Because They Wanted To: Stories (24 page)

“So at that point I was, like, this guy is kooky, so I just said goodbye and went to leave. And so he
follows me out
and holds the door for me and says, ‘Sorry I had to kick you out. But the rules are the rules.’ Referring, I suppose, to the automatic surveillance system.”

“He really does sound peculiar,” said Alex.

Alex and the television producer had come from New York on business. Most of the writers present were also “sex workers,” although one of them, an earnest bald woman, handed out cards advertising a therapy by which to recover from sex abuse. The television producer, a melancholy person with whom Jill once had a minor telephone flirtation, confided in her that Alex had arranged this dinner in order to meet Cindy, a determined and impish woman who published a stylish sex magazine. She had apparently written an article about anal sex which had gotten under his skin and provoked
a correspondence. She seemed very nice, but Jill wondered why Alex couldn’t find anyone to have anal sex with in New York.

“Why do you like this guy?” Cindy asked. “Is he sexy in any way?”

“Not in the normal ways.” Jill imagined the dentist standing before these people, and the bewildered looks on their faces. “Except I could feel. . . I’m convinced he’s a secret pervert and that he just doesn’t know it yet.”

Cindy smiled appreciatively. “You think if you could just get him into a sling, he’d be fine?”

“No, I don’t think he’d ever actually get into a sling, whether he wanted to or not. I think he’d just keep getting into slinglike positions in inappropriate situations.” Jill had of course just described herself, but Cindy didn’t know that, so she laughed. Jill wondered how Cindy would’ve reacted if she’d said, “Because I thought he was kind.”

Several of the guests began to discuss the politics of the various strip clubs around town, one of them denouncing “those corporate strippers” who were really just middle-class girls who thought it was cool to be a sex worker. Someone else expressed disdain for those who said sex workers had all suffered child abuse and did such work as a result. Another got irritated over the negative portrayals of sex workers in the media. The woman to Jill’s left was muttering darkly about her desire to infect the water supply with chemicals that would sterilize the population.

Longingly, Jill thought of the dentist at home with his entertainment center. As if reading her mind, Alex said she should’ve invited the dentist to the dinner this evening. “He wouldn’t have come, of course. He would’ve driven up and down the street looking in the windows over and over again, wondering whether or not he should come in. It would’ve driven him crazy.”

“I don’t want to drive him crazy,” said Jill. “He’s shy, Alex.”

“Nonsense. Of course you want to drive him crazy. And in the long run you will. Because you touched his fear. Every time he sees anything you’ve written, he’ll think of you and twist a bit.”

“You think?”

“Oh, yes. Why do you think I put out a magazine? So that girls I’ve been with will see it and twist.” Alex’s voice as he said this was calm,
but underneath was a muffled agitation that made Jill think of the dentist wresting his wrist out of his sleeve. It made Jill want to hold Alex and stroke his head. “I wanted him to pierce my genitals with needles,” she said dreamily. “It’s funny. That’s not something I usually fantasize about.”

“Was he wearing his white coat while he pierced you?”

“No. He was just George.” George with his glassy eyes, his cold lips, his jocular warmth held far away in a tiny place.

“That’s the trouble with your fantasies,” said Alex. “You haven’t got the right clothes.”

Meanwhile, someone made the argument that it would be awful if the “mainstream” ever came to truly accept whatever anybody might want to do sexually, because then sex wouldn’t be shocking anymore.

“That won’t ever happen,” said Jill. “Sex is too complicated, it means too many things to people. It connects to the dirt within, and there’s just too much dirt.”

“You’re wrong,” said the television producer. “It’s already happened, in San Francisco anyway.”

