Acts of Service

by Lillian Fishman

My body was crying out that I was not fulfilling my purpose. I was meant to have sex—probably with some wild number of people. Maybe it was more savage than that, that I was meant not to fuck but to get fucked. The purpose of my life at large remained mysterious, but I had come around to the idea that my purpose as a body was simple.

The only real experience she’d had of her sexuality, of any relationship, was that terrifying first, in which every desire and act seems to determine who you’ll be for the rest of your life.

Most men seemed hardly to exist for me, except nebulously, as acquaintances or obstacles. And then, occasionally, in the presence of a man who exuded power, I would feel a kind of weightlessness; I could feel myself growing soft and dimpling amiably under even a light touch of his attention.

It takes a little bit of sex to remember you don’t really know people when you see them on the street. Sex forces you back into awe—reveals to you just how difficult it is to know someone, just how much attention and self-delusion are required to conjure love.

For the shine of life, I thought, immense teams of participants were required: Men were required, women were required, respect and disrespect were required, love and the lust of hatred required.

the way romance with a woman so often asked that I advocate for myself and trust that I would be loved once I had shown how I could care for and excite her, how this kind of relationship seemed to rely on my convincing a woman of my value?

It occurred to me that maybe they continued to see me not because I was a great fuck but because I didn’t cause trouble.

Had I ever fucked this way? With such devotion that I forgot myself?

And yet I knew that the hour in which sex occurred was the least superficial thing: For that hour, at least, I was absolutely real and present, capable of feeling, intuition, care, vulnerability.

I moved between high and low emotions with speed. If I couldn’t live ecstatically, at least I could live at this fever pitch, which on the best days allowed for ecstasy.

I grew up talking about sex as this thing women should have however they want it, sexual freedom as this great sort of pinnacle beyond morality or anything provincial. So I’m supposed to think I can’t damage myself, that things don’t hurt me, if I choose them, if I see them clearly? Isn’t that just the deepest submission to power? Here, fine, I can’t resist this anymore?

I felt the sharp awareness that this was my real life, that it would be my real life as soon as he walked through the door. Nathan would no longer be confined to places I remembered for no reason other than that he had provided them.

All the terms by which I imagined he valued me had been exhausted: My sex no longer surprised him; my body was no longer a novelty. Somehow my beauty was so exquisite that it continued to fascinate him. Or, if it was no longer my beauty that he craved, he had found something in me to admire.

had chosen to treat Nathan as something more than a trifle—to treat him as real—because he had given my trifling life, in all its greed and flirtatiousness and secrecy, its absolute reality.

How could it be that I would be happy if I never saw him again, or if I encountered him in the next minute? There was nothing rational about my feeling but I knew that when I thought I was acting rationally I was only trying to justify an inchoate desire. There was nothing rational in my feeling but it was the most generous feeling I could remember.