by Siel Ju
The girl hesitated, then said okay, though Sam was looking at the boyfriend when he’d asked the question. As soon as Sam started moving again, I could tell the girl was in real pain, her body rigid, braced against him. He was going really hard. There was a part of me that felt responsible, felt like I should say something, but then again she’d given her consent. I thought about leaving but that felt wrong too, like I’d be abandoning her. And watching her, even wincing with her, I realized a part of me felt relieved, like I’d dodged a bullet. I told myself it would end soon but Sam kept drawing it out, speeding up then slowing down. The girl dug in her elbows and buried her face in the couch, between her boyfriend’s legs. Her boyfriend put her hand over his penis, trying to get her to play with it, but she just let her wrist dangle loose and he let it be. People started coming in the space, but she seemed too in pain to notice or care. A girl in a blue dress sat down next to me. Sam introduced himself to her, grinding ostentatiously. “You like to watch?” he said. “Oh, yeah,” she said.
As soon as Sam came he pulled out and got up. He looked around at the half-filled room like he was preening, then pulled off the condom and went to throw it away. When he left I looked at the girl. She was sitting on the floor alone with her legs tucked under her, her head downturned, trying to get her dress right side out. Her boyfriend handed her the thong, then looked up at me, proudly, like he’d just taken his bows.
I went to the bathroom again. I felt nauseous. I tried sticking my fingers down my throat, but couldn’t get myself to throw up, then I realized someone was knocking at the door. When I opened it I saw it was the blond girl, dressed again. I was about to say something, I felt I needed to acknowledge what had happened somehow, but she just brushed past me and closed the door. She hadn’t recognized me.
We left soon afterwards, but it was a little past two in the morning when we got back in the car. On the drive back Sam was hyped up and garrulous, like I had been on the drive there. He talked in an excited patter.
“That guy David,” he said. “When we were leaving, he was like, ‘see you next week.’ It’s going to be a flapper theme.”
“Wow,” I said. “Well, I definitely won’t be there.”
He paused. “You didn’t have fun?”
I was going to say something else, but checked my response. Instead I said, “I think I would start to lose my grip on reality, if I went regularly.”
“You’re right,” he said quickly, eager to be agreeable. “So what was your favorite part? Of the night, I mean?”
“Huh?” I said. He was irritating me. “What was yours?”
“When we were on the couch, with that other couple,” he said. He turned and looked at me like he’d paid me a compliment. “What did you think of them? They were good-looking, right?”
“Sure,” I said, and shrugged. “Why not.”
When he dropped me off, I felt too exhausted to shower, though I’d wanted to. I just took off my dress and shoes and dropped into bed. But then I couldn’t fall asleep. I tried masturbating, to help bring the night to some kind of closure, but I was too tired to come. I thought about the damp trail David left on my arm with his clammy hand, the four roving girls with their looks of dejection, the blond girl’s blank, glassy eyes.
Something about those eyes reminded me of the Match.com pop-up I’d clicked on the day I joined. It was one of those collage ads, a dozen or so headshots organized in a grid with the text “View Singles in Los Angeles” at the bottom. The pictures looked just casual enough to pass as ones regular people might put up, but at least in my memory, the faces still all had that symmetrical, bland look of stock photo models. I wondered why those plastic heads had made me click and go on to create a profile. Maybe it was exactly that look that triggered a coercive, egotistical arousal in all of us, benign attractiveness somehow announcing itself as an easy target to play out self-seeking behavior. Because despite the glassiness, the blond girl did have a lonely mournfulness to her, the kind that made her seem like the type who’d closet herself to suffer in silence.
I wondered if I had the same look. Then I remembered my own profile, that line about wanting to make out. I remembered some of the messages I’d received: “I have measurements and pics. You won’t be disappointed.” Or more directly, “Make out means oral?” I was aggravated at myself for thinking Sam’s message was any different. The image of the blond girl’s body jerking in pain flashed in my mind again. I let my mood sink and wallow in a morass of disgust and defensiveness and pity and self-blame. I tried to shape for myself a hard definition of trauma and abuse, then thought, well, maybe she was asking for it, which made me snigger out loud. I stopped and sighed. I knew I was just laughing at myself, but it felt good anyway, to be able to make fun of someone, or something.
