Readers Report Back From? Friends With Benefits - The Rumpus.net

* * *

We had been corresponding with each other fairly regularly, and it has now been quite awhile since I?ve heard from you. I was the last one to make contact, so ?the ball is in your court,? as they say. A considerable amount of time has passed since then, though, and perhaps I ought to pick up the slack. Or maybe you didn?t wish to continue the conversation? Is it possible you?ve grown tired of our repartee and would prefer I not try to communicate with you any longer? If this were the case, then it would be wise for me to refrain from attempting another dialogue with you. I wouldn?t want you to grow annoyed with me or to put you in the position of thinking that you must respond in order to spare my feelings. Or maybe I?m overreacting and you?ve been busy and have merely forgotten to reply. That?s understandable. I?ve also been busy, and it?s not as if I?ve gotten in touch with you recently, either. Perhaps you?re also questioning whether or not I wish to renew these conversations, and this is holding you back from contacting me. Word from me, then, might be a relief to you and lead to a resurrection of our correspondence. Is this what you want? As I cannot know your mind in this matter, I am unsure of how to proceed. I would be grateful if you could find some way of letting me know.

? Kyle Smith

?* * *

The first time I met you, there was a pregnant stripper grinding her G-string into the lap of your friend, the birthday boy. When she revealed her small belly,?the women in the room gasped and glanced at each other, appalled, but the men muttered that it was just a pooch. I saw your face; you knew better. You didn?t want to ruin the party and I thought that was strangely sweet. On a fraying flannel couch, you touched my thigh and asked me for my phone number and I forgot about you.

I went to college and many things were lost and won. When I came back, you and your phone number were still there. In the blue glow of your bedroom?the only room in which we ever spent even a moment?we did all of the things you had wanted to do and I was only just then ready to attempt.

Everything fit the way it was supposed to fit, and I never had to explain to you the things that I wanted. To be silent and so well understood was new to me, someone who relies on an excess of words to make my simplest point,?someone for whom sex is mostly about talking.

That was six years ago.

The boy whose birthday it was is no longer a friend of yours for a reason you have never explained but has something to do with gambling debts. I haven?t spoken to the girl who brought me to the party with the strippers in years. I think she?s a chiropractor now. That stripper has a six-year-old.

I live a thousand miles from you, but every Christmas, most Thanksgivings, and some arbitrary Tuesdays every summer we reconvene in your bedroom to not talk.

It is the longest relationship I have ever not had.

? Emily Heist Moss

?* * *

?A taxi will be quicker.?
?The yellow lamp is the right height but red?ll go better with the rug.?
?The suburbs have better schools.?

Most necessary rational choices come as a result of comparison. Love becomes a necessary rational choice but usually doesn?t start that way. For a time extraneous sights and sounds do not become apparent over the pitch-black din of the person who can never be close enough. The brain and the body will try to crack the seal but love can stay alive and incomparable in perfect vacuum forever.

Life always finds a way. Love sometimes finds a way to adapt.

Love can be the result of a necessary rational choice. Take it and put it in a cracked vessel. Close it. Needn?t be airtight. Hand-tight?ll be fine. This will be easier than keeping it pristine. This will be better. This is the only way it can be right now. This is better. This is easier.

This is not love.
This is less significant.
This is temporary.
This is a vacuum.

There are no necessary rational choices left. Love will leak in through the cracks and life must defend itself immediately and violently or be forced into another choice. Reject or embrace the aggressive and unnecessary and irrational. It is impossible to compare competing bloody outcomes.

Love always finds a way. Life always finds a way to adapt.

?Let?s just walk?they?re always late anyway.?
?I thought we were getting rid of that rug.?
?We don?t have to decide this tonight?just come to bed.?

? Matthew Charles Donald

?* * *

My friend with benefits is rich now and full of himself, used to be that he was just full of himself. So, you?d think that the rich part would be good. Today he told me he?s going to invest in an Internet email fledgling company. That was before he mentioned he had to have his fishing boat serviced and the boat lift repaired. Even he admits that these service payments are like charitable gifts. Small maritime companies smile when they see my friend, the gentleman fisherman. There?s always maintenance on a boat and real fishermen likely fix things with duct tape and do without fancy systems. But rich ones hone their relations and buy stuff like top notch fish-finder electronics. They gladly write the checks to be called Captain So-and-so. As for the email company, my friend thinks he?d like to invest $50K. He has a good feeling about this one. That?s what he does now is invest in start-ups. He went on to say he?ll get a Board position. So back when he was only full of himself he worked for a famous company with arrogant computer geeks. It served our family well and the benefits rolled in with gusto. There were braces for the kids? teeth, stock options, and we?d get to eat at the company?s gourmet cafeterias. On Saturdays we?d direct the kiddos to go to bed after a day of nurturing activities. And my friend and I would roll around in the so-called hay with energetic benefits?stand up, lie down, turn around, and all kinds of traditional stuff. For us, two friends, who met in college in the 70s, we?d missed Woodstock, but donned tie-dye and twirled at lots of Dead shows. Our loving felt creative and free. It made us blush in the dark and smile in the morning. The kiddos left for college and landed jobs far away. The captain or director, or whatever he wants to be called likes being rich, but doesn?t seem to like hay rolling so much anymore. Maybe it would have been better to hook up with a farmer rather than a fisherman. He might like hay better. Or maybe I?ll have to learn to bestow more benefits and bite the bait.

