Girls (15 page)

And then you went downstairs and found your roommate and said, “Dude, have I got a present for you.” And he stumbled up the stairs after you and you told him to go into the room and leave the light off and undress and get into the bed and wait.

And the next morning you were up before both of them and you found a song you knew you had on this one album called, “Did You Do It?” and you put it on your stereo at full volume.

At the time it was hilarious. At the time you woke a lot of people up and they came into your room to complain but when you told them what was going on they thought it was funny and they all sat around your room in towels and bathrobes and boxer shorts eating cereal and donuts and watching TV and waiting for the door to the room next to yours to open.

And now, in the right crowd, you can tell this story and the story’s still funny, a big hit in fact — clients love it. But it’s not something you’d do now. If you did it now it wouldn’t be funny.

Panthus was wrong. He should have said not, “We Trojans were,” but rather, “We Trojans never were.” The Romans didn’t believe in Justice more than the early Greeks, they simply realized its usefulness. They realized while a man fights well for something he wants, he fights even better for something he thinks he deserves. They realized Justice could sedate the people. They realized the one god missing from the pantheon was Janus.

The Romans were the sons of Odysseus, not Achilles. Their gift to us was not civil engineering or organized warfare or even written law. Their gift to us was dissemblance.

After all, what could be more Roman than the Trojan horse?

I never dreamed about you, not once. I had dreams where you played a part, where we bought groceries or fixed a telephone. But I never dreamed about you.

“‘. . . and the souls of the perished dead gathered to the place, up out of Erebos, brides, and young unmarried men, and long-suffering elders, virgins, tender and with the sorrows of young hearts upon them, and many fighting men killed in battle . . . ’” —
Odyssey
11:36

And eventually you reach a point where an old friend of yours, one outside your circle of influence, one in a different business altogether or not in business at all, maybe a writer or an artist, says, “You’ve changed, you never used to be this way.” And you say, “I know, I know,” but you don’t. You think back and you decide you were always this way it’s just that now you’re not so afraid.

Yes, part of it is that you’re just too tired to bother, you don’t have the patience to worry about anyone’s needs but your own. And yes, part of it is that you believe in yourself and your opinions much more because, after all, they’ve gotten you where you are today.

But mostly it’s just that you’re not so afraid. You no longer need to worry about what the majority of people think of you because now they’re worried about what you think of them. Now you have so much money and thus so much power that even your parents can’t help but be a little afraid of you. So now, most of the time, you can do what you want and say what you want without fear. So now, most of the time, you don’t have to keep yourself hidden. Power hasn’t corrupted you, it’s set you free.

And you find yourself wondering if maybe that’s what your old friend meant, if maybe he meant he never knew you were this way, if maybe he meant he never knew you were just trying to avoid burning any bridges all those years. You find yourself wondering if maybe it seems like you’ve changed to him because he never knew until now who you really were.

Ah, Nabokov, you sly old dog, you cunt, you. Even though you call Humbert a pedophile, you chose a girl just after puberty, not just before. Why would that be do you think? Could it be that you knew even your staunchest supporters would desert you if she had been younger? Could it be that you knew because she was postpubescent there would be plenty of people that would understand but that if she were prepubescent you wouldn’t have found a single sympathizer? That if she were prepubescent you might as well have written a book asking its reader to pity a genocide? Could it be that all, yes all, the men you knew too, when the doors were closed, when the room was empty but for them, would look at each other and smirk and say, “Humbert was one lucky bastard, wasn’t he?” Could it be that for all your respectable, scholarly exterior, you had more than one male friend who knew you well enough to say with a grin, “I can’t believe you got away with that!” Could it be that you knew damn well there are plenty of people who, underneath it all, believe the saying “Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed.”

Because at the end of the day, what else do we have? After the rebellions, and the struggles, and the political endeavors, after watching our backs day in and day out, guarding them not just from others but from everything, what else do we really have? A dog like the Cavaliers? A month like August? A toilet-bowl cleaner like the tragic son of Telamon? What else do we really have? What else can really make us feel alive, even if it is only for an hour or two? Is there anything else, out of all we have, that we can actually say is worth living for?

“‘Achilleus, no man before has been more blessed than you, nor ever will be.’” —
Odyssey
11:482

It is not you that we hate.

Sociopsychologists and pop culture theorists point to the annual increase in the popularity of misogynist media (e.g. the explosive success in recent years of gang bang, rough sex, and bukkake pornography) and most frequently claim this indicates that as women gain more and more power, men feel more and more threatened by that power and therefore direct more and more hatred towards women.

This is incorrect. It is not hatred we feel towards you, it is resentment. We resent you because you say you want us to treat you like men but when we treat you like men you accuse us of only treating you that way because you’re women. We resent you because you say you want us to behave towards you as we would behave towards ourselves when you mean you want us to behave towards you as you behave towards yourselves. We resent you because you say you can do business the way we do business and then tell us the way we do business is “inappropriate.” We resent you because you say you want things to be fair when you mean you want them to be unfair, you mean you don’t want ruthless men to subjugate you as they would weaker men.

And it is the resentment that is growing. Because more and more often we hear you say, “See? We told you we were equal. We told you we could succeed in your world if the playing field was leveled,” when we believe that, in fact, you succeeded in our world because we began to treat you unequally, because we unleveled the playing field.

Because it is not what is done but what is said is done that we, like you, can have problems with. After all, we are happy to use handicaps in golf or polo or video games, aren’t we? Satisfied to be on a losing team as long as it beats the spread, even?

No, it is not the unfairness itself we have a problem with, it is with your saying, “We’re just as strong as you, now stop punching so goddamn hard.”

