The Devil Tree

by Jerzy Kosiński

  Between drillings, the doctor said to the nurse, “I’ll give him another injection now,” and through my filed-down teeth I mumbled, “I’m not ‘him’ yet, doctor. I haven’t died.”

  While the lab technicians worked on my caps, I rested in the room adjoining the operating room. Groggy, my lips cracked, my gums in pain, I dozed. I kept thinking of the green-eyed nurse, of making a pass at her as soon as my new caps were installed, of carrying out with her a big seduction scene in some fancy nightclub and then fucking her in my hotel—all to erase from her memory the image of me as a pathetic-looking spike-toothed millionaire.

  • • •

  The next day I slept through lunch. When I awoke, feeling like an accomplice to a crime the dentist had committed on my body, I rushed to see myself in the mirror. The well-proportioned porcelain teeth looked as if they had always been there, but I immediately began to wonder how radically they changed my physical appearance. In the nineteenth century people assumed that white teeth free of decay indicated moral as well as physical health. What do such teeth signify today?

  What next? I pondered. I recalled Barbara, who had thought my testicles were droopy and hung too low. Should I, I asked myself, go under the knife once more to improve the look of my testicles?

  I called Karen. Luckily she was free to have dinner with me. In the evening I sent a car for her, and when she arrived at the restaurant I was already there waiting for her at a well-lighted table. As she walked toward me, escorted by the maitre d’ men and women at other tables turned to watch her. Once again I realized that nothing I could do for Karen could match her own splendor.

  She sat down, and as I ordered her favorite drink I felt her eyes on me. “You look so different, Jonathan,” she said. I smiled, and she exclaimed, “Your teeth! What have you done to your teeth?” When I told her I’d had them capped, she said, “That’s incredible. Now, when you smile, you look like Sean. You remember my telling you about Sean, don’t you?”

  • • •

  While cashing a check for me, the night clerk at the hotel slipped me a handsome calling card inscribed: “2001 Love Odyssey: Elite Centerfold Residential Escort Specialists.” Later that night I phoned 2001, and after a short introductory talk in which I sketched my ideal love mate, the madam said that my girl was on her way. The madam also let me know that money was a taboo breaker: in addition to the standard minimum, I might wish to pay the girl extra for what the madam called “Dr. Strangelove.” The pun suggested bizarre lovemaking, kinky costumes, and role-switching.

  The idea that I was about to make love to a woman—albeit a call girl—whom I had never seen and who had been selected for me by someone else I didn’t know on the basis of my abstract description excited me more than any speculations I could possibly make about the girl concerning her age, her charms, or her skills.

  The girl—my own private cheerleader—arrived on time. She was about twenty, fresh and pretty, the perfect model for a men’s magazine centerfold or a TV soap commercial. I became instantly aroused by the prospect of doing anything I wanted with her.

  “How much do you keep?”

  “Half, plus the tip.”

  “This is for the night, then,” I said, putting a number of large bills on the table in front of her. “And this is your tip.”

  “Do you always tip in advance?” she asked, not hiding how impressed she was by the tip, which was double the night’s rate.

  “I do. It encourages initiative,” I replied.

  “Then what’s left for service?”

  “Another tip—a reward,” I said, hoisting up her skirt.

  In bed, she behaved like a possessive steady girl friend, kissing and demanding to be kissed, insisting on being made love to. Each time I became engrossed in her immaculately clean, taut body, I was distracted by the thought of all the other men whose sperm, sweat, and spit must have filled her every pore and crevice.

  After our lovemaking I asked her whether her shudders, moans, and orgasms were real or only a show staged for me.

  “Why are you so worried about whether or not you were a good lay? Why should you care about the orgasms of an outcall escort?”

  I told her I couldn’t stand the idea of fucking a passive body, of letting myself be screwed and sucked by an anonymous piece of flesh with nipples and a vagina.

