The Write Thing

An erotic proposition, when it brings uneven numbers into the question, is always a tricky one and therefore more exciting. Two young European girls arrive in Buenos Aires and decide they want to open their relationship to another player. They reply to her ad.

A few days later, they meet the potential candidate. First, there is dinner in Puerto Madero, and casual talk over a well-done lamb and three varieties of potatoes as a side dish. Wine is of course the obvious companion. Then there is the decision of going somewhere else for a drink, perhaps a disco, or maybe just a bar. There happens to be one nearby, a straight and cool lounge where they continue to talk…this time about the juicy stuff, sex, clubs, erotica and all the rest. They define their candidate as queer, and they seem to like the coolness with which she talks and expresses her mind. The night unfolds, and they are all a little drunk by now; tired, but not as much as they were before, when the conversation was much less spicy.

Looking at the young couple, it is obvious that their connection has all the elements of lesbianhood. They are totally out, as one of them prides herself in saying while she caresses her companion’s hand and plants her a soft kiss on the lips in front of an admiring crowd. They are kind of hot together, each keeping the boundaries a little open as they play their butch and femme versions of themselves. One of them leads, and this transpires in the long time it takes them to decide what food to order, or where to go. The leader will always have the last word. She later will voice her convictions about the gay community, with her militant past and her vast reading on gay-related issues as a banner of authority. Her partner will remain cool, her eyes betraying a certain admiration for her lover, which immediately precludes any counter-argument on her side (although she does have it). Meanwhile, their incidental guest is amused by the husband and wife scene, and she cannot help thinking that the subject will be a suitable platform for angry sex later on, a perfect remedy to efface the violence of the discussion and set the counter back to zero. In any case, it is already 4.30 am, and the three are too tired to solve the plights of the gay world in one night.

The game remains open for a next time, although some of the cards may have already been played. The potential candidate gets into her taxi and heads home, pondering on the power of classification as a form of security, the eternal dichotomy of men vs. women, gay vs straight, butch vs femme. A little disappointed, she sighs and right there vows that, even if it is a mammoth task, she will still be looking for that soul capable of escaping labels, that woman who will refuse to go by accommodating titles, the human being that will want to evolve beyond the typecast role of Blanche DuBois or Lara Croft. Il faudra continuer à chercher la femme, my dear, a voice seems to say…and a new day begins.

T and I started this game after our first meeting in Buenos Aires last month, which failed to produce an expected one night stand that we will never know how it would have been (ah, the cruelty of third conditionals! They can only keep us thinking). It turned out to be that, despite the fact that one of us got rebuffed in her propositioning the only night we met, we kept on talking, especially as I was supposed to be in America for quite a while. She gave me her cell phone number, and I gave her mine in the US. However, we continued a nice email exchange in the meantime. We would talk on the phone once a week or so, and would have fun with our conversations (I know I should not be saying this, but I am really charming…Woolfian rules! . One day she was about to ask me something a little too intimate, and she did not dare. I encouraged her, to no avail. Therefore, I thought she could ask her questions by email and provide a multiple choice set of answers to choose from. She laughed at this, but was enticed by the idea.

I was particularly intrigued by the fact that she has an identical twin who is also gay. Therefore, I shot first in the realm of questions. The following is a sample of the first multiple choice between us:

Would you ask your sister to “validate” someone you are dating in some physical way, just to be totally convinced that your girlfriend is right for you?

a) No, because my sister and I have different taste in women
b) Yes, because it’s always important to have a second opinion, and my sister’s taste is better than mine.
c) No, she will always ask me to validate her women, but I kiss too well and then her girlfriends want to keep on dating me.
d) None of the above, and you are a twisted person, W!

Oh yes, I am a twisted person, but just think of the possibilities that having an identical twin could provide! And, by the way, you call me twisted but…aren’t you dying to know what she answered?

People struggle. Some struggle with awareness, which is there but escapes them as they move forward in the vacuum toward the encounter with their better self. Others simply struggle. She started struggling only a while ago, but it was always clear that she was ready to put up a fight to her own struggling. She would stop and stare, only to seek asylum beneath the pages of a prayer book that might put words in her mouth she would be otherwise unable to pronounce. In that lonely and borrowed way, she struggled. Will she go on struggling? Maybe. When she crosses the bridge to the other side of the continent, many truths will possibly be there, waiting, to haunt her. Perhaps they already haunt her now. So she prefers to react by hiding behind the lock in the metal door that leads to the house upstairs. She prefers not to deal with more, she cannot handle more. She wants to be right, something inside her tells her she is, but she is not. She is simply struggling, against herself.