not 
Disgrace notes
Posted by Aphra Behn on December 12, 2006
2004. I am waiting in the foyer of a London hotel to meet the man I am having an affair with. My handbag is large and slung from my shoulder. It contains a selection of scarves, condoms, lube and other bits and pieces. I have no other baggage. It is February and there is a light sprinkling of snow on the ground. I am wearing a fur coat. The young man at the desk accepts my payment up front without bothering to ask if I will be wanting a newspaper in the morning. I realise that he assumes that I will be making a profit out of the afternoon, though in fact I am an amateur doing it for fun.
2006. My lover wakes me suddenly out of a sleep he didn’t know I was having. There is some confusion and I end up crying as I tend to when woken quickly from post-coital sleep. He ends up bewildered and distressed. Neither of us know what we are fighting about. Neither of us want a complex scene. As I go down on him, I reflect that oral sex is the great ender of squabbles and that if it weren’t for the risk of infection I would like a tongue piercing. Sometimes I wish I was not quite so sensible.
1982. Students. I have arranged a girls’ night out with a friend. I have a shower, wash my hair and I ruefully acknowledge as I shave my legs that I am preparing my body as I would for a lover. Later, I realise that sex with another woman is the nearest I will get to sex with myself; I love the soft mirror-image of myself in bed beside me.
1983. Still students. I am at a party, a formal ball in fact. The young men are in DJs the young women in satiny gowns. It is late and four of us are piled, kitten-like, in a huge arm chair. For no particular reason I am kissing her escort, and she is kissing mine. Someone elsewhere in the room says “swap partners” but we already have. I look at her and she looks at me. We smile and start kissing each other. The quality of silence in the room changes.
2002. I am standing outside a hotel with my lover and a young girl who works at the hotel. She is bright, funny, clever, sexy, charming. Who wouldn’t fancy her? She is also talkative and, standing in the street lights as we say goodnight, I do not have the time to say to him “I fancy her, do you fancy her?” So the three of us go our separate ways. I see her once again some time later and we go out for a meal and some drinks. She is the first person I tell the story of how I lost my virginity. I don’t sleep with her that time either. Looking back, I am not sure why.
1971. Childhood. I am standing in a secluded part of the playground at school with another girl and a boy. We are playing “aliens”. It consists mainly of cautious explorations of each others’ bodies. There are no kisses. There are no naked parts. There is however sexual tension, though we do not understand it at the time.
2006. Another formal ball. My lover’s gynaecologist is there. He is a little drunk and rather puppyish. Like all male gynaecologists he is deeply charming. He remembers my lover’s hysterectomy and tells him about other work he has done with trans-people since then. He keeps on saying “good on yer, mate”. At one point he blinks at my myopically and says “… but you look so straight….”
The bauria language in India has a word which means “to love falsely”. Well, there’s a thing.It also has a word which means “to love for the last time”.I dread that.
Z said
Wonderfully written AB!
floots said
love this for its title
its confusion
and
its innate sadness
Z said
How interesting. I didn’t see confusion at all in it..
Aphra Behn said
And I didn’t see sadness, though I can see that one could see sadness in it. Now I don’t know if it is a sad piece or not.
Floots and Z, thank you very much for reading it and for commenting.
charlotteotter said
I think this post is beautifully written. I like the way you didn’t follow a time-line or a trajectory, but instead provided snapshots of who and where you’ve been at different times in your life. I detected sadness, but a celebration too.
Aphra Behn said
Thank you Charlotte. I hesitated before posting it.
Sometimes I get wondery about the life I expected to have, (children, labradors, and lovely warm cooking ranges), but then I realise that I know the answer to the question that would have itched and itched and itched at me if I had led that life. The question being “what would I have done if I’d been calling my own shots?”
Dunno which life would have been better, but this version has almost certainly been the most interesting.
Aphra
Random Scot said
Well I didn’t pick-up on sadness or confusion from the initial post – but I did think it was interesting.
Just think, if you’d gone the children-labrador-aga route you could almost be me, sitting here thinking about avenues that were never explored.
Reed said
I read it as a bitter-sweet celebration of opportunites taken and opportunities missed. (But I like bitter-sweet, one of the more interesting and mature of flavours).
And dang, but you’ve had an interesting sex-life *makes jealous face*.
Teuchter said
Interesting and well written, as always.
Just wondering if there was any particular reason for putting the vignettes in the order you did?
Aphra Behn said
Hi Random Scott – I guess we never do know what else would have happened. I do know I tried for the children-labrador-aga route, and someone else has the chidlren and aga, but apparently no labrador.
Bitter-sweet is a good word Reed. And my sex-life hasn’t been that interesting really. This is a reflection on opportunities not taken up, as much as anything else.
A few years ago I was working in Munich and a higher-up boss-man asked how I was finding things. I said it was “entertaining”. He said “at least you didn’t say ‘interesting’; it took me five years to understand what the English mean when they say ‘interesting’.” I am not sure if he realised that what I meant by “entertaining” was “the work is difficult but I’m not going to complain about that because I am Terribly English, the good thing about it is that I like my colleagues”.
No reason for the order it’s written in, Teuchter. I think it is probably the order I wrote it in. It took a while to get it together. I tend to over-write and I wanted this to be as simple as possible.
Thanks to all for reading and commenting.
Aphra
bloglily said
Simple is quite hard to achieve, and you’ve done it beautifully here. I very much like the back and forthness of the pieces, which are powerful individually but really beautiful and effective as a group. Thank you, Aphra.