On Bodies That Lie to You, and How to Touch Them Anyway

The café was wrong for the occasion. Too bright, too cheerful — one of those places in Nottingham where every surface has been painted the color of pistachio ice cream and the menu uses the word “artisanal” without irony. I’d chosen it because it was equidistant from where I imagined both of them living, which was a strange calculation to make for two women separated by nearly a century, but I was nervous and distance felt like the only variable I could control.

Virginia arrived first. She ordered black coffee with the air of someone who had expected tea and was making a philosophical concession. She sat by the window and watched a man outside trying to parallel park a van, and I could see her constructing the scene already — the van becoming a metaphor for something, the man’s hands on the wheel standing in for all human futility. She wore grey. She always wears grey, in my mind, though I know from photographs this isn’t true.

“You want to write about a body in pain,” she said, before I’d even sat down. “A body that desires. These are not the same body, and that is precisely the problem.”

I started to explain the premise — a woman with chronic pain, a love interest who experiences sensation differently, an erotic romance where the sex scenes function as —

“Don’t tell me what they function as,” Virginia said. “Tell me what they feel like.”

Talia came in carrying a tote bag that said ABSOLUTELY NOT on it in block letters. She ordered a flat white and a pain au chocolat and pulled a face at the pistachio walls and said, “Right, what have I missed? Because Virginia looks like she’s about to tell me that desire is really about time, and I need to head that off.”

Virginia almost smiled. Almost.

“I was about to say,” she offered, “that the problem with writing the erotic is that most writers believe the body is a fixed instrument. You press here, the note sounds. But a body in pain — and I speak from some experience — is an instrument that has been retuned without your consent. The note you expect is not the note you hear.”

“Okay, yes.” Talia leaned forward. “But you’ve jumped straight to metaphor. Before the body is a retuned instrument, before it’s a symbol, it’s just — it’s your hip clicking out of place when you roll over in bed. It’s your partner asking if you want them to stop and you saying no, not because the pain is gone, but because the pleasure is louder. There’s nothing prismatic about that. It’s just math.”

“It is emphatically not math.”

“It’s not math in the way you think I mean math. I mean the body is running two signals at once, and you have to choose which one to attend to, and the erotic part — the actually sexy part — is the choice. Not the sensation. The choosing.”

I said something about how I thought they were both describing the same thing from different ends. Virginia looked at me the way a professor looks at a student who has confused correlation with causation.

“They are not the same thing. Talia is describing a decision. I am describing a state. A decision is a door — you walk through it. A state is weather. You are inside it, and it is inside you, and the question of when it began is unanswerable.”

“The question of when it began is extremely answerable,” Talia said. “It began when someone touched you, and it felt good, and also your left elbow had been screaming for three hours, and the good feeling didn’t make the screaming stop but it did make you realize you’d forgotten you had a right elbow at all. That’s the erotic. Forgetting parts of your body exist because other parts of your body have become everything.”

There was a silence. Virginia’s coffee was untouched. Talia bit into her pastry.

“That,” Virginia said quietly, “is quite beautiful. I would have written it differently, but it is true.”

“How would you have written it?”

Virginia gazed out the window again. The man had given up on the parking and was now standing on the pavement looking at his phone, as if the phone might tell him something about the geometry that the steering wheel could not.

“I would have written: She lay beside her and felt her own body as a country seen from a great height — the pain a mountain range, the pleasure a river, and the place where they touched the confluence where the mapmaker has written here the territory is uncertain. And in that uncertainty was the only honest thing.”

“That’s gorgeous,” I said. “But is it sexy?”

The question landed like a glass breaking. Talia laughed. Virginia did not.

“Sexy,” Virginia repeated, as if the word were a species of beetle she hadn’t previously encountered. “You wish me to be sexy.”

“I wish us to be sexy. This is an erotic romance. The sex has to be — it can’t be all rivers and mountain ranges. There have to be hands. There have to be mouths. Skin that does specific things when specific things happen to it.”

“I am aware of what skin does,” Virginia said, and I swear the temperature in the café dropped.

Talia cut in, perhaps sensing the same drop. “Look. Virginia. The thing you do — the luminous thing, the consciousness-expanding thing — that’s what most erotica lacks. Most erotica is choreography. Tab A, slot B, moan here, arch there. What you do is let the reader feel what it’s like to be inside the sensation. To lose the edges of yourself. That’s exactly what good sex does. But it only works if the reader can also feel the hand. The actual hand. The callus on the thumb. The hesitation before the thumb moves. I can write the hand. You write the dissolving.”

Virginia considered this. She picked up her coffee, finally, and drank from it.

“And the pain?” she asked. “How does the pain participate?”

“That’s what I keep thinking about,” I said, and both of them turned to me as though they’d forgotten I was there, which was fair. “The chronic pain isn’t an obstacle to get past. It’s not the thing that gets cured by love or overcome by desire. It’s present in every scene. It shapes how she moves, what positions are available, when she needs to stop. But also — and this is the part I can’t quite hold — it shapes what pleasure means to her. Because pleasure, for someone in chronic pain, isn’t the default state you return to after the pain stops. Pleasure is an event. It’s news.”

“Pleasure is an event,” Talia repeated. “I like that. It’s wrong, but I like it.”

“How is it wrong?”

“Because you’re making her exceptional again. You’re making her a brave chronic pain warrior for whom pleasure is this rare, precious gift. That’s not how it works. Pleasure is as ordinary as the pain. Tuesday you can’t get out of bed. Wednesday you come so hard you see colors. They’re both Tuesday and Wednesday. Neither one is the special episode.”

