Dildo Story

By Laurie Lathem

/ Third Place, 2025 Plentitudes Prize in Fiction /      

When I go with my girlfriend to the sex shop to buy a strap-on, I learn that she lacks imagination where dildos are concerned. She is drawn to average-sized ones, in real human flesh colors, with bulging veins and jaunty-looking caps.

“These look just like the real thing,” I say. “What’s the point of them?”

We are two women who, for seven months, have been enjoying our own and each other’s hands and mouths, our minds sharpened by fire. If we are going to bring a toy into our bed, I want it to be something that looks nothing like a human cock, like the one my girlfriend can enjoy with her partner, for example. I want our toy to be something that could never exist in real life, bright purple, maybe, enormous and smooth. It should look like the Pixar version of a dildo, and like a Pixar character, I want it to make me laugh until it makes me cry. 

A bright crimson dildo looks promising standing straight up in its little dildo

stand.

“That’s ugly,” my girlfriend says.

“They’re all ugly,” I say. I wiggle a big pink dick in her face.

My girlfriend’s name is Maya and she dislikes the word “girlfriend.” She says it is infantilizing for women who are well into their fifties. I agree we should have a word with more heft. But the options are limited and the truth is I like calling her my girlfriend. I like how it does two things at once; it makes fun of itself at the same that that it makes her mine.

Maya is almost six feet tall. Her long, black hair is streaked with fine strands of silver. Her skin is the color of milky tea, her eyes an eddy of sea water and sand. To look at her is to believe in the transmigration of souls, to know that in another life she was the queen of something. I am of average size, both in height and width. I have hair that once was a mousy brown and now is an even mousier white. Next to Maya I am round and small and anxious and lucky. She says she likes my fire and my bite, the literal one as well as the figurative. She doesn’t know how happy I am to have accustomed her to being called my girlfriend.

The sex shop is nestled between two brownstones off Flatbush Avenue. Inside it is small and cramped. We drape our coats over our arms, taking care not to bump into the standing army of dildos – plastic, glass, short, tall, fat, thin, angled and straight, the prices ranging from reasonable to a sizeable chunk of my weekly paycheck. It was my idea to come here, to add a bit of theater to the mix. I thought we could handle whatever came up, the questions about preferences, about what it means to perform a kind of masculinity, if that is what it is. But now I am beginning to wonder if we should have discussed things more in advance. A neon green dildo catches my eye. It curves upward in exactly the angle I think Maya and I would both enjoy.

“What about this one?” I ask, hopefully.

“Maybe we should ask for help,” says Maya. I predicted this. Maya asks for help the way, just because they are on offer, she loads up on the baked goods at a breakfast buffet and piles them precariously on the too-small plate.

The woman behind the counter has four nose rings in one nostril and wears a spiked, leather dog collar. I don’t want to ask her to help me and my girlfriend shop for dicks. Anyway, she seems too young to work in a sex shop. Does her mother know where she is? 

“I don’t think we need any help,” I say. I wonder if it is common for couples to come in to the sex shop and immediately disagree on the fundamentals. 

“Are you embarrassed?” Maya ribs me, actually poking me in the ribs, a thing she knows I can’t stand.

“Ow,” I say. “And yes, a little.”

“That’s cute.” Maya grins at me. Her mouth is the best mouth I have ever seen; lips the color of coffee, bookended by little parentheses. When it opens into a smile, it threatens to drain all the color from the room. It is happening now; the pink tasseled whips, red dildos and tubes of flavored lube are growing dimmer.

