vanessa

WOMEN 63
Hm. Putting her name in caps doesn't seem sufficient. Is there a caps-exponential option? In my first year in New York, my brothers set me up with a newer computer, and at their insistence i relented to finally joining this thing called the internet. Before long, i was glad i had. On Craigslist, a site i surfed for jobs, i came across a "platonic only" personals section. I'd always thought personals a touch pathetic, but this was a twist, so i explored, and answered some ads. Vanessa was very sad, just looking for honesty. We wrote back and forth for a couple months, much of it about the misery she was enduring with her boyfriend. He lied to her, cheated on her, accused her…she sounds like a sap, but she was no dummy. Born and raised in Chinatown, she was very Americanized (she had gone to college in the Midwest), but her parents were first-generation, and many if not most of her problems stemmed from old world guilt. She spoke Chinese in her parents’ home. A freelance web designer, she'd had one long-term romance in her college years, which ended in harsh betrayal. For the past few years she'd gone from one dysfunctional relationship to another. Asserting her own needs and self was where she always came up short. We finally met one early evening at a Virgin Music Store cafe. Before a word was spoken, there was a whooshing inside me, and three little words flashed in my mind, "i’m in trouble". We discovered that talking in person was as nice and comfy as our letters had been. If she were taller she'd have been called willowy. She wore lots of black. She was in good shape, with some muscle tone. In two obvious ways she wasn’t my type - she had died a section of her beautiful beyond-shoulder-length hair red, and had a navel piercing. I was no fan of jewelry in general, and navel rings in particular (so embarrassingly derivative...but an African lip disc wouldn’t have kept me from her). A month or two swirled by in which we phoned or wrote almost daily, and saw each other once a week or so. Walking along the Battery Park waterfront one evening, we stopped in a little courtyard. I was climbing a stone structure behind her. The wind was blowing off the water, and she spread her arms as it flowed by. I knew in that moment that her arms were the most beautiful i’d ever seen. I came down behind her, and raised my arms to match hers. We meandered on. Then as always, her demons were never far...and they usually summoned her through cell phone. Demons of parents or boyfriend. We ended up in a playground, two interlopers with a world to ourselves. We came to rest eight feet off the ground on a net, looking up at the sky. Finally our hands brushed, and a brush became contact that didn’t break. I broke the mood by suddenly tumbling away, making her smile. I said i wanted to hold her. She said that would be nice. We cuddled until we were rousted by a flatfoot. I dreamed of returning one future night, to make love with her on the net. I soon told her that wanting to hold her was becoming one of the driving forces of my life. She started visiting me in Jersey City. I picked her up at the Journal Square PATH station, and drove her two miles to my home (she was a night person, and the shuttle busses were usually done running by the time she crossed the Hudson). Her first visit was during a rainstorm, and we arrived at my home soaking. The rain became a minor motif in our relationship; it seemed the skies turned on the waterworks so often when we were together. That first night her demons found her almost as soon as she was in my door. She took the call, and argued tearfully in Chinese with her father for half an hour, looking out the back window. At one point i lightly hugged her from behind. I broke off after a minute, because i suddenly had the kind of erection that arrives fully stiff in the space of a breath, which was not the hug i'd intended. Finally she came into my room, where i waited in candlelit darkness. She lay down, put her wet head on me, and before long her tears flowed onto my neck. I wanted to stay in the moment forever. On another visit, there was a more torrential downpour, and i kept circling in my car, unable to spot her. I parked illegally, and ran through the storm, searching. Finally there she was. I grabbed her hand and we ran. With the car in sight, we came together in an embrace. The profound violence of the wind and rain was so beautiful, as i held her with a need i was only beginning to understand. In the tumble of those months, clothing dropped away from our nights together, and on that stormy night, her tears on my chest, i knew i was in love. She said she had never been unfaithful, and couldn’t be now. I said that was fine. On those many nights we shared my bed, i searched for ways to express the blinding feeling inside me. Embraces gave way to baby kisses over every square centimeter of her. The first time her bra came away…i'd known that her chest was small, but wasn't prepared for how small. I grew to desire her physically like nothing i had ever known. My closed-mouth kisses evolved into open-mouthed...timeless explorations with lips and tongue. I still held back from any fluid swapping, but every piece of exposed skin on her, i found. She said that no man had ever given her attention on that scale. My mind reeled as she spoke, knowing how much i was holding back. I wanted to ingest her, devour her, pour myself into her. The word "worship" had always seemed perverse when applied to human loving, but that word slammed into my existence as one of the few that began to capture what i was feeling. One night i took her big toe