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Going over to Rob’s house offered me a few precious minutes or hours of respite. It felt effortless and light, a completely levelheaded sex arrangement. We regularly patted each other on the back for being the world’s chillest sidepieces. Of course, despite its lack of histrionics, my relationship with Rob ran roughshod over my own morals. I was lying to my partner and routinely ashamed of my selfishness. I knew somewhere deep in the recesses of my concupiscent mind that this cathartic sex was going to break any lingering bond I had with Aaron. In a certain way, that was precisely the appeal.
What happened next didn’t feel like liberation so much as demolition. After midnight, I started texting with a sweet, respectful software engineer I’d seen a few times before, aboveboard, within the parameters of Aaron’s and my rules. Eventually it became clear that I was, at that moment, again going to break those rules. I slipped out wearing nothing but a sundress to go meet the guy while Aaron was dead to the world. When I walked through my own door at four a.m., knees buckling and hair a mess, there was a large part of me that wished Aaron would wake up and demand to know where I’d been—not just because the despair was starting to creep back and an angry confrontation would have been more satisfying than nothingness, but because I knew it was over, and I wanted him to do the honors.
He didn’t. I don’t want this, I thought: not this relationship, not an affair, not a life devoid of the erotic. A few weeks later, I moved out.
I thought back to the best sex I’d had in recent memory: the topaz pellet, my sweaty face on Rob’s couch, limbs tied up, lava lake of desire completely exposed. I was so disarmed, so trusting. That wasn’t the kind of sex you had with a one-night stand. Despite our best efforts, Rob and I had failed to keep it “casual,” and that was with our respective partners acting as emotional buffers. The high stakes of seeing Rob had also heightened the hotness. It wasn’t just sex but forbidden sex—a classic trope, of course, a source of eroticism that depended on dishonesty and the risk of negative consequences. That kind of thrill felt both inaccessible and antithetical to a slut with integrity. I wanted my hookups to be both fulfilling and morally sound.
Almost right away, I was confronted with a dilemma that has long complicated the success rate of casual sex, even between two upstanding humans. How could I have satisfying sex while feeling safe but not bored, cared for but not smothered in sentimentality? How could I stay true to my feelings but not be “too much”?
Facetious critiques of the theory and its resulting law expressed concern that enthusiastic consent would make sex artificial and sterile, requiring awkward checklists. Others gave the false impression that fishing for one “yes” and moving on was good enough, rather than interpreting consent as a fluid, ongoing process. Friedman would later clarify that enthusiastic consent is a more active process than just following rules or waiting for a green light; it’s “a humanizing ethic of sex.” Truly internalizing the values of consent, she wrote, must include “emotional literacy”—the ability to be vulnerable, and to be trusted with others’ vulnerability.
When I first met concussion specialist Dr. Michael Collins, after three and a half years of suffering from post-concussive syndrome, he said, “If you remember only one thing from this meeting, remember this: run towards the danger.” In order for my brain to recover from a traumatic injury, I had to retrain it to strength by charging towards the very activities that triggered my symptoms. This was a paradigm shift for me—to greet and welcome the things I had previously avoided.
As I recovered from my concussion, “run towards the danger” became a kind of incantation for me in relation to the rest of my life. I began to hear it as a challenge to take on the project of addressing and questioning my own narratives.
When it came to learning—or indeed any activity of any sort—my father believed that everything must be for the sake of itself rather than some greater ambition. The story my father told most often about himself as a youth was one in which, at the last moment, he ran in a race he had not trained for. He had been asked to replace a sick runner to represent his school. Not caring about running particularly, and knowing he had no chance of winning, he made a game for himself: he would treat the passing of each runner in front of him as a major victory. And so he ran the race this way, trying to pass each runner as though it were the end goal, celebrating each small triumph, until the end, when he suddenly realized there was only one more runner in front of him. He gunned towards the finish line, bewildered by the unexpected ending of having won the entire race.
