by Nic Kelman
“There is nothing worse for mortal men than the vagrant life, but still for the sake of the cursed stomach people endure hard sorrows. . . .’” — Odyssey 15:343
You’re out with an old friend of yours. He started his own company a few years ago and it’s been doing well. He’s only thirty-five and he’s worth a few hundred million, you’re not sure how much. He’s only thirty-five and his hair’s grey. He called you up and said he wanted to go for a drink, that he needed “to vent to someone outside the industry” so he wouldn’t “have a problem later.”
You meet him at a bar and you catch up for a few minutes and then you ask, “So what’s up?”
And he looks around suspiciously, as if in this crowded, noisy, trendy New York bar anyone would be listening. And then he moves over to your side of the booth so he can talk to you without being easily overheard and he says:
“OK. Are you ready for this one? When we first started the company we needed a little eye candy in the web development department so we pick this girl from Brazil out of the applicants. She wasn’t the most qualified in terms of skill or talent — in fact she was hardly qualified at all — but she was more than qualified in the ways we wanted. We figured we could teach her what she needed to know and meanwhile we’d have something nice to look at in a department where you’re usually lucky you’re not turned to stone, right? And besides, what harm could she do? It was all VC money we were paying her and we could just assign her to noncritical stuff until she knew what she was doing.
“So everything’s going fine. She learns the ropes, after a few months she can actually do the occasional thing we need her to do, she still looks pretty — doesn’t flab out or anything — and, bonus for her, she meets this IB guy at one of our parties and ends up marrying him and — boom — green card. So she’s sitting pretty and we’re happy.
“Then last month we needed a new head of web development. So we bring in someone from the outside, someone who really knows what they’re doing.
“And now — you ready for this? — now, out of the blue, she’s fucking suing us! Not only is she stupid enough to think she’s actually qualified for the job — which she isn’t, not even close — but she thinks she didn’t get it because she’s a woman! I mean, can you appreciate the irony here? This dumb fucking cunt who only got her job, her green card, and all her fucking skills because she’s a hot chick, is suing us for discrimination.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” you say. “That’s fucking crazy — God that’s such bullshit!”
“I know,” says your friend. “And we’re going to have to settle if we don’t want the whole thing to go to court and we can’t even fire her because that’ll give her more leverage. It’s ridiculous — she basically just said ‘give me a check for fifty grand’ and we have to give it to her.”
“Man,” you say and take a sip of your Martini.
Your friend just nods and takes a sip of his own Martini and then he says:
“You know what really gets me about this stuff? You know what really burns me? It’s not the hypocrisy or the double standards like this you see every fucking day, it’s not that they want us to play by one set of rules but use another set for themselves — it’s the idea that life is supposed to have rules in the first place. I mean, where the fuck did anyone get the idea that life is some kind of track meet?
“Really — can you imagine the board asking me why we delayed the release of some product that was going to drive our competitors right out of the market and me saying, ‘I thought they should have time to get their version ready, it wouldn’t be fair otherwise’? Or what about me going to the Supreme Court and saying, ‘Hey, my predecessor didn’t realize how important the Asian markets were going to be so I was wondering if you could pass a law that says I get a share of those markets equal to my competitors’ — it’s only fair.’ It would be like standing up in the middle of a war and saying, ‘Listen, we ran out of ammo can you give us a day or two to get resupplied?’
“I mean, I don’t know anyone who thinks life is fair, so how did so many people get the idea it’s supposed to be fair? Christ, it’s not like there’s anybody watching, it’s not like there’s a goddamn referee!
“That must be why people like her think it makes sense to accuse people like me of cheating — they don’t understand there’s no such thing.
