Permission

by Saskia Vogel

  I was sweating, which made the cool night too cold. I should have taken a jacket. My dad always told me to take a jacket when I leave the house and to always have a decent pair of shoes at hand. What if your car breaks down? What if you lose your keys? Of all the things he saw coming, I’m sure he never imagined his daughter like this. I remember him warning me about the ‘reach-around.’ He set the scene: I’d be on a movie date and the guy would put his arm around my shoulder, hand dangling near my chest. Once we’d settled in, he’d try to cop a feel. No man ever put his arm around me in the movie theatre, but every woman I know has had a penis sprung on her. Was it that my dad came of age in a different time, or did he want to keep the world from me in hopes I’d never find out what he knew? Did he hope – I remembered the dates Ana’s parents had started setting up for her as soon as she turned sixteen – I would be quick to find a pure and lasting love, and I’d slide from his care into the care of another, without ever having to encounter these wilds?

  I took the next left. The street widened as it wound downhill. The villas gave way to apartment complexes with For Rent signs stuck in patches of thirsty lawn. Soon I saw the main road, but my good feeling was long gone. I hadn’t planned on walking tonight or being outside. I wasn’t dressed for it. With each step, the edge of the paper towel dug into me. I kept reaching under my dress to make sure it wasn’t slipping. A pert buzz from my phone. If it was Van, I didn’t want to know.

  Behind me, a pair of headlights flashed. I looked back and saw a car making its way toward me. I walked faster toward the main road, where there were lights and people. I tried to ignore it. I tried to stop my thoughts. The what if, what if. A burst of blue light. I stopped. The car pulled up beside me. The driver’s window was rolled down.

  ‘I’m sorry, officer,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know… I mean, is something the matter?’

  The officer asked for ID. After studying my driver’s licence, he said my name and the name of the city out loud. I was still registered at my parent’s address. He repeated my last name: Logan.

  ‘As in Jack Logan?’

  ‘Yes, officer.’

  ‘You’re the daughter?’

  ‘I’m the daughter,’ I said.

  ‘I got a cousin on the Reserve Dive Team.’ He sounded apologetic. Rattled, even. I’d only ever known cops to be weary and bored, immovable in their decision to issue me a speeding ticket.

  ‘They did everything in their power – ’ he said.

  I cut him off, and as soon as I did I realized I probably shouldn’t have, but I didn’t want his condolences. I said, ‘You’re all so brave. Thank you,’ even though I wasn’t grateful. I was disappointed. Angry. I counted four divers that day. I watched them scour the bay. They were in the kelp beds and then by the rocks. After a while all they seemed to be doing was swimming in formation.

  In the back of the cop car, I thought I’d lost something. I did my usual check and slid my fingers around the pockets, the lining of my clutch. Cell phone and keys, my id. Crumpled kitchen towel. I smoothed it out. Nothing. No cash. I felt around the bag again and again. No card. I kept smoothing out the towel, as if the act of smoothing could cause money to emerge, like the live butterfly I’d once seen a magician pull from a drawing he’d made on his skin. But there was nothing. No money at all.

  ‘You all right back there, dear?’

  Dear. Even spoken kindly, it carried with it my father’s bite. I didn’t want to be anywhere near him.

  ‘I’m looking for my lip gloss,’ I said.

  He chuckled. ‘You don’t need that gunk, you know.’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  He dropped me off near the metro next to the mall on the Walk of Fame. Taxis rolled by.

  ‘You sure I can’t drive you home?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He nodded at me in the rear-view mirror. I reached for the door handle, but he turned around in his seat so he could look at me. I thought of his lower back, his discs degenerating with each twist, just like my father’s.

  ‘If my little girl lost her pops… I think about it all the time.’ His eyes were pleading, but I didn’t have an answer for him. ‘They know what to do if there’s a body.’

  ‘If there’s a body,’ I said.

  The silence between us. The ocean a grave. Everything an ocean. No body to bury, his body in the waves.