? Emily

?* * *

Bowling alley. In the humid cigarette of cat. On the stairs under. The door mat. On guitar cases?in bicycles?my hand on corduroy, a stuck lozenge. You like a lounge chair. There was a white pet. Her fuzz would cling to you. There was a back porch. First your sun, then mine. We kissed a quick idea of light, each other later when my hair was messier. Your bicycle became a body I would like to carry or I had to carry. I would like to drown. I would like to drown, if there was heaven quickly after. I knew, pointing my toes: naked or never. The ball rolled down the aisle. Lips parted. The gutter shone. A gate?came down to say the time. You held me in your sleep, tighter than me. You could have had me for the coins it took to buy a ginger ale. I had one sip. We played Battleship. I planted sunflowers that didn?t take. We leaned tremendously. The sheets creased theoretically, then literally. I made cookies. On a flower plate. So many trees to see! The printer spitting out its music notes. Heat vs. Fan. Let?s try this on the scratch carpet. Let?s strike a pose.

? Sarah Green

?* * *

We agreed to pause this thing until we were living in the same place, yet nothing changed last time I visited. You squeezed and twirled me around at the airport and drove down again to spend the night with me. My heart lifted. The groove along your neck still smells like vanilla and we laugh naked in bed. We are ephemeral lovers and we are most reliable for those intense hours when we?re in the same city.

In those moments, when your long arm wraps over my ribs and snakes between my breasts, my desire to wander ceases. This is it. We alternately intertwine our limbs and then move to the edges of the bed, playing our game of cat and mouse while we sleep. I want you and I don?t want your indecision. You want to live unfettered. I want a relationship, a partner, a lifetime of adventure and smelling your neck. You say you?re trying to live day to day. I say fear drives you.

Are you my friend or a long lost lover coming back again?

? Kathleen Hurley

?* * *

Amy had very recently been pregnant and I was sorry to hear the thing had died inside? her. I found her on the floor of her apartment, this in Aberdeen, New Jersey, surrounded by magazines in a one-size-too-small peasant blouse and her left thumb swathed in gauze. She looked uncomfortably moist. The summer was miserable and everything at middle distance blurred in the haze of increasingly interminable afternoons.

These miscellaneous periodicals, mostly gossip and style rags, were strewn about her, the faces on the covers staring, indicting her in an arc of vapid gazes. Fashion starlets and actresses with heavy black paint under their eyes, pouting their giant lips unnaturally. Addled Kabuki monsters. I tried reading one upside down: 10 Secrets to Regaining Your Pre-Baby Bod!

We drank and didn?t talk about it. I hadn?t seen her put something foul to her lips in five months.

?This fucking place,? she said, ?It?s an oven.?? She was glistening.

?We should go somewhere,? I offered. She glanced at her half-full bottle and seemed to agree. I think we were both eager to get out of there.

Her little domicile was fitted upon the far eastern side of our suburban New Jersey town, the place we grew up. Out of Amy?s back window you could see across the Hudson and stare directly onto the rising breast of New York City, or else Manhattan, or else the Big Apple. I had just been there, was still freshly flushed from the constant motion and going, but it was eerie to watch the place now?unmoving and asleep from this distance?from our blue-collar microcosm not but forty miles away. Like gazing upon Eden from some vastly less perfect neighboring district, or perhaps more like peering into the belly of Sodom from the perch of a bucolic paradise. I?m trying very hard to say that it?s different, that living in the shadow of all those towers makes you crazy after a good while.

Amy had thrown on an oversized maternity jacket, a grey pea coat with inches of extra room in the belly. She wrapped the excess fabric around her waste and held the coat shut.

?Amy, it?s 100 degrees outside.? She said not a word, and I decided to give her a break. It was the least I could do, what with everything I already put her through.

