For You, The Stars
Chapter Seven: Installment 5
Cecilia started getting a little self conscious about me knowing her secret and about all the attention I’d been paying to her sexual dysfunction. To get me to stop prying and stop trying so hard, she started asking me about my fantasies and then made a point of fulfilling them. I had mentioned once that I’d always wanted to get head in a shower, so she got down on her knees in the shower off of her little room and crossed that one off the list.
We got hold of some cocaine and used it in our sexual play. That was sort of interesting since it put us both into the same kind of space, never quite reaching the climax but suspended in a state of high arousal. Much later I remember reading that it’s dangerous to apply cocaine directly to mucous membranes, but nothing really bad seemed to happen because of it.
We’d sometimes ride the bus together between the city and her sister’s place, and when we were traveling at night, she liked to fondle me and then, after getting me hard, lean across the seat and take me into her mouth. I wasn’t sure if she wanted to get caught or not, but whenever anyone came down the aisle she’d sit straight up and act like nothing was happening.
I showed her how peep shows worked in the tenderloin, but they didn’t like us both going into the booths together, which I thought was kind of ironic, given that men were always trysting in those spots with other men.
We even went to one of those old-school porno theatres where you bought a ticket and sat in seats and watched the movie on a big screen with a bunch of other perverts in the audience. She asked when the next movie was starting and the ticket taker laughed. I explained to her that they just show the movies one after another and nobody worries about when they’re starting or ending.
Partway through the movie (one of the many sequels to Taboo), Cecilia leaned over to me and told me that the old black man sitting next to her had taken his penis out. I couldn’t tell if this was a problem for her or not.
“Do you want to move?” I whispered
“No, it’s OK,” she said.
“Do you want to touch him?” I said.
“Not really,” she said.
Later we agreed that it must have been a turn on for him to have this sexy young white girl next to him while he exposed himself.
Cecilia told me that her parents were coming out to visit. I’d met them once before, at my college graduation, but I wasn’t looking forward to seeing them now. All I could think about was that Cecilia was still suffering from this molestation in her family and that everyone else just wanted her to drop it.
She’d gotten love and sex mixed up and nobody else seemed to care.
I did agree to go out with her parents for dinner one night.
That evening she modeled some of the clothes she’d been shopping for with her folks. They were the kind of outfits she favored, mostly matching shorty tops and miniskirts, showing her bare midriff. One outfit was in a sort of gold brown, and another was black.
The clothes were form fitting, they really showd off her curves and they shaped her breasts high and prominent. I tried to picture her trying these on for her mom and dad.
I had in mind the typical father saying, “You’re not going out dressed like that!”
“Does your dad like seeing you dress this way?” I asked her.
“Sure, why wouldn’t he?” she said, defensive.
“Well, you know…” I said. “I mean, most dads don’t—”
“He likes knowing I’m his little sexy girl,” she said, cutting me off.
I let it drop.
I needed someone else to talk to about all of this confusion, so against my better judgement I wrote a letter to Maura hinting at the problem. She and I were still corresponding regularly, although I hadn’t sent her any more tapes for a while.
Cecilia knew about Maura. She had noticed the big folder full of letters prominently labeled in my bedroom, and having no boundaries one afternoon she had read a bunch of the letters from Maura. She asked me about her and I told her how I had pursued her all through college and she had slept with all kinds of other guys but had always freaked out around me and cut me off, and how somehow that had made me want her all the more.
I emphasized that I knew that the “relationship” if you could call it that, that we were having in our letters wasn’t real. It was romanticized and it had something to do with us both trying to be writers and writing ourselves into a story where we were better, cooler, sexier, more desirable than we were in real life.
We were both having real relationships in our real lives, but we both enjoyed having this alternate channel through which to explore our possible selves. Maura sent me books she was reading and books she thought I should read and books about literary romances. I told Maura about Simone and Dannie and Cecilia—partly to be brutally honest but a big part of it was I just wanted her to be jealous and to see me as someone who could actually get a girl, if not her.
