and lick her chin. He sat and watched intently as my brother and I lowered our dad’s urn into the ground. And at the end, he accompanied the mourners to their cars and waited for them to drive away.

  I left the cemetery feeling strangely uplifted. Nobody else in my family wanted to admit what I thought was fairly obvious: The dog was my father reincarnated. But that doesn’t make any sense, they told me. We’re not Buddhists. We don’t believe in that sort of stuff. Even as the logical side of my brain agreed with them and dismissed the idea as poppycock, there was a small part of me that wanted to think—that needed to think—my dad had found a way to come back for one final goodbye.