“Nicks,” Maya says, taking my hand. My name is Nickie, short for Nicola. Maya is the only person in the world who calls me Nicks. I pretend to be annoyed by it. “I can’t believe you of all people are embarrassed.” She says this because, besides the fact that I have not practiced monogamy ever in my life, I have had much more adventurous sex than she has - with people of various genders in twos and threes and, once, at a sex party, it was impossible to know the exact number of people involved. Maya has only recently become non-monogamous and, other than her partner and a few hotel hookups at conferences, I am the only person she has had sex with in years. It is hard to square this with what I know of her. Perhaps she didn’t feel as free when she was starting her adulthood. The times were different then. I know, because I lived them, too. But Maya denies this had anything to do with her choices, and to know anything at all about her is to know that it is impossible to imagine her speaking a lie much less living one. Sometimes, I allow a hint of judgment to creep in for her years of heterosexual monogamy, for what I imagine derogatorily as her life as a “wife” whose only trace of queerness lived in her memory. But this only happens when I am feeling fearful, which is beginning to happen now in the sex shop as a small fissure is making itself known, a rift between certainty and longing.  

“You know what, babe,” Maya says. “It’s kind of hot that you are embarrassed.” Her smile still blazes. Everything else is a black and white movie.

“OK, but shouldn’t we be more aligned?” I ask. Maya’s smile turns downward into a frown. The room floods with color again.

Lately, Maya has been talking about getting us all together, me, her and her partner, Erik. Erik is actually her husband, but I try to avoid using that word, as well as the word “wife,” even though I used to sort of have one of those. I don’t know why “girlfriend” is different. It just is. In theory, meeting Erik is a good idea. Not having met him means that he looms over my life like a weather system it’s hard to believe is coming because the sun is out and the day is so glorious that I no longer believe in the existence of rain. I want to want to meet him. He is, as Maya describes him, an unusual man, one who, when she arrives home after being with me in the bed for hours taking breaks only for cubes of cheese and tequila over ice, greets her with, “Did you have a good time?” Apparently, he really wants to know. He wants her to be happy. I admit to being a little skeptical about his apparent lack of possessiveness. Erik is a researcher of some kind, so maybe it’s an academic exercise to him. I imagine he’s done his homework, that he’s read the books on ethical non-monogamy that all seem to take place in Park Slope, and watched the TV series about the therapist who works with throuples, which also takes place in Park Slope. But it’s also possible that Erik is a man with a heart capable of holding many truths at once, and that he is therefore a person who is impossible not to love. Whatever Maya feels for him, she largely keeps to herself. I only sometimes want to know, the way I sometimes want to know other impossible things.

When I find myself imagining it, the three of us meeting in a café or a bar, I get so tangled up in the specifics that I lose sight of the bigger picture. What time of day would it be? Coffee or wine? Outside with the bistro tables and uncomfortable metal chairs or inside where the music is so loud, we’d have to crowd our heads together, mingling our scents over our drinks? How would we arrange ourselves? Is he tall like Maya, and would I therefore feel like a miniature person in a world of giants? Sometimes, in my imagining it all goes excellently. My girlfriend holds my hand and his and we are all in love with each other and ourselves for having rejected the false paradigm of monogamy, with the expansiveness of everything that love is capable of, with the Park Slope-ness of it all.

Other times, I can’t decide who she leaves with, or how we say goodbye, or if the gift of other people at the café is enough to distract from the awkwardness of how to seat ourselves when one of us is being shared by the other two.

“’Share’ is a weird word to use when talking about a person,” Maya said once when I brought up the challenge of loving a person who also loves another. “I’m not a toy in a sandbox. You don’t hand me over when your turn is over,” she said. But this is exactly what we do, I thought.

“How about this one?” Maya picks up a dildo that looks exactly like the one she has just put down, only this one leans slightly to the side the way some cocks do, a tulip angling toward the sun. Because of the way the leaning tip expresses an aching need, this dildo is even more realistic than the last one. What does it mean, if anything, that Maya wants something so realistic, a replica, really? Sweat beads on my forehead. I regard the way the dildo cocks its little cock head as though asking a question. It is so astoundingly lifelike I consider buying it as a sculpture.

“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s so sincere, so… redundant,” and then quickly add, “Absurdity is hot!”