Their words were such announcements, yet Jill could barely feel the life in them. She tried to fixate on the dentist, but he only came to her in faint, cold wisps of idea. The woman next to her was describing a transvestite bar to which they might go after dinner. She said that when loathsome suburban men came to her strip shows expecting to buy sex, she sent them to this place as a joke, archly informing them that “the ladies” there would be pleased “to negotiate.” She was tall and full of disdain. Her long black hair was dull and fake, her eyes were made up huge and dark in her chalky face, her lips were full and dry; like a starved feral cat, she appeared both fierce and desperately unctuous, which was interesting with her disdainful affect. Jill thought she was beautiful and wanted to talk to her, but the woman’s words were harsh and so full of puzzling judgments that Jill was afraid of her. She looked down at the woman’s hands, which were delicate and looked strangely lost in their movements, the nails pathetically small and bitten. Jill put her own hand down on the table so that their wrists were touching. The woman let her wrist stay there, and Jill thought she could feel her through her skin. She did
not feel harsh or disdainful; she felt like a tense animal, very fearful but also resourceful and curious, even rather innocent. Jill thought she could feel the woman sensing her back, as one animal sniffs another. But then she moved her hand.

Jill and Alex left at the same time. They stood on the street for some moments, chatting. He said that he had gone to a sex store to get toys in anticipation of his tryst with Cindy. He said he was going to tie her up, and he pulled a piece of black thong from his pocket, apparently thinking that Jill would want to see it. Jill thought that if she hugged him goodbye, it might generate feelings of warmth and friendship, but it only made her feel uncomfortable.

“I’m enjoying your discomfort,” he said.

“I’m glad someone is,” she answered.

They kissed each other goodbye. Alex got into a cab and sped away. As the evening was warm and mild, Jill decided to walk a little. Homeless people strolled about, pushing shopping carts full of hoarded things. Traffic ran and darted according to plan. She imagined the dentist driving up and down the street, staring at the restaurant, trying to glimpse the dinner party inside. She imagined his eyes moving back and forth as he turned his head away from the window and then looked back again. She was distracted by the sound of someone muttering. It was a man crouching on the sidewalk in dirty, wadded blankets. He glared at her. “If it’s a man, I’ll castrate him and stuff his balls in his mouth,” he said. “If it’s a woman, I’ll stick my fist up her cunt and fuck her dead.” Jill understood how he felt, but she still walked a few feet up before she stepped off the curb to hail a cab.

Lesly was desperately writing a trite, boring screenplay that he could barely bring himself to face, even with a bottle of Scotch at his side and the TV companionably talking in the background. His failure in this regard was highlighted for him—he knew it was petty, but he couldn’t help it—by the recent success of the woman he loved, Nicki Piastrini, who had just made her film debut in a thing called
Queen of Night
and was now being invited to glamorous parties. His normal misery over this was exacerbated by the fact that, after having wild, drunken sex with him three times, little Nicki had decided that they should just be friends.

The drunken sex and her terrible decision, expressed in a pause-strewn phone conversation, had occurred over a year ago, and he’d since been hanging around, meeting her for coffee after maddening coffee, plotting her eventual change of heart, which now seemed, in the light of her impending celebrity, unlikely. Obviously, his only hope was to sell the screenplay and become a celebrity himself, and time was running out.

Thus, fighting on through failing hope, he sat down before a hostile piece of paper every night, drunk or sober, even when exhausted by his degrading restaurant job, plowing through senseless sex, monsters, exploding heads, and the like, all to no avail.

Lesly’s apartment was not an inspiring place to work, especially
for someone who saw himself hanging over an abyss by his finger-nails. He’d moved in after graduating from film school. He’d perversely dwelt on the ugliness of the place, romantically seeing himself as the alcoholic hero of some seamy detective series available only in the bargain bins of used-book stores, bitterly turning his back on the world of success for mysterious reasons. He’d been forced to romanticize it; after as many fruitless interviews as his spirit could bear and one job as a gofer for the deranged producer of a tiny slasher-movie outfit, he’d sunk into the dark glamour of the “King Farouk Room,” which is what he’d almost immediately named his apartment.

It was a gloomy rectangle on the ground floor of a reeking Greenwich Village tenement with smeared linoleum walls. The ceiling sagged as if it were about to cry; plaster from the crumbling walls gathered in little heaps on the uneven floor. His dresser looked like a hiding place for dismembered corpses, his throw rugs emphasized the sad state of the splintering floor, his mattress was beset by a mean snarl of blankets.

“Welcome to the more-than-Oriental splendor of the King Farouk Room,” he’d debonairly sneered as he ushered Nicki in for the first time.