It was a self-aggrandizing story, but he told it with such intense drama that, listening to it, you rooted for him to pass each person he was racing against and celebrated with him each time he did. This was emblematic of his relationship to success. He believed it was acceptable only if it had been realized effortlessly, without ambition, almost by accident, and born out of a love of the moment, a commitment to overcoming the present, immediate challenge, instead of a long-term strategy. I loved his stories, and their out-of-step-with-society perspective, even if I had heard most of them a thousand times.
So it wasn’t an unhappy relationship with my dad, just a very complicated one, just a very adult one, in a house that was falling apart with mice and moths infesting many rooms, and far too many conversations about the tragic pathos of pedophiles.
damn
The White Knight, who Alice meets towards the end of the book, is clearly based on Dodgson himself, a bumbling, incompetent eccentric who so wants Alice to be okay and ultimately helps her to find the final square of the chess game, where she will turn from a pawn into a Queen, thus abandoning him. In these scenes, with Tom Wood playing the White Knight, I played a peculiar concoction of love and scorn. These dynamics were familiar to me. I had spent a life on film sets, my puberty unfolding in front of dozens of men with no sense (or care) of what was appropriate to say or not say in front of children or of the boundaries between adulthood and childhood. The size of my breasts had been commented on, often, through the years. I had experienced unhidden yearning from people three times my age. I had heard explicit conversations about sex or had had them directed straight at me. I dealt with all this by wielding the only power I had, which at the time felt very real and potent: I could mock these men to their faces, I could say whatever I wanted, I could be as mean and bad and hurtful as I pleased. Because we both knew that, as a child who had felt their desire, I had something on them.
On my days off, I took the train to Toronto to see Corey. We had a place together in the Gay Village, a sixth-floor boxy apartment with little light in a 1960s high-rise. It had no furniture. We would sleep on the floor together, our possessions limited to two little candle holders with cut-outs in them that cast stars on the ceiling as we lay together in sleeping bags. We also had a goblet with grasshoppers carved into it, given to me by the legendary actor Bill Needles, who had told me he thought Corey was “adorable.” He told me that he had had this grasshopper glass in every house he had lived in as an adult and it had brought him good luck. “It’s time to pass it along to someone who needs it,” he had said.
just, evocative
Now, when I said goodbye to the White Knight in that penultimate scene, I could not stop the tears from flooding down my face as I said “I hope it encouraged him.” I watched him, losing his things out of the hole in his sack, as he trotted on alone, unawares. I wished there was something I could do for him. I hated Alice Liddell for abandoning Charles Dodgson by fleeing her childhood into womanhood. I hated that my dad left chicken pot pies on the stovetop for a week, insisting they didn’t need to be refrigerated, or that he made the red cabbage three weeks before Christmas dinner, and that the cards he played solitaire with no longer had images on them. I tried to block out the mornings I had woken up to find him, still sleepless, staring at reams of papers on the dining room table, full of tiny, neatly written mathematical equations, numbers doubling and quadrupling until he ran out of space in the millions. (I later discovered he was trying to ascertain how many humans had had to copulate in order to produce him, and how many of those couplings were likely rapes. “How much violence was I the product of?” he said, looking helpless and childlike.) I wonder, in retrospect, if these moments were signs of a typical eccentric Englishman who’d never had to do a single domestic duty until his wife died, or of mental illness, or early signs of the dementia that would be diagnosed many years later. I suppose I’ll never know, and there is something I can’t help but find funny about how closely these states might resemble each other.
On a visit home one weekend shortly after I had moved out, I found a half-written letter to his sister Janet in England. He wrote that a mammal’s purpose in life was to bear and raise their young. Now that I was gone, his life had no purpose. He’d thought he would have a few more years left of purpose. But I had left so young. He wrote this in a detached, intellectual way that implied it was a subject of some interest but not heartbreak. I later found a reply from his sister in which she attempted to comfort him, saying, “I’m sure your Sarah will change her mind and come back to you soon.” But I never did.
Around this time, my dad, when I would see him occasionally, would sing to himself, with a little side grin, “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?”