The problem with Sadie is that she can’t cum. Now that’s not her fault and not mine either, but she’s with me, you see? And you know how it goes with a woman who has something festering in her deep down. They just keep diggin’ at it.

I guess I’d better start from the beginning. We met at a party in ’93, so I guess it’s been about three years since we got together. Memory’s a fuzzy thing. The party--I believe--was off Yinsh and Dinter. What fuckin’ names. I swear. Anyhow, she kinda got cornered by a guy in the laundry room, and the dryer was runnin’, and you couldn’t hear anything because it was one of those old dryers that rattled the legs off itself from stirring, but I came down there to get another beer out of the cooler, and I recognized the guy everyone called Boulder, and he was whispering, and I knew he had a reputation for coppin’ a feel, not quite a rapist, but if you’re a female it still isn’t comfortable, and so I walked up behind and said howdy doo. Of course he didn’t like that, and he didn’t get his name for no reason. He was huge, mostly round and chubby, but a lot of mass to hassle with, and Sadie—of course I didn’t know her name at the time—she was shaking a little. Now I have a way with difficult people. I don’t know why that is but I say to him

Now Boulder, you’re gonna get yourself wrapped up in something that’s gonna send you back to prison. You can see the young lady. She isn’t exactly enjoying your company. You see that, right?

He didn’t exactly like my sentiment, but it’s all in the delivery, and he took a minute to step away, mumbling like he does. It was, after all, a bad neighborhood, and small crimes happened every minute, and they add up to people eventually getting shot or stabbed. So I always found a way to communicate the tough things with a smile, but I’m also just concerned about people’s well-bein’. I care. I do. And I guess she saw that too—Sadie, who would only give me her name when I let her pull a few swigs off my beer.

She wasn’t right with her words at first. They kinda came out a bit slow and rattled, like a small engine low on oil just kinda idling low and sputtering. But then we went across the street on Yinsh. There’s a watering hole that goes by the Tinted Delphi—this fuckin’ town. Anyways, it ain’t such a bad place. We got in over there and took a seat at a table towards the back at her insistence. She had a hold of my arm like she didn’t want me to get away. Yeah, like I was going anywhere. Sadie’s gorgeous, she gotta a butt that won’t quit with eyes that are as mysterious as the devil himself, and she had really nice white skin. These days, you ain’t supposed to objectify women like that, but I’m just tellin’ ya how it is or how it was rather. That damn woman was sexy. Still is.

Anyways, Sadie made me order her something while she went to the bathroom. I had the cocktail waitress bring us a PBR and a Dirty Shirley. Sadie liked that drink. She kept sputtering the name on the edge of her mouth. Dirty Shirley, Dirty Shirley, Dirty Shirley. She must have drank like eight of those damn things, and once she did, she became the damn smartest woman I’d ever met. She’d talk about history, current affairs, legal precedents, medicine, astrology. Shit, I didn’t feel adequate enough to sit next to her, but she was a real nervous Nelly, you see? She was shy around people, and I was the only man she could ever look in the eye. She had real issues, as they say. But after that day, we never left each other's side. You see, we both lived off disability. I had a bad foot that got smashed when I was in the army, and she had a social disorder and couldn’t hold a job for longer than an hour. We were two unfortunate people with fortune enough to find each other.

On our second day, I took her out for lunch at the Brewtique, it’s up along the estuary inlet in Bankside. It’s the only brewery they got in these parts and they make the best damn dark stout anywhere. Of course, as I said, there wasn’t anywhere else, but Sadie didn’t know that and shit, she drank anything and everything. Booze was booze, and she shared my love of beer and spirits. You’re not supposed to embrace alcoholism, but if your life is shit, then your life is shit, and we filled it with what we could to keep our minds and hearts happy.

Well, anyway, we drank a good portion of whatever they had in the stills, and then we headed out to the beach during the evening and sat at the exact point where the salt water met the fresh water.

“You gotta be able to swim in both waters to live in this world,” she said as the light started slipping away from us.

She always said stuff like that. Stuff that made you think. But I was never the thinking type, really. I just dealt with things the way they were. The way they are. Come what will. But Sadie always thought of herself as transformative. That was her word for herself. As if she might not be who or what she was now. I never understood quite what she meant. But she kept my mind turning and twirling into new things, and I loved her for it.

