by M. E. Thomas
The thing that kept it all interesting was that I was genuinely fond of Lucy, smitten even. Her Pollyanna attitude was captivating. I almost wanted to be sincere back to her, almost wanted to be a true friend. There were so many interesting psychological angles going on, at least in my own mind, such that even the most mundane of conversations was absolutely thrilling to me. Just thinking about it makes me salivate. In fact, after a while, I began to avoid Lucy. She became a dessert too rich, too painfully pleasurable. Lucy gave me a stomachache, so I made Cass break it off with her for good.
And this is what I mean about ruining people being relatively harmless. What did I actually do to Lucy? Nothing. From Lucy’s perspective, here is what happened: She grabbed a boy and kissed him at a party. She liked this boy and they saw each other a couple times a week after that, sometimes with his creepy friend (me). After a while, it didn’t work out. The end. I didn’t ruin anything about her, really. She’s married now, has a good job. The worst thing I did was propagate a romance that she believed was sincere but was actually staged (as best as I could manage) to break her heart. And that’s the thing. I don’t just manipulate others; I manipulate myself. I mess with my own emotions as much as I try to mess with other people’s. In fact, in enacting the ruination of others, I concoct elaborate psychological fantasies that may or may not be happening. And the thought of the possibilities is often enough to satisfy me.
Someone once suggested that I expand my emotional horizons by taking MDMA, the pure ingredient in the drug ecstasy. I told him that it was an interesting idea, but that I sort of already manipulate myself into feeling other emotions via film, music, and art, and I wasn’t sure if it would be all that different.
I love music. There’s no doubt that music is manipulative, as is film (possibly because of the music in it). The whole purpose of music seems to be to evoke some feeling or sensation in the audience, if you let yourself get caught up in the experience. I have found that it can be a good way to learn about other people, allowing me to experience emotions the way other people experience them or the way the composer or lyricist experienced them. Music is like a drug in some ways because it forces me to feel something different from what I usually feel; it’s an artificial entrée into an alternative sensuality.
When I studied music in school, I even liked being critiqued, to get detailed judges’ sheets back after a competition. I liked that these people were compelled to pay meticulous and thoughtful attention to me and my performance; it hardly mattered whether they liked it or not.
As I have grown older, music has played a different role in my life, offering an avenue of human interaction with other musicians that is devoid of guile or artifice. The connection between performing musicians is mediated by sounds and instruments—musical acts in time—rather than words or facial cues. Playing music provides me with a level of pleasure and enrichment that I rarely feel when interacting with people in any other way. It also offers a means of avoiding casual social interaction with nonmusicians, since I can set up shop at a piano at almost any social function that has one. It is such a relief to see them in the corners of hotel lobbies or old-timey bars.
The truth is that I hate small talk. I care even less than most people about your eight-month-old baby making all of his developmental milestones or your trip last month to Colorado. And it is even worse for me because when I am forced to engage in small talk, I feel compelled to excel at it—smiling, nodding, and coming up with clever and complimentary anecdotes. But with music, I know that the impression I make on others while playing the piano is much more effective than what I could manage on my most impressive day of banter. Receding to the edges of parties becomes introspective rather than antisocial, artistic rather than awkward. It is sometimes easier to beguile without speaking. There is something about music that is so mystifying and alluring, and performing it is one of the very few acts of self-involvement that is universally perceived as generosity.
I often wish I could just passively watch people without being expected to participate myself, like television. I actually do spend a lot of time in front of the television for this reason, and I am pretty undiscriminating in what I will watch. I like the closed universes and conventional plot devices of television series, knowing that there is nothing for me to do but to passively watch what happens, having no stake in the outcome. I find it easier to identify with characters in movies and books than with people in real life. In movies, you can watch and analyze people freely and without detection. In books, you can listen in on their inner thoughts, take the time to contemplate them, and listen in again if you are so compelled. I have learned more about people from books, television, and movies than I ever have in real life. I have enjoyed people more that way, too.
People mistakenly assume that because sociopaths don’t empathize, they don’t have emotions. I’ve never heard of a sociopath not having emotions. I do think that sociopath emotions are frequently shallow and stunted, childlike even, but how many people do you know who are emotionally stunted and are not sociopaths? If I didn’t have emotions, how would I be so good at playing the emotions of others?
And what are emotions anyway? They’re at least partially contextual. They at least partially originate from the stories we tell ourselves. If you have “butterflies in your stomach,” you could be nervous or excited depending on your interpretation of your situation. And there are certain emotions that exist in some cultures that don’t necessarily exist in others, for instance the nostalgic saudades in Brazil or the intense aspects of shame in Japan. Are emotions just an interpretation of the body’s evolutionary fight-or-flight reactions? Are emotions only releases of adrenaline that we interpret as anxiety? Or endorphins that we interpret as satisfaction or pleasure?
