Fumbling Toward Ecstasy
1
I had just closed the window curtains when Keith arrived. The end of the workweek brought a relentless spell of exhaustion and with it the unwillingness to cook. I had a container in the microwave of leftovers from the night before. He followed me to the kitchen, and I felt his eyes as I fidgeted at the loosened latch on my boot. I was still in work clothes: creased black pants, bleached white collared blouse, and the knitted green cardigan he and the children left under the Christmas tree some odd years ago. I turned and eyed him as he stuffed his phone into his breast pocket, adjusting the lapel to secure it there. Then our eyes found one another as if reading the other in silence, and because I couldn’t confront the troubled nature of his visits, I turned away and grabbed the hot container from the microwave. I placed the leftover collards and dressing on a plate before him, and he thanked me and smiled.
There was a contemplative quiet between the two of us at first. Him sitting there, stern faced—his glinted eyes a shadow behind the frame of his glasses. I wasn’t hungry, nor was I full, and watching him savor those leftovers with such practiced gladness made me feel important and needed, but I couldn’t trust these feelings. I couldn’t trust myself as I sat across from him with a plate of my own and forked at the collards, putting tiny bites inside my mouth and tonguing them against my cheek.
“Juju,” he finally said, “you outdid yourself.” He gathered the dressing with pinched fingertips and sopped the dark broth. I thanked him, though the compliment did little to soften the uncertainty surrounding his nightly visits—or that he still called me by my family nickname with the same ingratiated voice used when we were married.
“Same greens I been cooking,” my back briefly as I emptied my mostly full plate.
“I beg to differ.” He rubbed the towelette over his sweaty forehead. “Something about these different.” He continued until the plate was empty and then held it out toward me, and pulled it back when I tried to grab hold of it, and that was when I snatched hold of the plate with such force—such forthrightness, and nearly dropped it. He laughed. I stood there, cradling the plate against my chest, transfixed by the reoccurrence of him making a fool of me.
“Oh, don’t be salty, Ju,” he said with a waggish look, his head slightly lowered. “I’m just playing around.”
“That’s your problem,” I told him, wiping at my stained shirt near the kitchen sink. “I’m not your play thing.”
He sighed and stood solemnly next to me, his back against the counter, arms tightly folded.
I didn’t know what to become of these moments. I have tried to figure out the reasons and rationales for all of our misfortunes, and the fortunes too. How he and I arrived at this place—this impasse. To me, our former lives together were a puzzle I desired to amass and then store in a basement or attic; to him, it seemed, a science, and like some formulation of a mathematical equation, he thought careful attention to studied operations of success determined the outcome. That is, until he grew tired and bored with what success constituted: a suburban home, a wife and children who obeyed public decorum, a well bred dog, and all the modern accessories that read us into the middle-upper class of Black America.
In our marriage, he often texted daily news articles of distant wars and conspiratorial lectures or videos of religious apocalypses when what I had often longed for were poems and song lyrics on the constellations of life and enduring love and the enlightened pathways of the human spirit. His texts on global wars and human peril soon became an irritant and reminded me of the deep dogma of his father’s church.
“How have you been?” he asked, and the question came again, in a new form, as if he were answering it for me. “All well with you?”
“As well as it can be,” I told him.
“And the children,” he said. “They seem to be dealing—” and he paused. “I guess we can never truly know what’s going on inside their little heads, but they appear on the surface to be dealing with our matter with such resilience.”
I did not want to discuss ways the children managed, or cared to hear the use of “our matter” rather than separation, or more accurately divorce, so I poured us both glasses of red wine, and took up a seat at the table. He left his post at the sink and settled at the kitchen table again, and soon enough, as the silence passed, the reluctance subsided and our eons of friendship and familiarity took precedence. He talked briefly of his parents, and the cleaners he sometimes helped operate with his brother, though he hadn’t been much help since law school. There were the formalities of our children’s lives: an upcoming school recital, the trivial affairs of pre-teen friendship woes, and the soccer practice carpool schedule. Of our children was the oldest, who showered without soap and obsessively spritzed her musty, pubescent body with Bath & Body Works. The combination sending our sinuses into overdrive. The middle boy preoccupied himself with fantasy novels and never talked unless to explain the unfairness of being born without his permission. An antithesis, as he once told us, of a world hellbent on communication with the dead, and not the unborn. The third, and last, for which sired conversation of a vasectomy, was a humorously charmful rabblerouser who wished only to cure our marital cynicisms with silly, unruly antics that often cost him early bedtimes and school detentions.
