We all die in the end, and sometimes we die in pieces, not all at once. Like phantom limbs—phantoms, revenants, only come into being once something has died. The arm, the eye, the breast, once vivid and pulsing with blood—for the blood is the life—is no longer part of you, it has died, but its pain remains. Often the phantom limb feels like it is in a distorted, painful position. The sensations are not only pain; sometimes someone with a phantom limb will feel as if they are gesturing with the missing part, or try to pick something up with a hand no longer attached. The literature tells us that phantom pain usually decreases in frequency and intensity as time goes by, as the death of the body part recedes further and further into the past.
There is something missing from me. Sometimes I forget it’s gone, and try to use it, like I see other people doing. But you can’t hold a teacup with a phantom hand, and soon enough I am reminded of what is missing.
* * *
Here is a girl. She is sixteen years old, but not the sexy sixteen of television and movies. She still wears the clothing her mother picks out for her. She is skinny and gangly. She doesn’t wear makeup. Her hair is a mess. She likes science fiction and watches a lot of BBC shows like Doctor Who and Blake’s 7. She has a group of friends, geeky, just like her, although she is beginning to fall in love with punk rock and they are not. She is reasonably happy.
This will not last long.
* * *
If you are a married forty-five-year-old man who notices that a teenage girl has a crush on you, there is a variety of things you might think and do.
You might think, This girl is young enough to be my daughter, and stay away from her. You know this is nothing but trouble waiting to happen.
You might talk to her, hear about her father’s recent desertion, and see the desperation in her eyes. You could then be straight with her, tell her that what she wants isn’t what she thinks it is, and you won’t do it.
You might just enjoy flirting with her. There’s nothing wrong with that, after all, and everybody deserves a bit of fun.
Or you might have her give you a blow job in the urine-soaked hallway of the apartment building where she is living, and if you do that, it really doesn’t matter what you were thinking.
You’re an asshole.
* * *
In the 1970s, a folk practice never before seen sprung up across the United States. Teenage girls assured each other that if you turned off all the lights in the bathroom, and brought in a lit candle, and chanted “Bloody Mary” three times while staring into the mirror, Bloody Mary would come out and wreak horrible violence, drinking their blood, scratching their eyes out, or sometimes, taking revenge on those who had wronged them. Sometimes.
Alan Dundes, the venerable folklore scholar, theorized that this practice has something to do with anxieties about menstruation and all it symbolizes. And maybe he was correct. But maybe not. Maybe the blood drawn by Bloody Mary isn’t a metaphor for sexual maturity, or womanhood, or anything like that. Maybe it’s exactly what it seems, the blood of undirected rage, of violence. After all, adolescent girls have a lot to be angry about.
Of course, there is no Bloody Mary in the mirror. Everybody knows that. All you ever get in a mirror is a reflection yourself, captured pieces of your own soul.
Phantom limb pain can be treated by watching yourself in the mirror moving the missing limb into a more comfortable position (remember, in the mirror, left is right and right is left). It seems genuinely to work.
I have looked into many mirrors in my time. Bathroom mirrors, subway windows, plate glass shop windows, dressing-room mirrors, but I have never chanted “Bloody Mary.” Not yet.
* * *
The same girl, a year later, under a mask of liquid eyeliner and bright red lipstick. She spends two hours every morning blow-drying her hair straight. She wears Lycra miniskirts and torn fishnet stockings. She looks absurdly young and almost feral. She has thrown all her geeky science-fiction books away and the group of friends has long since expelled her from their ranks. She comes home at five in the morning with beer and whiskey on her breath. Her schoolwork lies untouched.
* * *
I’ve never had a romantic relationship that’s lasted longer than a handful of months. Well, twenty years ago, I had a long-distance relationship that lasted a year and a half. It ended with my partner saying, “I think of you more as a best friend than a lover,” and breaking up with me, and I thought it was pretty rich given that we’d been having sex for quite some time with every evidence that he had enjoyed it, but he’s not the only one to have said that. They can’t quite articulate what’s missing, these partners. They think I’m an awesome person, and I am so important to them, and they love me. They’re just not in love with me. They don’t feel romantic about me. The sex is awesome, they assure me, that’s not it. It’s something else. They can’t quite put their finger on it. They don’t know why.
I know why. Don’t bother trying to find her; she’s not there.
* * *
If you are a forty-five-year-old married man and a teenage girl has a crush on you, here is an easy way to captivate her: take her seriously. Almost nobody takes teenage girls seriously. If you do—if you sit and listen to her and respond to her interests, her likes and dislikes, as though she were a real person with real, legitimate thoughts and opinions, she will be yours.
It helps, of course, if you have had interesting experiences to tell her about. If she likes punk rock, for instance, and you were in a band that played CBGB and Max’s Kansas City back in the day, you can be sure that she will want to hear all about it. While you are telling her, she will gaze at you with wide, impressed, admiring eyes.
If you are the sort of man who is doing this, you should try not to pay attention to the fact that they bear a striking resemblance to the eyes of a child.
