Earthly Delights
She had wanted only the simplest, smallest things: she kept a box of maxi pads hopefully in the back of her sock drawer for years before she ever got her first period. There were little squiggles on the packaging, teal and pink, in the flamboyant yet cool style of the day.
Then, later, with her childhood friend, their plan was to lose their virginity together, on the same bed, holding hands, one boy having sex with her, the other boy having sex with her friend. They agreed and made the pact and looked forward to it. In a way, it would be like losing their virginity to each other. That would be good, for they didn’t mean each other any harm. With a boy, you couldn’t know.
The point was: being someone’s girlfriend was never as good or romantic as wanting to be their girlfriend had been. She learned this when she was fifteen, the first time she ever had a boyfriend. For one thing, she didn’t enjoy giving hand jobs. They would be in Ivan’s basement, watching TV, her hand pulling lamely on his dick—it was completely unerotic. She was clearly missing the point. Something was not right. Now, of course, she understood: he wasn’t doing anything in return. He hadn’t gotten her in the mood. He probably just asked for a hand job. They had been watching “The Cosby Show,” she remembered, and she found touching his dick disgusting. She remembered saying to him, “Finish yourself off,” then getting up and washing her hands in his parents’ laundry room. That was what all the longing for him—all the admiring him, the dreaming of him, the glancing at him shyly all year in biology class; all the writing of two hundred poems about him—that was what it had all been for? This uncircumcised bit of flesh in her hand? How much more promising had been his bowl of floppy brown hair and glasses, his intelligence, and the fact that he was Czech and the class clown. Then, after a year of longing, it turned out he liked her, too! When they kissed, Ivan said, “You don’t know how long I’ve been wanting to do that.” Unfortunately, Ayesha, his previous girlfriend, told her friends that the first time Ivan kissed her, he said, “You don’t know how long I’ve been wanting to do that.” So much for her first kiss. It was just a copy of some other girl’s kiss! Why did she even know what he’d said to Ayesha the first time he kissed her? She wasn’t friends with Ayesha. They didn’t have friends in common—Ayesha was in the grade above! And yet she did know. He could never have guessed that this was information she’d have. Where had Ivan picked up that line? From a movie? Or is that what he really felt each time, spontaneously and authentically, first with Ayesha, then with her, forgetting he ever said it before?
Read an interview with the author for the story behind the story.
Then his family went on a trip to Prague, and he wrote her a letter from the airplane—wrote her a letter on a barf bag! Her first-ever letter from a boy. Didn’t he know how disappointing, embarrassing, and unromantic this was? She couldn’t tell her friends, “He wrote me a letter on a barf bag.” To be the girlfriend of the class clown was different from admiring the class clown. You couldn’t tell anyone what it was like.
“Have you heard from Ivan?”
“No. He’s in Prague.”
“I know he’s in Prague. I’m asking if he sent you a letter?”
“He didn’t send me a letter.”
The way Pier smiled at her on the dance floor! He hadn’t been at his most attractive, smiling in that way. But that smile—that’s what she kept coming back to in the weeks after New Year’s Eve. He was happy—that’s what the smile said. He was so happy to be there with her, dancing. It seemed almost goofy, how happy it made him, to be dancing at a bit of a distance from her, looking at her like that. Why had it made him happy to look at her? Who was she? What was so good about her that it should have made him so happy? It bewildered her, so she hadn’t found it attractive. But then, weeks later, it was the most attractive and, really, the most exciting part. She had never seen that look on a man’s face before. There was a kind of wonder in it. Like he was thirteen. Like he couldn’t believe he was dancing with a girl, this man whom all the women at the New Year’s Eve party had liked, or at least the two who’d said so. When she asked Lynn which of the guests she was enjoying talking to, Lynn said, “Uh . . . Pier?” Then she giggled, and said it again, “Pier . . . ?” As if she was too struck by Pier to remember who else she was enjoying talking to, Pier obliterating them all. Then, there was the tall woman who monopolized him all night, cutting into other women’s conversations with him, sitting next to him at the dinner table, always right there by his side . . . but Pier had liked her. That’s what she felt—he really, really liked her. And she liked him, too. That’s all it was, such a simple thing. A simple, beautiful thing—so rare and nice in this horrible world. How she wanted to hold on to the memory of it, and she did.
