Mary Gaitskill - Because They Wanted To - Stories

“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.