That Thing You Do With Your Mouth: The Sexual Autobiography of Samantha Matthews as Told to David Shields by David Shields, Samantha Matthews Page B

him down today as he rode his bike down the street, this guy, this flash, dashing monster on wheels. Guilty, addicted, like a moth to flame—there must be another expression. I emphatically suggested lunch next week. Not dinner. I’m getting better. Right?
    It’s been building for a while now and yesterday William and I directly discussed it: we’re in the process of deciding whether we can be together. I’m just trying to get through each day with work and kids.
    Heading to the cinema now to clear my head and/or fill it with things that have nothing to do with all this…
    Watching actors in a film, I watch their backs/shoulders when they’re listening to the other actor who has the close-up. I watch to see if I can see them breathing, how quickly or slowly, or the pulse in their neck—makes them real. On airplanes or buses or Metros, same thing: I’m constantly checking to see if I can see someone’s pulse and therise and fall of their chest. I don’t know why. Maybe to see if they’re truly alive. It’s an intimacy thing. It’s something you hear and see only with your lovers. The heartbeat, the sound of the breath. I can sense a vulnerability if I can see the heartbeat in the neck, see what’s really going on in there. I’ve always felt that the whole world is playing a joke on me, that I’m the only human/nonhuman. Perhaps I’m looking for clues in their vital signs.
    When I was six on the playground, I looked down at the shadow my hand was making on the pebbled concrete and had a sudden, overwhelming feeling of not understanding how I got into this body. It was so constricting. I had the feeling that my energy was limitless and was now in a cage. Is my soul trying to connect to something formidably beautiful and larger and feeling frustrated by this physical construct of a human body? Maybe what feels almost spiritual is actually just the manic side of me. Maybe I’m tocada (“ill”). In the eyes during sex, I see/feel that same expansive energy I felt at six on the playground. It grows during orgasm and almost leaves the body—the waves of pleasure from head to toe, limitless, infinite. Right now I’m apart from William, but I can sense him, almost be him for amoment, feel him, feel his nose, his mouth as though they were mine. I am him.
    We’re all star matter, right?
    Maybe I should write Hallmark cards.
    In grad school we were taught to always make your performance about the other person in the scene with you. Your actions were there only to get something from someone else. It’s not about tone or emotion or read or facial expression or posture but desire to make someone else feel something in order to get what you want. In theory, through that approach, something deeper and more honest would always be achieved in the interpretation. You were to forget about yourself. When you forgot about yourself and were focused only on the other person, some very honest things could happen.
    I say this so often: “I hear you”…
    In an OCD sort of way, I still find myself staring at crowds of people—in a stadium, on a crowded bus, on a pedestrian-jammed street, all rubbing/chafing up against oneanother—and I think, They’re all here because two people had sex . All these people. Then I imagine the parents of one person and the parents of another, and then another, all of them passing through their mother’s vagina, the most forbidden place on a woman’s body. And we’re not allowed to talk about that, or look at that, and most definitely not touch that. Especially your mother’s, even though we did when we were born. Well, that’s how I was raised: to feel shameful about something that, in reality, there is no getting around, or we all simply wouldn’t be here. Sex is everything.
    My mom sees me as her selfish mother: I’m abandoning my kids, doing what I want to do with my life,