The Chastity String

Gideon here. I'm thirty-eight, which I only mention because Rosalind says I mention it too much, like the number is a defense I'm entering at trial. She's thirty-four and has never once felt the need to explain her own age, which tells you most of what you need to know about the two of us.

We had been dating about a month when she finally explained the thing she does. We were in her archive, the long low building off Ironwood Court where she keeps shelves and shelves of ceramic tile samples and repairs mosaics at a scarred wooden worktable. She had been quiet all evening, and I had filled the quiet the way I fill all quiet, with talk, with little jokes, with the general performance of being entertaining that I've been running since acting school.

Rosalind put down her tweezers and looked at me.

"Can I tell you something about how I love people?"

I said yes, and I meant it, but I remember bracing a little. A month in, that sentence can go anywhere.

"I practice chastity," she said. "Not all the time. Not as a religion or a punishment. As a gift of time. When I ask someone to wait, I'm asking them to stay in the wanting instead of rushing past it to the part everyone remembers."

She said it plainly, the way she says everything, and then she kept working on the tile while I sat with it. My first reaction, which was that my ego took a hit somewhere low and unexpected, I will be honest about. I was thirty-six then, newly worried about my knees and the gray coming in at my temples, and here was this woman I was crazy about telling me that the center of her desire was restraint.

But she hadn't said no. That was the part I kept turning over on the drive back to the bungalow. She had said slow. She had said wanting is the center, not the obstacle. I lay awake that night in my rented room, thinking about a woman in a concrete-and-glass building full of broken tile, and about how long it had been since anyone had asked me to be patient with my own body.

The string came later that week. I should set the scene properly, because it matters, and because I like remembering it.

The archive at dusk is mostly glass on the north side, so the light comes in low and turns the shelves into rows of small colored fires. Rosalind keeps a little dish of odd things on the worktable, buttons, a cow clapper, a key with no lock, and a frayed length of what she told me was marionette string, cream colored, soft with age.

"Give me your left wrist," she said.

I gave it to her. She wound the string around it three times and tied a knot that looked simple and was not, I found out later, because she'd practiced it on a broom handle for years before she ever used it on a person.

"This isn't a lock," she said. "You can take it off whenever you want. That is the entire point. It only works because you leave it on."

"What does it mean?"

"It means your want belongs to me for a while. Not your body, I'm not taking your body anywhere it doesn't agree to go. Just the want. You keep it. You feel it. You don't spend it."

She ran her thumb over the knot once and then went back to her grout. I stood there with my wrist tingling like she'd done something to it, which she had, just not with her hands.

I wore it home. I wore it in the shower, careful, the way you're careful with something you've decided is precious. I wore it the next day at a callback where I had to play a grieving father, and I swear some of whatever I gave them in that room came out of the string, out of the practice of holding something back all day and feeling it get heavier instead of lighter.

That was the first night of want, the real first one, and I remember it in more detail than I remember some actual events of my life, which is either love or bad memory hygiene, probably both.

Rosalind sleeps like a cat in a sunbeam, total commitment, no embarrassed positions. I lay beside her and my hand wanted things. That's the honest phrasing. My hand had its own opinions and a whole itinerary. I let it travel as far as her back, just her back, the long smooth slope of it under the sheet, and I traced her spine from the knob at the base of her skull down to where the sheet began, slow, slow, slower than I have ever done anything.

I had asked first, in a whisper, "Can I touch your back?" and she had murmured "Mm, yes" without opening her eyes. After that she drifted and did not stir. And the strange thing, the thing I'd never felt before, was that it was enough. It was more than enough. My hand on her drowsy back, the string tight on my wrist, my whole body humming with a pure, resonant vibration, and no urgency anywhere in it. Wanting as the center. She had said that, and there I was inside it, a man lying perfectly still at eleven at night because stillness was the whole event.

I think I understood her then, a little. Not all the way. But enough to stop wondering if I was being denied something and start noticing what I was being given, which was time, hours of it, desire with all the rushing taken out.

The following Saturday she tested me, or I suppose she'd say she measured me. She'd deny the word test and she'd be right, there was nothing to pass, but it had the shape of a test in the way a cold has the shape of a flu.

We were on the sofa in the bungalow, a movie on that neither of us was watching, her feet in my lap. She reached over, said "Can I?", waited for my nod, and pressed her palm flat against my fly, over the denim, over nothing but cotton and me.

"Breathe," she said. "I'm going to count."

I was already half hard from nothing, from the string, from the week. Her hand through the jeans was almost nothing, just warmth and a small steady pressure, and it was the most I'd felt from almost nothing in my life.

"Four," she said, counting my breaths out loud, and I realized I'd been holding one. "That's one. Again."

"You're counting my breathing," I said, and my voice came out about an octave below where I'd aimed it.

"I'm counting you. Seven. Good. Stay loose."

She didn't rub, exactly. She rested, and occasionally pressed, a slow patient pressure like a hand on a drumhead, learning the drum. I stayed as still as I could, which was not very, my hips doing small involuntary negotiations that she ignored completely. The string on my wrist felt warm. Everything felt warm.

"Twelve," she said. "You're doing beautifully. So quiet. Most men can't be quiet."

The praise went through me like liquor. That surprised me, how much I wanted it, how much being told I was doing well at holding still landed somewhere the actual touching hadn't reached. I was thirty-six years old and being told I was quiet and steady and it rewired something.

"Fifteen. Do you want me to stop?"

That was a real question. She'd taught herself to ask real questions, I think, before I ever came along, and I've always