We talked of lunch supplies and the soon arrival of report cards. Then there was kibble for the beast—the family’s pet: a slobbery mouthed golden mastiff—and his turn to get it. But mostly, among our conversation that night, and most nights really, was the unspoken. Divulgences caught before they left the mouth. The unsaid was a lost game between us because neither knew the rules or cared to set them, and though his spoken words were a disjointed hymn in my ears, relegated to obligations already spoken for, I listened attentively—a deference to the hubris of men.
When I heeded him, with a steady though momentary glance at his nose, something stirred in me. I had always loved his nose. A prominent feature that made his whole face a kind of panorama. He had a lovely face too. A beautifully blue-black, dark face. A face he found ugly in high school because he thought himself too dark, too black. I had always wanted him to see the beauty I saw, but any woman, regardless of their own hue, had no foothold in the internal enticements with a world where colorism reigned.
I went to place his empty wine glass into the sink, and a kiss landed on the neck, then cheek. I felt pangs in the throat. My hands itched, and sweat formed at my temple. Soon enough, he had pressed himself against my back, and his mouth marked my skin like fingernails.
The next day, I awoke at the edge of dawn and felt the heat of his chest on my back. A slight turn over the shoulder and in a deep slumber there he lied. Under my breath, I cursed myself, and regret slowly unanchored me from bed and into the kitchen where I started a pot of coffee.
Hours would pass. It was soon midday. The sun had melted yesterday’s snowfall and beams of light from the sky creased the window blinds. I kept the coffee pot hot, and passed time with laundry and a lengthy, warm shower.
A toilet flush was the harbinger of his awakened state, and soon enough I discovered him at the foyer, fully clothed.
“Want coffee?” I said, eagerly. “Breakfast?” I had grown accustomed to the saintly art of servitude. I knew the importance of predicting and having ready the wants of a man long before he asked.
“I’m good,” he told me. “I should head on and get the kids.”
“Alright.” I tried to soften my words, so he wouldn’t sense that I didn’t care for him to stay much longer anyways, though I wanted him to continue to see me, somehow, as a willing sacrificial lamb who would always make room for his requests, even when they were an inconvenience, and even when they stifled my own.
“You know how Mama worries.”
“Okay.” I tightly crossed my arms, unwilling to correct the address of his mother as mine too, though the woman had stopped calling the house as frequently as she once had. To her, I had given up too easily and refused to fight. I knew this because she called me weak at my own kitchen table after the news spread among their congregation of the affair.
“Speaking of which, she asked about you,” he said. “Said she hadn’t heard from you as of late.”
“I—s th—at right.” I sighed out my words.
He knelt to kiss my cheek. “I’ll text you later.” His nose touched the lids of my eyes, and he caught the back of my ear with his lips as I turned.
“Drive safely,” I told him.
2
As his car engine started, I turned the coffee pot off and dressed in jean leggings and an oversized knitted sweater. I sat on the sofa with a cup of black coffee. I just sat there halfway watching the screen, and halfway thinking through the night events.
The Wellness Center was a few miles away in a Plaza near a spa and blocks from the sushi restaurant me and the kids frequented on our weekends together. My cousin Glo suggested Dr. Dillard, a licensed professional counselor—known for treating women with postpartum depression, anxiety, and other disorders and addictions. On the first day I sat down with him, weeks ago, he asked the reason for my visit.
I told him, “I felt the need to get myself all the way together.”
He asked, “What does all together look like?
I paused at the question, peered down at the navy-patterned carpeted floor, and fiddled with my cracked, dry fingernails.
“There are really no absolute visions of the rightness of any life,” he said. “We are all making things up as we go.”
“Sure,” I nodded. “I can be a believer of that.”
“So again, I’ll ask.” He cleared his throat and rubbed the side of his neck in a gentle, near sensual manner. His clean-shaven face similar to that of a professor who had grown old and erudite shined like that of a new silver coin. “What does all together look like for you?”