She was the one who kissed me. I guess she was waiting for me, but I just didn’t know how to get things started. I didn’t read body language very well. Sadie was always explaining that to me. She was always trying to make me a better man. More of what she wanted. Less of what I was. I guess I had a hard time paying attention to the things that made people more or less, but she seemed keenly aware.

‘Jimmy,’ she said, ‘You so God Damn shameless.’

She could never say it without a trace of a smile on her lips. She always said I was her kryptonite. That I was impenetrable.

‘Nothing ever bothers you, Jimmy. How the fuck do you do that?’

She had a dirty mouth and a dirtier mind, but it seemed to work against her. Even in her kiss, there was an element of war that she couldn’t quite sort through in pleasing and being pleased, as if some demon was at work, and she’d pull the plug and kindly ask me to finish. I knew that I didn’t have the know-how, and I asked in the beginning if there was something I could do, but she hated when I asked. If I asked at all, she wouldn’t speak to me for days, and I’d have to wait until she came around or do something stupid enough for her to laugh at. So, you see what I’m saying about the issues? She just was. Couldn’t be helped.

We moved in together a week later. I moved her from her mother’s house, who barely spoke and who Sadie didn’t have much of a relationship with, only that every Friday night, they drank a bottle of wine together and sat on the front porch knockin-down. That’s what they called the conversation. Sadie said it was a lot like bowling. How they talked about someone, setting them up like a bowling pin, and after a bottle of wine, they’d tore them down to nothing, like the tide that takes everything away at nightfall. Something like

Ol’ Johnny Harris, remember him? He used to run that sawmill in Pine’s Creek. Married Sue Johnson about two decades ago. Oh Gawd, how many daughters did they raise up, something like six or seven? And they saved for that place over on Watson Ave and had Mr. Burlington inspect it before they bought it. I guess that’s where it all went wrong for them. Mr. Burlington plain missed that cracked foundation, and some of the trusses were also fucked up or something because Hurricane Mortiari came through and wiped it out, and the insurance didn’t cover it because of the faulty inspection or however, that works. And then they lost all their money and had to move in with their oldest girl and their husband. And then her husband died, and they defaulted on their land over in Polly, and they had to keep jumping ship after that…

Sadie said knocking down was how records used to be kept. It was all through memory. Now, she said, nobody told stories. People just save names and dates, she said, and who fuckin’ cares about that. And so she gave her mother a hug full of whispers, and we moved what little she had to my place. It was mostly sentimental stuff. No furniture or nothing. Just some books and letters and trinkets that girls like to keep as if they will, at some point, foretell the future.

She brought this pint glass with her that had a funny set of lips on it, painted up with maroon-colored lipstick. Sadie never drank from it though, and one day, we came home from the pub, and I was a little knockered and grabbed the glass off the shelf, not thinking about it, and tried to pour me a martini, and man, I ain’t ever heard anybody shriek, like that. I put my hands over my ears, and she took the glass from me like a mama bear come to take back her stolen cub. She peered at me in agony and polished the glass with a rag from her pocket until the lights glared off of it and put the glass back on the shelf with the lips facing out. And I thought, what’s that shit about because I was afraid to ask. And to this day, she still hasn’t told me. And that’s what I’m living with buddy. She’s a hurt bird. Somebody clipped her wings a long time ago, and she never figured out how to get around without them. That pain is real, and it’s just a matter of time before it spills out into whatever we’re doing.

Shortly after she moved in, our love-making became the real issue. She’s the one that’s always initiating it because every time I try, it ends up just like the lipstick glass, and I’m running from the room with my hands over my ears, wondering if I will ever hear anything again after her one of her fuckin’ shrieks. And sometimes it can go awhile, and she doesn’t like me jerkin’ off. Because I’ve tried it once or twice in the shower, and she always comes waltzin’ in and does this cross-eyed inspection through the glass to see what exactly I’m doing, and the whole thing is humiliating, and so I just have to hold it in or pour liquor on it which just makes matters worse.

