what purpose did i serve in your life

by Marie Calloway

  “This is like that ‘Sneaker Lover’ video,” he grinned, referring to a scene in it where Aki Yoshino brushes her teeth in lingerie.

  When I was done brushing my teeth, I went to go rinse my mouth out.

  Then I told Adrien Brody to turn around and look at the wall until I said it was okay.

  He complied, and I picked the black lace lingerie bodysuit John had bought me from American Apparel the other day off the chair it was laying on and put it on.

  I told him to turn around, and then I sat on his lap.

  “This is too good,” he said.

  I kissed him and we made out for a while, and then I stopped and got dressed into clean clothes and brushed and straightened my hair and did my makeup.

  I decided I wanted to shop for clothes for him.

  We left the hotel, and I texted John that we were gone.

  We walked aimlessly around Midtown, looking halfheartedly for men’s clothing stores. Nothing seemed to suit him.

  We walked mostly in silence, holding hands.

  I talked about how I had gone shopping at Forever 21 a few hours before our date. He told me about an article he was writing about Forever 21 and fast fashion in general, and how the editor he sent it to criticized him for ignoring female subjectivity/“the female shopping experience.”

  “I always thought that Forever 21 was a really stupid name for a store.”

  “It kind of encapsulates the whole fast fashion philosophy. Like you’re only as old as the latest fashion you’re wearing…”

  Weeks later I would read the article about fast fashion he talked about, and when I saw that the opening line was, “I have always thought that Forever 21 was a brilliant name,” I wondered if he had written that in response to what I had said.

  After a while we gave up the pretense of finding clothes for him and just sat on a bench in Central Park and smoked.

  I felt like a lot of people were giving us dirty looks. I couldn’t tell if it was for smoking or for him being twice my age.

  I asked if he wanted to go to American Apparel.

  He said okay, and that he had never been there before.

  I was surprised because it seemed like he endlessly referenced American Apparel in his writing.

  I asked him if he got turned on by American Apparel ads. He said sometimes but that he didn’t see them much lately since he wasn’t looking at Hipster Runoff much these days.

  We walked hand in hand to American Apparel. We got lost on the way and had to double back a few times.

  We weren’t greeted when we walked in, which was a new experience for me.

  I’m always struck by, at least to me, the beauty of the interior of American Apparel stores.

  “Am Appy,” he said, looking around.

  I led him upstairs to where most of the men’s clothes were.

  He made fun of the packaging on the clothing, especially the packaging for a bowtie which had a picture of a blonde woman wearing a v-cut black leotard and a bowtie around her neck.

  “She’s going to an audition.”

  We looked through racks of clothing. I could tell he wasn’t interested in anything. Finally he said, “I don’t think I can wear anything here.”

  “Poor Adrien Brody, so out of his element despite writing about American Apparel all of the time.”

  The “I’m Going to be a Supermodel” song started to play on the store radio and he said, “The music alone is worth writing about.”

  We left the store and started to walk back to the hotel. It was around 2 PM. He said that he should probably get going to his friend’s birthday party that he had mentioned he had to go to earlier today.

  We walked in silence for the rest of the time back to the hotel.

  I started to feel very sad when we reached the entrance.

  We embraced for a long time.

  Finally he said he would text me later tonight.

  I walked into the hotel and he started to walk down the street towards his car.

  I went up to my hotel room and flopped on the bed, exhausted.

  John was there, sitting on the other side of the bed.

  “How was it with that guy?” he asked.

  I sighed.

  “It was really good, actually. I feel like, we are like…the same person.”

  “Really?”

  He gave me a maneki-neko coin bank and candy he had bought for me in Chinatown.

  I ate the candy and kissed him.

  I felt anxious, thinking that now that I had fallen hard for Adrien Brody, I would be even less willing to put effort into the already strained relationship I had with John. I realized how truly tepid my feelings for John were, and how disconnected I felt from him, now that I had Adrien Brody to compare him to.

  And indeed, that afternoon and night I spent with him consisted of uncomfortable silence that finally culminated in fighting with him. I felt relieved when he left New York the next morning to go back to work. And I was happy because I had our hotel room to myself for the last day that I was in New York.

  Early in the morning, right after John had left, I texted Adrien Brody.

  “John saw us coming back to the hotel. He said you look really tall and gangly.”

  “He left out gap toothed.”

  “John had to leave to go back to work, and so I have the hotel room to myself until tomorrow afternoon. Will you come over?”

  He replied that he worked until 10 at night and would come over when he got off work.

  I slept most of my last day in New York. I felt pathetic, but I was very tired and nothing seemed appealing. I just wanted to see Adrien Brody again. I thought and wrote about him when I wasn’t asleep.

  At around 6 PM I texted him.

