
And more, it would have been to betray my mother, to be disloyal to the person she had been to me: my hero, a single mother after she bravely left an unhealthy relationship with my father when I was five. To experience sexual joy, it seemed, would have been to negate that reality. I was bereft, in agony, destroyed over her death. Most of all I couldn’t have pleasure, not even for a moment. We aren’t supposed to want our mothers that way, with the pining intensity of sexual love, but I did, and if I couldn’t have her, I couldn’t have anything. Which was mysteriously, unfortunately, precisely the problem. He fucked me and I sobbed uncontrollably. I rolled over on my stomach so I wouldn’t have to look at him. I breathed deep and attempted to fake it. No, no, no, I said, but then sometimes I relented. Mark and I were an insanely young, insanely happy, insanely in-love married couple. I would soak in a hot bath, and he would lean into it to touch me. He didn’t make me feel that I had to come. He went down on me in the gentlest of ways. When she died seven weeks later, I couldn’t bear for Mark to touch me. When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, my husband Mark and I took an unspoken sexual hiatus. And this was like that - the end of one thing, the beginning of another: my life as a slut. I never forgot it, seeing so much happen so fast. One second it was a fist, the next an open hand. When I was a child I witnessed a leaf unfurl in a single motion. It was only a kiss, and barely that, but it was, anyway, a crossing. I thought this every hour of every day for a very long time: I want my mother. The inside of my mouth began to bleed softly. “You’re not mature.” He flung me away from him and left. “You lying cunt,” he whispered into my ear. He stopped and pressed me against a brick wall and kissed me, but then he wasn’t kissing me. I walked with him to a parking lot behind a building.

I didn’t ask his name he didn’t ask mine. He said he’d been admiring them from across the room. I had monstrous bruises on my knees from how I’d fallen on them after I walked into my mother’s hospital room and first saw her dead. “Well then prove it and walk down the street with me.” I felt distinctly that he might be a murderer. He just kept looking at me steadily, as if he knew everything about me, as if he owned me. “You look like the kind of girl who has a cat.”


It was nothing fancy: sterling silver, thick and braided. I’d taken hers off her hand after she died. I was wearing two wedding bands, my own and my mother’s. I folded my hands on the table, steadying myself I was shaking, nervous at what I would do. He stood and walked to my table and sat down without asking.
#Crying suns cheats skin#
He was slightly pudgy, with jet-black hair and skin so white it looked as if he’d powdered it. I was in a cafe in Minneapolis watching a man. The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week.
