No Church in the Wild Read online

  Then his relationship had ended, and we’d met a number of other classmates at a wedding of two of the bunch, and we’d had the commensurate number of drinks, and we’d made out in the hallway holding champagne flutes, him lifting me up to reach his lips.

  After he kissed me he’d said, “I guess that’s out of the way,” and for a moment I’d fantasized about being swept over a threshold and ravaged on the floor and taken to breakfast in the morning and cuddled in a park in the sun and taken to the movies on exhausted Friday nights and laying in a cabin that hovers over the water somewhere in Southeast Asia.

  But, there was no breakfast, no park, no movies, and certainly no cabin. The next morning, there was no public recognition of what had happened between us. I was initially taken aback, but quickly grasped the intended deception and numbly played along. In my room later, alone, I reminded myself how far away he lived. I’ll not get embroiled in any long distance madness.

  You can imagine my surprise when, after months without speaking to Jamal, in a similar venue of lights and chinks in glasses and hardwood dance floors and tablecloths, I felt his hand slide around my waist. I pulled away, still licking my old wounds.

  Hours passed, and, while I was still tingling with the weight of his hand against me, we found ourselves outside together, rather accidentally. I broke the rule I’d made for myself months before to never speak of it again, sort of.

  I suppose it struck me as ironic that he’d bemoaned being single, and that was what had tipped me off.

  “Yes, single, I know it well. No one wants to date me,” I told him petulantly.

  “Nah, Bacchus, you could go into any bar you want and find a guy to take home.”

  “I didn’t say fuck me. I said date me.” I hated myself for wanting it, but I did.

  He was quiet for a while. It seemed like a year but it was probably like fifteen seconds. Then he said, “It’s…” and shook his head, falling silent.

  “Lordy, don’t stop telling me now. I’ve been dreaming for years of knowing what ‘it’ is. From what I can tell I’m doing everything I can. I’m low maintenance, I think, but I try to keep myself in shape and, well, how many chicks can you date who’d be down to bring another lady in now and then?”

  “It’s too much!” he blurted out. He dropped his chin to his chest. “It’s just… too much.”

  “What is?”

  “It’s too sexual.”

  I sat perplexed for a moment while I considered that I had seen this boy shamelessly gaming on women in bars, openly proclaiming his desire to take one home for the night, but only the night. What I probably should have said:

  “I’m sorry, do you not like sex?”

  What I did say:

  “Ah.”

  I didn’t call out his hypocrisy. Even given the stints with a couple of girlfriends, I knew of more women he’d slept with than persons I had. And besides, I knew the number wasn’t the problem. I’d seen this reaction enough, I just hadn’t expected it from someone I thought smart. But I should have. Intelligence has nothing to do with the baseline requirements of human perception.

  Try putting “bisexual” on an online dating profile and see what kind of messages you get. Being sexual, at least, and not discriminating against sex with persons of the same gender if warranted, that seems to be sufficient to indicate to every onlooker that you are down for anything. With anyone. Both sexes. Not either sex. Not I’m not sure which sex I wish to be with exclusively right now or I’ve been with this sex before and I usually tend toward this sex. Certainly not I’m more toppy or bottomy. Semantically, you like men, you like women, or you like both. And both is greedy. It follows naturally that you just want sex all the time. And that makes you a whore. And they remember you that way, the way the word told them you are.

  “I guess that’s not surprising,” I told him. I looked upon his apologetic face, and underneath it I saw a familiar look – a gaze looking upon a rabid, horny savage just having identified as “bisexual.” I fiddled with the hem of my dress, head down. What a stupid word, to cause so much drama for meaning nothing at all. We should more properly say “I am attracted to x characteristic(s) of men and y characteristic(s) of women, and I feel more comfortable in long term interactions with ___, I crave A and I don’t want anything to do with B, but I’d consider C under the right circumstances. I spend about ___% of my time in the active role and ___% of the time in the passive role.” But who has time to go around saying that to strangers?