  “Anonymous?” she shrieked. “You don’t know what anonymous means. I was once a model, my friend; do you know what it’s like to go down on a stinking garment district boss just to keep a lousy job? If only they’d say, ‘We’ll pay you five hundred dollars a week to fuck and blow us, and we’ll let you be a star on the side.’ But no, they want you to feel like a star so they can enjoy humiliating you each time you tongue their asses, lick them off, whip them on order. I’ll tell you, in this city a woman needs two cunts: one for business and one for pleasure.”

  I began to think of Karen. Was there a time when, to get her first assignment, she too had gone down on someone? My silence put my cheerleader in a talking mood. She started to tell me her troubles, beginning with her first business blow job.

  “The assistant to a television producer called me from Los Angeles and said he was going to fly to New York to meet me. He said I looked so perfect on paper that he wanted to see me in person. ‘You could be the best in the business,’ he told me, ‘and I want to hire you, but what if you’re too straight for my boss?’ Later he called to say that he couldn’t make it but that Maury, his boss, the producer himself, was arriving in New York that evening and I should give him a call and have a drink with him. ‘Baby,’ the manager said, ‘you can wrap this thing up. In one evening—with your sweet lips—you can wrap it up.’ So that was it. All I had to do to get a television job with a producer was to go down on him.

  “I saw the producer. We screwed. I went down on him. But straight sex was not what he wanted, and when I wouldn’t do what he wanted me to do, he threw me out. I didn’t get the TV job. Later, when I met his assistant, I played the outraged girl: ‘Maury doesn’t just screw,’ I said. ‘Maury is into leather and chains. I’m not.’ The assistant was all smiles. He said Maury was going around telling everybody I gave him the best blow job he’d ever had. ‘What a waste!’ the assistant kept murmuring. ‘Wasting that cream, all that cream, and not getting the job!’ Then he decided that he himself wanted to be creamed. ‘But how about me, kid? I’m into straight sex, and I can also help you out,’ he said; ‘no strings—chains—attached.’ He leered, peeling down his zipper. I didn’t want to touch him at first because I had my period and I hadn’t washed; I felt uneasy even when he kissed my tits, but soon I really wanted to fuck him, maybe because I was accepted without having to wash. At first he couldn’t get hard, and my choice was: either I help him—and I still might end up with a TV job—or I don’t—and I wind up on welfare in a crummy one-room apartment, without even a TV of my own. The minute I made up my mind and went down on him, he managed to get it up. Then he gave me a whole load of crap about sexual, not just physical, love. The physical love, he explained, was like an emergency room: a quick release from discomfort was all you could hope for. But the sexual was a fancy clinic where you enjoyed all your senses. He turned me around and, gazing at my ass, said, ‘The best thing about being honestly sexual is that, since our senses are centered in our faces, we must begin by looking. The lust of the eye is the essence of sex.’ He could say this, that slurping worm, after I ate him with my eyes shut and my jaw aching, about to vomit from his smear.

  “After that it was always the same, though not always as direct. First, sex was only hinted at. It began with: Take off your dress so I can see all of you. Pretend we’ve just met on a nudist beach. Don’t worry, honey, I know how to control myself: I won’t touch you, just eat you with my eyes. You don’t have to do anything, just be your own beautiful self.’ Then it was: ‘You’re so gorgeous! I love your smooth skin, your silky hair, your long legs, your round ass, your furry clit. You turn me on so much, baby doll, you
could send me off just with your hand—or why don’t you let me feel you inside? You’re such a sensual kitten—I’ll bet you turn on easily. Let’s flood the little furnace.’ Or else the guy would give instructions: ‘It’s the texture of your tongue and the way you flick it. Some girls just can’t do it right. Now get it inside, as deep as you can, bite a bit, then kiss the rim. I said as deep as you can, baby, don’t make me have to ask you again.’