  AS THE COP DROVE OFF, bros on the sidewalk shouted at me and thought they were being cute. A homeless man asked for the time, and when I told him I didn’t have a watch, he asked again and again until I told him it was midnight in hopes he’d calm down. He pointed and backed away, shouting that I was a witch. No one seemed to notice.

  I considered going to the hotel bar across the street. A tabloid journalist used to take me there when he was tracking a pop star in the middle of a very public nervous breakdown. He said showing up with a girl like me made it easier for him to get into places like these. He bought the drinks and introduced me to people he thought were good to know. Like the bartender, Marty, who Van also knew.

  Marty liked trying out his concoctions on us. His homemade bitters and syrups, drinks with balloons that released a citrus essence when you popped them over your martini. Finally, a girl who can hang, he’d said about me after hours one night. Marty started inviting me to things. I watched him run through women like I ran through stockings. It was fun until the day he asked me if we were going to ‘do this already.’ When I tried to remember the look on his face, all I could see was Dr. Moradi. Something sharp entered my heart. I waited until it dulled.

  Instead, I went into the mall, a three-storey outdoor shopping complex built to look like the largest, most expensive film set in early Hollywood history. Bright, busy, and clean. I couldn’t stand the place, all dressed up to make you feel like you were in the Hollywood of dreams. I didn’t like the lie. I found a bench and sat down. Beneath reliefs of the Assyrian gods of water and light, cameras flashed as people took pictures of themselves with the Hollywood sign in the background. The mall’s viewing decks spanned a replica of the Babylon Gate, a door that leads to wonder.

  Two women stumbled out of the nearby elevators, leaning their weight on two broad-shouldered men. One of the women, her skin and hair and lips glistening, made the group stop in front of me. Her belly pouted in her dress.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ she slurred. ‘Men are buses. Right? There’s always lots of fish.’ She squeezed the arm of the man she was holding. Military muscle. The other couple was making out. The man was playing grab-ass with her. Maybe that’s what my dad had meant. ‘You’re so pretty!’ she said. She was nodding her head while asking the man: ‘She’s pretty, right?’ And then she tugged on the other man’s T-shirt. ‘Jeff, Jeff.’ He ignored her. ‘Cyn, Cynthia. Cyn, tell her she’s pretty. Isn’t she sooo pretty?’

  Cyn stopped her kissing and dropped her head back without really looking at me. ‘You’re soo pretty,’ she said as Jeff fixed his mouth to her neck. ‘You could have, like, any guy you want.’

  Cyn worked hard to make that sentence sound sincere, like believing it was a matter of my salvation. Mine and hers. She wasn’t wrong. You could have anyone, as long you didn’t care how you were wanted. That sharpness again. How different it all could have been.

  The women looked at each other, and chimed, ‘But not ours!’

  There was a buzzing in my clutch. It took me a second to realize what it was.

  I laughed along with them just to make them go away. Their men stood there smirking, indulgent. They wrapped their big arms around the girls, swayed down the steps, and disappeared down the sidewalk. Pedestrians flowed around street performers and party-goers posing by the names of their favourite stars spelled out on the sidewalk.

  At the foot of the stairs, a neon-haired kid with a reedy voice was singing while a man who looked like he spent his days at Muscle Beach listened intently, hands clasped behind his back, leaning in too close. Naked but for a speedo, a fanny pack, and a pair of hiking boots. Th
e musician held his guitar like a shield. Was my musician alone in that big house, or was he telling another girl about his big plans? I thought about the drive to and from his house, which I’d never do again, and how I should always have my own transportation.

  The text messages said: ‘What happened?’, ‘u ok?’, and then ‘hey.’ I deleted them. I scrolled through my phone. I couldn’t call any of these people. All these names, none of them friends, really. Not Marty, not Van. Maybe Krit, but I didn’t have his number. All the energy I’d expended. I scrolled and scrolled. I kept coming back to Orly’s number. Orly, who’d probably never get herself into a situation like this. She’d have put Van in his place and made him pay for her taxi. And if she needed help, she’d ask for it.

