Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

She turned the television to a news channel and put the volume on low, just loud enough for her to distinguish between the newscasters and the commercials, and hoped the blink of the screen might hypnotize her into something resembling rest. She did not think she could sleep with this quiet. She wanted all those familiar noises to fill her up.

Still, she’d never really shared any of these domestic visions with Chadley, and she couldn’t see that changing. “What were you going to do if you were stuck here alone?”

“Probably order more food, watch a movie.”

“What kind of movie would that be?” she said, adjusting the sheet to cover her breasts.

Chadley grabbed the remote control and pulled up the menu for the adult films. “The businessman’s special, of course.” But Cadence winced at the titles: Where the Boys Weren’t, A Taste of Chocolate, Naughty Newcummers 17, Rocco Goes to Romania. They all held a curiosity for her, but this was a longing she would rather keep to herself. She and Richard had even watched one of those Faces of Death videos, which left her understanding two things simultaneously: first, how distasteful it was that someone was making money off those videos, and, second, how her own voyeuristic gaze had proven that the human psyche had a remarkable capacity for getting, and staying, numb.

But this curiosity was not for sharing with Chadley. She knew how he liked to think of himself as a charming rogue, convincing enough to talk a random woman—the kind he flirted with in the laundry room or the grocery store—into performing for the camera. Cadence doubted he had any particular gift for persuasion; nothing he said could convince a woman to try the secret things these movies suggested to him—women with comical dimensions and artificially lightened hair who claimed to want to take on Chadley and all his friends, who enjoyed taking it anywhere he wanted to put it.

Cadence could not help but think that porn had ruined an entire crop of otherwise fuckable men; she didn’t need the Chadleys of the world, their baldly imitative techniques: a quick slap of her ass, or going down on her with a flapping, clownlike tongue. She wasn’t about to perform for him either. Cadence did not want to play any role other than herself. Already she imagined her return flight in a wistful way. Chadley wouldn’t know enough to say his good-byes at curbside, to offer only a modest kiss. She pictured him ruining the moment, doing something crass that only he could assume might be sexy, like bringing his fingers to his face, telling her that he could smell the traces of her that remained. She shivered because she had him figured as the kind of boy-man who thought whispering could make the word cunt sound sexy.

Cadence took the remote from Chadley’s hand, skipped past a few titles with Hustler in them, and found the next page of possibilities. “Amateurs? I mean, Jesus, there are some people you just shouldn’t see naked.”

Chadley snorted a bit. “Like who?”

“I don’t know. Anyone who looks like a high school P.E. teacher. Some guy with a mustache who takes his wife to a swingers’ party for her birthday. You know, the ones right at the cutting edge of fashion.”

Chadley nodded as if he knew what she was driving at. “If it was 1978.”

“Exactly.” She clicked to another choice. “And just who is this Rocco guy anyway? Is that the one who calls every girl he meets a whore? Charming. There’s nothing hot about a guy who stuffs it into you and says, ‘Take it, bitch.’”

Nothing could be more of a buzz kill than a woman who wanted to discuss the politics of erotic art on New Year’s Eve, but here she was, thinking in terms of exploitation, coercion, the hegemonic and male-driven industry of pornography promoting an image of women’s bodies—tan, enhanced, hairless—that could be achieved only through the diligent patronage of plastic surgeons and aesthetic technicians. She wanted to impress upon Chadley the absurdity of the situation, ask him to read books she hadn’t thought about since college, Sexual Politics, Backlash, The Feminine Mystique. She wasn’t opposed to pornography. She was simply opposed to situations, the situations of most of those movies and the situations she found herself in now, their contrived nature, this boy next to her with the insistent cock and utter lack of romance.

She could forgive the cock. The body was always the body, and wanted what it wanted; the people who spoke of what the heart wanted were often proven fools. Lately she had been dividing humanity into two categories: those who were fools and those who weren’t. At this moment, she was realizing in which category her recent behavior had placed her.

So, like countless other women in the course of history, she knew the rest of her trip had become something to endure. She pressed the Purchase button for what felt like the most innocuous choice, and the screen filled with two couples fucking side by side at a swimming pool somewhere in the plastic diorama of the San Fernando Valley.

Chadley turned the volume down a bit. “We should make our own movie. Get a camera and a tripod. You can see what it really looks like.”

“I have a pretty good idea what it looks like.”

“Only in your head. It would be more interesting if we were in it.”

“Maybe,” Cadence said, knowing that even though Chadley was still as enthralled with her as he would be with any new lover, he’d likely take her reluctance as a disappointment. “Maybe it would help you to learn what it looks like when it’s real.”

Just then the camera went back to a shot featuring a preeminent view of a guy’s muscular and completely hairless ass. “Okay, that’s real, but that’s disturbing. The guy has a tan line. From a thong,” Chadley said, punctuating his thoughts with an eeeeeewww. The camera focused on the first couple, the man sitting on the edge of the pool deck, dangling his feet in the water, while the woman lowered herself on top of him.

Cadence laughed, knowing he’d missed the point of her comment. “And what’s up with the way she’s shaved?” The woman’s pubic hair had been whittled down to a single, pencil-thin line that ran a half inch straight up and down.

Chadley said, “We live in an era of intricate grooming. What do they call that anyway?”

“Whatever you call it, it’s awful.” Cadence nestled into the crook of Chadley’s left arm. “That girl is just straight-off-the-bus-from-Topeka skanky. Those press-on nails could put an eye out. But Christ, this is boring. They’re not even really showing anything.”

She knew in her heart that she didn’t mean that the movie was boring; it was the company. She’d thought she had the temperament for a meaningless fling, someone who would be attentive and grateful, and here Chadley seemed bent on being neither. Cadence knew too she would become a story told to his friends, guys he played pickup basketball with, whatever he did to fill up his Saturdays; she’d be the older woman who’d curled his toes for a while, a tale to be told, the same way her father, when he finally put down the drinking for good, substituted stories of his drinking for an actual drink.

And that’s when it hit her—Chadley already was a story, one she hadn’t quite finished. But she knew how it would end. Just then, one of the men reared up and announced that he was going to come, and Chadley and Cadence stopped talking as the camera moved in for a close-up of his eyes as they wrinkled tightly shut.

“That’s worse than stupid guitar-player face,” Cadence said.

She was willing to let Chadley fuck her one last time and managed not to worry about her makeup, or that she was down to a last pair of clean underwear. She touched herself discreetly to make sure she was ready, then climbed on top of Chadley, who immediately began with his usual furious grindings. As she took his fingers from around her neck, she finally found a way to say it to him. “Can we just fuck like normal people for once? Make an effort at normal anyway?” And when Chadley raised himself up to argue with her, she pressed a finger to his mouth, which he licked a few times, stopping only when she told him, “Spare me the histrionics.”