What Do Women Want

blessings. She loved that, too.
    On the linoleum they hugged and drank the bottle of champagne he had ready. He listed all the reasons he wanted to spend his life with her, and eventually they stood and moved from the kitchen. They went not to the bedroom but outside, into the evening dark, into the unabating snow. As they walked, the sills grew more and more lush, the cars more and more enveloped. Everything was covered over, buried.

Chapter Six
    The Alley
    F or her twenty-fourth birthday, Ndulu gathered with several friends at a restaurant downtown. The restaurant was a straightforward, undramatic place, and Ndulu lived a straightforward, undramatic life, but a few of her friends were gay men who did not worry as much as she did about what was and wasn’t appropriate. In addition, the dinner involved some drinking.
    So, near the end of the meal, David called their waiter over and informed him that Ndulu needed a birthday kiss. By the time David was halfway through this overture, she had ducked her head and was covering her face with her hands. David had no idea how perfectly the waiter’s looks matched a longing of hers. And neither David nor Ndulu could have known how his wishes fit her fantasies.
    Standing now behind her, he didn’t laugh at David’s request. He didn’t tell David no, and he didn’t give Ndulu the suggested kiss. Instead, he leaned down over her shoulder with his lips close to her ear. “Go into the bathroom,” he said softly, though not so quietly that her friends didn’t glean his words.
    She stayed in her chair. Her friends—especially David, an aspiring musician who was used to plenty of sexual conquests and who campaigned regularly against Ndulu’s reserve—were jubilant, riotous with this development. They pushed at her with their hands. They pushed at her with their words. They managed to send her in the direction of the wooden bathroom door.
    T hese are fantasies, the first harbored by Isabel, the rest by others:
    “My grammar school principal. I’m in a skirt. Eleven or twelve years old. He has silver hair; he’s overweight; he’s wearing a blazer. He finds a way to call me into his office. He’s married. He has a million reasons not to do this. It’s not that perversely I think he’s attractive; it’s that I’m attracted to the fact that he’s so attracted to me. He’s risking that someone might walk into this office; he’s risking his job to be with me.”
    “A shower in a hotel with multiple people.”
    “A random guy on the street. I don’t want candlelight.”
    “Oral sex with a man I can trust. I know that sounds mundane, but I suppose this stems from growing up in conservative, backwater, buttfuck Kentucky, where blow jobs were expected and relished in discussion but eating out was either gross or wasn’t discussed at all.”
    “I am a young virgin peasant girl whose family is one of many that works the land of a rich landowner; the landowner or his son forces himself on me, and I know I have no choice but to let him do what he wants. Or I am the school whore or a social misfit, and the football team is taking turns with me. I am still coming to terms with the fact that things that I find to be wrong—rape; taking advantage of those without power—are the things that bring me to mind-blowing orgasms.”
    “Not scenes. Textural sensations playing through my head.”
    “Another couple having sex, near me, where I can see them. Someone licking me or touching me, maybe two people, and then a man entering me from behind. I wouldn’t say it’s violent. Maybe vigorous—is that a dorky word to use?”
    “The rape scene from The Accused , I’m ashamed to say.”
    “A married, older man that I work with, who I’m not even all that attracted to, fucking me from behind against a whiteboard—we work at a school—and hitting my face against it. Then he turns me around so that I can fellate him. Him coming on my face.”
    “Once in a while I dream of dreamy stuff: kissing and fluffy desserts we feed to each other. Quite often I dream of many men, servicing me all at once.”
    “A stranger, usually a construction type, peeking in my window.”
    “Essentially rapes. I started masturbating when I was around ten or eleven—the most common one back then was a middle-aged bald man while I was chemically paralyzed. Receiving pleasure wasn’t my fault if I was being raped; I didn’t have to explain myself to Jesus or my parents. Where the bald man came