  The Romans were, naturally, much more efficient, and my identification with their worldview had long before made me into Rome’s hopeless pedagogue. Romans had a set of six verb conjugations with twelve nouns to describe sex acts and when you used any of them you knew the orifice, the penetrating organ (hand, mouth, cock) and the active or passive role of the participant. None of these words had shit to do with sexual orientation. They only described actions, so they were generally very precise in reflecting a singular act. If I were Roman, I don’t think anyone would give a fuck what my “preference” was, much less ask about it. I’d have other considerations shaping my actions. Sure, there were pockets of the modern world – at Burning Man or in a theater troupe, etc. – where “bisexual” wasn’t the least bit jarring to your community, where no preference need shape your character. But I could never spend a whole life in such places, or in Rome, try as I might.

  I toyed with the hem of my dress and the idea of explaining all that to him, wondering if it would do me any good, unable to avoid hearing the crickets as I pondered.

  How awkward it would have seemed to Jamal if, upon making his acquaintance, I’d said something about a woman’s beauty, and to respond to his curious inquiry I’d launched into a twenty-minute monologue about my history, my feelings of the moment, and the various masculine and feminine traits I possessed in all contexts, not least of which the bedroom?

  I’d decided we need a summary, as humans, so that we can operate efficiently. We need a memory of any moment that can be referenced quickly and succinctly, and in our society the chosen shortcut is a memory of a person’s orientation. With knowledge of an orientation, we can calculate our behavior, where in another place and time other considerations would have shaped our actions long before we got to the philosophical consideration of how we were “oriented.” In Rome, whether the actor was a slave or citizen said much more about whether the act was morally right than who that actor preferred to sleep with on a regular basis. Those sorts of differences in priority are what enamored me of the study of the ancient in the first place.

  But for Jamal, for everyone who’s thinking of forming a modern relationship, a character type is a necessary default. Ah, exhale, now it’s so easy! A man’s “gay?” A “Straight” man knows to be afraid of physical overtures. A girl’s “bisexual?” A “Straight” man assumes you’ll fuck him, three of his buddies, and a chick on a live web feed. And that may be hot, but it’s certainly not the kind of person they’d elevate to the level of partner, or wife. It’s too sexual for that.

  But to have said to Jamal that I was “straight” was a lie that would be proven false quickly, as to say I was “gay” would be. To approach any intimate understanding with him I had to describe myself as bisexual, and I had to accept the risk – or the reality – that Jamal or his equivalents would place me into an “undatable” box. I could have only described myself with that godforsaken word, and I could not fix his memory then or now. Alas.

  The day he said I was “too sexual,” I sat on a lovely balcony at a lovely wedding surrounded by lush foliage and a trickling river, barely audible over the rising song of crickets, and I looked out over the rolls of grass. I swallowed and resigned myself to always being an unacceptable abbreviation to him, and assuredly to countless others. Well, I thought, I suppose there’s no reason to be proper when everyone will assume I’m not regardless. From then on, when I met someone I wanted to sleep with, I let it happen without bothering to lay the foundation for a long-term
relationship, and my partners noticed. I liked sex, and in the context of everyone assuming I was slutty based on my orientation, I had little reason to remain chaste. At that moment, Jamal unintentionally convinced me that I might as well maintain a sexual relationship with him, too, futureless as it may be. It was in precisely this way the word “bisexual” and all the connotations it carried became my self-fulfilling prophecy, over and over again.

  That night he’d invited me back to his room, and I’d accepted. I was not disappointed. The sex was excellent, though he’d be needing some coaching on the performance of oral sex if this were to continue. Not a huge deal. The occasional man would impress, but usually the poor darlings had no idea what it felt like to the girl when they did that and would need a touch of coaching.

  I’d found, after that crickety wedding, that a few times a year I’d had the opportunity to bone him. One of us would have business in the other’s city, or our friends would pull us together for one vacation or another. Of course, we never told anyone what was happening. I simply refused to think about the fact that the secret existed because I was unacceptable to tout as a partner. This was merely my plight with men. No need to dwell.

