Willing

by Scott Spencer

  3

  DEIRDRE MOVED OUT, temporarily, saying that in her view the apartment was hers but I could stay there while I looked for someplace else, and I tried to comfort myself with nihilistic thoughts about the eventual extinction of life on Earth, the catastrophe of which dwarfed my own little purse of nickel miseries. Francis Crick, who worked with James Watson in decoding DNA, believed that the first DNA came to Earth from deep space, from a star, and that eventually, we, that is humanity, this vast aggregate of soft machine whose main purpose is to house, protect, and spew DNA, eventually will return to our origins, to that distant star from which we came. That is why we are able to play so fast and loose with our planet, unable to stop fouling our little round nest—threatening it with extinction through atomic fusion, shredding the protective skin of our atmosphere, polluting our water supply, melting our ice caps, turning the once frozen tundra into a tepid trampoline.

  I, too, was going elsewhere, not to another planet, but surely I was not meant to spend much more time wallowing in my own mess. Not to equate finding another apartment with emigrating to a distant galaxy, but I couldn’t even accomplish that. Not to equate finding some other arms to hold me while I endured the slow-motion evisceration of living with Deirdre with actually facing and understanding why I had gotten myself into this fix to begin with, but I couldn’t accomplish that either.

  Failing to escape into deep space or into a new bed, I found a degree of relief and diversion on the Internet. Some of my travel from site to site was entirely wholesome. I read British magazines, took a virtual tour of the Hermitage, listened to archived interviews on the National Public Radio page, checked out hotels in Lisbon, browsed through New York real estate listings. Wherever I went, ads popped up on my screen. It was as if someone knew how desperately I wanted to make some money; nearly all of them were trying to lure me into the supposedly limitless profit opportunities of precious metals, touting gold or silver mining stocks selling for a dollar, tin mining stocks selling for fifty cents, wildcat oil drillers working the seas from Baja to the Bering Strait. This was who the world is for, I thought, the men who split the world wide open and suck it dry.

  And then I typed the words So Fucking Lonely into my search engine, and it was as if a bridge appeared, upon which I was welcome to walk across the moat that had previously separated me from the countless portals in the skin trade. One little click and there it was.

  No one forced me to walk across it. But I did. I’m not sure I have ever been able to turn away from the sight of a naked woman. The picture might be anthropological, medical, or forensic, it might fill me with horror, or compassion, or anger, but no matter what, there is always a limbic hiccup, one little rivulet of reaction that goes like this: she’s naked. And now here they were, the images, millions of them. And not only were they naked, but they all claimed to want to know me.

  It was madness and a kind of crime against humanity, this nonstop proliferation of images of women living in Click World, pretending they wanted to have something to do with you, except there was no You, save to the extent that you existed as a credit card number. I was going around and around and around. I had no idea who I was looking at, or where they lived—was I seeing them in Russia, China, Argentina, Las Vegas, perhaps somewhere within my own apartment house? My brain was sick, engorged, and reeling from the feeding frenzy as screen after screen of visual information flickered before me. I began to see that the human male’s sexual response had been originally forged for creatures who saw perhaps one hundred—or, say, one thousand—people in a whole lifetime. Then, when we lived in roving bands, in tribes, in towns with the population of my apartment building, the trigger-happy promiscuity of desire may have been necessary to animate the great human project of populating the earth. You saw something beautiful—you went for it. But this susceptibility to beauty could not get out of hand because how many staggeringly beautiful women did we see in a lifetime? We had very narrow choices. Now our hardwired susceptibility to beautiful women has remained essentially unaltered, unevolved, while our ability to see beautiful women has grown by leaps and bounds. In paintings, then in photographs, then in movies, and now, as we sit smoking and unshaved in front of our home computers. So now, with our hardwired susceptibility to the sight of a desirable woman, millions of men are inundated with visions of women, women who strike to the core of our need for prestige, our instinctual mission to improve the species. These images drive us mad, and without any undue effort we can view a thousand of them every day. Our ability to summon them forth and dismiss them with a keystroke makes the life of a sultan seem ascetic indeed. What happens to our wiring when we see not one or two attractive women, but dozens of them? And then dozens become hundreds and hundreds become thousands? In Click World there are hundreds of thousands of naked women, and they are pointing at their sex organ and saying Come on and fill me up; that’s just how things are done in Click World.

