Please excuse my prolonged absence. I’m writing a real book that will one day sell on actual bookshelves in a real live bookstore not within driving distance of my home. In the interest of that dream, I make no promises about when I might be in your inbox again. I’m dating though, so I’ve got lotsa fresh material… 🤷🏻♀️
If you want a reliable dose of Tarzan in your inbox, you’d have to subscribe to my business emails—hardly missed a weekly email in 7.5 years.
“Would you tell me about a desire you feel shy about,” you ask your date who is sitting in the bow of the canoe.
It’s a question you prepared in advance at the suggestion of your therapist. You are learning how to talk about safe sex, desire, consent and boundaries. The question is an experiment. You are attempting to put an end to a lifetime of not knowing.
At first he doesn’t understand the question. He shifts the paddle into his right hand after too few strokes with his left. He keeps doing this, unaccustomed to riding up front. You aren’t sure if you sat in the stern because it’s your canoe, or because you’re putting him to some kind of test. Will he be able to let you lead?
“Shy?” He asks. “You mean, like, something I’m too shy to do?”
“No,” you say, suddenly shy yourself at the intimacy the question. “I mean something it makes you feel shy to ask for.”
“Oh,” your date answers quickly. In his eager acknowledgement you hear that the answer is obvious, right at the tip of his tongue, as though he has been waiting for you to ask. “Rough play turns me on. Like, very rough,” he stops there, leaving you to imagine what this could possibly mean.
A cosmic joke!
The comedy of a romantic canoe ride with a man you met one time before asking him to drive three hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic to your home town on a Friday afternoon. Laughter bubbles up from the belly all the way to your cheekbones, infiltrating the back of your eyeballs.
“That’s so perfect,” you tell him, marvelling at the irony of living. “Because there’s something I want that I feel shy about too.”
A deep breath. A slow exhale. The invisible crossing of two fingers behind your back, a promise to your own dear heart. “I want someone to make love to me, slowly and passionately. I’ve been through a lot this last year. What I really want is tenderness, to be touched so gently it hurts. I know it sounds boring, but I want missionary-position-closeness.”
Another of the lines you rehearsed. Tenderoni kink, your therapist called it, and the two of you had a laugh. But there it is. You’re spoken it out loud. No going back now.
A can of lime soda water tips over in the stern, soaking toes that are muddy from a short portage through patches of poison ivy, wild mint and stinging nettle, in altogether the wrong shoes. You squint unto the sun, tossing your date’s retro MEC backpack safely to shore and stepping out of the boat. Something is waking up in your senses, like the smell of home-cooked meal reminding you how long it’s been since you last ate.
“I want to braid your hair,” you tell him, sidling between his body and the passenger side door. You run your hands through a long mane of coarse dark hair, pausing at the base of his neck to give the roots an experimental tug.
“You can braid my hair if you want to,” he says, as though it’s perfectly normal that you should want to arrange the salt and pepper hair of a middle-aged Korean man in the style of a 10-year-old Mennonite girl.
Your hips have their own agenda. They push into his body with a pressure you didn’t rehearse. He traps your bottom lip between his teeth when he kisses you. He sucks on your tongue like you’re made of spaghetti, and he wants all of you in a single bite. He bites other parts, too. Gently, enough to wake up your desire but not enough to leave a mark. Except when he does.
“I’m sorry,” he’ll say. “I didn’t expect you to bruise so easily. I’ll be more careful next time.” From his tone you glean that there’s a canon of kink you haven’t learned yet, but this man has. Later he will pinch you in other places and you’ll think to yourself how this is a man who knows about things you don’t.
You head for home, both hungry with so many desires.
“Your eyes,” he says. “They are so beautiful. Especially when you’re sad.” He draws your knees apart with his hands and leans in to kiss you from your perch on the kitchen counter, where you are wedged between the cupboard and the sink. It was from the same perch that you took a picture of him when he wasn’t looking, stooped over the oven door, fiddling with with the meat thermometer your ex-husband gave you that first Christmas after you left.
Your date produces a perfectly moist roast chicken using ingredients you didn’t even know you owned. The two of you will consume this with gusto some time after midnight, from a single shared plate, naked at your dining room table, overseen by an underripe bouquet of orange tulips you bought yesterday, hoping to give the right impression to a man you weren’t even sure was coming. The chicken tastes like Christmas. You don’t even like chicken but today it is your favourite food.
“Please don’t look for me on the internet,” you ask him.
“Okay, I won’t,” he says. For some reason you believe him.
At some point the heel of his palm will rub the length of your breastplate and he will grasp your neck under the chin, just for a moment. It is unexpectedly pleasant, this tender violence.
“Again,” you tell him, placing your hand on his and squeezing both around your neck. “I like that.”
It surprises you how much you like it. His hand presses harder the next time, and you feel the tender web between his thumb and forefinger press down on your throat, harder this time, almost but not enough to block the airway. His practiced hands offer you something new. Something violent and vulnerable, both hurting and holding. The startling pleasure of tenderoni kink. It is a kindness you didn’t know to ask for, so tender it makes your body shudder with desire.
More, your body says while his hand clenches around your neck.
“Yes,” you say. “Just like that.”
“Are you okay?” He will ask you later. “I saw that sadness in your eyes just there.” And now you are crying and also trying not to cry but also crying anyway.
“It’s just that I haven’t connected this way for a while,” you say. “I used to have people who I shared my body with. But it wasn’t what I thought it was. I had to let that go. I’m afraid to lose again. I’m afraid of being wrong about you too.”
He doesn’t say anything, just holds your half-naked body there in the doorframe, half in the dining room, half in the kitchen. All of your grief. All of your grace. All of your loss. You breathe, say nothing, and wait for your body to remember that you are safe here.
It was a hard paddle getting here but you are safe on this shore.
Notes from the underground.
Where I’ve been:
Nose-deep in writing my book. Listening to 79 hours of lesbo romance by Samantha Shannon. Getting my shoulder dry-needled by my physiotherapist. Trying not to fall out of my racing kayak. Bouncing on my new trampoline. Doing ketamine with two of my favourite people in the whole world, Tae and Coach Kathleen Oh.
What I’m reading:
Less by Andrew Sean Greer. A Pulitzer Prize winner and the most perfect book I’ve read in a decade, by far. Here’s my favourite line:
“He kisses like a person who has just learned a foreign language, and can only use the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you.”
That line hit me right in the guts. I once knew a person who kissed like that. May we all know such a kiss.
What I’m doing work-wise:
“Business Tarzan” has a new website. Buy stuff from me! My copywriting program is $200 off until the end of the month.
What dating apps I’m one:
Just one! It’s called Feeld. I learned about it from a TikToker who made a joke about finding his wife on an app for people trying to have threesomes. I high-tailed it to the app store before he even finished the joke.
I do not understand how this comment thread isn't FLOODED!!! Tarzan!!! This essay is a masterclass on how to write memoir and perhaps even on how to write erotica! Your ability to find words to the things that swirl around in our hearts and melt our guts is unparalled. I must have read this essay 3x before I could quote it because it seared itself into my brain.
Your courage. Your courage not only in going for what you want, but then sharing the story of you doing it. Your courage in facing not just the challenge of the thing, but the challenge of all the emotions the thing brings out in you. Your courage in finding the words to express it all - though perhaps that's more skill than courage... Oof!
Just here to say that this is one of my fave memoir essays ever and I read a LOT of them. In fact, I am telling all my own subscribers to sign up for your Substack immediately! Well done!
Beautifully (tenderly, even) expressed. Thank you for sharing this <3