Maya looks at me with what might be pity or else a kind of forgiveness. She touches my elbow and a flutter of warmth murmurs up my arm. I want to say something, but before I can think of what, the dog collar woman comes over. “I just want to let you know that we will be closing for lunch in ten minutes,” she says.

“Do you always close for lunch?” I ask. This is New York City. I have never heard of a shop closing for lunch in New York City.

The woman sees the toy in Maya’s hand. “This one has various settings. May I?” She takes the dildo from Maya, turns it over and hits a little switch on the bottom where the balls should be. The cock begins to circle around maniacally on its base. It has lost its little mind. I am unsure of how to feel about the circling dildo. I think I liked it better when its movements were limited. She hits the switch again and it vibrates in waves; again, and the vibration is constant. 

“So many options!” says Maya, intrigued.

“But does it take out the trash?” I say, and when Maya doesn’t laugh, I say, “Ha, ha!”

“What is your name?” Maya asks the woman.

“Talia,” she answers, still holding the dildo. Maya asks and remembers the name of every server, barista, airline steward, taxi driver. If there is a person who is serving her in any way, Maya will ask that person’s name and use it as often as possible without it ever being obnoxious.

Maya’s tiny frown is framed by the sexy little parentheses on the sides of her mouth. “The thing is, Talia, we thought we knew what we wanted but now we don’t seem to agree.”

“That happens a lot,” Talia says.

“It does?” asks Maya.

“It does?” I ask.

“With couples, sure. When someone comes in alone, they know exactly what they want.”

“That makes so much sense,” says Maya, looking dreamily into the middle distance. “Imagine if being alone were not considered a condition to be cured. We might take a more direct path to the things we want.”

Like noise cancelling headphones, this mutes the room. Maya stares off. Perhaps she is dreaming of what it would be like to have the more direct path. I am desperate to bring her back to now, to us, to the task at hand. I reach for her, and in the instant between the meeting of our fingertips and our eyes, I am skydiving, trusting my life to the strength of gossamer wings.

“Well, Talia, I guess we’ll keep looking,” says Maya. “And thanks for letting us know you’ll be closing for lunch.” By now Maya should be running out of patience, of which she is generally in short supply. We should have already been on our way to my apartment, having decided on a dildo which, nestled inside a discreet paper bag, knocks against her hip as we walk.

“I don’t understand the closing for lunch thing,” I whisper to Maya. “This isn’t Spain. This is New York City. It’s sort of the whole point of New York City.”

“We’d better focus,” says Maya. “We only have ten minutes.”

There are things I never say out loud to Maya, and this is one: there are parts of her that I chart and memorize, like her scar, for one, that runs across the place where her left breast once was. It is ridged, the skin bunched like clumsily sewn curtain fabric. I hold her right breast in one hand, while I trace her scar with the other, mapping what is underneath with my fingertips, the undiscovered desert inside of her, a secret cartography of souls.

And when I am alone and remembering her – the marks and bumps on her skin, the way her face contorts as she chases down pleasure, her unwieldy laugh – it is almost possible to believe that I am the only one ever to have known these things.

Maya’s mastectomy was six years ago in February. One month later, Erik was riding his bicycle when he hit a pothole and went flying, shattering his right wrist, his collar bone and his right femur. Maya said that when he came home from the hospital, he was a bag of broken glass, in so many pieces that for months she was afraid to touch him, and that when they finally fucked, she cried. He has scars, like railroad tracks I imagine, along his forearm and the length of his femur, the largest bone in the human body. It is strange to know these things about a person I have never met, a person who nevertheless forms one leg of our little three-legged table that sometimes wobbles and other times holds a single flower in the light so perfectly it could make a person weep.

A young man and woman enter the shop and go right to a section with a sign that says “The Kink Corner.” They are talking about kombucha flavors. I want and don’t want to see what they are looking at. I think I see them hovering over the bed restraints.

“Please focus,” says my girlfriend.

“OK,” I say.