  On the ground was a concrete trail meant to look like a red carpet leading to that gate of wonder. Inlaid in the trail were testimonies to success by anonymous somebodies and nobodies in the film industry. Key grips and directors. Screenwriters and property masters. A composer’s said he had been teaching at UCLA when a producer called, looking for a student to score a sci-fi movie. ‘I’ll send my best student,’ he said, but he sent himself instead. I accepted the blame the story placed on me for standing still.

  I looked to the gods on the gate for strength. Their blessing was in everything around me: the terrazzo and brass stars, the crowds, the letters on the hill. And so I did it. I dialled Orly’s number.

  WHO DID I IMAGINE Orly to be? I knew so little about her, her everyday, what I may or may not be interrupting by calling her late at night. What I did know was how she made me feel. Welcome, all of me. It was a bullet of a thought. Once it entered me, my flesh was changed. Maybe I could ask for what I wanted and not be denied. Maybe to feel the way I felt with her was worth the risk that it might one day end. I had learned to move through life in spite of what hurt, favouring my left side to my right, never bending from the waist. I knew how to find pleasure this way, and I had been happy enough taking the pleasures I could find.

  I think sometimes of Casanova, who wondered for whom pleasure was greater: woman or man? Nature can never be unjust, the famous lover writes, so for the pains of pregnancy and the dangers of childbirth, Nature must have compensated women somehow. And so, he suggests, it made her experience of pleasure so great it outweighed the pain. Did my pleasures outweigh the pain? Or were they like plaster, creating an attractive shell? Or had I learned to yield to pain until it could be understood as pleasure? Because I could endure, the absence of pain or discomfort was not a prerequisite for my enjoyment. In his pursuit of pain, was a masochistic man seeking an intensity of pleasure only women can know? If he had the choice, would he, like Casanova, prefer to not be born a woman, for though women’s pleasure may be greater, he believed that men have pleasures women cannot enjoy? I don’t know. It’s suspect to carve up the world along lines of anatomical difference. As if the stories science tells about our bodies aren’t subject to change. Casanova was wrong in this respect: nature is neither just nor unjust. She is blunt and indifferent, but she will carry us through if we let her, she will carry as much as she can hold, even in the harshest climates. How fertile amaranth are, able to grow taller than the tallest of men, but in drought this unfading flower can only muster a few inches of height. It was hard to imagine, for grief is a desert island on which it’s impossible to take a long view. Perhaps the pleasures only men can enjoy are to do with power, but even that power does not serve men well. My father was always strong. He expected himself to be and so did my mother. Capable. Able to handle what came his way, doing everything he could to shield us from incoming storms. His method was financial security and a house in a good neighbourhood with good schools. My mother resented it when he didn’t perform, grew angry when he wavered. Down the cliffs, he showed me a different side, a vision of a life that could be – simpler, closer to the heart. But his vision never came home with us. It was as though he was only able to trespass on joy. And this was how he found his release.

  A SEMIANNUAL PLAY PARTY hosted in a dominatrix’s warehouse near the airport soon after Piggy moved in with Orly. An intimate gathering of clients and friends new and old. Piggy had been saving up for six months to be able to spend time there and have a session.

  Last time, Mistress Victoria had worked on him on her own. She said her arm had gotten tired and suggested that not one, but two women should work on him with two floggers at the same time. This arrangement might deliver the intensity of sensation he had called out for. Laughing, she said she needed to save some energy for her other clients at the party. ‘I’ve never seen a man your size take so much,’ she’d added, and it made him feel proud. When Mistress Victoria and Lady Sabina were done, he fell into a sort of trance there in her lap, his head in Victoria’s hands as she stroked him over the ears, humming, and when he put his button-down shirt back on, his pants over his leather thong, belt, socks, and lace-up shoes, he sat at the bar for an hour, his body a soundproof shell, nursing a tumbler of Scotch, and then he got in his car and drove home to Orly. Her very presence was a mercy. It meant everything to him that she was there.