He’d met her at the West Village restaurant where they’d both worked. He’d been instantly taken with her unconventional beauty—her wide, long-lashed green eyes and luminous skin were the only normally pretty features on her bony, angular face. Her thin brown hair would’ve been mousy on another girl, but it accentuated her Botticellian frailty. Her unfashionably thin lips and eyebrows, which could’ve made her face too spare, instead added an arresting severity that offset her expressive eyes, giving her the piercing intensity of a small cat. Her body was merely pretty, but it was made beautiful by the invisible electricity that she discharged like a sweet, grainy odor as she ran from kitchen to dining hall with her hands full of plates.

He had spent a year developing the courage to ask her out, had been rejected twice, and then, as he was resigning himself to casual flirtation, she’d asked him out. They’d had dinner, during which she chatted happily, dropping silverware and flicking mustard. They saw
a movie and then went to a cheerful Eurobar, where romantic music flew from the sound system in bright ribbons, and Nicki got sloppy drunk in the middle of his impressive analysis of the film. He’d thought she was joking until she brained herself opening the door to the ladies’ room. This was an odd development in view of his courteous relative sobriety; he decided he’d better get her out before she keeled over.

“Listen,” he said, gripping her jacket as she slid giggling down the side of the building next to the bar. “Do you realize I’ve been adoring you for over a year, from afar, and now here you are, falling on your face? Pull yourself together; it’s idiotic.”

She giggled, sighed, and put her cold fingertips on his face. Clearly, there was no choice. He bundled her into a cab and bore her off to his lair, gloating yet slightly disappointed that it had been so easy after all. At least he could put to rest his worry that her delicate sensibilities would be offended by the ambience of the King Farouk Room, as she would probably barely see it.

He was mistaken about that. As soon as they entered, her suddenly clear eyes moved alertly from crumbling wall to collapsing bookcase, and then she excused herself to go to the bathroom, where she crashed around for several minutes, peeing, running water, probably going through his medicine chest. He was thinking he’d made a mistake bringing her there and that he should take her home, when she emerged without her pants and bore down on the bed. She wore a pair of cream-colored panties over which peeped curly brown hairs.

“Well,” she said, “as they say, I’m much too drunk to fuck.” With that she climbed under the blankets and curled into a sleeping position.

He politely turned off the light over the bed, got a bottle of vodka, and sat down to contemplate the small bundle on his bed. Her thin shoulder in its T-shirt was exposed; it looked both winsome and pathetic in the King Farouk Room. This would be cute, he thought, if they were anywhere between eighteen and twenty-five. But they were both over thirty; they had lines under their eyes, stains on their teeth, faces that more and more showed their essential confused mildness.

He finished the bottle, then crawled into bed with his clothes on
and eased into a consoling blackout with his arm around the gently breathing body of his coworker.

He woke up feeling the granules at the foot of the bed with his clammy feet; she turned into his arms and smiled with her mascara-smeared eyes. Their clothes came off. She reached between his legs and stroked him fore and aft. With sodden hands he groped her breasts and genitals; he mounted and pasted her through a pounding headache.

He made them tea, and they clawed off hunks of Italian bread to have with butter and jelly. She sat with the blanket wound about her hips, crumbs and a blob of purple jelly ranging nicely across her breasts. “I haven’t done this for years,” she said. “The last two people I was with were married, so they never spent the night. This is fun!”

The next date was more seemly. They had dinner at a Thai restaurant; Nicki sat erect as a fourth grader practicing penmanship and gestured with her skewered meat while talking about her most recent casting-call failures as if they were hilariously funny. He asked her how she felt about their night together. She seemed surprised; she shrugged and said she didn’t know yet. He didn’t want her to think he was sensitive, so he didn’t pursue the subject. Instead, he listened to her talk about her therapists, psychics, and healers, and the progress she was making on all her problems, the great upswing her life was about to take. Her talk had the aggressive charm of someone who has just met you and wants to make a good impression, as well as the false candor of someone who doesn’t want to reveal herself yet wants to give the impression of doing so. Hey, he wanted to say, I just fucked you. Then he was embarrassed that he’d even thought such a thing.