Cecilia knew about the thing Maura and I had about the song Crazy Fingers, how I had sung it to her softly on one of our good days when we were just hanging out together, spooning, and how I now associated that song with her and how I somehow rarely ever managed to hear that song live even though I was going to, like twenty or more Dead shows a year.
Maura wrote back a week or so later and told me a story about incest from her own family but really had no advice to offer and, really, how could she?
For You, The Stars
Chapter Seven: Installment 4
It got worse.
Over the next few days I encouraged Cecilia to talk to me more about the abuse she had suffered as a child. It was obvious she blamed herself and that her self-esteem was lower than I had realized, although I guess in retrospect the warning signs were there: her use of her sexuality for seduction but her take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward sex itself, and of course the big problem that brought it all to light.
It turns out that this cousin of hers, the bastard, had continued taking advantage of her for several years. Eventually teaching her how to give him blowjobs. It made my flesh crawl, the thought of using a little girl like that, and worse yet a member of his own family.
For a long time she thought it was only happening to her, first that there was something special about her that was earning her all this close attention from the guy, and later that there was something particularly wrong about her that was making it all happen.
Then one day, she told me, she was swimming in her family’s pool and listening to her two older sisters, Bella and Laurie talking about their cousin. From the conversation, it was obvious that he had groomed them both at younger ages for his abusive attention until they had made him stop or he had lost interest in them.
“At least it never happened to Cecilia,” said Laurie.
That’s when she told them.
I was preoccupied with this revalation. It was like a nightmare, a glimpse into a family horror I couldn’t fully fathom. I thought my only family life was fucked up in its own way. There was a reason I was living 3000 miles away. I didn’t have to face my alcoholic father with his alternating rages and pathetic cries for sympathy. But at least in my family the siblings looked out for each other, and my cousins seemed pretty decent too, not that I saw them much growing up.
I called Paulie in LA to talk about it. I don’t know why. Maybe because he had gone out with Bella in college and maybe had heard the story before. Maybe I thought he could give me a clue about what to do, how to help. I was surprised that he didn’t see it all as such a big deal.
“Daniel,” he said. “You have no idea how common this is. It’s in almost every family.”
“But it’s so messed up,” I said. “I can’t accept that it’s normal.”
“I didn’t say normal,” he said. “But it is everywhere.”
“Well,” I said. “It’s had a devastating effect on Cecilia. For one thing,” and her I lowered my voice, because I was calling long distance from the repro room at work, “she can’t come because of it.”
“Dude, that does suck,” said Paulie.
“Yeah, so there’s this creepy third person, like a phantom, visiting us in bed and making her not enjoy sex. It makes me want to track him down.”
“Has Cecilia every talked to a psychiatrist?”
“No, I don’t think so. She went to a counselor at that fancy prep school for fucked up kids she got kicked out of, but I don’t think she talked about the abuse with him.”
“Well, therapy could help.”
“True…. So did Bella ever mention these incidents to you?”
“No, she never did.”
I called Bella too, in New York. She told me that she didn’t like to dwell on this. She was all about getting over it and forgetting it and not staying stuck in the past. That sounded like denial to me, but who was I to judge someone else’s coping mechanism?
I told her that Cecilia wasn’t having as easy a time getting over it and that I thought her whole family needed to deal with it together, but she said that would just make things worse.
“When Cecilia first told us it was happening to her too we went to everybody. We talked to mom and dad and we talked to our uncle and aunt. They made Bobby get psychological help even though he at first denied anything had happened and later he said that it was always totally mutual, which is not true.
“Our grandmother got rid of all of her pictures of him when she found out. To this day she won’t talk to him or about him.”
“So he hasn’t apologized or even admitted responsibility?”
“No.”
“Wow,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to see him at a family reunion. I wouldn’t want him near my kids, if I had kids.”
