Worth More Than a Thousand Words
Lawrence Schimel
I have never been good at keeping a diary. It presupposes an audience, supposedly one’s self, but I have never been comfortable with the idea. I am afraid someone will find it, and read it, and I will have bared my soul to a stranger, or worse, someone I’m close to. I am afraid because I have done this to others. Friends of mine. My sister. I have always been a voyeur.
Reading someone’s diary is the thrill of the forbidden. The knot of worry in the stomach, the fear of being discovered. When I was younger, I read porn that way. I didn’t need to. My grandfather kept stacks of porn magazines on top of the toilet in the bathroom of his apartment; I could have read them at leisure, in that small locked room, poring over the pictures. But I would go to a bookstore and sneak porn magazines from the rack, hiding them inside a copy of something innocuous like Cats Magazine. I would walk back to the middle of the store and stand in an empty section to flip through the pictorials. I hardly even looked at the pictures, glancing down for a second and taking a mental photograph, my heart racing as I quickly glanced back up to make sure no one was coming down the aisle where I stood, to make sure no one ever saw what I was doing. As soon as someone came near, or if I even thought they would, I closed the magazine and moved from Gardening to Humour, to wherever there wasn’t anyone else.
My heart pounds the same way when I read someone’s diary, even if there’s no chance of my being discovered – they’re away for the weekend and I have the only key to the apartment, whatever. It is forbidden, and I feel there is someone watching me as I reach for the slim, clothbound book that’s hidden beneath the bed. I flip through the pages, scanning for any mention of myself, or anything else that catches my eye. I look for moments where the handwriting changes, clues to highly emotional scenes. I’m like a vampire, thirsting not for blood, but vicarious emotion. Thirsting furtively, at night, when no one else is around, lest I be discovered.
I am always careful to replace the diary exactly as I found it. If it were my own, I would notice if it had been moved, even if anything around it had been moved. I guess that’s why I’ve never been able to keep a diary before. I’m too paranoid. Afraid of exposing myself. I’ve broken the trust of too many friends who left me alone in their rooms while they went to class or work, while they went on vacation for a week, trusting me to water their plants. Trusting me not to read their diary.
So I know someone else will read this. I can’t help being aware of you. I feel as if I’m writing for you, not for myself. But I have something I want to write down, need to write down, so I don’t lose it. So I don’t forget. I know you’re reading over my shoulder, so I’m going to fill in the background for you. After all, who knows what will happen? Fifteen, twenty years from now, the stranger who finds this book again, buried in an attic at the bottom of a box of books, might be myself. And my heart will begin pounding as I realize it is a diary, and I open it and read all the details I’d long since forgotten.
There are some who consider thirteen an unlucky number. Not I. But I’ve got reason; I have a lover thirteen years older than myself.
Not unlucky, but still witchy. She’s definitely a witchy-woman. Enchanting seductress. It’s almost impossible not to be drawn in by her. When we go out together I watch it happen to the men around her. And I, I was drawn in, as well, although it’s harder for me to know what happened, trapped in her glamour.
I’ve wondered sometimes if it was a potion she made, something she wore. She’s an aromatherapist, always using subtle essences of plants to influence mood. Lavender. Ginger. Scents I’ve never been able to identify. Her home is suffused with a rich aroma of comfort and warmth, an amnesiac to anxiety.
Yet each time a man is ensnared by her spell she is taken by surprise. It is perhaps that very aspect which is so appealing: she does not wield her sexuality like a weapon or tool, but is so familiar with it, so intimate, that it sits upon her as an integral part of her being, as simply as the features of her face. If you saw her, you would understand what I meant. If you saw her, you would be drawn in by her spell.
While she may not understand the effect she has, she is now aware of it. We met at a poetry reading in Boston, and exchanged business cards. Later that week, a story showed up in my mail, a piece entitled, “Desire”. It was our first flirtation. I know not to assume that a first person narrator is the author, but I could not help noticing similarities, how men seemed drawn to the protagonist like moths to a porchlight on a summer’s evening. The writing was infused with that same sensuality which surrounds her presence. Though the story wasn’t full of explicit sex, it played a strong role, tantalizingly alluded to or glimpsed. And the writing itself was lush, like a flurry of caresses moving up one’s thigh and across belly and chest.
A writer myself, I appreciated the sumptuousness of her prose. I was also very turned on by it. Words have always held strong sway over me. Perhaps she’d sensed this about me, and thus chose to make her first move in print. Subtly, yet relentlessly, working my weakness.
Perhaps because she understood this power words held over me, I was able to persuade her to let me read an erotic fantasy she had written for another lover of hers. Showering after the first night we spent together, I’d found her aromatherapy jars in the medicine cabinet. Later, I asked her if she ever used them in lovemaking. She said she had, and also mentioned this fantasy she had written. The moment she realized what she had confessed she said, “I can’t believe I just told you that.”
I begged her to let me read it.
I was curious. I wondered who he was, what he looked like, why she had chosen to write something for him. I wondered what it would reveal about her, her own desires, her fantasies.
And the idea of reading something meant for someone else thrilled me. I’ve always been a voyeur. In college, I would lie atop the window seat for hours, warmth on my stomach from the radiator underneath as I stared across the courtyard. I could never see much – the buildings were too far apart – but what I saw was never really the issue. It was the looking. Often I would spend an entire night staring at the yellow squares of light across the way, waiting for the brief shadows to cross their frame, unaware of how time was passing, lost in the act of watching.
Reading a fantasy for someone else held the same appeal. Already I could feel myself begin to grow hard with anticipation.
She relented. I’m still not sure why. She’d never shown it to anyone but the man it was written for. But for some reason I convinced her to let me read it. Maybe because she had realized how powerful words were to me, and wanted to help me change, to grow.
I remember almost everything I read. It’s as if I had a photographic memory, which I don’t, since I only remember words. But eventually I will forget, or not be able to remember exactly. I’m sure that already I must have changed things, remembering what I would have found more erotic rather than what she actually wrote.
He was an actor who starred in horror films. Naturally, he lived in LA, across the country from her. Most of their relationship therefore took place in words, on the page or the phone. Once, it took place like this:
For Paul
I woke up this morning with the most luscious fantasy in my mind. Here, let me share it with you. Then we can both enjoy it.
We are in a luxury hotel; it is night. You sit on the bed in a white silk robe, gazing through the window at the panorama below: a city bejewelled with light. A muffled whisper of traffic filters through to your ears, almost as soothing as the surf.