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Triptych | Apr 10 2002

We’d take turns reading to each other while having sex. If you were the reader, the idea was the keep reading. Whoever read longer without stopping won.

What we read was unimportant; it could have been anything; we even used the phone book once, as a goof.

I don’t think I ever lost this game. She wasn’t very good at it, or at any game, really. Not that she didn’t enjoy playing. It was the kind of game (bowling is like this, although for different reasons) you didn’t need to be good at to enjoy.

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She would often talk during sex—a kind of continuous commentary, like an announcer at a race track, but more associative.

I listened less to the words than the feeling. Probably this is always so, but here it was exaggerated.

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Sometimes she would type things on my back. We didn’t have to be having sex for her to do this, but I can’t remember her doing it out of bed.

She was an extraordinary typist: over 100 words a minute, and accurate.

I don’t believe she knew she was doing it. Her fingers would form the words by themselves, without her conscious direction or awareness.

As much as I wanted to know what she was typing, I didn’t dare ask her. What if my asking made her self-conscious? Instead I’d try to follow the pattern of the touches—a hopeless task.

I had the idea—the dream, really—that she was typing her secret thoughts to me. Things like: “I love you and can’t tell you I love you, because to say that, I lose you. I have to pretend I don’t love you, and that you don’t love me, so I always have you.”

There were other possibilities—“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,” for example—which I preferred to ignore.