  Somewhere along the way, like a traveler lost in a dark wood, I began putting one virtual foot in front of the other, clicking from site to site, link to link, less and less sure of where I had just been, more and more surprised by what came up next. Soon, I was no longer following paths that led me to pictures of naked women. Now I was flitting about sites that were offering for sale the women themselves.

  I had passed hookers on the street many, many times before. In fact, my apartment was near several hotels around which streetwalkers orbited, in their vertiginous heels and short skirts. But whenever I was near a street prostitute I was careful not to look at her too closely. I didn’t want to give her the impression that I was cruising her, evaluating her wares, squeezing the fruit, as it were, and then tossing it back into the bin. I avoided eye contact out of good manners. I did not want to intrude on their consciousness. I was also, quite frankly, a little afraid of them. It seemed to me that that line of work would attract more than its share of psychopaths. Was it really so unlikely that, say, 1 percent of the women trying to make a living selling sex on Seventh Avenue were in a murderous rage? Throw in another 2 percent for women in the grip of drug psychosis, which brings us up to 3 percent, and we can stop there. If, say, a thousand women are prowling the streets looking for someone who will pay to have sex with them, that means thirty of them are extremely dangerous. So I cut them all a wide berth, for fear that one of them would cut me.

  In the gloomy, hypnotic safety of the Internet, with its ceaseless presentation of a world that was full of spectacle and danger, I was completely safe because it was fundamentally not real. It was a world where I could see them but they, as far as I could tell, could not see me, and I was free to examine hundreds of women doing business within a two-mile radius of my apartment, without the slightest risk—except, of course, the risk that the women in those pictures were not real, and the images were put forward with the same cunning with which a trout fisherman baits his hook with little pieces of plastic and sparkle to fool the hungry fish into thinking the lure is an actual meal.

  There followed days of dithering, in which I could barely do my work but instead went around and around such local call girl sites as New York Pink, Desirez, Do Me, Empire State Tens, Manhattan Courtesans, and literally hundreds of others, looking at the pictures, reading their mission statements: I love what I do and U will 2; I am an international runway model; I am here from Brazil for just a little while and love meeting new people; I have a sweet, bright, unforgettable smile that will leave you speechless when we meet; my all-natural measurements are 36C–24–34, and I stand 5'7" and weigh 115 lbs. of pure elegance; I exclusively cater to mature, upscale, distinguished gentlemen who appreciate the finer things in life; I am here to pamper you with my seductive charm and grace and make you feel as comfortable as possible; I am well educated and can adapt to any situation; I am finally legal. None of these were necessarily true, but, then again, the offering statements of several recent IPOs also turned out to be fairly fictitious. Then I made a new discovery. Just as investors in stoc
ks have the Securities and Exchange Commission to look after their interests and protect them from fraud, the men cruising the Internet in search of flesh had a site to consult, which rated the various women advertising their services and told you whether the actual woman you would end up seeing looked like her picture, and rated on a ten-point scale the quality of the services she provided. Of course, one couldn’t tell to what extent this consumer protection site had been penetrated by the providers themselves, but the same misgivings were appropriate when it came to the SEC, as well.

  I knew it was just a matter of time before I went from voyeuristically clicking on ad after ad, looking at the women, to actually making a call and arranging to see one. The first woman I chose was named Stephanie, a standard-issue male fantasy: her photograph, showing a long-legged blonde in a turquoise bikini bottom, thrusting her breasts up toward the sun, looked as if it had been taken in Florida or Southern California, and probably wasn’t even Stephanie. Further investigation revealed that she charged $1,400 per hour, putting her well out of my pay grade. I couldn’t even afford to be defrauded by her.

