Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

She began to pull off her clothes. She felt him looking at her, and she wasn’t embarrassed. She felt young and lovely, which was something she didn’t often feel, certainly not with Josh. But don’t, don’t think of Josh now. And she didn’t.

They moved awkwardly. His arm in her face, she banged her head at one point. “Sorry.” “Sorry.” The condom was a disaster, it was on, but oh, how it felt. After a while they gave it up — which is what people do, because it feels worth it — then pauses, whispers, adjustments. Calibrations.

Despite the confused and awkward coupling, it was still painfully exciting. Miranda felt that if it went too smoothly it would mean it didn’t matter as much. She thought this during, and she then decided to stop for a moment and just hold him close, kissing him slowly. She pushed against him and stopped “trying” to do anything except feel his breathing and his weight next to her. She let him move her to her side, facing him and leaning back on the bed. He placed a hand across her and rested it on her middle back; then he moved it slowly to the indent of her waist, then down the curve of her hip, and very, very softly along the edges of her thighs. She moved her legs slightly apart, and he barely touched her inner thighs. He traced his hand lightly up to her stomach, and he looked at her, unsmiling. She stopped smiling too, and let him touch her. That could have lasted hours, the gentle touching, the close faces, the kisses. Eventually, they did the beginning part again, not awkward at all, but easy, easy. And somehow without warning they both slipped into a deep, calm sleep. When she woke up he was watching her. It felt nice. She beamed at him.

“I’m too old for you,” he said.

She stopped smiling. “I know,” she said.

Miranda waited for Josh at the brand-new lo-fi coffee bar on Broadway. Espresso and cappuccino had become so ubiquitous in the city that nearly every block featured an espresso cart, or a coffee kiosk, or a cappuccino counter. The trend was so overly elaborated that the details of consumption became parsed and specific; there were conventions and argot. Cappuccinos could be “wet”—meaning made with not just foam but a little steamed milk. There were macchiatos and lattes, and a thousand variations on beans and brewing. Naturally it didn’t take long for the coolest, newest coffee bars to defiantly serve only drip coffee. In retro, normal-sized cups. Eventually, perhaps, it would be instant coffee. She drank the watery brew and read the paper. She felt excited and high from hardly sleeping. Her skin glowed from kissing a man with some stubble on his face. Her chest was a little red as well, as if she had hives or a rash. It’s weird how when you first sleep with someone it is almost like your bodies are allergic to each other. She felt absurdly pleased, and then she watched for Josh. As soon as she saw him, she would put thoughts of Nash aside, just deliberately unthink them.

The left wall of the shop was covered with underground magazines and newspapers. All those promising titles: Angry Girl and Bitch. Slits & Tits and Heroic Heretic . All these fierce chick zines that claimed to be überfeminist but sounded like S & M porno magazines. Liberation, apparently, had to be appropriation, with double A batteries and a double D bra; pert Betty Paige bangs and no apologies.

She noticed Josh walking slowly toward the coffee bar. He wore a sports coat, corduroy with elbow patches. These days it was either that or the cable-knit cardigan. He looked like a Midwestern professor lately, less young prep and more middle-aged uncle. She found it a bit affected, not that clever. But Josh was a very affected, very formal guy, no matter what he wore. He caught her eye and barely acknowledged her as he approached. He did have such remove. That part wasn’t affected. That part just was. It was enormously alluring to her for reasons she didn’t care to fathom.

“How’s Sissy?”

“Great. We had fun.” She had told him she was spending the night with Sissy. Which was really the plan, until she just decided otherwise. Josh sat and took a sip of her coffee. He frowned a bit.

“Where did you guys go last night?” He didn’t look at her but at the newspaper he had in his hand.

“Here and there,” she said.

“Right,” he said and opened the paper. He was reading The Wall Street Journal .

Together they walked through the ever-expanding ultrahip retail center. Miranda hated it. It was a mall but not called a mall; it was really postmall, a series of attached indoor stores with the sensibility of independent boutiques. Whether they were corporate chains or not (many were owned by corporate chains), they appeared quirky and eccentric. There was a tattoo emporium. A store for DJs, with underground twelve-inch dance records, turntables with slip mats, and metal-braced “coffin” boxes for carrying the records to the clubs. A cineplex showed foreign and independent films. Even an art museum in the basement with video installations. The centerpiece was a large, trendy clothing store called Suburban Guerrilla.

Josh and Miranda wandered into the store, lost and mesmerized in the low-intensity way only an airless retail space can induce.

“The Gruen effect,” Josh said.

“What?”

“When you become narcotized by the retail array, when you enter the shopping soma, the enticement overload.”

Miranda nodded vaguely.

“I’ve been studying it. How the placement of doors and windows can manipulate psychological states. The very architecture makes you feel small and submissive. Victor Gruen was the first to recognize that if you are forced through a series of shops before you find the poorly marked exit, and if you hear music of a certain tempo, and if the lighting is right, you will reach the disassociative state in which you will be vulnerable to suggestion. You will feel the urge, or desire, for impulse purchases.”

“Really,” Miranda said, wandering absently toward a table piled with books, candles, shirts and throw rugs, all done in the same three shades of green-blue. She examined a rack of clothes. There were fake vintage dresses with bohemian patches. Gauze and macramé peasant dresses. Lace-trimmed camisoles next to a poster of Carole King’s 1971 Tapestry album. Angel sleeves and high-heeled boots. Clogs and granny glasses, but also tube tops, denim short-short cutoffs, roller skates. And finally a whole rack of fat, colorful, striped clip suspenders next to long-sleeved sweatshirts with puffy satin rainbows sewed on them, circa 1976.

Josh picked up a reissue of the Silver Surfer comic book from a table piled with puka-shell necklaces just like David Cassidy used to wear in the ’70s. He walked past the selection of graphic novellas to Miranda, who was looking at an earth-art display. A huge poster of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty hung overhead, and underneath were books on contemporary environmental art and land art of the ’70s. There was a DVD on Andrew Goldsworthy, and leaf-patterned bike messenger bags as well as vintage Greenpeace buttons and some vinyl Jackson Browne records in plastic sleeves.

“It’s not just the Gruen effect, you know. It’s the way everything is no longer organized by category but by subject. By theme, everything is tied together by associations of theme,” Miranda said.

“Yes. On the Internet one thing leads to another in this nonlinear, associative way. Increasingly the world will imitate the Internet in how it processes information. Like Allegecom opening its drug superstore in imitation of its hugely successful retail website. The first physical store to spin off a website. Brilliant.”

But Miranda wasn’t listening. She was distracted by one last themed section. The walls were covered in black, and the clothes on the display racks were all black. There were books on anarchy and radical environmentalism. Big coffee table anthologies. But there were also triangle-shaped black scarves for sale — just like the ones the anarchist blac bloc kids used when they busted windows at Niketown and Starbucks last year. Just like on TV.