The Robertson Case
In line to pay for a turkey sandwich at my neighborhood grocery store, I heard one cashier say to another, “That should teach you the perils of pride.” She said it laughing, like it was a joke, but the other girl twisted her mouth and said, “Yeah, the perils of telling you.” Then she swiped my sandwich over the scanner and looked up at me, hard, like she expected me to speak up and show I was on her side. “I don’t need a bag,” I said.
Those were the types of exchanges I’d been having lately. The kind that didn’t involve me, but with lots of meaningful eye contact.
When I got back home, a girl I hadn’t talked to since college had emailed out of the blue. She asked, “Did you hear about Allen?” He had been crushed in a freak accident involving a crane, spent a week in a coma before they pulled the plug. Reading this, I was surprised to find myself growing darkly gleeful, surprised that my feelings about him were still strong enough to elicit this response, four years after graduation. Allen was the first guy I’d slept with in college, though I knew he had a girlfriend who went to another school. He was shy in bed but gave great full-body massages. We’d have quiet sex in his dorm room then lie awake in the cold dark, him talking about his conflicted feelings about me and his girlfriend in excited, breathless tones that were oddly infectious. Of course the affair was brief, but I’d trusted him and it ended badly, spectacularly, so that the rest of my time there I imagined everyone on campus looked at me with an aloof distaste and pity. In those years I nursed revenge fantasies about hurting him somehow, exposing him as some kind of fraud, one-upping him in some life competition. Those more or less ended when I moved back to Los Angeles, leaving behind the Pennsylvania college town and its petty, ruminative drudgeries.
“It’s scary,” my college friend wrote. “People our age are already dying.”
“So great to hear from you!” I wrote back. “How goes it in the Windy City?”
I closed my laptop and looked out the window. It was just beginning to get dark. I started dressing. My friend Erin and I were going to a cocktail mixer for professional singles in their twenties and thirties. Erin had found out about the event through a coworker in the know; to get on the list for the mixers, you had to be invited by someone already on the list. It was at Evoq, a posh newish bar in Hollywood I hadn’t been to. I put on a black scoop-neck tank, a tight, black pencil skirt that hit just above the knee, fishnet stockings, and red heels with pointy toes.
Erin picked me up. “Fishnets?” she said. “It’s supposed to be like an after-work event.”
“I could wear this to work.”
“The skirt, maybe.” She gave my outfit another once-over. “Who wears fishnets to work?”
“The ones planning to go to mixers afterwards,” I said. “Like people are really going to show up wearing their work clothes at this thing. Watch—we’re going to be the underdressed ones there.”
Erin checked the rearview mirror a little gloomily. She had on a pinkish beige skirt suit, the pressed jacket perfectly fitted over her thin shoulders. Her blouse was a rich cream. She looked liked a kept woman, somewhat demure, almost docile. She was wearing pantyhose.
“You look great,” I said. �
��Expensive.” I waited until she smiled thinly. “This guy I dated in college would always freak out when I wore fishnets, said I’d die of frostbite. This was in the winter. He liked them though. He’d take them off then rub my legs warm. I heard he died recently, but not of frostbite.”
Erin crinkled her eyes, then cocked her head at me, snorted. “Dated? Or slept with?” she said.
At the mixer we headed straight to the bar, then stayed there—a good vantage point. We’d arrived on the early side; the place was just starting to fill up. Two guys that looked about our age in tailored suits came next to us in the bar to order their drinks. One was cute, with a chiseled jawline and sandy blond hair that looked professionally tousled. He seemed snobbish, held his face tilted up so he was literally looking down his nose. The other looked Jewish and nervous, driven—good on paper. He caught me studying them and smiled, introduced himself and his friend. The guys were both lawyers, first-year associates at the same firm. The nervous one, Jonah, said he went to Harvard for both undergrad and law.