“Yeah,” she said. “He wouldn’t be welcome at my house if I had daughters.”
My anger didn’t subside. If anything, the complacency of Cecilia’s family made me more angry. Couldn’t anyone see how badly she had been hurt? I talked to her about making trying to get everyone in her family, her sisters and parents, into some kind of group family counseling thing, but she said that everyone would give her a hard time for stirring up the past. In some ways they were an old-fashioned Catholic family and the guilt was unbearable.
I told Cecilia she could talk about it if she wanted to or she could not talk about it. It was up to her. I’d be there for her no matter what. Which was true up to a point.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Seven: Installment 3
I was staring at my boss’s closely cropped beard as he started talking about how he’d noticed I’d been out sick a lot lately. He didn’t mention that it was usually (always) on Monday, and he wasn’t really calling me on it. Instead he was kind of speaking in code. He said he was worried that I wasn’t feeling well lately and that maybe the job was getting me down.
It’s true that I didn’t care about the job much, but I sort of played along as he tried to explore ways to make the job more interesting. I was kind of surprised. The firm had been tightening its belt, letting a few architects go lately.
But I also wasn’t surprised. He was a young guy on the go. He wanted to modernize the place. My facility with spreadsheets and recordkeeping on the PC was part of his vision of a high-tech architecture firm. He asked me if I’d like to be trained on a computer-aided design program and discussed how maybe I could do some of the basic layout work for the cookie-cutter hospital-bathroom type blueprints.
“Sure,” I said. “That might be interesting.” But my mind was wandering.
Two days later, Cecilia called me at work and said, “I got it,” and then hung up.
I felt relieved, I realized, that I wasn’t going to have to tell anybody in my family about this.
I called her back and said maybe I could come up to Marin that night, maybe we could celebrate.
“Let’s wait till the weekend,” she said.
I swore to myself I’d never take that risk again.
The near-miss left me with a jumble of emotions. With all the risk gone it felt safer to indulge the macho side of my reaction: the feeling of potency. We had ducked the Catholic-guilt punishment for our shenanigans that rainy day. We got away with it. I was a stud. Or maybe I was infertile. Hmm, forget that line of thought.
When I got up to Cecilia’s sister’s house on Friday night she was waiting for me in bed, wearing a purple satin-y teddy. I pounced on her. Goddammit I was going to make her come once and for all. I told her that. I was kissing her neck, nibbling her ear. I said, “You’re going to come tonight. I’m not going to give up till you get your orgasm.” I growled. She clutched at me.
I went down on her. She got close, so close that with another woman I’d probably have believed she’d made it, but again — right on the threshhold — she pulled away. Her thighs spasmed, she clenched them together. She rolled onto her side and groaned.
“What is it?” I said, almost yelling at her. “What’s the matter? What am I doing wrong?”
I acted like it was about me.
“Nothing. It’s not you, she said. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“We have to talk about it,” I said. “I can’t stand it like this. Even if you don’t care, it matters to me.”
“Oh, I care,” she said. “Believe me. I want to come, I do.”
I did believe her. I didn’t want to make her feel bad so I just held her for a long time. My pants were still bunched around my ankles so I kicked them off and pushed them over the edge of her bed. I held her in a spoon position. She sort of cried but without tears. Her face got puffy and her shoulders heaved.
“If you don’t want to talk about it, it’s OK,” I said. I hummed Ripple in her ear.
If I knew the way
I would take you home
La la la-la
After a while she said, still turned away from me, “Let’s talk.”
“OK,” I said. “One question: Have you never had an orgasm?”
“I think maybe, once, I did,” she said.
“When was this?”
“When I was little,” she said. “We were staying at our cousins’. I was about eight. I was flirting with one of the boys, who was a teenager, probably about 15. He was flirting back. He made me feel really pretty.”
“Oh, man,” I said. “What happened.”