And it is because of this that we respect you less and less and resent you more and more. Because those are precisely the feelings we would have for men who repeated such a thing over and over and you tell us to treat you the same as men.

“So why do you put up with it?” you ask. For the same reason so many of us put up with having to ask you permission to go out with our friends, for the same reason we put up with so many of you saying you don’t want us going to strip clubs any-more, for the same reason we put up with and sacrifice so many things. Because even though you may not be as strong as us, you can make us weak.

And this is why “misogynist” media is becoming more and more popular. Because the longer we keep our mouths shut, the more we want to show ourselves that, in the end, when it comes down to it, we are the ones with control over you. We desire not to suppress your developing strength but to deny our continuing compliance. We feel threatened not by your increasing power, but by our increasing weakness.

We do not hate you.

Vietnam was the only war we’ve ever fought where we could not expect participation or victory to bring us at least some immediate material gain.

Vietnam was the only war we’ve ever fought that took us into, not out of, economic hardship.

Vietnam was the only war we’ve ever fought simply for the sake of a cause.

How did we meet? Was it in college at some party? Did you stumble backwards into me and spill your beer on me from a plastic cup and apologize but giggle while I said it was OK, not to worry about it, even though if you’d been a man I would have picked a fight with you? Was it at our first job? Did we both start working at the same place on the same day and chance to sit next to each other when they served pasta salad and mineral water during orientation? Was it at a bar with some mutual friends? Did they mean to set us up together or did we just hit it off and surprise them all when they found out we’d been seeing each other? Was it on a deep-sea fishing boat, in a local fair-ground, at an automatic teller machine where you were briefly afraid I might be a mugger? Did we act shy, bold, combative because we didn’t want to seem like we liked each other in case we didn’t like each other? Was it cold or warm? Did the rain or the sun beat down? How did we meet?

I don’t remember. But I know I thought I was lucky to have a reason to talk to you.

And what word did we choose for ourselves at the beginning of the English language? What word was chosen as the earliest colloquial term for penis?

“Cock.”

From whence “cock”?

The
Oxford English Dictionary
seems to think it is derived from the compound word “stop-cock” meaning “a spout or short pipe serving as a channel for passing liquids through and having a crowning tap, the whole resembling the combed head of a cockerel.”

This is the meaning from which “cock” in its modern usage is derived?

This when the word “cock” was used to denote “male” as opposed to “female” as early as 1325
A.D
.?

This when the word “cock” meant “one who arouses others from slumber, a minister of religion,” as early as 1386
A.D
.?

This when the word “cock” meant “leader, head, chief man, ruling spirit; formerly, also, victor: said also of things,” as early as 1542
A.D
.?

This when the word “cock” was used colloquially after 1639 to also mean, “one who fights with pluck and spirit”?

This when as early as 1300 the word “cock” also meant “war”?

This when as early as 1386, in order to avoid blasphemy, the word “cock” was substituted for “God”?

Please.

Or maybe you were born rich, maybe you are a forest guide, a dolphin trainer. Maybe you are even happily married. It is possible you have never even thought of young girls in that way.

But then one day something happens, comes along. One day, God forbid, you have a child you don’t want or one you did want is born deficient in some fashion. One day, God forbid, there is an earthquake and you were late, a day late, on the insurance payment. One day, God forbid, something happens to her, to your wife. She gets sick. She has a breakdown.

But whatever it is, you can be sure of one thing. They will turn to you and you will shoulder the weight. Without thought, without question, without looking back. Because that is what a man does. A man pays for things.

It will cost you your time. It will cost you your life. You will enter a dark, dark tunnel and even if you are, one day, blessed enough to come back into the light like Lazarus risen from the dead, you can be sure of one thing. You will not be the same.

And you cannot describe the inside of the tunnel to those who have not seen it.

And no one who has been in the tunnel ever wants to talk about it.

And suddenly a breath of fresh air once in a while will seem like something you deserve.

The decadence of the Romans was starting to believe their own sophistry and forgetting what had really built the empire.

The decadence of the Romans was allowing themselves to become enslaved to the very propaganda they had invented to set them free.

The decadence of the Romans was not beginning to value materialism too much, but too little.

You are on a plane to Guangzhou. You sent your own jet to pick someone up so you are flying first-class instead. They are building a plant for you. It will cost more than a stadium, more than a subway. When it is finished, it will be nine times larger than the block you grew up on. You know this because last Tues-day afternoon you had your personal assistant find out how big that block was, still is.

Since you boarded the plane in Los Angeles, you have been going over the numbers. You have people that have already done this for you, people whose job it is to do this and only this — accountants, investment bankers. But, unlike the racehorses you don’t ride and the cars you don’t wax and the paintings you’re not sure you don’t understand, you only have two of these. This will be your third. So for this, you are checking the numbers yourself.

When you are done, you make a call. As you suspected, all of those people have been lying to you. You are not surprised, that is the way things work. You don’t even blame them, you will need to fire someone over this, someone who just leased a new car for their daughter to take to college, someone whose wife just quit her job to finally start sculpting “for real,” someone with a mortgage. They were afraid. They were only protecting themselves. You would have done, will be doing, the same.

When you disconnect, the woman sitting next to you says, “Are you going to Guangzhou?”

You laugh. She looks vaguely familiar. She must be at least five eleven. She has short blond hair a little thin from too many color treatments. She wears a white, sleeveless turtleneck sweater — cashmere — and a short silk skirt. These two items cost over a thousand dollars. You know because you’ve bought them before. Her exposed arms and bare legs are fit, athletic, shapely but full of sinew. She must have a personal trainer, follow a rigorous exercise regimen. When she notices your eyes flicker over her legs, outstretched on the legrest, she cocks her right knee over the left, points the toe. Her calf and thigh flex under your eyes.