All Fours

by Miranda July

Sometimes I could hear Harris’s dick whistling impatiently like a teakettle, at higher and higher pitches until I finally couldn’t take it and so I initiated.

One day when we were both ready I would reveal my whole self to Harris; this would be like presenting a sweater knitted in secrecy. Oh. My. God, he would say. How did you find time to do this?! Just here and there, whenever I could. Sometimes even with you right there beside me. I didn’t even know you could knit! There are a lot of things you don’t know about me; that’s the whole point of this sweater metaphor. Of course if you’re knitting for years the sweater eventually becomes so huge that it simply can’t be hidden.

At two a.m. PST I was still mourning and jerking off, but eyebags weren’t going to make or break anything at this point. —

the fact that she uses jerking off is so funny to me

“I’m a dancer,” he said abruptly. “Not like a ballet dancer but more what you would probably call hip-hop. Street.”

Why is this so funny

Suddenly I could not leave the bathroom quickly enough, I nearly ran to him. He put his arm around me and we walked out into the night.

Oh brother

He ran his hand over the silk coverlet. “It’s very girly,” I said. “I love it.” We stared at the bed like it was doing something interesting. “But maybe,” he added, “we shouldn’t lie down on it. That might be too tempting. For me.” Also it was his mattress, under there. His marriage bed.

This is fucked up

I picked up my phone and texted: I adore you. I don’t regret anything. I want to put every part of your body in my mouth.

GIRL!??!!!???!?

I spent the day preparing to see him, cleaning and smoothing my body. I pushed my finger deep inside my pussy and tasted it, as if his tongue would soon be in there and I might be able to adjust the flavor. But it tasted fine. I thought a young man with a hard dick would find the taste satisfactory.

oh she is a complete freak

“I wondered if we could—” And he showed me, turning onto his side and reaching for me. I scooted backward into him. He folded his arms around me, we lay like a married couple in a bed and the song went, I’ve been thinking ’bout you, you know, know, know. When he got too hard we rolled apart.

Right

The R&B had changed to hip-hop. He suddenly jumped to his feet and turned up the volume. Was he about to start dancing? I casually rose and made my way to the bathroom, shutting the door behind me. I rubbed lip balm on my lips and cheeks and fixed my hair. He was definitely dancing out there. Which was a little awkward. What was I going to do—stand there and watch and then clap when he was done? Or maybe just pretend it was normal. Yeah, that was the way to go with this.

Is this real

The point was, I had it all. Or I had a lot of things, including a meeting with someone who had it all.

“You love me but you wouldn’t leave your husband for me.” I stared at him, agog. Was he insane? Just switch horses? And Sam would be his, what—stepchild? Harris was an adult, my partner. I didn’t respond. It was like a ghost asking you to leave your husband for them—there was no kind way to say But you’re see-through. He got the message anyway.

I watched him walk to the bathroom. I’m thinking something, I thought. What am I thinking? I jumped up and before he completely realized I was behind him, I stuck my open palm in the stream of his hot pee, catching an overflowing handful.

I am actually losing my mind

Come back to me, big dick, please take this heartache away. He is lost o’er the sea, my big dick. I cried with my mouth hanging open, the sad, empty place where the dick should be, and then, after a while, I just silently held the crying dog but left my mouth gaping like a distended stomach, loose and dumb.

“Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age. Then you have to have lived experiences or you’ll go batty. Which is the normal thing: dementia, memory loss, Alzheimer’s—all more common in women. Fantasy consumes them until they can’t tell what from what.”

Jordi was gobsmacked. For the first time in years she felt the need to smoke a cigarette so I walked with her to the corner store, where she bought a pack of yellow American Spirits.

It was easy to imagine us earnestly saying too much or the exact wrong phrase—something accidentally but unforgettably disturbing—so we wrote a script together, making edits in a shared Google doc.

You people are insane

Back when Harris and I slept together I would often whisper, Let’s dream the same dream, right after we turned out the lights. He took it as a sweet sign-off, but I yearned for this joint dream so hard my teeth hurt. He didn’t understand that you could create a world—a fantasy, a nightmare—and bring other people into it, not just artistically but in life. I was pretty good at getting people to meet me in my mind, but ultimately no one wanted to stay there.