The Sex Fairy
She is visiting her mother in the long-term care facility when her position in the social world is brought home to her. She generally excites a lot of attention when she visits, simply by being young and not in uniform; the old women—most of the residents are women—make urgent noises, roll their eyes and pluck at her arms and clothes in a bid for her attention. One of the more mobile female residents, after asking if she is a swimmer and saying she reminds her of someone, bends and kisses her on the side of the breast—the tender, shadowed side, over her heart. But when George, one of the few male residents, begins making eyes at her, she experiences his attentions differently.
It is because I know, she thinks. She feels an answering pang of desire; George is one of the younger residents, struck down unexpectedly by his disease of forgetfulness before even reaching the age of fifty. Not one year ago he might have been the respected father of young grown children, approached for advice over engagements, the purchase of cars, the right native plants to create wildlife habitats in gardens. And he is good looking, with a hooked nose, thick grey hair and a dark brow: slender and muscled, a well-built man. He seems kind, too, which might be a consequence of his illness and immobility; any aggression he harbours can hardly be expressed. His loss is real to her in a way her mother’s loss ceased being some time ago.
She drives to the house of her longest-serving lover. It is breaking the rules, she knows, to come at this hour of the day, and she can’t be sure of finding him alone. But she doesn’t see that she has anything to lose. She met another man last night, at a party; he took her mobile phone number and she has high hopes of him. He has beautiful eyes and he likes to talk—to listen as well as lecture—a quality she values in men, as long as they are also prepared to be men of action when it counts. She knows hers wasn’t the only number he took at the party. He is new in town; his recent arrival explains his availability without suggesting some inherent personal failing. The fact that she was not his only choice increases rather than diminishes his attractiveness; it gives her a sense that his interest in her is perhaps not confined to the opportunistic desires she generally inspires.
Knowing the rules, and showing it, is considered tantamount to acceptance, she thinks. Because she seems to understand what men want from her—for her to appear and leave her gifts, under or on or around their pillows, when she is most desired, without being courted and without making demands, and to make off again discretely—they imagine this state of affairs is acceptable to her. And she—she expects, because she understands the rules, to be treated as an equal. But once she puts the blindfold on, she thinks, she may as well put herself in ropes.
This is the case, anyway, with older men; younger men are resistant to having their romantic illusions shattered, even—or especially—if they have created those illusions themselves. She is not attractive to men her own age, or at least their interest can be relied on to dwindle rapidly. Young men discover quickly that her charm is of a kind that won’t reveal them as the better men they want to be. Older men are less attached to the belief they can become better.
Back at the nursing home, a colourful phalanx of toys she bought when her was still capable of interacting with everyday things have been placed together in lewd couplings. She suspects one of the few male staff, a suspicion without any basis other than the looks they give her when she comes and goes. Her mother reacted with irritation when first presented with the toys, claiming, justifiably, she was being treated like a child, but her daughter has found her several times stroking and crooning to them.
The low seat near the bed has stained woollen upholstery, shiny with use. She covers one of her mother’s hands, pale and rigid, with her own, and her mother instinctively clutches one of her fingers. The inside of her mother’s fist feels blind and suppliant, like a baby’s mouth. Her mother is speaking to someone invisible, who, from the direction of her eyes, seems to be located a couple of feet to the left of where her daughter sits. At least she is cheerful. Sometimes she pinches her daughter’s fingers as if they are something inanimate—perhaps part of the bedclothes, or a toy—and at other times she appears to believe they are her own fingers, an experience that causes her daughter to feel a flush of love and shame.
Her mother stops speaking—her words, a cascade of sibilant, alliterative syllables, are unintelligible to her daughter—and lays her head back against the pillows. She frowns, and puts both hands to her face, trying to remove her glasses, which her daughter has just paid to have repaired. In her mother’s absence the optometrist had to fit them to the daughter’s head, and she wonders, with a suppressed sense of impatience, if they are perhaps too tight. She removes them and bends the earpieces away from one another. When she reseats them, her mother begins again to frown. She considers taking them away altogether—her mother hardly needs glasses to see her invisible visitors—but she spies a thin silver hair trapped behind the glass of one lens, curled against her mother’s eyelashes. She lifts the glasses, removes the hair, and replaces the frames on her mother’s face, taking care to seat them evenly. Her mother’s frown relaxes into an expression that is almost a smile.
The hands of the clock are moving very slowly. She believes this is because she has so many things to do outside this room and can do so little within it. Her mother utters something, an ejaculation from McCarthy era television: good gosh. She lifts her hand, mummified by a coil of sheet and blanket, and presses it into her open mouth. Lunch is overdue.