“I want to make changes,” I said. “Big changes. Yet, I recognize any change can be difficult.” And how rather difficult it had certainly been to see a future outside of Fairfax and outside of my work at the local homeless shelter on Winston Avenue, and outside of Keith.
“I need to reclaim something for myself, discover myself, free myself of the past.” I said this, searing with doubt and weary of all the felt constraints of a beginning that felt a lot like searching to find something hidden or lost.
I told Dr. Dillard there were promises I made to myself, reneged promises. I wanted not to be so easily assuaged by the past. I wanted to find a way back to myself. Maybe go back to college and finish my social work degree. The doctor listened and repeated back much of what I had said, and I heard myself and spells of understanding deskinned my thoughts in the way anatomy illustrations disclose the inside parts of the body. Right before he escorted me to the door, Dr. Dillard gifted me a book: The Keys to Desire.
Days would pass without as much of a second glance at the book, but an interest dawned when I found it on the floor in the storage closet near the sewing machine. I spent the late afternoons, once supper was finished and the kitchen was cleaned and the children had set off to their bedrooms, reading. The next day, a Friday evening, I was nearly half-finished with the book when I heard the mad beast moaning and clawing at the back door. Usually, I called on the oldest to quiet it, but this was his afternoon with the children, and they’d all gone bowling. Afraid my inattentiveness to the matter would mean having to call for an estimate on a new door, I earmarked the book, walked the way to the back end of the house, and found the beast tangled in its leash.
“You sure know how to work a nerve,” I said and unraveled the thick black cord from the beast’s abdomen. Its tail frantically wagging as the leash loosened.
“What in the world was I thinking, letting him and three children talk me into taking on another needy thing,” I grumbled. I watched its bobbled head, astonished by its response, and with an air of deliberate vigor, as the beast now stood before me seated like a statue, I looked directly at the beady-eyed bitch and spoke again: “Don’t let me have to come out here and deal with your foolishness once more. You hear? Or it’s to the pound you’ll go.” The animal tilted its head as if to question my rebuke. Its droopy mouth salivating.
I lay back on the sofa, and squirmed until my body found resolve. My fingers moved across the pages of the book until the last read paragraph was revealed yet again. I read on and pondered the origins of my own desires: Desire is the very foundation of living. The intensity of passion beset by desire is a matter of wanting some act of the will fulfilled. Desire is a mental event that articulates an attitude or sense of wish or want. Understanding what dictates our desires requires a level of mindfulness which can restrict desires that can bring about human suffering.
I pondered honest questions. Had I desired to marry Keith again? Or was it just an obsession with the illusion of the familiar? Had I been a naïve woman? What if my desires were my own? I had thought myself to be a simple woman, simple in my coming and goings, but precise in my use of time, except when it came to him. The children brought an immediacy to time, they also brought responsibilities which unmarred the betrayals in the marriage, but they weren’t enough to salvage the ruins. I vowed the next time he arrived for another nightly visit I would not greet him with an eagerly opened door. Nor would I entertain calls in the late hours of the evening when he would ask about the wetness of my woman parts, or the dealings of my heart, and whether another man had touched me. I would demand my own diplomacy—and to be greedy with my own desires for once—but what of the urges, those feelings I was made to feel as if weren’t there, and where would I find intimacies if not with him?
I had been seeing Dr. Dillard for about a month now, and I found his statements exacted upon me a sense of pragmatism.
“I am slowly getting to where I no longer feel persecuted by failures,” I told the doctor at our last weekend session. “But I can’t seem to shake feeling like an imposter having married into something that feels outside of what I am.”
“What are you?” asked Dr. Dillard. “I mean where are you really, outside of care for the children, or the nightly relations, as you call them?”
I tugged at my earlobe, afflicted with uneasiness. “Circumstances can win over self-descriptions.”
“And yet, you’re not, or you don’t have to be if you shift away from the negatives and toward—toward a direction where the labels aren’t about your relations to others. What of your relationship to yourself? “
He placed his half-fisted hand under his chin and watched me as if I were a specimen in a petri dish, as if he were enjoying how I squirmed my way toward a reply.
“I am finding my way toward an answer to that question,” I told him.