These were exactly the things to hold on to in this life; these were exactly the things which made life so beautiful. It was O.K. to hold them close, to let them make you so pleased. To draw pleasure out of such a simple thing—why not keep drawing and drawing until there was no more pleasure to be wrung from that beautiful liking for each other they had? Why not wring it dry, over as long a time as possible—a few drops here, a few drops there. After all, everything in this life dried up—except love. Love could never be wrung dry. If it could, it wasn’t true love. This thing with Pier wasn’t necessarily love—it would probably run dry—but did that make it any less good now? She was just happy that she had been with him in that little slice of time and space, in that tiny slice of the universe’s eternal life. Just a little shard of eternity that had both of them in it, on the dance floor. That evening would exist forever, suspended, discrete and complete, in the eternal present of time and space.
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Listen to Sheila Heti read “Earthly Delights”
There were no friends to talk about it with. “You danced with a guy?” they would say. “At a party? So? How old are you? Thirteen?” Was it possible that she and Pier were thirteen somehow, that their souls, together, became thirteen—and would stay thirteen forever—or that this is what happened to them when they met, that thirteen was the string between them?
“Wait—you’re talking about Pier?”
They knew Pier and that he was no good, and they were not fascinated by him. Was he, therefore, a bad boy?
“You always only like assholes,” her friend complained, the one who had thrown the party. Pier was her husband’s friend. Colleague, really. “Why do you like assholes so much?”
“Pier is not an asshole,” she said, but she didn’t know. The idea that he was an asshole, and that she only liked assholes, excited her and made her feel a little bit proud, like she was secretly better than everyone else.
Returning to her city from the party, she had sat on the train and looked out the window and listened to songs that made her think of him. Some songs she played ten or twelve times in a row, songs she had never before liked, with lyrics such as It felt like springtime on this February morning / In a courtyard, birds were singing your praise / I’m still recalling things you said / To make me feel all right / I carry them with me today. . . . She smiled to herself. It was practically February, and yet it did feel like springtime. The musician was probably singing about some “asshole” whom none of her friends liked, but whom the singer wanted to fuck more than she had ever wanted to fuck anyone ever. And she had made this sweet and beautiful song out of it. The same was true of her: she had never wanted to fuck anyone as much as she wanted to fuck Pier, and yet inside her the feeling was so sweet, and so beautiful. Too bad she had a boyfriend, and Pier, she guessed, a wife.
She got home from the party and bought a shapely rubber thing and fucked herself so hard with it, pretending it was him—she did this for weeks. She had never done something like that before. Another time, driving down the highway, she had to pull off; she had made herself so dizzy just thinking about him that she thought she was going to crash the car. She calmed herself down, then continued on her way.
It was a gift from God, this desire—which was now a memory of desire. But a memory of desire is desire, and it kept coming back to her over the years; Pier. They did run into each other again—seven times! And each time the same excitement was there, and each time they did nothing: treated each other like they treated everyone else in the room, although something very special was hanging between them. But they pretended there was nothing special between them, but she knew there was. It had turned on at that New Year’s party, and it never turned off. Several of those next times, saying goodbye, they fumbled their hugs and nearly kissed each other, but withdrew, laughing, pretending it hadn’t happened. Had she asked for this? It was God who put this man in front of her. It was God who was to blame.
And when she let herself dream of Pier she didn’t think about the disappointment of those early afternoons, giving hand jobs while watching “The Cosby Show.” Instead, she imagined that somehow she and Pier would meet again, when both of them were free. They just had to. Then, if he one day put his penis inside her, it would be like all her dreams of fucking him. It would be that good. It would mimic her mind, not his mind. Even if no sexual or romantic experience with a boy had ever, ever mimicked her mind. Still, she believed.
After she died, God took her into his arms and showed her a little marble that contained her and Pier dancing on New Year’s Eve. He said to her, “Your friends called you ‘boy crazy’ and said you liked assholes, but I gave you the gift of desire and you used it properly: in private. The whole point of it was to enlarge your inner world, and it did that. I put that sodden penis in your hand when you were fifteen, too.”
“But why?”
“It’s a secret.”
She didn’t know if she was in Heaven or what. “Is this Heaven?” she asked.