One theory of why we dream suggests that dreams are the result of the brain trying to interpret external stimuli during sleep. For instance, if we are cold, we imagine that we are walking through snow. Our subconscious concocts a story to explain things we are sensing during our sleep—trying desperately to make random and incomplete sensory inputs fit into whatever fictional scenario we have literally dreamed up. Are our emotions the same? Are we just interpreting sensory inputs, making up explanations that support the stories we tell ourselves?
But as much as I want to believe that everyone else lives in a collective delusion, I know that love exists.
In his tragic narrative poem “Lara,” Lord Byron wrote a semiautobiographical narrative of a wayward count, describing him thus:
Tis true, with other men their path he walk’d,
And like the rest in seeming did and talk’d,
Nor outraged Reason’s rules by flaw nor start,
His madness was not of the head, but heart.
I’ve always known that my heart is a little blacker and colder than most people’s. Maybe that’s why it’s so tempting to try to break other people’s.
Chapter 8
LOVE ME NOT
When I was eighteen years old, I was an exchange student in Brazil. There I was enthralled by a new way of thinking of love. Naturally, I saw love as something to be achieved, because achievement was the lens through which I viewed everything. This meant that my study of love would be a study in seduction.
Watching the endless string of B-movies on Brazilian TV gave me a rough blueprint of what love was, and of course, I was a quick study. You really can learn almost all you need to know on television. Love is not a hard kind of con; it doesn’t require all that much subtlety. People are so starved for love that the usual manipulations really do work—the fleeting touches, the vague statements of feeling and devotion, the powerful embraces as passionate in parting as in their initial entanglement. Any soap opera could show you that love is most tantalizing in its evanescence. Its nature is to shift constantly through states of being—condensing into dense beads of sweat on hot skin only to disappear into the air, thick with promises of something more, of something better simply because it has yet to come
.
Brazil was the perfect place to learn about love and touching. By the time I arrived there, I had forgotten—or never really knew—what it felt like to be touched tenderly. The sense memories of the kisses my mother must have given me in my childhood were eclipsed by the sensations of playground fisticuffs I regularly experienced as I grew older. But those knocks were replaced in my adolescence by the constancy of hardly ever being touched at all. And I didn’t like any extreme shows of emotion—not the stumbling, ogre arms of my grandparents reaching out to wrap me up in their old-person auras, nor the ugly contortions of anger or sadness or incipient tears that would regularly crumple the faces of my family members through our various sagas of dysfunction. It felt like people were manipulating or even bullying me to react in some way of which I was uncertain, as if they were pushing me to the edge of an emotional precipice. I rarely jumped.
That was the life I had left behind. But thousands of miles away from home, touching and physical displays of emotion were a part of the intrigue of love. And love was such a thrill—a page turner—that I knew I wanted to play. Brazilians kissed and embraced upon every meeting and departure. They played with each other’s feelings like it was nothing or everything at once, at turns feigning sympathetic outrage or passionate emotional bruising. Their hips were sexually possessed: At the time, a popular dance was hitting the clubs of Rio called the bottle dance, in which a woman or man would gyrate over an open beer bottle placed on the floor. Sensuality was everywhere. I was not prepared for the three-year-olds I would see dancing the samba in the middle of the street on workday afternoons.
Brazilians were beautiful or very ugly in interesting ways. The young people were shiny, slender, and flexible, like willow switches in shades of pale amber and dark coffee. The old and the infirm were wretchedly dehydrated, hardened in the heels of their feet and in their lower backs like petrified wood. There was a smile, or a hint of a smile, or a memory of a smile on every face I encountered. Set against such apparent despair and abject squalor, you could not help but notice a strong corporeality in the way people lived that you simply do not see in the States. Bodies—and the stuff of bodies—so saturated every molecule around you that oftentimes you felt like you were living in a baroque fantasy, except that instead of Italian marble you got tons of haphazardly poured cement, and instead of St. Theresa in ecstasy you had seminaked strangers copulating in the street. It was a wonder that people did not cry or laugh or scream or sing all day and all at once.
Part of the freedom of Brazil, besides knowing or being accountable to hardly anyone, was being immersed in a culture of ambiguities. There were not white or black people, but people of varying shades from so many generations of mixed race and ethnicity that you could not define them if you tried. I came across many transgendered people, who defied the gender norms and conventions by which I had so long felt entrapped. Some people had penises and breasts; some had neither. Having either/or was not a condition of being human. As a person who felt ambivalent about her gender, I felt kinship with these people. They offered me possibilities that I had hitherto not considered.
I had never seen such an array of human life, and it made me interested in people in a new way. Brazilians were much more than just mirrors for me to try on different personas in front of, as everyone else had been back at home. They were so different from me, viewed the world through such a foreign lens and daily engaged in such strange behaviors, that I was forced to put away the lazy, naïve thought that I had already learned all there was to know about people.
They were their own species and I was a scientist embarking on a mission to discover their secrets. The most beautiful people were always the ones who seemed happiest and most satisfied with their lives. And the most attractive ones were the ones who carried around with them a cushion of humor and goodwill, so that the particles in the air around them floated a little lighter and danced with a little more joy than anywhere else. I wanted to be like this.
