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.
The first questions were easy. Hands. Mouth. Where on the body, and where not. She wrote in small clear letters, almost printed. She asked about my hair and I said yes, the hair, pull it, and she nodded and wrote and did not pull my hair. She asked about my throat and I had to think. I said the side of the throat, the place under the jaw, but not the front, not pressure on the front. She wrote it down with the same calm with which she had written hair. No flicker. I had been afraid of the flicker — afraid she would lift her eyes when I said throat and there would be something in them, hunger or pity or amusement, and the whole evening would unhouse itself. There was no flicker. Throat side yes. Throat front no. The pen moved.
She asked about names. What I wanted to be called. What I could not bear to be called. I said my own name, said aloud, made me feel suddenly small in a way I did not want tonight. She nodded. She asked what I wanted instead and I could not say it. She waited. The kitchen across the courtyard went dark and then a different light came on, a hallway probably, yellower. She did not fill the silence. After a long time I said a word, a very small word, almost not a word, and she wrote it down without looking up, and I felt the relief of a confession into a well.
She asked about marks. I said marks where clothes covered, yes. Marks where they did not, not this week. She asked if I wanted her to ask again next week and I said yes and she underlined the word week. The underline did something to me I will not try to describe.
She asked about being told what to do. I said yes. She asked about being told what I was. I said — and here I had to stop and drink water from the glass beside me, because the water was something my body still knew how to do — I said I did not yet know. I said I had wanted that in the abstract for years and I did not know what it would feel like in her actual voice in this actual room. She said: then we will not do it tonight. She said: tonight I will only describe you, and you will tell me if the description fits, and if it does not fit we will find a truer one.
This is when I understood that she was not going to take anything from me. She was going to give me the language and let me hand her, piece by piece, what I wanted her to hold.
She asked about fear. Not as a thing to avoid but as a thing to use. I said a little. I said the edge of it, not the inside. She wrote edge of, not inside.