“The big star,” muttered the owner.
“Shut up, Nelson,” said the stripper. “If she says I’m beautiful, then I’m beautiful.”
“Silly bitch,” he replied.
The photographer turned sharply. “Don’t call her a bitch,” she snapped.
“It’s okay,” said the stripper mildly. “I am a bitch.”
The model entered in the full splendor of her great height and conferred glamour. “Wow, there she is!” bawled the stripper. “Yeah!”
As the model and the stripper posed together, Jill drank coffee with a set of superfluous assistants, listening while the model asked the stripper about her life. For example, did her boyfriend object to what she did for a living?
“Boy, that light sure is hell on the old cellulite,” said Jill.
“We were just saying the same thing,” responded an assistant.
During a break, Jill questioned the model about why she wanted to pose in a strip joint.
“These women are so interesting to me,” she said. “Their lives are totally degrading—but are they really so different from us? I’m saying, Look, let’s have some compassion.”
Jill remarked that she had not felt degraded when she was a stripper, which seemed to surprise the model.
“Well,” she said, “there’s a lot of denial. There has to be, in order to survive.”
The crew was still engaged in a disorderly departure when the bar opened for business. The lone customer did not seem to notice the harried people carrying camera equipment. He just sat there with a drink in his hand and stared at the stripper, who had taken off her G-string and was bending over to look between her legs at him. He looked completely uninterested, but still he sat there and stared. When the song was over, he handed the girl two dollars. She came off the stage, holding the two dollars and griping about the lousy tip. There was humiliation in her griping, but there was also feistiness, and the combination was lovable. Jill tried to figure out why it was lovable and couldn’t, except that it was an interesting combination of collapse and ascendancy. Jill thought the dentist might really like the stripper. She was, after all, a lot like him, yet he could feel superior to her.
On the plane back to San Francisco, she imagined talking with the dentist about the experience. She didn’t imagine anything more than a conversation, but she so layered this conversation with the pleasure of understanding and being understood that it became a fantasy of mental sensuality: She and the dentist would rub their brains together. Together, they would pick apart each strand of the model’s show of compassion and daring juxtaposed with the stripper’s humiliation and guts juxtaposed with the customer’s bland compulsive staring and the editor’s relentless practicality. It was a cornucopia of contrasts and bursts of personality and slithering emotional undercurrent, from which they could select the strands that made their inmost strands vibrate and hum. And they would feel the vibrating and humming in their voices, deep under their ordinary words. For days she cherished this fantasy, even as it faded like a favorite rough spot on the inside of her mouth.
Then he called her. Her impulse to vibrate and hum was pretty well exhausted by then, but still his voice aroused it, even though his voice was jocular and empty. It was fun to talk about the stripper and the model. He loved the stripper’s saying, “I am a bitch,” and he liked the part where she bent over in the guy’s face. He didn’t say he liked it, but his voice became warm and friendly, as though he were being rubbed. Jill got stuck for a moment on the complexity of it; was he responding that way because he was enjoying the idea of someone in a degrading situation or was he too feeling the lovable feistiness bleeding through the story? Both of them enjoyed condemning the model and the vulgarity of the project. Jill complained about being forced to write something charming about such a false and manipulated experience, and she infused her complaints with a flirtatious petulance that invited him to compare her to the undertipped stripper. She wallowed in a sense of voluptuous connection through mutually acknowledged degradation, and she thought he did too. He said he was very busy but that he’d call her sometime and they could go to a movie.
That night she thought of the dentist again. She wanted her thoughts to be tender and kind, like they had been the first time she’d thought of him. But they weren’t. Try as she might, she could not imagine him touching her, or even being close to her. She couldn’t imagine him going away, either. Whichever way she turned, his face and his eyes stayed before her, staring with a masklike fixity that was both intense and detached. There was a hint of contempt and a hint of fascination in his face, except that, in her mind’s eye, those feelings were too stilted to properly be called feelings. The image made her both desperate and numb, and, under that, other feelings oscillated too rapidly for her to identify them.
By the morning, she was sick of the dentist. Grimly, she directed her thoughts at the essay she was supposed to write; when they moved elsewhere, she supervised them sternly. But whatever they touched upon, she felt the dentist lurking beneath. She remembered Joshua’s story about the mother confronting her daughter’s rapist and killer. She imagined the incoherent weeping mother and the killer sealed away in his politeness. She imagined the killer’s eyes sparking with recognition as the mother stepped out of her territory and onto his. She imagined telling the dentist about it, over and over again.
