Sex? She Asks - a Sketch

Sex? She Asks

Her hair is long, straight, shiny, well combed, and parted with such precision that it leaves a straight line of lambent scalp running exactly north to south: a moonlight scar. It is also very black. So black, in fact, that I find myself looking for lighter roots in the dim light of the bar. They must be there, surely. But I can find none.

She has long, pale, ringless fingers and kind eyes, curious and kind under bluish lids, that now and then glance up at me from the other side of the narrow table. She gives the impression of being very clean, almost sterilized. At least very well scrubbed.

These long, pale, ringless fingers pick up her beer and bring it close to her face. She squints to read the fine print on the label and as she does her brow wrinkles into two little crosses.

God, she is beautiful.

Crossless again she puts the bottle back down. She gives no indication whether she made out any of the small letters.

I’m just about to ask whether her hair really is that black, naturally, when she asks me first.

“What do you think about sex?” is what she asks.

Now, I come prepared for this question.

I reach for find my wallet and pull out of it a much folded, yellowing, eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper. She follows my doings with her kind, curious, now widening eyes.

With the sheet in hand, all unfolded now, I say, “Let me read you a prepared statement.”

At this she looks up at me, eyes wide all the way now, and clears her throat with a small noise. She looks away, then down at her hands, then at her beer. Her left hand moves for the bottle, still half full, lifts it, but returns it to the coaster before getting even halfway to her lips. I get another quick, wide eyed glance before she looks around as if to see if anybody else has heard my strange announcement. No, I don’t think there is any as if to about it: she is looking for corroboration, just to make sure she heard me right. But no comfort there it seems, no one else has heard. All absorbed in their single, or shared, worlds. Going to have to trust her ears.

I wait for her to look my way again before I continue. Eventually she does. A little uncertain, now. Not quite afraid. But I’m obviously a little insane, harmlessly so we hope.

“A prepared statement?”

“Yes.”

A flicker of a smile tells me, okay, sure, go ahead.

“Firstly,” I say, reading from typed text that has faded and is almost impossible to make out in the half light, but I know it pretty much by heart and what little I can make out serves as prompts for the rest and I proceed with practiced confidence, “please understand that I believe in the spirit. And I believe, naturally, that the spirit is sexless. Understand also that I believe that we are spirits, you and I—not that we have them, that we are them—and that as spirits we relate to our bodies as our bodies relate to, say, our cars: we drive them, we feed them, we maintain them, we copulate them.

“Secondly,” I look up, yes I have her attention, she is listening, her eyes, unblinking and very still now, holding my unfolded declaration, “I believe that we are imprisoned. This is evidenced by the simple fact that we can’t get out. It’s as if someone has welded the car doors shut.”

She shifts in her chair, slowly brushes back a colony of strands, shiny waterfalls of hair, looks at me, but says nothing. I still have the better part of her attention and I continue, “Having said this, let me ask you: if you were building a prison, what would be the best possible prison you could build? No, don’t answer, it’s a rhetorical question. I’ll answer it. The best possible prison you could build is one which the prisoners would not want to leave. They would so enjoy their confinement that only the very, very few would not find comfort within and would seek a way out. Of these very, very few , fewer still eventually find a door, or a trace of one, and from this search grow our various religions, of course.”

Her left hand moves a little, as if looking for its mate, then finds it. They join in prayer. A curious gesture, and she looks down at them, surprised I think. Then back at me, at my paper, at my mouth, at my eyes.

“But soon enough,” I continue, “these religions forget the searchers and turn themselves into good solid business or comfortable and guiltless living and in the end much prefer to forget, again, that this is indeed a detention facility, and as soon as any remaining soul crazy enough to insist there are doors and truths has been safely incarcerated and drugged or electro-convulsive-therapy’ed into oblivion, that, as they say, would be that. You’d have perfection.”

I pause for effect. Her eyes on mine. A sculpture in bluish light. Hands by Michelangelo. Pale and still clutched in prayer. “Thirdly,” I say to the listening girl, “I believe that sex is the bricks and the locks and the chains. I believe that sex is what makes our prison so wonderful.”

Her eyes follow my fingers as they refold the paper. Only after I have replaced it in my wallet, and restored it to my pocket, does she unlock her hands and reach for her beer. This time she drinks. Emptied, she puts the bottle back, looks at it, doesn’t smile, and says, “Wow.”

Thoughts? I'd like to hear them.
Ulf Wolf

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