what purpose did i serve in your life

by Marie Calloway

“Yeah, but I think you can find a balance between those things.”

  “But I’m not interested in a balance.”

  “I guess that’s legitimate…”

  And I talked about how all of the competition and ambition made me sick.

  “I wish I could just show my writing and pictures I take of myself to a lot of people without all of the other things that come along with writing to write. Like all of the competition between writers bragging about how they were noticed by whatever important person, and bragging about how they’ve gotten published in so many places. And all of the ambition that they talk about, like how they want to become rich and famous through writing…”

  He listened, but I was disappointed when he didn’t seem to understand that I wasn’t afraid to compete or be ambitious, but that I just didn’t want to.

  I lay on his chest.

  “Are you an idealist or a materialist?” I asked.

  “A materialist I guess…I assume you’re a materialist, that goes along with Marxism.”

  “Yeah,” I said, smiling, happy that he was a materialist, too.

  We started to make out and we took off our clothes.

  We didn’t have any condoms.

  “Do you wanna just do it?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to get you pregnant…”

  “You can just pull out.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “It’s okay. Like I get tested all the time and I don’t have anything.”

  I was really desperate to have condomless sex with him, to become totally connected with him.

  “I wish…that it didn’t have to be that way.”

  And I knew that was the last word on the matter.

  I asked if I could go home with him, and then take a cab home tomorrow morning.

  “No. That’s too much.”

  I was both surprised and not to hear that from him.

  Here it is, what I’m used to from men.

  “Can’t we just go and buy condoms then?”

  “That’s a good idea…”

  So we got up. I tucked my shirt into my shorts and he nodded in approval. Men respond much more to hot pants than miniskirts. I had no idea until wearing them for the first time in New York.

  I looked at myself in the elevator’s metal reflection.

  “I look really stupid right now,” I groaned.

  “No you don’t.”

  We walked a few blocks to Duane Reade.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “About 3 AM.” I gasped, “You’re joking.”

  “No.”

  We got there and he got condoms, and I asked him to buy me beer so we got a six pack of Stella Artois.

  We got in line, but I slipped outside while he bought them, embarrassed for some reason to be seen buying condoms with him in the middle of the night.

  On the way back to my hotel we walked past a produce vendor on the street.

  I thought no one was watching it, so I grabbed an avocado.

  “You have to pay for that,” Adrien Brody said.

  I turned my head backwards and saw the vendor nodding.

  “Oh. I thought he wasn’t around.”

  He went over and paid for the avocado for me.

  I really liked the image of him taking three dollars out of his wallet and handing it to the vendor for me.

  We started to walk again.

  “This isn’t ripe. I didn’t even want it, I just felt like stealing an avocado.”

  I put it in my purse.

  We got back to my hotel room and sat on my bed.

  “I’m going to have to leave right after we do this,” he said.

  I started to drink a bottle of Stella.

  “Do you need to be drunk to—” he started.

  “No.”

  “You didn’t even need me to finish that sentence.”

  We started to take off our clothes again.

  “Is this alright?” he asked.

  “No, but, ‘this is the life I have chosen.’” I said, quoting him from when he had talked earlier about living a boring white collar life.

  “I feel like…I haven’t ever met someone I was able to talk to like I can talk to you. The way I always wanted to talk to people, like the way that I think and write. And I feel like we’re very similar and I’ve never met someone like me before. Do you feel like you’ve met someone like you before?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “No, I haven’t, except for you. But I don’t know what it means.”

  I lay down on the bed and he lay down on top of me.

  “I want to get you out of your head,” he said.

  We started to have sex and I was overcome.

  This is it. This is what sex is. What I’ve spent the past three years of my life, my entire adult life, looking for, even though I hadn’t realized it until now.

  “That’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “What is?” I asked, though I knew.

  “Your face right now.”

  I was vaguely aware my eyes were open very wide.

  “Do you want to know something? This is the best it’s ever felt for me,” I said.

  “Because I’m going slow?”

  “No.” I felt put out that he would try to reduce it to that.

  “I feel like this is the most that sex can ever be,” I said.

  I meant it in a positive way, but he agreed and was instead disappointed. He said that he hoped for “some feeling of transcending bodies.”

  “What does this mean for you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get really bored of sex after this.”

  “Will you lift your arm up?” I asked. It was blocking the side of his face.

  “Is it squashing you?” he asked and did.

  It wasn’t good enough; his head was too close…

  “And will you move your head up a little bit?”

  He did and so his face was now about a foot above mine and there was nothing in the way.

  I slapped him in the face.

  “Ow!”

  I started to laugh really hard.

  I wish I could say that I did it for a more dignified reason: that I wasn’t going to let him use my body for his pleasure, some fake imagined emotional connection that he was forcing in his mind onto us…but really I was just sad and angry about how he was going to leave after we had sex, that he wouldn’t let me go home with him earlier.

  But then my laughing died down and tears started to well up in my eyes.

