Jill Malone

This evening, at the dinner table, I asked Gavin if he were cold, and he said, “No. I’m not.”

“Really?” I said. “I’m freezing. How aren’t you cold?”

“I have fur.”

“You have fun?”

“No,” he said. “Fur. I have fur.”

“Where?” I asked.

“On my back.”

“What are you talking about?”

“My fur,” he said. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

“You don’t have fur on your back. Who are you kidding?”

“I’m a small talking cat with fur.” And then he meowed a couple of times before eating the rest of his noodles.

And the thing is, he’s so resolutely in the play of his life—the rest of us in important, but undeniably minor roles—that I look forward to the next story, because that’s really what’s begun, what he’s telling.

I’m writing this current manuscript in first person, present tense (I walk). I’ve never written the majority of a novel in present tense before—although the hospital scenes in Red Audrey are in present tense—and for the scholars among you, there’s a dirty tense trick in the last hospital scene. 

The weirdest, and most fascinating of my grad school professors railed against present tense as a dangerous fad. He argued that past tense is designed for writing: “Jim biked up the hill. He was biking slowly. He had biked earlier and injured his leg. He had been biking on an injured leg for weeks.” And that readers have learned to recognize shifts in past tense to indicate flashbacks and time shifts. He felt that present tense required distracting tense constructions to indicate time shifts. “I bike up the hill. I am biking slowly. I have biked earlier and injured my leg. I have been biking on an injured leg for weeks.” 

Over a page, a chapter, a book, the difference might be more remarkable, but I do think that in present tense, I have to be more conscious about shifting into a past episode so that the reader realizes we’re in the past, and doesn’t read past tense as the present experience of the book out of reader-habit. (Also, I avoid present perfect—”I have biked earlier and injured my leg”—because it’s too jarring, and sounds ugly.)

Did I get sought out because I was a masochist, and they could smell it on me? Or was I the one that sought them? And who do I mean by them?

Last spring, during a free-form discussion of her life and work, Dorothy Allison said it took her a while to learn that the “bottom could run the fuck.” When she said that, I looked around at the rest of the audience, and wondered if that statement kicked them in the belly too. For me, it was a similar revelation to my freshman Lit professor announcing that just because we fantasized about something didn’t necessarily mean that we wanted it to happen.

Maybe you’ve never wondered if you’re depraved, but, god I have. When I turned “Red Audrey and the Roping” in to my fiction workshop, I had to wait a week for the response of my peers. I’d dated several people in the class, and would date more before the end, but there was a palpable shift the night I walked in before our discussion. It was an experience that I’d have again when I was pregnant and my body became a public representation of a private act. The assumption, always, on the part of the reader, has been that I’m writing about myself. That I am Jane.

The most important shift in my thinking about my own sexuality came when I stopped thinking about normal and started thinking about comfort. Am I comfortable with this? Is this OK with me? Or, since sex is power, have I allowed myself to be powerless, or am I being made powerless? How assertive am I?

Where, in short, are my boundaries?

Turns out they’re in different places all the time, and dialogue is the most effective way to make sure they aren’t breached. Is that self-evident? For me, dialogue about boundaries was hard won—sexual boundaries and otherwise. I hope for you, it’s simpler. I hope, you’re one of those people who says, “Of course,” when you’re told that the bottom can run the fuck.

Whatever you test and choose with consenting adults, I want you to live without shame.