“Well, everyone fell asleep and it was just us left sitting on the couch in the livingroom. There was a fireplace with the end of a fire in it, I remember.
“I think he had a beer and gave me some of it. I felt very grown up getting all of his attention.
“He said, ‘Look what you’re doing to me,’ and he showed me he, like, had an…. He had a hard-on. He showed me through his pants, like. He said I was turning him on.”
“Did he act like that was your fault. Like you owed it to him to help him get off?”
“No, it wasn’t like that,” she said. “He was sweet about it. Let me tell this.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I won’t interrupt.”
“I wanted to touch it, you know just through his pants. I though it was kind of amazing that I would have an effect on him like that. He said no. He said that would be wrong.”
“Good,” I said.
“Shut up. You said you wouldn’t interrupt. He said it was OK for us to kiss, though. I said, ‘But we’re cousins,’ and he made a joke about ‘Kissing cousins,’ so he kissed me and it was nice.
“Then he said, ‘Let me show you something cool.’ He told me to lie on my stomach, and he pushed my skirt up to my waist. I remember I was hot from the fire but that the air also felt cool on my legs. He started sliding my panties down a little. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he said ‘Just wait— it’s a surprise.’
“Then I felt something wet— his mouth I guess, maybe his tongue… down there.”
“On your puss?” I said.
“Actually, I think he was kissing my butthole, or licking it. I’m not really sure. My memory of that night isn’t as clear as I’m making it seem. I’ve only told a few people about this.
“At one point, his mom came downstairs and we were both afraid. He put a pillow over my butt and told his mom we were just hanging out talking. She only got partway down the stairs. She just said that I shouldn’t stay up too late and told us to make sure the fire was out before we went to bed.
“Eventually, I think he made me come. I felt something like I’d never felt before. It was kind of amazing, but it also freaked me out. As soon as it happened I felt kind of sick. It’s like I knew what we were doing was wrong and I felt like it was my fault, like I had seduced him.
“He told me I had been teasing him all day. I don’t think I was, but maybe I was flirting.”
“It couldn’t be your fault,” I said. “You were eight, for God’s sake.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m just telling you how it felt.
“Right after he made me come — I’m sure he did — I pulled away. I pulled my underwear back up and I told him I had to go to bed. I went to bed without brushing my teeth, without peeing, without wiping myself where I still felt wet from his mouth. I was lying awake in bed feeling like I was going to get in trouble in the morning, but nothing happened.”
Then she was quiet.
After about ten minutes of letting it sink in, I said, “Man, that is really rough. So you’ve never been able to come since then?”
“Yeah,” she said. “When I started fooling around for real, in high school, the first time I got close I remembered that night just when I was about to come and I felt sick to my stomach and I couldn’t do it. That happens every time now.”
“Jesus,” I said. I felt an unfamiliar form of rage. I’m not a violent person. I usually try to talk my way out of fights, but I was consumed with the urge to find this cousin asshole and beat the shit out of him. For what he did to Cecilia and to what he was still doing to my sex life.
For You, The Stars
Chapter Seven, installment 2
I got into a routine of spending nearly every weekend up in Marin. Usually on Sunday night we’d smoke a joint with Cecilia’s sister and brother-in-law and then fire up the hot tub. We’d end up going to be late and in the morning when the alarm went off I’d be totally not in the mood to dress in the work clothes I’d packed, walk down to the bus stop and ride across the Golden Gate Bridge to work.
I got in the habit of calling in sick just about every other Monday. Though I didn’t particularly want to get fired, the job never seemed important compared to sleeping in in Cecilia’s warm bed and then spending a relaxing day with her babysitting and sunbathing, listening to music and when the baby was asleep sometimes, getting high.
As I was getting ready to take the bus into the city one Monday evening (Cecilia never walked me to the bus stop - she usually waved goodbye from the garage just outside the door to her room), out of the blue she said, “My period’s overdue.”
“How late?”
“Four days.”