“My sister went to Harvard,” I said.
“What house?”
“House? I don’t know.”
“Those shoes are fierce,” he said. “Do you work in the industry?”
I heard Erin snort again, then shrink into herself a little, embarrassed at the loud noise she’d made. The cute guy turned to look at her with a mild disgust, then politely rearranged his face. “I’m a writer,” I said. “At this trade magazine company.”
Jonah and I split away from our friends. We talked about restaurants and yoga. When I told him I majored in English, he went through what he read in college: lots of Nietzsche, some Edith Wharton. “I’d never have known pickles and donuts had to do with sex,” he said about Ethan Frome, then giggled. I laughed with him and he said, “It’s so great to meet someone smart here.” He squeezed my arm gamely with a sweaty hand. “Can I get you another drink?” The crowd at the bar was now three deep but he elbowed his way through, came back almost instantly holding two pinktinis, grapefruit-vodka cocktails that were the night’s seven dollar special. I was impressed by his uneasy determination. “Let’s sit down somewhere,” he said, and led the way to an empty booth in the back.
The booth was like a cave, darkly set apart from the rest of the bar. Even the music sounded muffled. “It’s quiet here,” I said. “Nice.”
He was a gulper, draining his drink as soon as we sat, like he was completing a prerequisite task. He said he and his friend, Brian, had gone straight from work to happy hour to here. “I actually don’t drink much usually,” he said, “if you can tell.” He looked at me with glassy eyes. I shook my head. He started talking about his law firm, began a story about a partner he didn’t like, then fluttered his hands like he was erasing the air. “Ugh, I don’t want to be one of those guys who always talks about work,” he said. His gestures turned more languid, as if his hands were moving through a viscous gel. I watched them like I would a lava lamp. “There’s this restaurant I want to take you to,” he said, slurring a little.
Suddenly he took both my hands in his and pulled me toward him. His kiss was overlong and slightly suffocating, with a beseeching quality that I found slightly endearing. Afterwards he shifted closer. We spent the night that way, pressing together inelegantly, then exchanged numbers when the event ended.
The drive back, Erin looked defeated. She said she’d wandered around for a while but no one paid attention because all the other girls were in tiny cocktail dresses. So she’d gone back to her spot at the bar. Jonah’s friend was still there, and they had a forced conversation just to occupy themselves.
“He asked me what I did for fun and I said I went to museums and galleries,” she said.
“Since when?”
“I know. Then I said, ‘No I don’t. I don’t know why I said that.’ Then I went to the bathroom.”
For our first date Jonah took me to Hump, a high-priced sushi spot at Santa Monica Airport I’d never been to. It was a busy night and we got the last table, a round one that seated five in the middle of the restaurant, brightly lit like we were on stage.
He made a show of picking a sake from the list. He said he’d lived in Japan for six months, working, between undergrad and law school. The waiter brought big white plates, each with eight long pale strips of translucent sashimi, arranged like starbursts and topped with delicate garnishes—thin slices of jalapeño, slivers of jicama. Jonah gave me a slightly disapproving look when I mixed the wasabi with the soy sauce. “They don’t do that in Japan,” he said, then smiled forcibly to soften things.
I shrugged. “So what do they do in Japan?”
I watched his mouth move in time with his voice. He spoke quickly like he was afraid of losing my attention, punctuating his remarks with chuckles, his hand over his mouth when it was full. He seemed eager to please, which flattered me. In the short silence between sentences, a look of apprehension would creep over his face. Then he’d gulp more sake and start talking again. He said he moved here after law school just six months ago. Work could be brutal, he said. He hinted that he made a lot of money, but made clear he didn’t think it was enough. From what he described of his lifestyle he seemed wealthier than any guy I’d dated. This made me feel powerful in a passive kind of way.
