Mary Gaitskill - Because They Wanted To - Stories

When I woke the next day I didn’t think of her but I felt her, and I wasn’t sure what she felt like to me. I was acutely aware of the artificiality of our experience. It felt like a dollhouse with tiny plastic furniture and false windows looking out on mechanically painted meadows and cloud-dotted skies. It felt both safe and cruelly stifling, and both feelings appealed to me. More simply, I felt as if some habitual pain had shifted position slightly, allowing me to breathe more easily. As the day went on, I thought of her, but gingerly. The thought was like a smell that is both endearing and faintly embarrassing. I remembered how she had knelt and said, “I’m not sure what to do,” and I remembered her reckless blow to my face. She seemed split in two, and the memory split me in two. But when she called me, I was happy; I realized that I had not expected to hear from her.

“I would’ve called earlier,” she said. “But last night was intense for me and I had to process. Like I said, I usually bottom.”

Her voice was bright and optimistic, but there was something else in it. It was as if she’d made an agreement with somebody to supply all the optimism required on a general basis for the rest of her life, and the strain of it had become almost anguishing. But when she opened the door of her house to greet me, it was with brash, striding movement, and she was elegant and beautiful in a sleek suit.

We went to a Thai restaurant for dinner. It was a cheap place that maintained its dignity with orderly arrangement and dim lighting. Little statuettes and vases invoked foreignness unctuously yet honorably. The other diners seemed grateful to be in such an unassuming place, where all they had to do was talk to each other and eat. Erin pulled out my chair for me.

A waitress, vibrant with purpose, poured us water in a harried rattle of ice. We ordered sweet drinks and dainty, greasy dishes. Erin’s smile burst off her face in a wild curlicue. I imagined her unsmiling, wearing lipstick, with her hair upswept, in a hat with a little veil; she would’ve been formidable and very beautiful. Her jaw was strong but also suggestive of intense female sensitivity and erotic suppleness. Then under that was a rigidity that made me think of something trapped. I reached across the table and took her hand. We were both sweating slightly.

“I haven’t been involved with a woman for a long time,” I said. “Mostly I’m with men. Although I haven’t been involved with men lately, either.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “Basically I’m a dyke, but I like sex with men sometimes so I can understand.”

I asked her if she always needed to role-play in sex. I said I was trying not to relate to people in such a structured way. “I mean, I can do that kind of sex, um, obviously, and I can like it. It gets me off and everything. But it’s a mechanical response. It’s not deep.”

“Well,” she said, “I hope you didn’t feel like what we did was mechanical, because it wasn’t for me. I hardly ever top anybody, so it was really new.” She drank her sweet iced coffee with ingenuous relish.

“It wasn’t really mechanical, because I could feel you under the fantasy. But I’ve done those fantasies all my life, and I want to try to be more genuine and direct, so whatever we do, it’ll really be us. Emotionally, I mean.”

“I can respect that,” she said. Her voice was like that of a little girl trying to be good for her mother. It gave me a strange, sad pleasure. It made me want to pretend to be her mother, just like another little girl.

Erin was from Kansas. She used to be an Evangelical Christian. She wasn’t raised a Christian, but she had converted on her own initiative when she was fourteen. Her parents had separated when she was ten, and her mother had to work brutal night shifts that made her more disappointed with life than she already was. Erin spent most of her time with ardent Christian boys, with whom she went to religious meetings. She was occasionally moved to give bouquets of hand-picked flowers to various bewildered girls, but it wasn’t until prom night that it hit her that her repeated day-dreams about the elaborate scorn of a certain beautiful brat were actually erotic in nature. She made a successful pass at a drunk, pretty little mouse in the rest room and never wore a dress again—although she valiantly tried to be a queer Evangelical well after she realized it would never work.

I pictured her standing alone in plain, neat clothes in a landscape of dry sunlight and parched yellow earth. Vague shapes were present in the distance, but I couldn’t see what they were. She was extending her arm to offer a bunch of flowers to someone who wasn’t there. The expression on her face was humble, stoic, and tenaciously expectant, as if she was waiting for something she had never seen yet chose to believe would someday appear. It was the expression she had on her face while she was talking to me. She was telling me that when she told her mother she was gay, her mother said, “I could just shit,” and went into the next room to watch TV

She had other expressions too. When we talked about the ongoing rape trial of a pop star, I made predictable sarcastic comments about people who said that the girl had probably brought it on herself. Erin first agreed with me, then reversed herself to say that maybe the girl had asked for it. Her expression when she said that was rambunctious, with a sensual shade of silly meanness—but mostly it was the expression of a kid with her hands in Play-Doh, squishing around and making fun shapes.

After dinner we went to drink. As we walked down the street, we held hands. There was real feeling between us, but it was unstable, as if we had been rewarded with a treat of flavored ice, which we wanted to put off eating for as long as possible so that we could savor it, but which was already melting anyway.

We went to a bar where people in various states of good-natured resignation sat in the dark under crushing disco music. I ordered drinks with lots of amaretto in them. The sweetness gave my mild drunkenness a pleasant miasmic quality.

Erin said she liked what I had said about trying to be more genuine. She said her therapist had recently suggested to her that it might be good for Erin to spend at least a few weeks getting to know women before she had sex with them, and that although she hated the idea on principle, she was considering it.

I reminded her that we’d already had sex.

“But we could start fresh,” she said. “And get to know each other before we do it again.”

I thought of going with her to restaurants and movies. We would sit and discuss current events, and under all our talk would be the memory of my open mouth and exposed tongue. I moved close to her on the banquette and put my head on her slim, spare shoulder. She held me. Her hair had a tender chemical smell. I pictured her washing it, bent naked over a bathtub, moving her arms with the touching confidence of rote grooming practices.

She walked me to my door and we kissed. Her kiss felt honorable and empty. I asked her in. “We don’t have to have sex,” I said. She came in and we lay on the living room floor with our arms around one another. We touched each other gently and respectfully, but with each caress I felt as if we became more separated. That made me touch her more insistently and more intimately. I felt her neediness rise through her abdomen in a long pulse; we brushed our lips together in a stifled dry kiss and then opened our mouths to feed.

“I want to do what you said,” she whispered. “I want to just be us.” I took her face in my hands. I wanted to say “my darling girl,” but I hardly knew her. I pulled up my shirt and pulled my bra down. I pulled up her shirt. I knelt over her and rubbed against her chest and belly, just touching. She closed her eyes, and I could feel her waiting in her deep body, wanting me to show her what “ourselves” might be. And I would’ve, except that I didn’t know. I could remember her at the restaurant talking about her mother and religion, expressing her opinions. Again, I imagined her standing alone, offering her flowers to no one. She was very dear and I wanted her, but I could only see her in pornographic snapshots, stripped of her opinions and her past. I unzipped her pants and pulled them down. I turned her over and positioned her. Her breath subtly deepened; she was taut and vibrant and absolutely present. I lightly rubbed my knuckles against her genitals. I felt an impersonal half-cruelty that was more titillating than real cruelty.