  After my ill-fated courtship with Claire, ragged with disappointment and hungry for escape, I’d delayed my flight out of San Diego after the conclusion of business for just one night, electing instead to leave in the morning. I’d left my client’s offices and met Jamal for dinner at a fancy seafood shack with partially-tin walls and buckets full of utensils and thirty dollar entrees. We each had half a dozen oysters, and laughed, and waxed philosophic on the progress of our lives, and let our legs encounter one another under the table. We drank pedestrian beer and enjoyed the hell out of it.

  I’d then discovered the restaurant choice was hardly about the oysters. I didn’t have to move my rental car to get to his apartment, which was scarcely three blocks away. As we walked we bumped against one another to highlight our jokes, and I ignored the distinct feeling that I was walking with my run-of-the-mill boyfriend.

  When he left me alone in his apartment to perform some menial administrative task, he returned a few moments later to find me staring blankly out of the window at the ocean, still, eyes watering as I blinked slowly, just gently enough to avoid forming tears. I was so entranced by my ambiguous internal processing I didn’t notice him until he was standing next to me. I looked up, vaguely startled.

  “Bacchus, what’s up? I’ve felt like something was off with you all night.”

  “Oh… I…” God, I hate talking about my feelings. But it was too late. I’d shown clear enough signs that I was not alright now, and despite his susceptibility to insufficient adjectives he was a truly kind person who maintained deep loyalty for his friends, including me. I couldn’t deny he cared about me. I didn’t want to. Maybe he didn’t care in the call-you-every-week-can’t-stop-thinking-about-you way, but the important-person-in-my-life-whose-happiness-concerns-me way. I knew that. And he went out of his way all the time to do right by people, his family, his friends. Financially, with his time, whatever people needed. There were actually very few people I knew who were so genuinely kind. “Jamal, do you remember that conversation we had back at Charlie’s wedding?”

  Now he looked confused. “I recall more than one, but not— ”

  “Well, that’s irrelevant. What’s wrong with me is really stupid. I met this girl. We went out, but only once. It was a weird date, but it felt fun. She was gorgeous and bright and effusive and I let myself get excited about it. And I never let myself get excited. But she was bi, admittedly, and took words out of my mouth about how annoying it was to try to explain to people that we couldn’t say whether we wanted to end up with boys or girls. I think more than her personally I got overexcited by the idea that I could be with someone who really did understand what it’s like… to be into both… in different ways, that don’t rank. Someone who understood me.”

  He apparently had no response, so I continued, “Anyway, I was excited, and I’m so rarely excited. I never let myself get excited, but for some reason with her I did, and I got burned. She ended up being sort of odd, rude, standing me up. It soon became clear that I had been strung along in service of an ulterior motive. And so, you know, whatever. People can be shits, I’m well aware of that. At first I couldn’t put my finger on why I was so torn up. But now I think what’s gotten to me is that I’d allowed myself to hope there was a person out there who could really understand me, only to discover that person didn’t really give a shit about me. And now there’s this void… just a big, black void where my hope had formed. And now I’m afraid of hope, too.”

  I kept looking out the window, not sure that I wanted to see his face. “I’m sorry,” I said, “that was quite the diatribe.”

  “That wasn’t a diatribe,” he said simply, and finally I looked up at him. His face was drawn with resigned curiosity and sprinkled with sadness. He reached out and collected me into him, wrapping solid arms around my shoulders. My head fell onto his chest. I breathed in, and then out. And then I remembered I didn’t deserve sympathy.

  I looked up at him from his arms. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I did it to myself. She threw off plenty of warning signs that I apparently chose to ignore. I don’t get to have fine gentlemen such as yourself feeling sorry for me because I screwed myself over.”

  “I don’t get from that story that you were the one doing the screwing over.”

  “It was at least both of us.”