But we’ve found ways around it, though, I would say. Sadie taught me to play chess. It took me a while to get the hang of maneuvering the knight. She’d get frustrated and sigh and move my knight back to its original position.

“Try again,” she’d say.

“What the fuck kind of L-shaped shit is three squares and one or one square and three.”

And I’d move, and she’d put it back, and I’d move, and she’d put it back until finally I just stopped using the fucking knight altogether because I couldn’t remember how the damn thing worked. Finally, when she caught on that I was never going to use that piece again, she took hers, the dark one, in her hand and came to my side, opened my hand, and placed it. Then she closed it and made me hold it close to my chest and said

“This is the key to my heart. Please learn how to use it, Jimmy.” And then she kissed me gently on the lips in that strange quivering way, in which she appeared to be choking back a damn of tears, and went to bed.

We played other things too. After a lot of begging, I finally got her to play Mario Brothers the original on an eight-bit Nintendo that I got from Burty’s Pawn down the street. I didn’t like the newer style games, they were too hard to control and had too many buttons. Sadie loved it at first as I first did because it was like living in a cartoon. And we whistled that toon that everyone has come to know. That doo doo doo da doo doo doo that chimed in that electronic tone that never left your head after you played it awhile. But then Sadie didn’t like the dis-continuation, as she called it.

“You drop down a damn hole, Jimmy, and it doesn’t show what’s in that hole, and then you just reappear at the beginning of the level. And where are these levels? I mean there are no maps. How the fuck do you know where you really are?”

And I kinda understood what she meant. I’d just never thought about it. I mean, I always just played from wherever the game put me, just like in my life. And I explained this to her. I did. But she saw this creation of the game to be lazy and unjust.

“I mean, they couldn’t come up with some kind of story for these fuckin’ plumbers?”

So for a long time, I played by myself, for hours on end sometimes, while she drank and threw stuff at the screen. One day, we came back from Wendy’s with some burgers and fries, and I was chowing down and licking’ on a frosty in-between levels on a new—well, new to me—Mario Brothers three-game I’d got for half-price at a yard sale in Yerba when she just started throwing bits of hamburger and fries on the screen like some mental.

“You know,” I said, while I continued to leap and ‘do mushrooms’ as Sadie called it, “Mario can’t eat any of that stuff you’re throwin’ at him.”

“Eat your fuckin’ fries, Mario!” And then she laughed, like a mental, on purpose, playing the game that I’d started. “Here’s some Ketchup to go with,” and she peeled a packet and squirted it on the TV.

I didn’t blink. I guess because that one-of-a-kind smile bloomed out of her face at that moment. I just decided to join in.

“Well, he gonna need something cold to wash that down,” and I slung the last of my frosty into the screen, and she jumped on me all feverish and shaking, and she started peeling off her clothes, and I could tell she was struggling with something as she did it, but I didn’t know what it was. I thought I should say something. Something to help her along, you know. But I didn’t want her to freak out, so I pulled her real close to me, stopping her from undressing and trying to soothe whatever was at work inside, and then she looked at me a little confused.

“I’m never going to hurt you,” I whispered. “Never ever, baby.”

And for reasons I didn’t know at the time, this seemed to hurt her more than anything I’d ever said to her. I mean, her face just sucked itself deep inside, and she started rocking and making sounds. Still, she didn’t stop what she’d set out to do, but maybe changed course because she stopped undressing herself and instead unzipped my pants and pulled me out through the front of my underwear. I reached for her, but she pushed me away, and she went down on me, choking back some sobs, and her tears ran down my junk, and everything was wet, and I was confused about how I should feel or what I should be doing. Luckily there wasn’t much time to think about it because whatever she was doing she did it well, and it was over because it had been so long since I came.

That night, I watched her sleep and thought about what it would be like to not be able to have any release or pleasure like that at all. If my body had never let me do it, how would I learn to do it? I wanted to take her tears and make them mine while I stroked her snowy white hair.

‘I’m still hungover, Jimmy,’ she said one afternoon. We’d drank too much the night before, and we were at that point I guess, in every relationship, when you know all the stuff about each other up to a certain point, and then you’re either gonna share one heart or break it. Because every day, we were binging until neither one of us could see straight, nor were we keeping everything in real tight because we’d made our promises—promises that everyone makes in the beginning.

