I felt like I could trust Jenny. I wanted to tell her about the Wal-Mart incident, but worried she might judge me for being weak or weird.
We danced for a while before I stopped to take another sip. The more we drank, the more Jenny would fall into me, grabbing the soft, exposed parts of my body.
At eight, we both texted Sam, asking him when we should come over. I laid down on her bed and we talked about work. I thought about sharing with her my anxiety surrounding who would do what tonight, and when, and in what positions. Still, I didn’t want to come off as weak by revealing my fears. I liked that things felt easy with her, and so I talked around my fears instead, asking her what she thought we would do. We discussed things like Is he just going to hand me off and then start on you and How do you get a blowjob from two girls at once. We laughed nervously as we discussed each potential situation, and then I realized that we had not heard from Sam all day. I wondered if he would disappear, and in a way I felt a sense of relief.
At ten, we texted him again. Still no response. By then we were both hammered. We’d listened through my whole CD a half dozen times and settled on our outfits and to pass the time we watched The Hunchback of Notre Dame on her tiny TV.
There is a fear that comes with opening yourself up like that, even when it is just sex. The moment Sam was pulling at my hips in the pool, I felt every eye on me waiting for me to perform. It was why I tugged him out of the pool, why he followed me into his bathroom and into the shower. There was a natural desire to only be seen by each other.
It’s easier than a threesome. Three people observing and experiencing a situation make what’s happening more true than if it’s just between two. What happens between two people stays between them, and there are only two truths. In the shower after the pool party, there was Sam’s version of events and there was my version. The truth cannot be known by anyone other than the person who experienced it. Add a third person, and you get much, much closer to it.
SOLVE ET COAGULA
AT SOME POINT AFTER MATT tattooed me, he let me borrow the autobiography of Marilyn Manson. On the cover is a picture of Manson with an overlay of ribs from a medical book. At the time, The Golden Age of Grotesque was only two years old. The album was inscribed with the Waffen-like double M’s that had become emblematic of the current iteration of his work. Matt had those double M’s tattooed on his bicep. I would see them, myself underneath him, and rub the blank ink with my thumb in the same way that he had rubbed the ink on the back of my thigh.
A week after the Wal-Mart incident, we were all hanging out at their apartment. Frankie was making dinner, the baby was napping. Matt and I sat on the couch, alone for the first time ever. My time had either been spent with both of them together or with Frankie alone. This was the unspoken arrangement of the relationship. I did not know how I should act with just Matt. He wanted to discuss the details of Manson’s book with me, of which I had already read about half.
“Manson is a Satanist,” he said.
“What does that even mean?”
I had never met any Satanists, though I had been accused of being one in high school many times. I didn’t know much about Christianity, despite the religious nature of our town. But Matt called himself a Satanist, too. He had also suggested I get the Satanic Bible. He said something about religion being an opiate, how everyone in Colorado Springs was just following rules for the sake of following them, and how Satanism was somehow an answer to break free from these constraints.
“It’s an antidote,” Matt said. “A rejection of the puritanical world that is always pulling you outside of yourself and asking you to serve others shamefully. Always asking you to turn the other cheek.”
Frankie clinked dishes in the kitchen, but she couldn’t see us. I found it hard to concentrate on what Matt was saying because I was so focused on the novelty of our privacy. I inched closer to him, but it felt wrong somehow. Although Frankie and I were allowed to spend time together, it seemed like she might be upset by me and Matt being close.
“Would you prefer serving shamelessly?” I asked.
“Maybe if you did,” he said.
He grabbed his own copy of the Satanic Bible from a bookshelf. I noticed words tattooed on the sides of his forearms but couldn’t catch what they said.
“Do you know what the Baphomet is?” he asked. I shook my head. He pointed to the image on the cover of the book. It was glossy black, and in the middle was this red-pink pentagram with the tip of the star pointing down, toward the earth. In the star was the image of a goat head.
“Inscribed on his arms are the words solve and coagula,” Matt said. He raised his arms into a prayer position so I could read his forearms, where the same words were tattooed. “It means to dissolve and come together.”
I thought about it for a second. I thought about blood, and bodies and blood, and how the coming together of different meats and textures created a human body and then a human brain. How the leap from primordial soup was a kind of coagulation, reaching back to spores and algae. Life was a kind of summoning. Sex was a kind of summoning too, a coagulation of fluids