Soon the sake loosened his face to a giddy droop. He ordered more. As a non sequitur he told me his grandmother would like me. I said I wasn’t close to my family, but that it didn’t worry me, I enjoyed the freedom. He looked at me quizzically. He asked me if I thought family was important. “I’m not sure what that means,” I said. “It’s not something I think about too much at this point in my life. I’m more focused on my friends, and meeting new people.” He nodded fervently.
The new sake arrived and he poured more, ordered dessert.
With the next drink what remained of his nervousness seemed to slink away. His posture sagged, though he retained his impatient quality. He gripped my arm and pulled me toward him, but he hadn’t measured the distance right and he almost pulled me off my chair. “Careful,” I said. “These seats are wobbly.”
I saw his mouth open wide as it neared my face. He was clumsy but insistent; once we started kissing it was hard to pull away. He had mentioned a girlfriend the first year of law school and I wondered if that was the last time he’d had sex. The waiter set down the green tea ice cream with a smirk.
Finally I whispered, “The dessert’s here.”
He stopped chewing my ear, quickly picked up a spoon. “They make their ice cream in-house,” he said in a tone of embarrassed cheer. He tried to pour me more sake but he’d already drained the bottle. He asked for the check and paid it.
As we walked back to the car his anxiety returned full force. He was holding my hand but looked lost in thought, his expression almost angry. When he caught me looking at him, he unknitted his forehead and smiled unconvincingly. “That was fun,” he said.
In the car we fogged up the windows. The desperate quality of his need made me reticent, much more reserved than usual. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I kept putting them on his chest, pushing him away slightly. I didn’t want clothes coming off in the parking lot; I remembered how Erin had said “Dated? Or slept with?” in that resentful tone of hers. I could tell Jonah was trying not to appear too pushy but having a hard time of it. My mouth felt raw; he had this aggressive way of sucking my lip. Finally he pulled away, fell back into the driver’s seat, breathing hard. He looked at me with a mix of desire and dissatisfaction, then suddenly grabbed my hand and rubbed it against his crotch, hard, three times. He let go, waiting to see what I would do. When I moved my hand away his face contorted into a frustrated cringe. Then he recovered. He smiled, teeth gritted with a mock confidence, like this was about how far he’d expected things to go, and he respected me for it. I smiled back.
About a week later, it was my birthday. Jonah called with brief, happy wishes, made plans to take me out that weekend. I imagined what Erin’s voic
e would sound like when I told her about it, but instead of her usual call she sent me an ironic e-card. “Let’s celebrate the first time you cried naked in someone else’s bed,” it said. In the message section she wrote, “Champagne brunch with the girls at Lago Sunday?”
On Friday Jonah showed up with a book—a big, hardback Yoga basics book that I’d seen on the $4.99 sale table at Barnes & Noble. He handed it to me in a wrinkled gift bag that looked reused. “Thanks,” I said. “I thought about getting this book.” It had been a long while since a guy had gotten me a gift.
We went to Monsieur Marcel, an open-air restaurant on a pedestrian shopping street in Santa Monica. We had trouble keeping up a conversation but pretended we were enjoying a comfortable silence. He ordered generously. He was an odd contradiction—cheap gifts, expensive meals. He drank less this time, stayed tense, but he worked hard to affect a laid-back attitude. The result was unpersuasive, but his effort warmed me to him. Waiting for the check, he slipped his hand under the table like a tentacle. My hand was on my lap and he gripped both my hand and the thigh beneath it, squeezing. “You’re good company,” he said. He smiled with an anxious flinch.
“You too,” I said. I put my other hand above his hand. “You have nice hands,” I said.
I’d already planned on sleeping with him that night, but he worked hard to talk me into going to his place, said his wine club had just sent some bottles and we could watch TiVo. Once we got in the car he turned less handsy and more officious, like he was biding his time before the big attack. He lived in a high-rise in Westwood, the kind with a valet. As we took the elevator up to the ninth floor I thought I felt a mix of excitement and dread, like I was about to take a big test I’d overprepared for.
“Study harder!” I said, when he opened the door. I was reading aloud his laptop screensaver’s scrolling green text.