“Shit, are you usually pretty regular?”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t want to miss my bus so I said, “Can we talk about this on the phone tonight?”
“Like, whatever,” she said.
I called her before going to bed and said, “Well…”
“Well, what?”
“Did you get it yet?”
“Uh… no,” she said, like I was an idiot. But it was possible.
“I’ve never been in this situation before,” I said.
“Well neither have I,” she said, as if she was offended that I was trying to imply that maybe she had.
“Well I didn’t know,” I said.
This was not like me, I thought. I felt kind of like I had after cheating on Simone. Like I was turning into someone I didn’t recognize. I had felt like things were so much more straightforward with Cecilia. We had an open relationship, so it was impossible to cheat and I didn’t have to put on a false front.
Once again, though, I somehow had managed to violate my own personal code. I mean, I never had sex without protection. I wasn’t one of those guys who complained about condoms and tried to get out of using them. Sure, I preferred it if the girl was on the pill or had a diaphragm or whatever, but it’s not like I thought it was her sole responsibility.
I was the kind of guy who talked these things over in advance, even at the expense of spontaneity.
I was a good guy.
That’s what I used to think. Now I was thinking if Cecilia was pregnant it was because of me, because of impulsive in-the-door-way sex, with no protection. Because of my misreading the signals and finishing up inside her. Although, what was I supposed to do? It felt right at the time. It felt like what she wanted. I thought she wanted me to take risks and be cool. What did I know?
“Have you thought about what we should do if—?”
“If I’m pregnant?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Of course I’ve thought about it,” she said.
“I’ll support whatever decision you make,” I said, being the good guy again, in my own mind. “And if you decide, you know, to get an abortion— or whatever— of course I’ll pay my share.”
“Gee, thanks,” she said.
“Wow,” I said. “We could actually have a kid. I’ve never gotten anyone pregnant.”
“Yeah, cool,” she said, sarcastically.
When Dave got home from his work on the peninsula, I told him about my possible predicament.
We were sitting in the living room with English Settlement playing quietly on the stereo.
“Whew,” he whistled. “That sucks.”
“I know,” I said. “I feel like an idiot. This is what happens to stupid people.”
“What are you going to do?”
“It’s not my decision,” I said. “Whatever she wants to do I’ll go along with.”
“Really? You don’t care one way or the other?”
“It’s not that I don’t care— I just don’t think it should be up to me. I mean if she asks my opinion I’ll give it to her.”
“What is your opinion?”
“I don’t really know,” I said. “This has never happened to me before.”
“I can’t see you raising a kid.”
“Yeah, that isn’t going to happen. I mean, we’re both Catholic, technically. I don’t even really know how she feels about abortion. I know some of her friends have had them. We’ve talked about that. Girls today seem to take it for granted as something that might have to happen.
“If she does have a baby, though, I think we’d have to give it up for adoption.”
“That would be weird, knowing you had a kid out there,” said Dave.
“I know,” I said. “I’ll tell you something really weird, though.”
“What?”
“I know it sounds stupid, but in a way I feel kind of proud of this. Like… I dont want to make a baby but I guess now I know I can, or maybe I do. I don’t actually know. But just thinking about the possibility, in a weird way it seems kind of cool.”
“I don’t think that’s weird but it’s definitely not cool.”
I called her again from work the next day.
“We could get married,” I said, bluffing.
“Yeah, right,” she said.
“Well, we could.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I think we would have a cool baby.”
“Yeah, you’re looks and my brains,” she said.
“Oh, shut up,” I said. “How many times do I have to tell you you’re smart before you’ll believe me?”
I waited for her to tell me I was good looking too, but she plowed ahead.
“I’m not ready to have a baby,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “Me neither.”
“For one thing, it would mess up my body, my hips. Nothing would fit.”
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “That too. Look, maybe this is just a fluke.”
We were still on the phone talking about random stuff when my boss stuck his head around my cubicle wall and asked me to come into his office.