Because They Wanted To: Stories (21 page)

“Twenty-two. Why?”

“It’s very unusual for a man that age to be so uninterested in watching women take off their clothes and gyrate. Especially if you were interested in whether or not they were dykes.”

“Have you ever been in one of those places, Jill? They’re pathetic and—”

“I used to work in one, actually.” She paused so that he could say “Really?” but he just sat there and blinked. Maybe, she thought, he had read it in a magazine bio note. “I didn’t think of it as pathetic, personally. Some of the women were worth seeing, I thought.”

“It wasn’t the women who were pathetic; it was the men.” A certain professorial tone had crept into his voice. “Sitting there slavering over women who were really lesbians anyway.”

“I’d just think. . . out of curiosity, if nothing else—”

“Look, during my second year of college I worked as an assistant cameraman for a low-grade porn company, and I wasn’t interested in seeing any more naked women.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well. That’s—”

“And I was disgusted by the way the women were treated. Really bad.”

She pictured the young dentist standing in a nondescript basement holding camera equipment while all about him nondescript naked women assumed lewd poses. He was wearing the same beneficent,
self-consciously goofy expression he’d worn when he’d first arrived at her home with his computer.

“But a strip show isn’t necessarily the same as porn,” she said. “At least not when I did it. It’s more about watching someone’s fantasy of themselves.” She paused. “Unless of course you’re gay.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Well, then—”

“Jill, I’m shy.”

“The funny thing was, when he said the thing about not wanting to watch strippers? It made me feel slighted, almost demeaned.” Jill was stationed on her bed in extended phone call position, bolstered by pillows, wrapped in a quilt, legs tensely curled into her chest. “When he said he wasn’t interested in seeing any more naked women, it was almost like he’d slapped me,” she said.

Joshua was silent for a moment. “That’s a very unusual reaction,” he said.

“I know it doesn’t make sense,” she said. “But I felt the same way when he talked about how terrible the porn people were. What he said seemed nice and even moral, but there was something . . . hostile in it.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, of course not. But I can’t shake the feeling. It’s infuriating. He’s trying to put himself in this superior position. Like, here’s these strippers, doing their all, and he’s sitting there going tut-tut. Unlike the gross, pathetic men who
are
interested, he’s scrutinizing it with a purely scientific eye, in order to ascertain exactly how many lesbians there are per strip joint. And if he’s so disgusted by porn, what was he doing there? He was feeling superior, the smug fuck.”

“So I guess you don’t like him anymore.”

“He told me he didn’t like strip shows because he’s shy,” she went on excitedly. “But I don’t buy that. Strip shows exist for shy men.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Joshua. “I’d be shy about going to a strip show. I mean, I could picture some huge, leering stripper putting her underpants over my face while brutish guys laugh.”

“Oh, come on, Joshua. You know it wouldn’t be that good.”

But later that night, his plaintive joke had its effect. She lay in bed,
fantasizing about the dentist lording it over a grinding stripper, then interposing it with another fantasy, in which he trembled in fear before her. Each image was affecting in its own way; together, they were dramatic and moving. The dentist was complicated and unusual, she thought, yet decent. Like her, he had done things not everyone could understand, and he was perhaps not sure what he felt about it all. She went into sleep imagining that she was leading the dentist up a gentle, grassy hill over which a primary-colored rainbow stoutly arched.

She woke the next day feeling very emotional. She decided she was going after the dentist whether he was a ridiculous love object or not. She went for a long walk, during which she brooded, toiling uphill and down, on how to best declare herself.

“I got him some flowers,” she reported to Lila, her hairdresser. “And I brought them to his office.”

“That’s so sweet,” said Lila as she moved efficiently about Jill’s perched, enrobed frame. “How did he respond?”

“Well, I was planning to just drop them off with his secretary, but he happened to be standing there by her desk when I walked in with them. He just gave me this glassy-eyed stare. His face looked frozen, like he was suppressing insane rage. And then he looked normal and flustered.” Just beyond the dentist’s shoulder, Jill had glimpsed the profile of a woman’s head lying on the headrest of the reclining dental chair; her open mouth made her look stunned and victimized. “He said thanks, I shouldn’t have, and that he had to get back to work. He took them and just wandered off to some back room, while his secretary beamed. I figured, okay, he’s not into it. But then he called that night and asked me to the movies.”