Maya owns and runs a book store and is in the process of opening a second one. She also writes novels and has raised three children, a family blended from hers and Erik’s current and previous relationships. For years she managed the calendar of the comings and goings of the children and their other parents and their partners, a constellation of adults and bedrooms and travel days. If anyone knows how to focus, it is Maya. I, on the other hand, get lost in the details. I was a warm and sloppy parent to my one, now grown, daughter who was mostly cared for in all the practical ways by my ex-sort-of-wife. At the high school in the Bronx where I teach English I am known as demanding but also absent-minded. My students get away with all kinds things because I forget and also because I choose to give them the benefit of the doubt - a bad combination, or a good one, depending on your point of view. I don’t think any lives were ever saved because a kid was caught in a lie about a missed homework assignment.

Here is another thing I have never told Maya: I sometimes imagine that Erik maps her the way I do, that their scars are parallel roads to places I will never see. The images arrive unbidden, fuzzy and precise at the same time. I try to banish them, but it’s a game of Whac-a-Mole. My mind wanders. I am grabbing the toy in the sandbox. I know that the sex between two people who have shared and nursed and grown used to each other’s wounds the way Maya and Erik have, whose bodies hold the memory of their unwounded selves, can’t be compared to any other kind of sex. It exists on its own plane; it has created its own atmosphere. There is such a thing as time, after all, and all that it contains.

Once, when we were lying in bed with the sheets tangled at our feet, I almost formed the words to ask how she manages it, the seesaw of her heart, if that is what it feels like. We were starting to get hungry, remembering that we needed food. So much of our time together is spent in bed that meals are often eaten half-naked at the kitchen counter out of take-out containers, our damp smells still on our skin, the memory of how we have just wrecked each other. The joy of this, the food combined with the love we know is coming after the love we have just made, the in-betweenness of everything that is not us gorging on each other, is like no other.

“Should we order a pizza?” Maya said, rising. My hand was on her chest, the scar a dirt road across a prairie, and now it slid to her hip as she rose.

“Do you ever feel like it’s taking too much of you?” I asked. Immediately I was afraid of the answer, but it was too late. The question was already hanging in the last of the light.

We had been here in the bed since afternoon, and it was almost completely dark by now. The light had moved across the room in yellow and then orange and red and finally a burnt rust tinged by an impossible pink, but we had ignored it all. Maya leaned back on the bed.

“It’s jet lag,” she said. “Sometimes, it feels like that.”

I wanted to turn on the light but I didn’t want to break the seal that bound our bodies together.

“This whole thing,” she swept her hand down my torso, “requires…”

I waited in the breathing dark.

“… a deeper, harder way of seeing.”

I wanted to ask if she meant hard like a hammer is hard, like a rock is hard.

“I want to see the whole story,” I said. “Only I’m sitting in the section with the obstructed view.”

The young couple makes their way past the cock rings, and now he is talking about Subarus, telling her what kind of car she should buy if she intends on driving in the winter. He is still car-splaining when she picks up an extra-long magenta dildo, dreaming, I imagine, of how he will submit to it. I envy them their clarity of purpose.

Maya picks up a dildo that is blue and veiny, and I fear I am losing the plot. I should have mentally prepared myself for the visual onslaught of so many cock-shaped things in one place. It’s not that I have anything against them even when they are attached to a human person. I even enjoy one of those from time to time, for the mechanics, the simplicity. But the sight of them all lined up like soldiers at attention is causing a tiny pinprick of rage to glow warm in the pit of my stomach, for the way the cock asserts itself without apology, though apologizing is exactly what it should be doing for all that has been done in the world because of men and their needs and their cocks. And so, any desire I have for men and cock is bound up with revenge, and revenge can be hot in bed, in the fucking, but it cannot be shared, it can only be exacted, all pleasure taken as the spoils of war.

Maya is holding out the blue, veiny dildo, her hands encircling it as though there were love involved.

“I am no longer clear on the mission,” I hear myself say.