  “With a man thrashing under or above or in front of or behind me, on the couch, on the carpet, in bed, on the chair, on the john, at first all I could think about was whether I was doing it right. I worried about making a fool of myself. In this town everyone is whoring, so there’s a lot of competition. It’s not easy to be a good whore all the time with all the guys. Afterward I would cry, hating myself for even thinking about those guys. Still, I said words to them I thought they’d like to hear, words to make them feel like real men, words that depressed me more than fucking them. But these guys were all so stupid they couldn’t tell the difference between a good honest lay and a bad one. I was willing to let them enjoy me, but why did they always do it wrong? Why did they have to abuse me? ‘Can’t you see my potential?’ I’d say. ‘I’m star material, you cockhead. Just look at me! I’m young, peach fresh, girlie soft, all willing, cheerful like a bird ready to take off. I want you to use my velvet skin, my lips, my tongue, my tasty cunt, my nice little ass. I want you to fuck me front or back so we can dig getting it on; I don’t want to just follow your orders. Can’t you see, you asshole, that when I do only what you tell me to do, it ends up being disgusting and degrading for us both?’”

  I couldn’t help thinking of Karen, and I asked her why she didn’t quit.

  “Quit for what? For office work? I can’t even type a decent letter. I wouldn’t last long as a fashion model; I eat and drink too much and get fat once in a while. In any case, these days models make it when they’re thirteen. To be a private nurse? I have no patience with sick people. And I don’t like to be alone for too long; I wallow and complain and don’t do anything; I’m nowhere. I live only for suffering no pain, for looking good and keeping healthy. Everything I do I do to get a reaction from other people. I’m known now—maybe not in the way I wanted to be, but at least men notice me. They don’t know who I am, but I look glamorous enough for them to imagine they’ve seen me on TV or in a magazine. From time to time I even enjoy being the way I am. I want money, and I don’t really care where it comes from. Eventually I’ll probably marry some rodeo rookie who’ll think I’m all love and honey. Speaking about marriage and money: living and tipping the way you do, you must be rich enough to afford a wife with a rich past. Why don’t you marry me?”

  She woke me at dawn, and with the reward I had mentioned in mind, she made love to me with the zeal of a wife about to part with her beloved husband. After I rewarded her, generously, she assured me she would gladly fuck me for free, and then she left. I was drained of sperm and nagged by a single thought: if the whore had been diseased, I might infect Karen.

  • • •

  I told Karen that while I was abroad I sometimes came across photographs of her in American, British, German, and French magazines. I said I was surprised that she had so often consented to seminude modeling. Even now, I said, when men surround her in my presence, I can’t help feeling uneasy knowing that so many of them have also seen her undressed—even if only in pictures.

  “Have you ever known a woman who got old without being afraid of losing her looks?” Karen asked. “Have you ever known one who kept faith in herself? Thanks to modern medicine, we were supposed to have our youth extended well into old age. Instead, it all turns out the other way: we’re terrified of aging, and we consider the old—even the middle-aged—inefficient, ugly, and repulsive. Look at the ages of Olympic athletes, or of models and stars today. They’re kids.

  “Sure I like to pose and be photographed that way—as naked and voluptuous as the law and the advertisers allow. Why not? My looks and my body are my defense against aging, the unavoidable law of nature. Beauty is my profession; and don’t think I’m not terrified of being condemned to professional death by the faggots of the advertising business whose terror of age is matched only by their fear of the moral majority.

  “Have you ever gotten ‘prune fingers’—wrinkled fingertips after soaking a long time in a hot bath? One day all of me will be like that. Youth is the only commodity even you cannot buy for me. It’s my nude photographs that reassure me—along with the advertisers—that I have nothing to worry about yet.”

  • • •

  As a boy I would introduce my father to my friends by saying, “This is my father. He’s a businessman. He’s very rich. He owns everything.” Instantly he or my mother would reprimand me for bragging. I deduced from their reaction that it was wrong for me to find my father powerful and rich; even if his power and wealth made him a fine and lovable figure to others, it was somehow wrong for me to love him for them.