God gave her the marble and then disappeared. She looked into it: she and Pier dancing. She had never gotten bored, thinking of Pier—for decades, whenever she remembered the night they met, it had completely thrilled her. She had left the boyfriend she’d been with at the time of the party, the one who spent every New Year’s in a cabin, alone. Then she met Roy, who became hers for life, and their love and sex had nothing to do with fantasy. She just liked the way her body felt when it was in the same room as his body. Her body felt alive and good whenever his body was anywhere near. And so they lived together for the rest of time, because his body felt the same way. They didn’t really understand it, but they called it love.
She dashed the marble to the cloud floor, and it shattered. Then she got scared. “Oh, shit, was I supposed to keep that?”
A little worker with a broom came by and swept it up.
“I don’t think I was supposed to do that,” she said to the little worker. “But that wasn’t the image I was hoping to receive in the afterlife. He was just some guy I danced with and really wanted to fuck. And I mean really.”
The little worker, who had long white whiskers like a cat, kept going with his pan and broom.
Then, almost before she knew it, Pier was there.
“Did you die?” she asked him, confused.
“Yeah, did you?”
“Yeah.”
They looked at each other, bewildered. They really hadn’t seen each other for more than a few hours in life, and they looked to each other the way they had looked the night they met at the party. They were even wearing the same clothes. Presumably, this was it: eternity.
“Were you married or something?” she asked him.
“Yes, to Lila. Were you?”
“Well, eventually. We didn’t have a wedding—but basically. You didn’t love me more than you loved Lila, did you?”
“No,” he said. “But I wanted to have sex with you more than I wanted to have sex with Lila.”
“Yeah, I really wanted to have sex with you, too.”
“So are we in Heaven with each other because we didn’t?”
“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “I don’t need to have sex with you anymore. I don’t even think I want to. I miss Roy.”
“I miss Lila.”
“So then are we in Hell? Are we being punished for lusting after each other?”
“I guess so,” he said.
They stood there awkwardly for a few minutes, or maybe it was a few years.
“Should we try having sex?” he asked.
“I guess so,” she said.
So then they did it. And it was pretty incredible—pretty incredible for a first time.
“Huh,” she said.
“Yeah, this is pretty weird,” he said.
“I really felt we were destined to meet—on New Year’s, when we met. I went away with that feeling.”
“I guess we were, if here we are.”
“This is so stupid,” she said, looking around, as if someone were standing by with a clipboard or something, waiting to take them on to the next thing, or to explain this to them.
“I mean, we can’t be the only ones in this situation,” he said.
She sat down on a cloud. “Let me think,” she said, but it was as it had been in life—whenever she declared she was going to think, she suddenly felt completely unable to think. In this case, however, it was probably that there was too much to think about, as all of this was beyond her comprehension and experience. She was like a newborn, there in the afterlife, newly born into the afterlife, not yet knowing what anything meant, just as when she had been born into her earthly existence, it had taken her years just to be able to identify oatmeal. She suddenly felt hopeless. As a baby, you didn’t know that you didn’t know, but here in the afterlife, with your memory of your earthly life, you did know that you didn’t know. She understood that she was in a new dimension, with probably all new rules and meanings.
“I just can’t figure it out,” she said.
“Maybe God didn’t want us cheating on our partners—”
“Yeah, maybe God wanted us to be with our earthly partners, so he kept us separate until now. They were for earth, and you and me—we’re for Heaven?”
He threw up his hands.
So they tried having sex again. It was astonishing, completely mind-blowing, actually, but it was not surrounded by earthly life. It just kind of happened in the middle of nothingness, which—it turns out—isn’t that erotic. Even if it felt great, and there was that energy and knowing between them, something was lacking. Sex here wasn’t a distraction from the toil of everyday life. And there was no one to tell about it. Some heart of mystery was gone from it. It was like God, in all his wisdom, didn’t really understand what one wanted from sex. It was its embeddedness in life that gave it its deep pleasure and meaning. It was hard to explain. It was hard to explain why isolating it from everything else basically drained it of its point. Its point was that—in that moment—everything else wasn’t being done, but sex was! That it had triumphed over everything else. But, with nothing else, there was no triumph in it, and, without the triumph, sex had no point.
“I’m really glad I got to see you again, though,” she said, hoping to leave Pier now and go on to whatever else eternity had in store. But she couldn’t go. There was nowhere to go. And when Pier tried to walk away somehow the laws of the place had him walking back toward her.