“They must think I think like them — not that that’s not what everybody does — contrary to popular belief that’s why the world’s so fucked up: not because everyone sees things differently but because everyone thinks everyone sees things the same. They must think that, like them, I don’t just have a goal but also some effed-up set of rules I made up for myself defining how I have to get there. Which must be why they think it makes sense to accuse people like me of racism and discrimination — they must think I give a fuck about something other than winning to believe that if I found some squad of ugly, black, femi-nazis who pumped out code better than a well-paid Trek convention I wouldn’t hire them because they were ugly women or because they were black or both. They obviously have no clue exactly how ridiculous an accusation like that sounds, the idea I’d turn down some competitive advantage because of some fucking belief of mine — it’s crazy!”
And he looks at you and you look at him and you realize he’s not talking anymore and you say, “Sorry, say that again — I thought those girls were getting pissed off at us but they aren’t, they’re checking us out.”
And he says, “Really? Which girls?” and turns around.
Because in ancient Athens, to get to Plato’s academy you had to walk through the public cemetery for those killed in war.
Because the Peloponnesian War began in 431 B.C., The Trojan Women was written in 415 B.C., Lysistrata was written in 411 B.C., and Athens lost the Peloponnesian War in 404 B.C.
Because the great vanity is not thinking we can win, it’s thinking we don’t need to fight.
And there was that time when I had the flu but was supposed to give an important pitch the next day. That time you stayed up with me almost all night. You couldn’t help with the work but you made me tea and toast and soup and made sure I was warm enough.
And the next day when I left, uncertain if what I’d done was enough, uncertain that I could pull things off because I was sick, you really did say, “Don’t worry, everything will be fine.” And you really did kiss me.
“I love you,” I said. And, right there, right then, I did.
“‘. . . there is no suppressing the ravenous belly, a cursed thing, which bestows many evils on men, seeing that even for its sake the strong-built ships are handled across the barren great sea, bringing misfortune to enemies.’” — Odyssey 17:286
You are watching TV on a Sunday afternoon. Flipping through the channels you stop briefly on a women’s talk show. The hosts are women, the audience is women, they are discussing women’s issues.
It takes you a minute to figure out what they are actually discussing but it seems like some famous supermodel in her twenties just married some man in his eighties worth a few hundred million. The hosts and their guests and the audience are all taking turns saying how disgusting it is. And then one of the women in the audience gets called on and stands up and says, “I’ll tell you one thing — if I was going to marry an eighty-four-year-old man, he’d have to be worth a lot more than three hundred and forty million dollars!”
And she brings down the house. The hosts, the guests, the audience all cheer and clap and laugh. And it’s a big joke. Except you know it isn’t, you know the reason they’re all laughing is that their idea of integrity is not whether or not they’re for sale, but rather how much they think they’re worth.
And so believe me when I tell you peace is a Gulfstream V or a one-off dress by Coco Chanel. Believe me when I tell you guilt is a Loire Valley château. Believe me when I tell you they are both just one more luxury.
You are in a department store buying some cologne and you look up and across
the counter, on the other side, on the women’s side, are two high school girls and they are staring at you and when you catch them they look caught and one of them says “oh shit,” and they duck behind a sign, giggling.
And it occurs to you that things are also so much easier with them, with those girls that, as misguided as they may be, are not yet afraid, those girls young enough to still show interest in you by doing more than simply not resisting when you show interest in them. With them it’s so simple to get to the bottom line. With all the other things you need patience for, with all the other things you have to work on, who wants to put time and energy into wooing, into something that’s supposed to be a pleasure?
“Now as these two were conversing thus with each other, a dog who was lying there raised his head and ears. This was Argos, patient-hearted Odysseus’ dog, whom he himself raised, but got no joy of him, since before that he went to sacred Ilion. In the days before, the young men had taken him out to follow goats of the wild, and deer, and rabbits; but now he had been put aside, with his master absent, and lay on a deep pile of dung . . . covered with dog ticks. Now, as he perceived that Odysseus had come close to him, he wagged his tail, and laid both his ears back; only he now no longer had the strength to move any closer to his master, who, watching him from a distance, without Eumaios noticing, secretly wiped a tear away. . . .
