Fucking Daphne by Daphne Gottlieb Read Free Book Online Page A

want?” she asked, pulling away and yanking my shirt over my head.
    â€œHit me,” I said. Or I might have said, “Hurt me,” or something else. But whatever I said was lost in the fabric; she didn’t hear me right. She thought I said, “Choke me,” and she gripped my throat and squeezed my windpipe shut. My breath was gone and I saw stars and she pulled on me frantically. “Come on,” she said. “C’mon, c’mon.” I felt my legs go as the screws and beams rattled in their bearings and then I came all over the stall.
    I was lying on the cool pink bathroom floor and she was sitting on the toilet, her jeans bunched over her boots. I ran my fingers gently across her laces while she peed. The bathroom door opened and closed several times but nobody said anything. That’s the kind of city San Francisco is.

    â€œI want to see you again,” I said. It was easy for me. I didn’t know anyone and I had nothing to lose. She snatched sheets of toilet paper and rubbed them quickly between her legs. She looked down on me with something resembling guilt, but not quite—more like the realization of two ideas that don’t exactly contradict, but affect and enhance, each other. She didn’t like me anymore. I was desperate and lost and she had problems of her own. “Usually I’m a lesbian,” she said, looking away, flushing the toilet.
    I didn’t know yet that I would stay in San Francisco for nine years and see her many more times and we’d become friends but not lovers; or that one winter day, on our way to catch some acquaintances at a party, she would ask me to wait with her outside the building, then force her entire fist into my mouth. At the time, on the bathroom floor, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t meet her again. I didn’t know where I’d be. I leaned toward the tip of her boot, sniffing the old leather of her shoe.

NEW FRIEND

    Bett Williams
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    D aphne Gottlieb and I met when we did a reading at a small women’s college near where she lived. Another queer girl writer, better known than we are, read that night too. Better-Known Girl got paid. We didn’t. She asked to get paid. We didn’t.
    I played spin the bottle with some of the college girls after the reading but put a stop to it before any genital contact occurred. Eight of them ran after my car with their shirts off, their breasts dancing in my rearview mirror. One of them wanted me to come back to her dorm room and spoon. Another was convinced that if I left Mills that night, I would get into a horrible accident and die. It had something to do with the fact that I was wearing a red T-shirt and chose to leave at 2:30 AM, an unlucky hour or something.
    Daphne and I had talked about getting together at a bar the next night. I called her and we arranged to meet at the Roost, a
dingy bar that had been taken over by yuppies for no reason we could figure out until someone played David Gray’s “Babylon” on the jukebox. We talked mostly about Better-Known Girl. Daphne was pissed at her for getting paid, and I sort of let on that I was pissed, too, even though I wasn’t. I think Daphne knew I was wishy-washy about dealing with the dilemma: How typical of Bett Williams to use some boozy sexual escapade with the barely legal as a way to deflect the focus from the issue at hand, once again bringing the attention back to herself.
    Daphne was wearing a black dress and boots with soccer socks that hugged her calves. Her black dreads held in tight all the things most people want to wash away. We gossiped about some people we knew, as negatively as possible. At some point the negativity reached total saturation level and we achieved an amiable ease. Because I was willing to be critical, she seemed to trust me.
    She leaned in closer and I thought, Some people I know want to fuck Daphne. During our shitstorm of gossip and complaining, I scanned the