Acts of Service

by Lillian Fishman

Sure, Nathan said, a familiar grin in his voice.

Yes, he said, I’m happy to hear your voice.

Just so you know, I’m pissed at you. Are you really? I turned around on my heel on the sidewalk, leaning first the right side of my body and then the left against the cold stone façade. Nathan was quiet. Still grinning, I imagined. No, I said. Not really. But fuck you. I really am sorry about all this, Nathan said. I miss you, you know.

But what could I say? Not one day had passed since I’d met Nathan that I did not feel in some way under his thumb, yet I chose him again and again; it was a manipulation that sated me, one in which I participated. If I had left him behind, he would have let me go wordlessly, I had never doubted it.

I was madly humbled by the vastness and the wonder of my certainty, a blunted version of which I had felt two decades earlier while sitting beside my father in a church pew. I could see it all from above, like a pearly, singing map.

What better way could there be to live? To be in constant motion toward something perfect, a motion that would carry you to the end of your life?

It was warm on the sidewalk, and the air smelled of baked pretzels.

So it’s very hard to try to paint that—especially since it’s sort of a secret, a secret life, and I have to respect that—to represent that process of being so afraid, of being jealous, of being neglected and hurt, even though I crave it, all that, and I want to push through.

And I don’t have to worry about my body, what I’m doing, how I look or anything like that. I’m just absorbed by him, by his body. It’s entirely different. Sorry I’m telling you all of this out of the blue,

look for what was at my very core, for what was me beneath all the noise, as though there existed a sexual truth that was born in me, immune to every social lesson about what is sinister and what is sweet. At my very core were only the smallest seeds of desire,

While I walked away from the gallery Nathan was at home with his wife, his hand touching her sleeve as he passed her in the kitchen, in that part of the apartment he had never shown to me. Or maybe he was beside her in bed. His watch was on his wrist, or it was on the side table where it always rested while he looked at me.

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.

We love what disturbs us if it chooses us and tells us how we matter. Don’t we love a cashed check, a passport, the touch of a president’s hand, though each pleasure rests on a cruelty just beyond our sight? The finger points, without equivocating, at us, and we wonder at being chosen.