Because They Wanted To: Stories

by Mary Gaitskill

  That day she sent her article to the magazine that had commissioned it and, since her jaw was feeling better, arranged to have dinner with her friend Joshua. Joshua was a frustrated musician. He was frustrated mostly by himself. He had achieved a modest success in Boston and then come to San Francisco to pursue a hopeless infatuation with a lesbian who didn’t even like him as a person. He claimed the experience had damaged his “voice,” and now he worked as a cabdriver, occasionally managing a sit-in gig for some obscure band. Joshua was very intelligent and very dear, and like many people who have difficulty managing their own lives, his opinions and advice were often excellent. They went to a cheap Thai place in the Mission. Jill told the story of the dentist as if it were a funny joke.

  “He’s a total nerd,” she finished. “He’s the kind of guy who says All righty’ at the end of conversations. Of course, I’m not really attracted to him. But it’s funny that the thought even crossed my mind, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” said Joshua thoughtfully. “I can see it, actually.”

  “See what? What’s there to see?”

  “Well, it’s like—remember when those weird thieves broke into my apartment?”

  He was referring to the time a spectacularly eccentric thief or thieves had broken into the house he shared with three other people and apparently meandered through it, stealing a scarf, two pairs of pants, an address book, a Sonic Youth tape, and the contents of the mailbox.

  “They took my unemployment check, and I had to go through this ordeal of getting it canceled, which meant I had to officially sign up for benefits again. Which meant standing in line at the unemployment office and explaining my situation and being told I was in the wrong line—it went on all day, and still it wasn’t fixed. And that’s the kind of thing that drives me crazy.”

  Jill murmured sympathetically.

  “So I had to come back the next day and wait in yet another line. I was almost at the end of my rope when this woman who worked there overheard me talking to another clerk about it, and she said, ‘Come over here, I’ll help you.’ And not only did she help me, but she turned the whole experience into this really nice exchange.”

  “Was she good-looking?” asked Jill.

  “Not especially. She was a middle-aged woman with a smart haircut. She had on a nice blouse with tiny polka dots, which I always like. But what really made me respond to her was that when these people just behind me in her line started bitching, she yelled out this funny comment off one of their complaints and made them laugh. That opened up the experience and made it okay to be standing there in line. I felt really attracted to her because she could do that.”

  “Enough to ask her out?”

  He shrugged. “It was more ephemeral than that. Sort of like what you’re describing. But it was a great little moment.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It is like me and the dentist. You and I are so inept at practical details that when the practical details are, like, exploding in your face, and suddenly there’s someone who can not only straighten it out for you but who seems to embody a whole universe where these disasters are just taken in stride, you’re going to be incredibly grateful. Like, yes, there is an emotional hell that can’t be fixed, but on the other hand, there’s the dentist and the unemployment lady working away making things go smoothly at least on some level.”

  “And who also acknowledge the emotional hell,” said Joshua. “Like the polka-dot lady with her joke.”

  “Yes! Exactly.”

  “What’s interesting about the dentist, though . . .” Joshua paused, and his face became uncharacteristically sly. “He’s solved your problems, but he also caused them to a certain extent. I mean, he hurt you.”

  They finished dinner and relocated to a dark little bar. They sat in a booth with sticky wooden seats and steadily drank. Joshua described a TV show he’d seen, about an experimental program being conducted by some prison systems that enabled victims and their families to confront the criminals who had victimized them. He described the emotional scene between a thief and the clerk he’d shot, each of them telling the other what the robbery had been like for him—the clerk refraining, “Why did you do that to me?” until the robber apologized and they embraced with a great deal of emotion.

  Jill was interested, but as she settled more comfortably into drunkenness, she found it hard to concentrate on the story; she was distracted by the memory of the dentist’s disembodied voice issuing instructions over the phone. “I want you to press ‘alt,’” he said inside her head. “Good. Now I want you to go to file.”

  “But the last confrontation was pretty nasty,” continued Joshua. “It was between a woman whose daughter had been raped and murdered and the guy who did it. The mother was religious, apparently, and she kept trying to appeal to the guy on those terms. He seemed to have respect for religion, and a couple of times he said he was sorry for raping and killing the daughter. But he said it with this odd kind of reserve, this detached compassion for the poor old mom, and that just seemed to drive her crazy. She kept saying she wanted to know exactly what it had felt like to rape and strangle her daughter, and after a while he started to look at her like, ‘Hey, lady, who’s the freak here?’ And I have to say he had a point. But he couldn’t remember anything about the murder or the rape, because he’d blacked out—which he also apologized for. The mom got more and more frustrated, and in this kind of masochistic frenzy she blurted out, ‘I know I should get down on my hands and knees and thank you for not torturing my baby.’ And a look of utter shock flashed in the killer’s eyes, like two live wires had just been touched together inside him. He just stared at her. Like he recognized her. It was way creepy.” Joshua paused. “The girl’s father was there too. But he didn’t say anything. He just sat there with his head down.”