I understood so much, and I practiced a lot. I was in a place filled with people I would never have to see again, so I could do whatever I wanted without any real consequences. It’s why American students abroad are often so well liked (girls) and so despised (boys). I could hardly be blamed. In the cultura de ficar, I was young and unattached and therefore expected to share my body with other young people as part of a communion of bodies, a celebration of sexuality and sensuality and intimacy. At the end of the night, individuals would become couples locked in deep, exploring kisses, and I was one of them. I learned all kinds of things in these experiments—how to suck on a person’s tongue, how to let your own tongue be licked and sucked, how to tickle the roof of a person’s mouth so that it is almost irresistible for them not to lap up more of you. I came to understand kissing as a conversation. Sometimes, it can be small talk or playful banter between goodwilled strangers. Other times, it feels like you are forging an intimate connection with another human being, reaching as far as you can inside them.
I treated love like it was something to be mastered, like becoming fluent in Portuguese. Just as I developed my language skills, I devised milestones and challenges for seduction. I would go to clubs with goals in mind, testing how close I could get to a person without saying a single word, or how frustrated I could make them without touching. I practiced on sweet high school boys and jaded exchange students, old men and transvestites.
The first person I kissed was a man in drag. He was magnificent, his body bronze from glitter and paint. He wore a golden, ornate breastplate and thong, and there were vibrantly colored feathers and gemstones in his long, black hair. It was natural for me to want to touch his red-stained lips with mine, to be attracted by his peacock confidence because it made me want to take possession of him. It was like winning a prize or a trophy, and an uncommon one, like me.
In my short life I had not met a man so magnificently adorned. I imagined him in a tiny, run-down apartment, carefully orchestrating his appearance by placing each rhinestone just so, applying each shade of eye shadow to complement the others. My attraction had nothing to do with his masculinity or femininity—it was his attention to beauty that screamed for appreciation. There was a kind of seamless courage in him that I admired and a trembling vulnerability that I wanted to exploit.
Perhaps in some way, I envied his ability to embrace his strangeness and to display it to the world, or even to know what and who he was in order to do so. I did not have this ownership of myself, not yet. Outwardly I was all confidence and openness; inwardly I was spiteful and lonely and unaware of how to relate to the world. I wanted so much to be good but only knew how to appear that way by being bad. I knew no other way to live but to dissemble and to violate. So in kissing him, I momentarily captured his earnest effort, his honest beauty, the phantasmagoria made human by his mere existence in the world. All that good intention and energy cast out into the world—I wanted to taste it in my mouth and swallow as much as I could.
It wasn’t the kind of possession that needed to be enduring. I only wanted a moment with him, to gain the feeling that I could understand or comprehend him in a certain physical way. It would not have mattered to me in the slightest if he had dropped dead the moment we stopped kissing. If a gang of teenagers had appeared that night to kick in his organs and slash his throat, I would have stood by to watch in order to enjoy the enthralling violence of it. If I had not been a young girl with a future to lose, I might have joined them so that I too could feel the satisfaction of his bones cracking and muscles bruising from my blows, these human parts I had caressed only moments ago.
After that first drag queen, I moved on to others, practicing physical affection with strangers so that I could use what I learned to cultivate emotional love with my few acquaintances. I could not even experience a kiss without making it contribute to some kind of agenda I formulated having to do with gaining power over other people. I was a calculating, ruthless animal, after all.
I now realized that love and se
x had everything to do with the kinetic energy that I had admired and tried to understand in my drag queen. All I had ever read or heard or saw (not least of which were the soap operas and movies I watched day in and day out) told me that love could not be bad, that it made everything worthwhile, that it was the greatest thing in the world. And sex, though it had so long been stained in my mind with the bad, I now understood was a vital part of love. It wasn’t just the stuff of perverts and male oppression, but a means of singular connection. And all of this, wonderfully, was a means to awesome, delicious, euphoric power—for which I had a knack. Formulated in this way, the pleasure I had in the manipulation and exploitation of others—the principal stuff that made my life worthwhile—could be described in a narrative of love. What could be more redemptive and human than this?
It was such an amazing discovery. I found that I had spent almost two decades overlooking a vital entry point into the inner worlds of other people—the universal Achilles’ heel. I finally understood what it meant to kill people with kindness. People are so hungry for love; they die a little every day for want of it—for want of touch and acceptance. And to become someone’s narcotic I found immensely satisfying.
Love was an addiction for me too. I loved being adored; I loved to admire. I did not understand why people didn’t rip their hearts out and shout declarations of love in the streets, why they did not write pages and pages of love letters every day. It was so easy. It cost me nothing and gave me such thrilling satisfaction. The deeper I went with my love interests, the more they relied on me for their daily happiness, and the drunker I became with power. I generated their smiles and sighs, as if fashioning their moods from clay—I did this to them! The ecstasy of that thought was incredible.