A Word for What I Mean
Slow Burn Age Gap Erotica // Good Girl's Anal Awakening
This is the free opening. Paid subscribers get the older man’s invitation, the choice she cannot explain away, and the full aftermath.
The paragraph was page 138, line 12 through page 139, line 4. Susannah had been on it for nine days. Forty-seven drafts in the file. Fourteen more in the notebook she had stopped numbering on Tuesday.
The muscle under her right shoulder blade had locked on Sunday and had not let go. Her bra strap had been cutting into the place where the muscle ran into her arm for nine hours and she had not adjusted it because adjusting it would have meant standing up. The radiator under the window was hissing. The window had been painted shut a long time ago. The apartment was warm in the way an apartment got warm in October when the building turned the heat on too early and the tenant could not crack a window. She had not spoken to anyone since Tuesday.
The French ran six lines without breaking. Sarrazin had built the sentence so the verbs gathered toward the end and arrived all at once, the way the act she was describing had arrived, the older woman writing the younger one into a tense she had not yet learned. Réclamer. Se rendre. Words that English could approximate and not hold. Sue had translated réclamer as demanded, as claimed, as called for; none of them carried the second meaning, the meaning that turned the verb back on the speaker. To réclamer was to want something with your whole body and to say so, and the saying was the wanting, and the wanting included being heard. English broke the circuit. English picked one.
Below the French she had written, in three columns:
clinical: She demanded he take her there. She submitted.
vulgar: She begged him to fuck her ass. She gave in.
literary attempt: She asked, in the only word she had for what she meant, and he gave her the act she had named.
She closed the laptop. The light in the apartment had gone the color of dishwater. She was twenty-two. Three months out of the MA. Eight months into a contract she was going to miss. The muscle had locked the first time during her first semester at BC and had never fully released and had become a fact about her body four years ago.
She stood, walked to the window, pressed her thumb into the muscle below her shoulder blade until it gave a little. The street was empty. The maple in front of the house had lost half its leaves in the storm Tuesday and the other half were going. She had been here since August. She had not learned the neighbors’ names except for the one downstairs.
The rent check was on the desk in its envelope. She picked it up, set it down again. Tomorrow.
She made tea. She opened the laptop. She wrote draft forty-eight.
It was worse.
• • •
She knocked on Bellamy’s door the following Wednesday at three in the afternoon, after she had stood at her desk for forty minutes and gotten no further, after she had passed him in the front hall the day before with a bag from Formaggio Kitchen and said something about her back without intending to.
He had stopped on the second-floor landing. He had a wedge of something wrapped in white paper and the receipt sticking out of his coat pocket. He was fifty-eight. She had learned this from a faculty page she had looked up after their second hallway conversation. He had retired two years ago from teaching French and Italian at a college in western Massachusetts. He had a face that looked like it had spent its life listening to people pronounce things badly and not correcting them. He said, This thing in the cervical spine, I used to do ten minutes on my graduate students who hunched. If it would help.
She said something noncommittal. He nodded. He went into his apartment.
She had gone upstairs and worked on the paragraph for another forty minutes and then she had closed the laptop and gone to the bathroom and brushed her hair, which she did not normally brush in the middle of the day, and then she had unbrushed it because the brushing seemed too much, and then she had stood at the window for another five minutes and not let herself name what she was doing, and then she had gone downstairs.
Now she was at his door with the rent check in her hand as cover.
His name was at the bottom of every document she had signed to live in this apartment. She had countersigned. She had wired the deposit to the account he had given her. The check was for him and the descent was for him and she had not let herself decide, on the stairs, which was the cover for which.
She knocked. She heard him cross the floor. He opened the door in his shirtsleeves, the white button-up rolled to the elbows, no apron, the kitchen behind him bright and smelling of onion. He looked at the envelope in her hand. He said, You could have slid that under.
She said, About the cervical thing.
He stepped back from the door and let her in.
• • •
His kitchen was the one she had imagined when she signed the lease and met him only as a name on the deposit check. Tiled floor in a pattern Margaret had let go a decade before she died. A round table by the window that she had not seen since she was eight. Herbs in a clay pot on the sill. A copper saucepan sat off the burner with onions softening in butter. He turned the heat down without comment.
He pulled a chair out from the table, the one facing the wall, and said, sit, and added, no, the other way, straddle it, you’ll be able to lean forward, that’s it.
She straddled the chair. She put her forearms along the top rail and her forehead on her forearms. The room smelled of butter and the cold from outside still in her hair.
He stood behind her. He said, This isn’t going to be anything. Five minutes. You tell me if I’m pushing somewhere I shouldn’t.