* * *
Here is what happened: one morning over the summer she was sixteen, she woke up late and staggered into the bathroom to brush her teeth, and overheard her parents talking. Her mother happily told her father that she was off to buy him a present for their twentieth wedding anniversary. Her father responded by announcing that he had met someone else and was leaving her. The girl sat on the edge of the bathtub in her pajamas and listened to the conversation. Her father was very calm and collected, which was unusual. Usually he stormed and raged during fights. Her mother was neither calm nor collected. She sobbed hysterically, and her daughter hated her for it. It was embarrassing, was what it was, and frightening also.
During a lull in the conversation, the girl crept back into her bedroom and got dressed in the clothing her mother had picked out for her: a white T-shirt, pink shorts, and white sandals. She looked clunky, with too-long limbs. When she finally went out into the living room, her mother was immobile on the couch and weeping. Her father gave her twenty dollars and told her to go away. She took the money, bought some women’s magazines, and went to a local café.
There’s more to the story, of course. Her father does not stay this calm. Eventually her mother stops crying and gets up off the couch. And that café isn’t there anymore.
* * *
The neighborhood I grew up in is almost unrecognizable now. I used to have friends who weren’t allowed to come visit; it was that kind of neighborhood when I was young. But it was a mix of working-class families and bohemian artists and musicians and there were baby supply shops and there were dive bars. Now it’s very chichi and only stockbrokers and rock stars can afford to live there. And my mother, whose apartment is rent-stabilized.
But I can still see echoes as I walk down the street. I still know where everything used to be, so I wait until late one night, after dark, and I leave my four-year-old son with a sitter and head down to Avenue A, which is of course alive with light and noise at that hour, even on a Tuesday. So I go into one of the side streets, where a certain café used to be, an Irish café where I ate brown bread with butter and drank tea while my mother sobbed on the couch, and
I lean in close to the plate glass of the jewelry shop occupying the space now.
And I whisper, “Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary.”
There is a pause, pregnant with the possibility of my dead self reborn. And into it, I whisper, “Wait.”
And then I go home, and pay the babysitter, and check on my sleeping son, and slip back into my own bed, and wait for him to wake me up in the morning.
* * *
The thing you want to remember about teenagers is that while they like to act cynical and like they’ve seen it all, they’re really very naïve. As you can imagine, this is quite an advantage if you are a married forty-five-year-old man and trying to seduce one. All sorts of lines that would send a grown woman into gales of laughter or cause her to roll her eyes at you will have their full romantic effect on a teenage girl. You can tell her, for instance, that she resembles the girlfriend you had when you were eighteen, and she won’t snort scornfully at you, even if she is a New York City Jewess and you grew up in southeast Ireland, and the likelihood of you having known anyone who looked like her in your youth is close to nil. You can even stare deeply into her eyes and tell her that age doesn’t matter, the only thing that really matters is how two people feel about each other, and she won’t shake her head in disgust and immediately dismiss it as a pathetically transparent attempt at emotional manipulation, to say nothing of nonsense. Instead, it will work.
Years later, she will come to regret this, and feel deeply ashamed of her own naïveté.
But you needn’t worry about that. If you are the sort of middle-aged married man who is doing this sort of thing, no doubt you won’t.
* * *
Who doesn’t love the first few weeks or months of a romantic relationship, those giddy, heady times when you’re drunk on love and sex and the new partner seems perfect, and all you want is to stay in their arms all day and all of the night, and then maybe wander hand in hand, presenting each other with flowers and staring deeply into each other’s eyes over glasses of champagne at brunch and maybe take long walks on beaches?
I don’t. You can’t trust all that. People say things they turn out not to mean. The first few weeks for me are full of painful disbelief. “I love you,” they say. “You don’t have to say that.” “I love you, though.” “It’s okay if you don’t, if you want to go on dating other people, we haven’t agreed to be exclusive.” “I love you.” But they don’t mean it. Because a few months later, I really fall in love. When I feel secure, when I feel like I can trust them, really truly trust them, and then it’s like relaxing into a deep warm bath, and I finally allow myself to believe every word they said. By that time, they’re no longer so enamored, and it’s unfair, because they said, and I believed them, and now they’re saying they didn’t mean “I love you” like that, they didn’t mean romantic love, they meant camaraderie or some such nonsense, and all the water turns to ice and I’m trapped, I can’t move.
There’s something missing from me, some piece of my soul that just isn’t there anymore and I can’t believe in the champagne and the long walks on the beach while they are happening, I can’t trust the—what’s the word?—oh yes, the limerence. The missing piece, she died a long time ago. I was so young. She was so young.
* * *
She loses most of her friends after her parents’ split—after all, they’re only kids, too, and don’t know how to deal with her constant simmering tension and anger. She spends school lunchtimes huddled by herself at the top of the elementary school jungle gym listening to punk rock on her Walkman. So she finds refuge in a downtown bar that doesn’t take the drinking age too seriously.
The bar hosts a local band on Saturday nights. It’s made up of men who’ve been on the scene for years, men in their forties. The music is good and the bar is packed and she’s heard that Joe Strummer used to hang out there when he lived in the city. Eventually she develops a crush on the singer, who has a certain amount of seedy, dissipated charisma.
