Yield by Lee Houck

Author:Lee Houck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Books
Published: 2010-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Part Two

Chapter Seventeen

When I was little, my mother told me that inside everyone, at the absolute center of us, there is a tiny golden kernel, our essence distilled down to something pure, elemental, something very close to a soul. She told me that radiating from this small kernel are thousands of vaporous strings, impossibly thin, like the rippling pink licks that float inside a plasma globe. And those strings hold us all intact like a magic anchor, tied with minuscule square knots to our organs, our bones, our skin, which pull our bodies back toward that absolute center, toward that precious kernel, like our own unique gravity.

I used to stand in the middle of my bedroom, arms splayed out, looking at my naked body in the mirror, wearing the cheap X-ray glasses mail-ordered out of the back of a comic book, trying to see through my flesh, trying to locate that shining golden center. I would squeeze my eyes closed and open them quickly, as if to sneak up on the real me. I would curl into a ball under the sheets, the bedroom dark, the curtains closed, and the lamp turned off, expecting the light from that kernel to shine out from my insides, a flickering orange glow like a far-away candle.

But as I got older, passing involuntarily through the summers as a horny, lanky teenager, somehow those pink strings began to stretch and break. Imagine your body growing larger, inflated, ballooning out—imagine time as physical distance, your edges moving ever farther away from the core that holds you together.

It never occurred to me that I could make money doing what I did. Sleeping with men wasn’t a pastime, it wasn’t a hobby. It was who I was. Or it was the way I figured out who I was. Sex was how I learned to read myself. It was where I learned to disappear into the other side of the known world, sink into that flat place. It allowed me access to my hidden self, that unknown person that comes scratching its way to the surface, unexpectedly. It unlocks a space, a landscape, a perpetual wind.

The first time I got paid for sex, it was an accident. I had picked someone up, or maybe he had picked me up—however that mutual glancing is decided. He was rich (so he said), and happily married (so he also said), and he poised his pen over his checkbook after I had finished. “One hundred dollars,” he mumbled, as if he were speaking to nobody in particular—and at the time, I didn’t know what kind of money I was worth. I was still breathing hard, my temples moist with sweat. He wrote it out, tearing along the perforated line, a clean, satisfying sound. And I took it, foolishly I know now—who takes checks? But he stuck a twenty in my pocket and asked if I’d come back in two weeks. So for almost a year there were one or two appointments a month. One time we fucked on the sofa, and I accidentally knocked a lamp off the end table.

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