Acts of Service

by Lillian Fishman

I don’t think you’re really jealous of anyone. You’re too vain for that. But you like proof. Proof of desire, proof of sex, proof of pleasure. In part that’s why I thought you might like having those pictures taken.

We had been made to believe that beauty was suspect, vanity was sin, desire was predatory. We believed we were at our most attractive when shy and acquiescent toward each other.

I had enjoyed being no more than a beauty to him but now it hurt me to remember that this was all I was.

But wasn’t that the nature of all love? Gratitude, for how we had been made to feel?

My relationship with him had little resemblance to what I knew as love, contained no safety or certainty or real knowledge. It seemed mistaken to assign love to a person with whom I spent few, anonymous hours, who had never answered the phone when I was in crisis or come, for any reason, when I called. But was I still a person who would deny what I felt simply because I disliked it?

His smooth self-assurance, the sense I sometimes had that he was only performing his duties, was replaced by a hunger I had glimpsed in the way he looked at me but hadn’t felt, before, in his touch.

It was erotic to challenge Nathan. Yet in the bottom of my mind I knew what was erotic was the knowledge that, in the course of the hours that followed, I would surrender to him.