  “Oh, no. I don’t want to be that person who cries during sex.”

  “Why not? It’s really common…”

  Is it? I stopped trying to fight the tears and just started to cry.

  I could feel him lose his erection.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because you’re feeling sorry for yourself?”

  That was his counter-attack. A verbal slap in my face.

  “I feel like you’re the one who has all the power here,” he said.

  “You’re the one who wants to leave in a few minutes. That’s why I hit you, because I was sad that you have all the power.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hit the last guy I had sex with, too, because I was sad he didn’t want to date me. It’s like that again. Hitting you didn’t make me feel better or change anything. It’s not like I can stop you from leaving.”

  I’m totally powerless in the face of men.

  He pulled out and threw the condom in the waste bin and started to get dressed.

  For the first time, I looked closely at his face as he was getting dressed. I realized that he was actually very attractive, just in a strange way. Or a complex way, rather, where you had to look at him for a while and think about it.

  “I’m going to say something, and don’t say it’s not true. I’m never going to connect with anyone.”

  “I think that’s very fatalistic.�
��

  He finished dressing and I lay in the bed naked and quietly crying.

  “I know you said you don’t want me to say this, but you will connect with someone one day. It’s just not going to be me.”

  It was nice, and I wanted to believe it, but I knew that he didn’t know, and that he was just saying that because it was what he should have said right then.

  We hugged and kissed and he headed towards the door.

  “Goodbye,” he said.

  “Bye.”

  He went out the door, stuck his head in again, and then he was gone.

  *

  She works under an assumed name. She once wished she were in Japan, but now she subjects her fascination with Japanese culture—its preoccupation with reified cuteness, with fastidiousness, with compliant femininity—to elaborate scrutiny, with a variety of unconventional tools: submersion, revulsion, role-playing, obsession, ridicule, mimicry. She writes with a stark and troubling ambivalence. It can be easily misread as apathy, numbness; this is part of what she risks. An elaborate strategy of purification, to blend honesty and revulsion until they are no longer separable, until readers must begin to shut down themselves. She is sure enough of herself to confront and even invite misunderstanding, as though misunderstanding might offer a way forward toward an authenticity beyond the deceptive surfaces of exhibitionism.

  criticism

  jeremy lin

  I emailed Jeremy Lin a story that I wrote at the behest of my friend. Not soon after, he emailed me back with this reply, “I liked it, if you make the capitalization normal and send it to me I’ll publish it on the website of my publishing company, muumuuhouse.com.” A few minutes later, he sent me a follow up email, “I got an idea. I’m going to France on December 3rd because they’re translating my books. If you are in Paris from December 4 on 7:45AM until December 10 on 5:45PM, you can stay in my hotel room with me. But you have to ‘cover’ the entire trip, as if you are a journalist, in the style of all your other pieces, then get it published somewhere. (I’ll help you find a venue). If I were rich I would pay for your plane ticket but I honestly have like $300 right now. But I am willing to pay half the amount of your plane ticket later, when the piece is published. I’ll pay $700 of the ticket price after the piece is published. The piece should be at least 10,000 words.”

  I replied, “Okay, I edited the story so the capitalization is standard. I have attached it to the email. As for Paris, I’m interested but I might have trouble getting the funds. I’ll keep you updated. Thank you very much for your interest in me and my writing of course. I feel very flattered.”

  “No problem. Sweet re: Paris. Sweet re: story. I will post it in one to seven days.”

  We emailed back and forth, fixing technical details in the story. Then he published it on the Muumuu House website. We arranged to chat on Gchat one afternoon about Paris.

  “Hey. I feel like I was in a really social mood when I thought of the idea, now I feel like it’ll be way too stressful,” he typed.

  “Okay. I probably couldn’t get the money anyway.”

  *

  A few days after Jeremy Lin published my story, I received an email from a reporter who wanted to do a phone interview with me about it.

  “Hi Marie. I’m a reporter for the New York Observer. I’m writing because I read your story and admired it and want to write about it, and maybe first person writing/the Internet more broadly. I was wondering if I could interview you. What do you think?”

  After thinking about it for days, I apprehensively agreed to do the interview with the encouragement and support of Jeremy Lin and my friends. The interviewer and I talked for an hour on the phone about my motivations and intentions with regards to writing, sexism in the literary world, Jeremy Lin, and aspects of writing on the Internet. The reporter ended the correspondence by saying that she would email interview Jeremy Lin for more information.

  *

  The day after the interview, Jeremy Lin forwarded me the responses he gave to the questions that he had received from the journalist.

  “Tell me about how you met Marie Calloway. What did you think of her writing and also her as a person?’

  “I’ve never met Marie in real life. Based on her Facebook, writing, Tumblr, etc., I think she’s funny, kind, discerning, interesting, and attractively confident.”

  “‘Why did you decide to publish her story on Muumuu House?’