  “Hmpf,” he half-chuckled. He released his arms and slid them beneath mine, and he lifted me off the ground and kissed me, once, slowly, softly, as if to say he was sorry. Then he put me back down. “You want a beer?”

  “Yes.”

  We sat around with the television off, letting the darkness deepen outside the window, sipping beers and talking about anything else.

  On our fourth round, I was rewarded for overzealously tearing at the bottle’s lid with a spray of foamy hops all over my hands. He laughed at me.

  “See, you can’t even screw that beer over!”

  I flicked the moisture on my hands at him, catching him in the face with a bit of it.

  “Oh no you di-ent.” He leaned over and collected a bit of the beer that had puddled on his coffee table, flicking it back at me.

  I sputtered, “You cannot win!” while I started to dump a greater quantity of beer onto my hand, but he swept over me and took the bottle away, pinning my other hand with his in an almost-pointless demonstration of superior strength. I curled away, sending the pinning intentions of his hands along the backs of my wrists. His groin pressed into my ass, and I flexed against him purposefully as I feigned struggle, wriggling his cock between my glutes and feeling it grow between them through his pants, smiling wildly as I did. I felt his breath grow heavier on my neck, and he took one of his hands down to my waist, turning me over to face him, laying the swell of himself against my clit and leaning down to take me in a kiss, now a harsher, rabid, subconscious kiss.

  I opened my mouth hungrily against it. As he ground into me I felt his pulse on my slit and, soon, a rush of wetness, my sex gliding against itself from within my jeans. Jamal released my hands and planted his own alongside me, dropping his chin down to my chest and rolling his head between my breasts, tugged the edge of the tie holding my shirt together, and pulled it open. He lifted my bra and took them, one by one, in his mouth, suckling. I bucked against him.

  I put my newly-free hands against the flat of his stomach and around the curve of his ass, pulling him into me and pushing him away at once, sliding his shaft along me. He groaned and rose from my breasts, taking his hands to the button of his jeans.

  “Wait,” I said, and he paused. “Me first. Sit.” And I pointed back to the far arm of the couch. To my delight, he shifted backward, wide-eyed, and leaned back, his cock struggling against his pants. I rolled my left foot underneath me on the cushion and let my right foot fall to the floor, then sat back atop the other a
rm of the couch. I reached back to unhook my bra, pulled the wrap of my shirt apart, slid it off my back, and let my fingertips pull on my brastraps just enough to cause the rest of the bra to fall swaying like a feather to the ground.

  I stepped toward him, slipping the button of my jeans as I went, hovered over him and began unbuttoning his shirt.

  “I thought you were going first?”

  “Color me fickle.”

  I slid my hands into his shirt as it opened before me and let my fingers glide along the ridges in the center of his stomach, up the crest of his ribs, flattening against his pecks, pinching his nipples. I made sure to guide the shirt off both of his arms with a lingering touch as I lowered myself to a seat and let my gaze fall on the bulge in his pants, reaching down to unzip him. I slid my index fingers around the protruding tip of him, then down the length of him, then released him and went for the button, the waistband, all of a sudden in a hurry. I giggled at the V his hips made into the band of his soft dark boxer briefs, marveled at its beauty. I slipped his jeans off one leg at a time, then freed him from the boxers. When I began to move backward, he reached for his cock.

  “I promise I have a good reason to make you wait…”

  His hand jerked back.

  I stood and trailed my own zipper down, sliding my jeans and panties from my hips, stepping out. I straddled Jamal and looked into his eyes to hold his gaze while I dropped my fingers into the oasis between my legs and wet my fingers. Looking down to his erection, the head of his penis pointing outward in its swell, I slid my lubricated fingers around the ridge of it, the shaft bouncing a bit against me as I made contact. He moaned. I leaned down and licked myself off of him, taking him in my mouth, my lips hot with the taste of the velvet of his head. I sucked with all of my breath, taking my lips back and forth against him, wrapping my hands around the dense rod, sliding them along the shaft behind his balls, reveling in the shape of him.