“But surely,” Virginia said, “the juxtaposition —”

“There is no juxtaposition. That’s the point. They coexist. The Tuesday body and the Wednesday body are the same body. The trick isn’t writing the contrast between pain and pleasure. The trick is writing a body that contains both at the same time and doesn’t find this interesting, because it’s just what a body does.”

I wrote this down. I could feel Virginia thinking beside me — not formulating a response, but letting Talia’s words settle into the architecture of her mind, where they would be rebuilt into something Talia would half-recognize and half-resent.

“There is something I’d like to propose,” Virginia said. “About the love interest.”

“Go on.”

“You said the partner experiences sensation differently. I want to be specific. I want this person to have — what is the word — not numbness, but the other direction. A heightened reception. Where being touched is an overwhelming event, not from pleasure but from intensity. So that we have two bodies in conversation: one that cannot trust its own signals, and one that receives too many signals. And the erotic project is the negotiation between these two ways of being a body in the world.”

Talia was nodding slowly. “Sensory processing stuff. Hypersensitivity. Yeah. That’s good because it means neither one of them gets to be the ‘normal’ one. Neither body is the baseline. They’re both navigating their own weird instruments.”

“And the sex,” Virginia continued, gaining momentum now, her voice losing its careful calibration, “the sex becomes a kind of — mutual cartography. Each mapping the other. Here is where you feel too much. Here is where I feel the wrong thing. Here is the place where, if I touch you like this, and you touch me like that, we have invented a third territory that belongs to neither of us.”

“Mutual cartography,” I said. “That’s — can I use that?”

“You may use anything,” Virginia said. “That is the purpose of this conversation.”

“The problem with cartography as a metaphor,” Talia said, and I could see her wrestling with whether to say this, “is that maps are finished. You complete a map. You say: here is the territory, now it is known. But bodies aren’t like that. Bodies change. Your pain map on Monday is not your pain map on Thursday. The places that hurt migrate. The places that feel good migrate. You can’t survey a body the way you survey land.”

“Unless,” Virginia said, “the map itself is alive. Unless the project of mapping is the project of love — never finished, always revised, the cartographer perpetually surprised by the territory she thought she knew.”

There was a long pause. Outside, the man with the van had driven away. A woman on a bicycle took his spot, effortlessly.

“I have a concern,” Talia said. “About the Woolfian interior thing. Can I be blunt?”

“I would expect nothing less.”

“If we go too far into consciousness-expansion during the sex scenes, we lose the body. We float up into metaphor-land and the reader stops feeling the heat. The sex has to stay physical. The interiority has to deepen the physical, not replace it. If I’m reading a scene where two people are in bed, and the prose goes: She felt the centuries folding, the self dissolving into selves, the present moment a coin tossed into the well of all moments — I’m going to put the book down. Because what I wanted to know was whether the hand moved. Whether she made a sound. Whether his breath changed.”

“Her breath,” Virginia said.

“What?”

“You said his breath. The assignment specifies nothing about the love interest’s gender.”

Talia blinked. “You’re right. I defaulted. Old habit.” She turned to me. “What have we decided?”

“I haven’t decided. The brief says desire as fluid and shifting. I was thinking —”

“Don’t think,” Virginia said. “Choose. The character will tell you who they want. You simply must be willing to hear it.”

“I want the protagonist to be a woman,” I said. “Late twenties, maybe early thirties. Chronic pain — something specific, something that affects proprioception. And I think the love interest should be a woman too. Because the Woolf of it — Orlando, Vita — there’s a queerness at the center of that book that isn’t incidental. The love letter to a specific person that becomes universal.”

“Good,” Talia said. “And the humor?”

“What about it?”

“Where does it live? Because if this is all luminous interiority and pain cartography, it’s going to be insufferable. There has to be a moment where someone says something genuinely funny about their own broken body. Not self-deprecating in a sad way. Funny in a way that makes the other person laugh and then feel guilty for laughing, and then the first person says don’t you dare feel guilty, the funniest thing about chronic pain is —”

She stopped.

“Is what?” Virginia asked.

Talia shook her head. “I don’t know yet. That’s what the story will figure out.”

I wanted to ask Virginia about the Orlando of it — the centuries collapsed into a single consciousness, the historical contingency of desire, the way clothing and presentation shape who we are allowed to want. But she had already turned back to the window, where the light had shifted, and I could see her watching the way it fell across the pistachio wall, turning it briefly gold, and I understood that she was done talking, that whatever she had left to say she would say through the prose, through the way the light behaved on the page, and that the conversation had already become, for her, a memory she was examining from the inside.

Talia was typing something on her phone. She looked up.

“One more thing. The bucket list from Chloe Brown — the choosing to want things again. That’s essential. This character has spent so long managing her body that she’s forgotten she’s allowed to want things from it. Not despite the pain. With the pain. The whole erotic project is: I am going to want this, with this body, the one that hurts, the one that lies to me about where my own hands are, and I’m going to want it on purpose.”

Virginia, still watching the light: “And is that not, finally, what Orlando discovers? That the self who desires is not the self who was born, nor the self who will die, but the self who is here, now, in this body, which is the only country one—”

Talia’s phone rang. She answered it. Something about a publication deadline. She mouthed sorry and stepped outside.

Virginia and I sat in the pistachio café, in the silence Talia had left, and Virginia said, without looking at me:

“You are afraid the sex will not be good enough.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Write from that fear. The body afraid of its own wanting is the only body worth writing.”

She left her coffee half-finished and walked out into the Nottingham grey. I sat there with my notes, which said things like mutual cartography and pleasure is an event (wrong but useful) and the hand, the actual hand, the callus on the thumb, and I thought: I do not know how to write this story yet. But I know where it hurts, which is perhaps the same as knowing where to begin.