Boundaries, then, where nothing comes
between us
Sam Hamill, "Many Happy Returns"
The first time a woman opened her legs long enough that I could look for more than the few seconds it took to bend to her with lips and tongue or to climb up blind into her and start moving, I crouched between her thighs to get as close as I could, and I remember even now how the words began to list themselves in my head: pussy, beaver, twat, slit, love muscle, fur, muff, quim, cabbage snatch, box…and all of them but one felt inadequate, and that one was the one I wanted most not to think, the one I'd come to understand as degrading of my lover by its very existence, and yet no other word but cunt captured in my imagination the wet and hairy wildness, the pungent and disheveled and untamed and multi-shaded pink and red and brown and flesh-colored beauty of what I was looking at. I'd seen pictures of course, plenty of them, had discovered as a young teenager that I grew hard at the sight of them, but those images of carefully coiffed, sometimes completely shaven, meticulously arranged specimens of female genitalia, I understood now, were so obviously composed, so clearly intended as artifice, that I felt, looking at my lover, as if I were seeing a cunt for the first time.
I stared for so long that she became uncomfortable, "What are you looking at? Is something wrong down there? Answer me!"
"You're beautiful," I answered, and I know it sounds like something out of a romance novel, but the words came in a whisper, and I looked up at her and I smiled, and then I tried in everything I did next with my fingers and my lips and my tongue to make sure she knew that I'd meant what I said, and when she asked me to fuck her, her word, not mine, tears—but how do I write this without sounding like a braggart? How do I make you see that this is really how I remember it and that this memory, even more than it makes me feel good about myself, which of course it does, humbles me and fills me with awe and gratitude—tears had risen into her eyes. It was, she explained as we lay together afterward, the first time a man had told her she was beautiful "down there," much less made love to her in a way that convinced her he really meant it.
"And all those other times?" I wondered to myself, "What had I meant then? What had she understood my meaning to be?"
