Mary Gaitskill - Because They Wanted To - Stories

The next day I was shopping in a clothing store and daydreaming about Erin, when a pop song on the sound system took my imagination in a facile grab. It was a flimsy love song, sung in a high, caressing register. There was real feeling in it, but the singer had tortured it into deformed and precious shapes that debased his own emotionality with a methodical viciousness that was quite breathtaking and gave the bland song an odd, obscene jolt. It reminded me of Frederick and the artificial civility just veiling his furious contempt. It also reminded me of Erin, offering her flowers to no one. These images seemed opposite each other but at the same time locked together in an electrical stasis, each holding the other in place.

It was a very popular song. I had seen the singer interviewed on TV. He was a foppish young man who seemed thoroughly disgusted to find himself so liked.

We no longer talked about trying to have sex as “ourselves.” Some-times this was all right with me; we could find a little slot to occupy and frantically wiggle around in it until we were both satisfied. Other times I felt disgruntled and ashamed of myself. On those occasions I was aware that I was offering her only a superficial tidbit of myself, a tidbit tricked out to look substantial. It was dishonest, but our tacit agreement to be dishonest together at least allowed a tiny moment of exchange that I wasn’t sure was possible otherwise. And perhaps it was not fair to call her behavior dishonest, since she was so used to it that to her it felt true.

We saw each other two or three times a week, usually for dinner or a movie. Sometimes we went out with her friends. They were loud, lewd, exhibitionistic, and kind. They were a comedienne, an office worker, a photographer, and a waitress who wrote acerbic short stories. They were mostly ten years younger than me, and in their presence I felt enveloped in bracing female warmth that I did not experience with most people my own age, certainly not with my august colleagues. I loved standing around with them in the dark of some bar, talking sex trash. They made fun of me for having sex with men, although most of them occasionally did too.

“When I have guy fantasies, I want it to be a frat boy thing,” said Gina, the robust waitress. “I want them to call me bitch and make me suck their cocks and all that.”

“I like something more refined myself,” I said. “Cruel but refined.”

“I’m the reverse about guys,” said Lana. She was a curvaceous girl with loud clothes, severe hair, and signifying glasses. “Women can degrade me sometimes, if I really like them. But if I’m with men I want them to get on their knees and worship it. And they have to mean it.”

Their talk was like a friendly shoving match between giggling kids, a game about aggression that made aggression harmless. Although I wasn’t sure that it was completely harmless. It was fun to say that I liked something refined and cruel, but under the fun was an impatient yank of boredom and under that was indignation and pain.

One night Gina wore a rubber cock strapped onto her body under her pants. She clownishly pressed it against the rumps of men, who laughed and jovially explained that she was doing it wrong. She pressed it against my thigh, and I cooed and groped the rubber thing, arching my back and butt in a satire of narcissism and subservience.

“I’ll give Erin ten dollars if she’ll get on her knees and suck Gina’s cock,” said Donna.

Erin smiled and began to move forward. “She doesn’t need ten dollars,” I said.

“Just for you, baby,” said Gina.

“She doesn’t need it,” I said, and put my arm around Erin’s waist. Erin’s smile stuck, and she halted uncertainly.

“Aww, Susan loves Erin,” said Donna.

We all went to dance, our movements sloppily describing friendship, sex, display, and animal warmth, all in a loop of drunkenness that equalized every sensation. The bar was saturated with dumb, lurid kinesis. Mischievous entities with blearily smiling faces peeped from behind corners. I loved these young women.

But the next day, our posturing seemed stupid. I sat in my office between hours, thinking of the moment when Donna had offered Erin ten dollars, and I felt embarrassed. I imagined my officemate, a hale critic in her fifties, witnessing the exchange in the bar. I imagined her smiling gamely, eager to approve of these young women who were, after all, “gender bending.” I imagined her smile faltering as she registered that Erin’s eager response had nothing to do with sex, or even with fun. I imagined her frowning and turning away. I closed my eyes and felt this imagined rejection. I wanted to protect Erin from it, to make my officemate see her in all her different aspects—her brave flowers, her swagger, her private tenderness. That way I made my oblivious officemate bear the discomfort I didn’t want to feel.

When I got in bed that night I thought of Erin erotically, but my thoughts quickly became inarticulate. I pictured her staring at me like a frightened animal. I imagined a deep, perpetual moan that racked her body but did not come out of her mouth. I pictured the organs in her abdomen dry as old roots, parched for lack of some fundamental nurture that she had never received and was trying futilely to find.

The next night we had dinner together. She pulled my chair out for me, as she always did. Her gestures and expressions were piquant and feisty, but for me they were occluded by the way I had imagined her the previous night. What I saw in front of me and what I had imagined both seemed real, yet one seemed to have nothing to do with the other. I was appalled to realize that I didn’t want to see her again.

Still, I invited her into my apartment. We sat on my living room rug, and I brought us dishes of tapioca pudding that I had made. There was subtle discomfort between us; I wondered if she had seen the change in me or if there had also been a change in her. She tried to kiss me, and I said I wasn’t sure I wanted to have sex. She said okay. We ate our desserts and talked. I said I didn’t think I wanted to stay in San Francisco. I said I thought my apartment was beautiful but that it seemed to me like a way station.

“There are so many doors and hallways in this place,” I said. “It makes it seem like a crossroads.”

“Is that how you think of me?” asked Erin.

Her question startled me. I said no, and took her hand and kissed her, but I wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth. She kissed me back as though she knew this. Kissing, we toppled onto the floor. The moan I had sensed in her was nearly palpable, but I knew she didn’t feel it. My kiss became an escalating slur of useless feeling. I kissed her to locate her, but it was no good; she was all in fragments. I took her wrist. “Don’t slap me,” I said. “I don’t want that.” She disengaged her wrist and pulled up my skirt. I knew I should not let this happen. She pulled my panty hose and underwear down. Inwardly, I rushed forward, trying to engage her, to find one tiny place we could wiggle around in together. She flew by me in an electrical storm. She had discovered that I didn’t want her, but she was ignoring her discovery. Without knowing why, I ignored it too. I rifled my memories of her, all her different faces; none of them stayed with me. She handled me roughly. Tomorrow, I thought, I would tell her I didn’t want to be intimate anymore. I closed my eyes. She was doing something strange. I opened my eyes.

She slapped my crotch with a handful of tapioca.

Jerkily, I sat up and stared. “Erin,” I said, “what are you doing?”

“Sorry,” she said. “It just felt right.” She giggled nervously and contracted herself. Her open hand sat in her lap, wet with beads of tapioca.

Absurd tears came to my eyes. I felt almost as if someone had thrown a pie in my face, but that wasn’t why the tears had come. “What a gross, inconsiderate thing to do.” But that wasn’t right, either.