Not all her parties were sex parties and she didn’t always call me her girlfriend, but we rode that late summer into an Autumn of mostly lesbian orgies. Sabine driving the car, everyone else an unbuckled mess in the backseat. Where are we trying to go is something I never asked her. I can’t remember the first time it happened. I don’t remember a lot of the times. For me to get in there required first drowning a little in mostly martinis, which are a reliable way to forget your body and throw it at anything, anyone. At her, preferably, in my case.
There was always more than one option. Pairing together the different cocktail components, we’d lay out the orange peels and vermouth all nice. A bucket of ice on the makeshift bar that doubled as a break room but without walls. My only consistent clear memory is playing bartender to give myself a direct purpose, reprise from the frenzy of touching. I’d pretend making everyone another round was a chore. And then the naked voices praising me for mixing, the part I loved. My way to spill into the pile of pieces making the scene sex despite it never feeling like sex exactly, not that I understood what made sex sex, but these mounds of people doing it together read kind of pop up picture book, not directly learning anything specific but exciting because it was different than how you typically read. A gallery but you could touch and see the picture shift, spread out, sound. It doesn’t seem like it, but I was there.
My favorite one happened after a picnic, sunshine flooding a room I didn’t know. Sabine and I were putting on a little show in the park, with words, mostly hers. Sitting on a quilted blanket. Beers run out early in the afternoon. To keep the show going Ava offers her new apartment and the case of wine in it. Perfect. Eight of us with rosy cheeks, knowing things. Ensuite jacuzzi, king size bed on a built in platform like it was porn already. And right away the bath is running, clothes come off. Knocks at the front door, some guys invited earlier. Sabine pokes out just her head to say you can’t join us anymore actually. Being on the inside felt even better then because we closed it off, like a renaissance painting if the gaze and muse were the same source. Incredibly there was an antique speculum and we started playing doctor. Looking into each other. Then touching. Three in the bath, five on the bed, Ava saying I swear I’m not a lesbian. Ava, who had lent me so much money. Mostly for drugs but food, too. Ava, my friend I was now fucking with my girlfriend who she typically despised the way friends despise your girlfriend but in this moment she likes her and that wedged me between them like a door. In the polaroid from this afternoon it’s not clear if I’m dancing or falling: eyes closed, body mid motion, disembodied arms wrapped round me, not Sabine’s.
I think we went to Silencio after, it was only just getting dark when clothes came back on. Sabine worked their Jazz and Tarot night as a reader, so she could get us in for free. Never discreetly. We had both learned tarot our year not talking, her still in Montreal, me on an empty beach somewhere far. There was this cat named Evie who meow’d like a wolf and her human gave me my first deck. I studied the card book, researched different spreads, interpretations, memorized every symbol, made altars, the ex-catholic in me so ready. Sabine’s religious equivalent was poker. Waiting for a date to arrive at an empty table with tarot cards on it, a stranger asks for a reading and she improvised. Then a twenty dollar tip was in her hand. The manager clocked it all. Without testing if she knew what the cards meant, hired Sabine the spot. A threesome with next November’s boyfriend got us back together after that.
Sabine’s walk up apartment in the trees of Esplanade Ave, we’d never had sex just the two of us there. But that night we did. Despite someone else also being there. Green windows flicking in her brown eyes and lemon melange tasting cunt. Being the first person I knew to get paid writing made Sabine a minor god instantly. Oh and the pear shape of her open mouth sounding. Thin lips like pear skin. Clammy pearl smell. She taught me how to shuck oysters, knuckles all bloody. A minor god cracking things open for me—one time while I napped, which became the kindness I’d straddle when she was cold or briefly loving someone else.
No memory of another body but of eyes watching, which was familiar to me—steps back from my body gazing at my body, eyes bloodshot, red. My only door somewhere inside being the soft room that rose out of poems I’d scribble in notebook margins. Staying there though. Too alone of a place rubbing all close. The first time it was just us and a guy, he barged out of my salon sized bedroom, eyes squeezed sour like a grape and slammed the apartment front door open before sing shouting: FUCKING LESBIANS. The rocking horse between performance and reality, her sounds. And I was there to believe in every pitch. Not totally hypnotized, more fascinated by the range and what had to be a practiced cadence that answered my mouth, my hand.
The boyfriend had left for work before we woke up. Sabine’s flight in a few hours, it was clear I’d skip my morning shift. Outside it was snowing of course. A few days later I’d also be going home for the holidays, both our families knowing nothing about me. We took the 99 line downhill together, Sabine’s suitcase between her legs, my nerve endings humming. And the dense city was a white sheet of light out the window, not cold. That desire to be just us fulfilled on the public bus, feelings bright and tipping out. A particular sense of us being in time, the snow an exclamation mark of that. It’ll be different when I’m back, you said when we parted, confirming my belief in us as something to conquer and therefore, original—and thus, important.
After I would have gone back to a pink room, furnished by a revolving door of subletters before me. It could have been a nice room. There was even a Juliet balcony. I only used it to smoke. Or yell down at Sabine on the sidewalk, make plans. She’d throw rocks at my window to call me the month my phone got stolen. Somewhere in that room I wrote many bad poems, really trying to write just the one, about not recognizing myself in the mirror. It was the first literal poem I ever tried to write. Perhaps I'm still trying now.
We had both been dancers once. Now the stage was missing, which didn’t mean it was gone. The comfort of performing for an audience, a mask we knew young. Moving your body with recited emotion to make whoever watched feel it too. An estimate of brief understanding, like music. Or sex. That’s where we first met. I remember lying in bed pointing our toes at the ceiling in the first apartment I knew her in. Sabine’s basement bedroom was sexy, the only time I’ve ever thought that. Black silk curtains substituting two of four walls. High beams and an almost average sized window. Her tall bed completed the feeling of being in the cabin of a trans-atlantic boat, the world outside distant, blue, and you’re not exactly certain where you are but navigating is not currently your job. She showed me old dance costumes recycled into sex party outfits. Kept in the same box. Kind of perverse, but I was jealous she still had something of her dancing past. I didn’t. New pieces made of leather added, the old fluffy ones thrown out. I thought this box is just like a collage and decided to like it for that reason. Sabine’s body the frame. Her Parisian tits. My big hands holding onto them.
The last group sex we ever had together, Sabine and I held hands across the other bodies. Lines passed around on a little round mirror, a bourbon bottle, swigs not cocktails. Not our set-up. The hosting couple had heard of Sabine’s parties, wanted to show her something. She was only around for the weekend, visiting me, we didn’t live in the same city anymore. The worst part was our eyes locking as Amber howled what I think was a climax, tits smacking my jaw. Bad because in Sabine’s eyes I saw what I felt, totally bored. Even worse, the Arctic Monkeys’ new album was playing. Just terrible. It was my birthday. Twenty two. Every gift she ever gave me was a joint gift from someone else, too. She was my first girlfriend. When the couple invited us that night I said sure okay like it was my job. I think I wanted to be Sabine’s assistant. How in couple-run businesses there’s always one truly passionate about the gig and the other keeps the books, ensures everything is set up good. I wasn’t technically a boy so I thought that meant I needed to give her something else. Thinking it was only me that could bring back her stage and get up on it too. Thinking an audience made it true.
