I wanna hold your hand

I have gone to bed with men, in part, for the beauty or agility or originality of their hands.

By Michelle Richmond

Jun 26, 2002 | Once, on LaVista Boulevard in Atlanta, a guy I'd never seen before slammed his car into mine. The accident happened only a few hundred yards from my house, so we pulled our cars into my driveway and went inside to call the police.

We were standing in the kitchen, the spiral phone cord stretched between us, when one of the spaghetti straps on my sundress snapped. He reached up, plucked the two broken ends of the strap delicately from my shoulders, and slowly tied them together in a bow. I was amazed by the gentle precision of his hands, following so quickly the clumsiness with which he had crashed into my car. I hung up the phone and we walked to a café, where we drank fresh-squeezed lemonade and considered the odds of finding each other like that. Later that night I found myself in a small rowboat on a lake in Macon, Ga. The guy who had crashed into my car was handling the oars, and I couldn't help but wonder how he might handle me. We floated for most of the night, then spent three months together. My car never entirely recovered.

My confession, then: I have gone to bed with men, in part, for the beauty or agility or originality of their hands. Some women fall for the curve of a thigh, the slope of a shoulder, the broad welcoming plane of a chest. I fall, instead, for hands. There is an erotic expressiveness in hands that cannot be found in any other part of the body. A hand in slow motion, a hand lifted to push the hair from someone's eyes, a hand doing something it does naturally and well -- this is, for me, the apex of desire.

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