into my mouth and worked it over, not sure whether i was going too far or even if she would like it. It was the first toe i ever sucked. She liked it. I explored and caressed with hands, arms, fingers, nose, and face…i spent hours kissing her pelvis, front and back. I grew weak at the sight of her ass. I didn’t realize it the first time (as i had with her arms), but as time wore on i knew that every tushie i'd ever seen or touched just paled in comparison. I wanted to put a tent on her tush and live there forever…although in truth part of my relationship to her ass may have been about more than just her. I had never before related to the ass as an erogenous zone, and remember laughing at some of my drunken floormates in college who talked about rimming or wanting to rim. But through my taoist training, my anus view had been changing. Putting a finger in my own while pleasuring myself was interesting, and not unpleasant. One of my artist friends told me that a rim job done right was one of the most exquisite pleasures to be found. I suppose these factors placed me in a growingly receptive state of mind, and...one night, as i kissed and nuzzled her behind, i suddenly knew that i wanted to plunge my tongue into every orifice she had. How i restrained myself to the extent that i did during those months…it's partly a mystery, as i’d never tasted anyone so perfect and true. But i knew it was important to her that we wait. Because of that, resisting the purest desire i’d ever known was in a sense, easy. To love her, and love her right…i began having thoughts of changing my life, of sacrifices and such, to be with her. This wasn’t as mind-blowing as it should have been, considering that no woman had ever even vaguely affected me like that. With Vanessa, so many of the controls and walls i'd acquired in a lifetime felt irrelevant. Things like pregnancy or safe sex…if she had an STD, i wanted it. If there were an experience to be had, be she by my side, then bring it. I know, a lot of my reaction can only rationally be called…not rational. But there it is. Perhaps the single most brain-scrambling moment with her came in the apartment of her closest friend M, who was interning at a downtown hospital. M was great, tiny with big expressive eyes and an irrepressible personality (Vanessa called her an anime character). M hated Vanessa’s boyfriend. M liked me. One night, Vanessa invited me to stay with her at M’s, who had an all-night shift. Vanessa drew a candlelit bath, and sometime that night i broke one of our barriers a tiny bit. I was holding my head to hers, nuzzling her face for an eternity. As i held my closed lips against hers, my tongue came out and licked her upper lip. Then the lower. Then very slowly across them both. I stopped. Her lips had parted. My tongue crept inside her just a bit, and i lightly touched her teeth. I held my tongue still. From between her nearly-clenched teeth, her tongue came out and slowly rolled across mine. And my brain promptly flew...apart. One night, she took me to a nice restaurant and showered me with gifts, chiefly a beautiful journal that had her poetry on the cover. She hoped that i would fill it with words for her. I said that i suspected it would stay empty until the day when her love was as free as mine (i was writing poems about her, just not in the journal). I told her i imagined sitting with the journal on an ocean cliff someday, where computers and phones don't go. One night we strolled through the city hand in hand, with me wearing a four-foot wide Sponge Bob costume. We talked about moving to Alaska, or upstate to New Palz, or opening a little bookstore in the Rockies. Getting away from her parents would bring her nothing but good, i thought. I imagined how unbearably cute she would be in ten years, or fifty, when all that heavy weight was lifted from her head. All these bizarre life-partnering ideas, and thoughts of taking a regular job, i had never even begun to entertain them with any other woman. Would i have done them? It’s a tricky question, but one that took a backseat to doing what was right to get her healthy with herself. Living life on my own terms and chasing my dreams had long been so enormous a part of me that…i can’t say with certainty what would have happened had Vanessa been able to be with me. Nor can i say that her inability wasn't ultimately the best thing for me, in terms of living my life optimally. But what is certain is the paralyzing comfort i felt around her. Hormones? Of course. I couldn't know what our true togetherness would be like, but i kept getting windows into her that revealed how like-minded we could be when it came to day-to-day living and worldviews. That was perhaps the most mind-blowing thought of all, that after thirty-six years i knew what it was to desire another human without reservation, and maybe just maybe that same human was also startlingly compatible?? I’d never known any woman who was startlingly compatible. Of course, her depression was not startlingly compatible. Depression had been a part of her life for just about as long as she could remember. I forget how young she was when she first tried to take her life…she hadn’t tried in a long time, but the figurative and literal scars were there. One day she decided that we could never be compatible, as any man wanting to love her would have to have known clinical depression himself. Maybe i never did see her at her worst, but never once did i see any behavior that frightened me or made me think she needed anything other than the loving all humans need. If any of this sounds like it can’t have been fun for me, disabuse yourself