I made up my mind in that moment: there would be no more fooling around with Keith, so I called him on the drive home. When he answered, I suspected he wasn’t alone from the restless tone of his hello, but his privacy wasn’t of my immediate concern. And then, I told myself: be frank, don’t budge. “We can’t continue—” I started. “I know,” he retorted. “I know, I know.”
“But I haven’t finished.”
“I’ll call you back,” he hastily said. And before I could protest, make him hear me, listen to my demands for once, the receiver went dead.
3
Weeks passed. Spring break came and the warmth of the early afternoon sun was like the thread on a sewing machine, unspooling us from the many winter layers we wore. The children ran outside barefoot and shirtless in the damp and airy late March. Their sweaty, sticky bodies tart and odorous, they coughed and grunted and used their lower arms and elbows to clear their runny noses. Once they were no longer intrigued by the outdoors, I ushered them to the kitchen island for hot chocolate and marshmallows after warm baths, and each of them, including the beast, spiraled around the kitchen as I rinsed the scorched pot and filled the dishwasher. Although it was my designated week, Keith came and joined us. He brought puzzles, nail polish for the oldest girl, science fiction trilogies for the middle child, and Nintendo gaming accessories for the youngest boy. As the children played and read, the beast collapsed on the sofa. I adored these tranquil family affairs but would not be swayed by them. I did not want to succumb to those old ways where he spoke and I listened. He instructed and I obeyed. He freely roamed, and I stayed put.
Matters had gone smoothly for months—that is, if smoothly meant avoidance and redirection—until one night, faint and haggard, the children begged for ordered pizza and a family movie. I sat on the tufted chaise with a blanket and a closed book in hand. The children were sprawled at random about the living room and gazed into the television screen as if hypnotized. When I woke, daybreak was near, the empty pizza boxes had been cleared away, and the children had journeyed to their bedrooms. I stood at the kitchen doorway, caught my bearings, and there appeared the beast who whined at my feet. I felt an otherworldly amity for the thing and scratched it under the ears before letting it out the back door to relieve itself.
As I opened that back door, a stealthy figure moved beneath the patio, and though I could not make out whether it was a creature of human form, I felt its presence as if it were before my very eyes. The beast did not bark or howl, which startled me even more, so I abruptly closed the door, turning over the animal to whatever lurked outside.
There was a clank at the screen door. Then, without a word, he appeared with the beast, whose tail gleefully swung like windshield wipers.
“Juju, you—okay?” asked Keith.
“What in the name—”
“It’s me. Just came out for a smoke. Thought you were still sleep.”
“When did you get—” I started, remembering he still had keys to the house. I decided it didn’t matter when he got there. The familiar anguished look on his face had said it all.
“I really don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. “Who am I even?”
In dire exhaustion, I lifted a hand and palmed my face. “Where is all of this coming from?”
“Someone told her. Someone told her about us. She knows.”
“Now. Now. So, now, you want to talk.” I watched him, stricken-faced, and queasy.
“I still—” he said, and I interrupted him.
“Get some rest and go to her tomorrow. Tell her it’s over. Tell her you’re sorry, that it won’t happen again. Make her certain you’ll answer to whatever demands she sets from hence forward. Then, go out and buy her something.”
“What?” he said, and in his eyes, I saw a wet glow. I was certain he loved me and our children—that he was regretful of his indiscretions, but I didn’t have it in me anymore to punish him. I always knew there were other women. I had known this long before our marriage, and long before the silences grew between us. There would always be other women. Women who made me appear smaller and less attractive in my own mirror, and who, I knew, would be the motivation for whatever changes my life would take to keep him around. I wanted not to be so carried away by his demands. I believed a part of me went missing when we married. Now there was so much to be discovered, so much to be placed on blank pages.
“Think it over,” I told him.
“What—” he said. His hands above his head.
“Trust me. She’ll take you back.”
“But that’s not why I’m here,” he recoiled.
“We can’t have everything we want. Life doesn’t always work that way.”
“You know I want nothing more than to—”
I stopped him. “I am going to bed. Lock the door behind you when you leave. Do not follow me.”
“Ju—come on,” he pleaded.