His hand found the place under her right shoulder blade before she had finished agreeing. He had the heel of his palm against it and he pressed, slowly, while he talked. He said her trapezius was holding compensation for the levator scapulae, which was the muscle that did the lifting when the person had been at a keyboard with their shoulders forward. He said the levator was a small muscle, it should not have to do this much. He said this in the voice of a man who had said it to other people and meant it both times.
She said, into her arms, You sound like a physical therapist.
He said, I had three operations on my hip in my forties. I had to learn the words.
He worked on her shoulders for what felt like a long time and was probably four minutes. She had not been touched by a man with this little urgency in a year. Her last boyfriend had gone in for what he called massage and ended at her bra clasp inside ninety seconds.
Bellamy asked her, while his thumb worked along the inner edge of her shoulder blade, what was on her desk.
She told him.
His hand stopped.
He said, Hélène Sarrazin.
She said, Un autre nom. The 1967 one. Solal is doing a new edition. They asked me. It’s my first book.
He did not start working again right away. His hand rested on her shoulder. He said, I haven’t read her in twenty years. I read her at thirty-four. She is hard.
She said, She is impossible.
He said, Do you have the French up there?
She went up. She came down. He had moved the onions off the burner. He was sitting at the table with a glass of water poured for her she had not asked for. She gave him the book. He turned to a page near the front and then to a page she had not marked and read silently for a minute. He had reading glasses on a cord around his neck which he had not been wearing in the hall. He put them on.
He said, Which one.
She told him. Page 138.
He turned to 138. He read it silently, the whole long sentence. He read it again. He read it a third time and the third reading took longer than the first two. He said, Read me what you have.
She said, I don’t want to.
He said, All right.
He read the French aloud. He read it slowly, with the stresses in the places Sarrazin had set them, and Sue heard for the first time what the sentence sounded like when someone who knew the language read it without trying to make it English. The verbs gathered. The clause that should have been a relative clause was a kind of held breath. She understood the sentence in the moment he read it and lost the understanding before he finished.
He set the book down. He said, Three things.
He said, Réclamer sits between to claim and to demand. There is no clean English. You will lose one of the two meanings every time and you’ll have to decide which. I would lose claim. Demand is closer to the body.
He said, Se rendre is surrender, yes, but it is also to arrive, to make one’s way. The reflexive does the work English does not have a tense for. You will have to build the second meaning across the next sentence. Don’t try to do it in the verb.
He said, And then there’s pudeur.
She had been waiting for him to say it. She had not known she had been waiting.
He took his glasses off. He held them in his hand on the table. He said, The dictionary will tell you it means modesty, decency, restraint. The dictionary is wrong. Pudeur is the awareness of what should not be said. It is a kind of attention. The French lost the practice of it sometime in the last fifty years and the English never had a word for it at all. You cannot translate it. You can only enact it.
She kept her arms on the chair back. She did not lift her head.
She understood, while he was still finishing the sentence, that he had just described to her with great precision what she was doing in his kitchen, what she had been doing since she came down, what she had been doing the day before in the hall when she said something about her back without intending to. He had named the thing she had been doing and he had named it without naming that he was naming it. He had given her the word for what was happening between them and he had given it to her as a translator’s note.
She did not move. She did not speak.
He put his glasses back on. He said, in a voice that had not changed register, We should stop for today. Bring me a draft when you have one you’ve committed to.
He worked on her shoulders for another two minutes. He did not touch her anywhere ambiguous. He helped her up out of the chair with his hand on her elbow. He walked her to his door.
She went up the stairs.
• • •
She opened the laptop. She wrote draft forty-eight, then forty-nine.
Forty-nine read: She asked him, in the word for what she meant. He let her be heard.
It was the worst sentence she had written in nine days, and the first she had written without making herself invisible.
She read it back. She closed the file. She sat with her hands on the desk.
She had been seen. He had read her. Reading her was not what professors had done when they had given her grades for being smart. He had read what she was doing in the act of doing it. He had named it back to her in a register that gave her no exit. He had done it without making her face him. He had let her keep her arms over her head. He had let her keep the position she had taken without thinking.
She made dinner. She ate standing at the counter. She washed the plate and the pan and the wooden spoon before the water had cooled.
She did not go downstairs.
She read in bed. The book she had brought to bed was not Sarrazin. She read three pages and understood none of them. She turned out the light. The room held the cold from the window.
She put her hand on her stomach, under the elastic of her sleep shorts, and stopped. She moved her hand to her sternum. She lay with her hand on her sternum and her eyes open in the dark and did not let herself think about him touching her and did not let herself not think about him.
