Fear Play

I am not a fearful man. The stumbles and setbacks that limn the path of learning do not frighten me, and I do not care if my halting efforts to improve body and mind are scorned by those who are too timid to try themselves, the opinions of others will neither deter me from choosing according to my lights nor cause me to hesitate in my pursuit of goodness and justice and happiness and so I am generally satisfied with my lot in life, proud of myself even, confident in my judgment and facing with the world with optimism and without trepidation, and this is all well and good, but...

There are other kinds of terrors, fears that bury themselves so deeply inside you that you don't know they exist until something happens, or someone happens, to show you that you are not the person you thought you were, you are not incapable of being destroyed by longings you did not know were there, and then you are lost, truly lost, exposed as surely as if you were bound naked to a cross of wood and helpless before the lash, because a woman has robbed you—me—of any semblance of self-knowledge merely by being there, she is an apparition that takes no heed of anyone other than the man to whom she belongs, she is not aware of me from across a darkened dungeon and so I am suddenly nothing, and then...

She takes off her clothes to play with her man and it is like that television trick where the camera zooms in on one person while the background stays fixed so it looks like the person is moving toward the camera, but it isn't really like that, it's like that time when the hot water went out in the locker room at work and I came in after a long run and I couldn't go back to my desk without washing up so I had to take an ice-cold shower, and I thought I could prepare myself for the shock of the cold but when I ducked under the water my heart seemed to go arrhythmic and it skipped a beat and for an instant I couldn't breathe, and then my heart was in my mouth and it felt like if I hadn't been gasping for breath I could bite down right onto my own heart, that's what it is like when she takes off her clothes—my heart leaps into my mouth and skips a beat and for a moment I wonder if I am going to die.

It isn't that she is beautiful, there are lots of beautiful women in the world, it's that she is perfect, she is impossible, people like that aren't real, or if they are they can't ever be seen naked in real life by people like me, ordinary people who don't have the key or know the secret handshake or whatever it is that opens the obelisk so you can see the full measure of the majesty of creation—my God, it's full of stars—and then it is like when you wake up on a cold spring morning in Yosemite Valley and you see the first rays of sun light up the falls and you want to burst into tears like a helpless, pitiable child because you've never seen anything so beautiful and didn't know there could be anything so beautiful that you'd actually get to experience in person, that's how it is when she takes off her clothes to play, and don't ask me to actually describe what I saw because if there are words for it I don't know what they are and I know more words than most people but I think someone needs to invent new words to capture her, and I can't think of any new words except to say.

She is lean and compact and sinewy in a way that some men wouldn't fancy because her hips are narrow and her breasts are small, barely there, but to me she looks like a puma, a wild thing that suggests power and movement even when she is standing still, a cat with skin the color of cinnamon and a wavy black mane and the smallness to dart out from under the grasp of any hunter, she has a kind of lithe athleticism, she is latent energy straining to become kinetic and obliterate the senses of anyone foolish enough to look directly into her eyes, she would melt them where they stood or suffocate them by taking away their breath like she takes mine away for that instant when she takes off her clothes and my heart is in my mouth and I know true and perfect desire. Had you seen her you would know, but you would have to have seen her, because the photographs of her that exist are such pale representations, like a sun-bleached Polaroid viewed through a dirty window in the failing light of dusk, they are nothing like she is in life and they are more than enough for most but not for me, because I am right there when she takes off her clothes to play, and I am changed by being there, I am more and I am less than before because I see so much and lose so much more in seeing.

And there is another time I see her, when we are both on a beach and she is lounging naked in a hammock and I am watching her from a rattan chair on the veranda, I cannot stop watching, because I have never seen skin that undulates like the grain of polished mahogany, skin that is the color of mahogany as well, it doesn't make sense, because she has a man and he is not here, I have my life and it is not here, either, but dreams are like that, aren't they, and then she is sliding out of the hammock and moving toward the jungle beyond the edge of the grounds and I am following her, but too slowly, she is running because she has to run, someone as lissome as she must be in motion, and I cannot keep up, I stumble and pant after her dragging my clumsy, thick limbs that will not obey, and she is moving with such agility that she seems to barely skim the ground, she is not just in the jungle now but of the jungle, and I am rooted to the earth, sucked at by mud and clutched at by creeping vines that do not want me to reach her, and she recedes from view, and as I lose sight of her I know.

The terror that leaves you lost and looking for a sign, a clue that tells you what direction to go, because you are upended, your sense of self is stripped from you and you no longer know where you begin and where you end, every moment is compressed into the present, and the present moment is infinite, everything happens at once and lasts forever, this is what occurs when the fear that you have compacted within your guts becomes irreducible, it can contract no more and you explode outward into a million fragments, atomized as it were, torn apart, sure of nothing anymore except that.

The artist has been hired by her man to paint her portrait, to domesticate the feral with oils and pigment and cage her in light and shadow, when she holds the finished work she is shocked to see that the painter has not painted her features and he has not painted the light, he has painted the agony and confusion that burn in his chest and pound in his head when he looks at her, but when she looks up from the portrait he is gone, hurrying down the front steps and lunging into the passing crowd in an effort to disappear because he has revealed himself, he has said too much, the old fool, he cannot bear to receive her awkward thanks laced with pity, and so he gathers his shame about him and flees, because the only thing worse than being a fool is being a coward and he is both, so he disappears into the multitude and into the fathomless depths of his desire and mortification, and he—I—learn once again the lesson that must be re-learned every minute of every hour of every day: there is no beauty without pain.