  • • •

  During my years abroad, Karen befriended Susan, a college acquaintance of hers who worked in a New York advertising agency. On the surface, Susan is all Karen is not: ordinary, unobtrusive, modest, predictable. When Karen’s professional career peaked and her income hit six figures, she told Susan that she could afford to hire a secretary to keep track of her appointments, expenses, and travel arrangements, and a housekeeper to cook and clean. When Susan volunteered to fill both jobs, Karen accepted. Susan quit her job and ever since has been a fixture in Karen’s life.

  • • •

  Karen has been out of town, so today I took Susan to lunch. She reminisced about their college days. What she said casts a fascinating light on her own character and by implication illuminates Karen’s notion of whom she should depend on. It also might explain why Susan has become Karen’s most trusted ally, almost her Iago, ready to defend Karen against everyone—including me—and why I must be constantly wary of her.

  Karen and Susan attended a women’s college that seemed to turn out only girls who were well mannered, well groomed, and pleasant to talk to—perfect wives for doctors, lawyers, and businessmen. Susan told me that even though her college boyfriends could accept the fact that she was not a virgin, they were all preoccupied with and jealous of her previous lovers.

  For almost two years Susan dated Christopher, a charming, handsome, brilliant scholar. She mentioned in passing two earlier affairs, and he thereafter assumed that she considered her first lover a mistake and her second merely a test case; he convinced himself that only now, with him as her lover, could Susan be sexually mature, aware of the flaws in her two previous relationships, and ready to settle down. Toward the end of their second year together Susan told him the truth: before she met him, she had had many lovers, women as well as men, even one-night stands. Stunned by her admission, Christopher called her a whore and refused to see her again.

  Last year Susan found out that Christopher, by then an assistant professor of literature at a Midwestern university, was preparing to defend his doctoral dissertation on medieval passion plays.

  She also learned that one of the most prominent authorities in the field of medieval theater was teaching at a New York university. Posing as a graduate student at that university, she obtained a passkey and entered the professor’s office at night. The professor kept his notes neatly typed on small index cards in open files. Susan photographed all the cards containing pertinent research and theories and then returned the cards to the files.

  At home she typed the material on various odd sheets of paper and envelopes. These she sent to Christopher along with a typewritten letter, which she assumed he would believe came from one of his ex-fellow students whose full name he could no longer even recall.

  Dear Chris,

  I remember that during our college years you were always interested in the theater of the medieval period. In case it’s still your field, I enclose various notes on the subject left by my uncle, who died last week
of lung cancer. Even though he was an advertising company executive, in his last few years he had become interested in passion plays. I’m sure he would be pleased to know that his research was not in vain, and that there is someone who can benefit from his—however amateurish—studies. All the very best,

  Jim

  After Christopher successfully defended his dissertation, it was filed in the university library. Susan then secured a copy and compared it with the material she had stolen. As she had hoped, Christopher had incorporated as his own a major portion of the information she had sent him.

  Susan telephoned the New York professor and, pretending to be one of his past students, informed him that Christopher So-and-so, a recent doctoral candidate in the Midwest, may have plagiarized in his Ph.D. thesis certain ideas that she recalled from the professor’s lectures. Soon after her call, the professor investigated the case and demanded a special inquiry at Christopher’s university.

  Christopher failed to explain satisfactorily how he had come into possession of the professor’s materials. He could not even recall the name of the friend who, he claimed, had sent him the notes. He was dismissed from the university, and his academic career came to an abrupt end.

  • • •

  Volunteering her interpretation of my relationship with Karen, Susan remarked that it frequently benefited from my absence, when, like youthful masturbation, it could feed on fantasy. When distance separated us, Karen was forced to think about me, recall me, imagine me as her Byronic lover. As it was, Susan said, Karen and I saw each other only under “optimal conditions,” that is, when we were both fit, in a good mood, anxious to be together. Susan meant to imply that because she shared a house with Karen, she alone had penetrated the spiritual as well as the physical sphere of Karen’s selfhood.