Devin Goldring

Transatlanticism

Excerpt

I upload a series of five photos of myself to the internet. I am bare, nude, there is want in my eyes. Clicking through them, I make sure that all of the angles of my body bow gently inward and outward as they lead from my ribs to my waist down around my hips. I know my subscribers are paying to gaze upon my body, but sometimes they look at my face in a compartmentalized kind of way. They see my mouth, lips agape, teeth entombed beneath muscle and skin covered in red lacquer, ready to be abounding with their fantasy. Or, it’s my eyes, gentle and pleading, gazing at voyeurs through screens with a faux thirst to be taken. I know that when my fans look at me, they see only the parts that they can penetrate and those that communicate carnality, but when I look at my face, breaking down the whole into constituents as they do, I see my father.

It’s comfortless to think about my father while looking at the top section of my naked body, the part that is always uncovered, yet still, I have the same thought I always do when I think about myself as a product of him. I swim like my father. I swell with pride knowing that our coastal upbringings spreading across decades on the Jersey Shore led me to sway my arms with the broadness of my shoulders the same way he did. We kick our legs with our knees buckled in as mine bend improperly as do his; a painful inheritance. Analogous would not be a word one could use to describe my appearance in relation to my father, in fact, unalike would be the most accurate. It is so much so that never once have I been told I look like him, nor has it been asserted that I appear similar to my mother or brother. However, when I break it down, compartmentalize, pick my features apart as men do online, they are his laid upon another skull.

As a child, I’d peer out of the window in our gray-green wallpapered dining room until I could see the headlights of my father’s 1987 Saab Turbo shine down the cobblestone driveway in the dark. I sat in the foyer until he would open the front door and instantly I could tell the quality of his workday by the flare of his nose. He used to say that I got lucky because there was no way of hiding his Jewish heritage with a beak-like his, and mine was gentle, smooth, small. We both have a drop underneath the tip made by soft triangles above our nostrils pushing too firmly upwards and a narrow bridge with a small knot of extra cartilage distending outwards. I think the deviance exists within dispositions. The framing of his nostrils hook sharply, defiantly, spurting out at his cheekbones. Mine are soft. I don’t have much of a crease where my sidewalls meet the tip, as though I’ve never scrunched it up in pain or prepared to sneeze. Though if I flex the muscles in my nose, which I often do when I’m foaming with frigid furiousness, they inflect as his do, curving inwards harshly, defining the flesh. Perhaps they are the same—mine cradles the relinquished softness of melancholy and his clenches the harsh silhouette of rage—but that once, long ago, his looked like mine and his muscles froze as he flared.

My teeth and lips are solely mine, at least in how they appear. There is no one in my lineage with whom they share a similar shape or size. My teeth are green, gray, red. They flash in the back of my skull as I zoom in on the crooked, cracked edges of my front teeth peeking out below my upper lip. That’s what I remember when I think of that day. Green ivy, gray blur, iron-red fluid on concrete. I was playing within the trees, running across ground-creeping plants held back by a barrier wall. It was raining lightly—spitting, even—from the bleak, argentine sky. I was charging up the mild incline, bouncing from oak to oak, and then the ivy consumed me. All I remember was the blur and the sharp thud of the brick wall making contact with the malleable flesh between my lip and teeth. My dad found me on the concrete driveway basking in my own bodily, viscous liquids, with my central incisors touching my chin through the hole that had been created in my facial meat. He was tender, spoon-feeding me Jell-O and holding Popsicles for me to suck until the sinews desperate to hold onto dangling tusks finally retreated with the promise of disrepair. The fall shifted my adult teeth still veiled above gums, leaving me with a gap in the center of my mouth, crooked on the left side. Men online look at my pout with a hankering to fill it with one muscle or another. They don’t know that it’s made of brick walls, roots, hard edges. They don’t know it was made to achingly plead to a father, “Make it feel better,” and not to moan their names. They can’t find it in the place that emerges when harsh and tender meet; I’ve hidden it under ivy and red lacquer.

The skin surrounding our eyes—the folds that hold expression, demeanor—pleat in notably variant manners, rendering my father and me as disparate entities from distinctive bloodlines. Pulling towards his cheekbones, the center of focus on his face appears narrow; tugging upwards near the brow, his look is beady with startle, or perhaps bewilderment. Mine are open, welcoming, yet to be wrinkled with age. My online subscribers say they are akin to a doe’s, I would declare they are of a buck; lazily consuming, aware of the violent hunt surrounding me, searching for an escape route, a place to run. However, the gelatinous structure encased within the surrounding skin is shared in hue, in generational want for more, in the gaze we have upon the world. 

It feels odd to note that our eyes are particularly beautiful, whereas I have no problem vocalizing that my stomach, hips, ass, and the like are well-favored and statuesque. I have been told of the fair nature of all these parts—eyes included—by many, and yet only commenting on what comes below the neck feels justified. Perhaps it’s an objectification of the self, maybe I would rather not attach a face to all that I do. Either way, both my father and I have eyes, and they are beautiful. In the light, they are almost liquified, turning this golden amber that begs to be consumed, yet when shade cloaks our faces, they morph with it, becoming the color of shadows on desolate mountainsides. We are fluid and we flee, yet what it is we are running from, that fear, is held within our gaze. I can’t be certain, but I believe we attempt to liberate ourselves from differing despairs. Perhaps it is an inheritance, this need to find hardship and a way out, going back to our blood spilled in Austria or persecution in Rome, Russia, and Spain.

I zoom back out on the picture, noticing the likes and tips that have come in. I know that they do not think about it, but yet I still wonder if they know that I am a person with a likeness to their father, with hard edges and memories rooted in color, with wanting and grief and a destiny to flee. Without them holding the knowledge, I get to keep that which formed me into an unalike inheritance and so I don’t mind that they break me apart, reading their own desire into my face that does not hold the same.

About the Author

Devin Goldring is a writer from New Jersey. They received their BFA in creative writing from Pratt Institute in 2019. Their current body of work explores trauma, grief, and perception as it relates to their lived experiences with sex work. They are the Nonfiction Editor for the Line Literary Review.