“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.
Kiss and Tell
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 bet
ter 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.
Still, he walked with her to her apartment for “tea.” This meant roughly fifteen minutes of conversation, after which they rolled around, poking each other’s faces with their tongues. It was fun, but he had not recovered from the sense of remove her dinner chatter had caused him, and besides, at this moment he didn’t want to fuck Nicki. He wanted to find the vibrant girl he’d seen running around at work, but she didn’t seem to be present in the body of this agreeable but somehow inaccessible person who was pulling off his pants. Watching her, he felt that he could chain her to the radiator and per-form on her every obscene act possible and still not possess her.
Naturally, this made him feel he must possess her. Firmly he turned her around, pressing himself against her back and her round, dumb ass. Her body stiffened; her butt nudged him in greeting. He embraced her about the waist. Her hands splayed, her elbows poked out, he saw her crumpled, side-turned face from behind her fore-grounded haunches.
Afterward, there was a miasmic moment of separate breathing, and then, tenderly, she turned her head and kissed his hand, first with her lips, then with her hot, dry tongue. A gasp of happiness escaped him. He held her all the next morning, while the radio muttered about congressional scandal and she slept fitfully, discharging an innocent odor of sweat amid the musty sheets with every slight movement.
The third time was a drunken riot in the King Farouk Room, during which she ground astride him backward, showing him the rindy fat of her bunched ass—the unsuspected ugliness of which inflamed him all the more.
It was after this strenuousness that, as they lay sharing a smoke on the mattress, she told him she had been sexually molested as a child. He was so startled by this information that afterward he couldn’t remember how or why it had come up; suddenly it was just there.
“It was my uncle,” she said. “He and my aunt lived near us when I was nine and ten. Then they moved, and then he killed himself.” She drew on her cigarette, and for an instant her lips formed an expression he had seen on other women but never on Nicki: a tight down-ward sneer that was cynical and tough, yet weak and repellently vulnerable.
He felt bad for her. He wondered if this meant she was an emotional wreck. “Do you think it had a terrible effect on you?”
She looked thoughtful. “For a long time I tried to deny it had any impact at all. But I think it formed my sexuality a lot.”
He started to ask how, then put his arms around her instead.
A week after this discussion, they had the terminating conversation. He said he hoped they could still be friends. She said of course she cared for him as a friend, and they hung up. He felt dazed, as if he had suddenly found himself in a commercial for a love movie in which he had rapidly performed scenes of seduction, passion, emotional bonding—and then the commercial was over. He lay down and wondered if this development had anything to do with her story about her uncle.
Then their long, arduous friendship ground into being. They saw each other mostly at work, swimming through the slow, silly conversations of people doing jobs they don’t like. At first he didn’t long for her, although her abrupt ending of the affair hurt him. He wasn’t sure how he felt about her, and at times he thought there was some-thing wrong with her. His ambivalence made him receptive to her, and his receptivity gradually made him feel her charm and beauty even more potently than before. He would look at her and it would seem, even in the black anonymity of her waitress wear, even at the squalor of the break table, as if she were lounging at a casino on the deck of an ocean liner. He could not recall if she had looked that way to him before he’d fucked her, and he perplexed himself with the question of whether his perception had changed after the act to render her queenly or if she had actually become so.
Then one day he opened the door to the cold, cardboard-box-filled changing room and saw Nicki and a large blond waitress named Deirdre looking at themselves in a shard of mirror propped against the wall. Deirdre was seated, gazing dreamily at her own rosy face. Nicki stood behind her, tenderly combing the other girl’s long, pale hair. Deirdre said hi to him in the mirror. Nicki turned, dropped the comb, and looked at him, her eyes so startled and fraught that his heart filled with echoes of illicit intimacy. Suddenly he felt her touch, her breath against his chest, the lithe, muscular energy of her body beneath his hands. He wanted to have her, and he couldn’t.
“Deirdre is so beautiful,” said Nicki later. “If I looked like her, I’d be a movie star by now.”
“If I was a casting director, Deirdre wouldn’t stand a chance against you,” he said. “She’s just another
pretty blonde. You’re beautiful.”
She blushed and touched his hand with her cold fingers. “Thanks, Lesly,” she said.
They had coffee, then began to go to dinner and the occasional movie together. He felt her slowly opening to him in a way that seemed more genuine and incrementally deeper than during their previous hectic dates—and he felt himself opening to her. He remembered their lovemaking with a poignant shudder; its brief, superficial nature seemed to have been an exquisite distillation of what he imagined could happen between them. When he looked into her beautiful, caffeine-shadowed eyes, it seemed to him that she was thinking these things too. The afternoons spent with her in coffee shops radiated a muted glow that permeated the entire week, leaking over into the next week, until every week was saturated with her presence. He saw other women occasionally, but the sight of them naked in his bed could not arouse him as Nicki did sitting fully clothed in a café window, sunlight baring the meeting of age and youth in her thirty-two-year-old face. He thought: It’s only a matter of time.
This thought was nurtured by the incredible fact that, in the lengthening time since their affair, she hadn’t become involved with anyone else. An expression in her eyes or a slight movement of her body toward him could make the hairs on his neck rise; he’d move forward to meet the embrace he saw coming—then she’d lean back in her chair and dive into conversation again. Still, he dreamed of her.
Then one afternoon, as he was fighting his way out of an alcoholic sleep, the Cerberus of his answering machine clicked in warning and her voice fluttered forth. “Lesly,” she said, “it finally happened! I auditioned for Brian Slossman and I got it! It’s going to be a real movie and he—he—he loved me!”
Because They Wanted To: Stories Page 19
