Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania): Equations: Thesis: Wendy Smith

Here I am in New England, getting killed. It’s summer, there’s weed around, booze. I’m perched on a ledge, feel I’m being pushed off. Look who’s here to visit: Wendy, two years older than me, who has two pieces coming out in Poetry. My first major piece has been out two months. We immediately become big shots to each other. Wendy has slightly bronzed skin, brownish hair lightened towards dirty blonde, a voluptuous body but a way of holding herself that suggests she finds her own body embarrassing, somehow unworkable. Yet even her diffidence is enticing; it makes guys want to ram through those defenses. Our equation sinks into place: I’m a young Poundian firebrand, she’s got all the spiritualized quirkiness of Emily Dickinson, but with sex appeal. We are standing, having drinks in my room, smoking cigarettes in the balminess (open windows, flies). There’s a party down the hall we abandoned to smoke in peace. Somehow, a wind current comes into the room and does a loop so that the door closes: a minor miracle, or a universe sign concerning what’s meant to happen next. It does: I reach over, begin with gropes, which soon turn into kisses. As we go into this, Wendy lets her hair loose from her ponytail. We are two geniuses, kings and queens, and this is within days of Heather, her positing of me as underling. Such is a life in the arts. When a surfeit of symbolic material lands on two souls, they (sometimes) have no choice but to act them out. As I enter her, Wendy becomes a symbol of my own artistic potency, and I of hers.
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As I pound away at Wendy, I notice this about her: she’s scared of sex. I am on top of her, she clutches my arms with her hands. It’s like she thinks I might go crazy if not held back. Her eyes are opened wide and looking into mine, glazed and petrified. I later find out that fear of sex is one of her great poetic themes. But we bang away on this tiny narrow bed with no sheets in this dorm room that must suffice for this ten-day residency. I try Jean’s tricks (variations) but nothing works; Wendy’s afraid. She’s denied the unction of a stream; I’m wearing a condom. This goes on all night, right through the New England summer 4 am sunrise. There is some gruesomeness to wolf-hour sunlight that only New Englanders know. She leaves me and there is poignancy to her leaving because we both know this cannot happen again; we have taken our roles too far. She can’t handle the moves that accrue to the life of a big genius and I don’t like this diffidence in her parts that hates sex, loathes feelings, wants to curl up underneath a crab shell and close its eyes forever. I’m twenty-nine, and I’m building relationships that are instantly obsolescent. Wendy, for one night, got to be a goddess, and me to be a god, only to find out that we’re just more normal people doing that hallowed, time-honored routine: fake it ‘til you make it.

© Adam Fieled 2011-2023