Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

The intuitive parts of themselves are always highly aggravated when they are together. Intuition only tells them what they want, not how to achieve it, and this is intolerable.

He turned his face into the weight of her hair, basking in her aroma, exulting in it. How he’d found her. No word to describe it except recognition. Some chemical made her for him, him for her; they were not yet too fucked up by life that they wouldn’t realize it.

David was scorch-mouthed, felt strangled by his underpants. His hands, so exquisitely sensitive moments before, were as clumsy as if stuffed inside boxing gloves. He palmed and palmed his hair, which was short and unvarying, off his forehead.

She’s never understood, certainly because she’s never seen a live opera but also because she’s never heard a half-decent performance, not even in part, on TV, that opera, in fact, is the highest redemption of longing. That it’s her own anguish, salvaged by music. The victorious army’s fight song, in defense of her mute, savaged heart.

Surely he would not cross the lawn to make sure Sarah wasn’t crushing her clitoris over a white-knuckled fist in the passenger seat of her ex-boyfriend’s car, in the hope of the sort of orgasm that feels like one’s pleasure torn out by the root: a punishment for the pleasure as well as a final end of it. Still Sarah froze, heart racing in her chest, skull, and crotch. The scent of her lonely exertion wound into the car like an unwilled and shameful secretion, fear’s trickle of urine or mystery’s trickle of blood from the nose.

Angeles, waiting for her old friend, the author. She wasn’t petty, she has never been petty, has never had enough self-possession, or possessed enough self, to afford pettiness, because petty is a way people are who have something to spare.

It had been a sudden pressure on the sternum, a pressure that meant excitement, and dread, and anticipation, and reluctance, all rolled together, but with an emphasis on excitement and anticipation.

Possibly first love, despite all the fuss, is only mating with ideas attached.