At first he doesn’t pay her any mind. Not only is he much older than her, and married, but he also has a mistress. She is only four years older than the girl in question, with long black hair, perfectly arched eyebrows, and Celtic knotwork tattoos around her upper arms. She is an artist. So the singer doesn’t have the time or the inclination to notice the girl. But you shouldn’t mistake this for an ethical or moral choice on his part. Right now she is still gawky, awkward, and gangly. Eventually she will stop straightening her hair and wear slightly longer skirts. Eventually she will become lithe, even somewhat appealing. Eventually his mistress will move to another country.
I am the belle, they say, of Avenue A,
And if you’re strolling down that way,
You’re pretty sure to see me on the street.
’Cos I’m something of a walker,
And the fact that I’m a “corker”
Is the talk of every copper on the street.
Billy McNeill, he is my steady,
And you’ll always find him ready
For a scrapping match or any sort of fight.
He’s the bouncer down at Clary’s
And he says of all the fairies,
I’m the only one he thinks is out of sight!
Get off the earth, and don’t attempt to stay!
’Cos I’m a queen, the belle of Avenue A.
—Safford Waters, “The Belle of Avenoo A” (1895)
* * *
One thing you should prepare yourself for, if you are a middle-aged married man bedding a teenage girl, is the difference between porn-movie virgins and an actual real live teenage girl who has never had sex before, or even been kissed before you met her. In porn, or perhaps in your fantasies, a virgin is dewy, pliable, and wide-eyed, given to making unsolicited gasps at the size of your cock, amenable to your every guidance and suggestion.
A real teenage girl, however, one who hasn’t had sex before, is considerably different. For one thing, she will be painfully self-conscious and extraordinarily anxious about what you think of her. She will not know what she is supposed to be doing at any given moment or how she is supposed to be feeling. She will very likely freeze up.
Of course, you can make this sort of thing work to your advantage. You, after all, will know what you are doing, what you like, and what you want, and she will not be in a position to question you or object. After all, she won’t want you to think she’s not cool. She doesn’t want to be a disappointment to you. But be aware that she’s probably not enjoying herself, she’s quite likely numb with terror and embarrassment, she’s dissociating like mad. Of course, that may be precisely what you want.
She does know one thing, however. She does not like it when you push her head down. I have never met a woman who does. But you don’t have to care about that.
* * *
When the revenant emerges from the plate glass shop window onto the East Village, she is in the form of a young woman, of course, the Belle of Avenue A, as the song goes. Poor girl! She must be so confused. The city has changed around her so drastically. Well, that is what cities do, of course, but without even Trash and Vaudeville as a reliable landmark, how will she find her away around?
Where is she going? Well, I imagine she has an appointment, don’t you?
For so long I felt only guilt and shame and humiliation about that part of my life, for so long. But revenants come back thirsting for vengeance. And blood as well, of course. And they have already died, so there is nothing left to lose.
Still, Manhattan is mostly a grid, and the street signs are the same, so I think the revenant corner of my soul will get her bearings soon enough. I think. And when she does, she’ll head for SoHo.
* * *
The girl becomes friends with the mistress, which complicates her feelings to no end. Does she have a crush on the man, his mistress, or both? She certainly thinks she is beautiful, with her long black hair and her complicated tattoos, and she admires her hard-bitten attitude and her self-reliance. The mistres
s thinks of her as a kid sister.
She always knew that the girl was still—in all the ways that mattered—a child.
But eventually she moves away, across the ocean, leaving the girl to her own devices.
The girl doesn’t have many devices to speak of, not now. Later, she will. She will have friends, plans, projects, a career she loves. She’s good at all that, and she’s lucky. But not now. Now all there is is the loneliness, the black tar pits of self-loathing, the bar, the band, the man. If only we could go to her and reassure her that there will be more, much more for her. Perhaps we can. But then this would be a very different story, wouldn’t it? Best, then, to leave her to her own devices.
Soon, very soon, after the mistress moves away, the band’s singer approaches the girl. Perhaps “approach” is the wrong word.
* * *
Sooner or later, the question will arise of how you can get rid of this smitten teenage girl. If you have not sufficiently prepared yourself for the experiences described in our last tutorial, it may well arise the first time you take her to bed. It may arise the first time you take her to bed in any case, if you are that sort of man. You will want to be prepared.
One option is, of course, to talk to her. Play the guilt-ridden husband. Tell her that you adore your wife and you simply can’t go on in this way. Of course, it is hard to actually pull this off if you have been fucking a woman only four years older than this girl for several years without displaying a single pang of conscience.
Another option is to simply ignore her. It is easier to do this if you have been growing tired of her and dialing down the level of your attentions for some time. Be this as it may, simply ignoring her the next time you see her may not be quite enough. She may first react by going to ever greater lengths to coax a smile from you, and you will have to remain steadfast in your disdain. You must behave in such a way as to make her wonder if she was hallucinating your earlier pursuit of her. If you persevere in this, she will come to be completely off-balance; if you play your cards right, she will even blame herself for having been so foolish as to expect you to care about her. Remember, she has never done this before and she has no standard against which to measure your behavior. You are her reality check. This gives you an immense advantage.
Burning Girls and Other Stories Page 20