The minute hand has not moved from the position it occupied last time she looked. The second hand is still moving, but just as she registers this she sees the thin red needle stall and palsy, jump backward and retrace the second it traced a moment past, jerk and freeze.
Returning to work, she passes a dark man looking down his long nose in a slightly apologetic manner. She checks him over; although she doesn’t know him he is familiar to her. He is almost her type. A young man approaching, with long curls and broad shoulders, supplies something even closer to her physical ideal, but she resolves not to desire these men. In the past she has been spoiled by several very beautiful lovers, and she knows how much beautiful men may think they are entitled to. Her hunger, for a curve or a shade that will excite in bed, is something she is determined not to feed. She has been used to thinking old or married or ineffectual men should know better than to desire women who are too young or too beautiful for their attentions, or who simply deserve to be recognised for something other than their physical qualities. Now she is aware there is a dimension to their desires that she has not before taken into account. This dimension is defined by the axis of regret, an axis that presupposes disappointment and which is calibrated against the desirer’s self-image, a knowledge of his or her own failings.
There is a text message from the man at the party on her mobile phone. He asks her to join him to see a French movie, but he also mentions it is a favourite of his girlfriend, who is studying in Paris.
The nurses, attending to the woman in the bed next to her mother’s—a woman appropriately named Mona—are laughing while, with their thinly gloved blue hands, they whisk away fluids and apply absorbent materials. They are merry, having just shared something—a joke, an opinion, morning tea. She’s wet, she hit me this morning, shift her that way, no, I’ll do it! Odours, released by the process of opening and turning, spread across the room. Her mother, and the other residents, have lost the ability to smell: the olfactory sense is intimately related to the cognitive areas of the brain.
The bigger, more cheerful nurse, whose skin takes on the hue of a bad sunburn whenever she is cold or exerts herself, and whose orange hair has been dyed rusty brown with golden streaks, flames past. She addresses loud comments, alternately to the other nurse—a thin, dark woman with volumes of black hair in waves—and to whichever bed-bound woman she is attending. “You’re a nice, polite one,” she says, “until she bites me!”
When they come to change her mother—both her diaper and her position—the daughter decides, instead of waiting outside as she ordinarily does, to stay. She watches while they roll and strip her mother, so reduced in size and colour, in opacity, since the days when it was her daughter’s job to bathe and clothe her. Her mother makes no protest, although her hands open and close like beaks and her face registers a look of deep surprise.
Later, in bed, something her lover—the longest serving one—does hurts her, in the terrible urgent way of a blow to the scalp, or a stubbed toe. No! Stop! She is forced to shout, and she curls up in a tight fist of a crouch, rocking backward and forward. Her lover, still tumescent, is reduced to stroking her back and asking if she is all right. Eventually she is able to say she will soon be fine. Her desire hasn’t abated, and she becomes aware, as they resume lovemaking, that this is because she has felt no strong desire, anyway.
She works for an orgasm, which is intense and tainted by a fine, poignant feeling like the one inspired by old photographs. Afterwards, under the covers, her lover asks her what she has been up to. He is affectionate, but she is aware she can expect no sympathy or encouragement if she speaks about what has really been occupying her mind—her mother, her thoughts about romance. She would like to know what he thinks of her, but if she asks the response is certain to be disappointing. “Why did you come tonight?” she asks.
He takes refuge in a reputation for mental delinquency he has set about creating over the course of their relationship, which is bolstered by his job—he is an advertising editor for a free street magazine—and his haircut, which would be more suitable for a lead-guitarist. “I don’t know,” he says. He launches into a story about a friend he has recently disappointed and also about the misdemeanours of his father, a story offered in the nature of an excuse but which is also intended to make her feel her inability to hold his attention less keenly. After a short while he takes her hand and places it on his cock, which is rising again, and they shift away from the problem of finding words for their association.
Groggy from lack of sleep, she travels to her job, something that barely occupies her attention anymore, except when she is actively performing it. She drops her lover off at his house on her way. He has stayed a little longer than is his custom, and in gratitude she doesn’t ask when she can expect to see him again. She is ashamed of the toll her nocturnal activities takes on her involvement in things that used to be so important to her. Her unconventional relationship choices were intended to free her to devote herself to other things, a liberation that has failed to eventuate. The sex fairy is, she realises, someone who takes sex, not one who gives it. What she gives is something else, an absence of demand and challenge, collusion in a willing self-deception. She watches the long slope of her lover’s back and thighs as he climbs the stairs and unlocks his front door. He turns and waves to her, with a wry smile, as he opens it. She shifts gear from park to drive, checks her mirror for cyclists and cars, and pulls away from the curb, her brimming heart nearly closed against the early morning light.
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END
Originally published by performance at Griffith University's Masters & Slaves, Blooms Day Edition
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