“So then is this Hell?” Pier asked her. “No offense. But is this our punishment?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. But she wasn’t sure. Had she done something wrong in wanting Pier? Should she not have listened to that song so many times? Did it just take the soul some time to adapt to the pleasures of eternity? Was she too fresh to appreciate or understand its pleasures, and what was so great about being here with him now? She had really wanted to fuck him—more than any guy she’d ever met. And now she could for eternity. So? What exactly was her complaint?
I want to not have the things I want, she realized, for her mind was still working the way it worked on earth. I want the things I want to be just beyond my reach—just beyond my fingertips. That is happiness for me. Huh! It was so simple. Suddenly, she understood everything about her earthly life.
“I’m the same,” he said. “That’s how I was, too.”
“That’s why we liked each other—what we saw in each other.”
“Yeah.”
She hoped, now that she got it, that something would change. But they remained there. As if the point of Heaven wasn’t to understand things, the way it had been the point of earth. Indeed, her new understanding suddenly floated away, and she could barely remember the understanding she’d come to. But Pier was still there in front of her, clothed like he’d been that New Year’s Eve. She thought, I should just lick my tongue all the way up his neck, take off his shirt, pull off my dress, draw his cock into my mouth, and suck on it, then when I’m done sucking on it, I should turn around, let him take me from behind, just throw my head back, hope he yanks my hair . . . and so on. Despite the lack of context, she started to get wet and her skin flushed and she looked at him and gave him a little smile, and he gave her this little smile back, and then they were close, him touching her shoulders and kissing her slowly on the mouth, his hips and cock grinding into her, for they still had their clothes on, it was just like being thirteen, “dry humping” they had called it, back when they lived in time. It was amazing—this “asshole” was touching her breast so beautifully, she drew her fingers through his beautiful floppy hair and they collapsed on the cloud and she was on top of him, then she stopped and looked down at him and he smiled up at her the same smile he’d smiled when they were dancing, like, Fuck—I can’t believe it’s YOU, and she thought, But who AM I? And they laughed, and he started pulling off his belt, and she sat back beside him to watch him do it: she loved watching a man pull off his belt, she always had, there was just something about it, it was so sexy, so private, so manly, so much like a movie, and with just this hint of violence or punishment, but also he was just undoing his belt, but what was below his belt, oh was there ever an article of clothing in the history of humanity more enticing than bluejeans on a guy with a big pressing cock underneath, pressing hard against it, and that bronze metal zipper that you got to pull down, and then the whitest underwear underneath, how good a hard cock felt beneath soft white underwear . . . and yeah, it really wasn’t so bad to be here, she was getting into it, it was so hot, her friends had hated this guy, and she smiled to remember this. Weren’t most of those friends dead? Yeah! How come in life you could never remember that all those people around you would be dead, when it was the only truth worth remembering? This one would be dead, and this one would be dead, and this one would be dead, too—all the delight one could have felt if one only had the courage to remember this! And here was Pier—dead! And she, too—also dead! And it was fine! At last! At last they could fuck!
Pier had been like the box of maxi pads, waiting in her drawer, ridiculously there for so long so that whenever she opened the drawer, she would see it and think the day would never come when she would start bleeding like her friends. Would it ever happen EVER? Pier had also been a hope, there in the drawer, pushed to the very back of it, and whenever, over the years, she caught sight of it she would doubt the day would ever come. But she had been the one to tuck it in there. And she had eventually gotten her period, and now she had Pier, and they could touch!
The important thing about lust is to wait, she thought. It’s the thing lust needs: waiting. It actually makes it better—all along, and in the end.
Pier heard her thought. “How brilliant we were to have waited.”
“No one ever waited more patiently for something they wanted more.”
He smiled at her. They were heroes of lust. Here in the clouds. As space penetrates time, and time, rock-hard, penetrates space.
What had given them the strength to wait? “Goodness,” they agreed. “We were so good.” But what had given them goodness? Or was it not goodness, in fact, but the knowledge that the sensation of lust would always be superior to whatever lust was pointing to? Was that what had bound them, and no one else? God had put that fifteen-year-old dick in her hand, and she had learned from it. Only up here, here in Heaven, could sex be better than the wanting of it could be.
The little worker with the broom came by, passed them, moved right along.
“We can do this for eternity,” Pier said.
“Yes,” she smiled.
“What happens when Roy and Lila die?”
She shrugged; she didn’t know. “I don’t even know what sex is,” she said.
Then she heard God again. “No one knows.” ♦