“Then, O swineherd Eumaios, you said to him. . . . ‘This, it is too true, is the dog of a man who perished far away. If he were such, in build and performance, as when Odysseus left him behind, when he went to Ilion, soon you could see his speed and his strength for yourself. Never could any wild animal, in the profound depths of the forest, escape, once he pursued. He was very clever at tracking. But now he is in bad times. . . . the women are careless, and do not look after him; and serving men, when their masters are no longer about, to make them work, are no longer willing to do their rightful duties. For Zeus of the wide brows takes away one half of the virtue from a man, once the day of slavery closes upon him.’
“So he spoke, and went into the strongly-settled palace, and strode straight on, to the great hall and the haughty suitors. But the doom of dark death now closed over the dog, Argos, when, after nineteen years had gone by, he had seen Odysseus.” — Odyssey 17:290
Maybe there is a priest. Maybe every now and then you walk up the broad stone steps of a cathedral and through that smaller door in the bigger door. Maybe you go when it is empty so nothing but the pews stretch away from you towards the altar, dim in the distance. Maybe there is a coughing coming from somewhere but you never see the person who coughs, are never even sure if you’re looking for them in the right direetion because of the resonance and the echoes.
Or maybe it is not a cathedral. Maybe you pass through the gate of a temple compound into a dusty courtyard with a black gong shaped like a bell. And you walk to the small building off to the side where devoted laywomen, older, fatter, take donations for roof tiles.
Or maybe you make an appointment and visit a synagogue, finding your way into the back, into the rabbi’s study paneled with dark wood and with only one small window in front of which sits a sickly ivy.
Maybe, if you are religious after a fashion, you feel guilty all the time. Not just for the sexual exploits, almost every single one of which has been “sinful” by some definition, but also for everything else. You feel guilty about doing business the way you do business. Even though some part of you believes you should be praised for it, even rewarded for it, you feel guilty about winning.
So you go to confessional, you pay for prayers in your name to be painted on roof tiles, you ask for advice from a man who has never competed. And you are absolved or prayed for or given advice, it doesn’t matter what. Because it won’t help. It can never help.
And eventually you will stop going through that smaller door in the bigger door, stop passing through the temple gate, stop making appointments. Or you will stop winning. Because there can be no religions for winners. Because even if God really does clothe the lilies in the field, he won’t provide you with a present for your wife’s birthday. Even if Buddha really does grant enlightenment to those who have forsaken worldly ways, that would mean you’d have to send your son to public school and you’ll be damned if he has to attend the one in your district.
But ah, Nabokov, why did Quilty have to pay? It wasn’t a movie of the week, you didn’t have to worry about the advertisers pulling out (“pulling out”?). And you must have known the Quiltys of the world never pay. So why did you do that, you coward, you pussy, you?
You have no idea how it happened. You know you were staying with Jonathan, at his villa on the cliff in St. Barths. You know that it began the day he and Marjorie and Tamsin went out to shop for batik leaving you alone with Cassandra. But you were as surprised as everyone else that it happened.
You were lying by the pool and she came out for a swim. She had been there a month already, her skin was already tan. And you could see so much of it even when you just glanced up from your book, a masturbatory, soapbox piece by a CEO you knew very well.
And then when she came up out of the pool after doing some laps, she didn’t dry herself off. You think that was what did it, that was what broke your will to resist. Those beads of water on her smooth brown skin, those beads of water caught up in the transparent down that seemed to cover most of her body, those beads of water that smelled like suntan oil. She came up to your deck chair and knelt down near your head. You pretended not to notice her. She leaned over your book, her long, wet, black hair hanging down one side of her face, the side away from you, and just barely caressing the rough-cut edges of the hardcover’s paper. You could see the water seeping into the paper, ruining the book. But you didn’t move for fear of frightening her away, as if she were a wild animal, for fear of no longer being able to smell her so close. That smell of chlorine and suntan oil and sun and something else, something clean, something really only young girls smell like.