‘Well, what do you want to do?” I asked.’

‘What the fuck is there to do in this fuckin’ place?’

Sadie’s language was getting to me, actually, everything she did was getting to me. Everything I did was wrong. Everything I said was wrong. And she had to make a fucking comment about all of it. Every damn thing. I just threw up my hands. I’d run out of words.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

She’d actually apologized. Something she never did. We were standing at the edge, and I really just didn’t want to think about it anymore.

‘Let’s just walk,’ I said.

We kicked rocks along the pavement as we headed towards Bankside. We’d been by Sig’s Groceries, and we’d already passed Stoppers Pond. It was kind of a warm fall, but the leaves were still eaten through with holes and decaying at the veins. Sadie made it a point to crunch as many as she could because she loved the sound. We chased a few through the wind, a happy moment, but the closer we got to Bankside, we remembered ourselves.

‘I don’t want to go drinking,” she said. “God Dammit!’

Sadie’s expressions were scattered and taut, and she finally just started walking in the direction of the estuary toward the inlet. I let her go. Walked away. More like flew. I couldn’t get enough distance away from her, and I was pissed, which I never got like that. But it's like that when you’re stuck. Not just with somebody else, but when you just can’t find any more living space inside. My head was just crammed with all of her shit, and I wanted to drink and make it go away, only it wouldn’t. And I can’t play any more chess with her or watch any more of her fucking boring ass classic movies or sleep beside her every night and not fuck her. So I found myself veering towards her direction instead of the brewery, but without a plan. I thought maybe I’d apologize for everything, but I was tired of apologizing. It only pissed her off when I was sorry for no reason.

‘You’re always pushing buttons to see what they do without knowing what they fuckin’ mean, Jimmy!’

She said that a lot. And so I thought maybe I should give this more thought and maybe have more of a plan, but I wasn’t sure what I was trying to fix, and I was going in two different directions at once and kept veering from one side of the road to the other trying to figure out what I was going to do.

‘Do you always do what’s expected of you, Jimmy?’

Her voice was in my head something fierce, you know? And everything she said about me was the truth. I didn’t have a mind of my own. I had to consider her or everyone else in everything I did. So, I couldn’t even walk to the brewery on my own. I kept thinking maybe if I had a drink, I would know the right course of action. After I was calmer. But then maybe I might get too calm, and she’d pack up all of her things and leave while I was out. But then maybe she should move out. Maybe it wasn’t right for me. But what the fuck is right for me? I didn’t have anybody. I didn’t have anybody else in the world.

And this kind of thing just went back and forth in my mind, and none of it had any meaning at all. It was just everybody else’s thoughts inside of me. Or more, it was just Sadie’s thoughts now. But I see what she meant. The only thing that ever happened when she told me shit was that I heard it. It never resonated, as she put it.

‘I swear, Jimmy! I just don’t know what you’re made of.’

And I heard it, and I heard it, and I heard it. That’s all I ever did was hear it. I didn’t know what other people did or how they acted when they heard something. Sadie always made it seem like I was missing out on something magical, which always frustrated the shit out of me, and I would just shut off inside. Because that was the only thing I could ever come up with. I just went numb. And I was never mad at her. Because she had her own problems. And so I didn’t want to make her life worse. So-so, what do you do, you know? Whatever that thing was that was supposed to make me me…I just didn’t have it. Which is fucked up because you’d think that’d be something like inherent or something. Something findable.

So I kept walking in different directions and doubling back between the brewery and the inlet until I was just so pissed that I couldn’t even seem to make a decision. So I just started yelling. Not too loud at first, but then I just let it go.

“Sadie! Fuck you!”

And it felt good to just yell like that. And I thought maybe that’s why Sadie sometimes just shrieked like she did. Maybe she just couldn’t hold it, and maybe I had held it so long I didn’t know that I was holding it anymore. Maybe I was one of those people who wore glasses and was always looking for them even though they were on my face. I wondered if that were possible. And I screamed again.

“Bitch! You fucking Bitch!”