In fact, he had asked if she wanted to go to a body-piercing exhibition. She was surprised, as she would not have thought piercing was the dentist’s kind of thing—it certainly wasn’t hers, at least not as it would occur in the gaudy vacuum of a public exhibit. She said she’d rather see a movie, and they decided on an art film about a drug-addicted police officer who sexually abuses young girls.

The dentist arrived at her apartment an hour early, which was awkward as Jill had just emerged from the shower and had to answer the door in her bathrobe. Still, she chattered enthusiastically all the
way to the theater, in spite of her crude, unkind thoughts when the dentist proudly described his car as “the smallest in the world.”

She had hoped the vaunted sex scenes in the movie would provide a delicious cocoon of titillation and embarrassment that they could inhabit together. But she just felt embarrassed.

“I hated it,” she declared as they left the theater. “I thought it was pretentious and boring, except for that one jerk-off scene. I have to admit, that wasn’t bad.”

“I thought that went on a little long—for what it was,” said the dentist judiciously. “And it was very unrealistic that the nuns they raped were all so good-looking.”

They went to a restaurant and talked about random minor subjects. Neither one of them, it seemed, was at ease. The dentist’s facial skin appeared strangely immobile, and although he looked at her, his eyes seemed shut from the inside. As if in reaction to his stillness, Jill’s voice leapt and darted with an animation that embarrassed her and could not be restrained. She ordered glass after glass of wine. Her animation felt increasingly like a sharp object with which she vainly poked the dentist. What a boring person, she thought. I definitely don’t want to have sex with him. This thought calmed her, and as they sailed back to her apartment in the smallest car in the world, she felt so calm that she wanted to put her head in his lap.

“Would you like to come in for a little bit?” she asked as he pulled up to the curb.

“I can’t,” he said. “I have to feed the dog.”

She took a deep breath and exhaled. “Could you please come in for just a minute? It’ll make me feel safer.”

“And that’s exactly what he did,” she told Lila. “He came in for a minute. He stood there while I fed the cat, and then he said, ‘Had fun. I’ll call you,’ and left.”

“This guy really likes you,” said Lila.

“You think so?”

“Yeah.” Lila gazed at Jill’s hair in the mirror, meditatively cupping its new shape with both hands. “I think he likes you a lot.”

For the next week her octopus imagination wound itself about the dentist, experimentally turning him this way and that. But he remained obdurate and glassy-eyed in its sinuous grip, and eventually she released him with an exasperation that became forgetfulness.

She didn’t even notice when he failed to call her; partly because of an emotional fight with an editor named Alex, which made her rage about the apartment, angrily talking to herself for days. Alex, with whom she had cultivated a rather tender friendship, had wanted her to write something about her sexual experiences, even though she hadn’t had any for over a year. She was offended because she thought he was being exploitative, which offended him because he thought she was being judgmental and hypocritical as well—hadn’t she, after all, written about being a stripper two years earlier? “That was different,” she huffily explained to Joshua. “That wasn’t about stripping; that was about power struggles in relationships. Stripping was just the motif.”

Then her word processor returned, looking small and likable in its Styrofoam nest, and she was offered an unusual job writing text for a book of photographs by an artistic photographer, which would require her to travel to Los Angeles. The photographs would all be of a famous model known for her risqué public persona, and the model wanted some of them to be taken in a strip bar with a real stripper.

“We want a thousand words on illusion and transformation,” said the editor. “We want your real-life take on it.”

Jill arrived at the strip joint at eight in the morning. Various assistants, looking tired and hungover, worked at arranging elaborate camera equipment or stood with an air of taxed authority over portable tables of makeup. The model was sequestered in her trailer, and the famous photographer was shooting the stripper as she walked on a table. The photographer told the stripper she was beautiful. She wasn’t, and she appeared to know it, but the photographer said she was again and again until she finally, shyly, began to carry herself as if she were. The owner of the place sat behind the bar, nursing an early cocktail and desultorily jeering his employee. “Take it off!” he weakly cried.