  “Are you still coming over tonight? JW.”

  “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “JW.”

  Then around 10:30 he texted me that he was at the hotel and asked which room. I texted him the room number and decided to change my clothes. Just as I was fully dressed, he knocked.

  I cracked the door open.

  “Sorry it’s messy.”

  There were still clothes and packaging and books strewn all over the floor.

  “It’s alright I saw it before…”

  I opened the door all the way and he came in.

  We lay down on the bed together.

  I didn’t look at him, I just lay against him with my eyes closed.

  We lay in silence until he said, “Did you get into a fight with John last night?”

  He knew because I had written an entry on my blog about it.

  “Yeah. He read and wrote in my notebook. So I grabbed his Blackberry and threw it at the wall.”

  “I bet he wasn’t happy about that…”

  “He didn’t really seem to care. He was more worried because I was mad at him. But like, I had never been that angry in my life.”

  “Why were you so mad? Was it just the invasion of your privacy?”

  “It was that, but it was more like that he wrote in my notebook that made me mad. It felt like such a violation.”

  He didn’t seem to understand.

  “Do you always wear blue?” I asked, looking at his work shirt.

  “Most of the time. Do you think it’s a good color for me?”

  “I guess…”

  I started to hold onto him really tightly.

  I was working up the courage to say what had been going through my mind since we met.

  “I feel weird about having sex with you,” I said.

  “We don’t have to do that anymore.”

  “It’s not the sex really, it’s more like, like…I don’t wanna say.”

  He urged me to tell him, and that it would be okay.

  “It’s like, how much can you really care about and respect other people when you’re cheating on your girlfriend with me?”

  “I think that’s a fair criticism to make, that I have no integrity.”

  “And I feel like you reall
y want to feel connected to someone, so you’re like forcing this connection on to me rather than there like genuinely being a strong connection between us.”

  He sighed and said that could be true, but that he felt more like he could connect with me only because he knew that I would be gone soon.

  “You don’t want to see me again?”

  “I don’t know. We’re at very different places in our lives…”

  “The fact that you’re unsure means we won’t.”

  “Well, I’m here now.”

  He was.

  “I was naive to think that this wouldn’t happen…I guess I was hoping you would just use me. We’re messing with dangerous things here. Who are we to do that?”

  I didn’t understand.

  “Do you feel weird about me being twenty one?”

  “No. You’re an adult,” he shrugged. “Should I feel weird about it?”

  “No, I was just wondering if you did.”

  I was actually trying to explore my reverse Lolita complex with him, but I backed off after that because it seemed he wasn’t into it at all.

  “Were you attractive when you were younger?” I asked.

  “I didn’t think so but I’m not the best judge of that….I had long hair…”

  I started to laugh really hard. Him having long hair really added to the picture I had often imagined of him before we met, of him standing around feeling awkward at indie rock shows in college.

  “Were you?” he asked.

  “No. Like I got bullied a lot in school because of my looks.”

  “That doesn’t mean you were unattractive.”

  “No, I was. Like I was kind of fat and I had acne…I wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn’t gotten attractive. I’d be dead now, probably.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  I talked about how mean I felt I had been treated throughout my life for my looks. And how I felt like people judged me less now that I was attractive. How even though it’s not true, I can’t get the idea out of my head that I feel safer when I look pretty. How I felt like the defining theme of my life has always, always been the way I look.

  “It’s interesting because people always talk about how women manipulate men with their beauty and have all this power because of their physical attractiveness and ability to have sex or withhold sex from men, but I’ve always felt like my own physical attractiveness is just like a defense from men. I feel like men have all of the power, and they attack you if you aren’t attractive. And even men who are attracted to me, I feel like they have all the power because they get less emotionally invested in me than I am in them. But maybe I would have more of that power people talk about if I were more conventionally attractive,” I said.

  I liked to talk about these things with him because I could tell he was fascinated by female beauty, and what it meant.

  “I guess that it depends on what you mean by power and what you want to gain with that power,” he said

  He asked me what personality flaws I thought people judged me by.

  “Oh, I don’t know…Sometimes I get called a sociopath.”

  “Do you think you’re a sociopath?”

  “No. I get called that a lot, but I don’t think of myself that way.”

  “No, you don’t seem like that.”

  “I think ‘sociopath’ is just what really controlling people call other people when they don’t do what they want,” I said.

  “That seems about right.”

  “I guess also I’m really voyeuristic, and it gets me into trouble. Like I don’t respect people and their privacy as much as I maybe should. And sometimes I keep like drilling people for information about themselves even when they get uncomfortable because I’m so fascinated by other people I want to know everything about them, and I feel this drive to write about them.”

  “How are you voyeuristic?”

  “Like how I wanted to look through your computer and read your emails.”