It felt good. Because it wasn’t wrong. She was a bitch. All the time, she was a bitch. And I never said anything. I was always so fuckin’ considerate.

“What makes you so much better, bitch! Huh! What makes you so much fucking better than me! You live at my house and eat my fuckin food! You watch my fuckin’ TV!”

And before I knew it, I’d crossed Waker’s avenue and was stumbling on the trail down to the estuary where she’d kissed me for the first time. And I was still yelling things, not really knowing what I was saying, but saying them because my yelling seemed to be taking me somewhere without having to think much. But I was pissed. I was. And when I got to the place where the freshwater met the ocean, I saw Sadie sitting on the shore with her hands over her face, and she was crying.

I ran to her, realizing now that it was because it was what I thought I should do and not because I wanted to. And something inside me separated at that moment as I sat next to her and I put my hand on her shoulder. I didn’t say anything because I was tired of trying to hold everything up. Come what may. And what I should have noticed, had I not been so distraught, was that Sadie wasn’t wearing any pants or panties, but I only noticed this when she launched herself on top of me. I didn’t do anything. I just kind of laid there, and then, without warning, she bit my cheek, bit it like she was trying to scarf my face, and I hit her.

“Sadie, what the fuck!”

But she was laughing now. And she was on her feet with no pants on, and she was standing in front of me, daring me, almost, to do something. And for the first time I could ever remember doing, I grabbed her and picked her up. She beat at my back with the heels of her fists, and she shrieked that awful shriek and I could feel her tears coming down off my legs, but I didn’t care. I took her to the water, where a tree log was mostly sunk and hidden from view. I tossed her over the top of it and ripped her top off, not handily, but surely, pinning her down with my body as I did it. It was noon outside, and the sun hung over head and her body lay in the shade of the overgrowth, her gorgeous white butt propped in the air.

“Is this what you want, you fucking bitch?!”

But Sadie didn’t say anything. She breathed heavily and was shaking. I took my body weight off of her. I wasn’t going to rape her. I wouldn’t take it that far. But she’d have to tell me.

‘Yeeeeess!’

There was a moment of silence, but then I was still pissed, and it was almost more avenging to walk away, but I did something I’d been wanting to do for a long time. Like it was just hanging there in my mind like a dim object, and I was too lazy to put it into focus. I grabbed a branch from a wax myrtle and trimmed down some of the twigs until it made a nice switch. And then I brought one of her hands back behind her and pinned her down, and I whipped that nice white butt of hers. Because it wouldn’t quit. It had been there just teasing me all this time. And I wanted it until I hated it almost and just wanted to beat it. So I whipped and whipped and whipped her until her butt was full of red stripes, and she cried, and she shrieked, but I didn’t care. I just didn’t care anymore. I didn’t want to choose between two things. I wanted to do what felt good. And this felt so good. I whipped her hard even after she begged me to stop. Until she was exhausted, and her breathing subsided to a calm hiss. Then I dropped the switch and pulled my shorts down, and she gasped when I pushed myself inside of her. She couldn’t move, you see? And I made it last for a long time. I just kept rocking’, hard and steady, tide in, tide out, as we’d somehow defied nature, and she moaned in the good and the bad of it.

Finally, I pushed myself off her, and she slipped off the log, amphibiously, as if she were born to slide on and off, in and out, at will. I fell on the shore, exhausted; it had been longer than I thought. Hours. The afternoon had not gotten away from us. For once.

Sadie flopped down on the rocky sand with a hand between her legs, what she’d started before I got there, and now she was finishing. Again and again. Something she’d finally learned how to do after having been deprived for so long. She could’ve been one of those composers, actresses, singers, or any kind of artist that didn’t know she was an artist until she was. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but she was finally playing her instrument. And she just couldn’t stop herself. I watched her the way someone watched someone giving a performance, and she was right where she wanted to be, probably for the first time in her life. And she had this unbelievable look of satisfaction and joy, and she didn’t care anymore either.

I didn’t think she’d ever be done, and I didn’t want to stop her, so I watched until she finished, which was right around nightfall. Then she stood up and put her panties and shorts back on, and she made that sound that women make after a hot bath. That mmmm… sound.

We walked back to the house in the dark. Both of us drunk on something new.