“Are you OK?” Maya asks. “You look a little weird.”

“Five minutes!” Talia trills at us.

I take the blue dildo from Maya. It feels smooth and skin-like. It is arousing and a little revolting to hold it in my hand, this thing as blind as I am, that gives the illusion of possession, the veins cold and bloodless to the touch. I brandish it like a sword, slaying no one, its shape and bulge a spectacle of need, no room for wonder, the way with a woman you have to touch her to know how she feels. Maybe the desire for it is in its obviousness, for the pleasure and the hurt and the way they can be the same thing, for what it gives that I cannot because it feels and asks for nothing.  And I don’t know if it is the dick talking, but now I want more than it is possible to want, to feel that it all belongs to me like the early explorers, the plunderers, that it is mine to lay ahold of. What I want down in the dark, tender folds of my heart is getting further from what I know in the bright daylight of my mind. The ground shakes at my feet. I think I hear myself laugh.  Maya looks at me with alarm. I put the dildo between my legs and wag it in her direction. I mean it to be funny and a little hot, but it lands somewhere between obscene and sad.

“What is wrong with you?” Maya says. I drop my hand. The dildo dangles at my side, not limply, but uselessly, and then I drop it to the floor. The clatter is louder than expected, as though it were fragile.

Talia comes over. The store is closing along with the window of time in which to reclaim the ground that has opened up between us.

We walk home under a sky that is leaden and heavy with rain that never comes, the naked trees trembling with the anticipation of it. The brown paper bag goes thwack, thwack against Maya’s hip as we walk. We are very hungry when we get to my place, and so we order Vietnamese food, too much of it, and when it comes, we lay it all out – the pho and broken rice and bun cha, the spring rolls and noodles, all the little plastic containers of chilis and sauces. We eat without speaking. I watch Maya’s lips turn red with nuoc cham.

“I have a question,” I finally say.

“OK, but please don’t ask why the sex shop closes for lunch.” Maya twirls noodles onto her fork.

“It is bruising, though, you have to admit. This is New York. It’s a point of pride.”

Maya groans. I watch her shovel a forkful of pork noodles into her astonishing mouth. She eats with no grace, with the same exertion as when she is loving, or reading, or taking a brisk walk in the park. Her upper lip beads with sweat. “What’s your question?” she asks, chewing, with a full mouth. But the question, if I ever had one, is a road to somewhere other than here. I swallow a glug of beer, cold and bubbly.

“Sometimes I wish I knew things that are impossible to know,” I say.

“Like what?”

“Like how I will die, for one” I say, though there are other things, too.

“Some people know,” Maya says.

Her throat jumps up and down as she swallows, and I want to know a different impossible thing: how to mend this rift, if that is what it needs, or to learn to step around it, a familiar pothole on a familiar sidewalk, the way a child memorizes the broken stones and skips over them without looking.

The sky darkens outside, brightening the room where we sit. The rice grows cold and sticky with the sauce. We finish it and leave the spring rolls for later. The brown paper bag rests unopened on the couch where Maya tossed it, ready for the moment when we will tear it open, perhaps minutes from now, or days, or months, after time has done its work.

After dinner our mouths are still blazing from the chilis and the chili oil. We guzzle some more beers but they don’t help with the fire in our mouths. When we kiss, we can taste the flame in each other, and it is almost a quenching but not really, in fact it is more of a doubling down on the heat and the spice, our tongues feeding it to one another. We decide to try kissing until we come. We have heard it is possible though it seems too good to be true. And it is, as we stand in the kitchen kissing with our hands at our sides, with our tongues burning, and the space between our bodies a living, breathing, animal thing. And it almost happens from the kissing, it is so close, we are so close, but, as though being freed by an unseen hand, we give in to the rush of hands and thighs. Afterwards, we lie on our backs on the cool sheets, our mouths still pulsing with the heat, and we say we will try it again, only half-believing it can be true.