Mary Gaitskill - Because They Wanted To - Stories

On the plane back to San Francisco, she imagined talking with the dentist about the experience. She didn’t imagine anything more than a conversation, but she so layered this conversation with the pleasure of understanding and being understood that it became a fantasy of mental sensuality: She and the dentist would rub their brains together. Together, they would pick apart each strand of the model’s show of compassion and daring juxtaposed with the stripper’s humiliation and guts juxtaposed with the customer’s bland compulsive staring and the editor’s relentless practicality. It was a cornucopia of contrasts and bursts of personality and slithering emotional undercurrent, from which they could select the strands that made their inmost strands vibrate and hum. And they would feel the vibrating and humming in their voices, deep under their ordinary words. For days she cherished this fantasy, even as it faded like a favorite rough spot on the inside of her mouth.

Then he called her. Her impulse to vibrate and hum was pretty well exhausted by then, but still his voice aroused it, even though his voice was jocular and empty. It was fun to talk about the stripper and the model. He loved the stripper’s saying, “I am a bitch,” and he liked the part where she bent over in the guy’s face. He didn’t say he liked it, but his voice became warm and friendly, as though he were being rubbed. Jill got stuck for a moment on the complexity of it; was he responding that way because he was enjoying the idea of someone in a degrading situation or was he too feeling the lovable feistiness bleeding through the story? Both of them enjoyed condemning the model and the vulgarity of the project. Jill complained about being forced to write something charming about such a false and manipulated experience, and she infused her complaints with a flirtatious petulance that invited him to compare her to the undertipped stripper. She wallowed in a sense of voluptuous connection through mutually acknowledged degradation, and she thought he did too. He said he was very busy but that he’d call her sometime and they could go to a movie.

That night she thought of the dentist again. She wanted her thoughts to be tender and kind, like they had been the first time she’d thought of him. But they weren’t. Try as she might, she could not imagine him touching her, or even being close to her. She couldn’t imagine him going away, either. Whichever way she turned, his face and his eyes stayed before her, staring with a masklike fixity that was both intense and detached. There was a hint of contempt and a hint of fascination in his face, except that, in her mind’s eye, those feelings were too stilted to properly be called feelings. The image made her both desperate and numb, and, under that, other feelings oscillated too rapidly for her to identify them.

By the morning, she was sick of the dentist. Grimly, she directed her thoughts at the essay she was supposed to write; when they moved elsewhere, she supervised them sternly. But whatever they touched upon, she felt the dentist lurking beneath. She remembered Joshua’s story about the mother confronting her daughter’s rapist and killer. She imagined the incoherent weeping mother and the killer sealed away in his politeness. She imagined the killer’s eyes sparking with recognition as the mother stepped out of her territory and onto his. She imagined telling the dentist about it, over and over again.

Every night during the next week the dentist stared at her from inside her head. Eventually, she got used to it and slept through it, the way one can learn to sleep through a persistent noise. Any day, she thought, he would call and they would talk and their words would gradually diffuse the potency of the image. But he didn’t call, and his absence polarized his imaginary presence, making it both more vague and more powerful, so that it seeped through all her thoughts and feelings whether or not she visualized him at night.

She tried to remember what she had liked about him. She had thought he was kind and discreet. His kindness still seemed real, but it was mixed with elements she wasn’t sure of. His discretion now seemed like a remoteness so intense it was almost fierce. To receive kindness combined with such remove was like receiving an anonymous caress while blindfolded.

She went on a magazine assignment to see a performance piece by a masochist who tortured himself onstage in various complex and aesthetically pleasing devices of his own making, while he made jokes and talked about his childhood. His childhood was significant in that he had cystic fibrosis and thus experienced pain, frustration, and social humiliation very early on, which, he felt, had prepared him for a life of masochism—and for which he was therefore grateful. “It’s not about anger or self-hate for me,” he said. “It’s like a kind of spiritual jujitsu. It’s like, you give me pain? I’ll take it to the hundredth power.” He was a vulnerable and compelling person, desiccated, scarred, and rather luminous in spite of being quite puffy from cortisone shots. Several people in the audience were so moved by him that they wept. When he drove a nail through his penis, one man passed out.

That night, she dreamed about a tattooed man whose face and body had been ornamentally pierced many times over. They walked up a hill, on a beautiful wooded path. The man was naked to the waist, and he had the masochist’s slim, starved, scarred torso. His face was hollow, and the hollowness invited her in. Their entire conversation consisted of him pretending to want to touch her and then backing away. She eventually became angry. “Oh,” he said. “But you are very special to me.” And, as if to illustrate that sentiment, he opened his mouth and a bird flew out. It hung in the air, frozen like an iconic carving.

She decided to see a therapist, even though she would have to put it on a credit card. The therapist was a small, stylish person with coiffed white hair and a wardrobe of sleek suits. She thought the dentist sounded shy and that Jill should encourage him to, as she put it, “come out and play.”

“But something about him feels off,” said Jill. “Like maybe he’s a pervert of some kind.”

“Why do you interpret his behavior as in some way perverted?”

“Because . . . well, I don’t think it’s conscious. But it’s like he’s being apparently nice to me, and then when I respond he pulls away. Only it’s more complicated. First he seems like one thing, and then like the other.” She paused. “I can’t explain it. I just feel it. There’s something funny going on.”

The therapist said that “in the culture,” many people had not been confirmed enough so that they could extend themselves to other people with “the full capacity of their being,” because “the culture” was in a state of spiritual lassitude that enforced a level of blandness as the only acceptable way of relating. Underneath, she continued, was a great longing for free, unconvoluted expression, in which beings could be fully present with one another. She thought Jill’s dream was about this desire in herself, that the man on the path was her unintegrated male side, who was providing her with an opportunity to “take the initiative” and thus integrate her maleness. Why not just call him, she suggested, and tell him she would be delighted to get to know him in an unguarded way?

Jill liked the sound of this, although she wasn’t sure it had anything to do with the dentist. She discussed it further with her friend Doreen.

“I don’t know,” said Doreen. “He just sounds like a prick to me.”

“Why? I mean, an actual prick?”

“Look, he’s fucking with your mind. He does all this stuff for you, which usually would mean he wants to do it with you, and when you get interested he’s not there. ‘Feed the dog’? What’s that? All this crap about saying he’ll call and then he doesn’t? I’d say your instincts are right on.”