  “Simply because I liked it. I read it all at one time without stopping and was surprised, later, to learn it was ~15,000 words. It has similar qualities (detachment, focus, attention to certain funny/interesting details, lack of a “good/bad” agenda) of other writing I like that’s autobiographical and first-person. (I’m thinking The End of the Story by Lydia Davis and Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys), but maybe her writing is even more extreme and direct and even less sentimental.”

  I read this email several times in awe.

  *

  I felt anxious and uneasy the entire day before the piece came out. I had no idea what the article would say or how I would be represented in it. These feelings didn’t subside after it was published; it was titled “Meet Marie Calloway: the New Model for Literary Seductress is Part Feminist, Part ‘Famewhore’ and All Pseudonyms” and the article itself was full of gossip (“compared to Ms. Calloway’s other stories, Adrien Brody made bigger waves in literary New York because Mr. Brody was fairly well known here”) rather than any focus on my story and “first person writing/the Internet” as I had been told it would. The reporter made a lot of conclusions and judgments about me and my writing that I didn’t agree with (“with writing like Ms. Calloway’s, it’s tempting to believe that there is some sort of feminist impulse at work, that she derives power from humiliating men with her sexuality, the same tool they used to objectify her.”) I felt uneasy to be suddenly upheld as a “feminist writer,” which I had never thought of myself as and which seemed like a tremendous burden.

  *

  Jeremy Lin and I Gchatted about the article immediately after it was published on the web. He was also concerned about how he had been portrayed in the article. He quoted one of the mentions of him, “‘The poet/novelist/deadpan literary provocateur [Jeremy] Lin, once rumored to be the author of Hipster Runoff, made a documentary about [Internet fashion model Bebe Zeva] early this year, in which Ms. Zeva, now 18, poignantly tells him about growing up without a father. Later, Mr. Lin sprays whipped cream on her face and rubs it in her hair’” and said, “I feel like I definitely come off as like I’m trying to prey on young girls and as an unseemly presence in the piece.”

  “Yes. I was concerned about that. I’m sorry that I helped to create a Jeremy Lin is a creep meme,” I replied.

  “I don’t care. I feel like I feel nothing from any negative press about me anymore.”

  “Oh. Were you ever bothered?” I asked.

  “I’m not really sure. I think since I didn’t know anyone, and wouldn’t be in contact with anyone who would have the opportunity to think bad things about me in real life, it just concretely had no effect on my life, which I was able to focus on. Now I feel like I always assume that I will probably like the person getting shit-talked and, based on experience, not to believe what’s written. And I feel like the few people I’d be able to be friends with also think that way, so it doesn’t affect me concretely. In terms of publicity, there was a study that showed that bad publicity helps more than good publicity, because it gets more attention. Then after like three years people forget if it was good or bad publicity, they just remember that you got publicity, which seems true.

  “By the way, I feel like in the past I’ve felt really sensitive about pieces about me, like I viewed every single thing as negative, as you seem to be doing. For instance, when I read articles about me, other people would think what they were saying was good, but the same details about me I would think are bad. But I think that’s just from being sensitive.”

  *

  The day after t
he article came out, it was discussed on Gawker, a popular Internet gossip site, and HTMLGIANT, a popular literary site. There were hundreds of comments.

  “How is she going to feel when all her friends and family find out about her explicit blog about being a hooker in London. I am pro-sex and sex work and everything but this is not feminism, it’s attention-whoring and it’s going to blow up in her face when it’s no longer cute.” [female.]

  “I’m just offended that every teen who makes her diary public gets referred to as a “writer,” as if sharing what are essentially Penthouse Forum-quality passages is some kind of challenging profession.” [male.]

  “This is the literary equivalent of two straight girls making out on a keg in a field party. If this can be described as ‘chronicles of women’s sexuality,’ so can Penthouse Letters. Anais Nin this ain’t.” [male.]

  “It bothers me that anyone would consider this scenario remotely compelling—a young girl desperate for attention and validation solicits a random, married writer twice her age in a position of relative authority for sex, he cums on her face (easily one of the most degrading sexual acts, and one heavily influenced by porn culture), she writes about it in awful prose that’s borderline pornographic, and you manage to find something redeemable from it all.” [male.]

  “feminism as pure opportunism. let’s fuck famous people and tell how shitty they are. or let’s pretend to fuck famous people and tell. the younger we are the better. americans are such prudes. this whole deal would be so much more *edgy* if she were 15 or better yet 13. what’s the legal limit? the sasha-grey-azation of society. It’s my choice whether I profit off my documented degradation! if I profit, then I am in control! if I profit, I win! look at me! I can fuck famous people and hit buttons on a keyboard! I can take 10 cocks and then write about it! i’m a writer! joyce ain’t got shit on me!” [sic] [male.]

  “To write something like this pseudonymously in a fashion that outs the other person certainly meets the author’s self-definition of ‘fame whore’ with the accent on the whore.” [male.]