Letter to the Summer of Moss Letter to the ...

The first time Moss and I had sex was on the top floor of his friends' house in Stoke Newington in London. It was in the summer when I had sneaked off to Europe to see an opera of mine open in Denmark. I was still going out with my American boyfriend, but had fallen in love with Moss, whom I had met briefly and by mistake a few days before I left New York City for Denmark, and right before he flew back to London from his American trip. I had only eaten a piece of cake with Moss one afternoon, but that was enough.

In late-night phone conversations from the top of the world in Denmark, where the sun rose at 2 in the morning and the birds started chirping in the middle of the night, I sipped Carlsberg in the attic of the theater office where I slept on the fold-out couch, and was charmed by Moss' crinkly Newcastle dialect for hours at a time. He whispered smart things to me into the phone, and I had to look words up in the dictionary as he seduced me with his brain.

I was gestating and dying to go to London, but I had to stay in Denmark for three weeks before I could make it to England to see Moss again.

The Danes are people born out of their time. Denmark is the country of candles in windows, of snow, of darkness, of pornography on every magazine rack. Rude spread cheeks for any child to see, and the Museum Erotica.

On the top floor of the Museum Erotica is a 24-screen display of porno clips with accompanying music from the Doors. You sit there with a group of people and feel painfully awkward, but also turned on. You stand up to leave and notice that they have placed the bathrooms strikingly near to the monitors. You consider going in, but are afraid of what you might see or smell. But you go in anyway.

As you exit the bathroom, you proceed to the steps and descend, the epitome of nonchalance?in fact everybody has the face of nonchalance, pretending they are not dying to fall on the ground and start madly masturbating. This is, after all, a museum.

I came to Denmark in the summer because a Danish theater had commissioned an opera from me?the libretto to Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. To be performed in an ice rink.

I came to Denmark because living in New York City and working in the American theater had made me sad and lonely and broke. Because my American screenwriting boyfriend was an asshole, and my heart was closed.

I came to Denmark because the theater in Denmark pays $15,000 for a commission.

I loved those Copenhagen nights where my plays were translated and performed, because nobody?least of all I?was ever really sure if the words were mine or the translator's.

Finally, opening night came and I jumped on the stage with the cast, who invited me up for one of the most over-the-top curtain calls I've ever seen. Roses thrown up on the stage at actors, composers and a barefoot playwright. In the morning the critics said I had raped Hans Christian Andersen, but I had already fled after the show, taking a small plane over the sun that set at 11 p.m.?the sun that would soon rise again at 2 in the morning, because this is what summer is like at the top of the world.

I made it, finally, to Heathrow, to a tiny hotel room where I never spent one night. Instead, it was in the top room of his friends' house in Stoke Newington that Moss and I fucked?or at least tried to fuck?for the first time. I had gone over for just one drink but ended up spending three months. That first night we had drunkenly tried to slip it in, but it slipped out. It didn't matter because I can never have sex the right way the first time anyway?I always laugh. I can't believe I'm in bed with this person, that I'm this close, smelling him, feeling his lips for the first time, this near to his teeth, his body, this hard-on. And this time, it was uncircumcised. All my gay friends had told me this was the hottest kind of cock, and I felt that I was really embracing something very natural when, in the morning, he inserted it in me and I thought that I could actually feel the uncircumcision, the skin, moving inside of me, back and forth.

That morning, Moss went out and got a bottle of champagne and too much food and we ate it on the bed as he went down on me and I watched his ass wiggle in the mirror. I pretended I liked the feeling, but really I liked to watch his ass. Finally we ended up fucking with my legs spread very far apart when one of his friends suddenly flung open the door and we all screamed. The friend was back unexpectedly from a medical conference. I could not look her in the face again for that whole summer because she had gazed straight into my pudendum.

We were banished to the dining room, where we closed the French doors and tried to fuck underneath the dining room table. But people could hear us, because the doors wouldn't close all the way. We realized we could no longer fornicate in this house full of pissed-off people. After all, we weren't paying any rent and were just crashing that summer. We were torturing Moss' friends, who had jobs and lives and didn't have time to fuck all day like we did.

It was a particularly hot summer in London, so what we did was start to screw in public. It began at the cemetery in Stoke Newington, where we walked along and Moss looked like the boy I had always wanted to fall in love with. We stopped at a rather large, old phone box, and he came inside me from behind. A middle-aged couple passed us and smiled very kindly, without a trace of shock, just happiness. We then moved to a bench where I sat on him and squirmed around, grabbed his hair. Looking around, I finally realizing that we were getting it on in a famous fucking spot?a famous gay fucking spot.

The next place was the library, among the stacks, standing against the books, on the metal mesh flooring, a man watching from underneath as my skirt rose. I wore that black and red skirt every day of that summer and lifted it in public to let Moss inside of me. This hippie skirt had an extra fold of material in the front that looked like an outer labia. After that summer with Moss, I wore that skirt to every theater opening I had for the next seven years, for good luck. A year ago the fabric became so old that it tore while I was at one of my openings. It ripped at my ass and I walked around and socialized for about an hour with my velvet Banana Republic panties exposed. Finally, someone was kind enough to tell me. But I still couldn't get rid of it because it was my love skirt.

Back in London that summer afternoon, as the skirt rose my small British man pressed up against me and brought his cigarette and beer breath and chipped front tooth to my mouth and told me to pull down my knickers. There was something babyish about the whole thing and something safe, because none of it was really very erotic.

Because Moss was really never a body, he was never really all there. He was really the words, the thoughts, he was an epistolary romance that was spoken through phone lines crackling in the early morning. His face was a novel, and I could open him up and read him. What was sexy about him was the texture of his pages and the turns of his phrases. His body was somehow prepubescent-looking, like a delicious dumpling, but immature. And our sex was so teenage-like that when we did it in public there was something actually nonsexual about it. In fact, when people watched, I think it looked to them somehow sweet, gentle?maybe even a little pathetic?as if we were really trying to talk to each other but were too shy to do so, so we just fucked.

And in the end, I turned into the cliche of the sex-crazed American and he turned into the cliche of the repressed Brit who didn't want to fuck anymore. We fell apart, like the broken spine of the book of our own making. In retrospect, we should have remained nonphysical because that is where we were always the most sexy together. We were like children playing doctor, opening our legs, looking in mirrors and opening up books strewn around the bed, drowning in the words and the letters and the definitions that fell across our bodies as we whispered the world to each other that summer when I was 28.

Today, in my studio apartment off Washington Square, I move in my bed. It is the afternoon and I am alone. My body moves to form the letters, that form the words, that form the notes, that form the novels, that form the books that I write across the crinkling white sheets of the bed?my paper?in secret telegrams across the Atlantic, letters to Moss.