  The majority of the women advertising offered outcall, which meant they would come to you, which, in my case, was out of the question—however grimly entertaining it might be to have Deirdre walk in on us. Limiting my pursuit to the women who offered in-call services—and ruling out the majority of these, because they were Korean or Thai, and I had recently read that many of the Asian sex workers were in fact slaves, and while I was willing to sink a bit, there was a limit to how low I was prepared to go—I eventually narrowed my search to one particular provider, whose listing I returned to over and over. If this had been taking place in the physical world rather than on my Piedmont computer, she would have been standing on a street corner or sitting in a club chair in the lobby of a hotel, and I would be the hapless john who continually circled her, who got within a few feet of her and then got a faraway look in his eyes, as if he had just seen something that needed his immediate attention, or snapped his fingers as if some important detail that had slipped his mind was suddenly back on the mental radar, and then scurried away, only to return in a few minutes, at which point the pathetic, ambivalent charade would begin again. But because this was all taking place in the toxic privacy of the Internet, I was free to click on her name, visit her Web site, look at her picture, take note of her schedule and fees, over and over and over and over again, until I was beginning to fear that there was some aspect to the Internet with which I was not familiar, some little tracking capability, some way of registering visits, and she not only was aware of me but was getting irritated with me, just as she would be if this all-day approach and retreat were taking place on Seventh Avenue.

  Her name was Chelsea, almost certainly not her real name, but, I thought, an interesting choice, a vaguely hippie, Clinton-era name, friendly, not aggressively erotic. She had dark hair, parted in the middle, cut just above her shoulders. Her eyes were soft and melancholy, beneath dark brows. She looked like a girl who had had to defy a strong unreasonable father. She had a stubborn jaw but a wide, open smile—she seemed fond of whoever had taken her picture. She was posed shirtless in jeans, with her arms folded demurely over her breasts. Hi, I’m pretty new to this. I hope you like what you see. I promise this is me—some people say I look even better in person. I’m a down-to-earth girl, I like to laugh, and I like making people feel good about themselves. I offer an unrushed, full girlfriend experience (GFE). If you are a clean, respectful upscale gentleman and have three hundred roses, then make an appointment with me. You won’t be disappointed.

  It was four in the afternoon when I called her; she had a dry, sleepy, scratchy hello, startlingly intimate. I saw your ad, I said. Oh, she said, drawing it out, as if she was just remembering it, as if she had posted it in a moment of madness and now she was forced to deal with the consequences. I heard the faint rasp of a match being struck, then a sharp little intake of breath, an exhalation. Would you like to make an appointment? she said in her flirtatious crackle. Yes I would. To whom am I speaking? she asked. I hesitated for a moment. I didn’t want to give my real name, but I wasn’t prepared with a false one. Osip, I said. Osip? It was as if she had never heard anything so ridiculous. Yeah, it’s Russian. Are you Russian, Osip? How far could I go with this? I wasn’t going to suddenly come up with a credible Russian accent. Not really, I said. My grandfather was. Okay, she said, again drawing it out, letting the long a cast a shadow of doubt over the whole thing. So, I said, where are you located? (It’s what you say when you can’t say Where are you? or Where do you live?) I’m in the Upper Midtown area, she said, on the West Side. Really? I said, momentarily forgetting to be false. So am I. What time did you have in mind, Osip? I was thinking maybe now, if you have an opening. She was silent and I realized I had just made a smutty little pun. All right, she said. Go to the corner of Fifty-fourth and Seventh, and call me, and I’ll tell you where to go. Now it was my turn to be silent. Fifty fourth and Seventh was my corner. Could this so-called Chelsea be operating from an apartment in this very building? Okay, I said, I’ll call you in…what? Ten minutes. Make it half an hour, she said. Okay, that’s fine, half an hour. I was about to hang up, but I heard her say, Osip? You’re not a cop, are you? Absolutely not, I said. Sorry, she said, I have to ask, a girl has to feel safe. I don’t mind, I said. And, Osip, she said, one more thing. I tell this to all my new friends. It’ll be so much nicer if you take a shower. If that’s a problem, there’s a nice shower here you’re welcome to use. Okay, I said, no problem. My voice sounded husky and deferential.