  The next evening she called the dentist. She pretended to have a question about the computer, and he said, “I want you to press ‘alt.’” The banality, the politeness, and the harmless hint of command were all accentuated by the abstracted context and took interesting forms in her imagination. Happily, she visualized all kinds of things he might want her to do.

  When he finished instructing her, she asked him questions about himself. He told her that before dental school he had studied theater and film. He had done his undergraduate thesis on lesbianism among strippers—which, he confidently assured her, was quite high, at least in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

  “Really,” said Jill. She felt slightly nonplussed without quite knowing why. “What kind of show did they do?”

  “Show?”

  “You know, when they stripped.”

  He told her that he had only interviewed the strippers and had not watched them perform.

  “Why not?” she asked. “I mean, weren’t you curious?”

  No, he wasn’t.

  “That should’ve been your first hint,” said Pamela. “A twenty-some-year-old guy who’s not interested in watching strippers but who wants to establish their lesbianism? He’s either a pervert or he’s pathologically frightened or he hates women. Or all three.”

  “I don’t know,” said Jill. “I thought it might be something else with him. I was pretty surprised when he said it, but I thought maybe he was trying to be a feminist or something.”

  When she finished her project, he brought her his printer.

  “I must take you to dinner,” she said. “You’ve been so incredibly kind.”

  He demurred, making the expected mutterings about the least he could do. “Besides,” he said, “I like to help creative people.”

  They went to an Italian place in North Beach. They stared at their menus with ritual concentration. In the public setting, the dentist looked like a stranger, and that unnerved her; vainly she tried to revive the mysterious frisson that had arisen over the phone. He was wearing a loose-fitting turquoise sweater and faded corduroy pants, the casualness of which gave him a rumpled, little-boy sensuality that was pleasing but overly sweet for
her tastes.

  “How old were you when you did your thesis on lesbian strippers?” she asked.

  “Twenty-two. Why?”

  “It’s very unusual for a man that age to be so uninterested in watching women take off their clothes and gyrate. Especially if you were interested in whether or not they were dykes.”

  “Have you ever been in one of those places, Jill? They’re pathetic and—”

  “I used to work in one, actually.” She paused so that he could say “Really?” but he just sat there and blinked. Maybe, she thought, he had read it in a magazine bio note. “I didn’t think of it as pathetic, personally. Some of the women were worth seeing, I thought.”

  “It wasn’t the women who were pathetic; it was the men.” A certain professorial tone had crept into his voice. “Sitting there slavering over women who were really lesbians anyway.”

  “I’d just think. . . out of curiosity, if nothing else—”

  “Look, during my second year of college I worked as an assistant cameraman for a low-grade porn company, and I wasn’t interested in seeing any more naked women.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well. That’s—”

  “And I was disgusted by the way the women were treated. Really bad.”

  She pictured the young dentist standing in a nondescript basement holding camera equipment while all about him nondescript naked women assumed lewd poses. He was wearing the same beneficent, self-consciously goofy expression he’d worn when he’d first arrived at her home with his computer.

  “But a strip show isn’t necessarily the same as porn,” she said. “At least not when I did it. It’s more about watching someone’s fantasy of themselves.” She paused. “Unless of course you’re gay.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Well, then—”

  “Jill, I’m shy.”

  “The funny thing was, when he said the thing about not wanting to watch strippers? It made me feel slighted, almost demeaned.” Jill was stationed on her bed in extended phone call position, bolstered by pillows, wrapped in a quilt, legs tensely curled into her chest. “When he said he wasn’t interested in seeing any more naked women, it was almost like he’d slapped me,” she said.

  Joshua was silent for a moment. “That’s a very unusual reaction,” he said.

  “I know it doesn’t make sense,” she said. “But I felt the same way when he talked about how terrible the porn people were. What he said seemed nice and even moral, but there was something . . . hostile in it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No, of course not. But I can’t shake the feeling. It’s infuriating. He’s trying to put himself in this superior position. Like, here’s these strippers, doing their all, and he’s sitting there going tut-tut. Unlike the gross, pathetic men who are interested, he’s scrutinizing it with a purely scientific eye, in order to ascertain exactly how many lesbians there are per strip joint. And if he’s so disgusted by porn, what was he doing there? He was feeling superior, the smug fuck.”

  “So I guess you don’t like him anymore.”

  “He told me he didn’t like strip shows because he’s shy,” she went on excitedly. “But I don’t buy that. Strip shows exist for shy men.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Joshua. “I’d be shy about going to a strip show. I mean, I could picture some huge, leering stripper putting her underpants over my face while brutish guys laugh.”

  “Oh, come on, Joshua. You know it wouldn’t be that good.”

  But later that night, his plaintive joke had its effect. She lay in bed, fantasizing about the dentist lording it over a grinding stripper, then interposing it with another fantasy, in which he trembled in fear before her. Each image was affecting in its own way; together, they were dramatic and moving. The dentist was complicated and unusual, she thought, yet decent. Like her, he had done things not everyone could understand, and he was perhaps not sure what he felt about it all. She went into sleep imagining that she was leading the dentist up a gentle, grassy hill over which a primary-colored rainbow stoutly arched.

