Mary Gaitskill - Because They Wanted To - Stories

“I got him some flowers,” she reported to Lila, her hairdresser. “And I brought them to his office.”

“That’s so sweet,” said Lila as she moved efficiently about Jill’s perched, enrobed frame. “How did he respond?”

“Well, I was planning to just drop them off with his secretary, but he happened to be standing there by her desk when I walked in with them. He just gave me this glassy-eyed stare. His face looked frozen, like he was suppressing insane rage. And then he looked normal and flustered.” Just beyond the dentist’s shoulder, Jill had glimpsed the profile of a woman’s head lying on the headrest of the reclining dental chair; her open mouth made her look stunned and victimized. “He said thanks, I shouldn’t have, and that he had to get back to work. He took them and just wandered off to some back room, while his secretary beamed. I figured, okay, he’s not into it. But then he called that night and asked me to the movies.”

In fact, he had asked if she wanted to go to a body-piercing exhibition. She was surprised, as she would not have thought piercing was the dentist’s kind of thing—it certainly wasn’t hers, at least not as it would occur in the gaudy vacuum of a public exhibit. She said she’d rather see a movie, and they decided on an art film about a drug-addicted police officer who sexually abuses young girls.

The dentist arrived at her apartment an hour early, which was awkward as Jill had just emerged from the shower and had to answer the door in her bathrobe. Still, she chattered enthusiastically all the way to the theater, in spite of her crude, unkind thoughts when the dentist proudly described his car as “the smallest in the world.”

She had hoped the vaunted sex scenes in the movie would provide a delicious cocoon of titillation and embarrassment that they could inhabit together. But she just felt embarrassed.

“I hated it,” she declared as they left the theater. “I thought it was pretentious and boring, except for that one jerk-off scene. I have to admit, that wasn’t bad.”

“I thought that went on a little long—for what it was,” said the dentist judiciously. “And it was very unrealistic that the nuns they raped were all so good-looking.”

They went to a restaurant and talked about random minor subjects. Neither one of them, it seemed, was at ease. The dentist’s facial skin appeared strangely immobile, and although he looked at her, his eyes seemed shut from the inside. As if in reaction to his stillness, Jill’s voice leapt and darted with an animation that embarrassed her and could not be restrained. She ordered glass after glass of wine. Her animation felt increasingly like a sharp object with which she vainly poked the dentist. What a boring person, she thought. I definitely don’t want to have sex with him. This thought calmed her, and as they sailed back to her apartment in the smallest car in the world, she felt so calm that she wanted to put her head in his lap.

“Would you like to come in for a little bit?” she asked as he pulled up to the curb.

“I can’t,” he said. “I have to feed the dog.”

She took a deep breath and exhaled. “Could you please come in for just a minute? It’ll make me feel safer.”

“And that’s exactly what he did,” she told Lila. “He came in for a minute. He stood there while I fed the cat, and then he said, ‘Had fun. I’ll call you,’ and left.”

“This guy really likes you,” said Lila.

“You think so?”

“Yeah.” Lila gazed at Jill’s hair in the mirror, meditatively cupping its new shape with both hands. “I think he likes you a lot.”

For the next week her octopus imagination wound itself about the dentist, experimentally turning him this way and that. But he remained obdurate and glassy-eyed in its sinuous grip, and eventually she released him with an exasperation that became forgetfulness.

She didn’t even notice when he failed to call her; partly because of an emotional fight with an editor named Alex, which made her rage about the apartment, angrily talking to herself for days. Alex, with whom she had cultivated a rather tender friendship, had wanted her to write something about her sexual experiences, even though she hadn’t had any for over a year. She was offended because she thought he was being exploitative, which offended him because he thought she was being judgmental and hypocritical as well—hadn’t she, after all, written about being a stripper two years earlier? “That was different,” she huffily explained to Joshua. “That wasn’t about stripping; that was about power struggles in relationships. Stripping was just the motif.”

Then her word processor returned, looking small and likable in its Styrofoam nest, and she was offered an unusual job writing text for a book of photographs by an artistic photographer, which would require her to travel to Los Angeles. The photographs would all be of a famous model known for her risqué public persona, and the model wanted some of them to be taken in a strip bar with a real stripper.

“We want a thousand words on illusion and transformation,” said the editor. “We want your real-life take on it.”

Jill arrived at the strip joint at eight in the morning. Various assistants, looking tired and hungover, worked at arranging elaborate camera equipment or stood with an air of taxed authority over portable tables of makeup. The model was sequestered in her trailer, and the famous photographer was shooting the stripper as she walked on a table. The photographer told the stripper she was beautiful. She wasn’t, and she appeared to know it, but the photographer said she was again and again until she finally, shyly, began to carry herself as if she were. The owner of the place sat behind the bar, nursing an early cocktail and desultorily jeering his employee. “Take it off!” he weakly cried.

“She doesn’t have to take anything off.” The photographer spoke in the proud tone of a mother. “She’s perfect just as she is.”

“The big star,” muttered the owner.

“Shut up, Nelson,” said the stripper. “If she says I’m beautiful, then I’m beautiful.”

“Silly bitch,” he replied.

The photographer turned sharply. “Don’t call her a bitch,” she snapped.

“It’s okay,” said the stripper mildly. “I am a bitch.”

The model entered in the full splendor of her great height and conferred glamour. “Wow, there she is!” bawled the stripper. “Yeah!”

As the model and the stripper posed together, Jill drank coffee with a set of superfluous assistants, listening while the model asked the stripper about her life. For example, did her boyfriend object to what she did for a living?

“Boy, that light sure is hell on the old cellulite,” said Jill.

“We were just saying the same thing,” responded an assistant.

During a break, Jill questioned the model about why she wanted to pose in a strip joint.

“These women are so interesting to me,” she said. “Their lives are totally degrading—but are they really so different from us? I’m saying, Look, let’s have some compassion.”

Jill remarked that she had not felt degraded when she was a stripper, which seemed to surprise the model.

“Well,” she said, “there’s a lot of denial. There has to be, in order to survive.”

The crew was still engaged in a disorderly departure when the bar opened for business. The lone customer did not seem to notice the harried people carrying camera equipment. He just sat there with a drink in his hand and stared at the stripper, who had taken off her G-string and was bending over to look between her legs at him. He looked completely uninterested, but still he sat there and stared. When the song was over, he handed the girl two dollars. She came off the stage, holding the two dollars and griping about the lousy tip. There was humiliation in her griping, but there was also feistiness, and the combination was lovable. Jill tried to figure out why it was lovable and couldn’t, except that it was an interesting combination of collapse and ascendancy. Jill thought the dentist might really like the stripper. She was, after all, a lot like him, yet he could feel superior to her.