Maidenhead (25 page)

GAYL: Destroy? What are you talking about? Who do you think was destroyed? I’m the one who’s locked up now. I’m the one who can’t have a life. I’m the one who has to sit on my ass and write letters of confession.

LEE: Well, maybe some of that will be healing, or whatever.

GAYL: Healing? I don’t think so. I’d prefer my pussy get healed. It misses being fucked. Who’s got something for me there?

§

I was naked lying on top of my covers. Lee stood at the doorway of my bedroom trying to convince me to come with her and Wils and Aaron to Aaron’s parents’ place in Florida. She said that we could rent a car and go off on adventures by ourselves.

‘Bataille says that the power of the abject is the hunger for strong sensations,’ I said. ‘To feel yourself alive in the face of abomination.’

Lee entered my room and sat on the floor. ‘Bataille’s for boys.’

I could not do anything to free Elijah, to free Gayl. I wasn’t going to talk to any psychiatrist. Ms. Bain and Mr. Rotowsky did not give my essay an A or A plus. They gave me a joint and mutual C.
With reservations
, they wrote.
This is all over the place. Please be careful of being too personal in your writing.

‘Did you know that Chris had a major crush on you?’ Lee said.

‘Why’re you changing the subject?’

‘I’m not.’

‘You are. And he did not have a crush on me. He hated me.’

‘He told me he could barely look at you the first time he met you. He told me he thought you were the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. He was totally turned on by your thinking. He still wants to publish your piece. He says to thank you for sending it, he loves the new version. You should give him a call. Tell him yes or no. About the piece, I mean.’ Lee smiled at me.

I felt myself smile back at her even though I didn’t want to be smiling.

§

Anna dumped out the mop bucket in the kitchen sink. The water was elephant-coloured, a gush of torn nails and hairs. She was telling me about her three grown-up kids in Indonesia. Anna had been working in Canada since the kids were little and she had a sixteen-year-old at home, the baby she’d left with her own mother right after she’d been born. Anna had flown on a plane to Saudi Arabia one week after giving birth to her youngest. Anna said that working motivated her. She said that she cried for twenty-four hours straight after leaving her baby, but then she never cried about it again. The baby’s name was Innalo. Innalo would be going to university because of the money that Anna sent home over sixteen years every single week and Anna said that this was worth it. For not knowing her daughter at all, it was worth it that she, alone, would go to university. Anna said that my father had been very, very good to her, better than any family she had ever worked for in sixteen years. She told me that my father had offered to sponsor Innalo to come live in Canada so that she could study at a Canadian university.

‘You kids are lucky,’ Anna said. ‘To have such a good and responsible man as your dad.’

Anna smoothed out and folded our plastic bags. ‘Some ladies commit suicide,’ she said, ‘on the path that I have taken.’

§

I had a video camera in front of my face, shooting my friends as I told them a story: ‘Gayl filmed girls being fucked for the first time,’ the story started. ‘White virgins, Western virgins seduced by a beautiful and perverted Tanzanian musician. Then, for this totally spectacular ending, Gayl filmed the girls getting beat up by her.’

The sun was strong in Fort Lauderdale. I wasn’t positive if my ending was the only ending like that, or not. If I was the only one who was turned free by that violence, or not. Aaron’s parents had a huge fancy place with a pool. All of Gayl’s footage and archives had been destroyed.

‘It was this totally backwards and inspired allegory about masters and slaves,’ I continued. ‘Gayl was trying to make the masters aware of their privilege, the people who wouldn’t ever think of themselves as masters. A master can be a total innocent, you know, just from where she was born, how she grew up.’

I’d talked to my mom for a long time on the phone in Aaron’s parents’ bedroom suite. She said that people in Korea had been calling her Nina, not Irene.

‘Gayl made this kind of dialectical porn that degraded the oppressors.’ Lee and Aaron and Wils watched me, rapt. I had them. I could keep them. ‘Gayl made this porn to fuck up the people watching it, the people paying for it. She wanted to take these people to the height of their fantasy and give them what they wanted to see, like a teenage slut getting fucked, full of depravity and need, but then right at the moment of orgasm she could subvert the whole equation.’

‘How?’ asked Lee. ‘That’s what I want to know.’

