Mary Gaitskill - Because They Wanted To - Stories

But she wanted to be cruel too, or rather to pretend that she was. She would take her artificial debasement to a certain point, and then she would change direction. She would kiss me and I would feel her tender self in a burst of nakedness that stopped my breath—and then she would veer away, immersing herself in some internal personality that didn’t know or care about me. She was a nasty teenaged boy, she was a silly kid, she was a full, deep woman all the way down to her private organs. She slapped me and she pulled my hair—but she demanded that I beat her between her shoulder blades. And when I did she whispered “thank you,” her face transfigured with sorrow so abject that I was for one violent second absolutely repelled, and then drawn back with equal violence.

Afterward, we lay against my throw pillows, cuddling and drinking chocolate milk. “Well,” I said. “I guess that was us.” She giggled and rubbed her nose on my stomach. My feral kitten crept round the bedroom door and peered at us, her wide eyes wistful, curious, and scared.

Later in the week, we took a nighttime walk. We walked uphill to Noe Valley, talking through strained waves of breath. She talked about a book she wanted to publish, even though the author was a nut who called every day to pester Erin with questions about how best to advance her career. Her stride was long and confident, but the inclination of her head was mechanical and deferential. She asked me if I would ever again dress the way I had dressed when she’d first seen me. I said probably, but not to take uphill walks. She told me that a previous girlfriend, who had been molested by her father when she was little, had liked Erin to pretend to be her father while they were having sex; she asked me if I thought that was creepy. I said it definitely didn’t seem like they were relating directly as their real selves. She laughed and said it sure felt real to her. She pushed me against a car and tried to make me turn around. I snapped at her to cut it out; there was hurt feeling in her retraction, and I put my arm around her.

We walked downhill and came upon the slovenly burghership of Twenty-fourth Street. People dressed in floppy clothing and carrying lumpy handbags walked up and down in complicated states of distraction. Two men were standing on the corner, each with a telescope, offering people the chance to admire the planets for fifty cents. One telescope was labeled “The Moon” and the other “Venus.” A group of children stood around them, looking as if they were willing to be delighted but weren’t sure that the moon and Venus were quite delightful enough.

“Do you want to look?” asked Erin.

I said yes because I could tell she wanted to. I did enjoy waiting in line with the kids; their hope for enchantment, glimmering just faintly through their premature disaffection, was poignant in its secret tenacity. Their mothers sat drinking cappuccino on the out-door bench of an expensive coffee shop, looking pleased to see their children engaged in such a good, simple activity. The moon was cold and beautiful.

We held hands as we walked back up the hill. The city was sparkling and calm in panorama. Erin told me that she’d fantasized about adopting kids one day, but she knew she needed to “work on” herself before that could happen. She asked if I’d ever wanted to have a family.

“No,” I said, “not for its own sake.” I paused, watching my shoes crease with each steep step. “If, when I was in my twenties, I’d fallen in love with someone and he’d loved me, I would’ve wanted to have children with him. And I probably would’ve loved it. But that didn’t happen, and I’m not going to be running around trying to get pregnant just to do it.”

“It doesn’t make you sad?”

“No. Although sometimes, when I hear friends talk about their babies, or other friends talk about how they desperately want to have babies, I wonder if I’m really sad and am just pretending I’m not.” My breath chugged earnestly. “I think I’m sadder that I don’t write poetry anymore. Although I’ve been thinking lately that I might start again. Not now, though. Maybe when I’m old.”

“Cool.” She paused. “I just felt like pushing you up against a car again. But I won’t.”

Erin shared a large flat with a former girlfriend named Jana and Jana’s girlfriend, Paulette. The house had a tiny yard full of saucy flowers. Erin’s two large cats sat on the pavement or bounded and promenaded about the area. I loved coming to Erin’s house. Every time I rounded the corner and saw it, I felt I was approaching a place where tenderness and good humor prevailed.

One night I came unannounced, surprising Erin in her lavender thermal pajamas. We sat together on her bed and enjoyed the garish comfort of her electric fireplace. To entertain me, she brought a large cardboard box out of the closet and showed me what was in it. There were somber albums of family pictures (tiny, troubled Erin in a ruffled swimsuit, handsome Dad looking absently at something outside the frame, towering, pissed-off Mom), a plaque that had been awarded her in a high school photography contest, a track team trophy, a bracelet her brother had made for her in junior high, love letters, an artificial penis made of rubber, an apparatus with which to strap it on, an odd assortment of small plastic animals, and some Polaroids of Erin naked except for a dog collar and leash around her neck. She explained that the pictures had been taken by a heterosexual couple whom she had met when she’d answered their advertisement for a “slave girl.”

“They totally loved me,” she said. “It was great, but I got tired of it before they did. They dragged it out too long. They kept making it a big deal that he was eventually going to fuck me with his cock—the way they went on about it, I just lost interest.”

I looked at the Polaroids. I was slightly discomfited by her thinness; her ribs showed and her eyes looked starved and abnormally luminous.

“I forgot they even took those pictures until they sent them to me a month later.” She put them in a pile and placed them back in the box. She indicated the rubber penis. “I was going to use that on you,” she said. “But it reminds me too much of Jana. You deserve your own cock.”

Maybe because she had told me a story, I told her one about myself. It was something that had happened when, as a teenager, I had tried having sex for money. I told her the story to excite her, and I could see right away that it did. At first it excited me too; I had never told anyone about it before.

“He didn’t want me to take my panty hose off, he just wanted me to bend over and pull them down to about midthigh, which sort of embarrassed me. But I did it, and then I bent over and waited, and he didn’t do anything.”

“Yeah?” We were lying together, Erin up on her elbow, her eyes dilating slightly as she went into the rigid psychic suspension required by fantasy. She was, I thought, the only person I could tell this story to.

“On one hand, I was embarrassed on account of the panty hose thing, but on the other hand, I was very matter-of-fact—I guess teenagers just naturally are. I said, ‘Um, are you, like, doing some-thing or what?’ And he didn’t say anything, so I said, ‘Well, what are you doing?’ And he said, ‘Shut up. I’m doing what I gotta do.’”

“Which was?”

I realized that I was not excited anymore. I was not embarrassed, either. I didn’t know what I felt.

“What did he do?”

I put my face against her chest.

She ruffled my hair. “C’mon.”

I tilted my head up and whispered in her ear.

Erin yelped with glee. “He jerked off on you?” She fell down on her back and roared with laughter. We rolled around laughing, me tickling her, her little chin pointing at the ceiling. Then she grabbed me and held my head against her chest, and I felt, under her quick breath, her radiant tenderness; it was as if some secret part of her had come out to touch me gently and had then drawn back into its hiding place.