“She doesn’t have to take anything off.” The photographer spoke in the proud tone of a mother. “She’s perfect just as she is.”

“The big star,” muttered the owner.

“Shut up, Nelson,” said the stripper. “If she says I’m beautiful, then I’m beautiful.”

“Silly bitch,” he replied.

The photographer turned sharply. “Don’t call her a bitch,” she snapped.

“It’s okay,” said the stripper mildly. “I am a bitch.”

The model entered in the full splendor of her great height and conferred glamour. “Wow, there she is!” bawled the stripper. “Yeah!”

As the model and the stripper posed together, Jill drank coffee with a set of superfluous assistants, listening while the model asked the stripper about her life. For example, did her boyfriend object to what she did for a living?

“Boy, that light sure is hell on the old cellulite,” said Jill.

“We were just saying the same thing,” responded an assistant.

During a break, Jill questioned the model about why she wanted to pose in a strip joint.

“These women are so interesting to me,” she said. “Their lives are totally degrading—but are they really so different from us? I’m saying, Look, let’s have some compassion.”

Jill remarked that she had not felt degraded when she was a stripper, which seemed to surprise the model.

“Well,” she said, “there’s a lot of denial. There has to be, in order to survive.”

The crew was still engaged in a disorderly departure when the bar opened for business. The lone customer did not seem to notice the harried people carrying camera equipment. He just sat there with a drink in his hand and stared at the stripper, who had taken off her G-string and was bending over to look between her legs at him. He looked completely uninterested, but still he sat there and stared. When the song was over, he handed the girl two dollars. She came off the stage, holding the two dollars and griping about the lousy tip. There was humiliation in her griping, but there was also feistiness, and the combination was lovable. Jill tried to figure out why it was lovable and couldn’t, except that it was an interesting combination of collapse and ascendancy. Jill thought the dentist might really like the stripper. She was, after all, a lot like him, yet he could feel superior to her.

On the plane back to San Francisco, she imagined talking with the dentist about the experience. She didn’t imagine anything more than a conversation, but she so layered this conversation with the pleasure of understanding and being understood that it became a fantasy of mental sensuality: She and the dentist would rub their brains together. Together, they would pick apart each strand of the model’s show of compassion and daring juxtaposed with the stripper’s humiliation and guts juxtaposed with the customer’s bland compulsive staring and the editor’s relentless practicality. It was a cornucopia of contrasts and bursts of personality and slithering emotional undercurrent, from which they could select the strands that made their inmost strands vibrate and hum. And they would feel the vibrating and humming in their voices, deep under their ordinary words. For days she cherished this fantasy, even as it faded like a favorite rough spot on the inside of her mouth.

Then he called her. Her impulse to vibrate and hum was pretty well exhausted by then, but still his voice aroused it, even though his voice was jocular and empty. It was fun to talk about the stripper and the model. He loved the stripper’s saying, “I am a bitch,” and he liked the part where she bent over in the guy’s face. He didn’t say he liked it, but his voice became warm and friendly, as though he were being rubbed. Jill got stuck for a moment on the complexity of it; was he responding that way because he was enjoying the idea of someone in a degrading situation or was he too feeling the lovable feistiness bleeding through the story? Both of them enjoyed condemning the model and the vulgarity of the project. Jill complained about being forced to write something charming about such a false and manipulated experience, and she infused her complaints with a flirtatious petulance that invited him to compare her to the undertipped stripper. She wallowed in a sense of voluptuous connection through mutually acknowledged degradation, and she thought he did too. He said he was very busy but that he’d call her sometime and they could go to a movie.

That night she thought of the dentist again. She wanted her thoughts to be tender and kind, like they had been the first time she’d thought of him. But they weren’t. Try as she might, she could not imagine him touching her, or even being close to her. She couldn’t
imagine him going away, either. Whichever way she turned, his face and his eyes stayed before her, staring with a masklike fixity that was both intense and detached. There was a hint of contempt and a hint of fascination in his face, except that, in her mind’s eye, those feelings were too stilted to properly be called feelings. The image made her both desperate and numb, and, under that, other feelings oscillated too rapidly for her to identify them.