of that idea. My time with her was never anything other than sweetly, joyously, profoundly humbling. I did grill myself from time to time over why i had such a strong reaction to her, and whether it were just another beautiful manifestation of the lifelong attraction i’ve had for the wounded ones. She said she had done little or nothing to earn my love. Even though i told her she would have plenty of opportunity to earn what had been given, and that i wasn’t the type to stay in an unbalanced relationship…i also said that maybe sometimes things come our way that are pure and unconditional, and don’t need to be earned. She said she feared that if she couldn’t be with me now, she might never get a chance again. She talked about the possibility of past lives when we had been lovers. She had a little eye twitch, and i joked with her about passing an unfortunate gene on to our children. I was being glib...but also not. I wanted to share every fragment of life with her, from the most profound to the most mundane. I wanted her to know what it feels like to hold my penis while i peed. I wanted her to pee on me (not regularly, understand). When our relationship ended, i needed to remove physical reminders of her, but i kept the journal. Sometime during those many months, i said two words to her that i'd never said to another woman. Understand, i am not a pusher. Not. A. Pusher. If there is a school of thought that says that each person must find their own path, i sit in the front row. But one night as i held her, my lips whispered the words, "Leave him". I never met him nor the parents. So many nights i would talk to her on the phone as she sat locked in her own bathroom (their arguments would often culminate in her running to the bathroom and locking him out). Sometimes she would strike at him, when he was forcing his presence on her. He would pin her to the ground. He'd been living with her for many many months, without paying rent. During this time, she wasn’t working a great deal, as she needed to go back to school to get on the cutting edge of web design. I told her to kick him out, and i'd move in to share her rent load. Not even as a boyfriend, i said, because she suspected that when she finished with him she might need to be away from romance altogether. I said i would be whatever she needed. The only profound moment of hurt i had with her was when she said that the time it took to travel to me was a burden she no longer wanted. She did finally get him out of her home. By that point, she had broken off our romance…over being unfair to me, or being "clean" when they broke up. Whatever she needed, i responded with love. On our last morning, we woke up kissing and cuddling, our heads at the foot of my bed. She had been wearing black panties. I’ve never been a fan of lingerie, but these panties had the cutest windows on the sides (in the months that followed, i so wished i had kidnapped them). I rolled her on top of me, and our naked genitals came together. Up to that moment, i had avoided all but the most incidental genital contact...but as i held her, it felt so blissfully perfect. The closest thing my life had ever known to sustained perfection. At that moment, and on earlier occasions, i was sure she would have let me inside her, choosing to deal with the unhappiness and guilt later. As her labia rested on my half-erection, i was a little surprised i wasn't more stiff. But maybe psychologically my penis was smarter than i, because i’m not sure we would have resisted penetration, had i been at full mast. On that final morning, there were signs that we were becoming closer. She was considering going to the shore with me that very day. But perhaps a part of me sensed that our growing closeness would push her to run away. Maybe that put a tiny seed of desperation in my spirit, and maybe that seed would have made me act rashly. This is all a lot of analysis for a single moment when there was NO such overt thought going on. Before that, the number of erections i'd had from much less intimate contact with her was pronounced. In any event, i felt just a touch limp and off-balance as we parted. As time went by i became glad (for her, and probably for me too) that my penis had chosen that moment to be at half-mast. After she broke with her boyfriend, we kept in touch, though only once a week or so. A month or two later, she talked about me visiting her home. But then the strange thing occurred. She told me that more and more she wasn’t thinking about me romantically, and was becoming sure that we were not going to be lovers. I accepted it peacefully, but realized that a world in which she and i weren't together was not a world i could make any sense of. I sent her all the love i had, left the door open for her to find me again, and said goodbye. Not trusting myself to be strong enough (me!) to not contact her some lonely year, i destroyed all records of her contact information. It took me the better part of a year to banish her e-mail address from my conscious thoughts. I still remember pieces of it...fragments. It's funny the places your mind can go, in the wake of something so profound. You search for blame, where blame isn't appropriate. Could the greatest love of my life have been foiled by bad breath? I had been dealing with it for a couple years, and hadn't yet acquired my current complex oral hygiene habits. A very silly thought, perhaps. I'm content to know she loved me as much as she could, and if turning from me was what she needed to start healing...that thought keeps any demons of regret at bay. The demons are caged, through the strength born of loving her.