  “I want to meet Momus soon, but I’m afraid he won’t like me in person.”

  “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “I guess he just thinks I’m really smart and interesting and exciting,” I said and started to smile.

  “But you are.”

  I realized I was smiling because I realized that I did think I was all of those things.

  But I shook my head.

  Because it’s a lot easier to fall back on pretending that I’m still insecure than to actually present myself as someone who believes they have all these great qualities, since it leaves me open to being cut down, which it seems like people are dying to do.

  “No. I come off as really cool on the Internet for some reason.”

  “You don’t think you’re really cool?”

  “No, I’m really shy and awkward.”

  “Well, I think that you are pursuing this way of living…” That’s very genuine and honest, he went on to say.

  He said he admired me for “being upfront about your awkwardness. I wish I could go back to being young and do that.”

  “You’re going to admit that I’m awkward?”

  “I think…you’re a little awkward. I think I’m very awkward.”

  “I know. Even Tom who loves me and always sees the best in me always makes fun of me for being awkward,” I said, smiling.

  “Tom was your old boyfriend? The one who loved you?”

  “Yeah. He was the first person to like see me as like an actual human being instead of like…like…”

  “Some mystical nymph?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So why did you break up?”

  “Because I didn’t love him.”

  “I guess that is important…”

  “Meeting you started off really awkward and embarrassing, when I was running towards you and my shoe fell off.”

  “I thought that was so endearing. I took that as a good sign. That was just how I wanted this to go.”

  I felt so surprised, and relieved, that someone could find my awkwardness “endearing.” I had never even imagined that it could be something that someone liked, or even accepted about me. “I guess that’s why most of my friends are guys. They just are like more accepting of awkwardness for some reason.”

  He talked about how women are socialized to do the social work of putting people at ease in conversations, and how they expect other women to help them with that, and when they don’t they get put out.

  I brought up an article he had written since the first time we met, about young girls on the Internet who were pressured by the Internet’s “attention economy” and the way social media is arranged to exploit them by using their sexuality to get attention. I asked if he thought I was like that.

  He said that talking to me definitely made him think more about female subjectivity, but that he thought that what I did wasn’t like Kiki Kannibal, but that “what you do seems more in line with that video you showed me of that female artist who posed for porn herself because she didn’t want to exploit other women,” he said, referring to a video of Cosey Fanni Tutti I had sent him.

  I felt relieved.

  Then I asked him the other thing I was worried that he thought about me, that I was afraid he saw me as commodifying and exploiting myself on Facebook, like he was constantly writing about.

  “No. I’m not talking about people who are aware of it. It’s just like people who write status updates ‘today me and Susie went to the beach…’ It’s just, don’t you think there should be more than that tying people together?”

  I wondered if only people like us who had been disconnected from others our whole lives could be concerned about that sort of thing.

  “What do you think of those feminists on the Internet who think that pornography is ruining intimacy?” he asked.

  “Yeah, that’s what I think, actually.”

  “I just think it changes the terms of intimacy, like intimacy can be found in doing things that you wouldn’t see in porn
videos…”

  “I can already see it, when I have sex with young guys. Their whole idea of what sex is has been shaped by pornography. They’re bored by sex that isn’t like violent or degrading, or they think that sex has to be that way.”

  “I guess it’s different if you grew up watching it.”

  He talked about how he remembered when Internet pornography first became big, and how he was thinking about what would happen to the industry now that there wasn’t money involved. He was hopeful then, but now he felt that it seems like people are happy to just perform like before, except for free.

  I talked about the disillusionment I had with the Left in regards to pornography.

  “It’s just funny to hear leftist guys one day talking about the evils of wage slavery, and then the next day defending porn based on ‘women’s autonomy.’”

  He kind of laughed, “Don’t they see something wrong with how women are supposedly showing their autonomy with the way they act in porn?”

  Then I talked about how I was suspicious of third wave feminism and even leftists who had embraced “feminist porn” and things like stripclubs as “empowering.”

  “I feel like that sort of thing is feminists giving up and just trying to like change the terms of their exploitation,” I said.

  “I guess that’s the whole criticism of Slutwalk,” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s kind of how I feel. But at least something vaguely feminist is happening, I guess.” I sighed.

  “I think the main problem with sex work is how it’s romanticized. It’s not this mystical Belle du Jour experience. We just need to realize it’s just another worker being exploited by capital and unfair property arrangements,” he said.

  “I can see where they’re coming from, since sex workers have been portrayed as less than human for so long that you’d kind of want to like honor them, but…”

  I wondered if I should talk about my own experiences with sex work, or if that would be uncomfortable.

  I talked to him about my writing, and how I was afraid to publish it.

  “I feel like they would edit my writing so it would be technically better, but less honest and expressive.”