“Whatcha reading?” she asked.
And while you told her she just stared at you, nodding as if she were listening but her enormous green eyes wandering all over your face, her eyes wandering as if she had managed to get very close to some deep-sea creature and was only going to have this one chance to study it. She had the most beautiful lips, so full, so turgid. And her nose was so tiny, smaller than your thumb.
Or maybe it wasn’t the drops of water. Maybe it was the bee. Maybe if the bee hadn’t landed on your chest, hadn’t kind of somehow gotten caught and confused and angry in the seam of the book, maybe if that hadn’t happened then nothing else would.
But it did happen. It did land there, just as you finished explaining and she had yelped, leapt back, and you had slammed the book shut but somehow missed the bee and it had stung your chest, right at the base of the sternum. And then it was your turn to yelp and leap up and the dead bee tumbled down your body and onto your towel.
She had come closer cautiously, come closer as you swore and watched the welt grow on your chest. She had looked down at the bee and then pushed at it reservedly with her middle finger.
“They die once they sting,” you managed to say, not wanting to seem like it hurt too much, which it did, it stung like a motherfucker.
“I know that,” she said looking at you and rolling her eyes, “I’ve just never actually seen one die.” “Oh my gosh, look at your chest,” she added.
And you looked down, trying very hard not to spend too long on her recently risen breasts still glistening with dew, on her still-forming hips, on her new waist, on her brown belly with its belly button like a puncture, on the bony mound that pushed out between her legs, you looked down and saw the welt had grown considerably in just a few seconds.
As you went inside, as she took your hand to lead you inside to get you some aloe vera, you noticed the wet shades her knees and the balls of her feet had left on the sunbaked flagstone, left on the sunbaked flagstone where she had been kneeling when she had just
gotten out of the pool. Like the Shroud of Turin, you thought.
She took you into the kitchen, made you sit down, and padded off to some bathroom or other. The kitchen smelled like her, like all those smells she smelled like.
When she came back you went to get up, to reach out to take it from her, and she pushed you back down, said, “Sit down.” And you obeyed her, because it was really your obedience that made you sit down, not her push. She couldn’t have pushed you over even if she had used all her weight and strength, couldn’t have even moved you.
She squirted some aloe vera on her palm, squirted another clean, fresh scent into the air to mingle with the others, and scooped a little bit up with the fingers of her other hand and rubbed it into the wound.
Then, without looking at you, she kissed it. She opened her mouth slightly and kissed it.
When you didn’t push her away in horror, she kissed it some more, gently, her lips puckered but closed. At last she looked up at you. She didn’t need to say anything. You had to have your mouth on hers. You crushed your mouth to hers so hard it hurt you both a little. Her tongue was so small yet so strong, so resilient. You had her up on the counter in a second, had her legs spread and hooked around you, her bikini top yanked down exposing her little breasts to your hungry mouth, her bikini bottoms pulled aside, your fingers inside her as your other hand pulled her body to you by the small of her back. She couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and five pounds. Her hands just pushed up on the underside of the cabinets, kept her from slipping too far back, kept her from banging her head against them. You pulled your trunks down and entered her. Because of her tanlines, it was over very quickly. You couldn’t contain yourself inside her. But it was the best orgasm you’d had in years. She opened her eyes at last, had been keeping them closed since you hoisted her up on the counter.
“Oh God, what have I done,” was the first thing you thought. And it must have shown on your face because the first thing she said, as she pulled off you, as she straightened her top and bottoms, as she slipped off the counter and got some paper towels, the first thing she said was, “Don’t worry I’m on the Pill.” And then as she wiped up the counter she added, “And I wasn’t a virgin or anything either, if that’s what you’re worried about.” She said it as if “virgin” were comparable to “neo-Nazi.” But that wasn’t what you were worried about. That wasn’t it at all. You’re not even sure you were worried. As she threw the towels away, she said with a grin, “You may want to think about pulling your trunks up, I think I heard a car.”