? W. Maxwell Prince

?* * *

The boy flipped through albums on his MP3 player, album art materializing and dissipating and titles drifting across the screen. Souls at Zero, Jane Doe, Roads to Judah. He selected none, and after a few minutes bussed the remains of his coffee to the ancient counter and left the shop. A freezing wind whistled down Guerrero Street. He walked north. Earlier that morning a girl from Nebraska known only to the boy as Meg had ascended a metal ladder from the fifth floor to the roof of a warehouse in SOMA, not looking down even once towards the balcony and the rain-soaked street four stories below. In one corner of the roof stood a tent constructed of a blue tarp propped up by broomsticks lashed to plastic buckets. Underneath, two hooded figures strummed acoustic guitars by the light of camp lanterns, encircled by more people sitting on the ground. The boy reached Market Street and headed up Church towards Buena Vista Park. He wondered about Meg, and her fully nomadic existence and alien ways of survival. He wondered whether she existed as a closed-loop spiritual end, as something so beautiful as to be a priori essential to the universe; as fate collapsed inwards upon itself. He touched the metal cylinder in his coat pocket. He wondered whether he?d ever see her again and guessed that he would not. Meg squeezed into an open spot on the ground between two long-haired girls, just out of the rain. One of the guitar players turned as Meg settled down and a hairy snout poked into view from under its hood, and then its entire face was lit by lantern light. Large eyes flashed like the eyes of cats. The boy reached the stone stairway at Buena Vista and ascended in a hurry. He jogged up a winding trail and soon reached the top of the park, a flat clearing with huge fallen trees and long views of the city and distant hills. No one was around. He knelt down in the dirt, unscrewed the cap of his brass cylinder and poured a line of red powder into a groove of bark on a fallen tree trunk. He began to screw the cap back on when the ground quicksanded beneath him, and he reached out desperately with both hands but he had already fallen too far down below the surface of the hill.

? Nate East

* * *

Then what did it mean? she said.?Mean? If she didn?t want anything but to fuck you, what did it mean? It meant she liked to fucked me, I said, And I liked to fuck her. I see, she said, So ?fuck you? is the right way to put it. It wasn?t sex. Forget ?making love.? It still took both of us, I said. I didn?t tell her that she?d actually said, I like to fuck you, but?that there was an aspect of dislike. But she probably knew this. I didn?t tell her that what the other had said was what I?d thought countless times before and since. I wondered if she knew that too.

I said, You know, candor is good. We were honest with each other. She said, It must have been meaningless. Just different, I said. Any animal can do it. Don?t reduce it, I said, Reduce us. She said, You?ve already done so. Then she did some imagining: So let me get this right, you?d just meet up and fuck. No talking, no dates, no romance, no nothing. I didn?t protest, though I would have probably used different words. I wanted to say, We were friends too, but that hadn?t lasted long.

She tried to be understanding: I get the appeal of it, I do. Two people who realize that they enjoying fucking one another, but otherwise are incompatible, they should be able to have a relationship based solely on what they enjoy. Fucking is natural. I?ll say it again: any creature can do it, and will. Baby, I?m only being scientific. But I do worry; it?d be dishonest to say I don?t. I worry because the physical act doesn?t vary like circumstance. You can love someone or hate them, but you?ll be doing mostly the same things. I worry that you?ll confuse yourself, and not know it?that the physical will bleed into other realms.

During all this, we were in bed, touching each other aimlessly. Now I did what I do when I can no longer bear aimlessness. I touched her there in that way, and she arched. She touched me back. Soon, everything else would recede to the background, and what followed would be great. I knew?know?these things, but cannot speak them. I fear, more than anything, that this will always be true.

? Owen Neace

?* * *

Sunday night, and I?m sitting on a boy?s futon. I?m in my panties, his T-shirt. We?ve been sleeping together for a few days.

?So are we seeing each other?? he asks.

?I don?t know,? I say. ?Are we a thing??

This is the language of sex outside of relationships. There are things you want and don?t want, you know? So you start to draw lines: not dating. Not lovers. It becomes a game of semantics to describe what?s going on.

That night we decided that we weren?t dating, were kind of seeing each other, and maybe a thing. A few weeks later, we freaked out and decided to . . . not be a thing. To be nothing.

I freely admit to having cried, then?I?d wanted that something. Whatever it was. The change of phrase hurt, even though it was only words.

What?s the difference between something and nothing? It?s loving and not loving. Feeling or not feeling. And often the fear of feeling is very real: We?re not ready for love. We wrap this fear in the words we use to describe ourselves. We create a language of not loving.

During that thing that was not a thing, I did a lot of?well, stupid things. One of the first was giving him a potted plant. A succulent jade: small, sweet, bright green. I?d caught a friend of my roommate?s using the poor plant as an ashtray, and couldn?t let it live in such conditions.

?Do you want to adopt a potted plant?? I asked him. ?Just for a bit. It needs a foster home, my room?s too dangerous an environment.?

?Of course,? he said.

I brought it over later that day. We explored our benefits and were not anything. It?s lived on his nightstand ever since.

That relationship went through a lot?something to nothing, sleeping together and not sleeping together. And with every change, different words. ?Hang out.? ?Booty call.? ?Friends with benefits.?

Once, I asked for him to return the plant.

?I thought it was a gift!? he said. ?I thought it was for forever.?

?It wasn?t for forever,? I protested. ?I said adoption, I said just for a bit.?

?Yeah, well, this is an issue of semantics.?

?Just like us, huh.?

We may or may have not slept together that night.

I?m still waiting to get that plant back.

? Larissa Pham

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