4
The next month, afflicted with the worst case of anxiety, I closed myself up in my bedroom and watched Netflix documentaries on my laptop, and then out of some whimsical curiosity, I scrolled on Amazon, searching for vibrators, reading one customer review after the next for hours. I was ready to give up, ready to do away with the idea, off put by what I did not know. There were too many choices: Silicon Clitoris Stimulator. Penis Bullet. G-Spot Nipple Vibrator. Butt-Plugs. If I was going to do this, discover new parts of myself, I was going to need some assistance. Cousin Glo often talked about YouTube user reviews, so I typed each device into the search box and watched review after review, until my eyes grew wet and tired. Suddenly, without knocking, my daughter opened the bedroom door to complain about her brothers not sharing the last pint of ice cream left in the freezer, and I slapped the laptop closed and followed the girl into the kitchen.
Weeks later, the children were away at overnight summer camp, and I returned home one evening to shower away the long work day. I had ordered the Penis Bullet which had been buried for weeks in the top dresser. I held the packaged wand while in bed and felt my way around my body, and right before I discovered a route to my pleasure, forging a sense of assurance, I lodged the bullet into my cavern. The plastic shaft did not compare to human flesh, yet I tried to work into a rhythm before the vibration increased without warning, but I struggled to shut the instrument off. Then I went to pull the shaft out and couldn’t. It had become stuck, wedged inside, and inked to my skin like pen to paper. I panicked and reached for the phone as cramps began to materialize between my legs. I tried Glo. The phone rang without an answer. I texted. Tried again and waited. I phoned again. Still, no answer.
Feeling defeated, I dialed Keith. He answered on the first ring.
I held the front door open as he chuckled. He ordered me to the bedroom and asked where he might retrieve some baby oil and requested that I lie down. I took deep breaths and relaxed. Within minutes, he held the bullet above me, and I shyly exhaled. He then looked at me, and, in a coaxing voice, said, “show me.”
“Why?”
“I want to see.”
I roamed through my dresser drawers for a pair of leggings. “Image a woman asking a man to do such a thing.”
He pulled at my arm as I turned from the dresser. “I can imagine.”
“My point is such a request just wouldn’t happen.”
“How can you be so sure?” He reached for me again, pulling himself down to the floor as he clasped my arm.
On his knees, holding my waist, he kissed my stomach, and tightly gripped my backside and then he pushed his head between my thighs. When I didn’t move, my body turned to stone, he looked up incredulously.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Before I could answer, the beast barked. Her harsh sliding claws heard on the back door. I unfastened myself from him and threw on a t-shirt, then slid on a pair of leggings, and departed. The beast was again tangled in its leash. Gently, I undid the latch at its collar and watched as the beast launched hysterically across the backyard, thrashing and rubbing against the damp earth. He called me. I felt the rapid beats of my heart. I didn’t want to face him. I didn’t want to reject him. There was more to ponder beyond the sad reality of our dependencies. I knew this. My heartbeat grew more rapid and I felt as if I might faint. I heard him continue to call for me. I wanted to hide, hoping he wouldn’t come look. I took deep breaths. He called me again. I would not speak or move. I just sat there, sat at the back porch until I heard the front door squeak open, and the car remote beep, and then the start of his car engine. Then the beast let out a long howl before jotting about the fenced back yard in a fury. I watched the beast until it grew tired, and it came to me, panting with an open, soggy mouth. Its head went limp on my naked foot. I peered down at it, stroked under its collar, and in the darkness and among chirping crickets and the swarm of blood-thirsty mosquitos, I bent and stuffed my head between my hips and closed my eyes and when the tears came, I made room for them and didn’t harden at the thought of my own foolish fate. The crisp night air and the sonic sound of insects in the distance pried me open and emptied what doubts were there, and when I got up from the back porch, the beast straggling closely behind me, and I opened the refrigerator door, not looking for anything in particular, and when there was no want in what was inside the refrigerator, I turned against the glare of an iridescent light to see the bullet on the kitchen table, and with eyes still wet from tears, I laughed. Then I went back to bed and hugged myself, and the reach of my own pressing hands slid about the sheets.
LaToya Faulk has an MFA in fiction from the University of Mississippi. She received a 2022 Pushcart special mention for the essay “In Search of Homeplace.” Her work has been published in Scalawag, Southwest Review, Amherst College’s The Common, and Splinter Magazine's Think Local series.