  After a session as intense as this had been, he needed time before he reentered the world, and he felt too fragile to meet up with his friends at the all-night diner after the party was done. He loved the community he had finally found, but he was still a loner. It took him time to process what came up when he entered a submissive state beyond his threshold for pain. He thought of it as free-falling inside himself. It left him feeling vulnerable, like looking into the mirror on lsd had – an encounter from which no part of him could hide.

  Piggy sat between Orly’s knees in the morning, after he’d taken a bath. Bath and Bach, his post-session ritual. The music was still playing. Orly was using his special salve, made from a base of arnica. He kept it for himself, but he’d blend her a batch when she asked. She kept one hand resting on his forehead, her pinky stroking him at his hairline, which had receded somewhat since they’d first met. Orly knew he was tender, that this grip made him hold still. Orly dipped a finger in the pot and smeared the cool cream along each abrasion. There was no rush. It was as much about care as it was about touch. He kept his eyes closed, mind full of music, the sound of her fingers on his skin, the pressure of her knees. The two of them together, breathing out and in. In these moments, he felt whole and calm.

  When Orly was done, they sat together for a while, by the open window, the breeze blowing in a direction that brought the sound of the ocean inside. She asked him to face her. He kneeled, but she asked him to sit. She wanted them to be eye to eye.

  ‘I met someone,’ she said.

  And he knew she meant the neighbour girl. Orly was on the sofa where the girl had slept. Strange to see the girl inside, in his home. He’d waved at her every day and the gesture had seemed to frighten her. He’d taken it as a good sign. Orly had chosen a location where people weren’t interested in being neighbours. But then she’d appeared on Orly’s sofa, and he’d rushed out of the house on his way to work, not wanting to wake her.

  ‘We didn’t talk about this,’ Orly continued. ‘What would happen if we brought people over who we didn’t already know. I told her what I do, but I left you out of it.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Piggy thought about his separate lives. His office jobs, his service to Orly. The distance he enforced between himself and his work colleagues, never letting them get too close unless he trusted them to be in his inner circle. He had enough friends now who shared his interests. He was too old to watch his mouth during his leisure time. When he felt social, he wanted to be able to make jokes at his own expense and trade tales of mishaps on the road to getting here in the same breath as he explained the perfect blend for burger meat at a barbecue. He had spent too long holding back and keeping things down.

  ‘You must really like her.’

  ‘More than I think I was prepared to.’ Orly paused. ‘She’s going through a lot.’
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  Something dropped inside him, and the words came out harsher than he expected: ‘Not another project.’

  Orly looked hurt. ‘This isn’t like Kashmira. I took her on because she said she wanted to learn from me. Echo, she interests me. I wonder what she’ll be like if we play.’ She squeezed her eyes shut and smiled.

  He didn’t want to encourage her fantasy about this new girl. When she dreamed, it was potent, easy to get swept away. Part of her genius, he thought, was her imagination, but when she fantasized, she also lost her connection to the world around. He wanted her to stay with him in this conversation. He thought about Kashmira, who had been her assistant a few years before. Initially sweet, and eager. But when Orly let her get more and more involved, taking over the sessions Orly was supposed to do with him, he felt left behind. And then it became clear that Kashmira only thought about the money: she had seen what Orly had and wanted it for herself. She didn’t care about the work, the connection. She began poaching Orly’s clients, using Orly’s name as a reference, without her blessing. And one day there was no Kashmira anymore. Orly had asked him not to stay in touch with her at least for a while, as a courtesy. Thinking about the possibility of another girl spending time with Orly in the house – another project girl – it occurred to him that his hurt about Kashmira was really about something else. He said, ‘You’re supposed to protect me.’