I will tell you what I have not told anyone, and you will be the one I tell, because you are the one I have invented for the telling. Sit. Lean closer. The lamp is on. I have left it on for you. I have spent most of my life turning lamps off before this part. Tonight I would like to see your face while I say it.
There was a year, you should know, when I was unrecognizable to myself. I do not mean dramatic. I do not mean I cut my hair and bought a motorcycle. I mean small things. I mean I began answering the phone in a voice that was lower than my voice. I mean I started keeping a second bar of soap, a kind I would never have chosen, because someone had left it once and I liked, afterward, washing my hands with a scent that was not mine. I mean I learned, that year, to be looked at. I had been looked at all my life, of course. Every woman has. But I had not, until then, looked back. I had not understood that to be looked at and to look back at the same time was a thing a body could survive.
I am telling you this because I would like you to know what you are getting. I am not the woman I was at twenty, the one who would have closed her eyes for you out of politeness. I will keep my eyes open. I will watch you. I will watch you watching me, and I will not be embarrassed by either of us, and if you cannot bear that, you should go now, while the door is still close to your hand.
What else. I have lied about wanting less than I wanted. I have done this so many times it became a kind of dialect. I would like, with you, to try the other language. The one where I say the thing. The one where, if I want your hand in my hair, I say so, instead of tilting my head in the small coded way I have practiced on men who needed the code. I do not want to need the code anymore. I am tired of being clever. I would like to be plain with you, and to find out whether plainness, between two people who have agreed to it, is its own kind of undressing.
There is a place at the base of my throat that no one has ever kissed without making a production of it. I would like you to kiss it as if it were nothing. As if it were just a place. I would like you to make the production of some other place I have not thought to defend. Surprise me. I have spent decades being unsurprised. I would forgive you almost anything for the gift of one minute in which I did not know what came next.
I will not tell you I love you tonight. We have not earned the word and I refuse to spend it early. But I will tell you this, which is harder. I trust you enough to leave the lamp on. I trust you enough to keep my eyes open. I trust you enough to say, here, this, slower, again, and to believe that you will hear it as instruction and not as complaint.
Come here. The light is on. I left it on for you. I am done turning it off.
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She made me say each one aloud before she would touch me.
Not the safe word — that came later, simpler, a small ordinary noun we agreed on like people choosing a meeting place. The inventory came first. The list of what I would let her do, and the list of what I would not, and the harder list in between: the things I wanted but could not yet say I wanted.
We were in her apartment, the one with the long window that looked at the back of another building, brick and fire escape and a single lit kitchen four floors up where a woman was always washing dishes at this hour. I had been there twice before. The first time we drank wine and she read me a poem in Portuguese and I did not understand a word of it and almost wept. The second time she undressed in front of me and asked me to keep my clothes on and watch, and then dressed again, and made tea, and sent me home. Tonight was the third time, and she had said on the phone, with the carefulness of someone setting down a glass, that tonight she wanted to begin properly.
Properly meant the list.
She sat on the floor cross-legged with her back against the radiator, which was off, and I sat across from her on the rug, and between us was a notebook open to a clean page and a pen she had chosen, she said, because it wrote slowly. She told me she would ask, and I would answer, and the answer was the answer, and the answer would be believed. She said this twice. I would answer and the answer would be believed. She said if I tried to perform an answer she would know, and we would stop, and try again on a different night.