‘She got me, playing slut-slave, to embrace her, my female oppressor. The man as the perverse force was negated onscreen in the self-consciousness that all of us were actors.’

I imagined Nina in Korea in her love hotel, full of money and bursting, a whole other world.

‘I’ve been committed to tape,’ I told my friends in Florida. ‘I believe in what I’ve done. I don’t regret a thing. That’s what porn is. It’s sharing yourself.’

Lee smiled at me, she licked the salt off her glass. It was a good shot. Aaron and Wils were our witnesses.

‘Sharing is pleasure is lack of regret,’ said Lee. ‘I think we think we all agree.’

Notes

Epigraph:
The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity – which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are.
Michel Houellebecq, from
The Possibility of an Island
, p. 144. First Vintage International Edition, 2007

Epigraph:
My mystery is that I have no mystery.
Clarice Lispector from
Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector
by Benjamin Moser. p. 4. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009

p. 11, 122, 125, 157:
You could be raped a thousand times and you could still be a virgin.
From an email to the author from Moritz Gaede

p. 48:
I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess.
Gore Vidal, the opening line of
Myra Breckinridge
, New York: Bantam, 1968

p. 62:
Love is a sign of our wretchedness, God can only love himself. We can only love something else.
Simone Weil from
Gravity and Grace
, p. 62. London: Routledge Classics, 2002

p. 90:
Shame is the most proper emotive tonality of subjectivity.
Giorgio Agamben from
Remnants of Auschwitz
, p. 110. New York: Zone Books, 2002

p. 122:
Is it right to ignore me like this as if they did nothing to me? Were the soldiers justified in trampling an innocent and fragile teenage girl and making her suffer for the rest of her life?
A paraphrase of Miss Kim from the article ‘Inside Queens: The Memories of a Comfort Woman,’ by Jane H. Lii, published September 10, 1995, in the
New York Times

p. 125:
Base feelings, envy, resentment are degraded energy.
Simone Weil from
Gravity and Grace
, p. 8

p. 136:
A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.
Simone Weil from
Gravity and Grace
, p. 53

p. 152:
Subordination: economy of energy. Thanks to this, an act of heroism can be performed without there being any need for the person who commands or the one who obeys to be a hero.
Simone Weil from
Gravity and Grace
, p. 43

p. 152:
Cruelty and eroticism are conscious intentions in a mind which has resolved to trespass into a forbidden field of behaviour.
Georges Bataille from
Eroticism
, p. 80. London: Penguin Books, 2001

p. 152–3:
Silence cannot do away with things that language cannot state. Violence is as stubbornly there just as much as death, and if language cheats to conceal universal annihilation, the placid work of time, language alone suffers, language is the poorer, not time and not violence.
Georges Bataille from
Eroticism
, p. 187

p. 154: Circular absolute knowledge is definitive non-knowledge. Georges Bataille from Inner Experience, p. 108. New York: State University of New York Press, 1988

p. 163: The power of the abject is the hunger for strong sensations. To feel yourself alive in the face of abomination. Myra paraphrasing Georges Bataille, from Eroticism

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Rachel Fulford, Tess Chakkalakal, Emily Pohl-Weary, Susan Winemaker, Rosa Pagano, Lise Soskolne, Moritz Gaede, Christine Davis, Allen Forbes and Kika Thorne for talking with me about this book at various points of its existence.

Thanks to the Ontario Arts Council for a Works in Progress grant.

Thank you immeasurably to my editor, Alana Wilcox.

Thank you to Evan Munday and Leigh Nash for working on behalf of this book.

Thank you to Sam Hiyate and to Sarah Williams for working with me on early drafts.

Thank you to Geraldine Bowman, Sheldon Berger, Randie Berger, Ari Berger, Wolf Virgo and especially Clement Virgo, my family.

About the Author

Tamara Faith Berger was born in Toronto. She wrote porn stories for a living and attempted to make dirty films before publishing her first book,
Lie with Me
, in 1999. In 2001,
The Way of the Whore
(
A Woman Alone at Night
in the U.S.), her second book, was published. In 2004,
Lie with Me
was made into a film.
Maidenhead
is her third book.

Typeset in Whitman

Printed in February 2012 at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.

Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox
Cover design and hand-lettering by Ingrid Paulson
Author photograph by Christine Davis