‘The word hoax is a trigger. You know that,’ Sugarman said.
‘But I’m appropriating hoax,’ I said. ‘Like the so-called ASA Holocaust deniers.’
‘Come on, we’ve been through all this, like, a million times,’ Sugarman said.
I didn’t tell Ariane this part, that Sugarman months ago had started flagging me to campus security.
‘Barbra’s back,’ I said quickly instead.
Ariane stared at me. I turned away.
‘I don’t know why she’s here. With some guy. I don’t totally believe it myself.’
‘Look at me,’ Ariane ordered.
I couldn’t control the muscles in my jaw.
‘Are you okay, or no?’
‘You mean with her back here?’
‘No. I mean with everything.’
The hanging light in our kitchen heat-flooded my face.
‘You look like you’re happy she’s here, if we’re being honest.’
My smile was morbid anxiety.
‘You can fuck anyone you want, you know that, right?’
‘Ariane,’ I hissed. ‘This is not about that.’
Ariane was the one who said we were polyamorous. She thought that her being so-called supportive of whatever I had to ‘explore’ solved every other problem between us. But I hated these terms: supportive, explore. I hated fucking polyamory, too. I preferred lying. Lying was better. It was closer to the truth.
‘Hey, look at me, babe. We’ve talked about you fucking other girls.’
God, I hated it when Ariane called me babe. I hated it when she made a big deal about my sex drive. I didn’t want other girls when I was with Ariane. Fuck. I really wished she hadn’t come over tonight. Ariane always wanted to talk about why I’d never dated white girls, why I only liked women of colour. She liked listing my roster between Barbra and her: Erica, Ellery, Kawai, and Lisette. Ariane said that she thought that I thought women of colour were more oppressed or something, and that that meant I thought I had more power over them. She said that this process operated consciously in me. She said I had seriously unchecked white privilege.
‘White privilege is not invisible,’ Ariane said.
‘I know that, I get that,’ I agreed explicitly.
I told Ariane that I knew white men needed to step backwards, acknowledge their privilege, and practise listening in their own lane. I told Ariane that my relationship with Barbra had politicized m
e.
‘Explain to me why you’ve desired women of colour, especially Black women,’ Ariane said, ‘as a kind of exploitation.’
I rolled my eyes. We could never get further than this. S/M 101 was not exploitation. I could not do Ariane’s math to completion in my head. I mean, I knew that something she said about me was true. And I knew that it involved US history or something – like when I read about white slave masters absolving their guilt for raping their black female slaves because they said they tempted them. I knew about the stereotype of the black Jezebel. It was totally fucked. White men were 100 percent guilty of shooting trauma into Black women. But I seriously did not know how to fit myself into all this. Like, wasn’t my relationship with Barbra different than a white slave master raping? Was or was not our system of instinctive complicity consent?
Ariane always had to make me feel my so-called negative status as a white man – which she said trumped my Jewishness – even though I know she loved how I made her feel: how much I was in touch with my feelings, how much I was in touch with hers. I was the first guy to ever make her come multiple-y.
‘I’m not fucking anyone except you, Ariane.’
‘Bullshit,’ Ariane said, and walked away from me.
God, I felt guilty. Was I actually guilty? Why was I feeling white-man guilty right now? All three of them were down there in the family room. I plugged my ears so that I would not hear them. Barbra came back and Ariane just walked in. Ariane did not understand what this was doing to me! Fuck. This person who’d fucked up my life had just flat-out returned. I scratched my arms. Molester. My throat felt weird. Molester. Molester trumped Jezebel. I wished Ariane would stop playing these mind games with me.