  She woke the next day feeling very emotional. She decided she was going after the dentist whether he was a ridiculous love object or not. She went for a long walk, during which she brooded, toiling uphill and down, on how to best declare herself.

  “I got him some flowers,” she reported to Lila, her hairdresser. “And I brought them to his office.”

  “That’s so sweet,” said Lila as she moved efficiently about Jill’s perched, enrobed frame. “How did he respond?”

  “Well, I was planning to just drop them off with his secretary, but he happened to be standing there by her desk when I walked in with them. He just gave me this glassy-eyed stare. His face looked frozen, like he was suppressing insane rage. And then he looked normal and flustered.” Just beyond the dentist’s shoulder, Jill had glimpsed the profile of a woman’s head lying on the headrest of the reclining dental chair; her open mouth made her look stunned and victimized. “He said thanks, I shouldn’t have, and that he had to get back to work. He took them and just wandered off to some back room, while his secretary beamed. I figured, okay, he’s not into it. But then he called that night and asked me to the movies.”

  In fact, he had asked if she wanted to go to a body-piercing exhibition. She was surprised, as she would not have thought piercing was the dentist’s kind of thing—it certainly wasn’t hers, at least not as it would occur in the gaudy vacuum of a public exhibit. She said she’d rather see a movie, and they decided on an art film about a drug-addicted police officer who sexually abuses young girls.

  The dentist arrived at her apartment an hour early, which was awkward as Jill had just emerged from the shower and had to answer the door in her bathrobe. Still, she chattered enthusiastically all the way to the theater, in spite of her crude, unkind thoughts when the dentist proudly described his car as “the smallest in the world.”

  She had hoped the vaunted sex scenes in the movie would provide a delicious cocoon of titillation and embarrassment that they could inhabit together. But she just felt embarrassed.

  “I hated it,” she declared as they left the theater. “I thought it was pretentious and boring, except for that one jerk-off scene. I have to admit, that wasn’t bad.”

  “I thought that went on a little long—for what it was,” said the dentist judiciously. “And it was very unrealistic that the nuns they raped were all so good-looking.”

  They went to a restaurant and talked about random minor subjects. Neither one of them, it seemed, was at ease. The dentist’s facial skin appeared strangely immobile, and although he looked at her, his eyes seemed shut from the inside. As if in reaction to his stillness, Jill’s voice leapt and darted with an animation that embarrassed her and could not be restrained. She ordered glass after glass of wine. Her animation felt increasingly like a sharp object with which she vainly poked the dentist. What a boring person, she thought. I definitely don’t want to have sex with him. This thought calmed her, and as they sailed back to her apartment in the smallest car in the world, she felt so calm that she wanted to put her head in his lap.

  “Would you like to come in for a little bit?” she asked as he pulled up to the curb.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I have to feed the dog.”

  She took a deep breath and exhaled. “Could you please come in for just a minute? It’ll make me feel safer.”

  “And that’s exactly what he did,” she told Lila. “He came in for a minute. He stood there while I fed the cat, and then he said, ‘Had fun. I’ll call you,’ and left.”

  “This guy really likes you,” said Lila.

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah.” Lila gazed at Jill’s hair in the mirror, meditatively cupping its new shape with both hands. “I think he likes you a lot.”

  For the next week her octopus imagination wound itself about the dentist, experimentally turning him this way and that. But he remained obdurate and glassy-eyed in its sinuous grip, and eventual
ly she released him with an exasperation that became forgetfulness.

  She didn’t even notice when he failed to call her; partly because of an emotional fight with an editor named Alex, which made her rage about the apartment, angrily talking to herself for days. Alex, with whom she had cultivated a rather tender friendship, had wanted her to write something about her sexual experiences, even though she hadn’t had any for over a year. She was offended because she thought he was being exploitative, which offended him because he thought she was being judgmental and hypocritical as well—hadn’t she, after all, written about being a stripper two years earlier? “That was different,” she huffily explained to Joshua. “That wasn’t about stripping; that was about power struggles in relationships. Stripping was just the motif.”

  Then her word processor returned, looking small and likable in its Styrofoam nest, and she was offered an unusual job writing text for a book of photographs by an artistic photographer, which would require her to travel to Los Angeles. The photographs would all be of a famous model known for her risqué public persona, and the model wanted some of them to be taken in a strip bar with a real stripper.

  “We want a thousand words on illusion and transformation,” said the editor. “We want your real-life take on it.”

  Jill arrived at the strip joint at eight in the morning. Various assistants, looking tired and hungover, worked at arranging elaborate camera equipment or stood with an air of taxed authority over portable tables of makeup. The model was sequestered in her trailer, and the famous photographer was shooting the stripper as she walked on a table. The photographer told the stripper she was beautiful. She wasn’t, and she appeared to know it, but the photographer said she was again and again until she finally, shyly, began to carry herself as if she were. The owner of the place sat behind the bar, nursing an early cocktail and desultorily jeering his employee. “Take it off!” he weakly cried.

  “She doesn’t have to take anything off.” The photographer spoke in the proud tone of a mother. “She’s perfect just as she is.”