  I showered, shaved, flossed, and gargled, with all the nervousness of someone getting ready for a date. I put on a pair of jeans and the most expensive shirt I had ever purchased, a Savile Row blue oxford I bought at Saks, when American Airlines made a three-article deal with me for their in-flight magazine. I closed down my computer, cutting the power source of all the thousands of real and imaginary women swimming around its inner workings, and then I went to a nearby ATM and took out three hundred dollars for Chelsea’s fee, an extra hundred for myself, or for a possible tip, if it should come to pass that she would bring me to the brink of a pleasure that would cost extra. I put the three hundred in my front pocket—the one bit of folk wisdom I retained from Father Number 3 was a manly man does not put money in a wallet; he carries it neatly folded in his right front pocket—and five fresh twenties in a back pocket. It was a warm, still afternoon; the sky was the color of cod. I stood on the southeast corner of Fifty-fourth and Seventh, near a diner, one of those Greek-owned places that never close, and where the waiters always seem to be coming down from forty-eight hours on Dexedrine. I had had countless breakfasts there, especially since the Crushed Tomato Confession, and, as I dialed Chelsea’s number on my cell phone, I was also smiling and waving at Theo, who earlier that day had served me a cheese omelet and coffee. We had a special bond; he was the first person I’d met who wore an actual, bona fide Jankowsky Cross. He was forty: he lived with his sister and her husband in Queens. Theo seemed to spend his tips on lottery tickets. Even this morning, he had a couple of them in his shirt pocket, clearly visible through the thin white fabric. He had a lucky spot at the counter where he sat when he scratched off the numbers—at least he called it a lucky spot, though as far as I knew all Theo won were a few bucks every so often, money he used to increase his weekly investment in lottery tickets. Now, he stood at the window, his dark hair combed back, his eyes full of resignation, holding two of the diner’s heavy menus, one cradled in each arm, like Moses holding the Ten Commandments.

  Chelsea picked up her phone, and I slowly turned my back on Theo, in case he could read my lips and would figure out what I was up to. Are you on Fifty-fourth and Seventh? Chelsea asked, and when I said I was she said Good, now I’d like you to go to Fifty-sixth Street, between Broadway and Eighth. She gave me an exact address and told me to call her once I was standing in front of it. In ninety or so seconds I was standing in fron
t of the address Chelsea had given me. It was an old commercial building, which, in my short time in the neighborhood, I had seen go from a shoe store, to a Broadway ticket broker, to its most recent incarnation as a doomed little enterprise called the Healthy Donut. Now the storefront window was covered by plywood, the door was chained and padlocked, and all the windows in the three upper stories were also covered in plywood, except for one on the very top floor. Was the building condemned, or had it simply changed hands and was awaiting renovation? Was Chelsea hunkered down behind that one extant window? I didn’t see how I could venture into that building. A person would have to be half insane even to walk in there, let alone trudge up to the top floor and take off his clothes. Just get out of here, I said to myself. Go home, behave, stop acting like this. But all those hours wallowing on the Internet, all those pictures, descriptions, consumer reviews…They had taken me farther than I had realized. Which is to say that even though I was quite sure entering that building was a stupid, reckless thing to do, so much so that no one would have the slightest sympathy for me were I to be found dead on the fourth floor, I was still not able to abandon the idea of spending an hour with Chelsea. I had worked myself up into a state of desperate longing. I was not in my right mind. I was, in other words, exactly where she wanted me.

  Doing as I had been told, I dialed her number. It rang several times, and when she answered it she said Call back in three minutes, without even asking who it was. I waited and looked up at the one glass window, trying to catch signs of life, but there were none. A cop drove by, slowly. He looked at me standing there, probably wondering what business I could have in front of an abandoned building. I dialed on my cell phone, in an attempt to look busy, and, having no one else to call, I dialed my home number and listened for any messages that had come in, though I hadn’t been out of the apartment more than eight minutes. To my surprise, there were two messages. One was from Andrew Post, saying that an editor from Gig, a not-yet-published magazine for men, wanted to know if I was interested in doing a Major Piece about men and elective plastic surgery. That Andrew sounded so enthusiastic about this idea—an idea that struck me as ten years past its expiration date—was more proof of how desperate my situation was, if more proof were needed. And then the second call: Deirdre. Are you there, Avery? If you are, pick up, please. I don’t know where Deirdre got the idea that I didn’t answer the phone if I was home. Oh, all right, she said, with an audible sigh. I just wanted to let you know that I’m…Her voice trailed off. You’re what? I wondered. Sorry? Wishing we could put it all back together again? I’m going to have to come over and get some of my summer clothes, it’s getting so warm. I’ll call again and find out a convenient time. She cleared her throat, and her voice brightened. She was relieved she was through with an uncomfortable call. All right, Ave, take care. Hope work’s going well, and…well, see you. And then, before she pressed the off button on her phone, she turned to someone, probably Osip, and said Okay, let’s go.