Every night during the next week the dentist stared at her from inside her head. Eventually, she got used to it and slept through it, the way one can learn to sleep through a persistent noise. Any day, she thought, he would call and they would talk and their words would gradually diffuse the potency of the image. But he didn’t call, and his absence polarized his imaginary presence, making it both more vague and more powerful, so that it seeped through all her thoughts and feelings whether or not she visualized him at night.
She tried to remember what she had liked about him. She had thought he was kind and discreet. His kindness still seemed real, but it was mixed with elements she wasn’t sure of. His discretion now seemed like a remoteness so intense it was almost fierce. To receive kindness combined with such remove was like receiving an anonymous caress while blindfolded.
She went on a magazine assignment to see a performance piece by a masochist who tortured himself onstage in various complex and aesthetically pleasing devices of his own making, while he made jokes and talked about his childhood. His childhood was significant in that he had cystic fibrosis and thus experienced pain, frustration, and social humiliation very early on, which, he felt, had prepared him for a life of masochism—and for which he was therefore grateful. “It’s not about anger or self-hate for me,” he said. “It’s like a kind of spiritual jujitsu. It’s like, you give me pain? I’ll take it to the hundredth power.” He was a vulnerable and compelling person, desiccated, scarred, and rather luminous in spite of being quite puffy from cortisone shots. Several people in the audience were so moved by him that they wept. When he drove a nail through his penis, one man passed out.
That night, she dreamed about a tattooed man whose face and body had been ornamentally pierced many times over. They walked up a hill, on a beautiful wooded path. The man was naked to the waist, and he had the masochist’s slim, starved, scarred torso. His face was hollow, and the hollowness invited her in. Their entire conversation consisted of him pretending to want to touch her and then backing away. She eventually became angry. “Oh,” he said. “But you are very special to me.” And, as if to illustrate that sentiment, he opened his mouth and a bird flew out. It hung in the air, frozen like an iconic carving.
She decided to see a therapist, even though she would have to put it on a credit card. The therapist was a small, stylish person with coiffed white hair and a wardrobe of sleek suits. She thought the dentist sounded shy and that Jill should encourage him to, as she put it, “come out and play.”
“But something about him feels off,” said Jill. “Like maybe he’s a pervert of some kind.”
“Why
do you interpret his behavior as in some way perverted?”
“Because . . . well, I don’t think it’s conscious. But it’s like he’s being apparently nice to me, and then when I respond he pulls away. Only it’s more complicated. First he seems like one thing, and then like the other.” She paused. “I can’t explain it. I just feel it. There’s something funny going on.”
The therapist said that “in the culture,” many people had not been confirmed enough so that they could extend themselves to other people with “the full capacity of their being,” because “the culture” was in a state of spiritual lassitude that enforced a level of blandness as the only acceptable way of relating. Underneath, she continued, was a great longing for free, unconvoluted expression, in which beings could be fully present with one another. She thought Jill’s dream was about this desire in herself, that the man on the path was her unintegrated male side, who was providing her with an opportunity to “take the initiative” and thus integrate her maleness. Why not just call him, she suggested, and tell him she would be delighted to get to know him in an unguarded way?
Jill liked the sound of this, although she wasn’t sure it had anything to do with the dentist. She discussed it further with her friend Doreen.
“I don’t know,” said Doreen. “He just sounds like a prick to me.”
“Why? I mean, an actual prick?”
“Look, he’s fucking with your mind. He does all this stuff for you, which usually would mean he wants to do it with you, and when you get interested he’s not there. ‘Feed the dog’? What’s that? All this crap about saying he’ll call and then he doesn’t? I’d say your instincts are right on.”
Doreen was a former backup singer Jill had met through Joshua. She was forty-two. She lived in a tiny basement room in a house that she shared with several people, all of whom were on minimal government support for ex-drug addicts. The house was an odd mix of squalor, comfort, and mundane beauty. In the small, sorry yard giant roses grew, the petals almost fleshy in their dense unfolding, swollen with failing beauty. Adults, children, and animals lived together in the house, all scrambling after their divergent, yet interwoven, lives. The TV was usually on. They ate awful food and snacked hideously from pails of discount ice cream and bowls of candy. Doreen thought one of the little girls was being molested in day care, but the mother, who suspected Doreen of secret drug use and was trying to get her thrown out of the house, thought Doreen was dramatizing.
Doreen kept to herself in the basement, where she could smoke. She had covered the walls with paintings depicting horrible scenes from her childhood and posters of rock stars. Every time they talked, Doreen told the same stories about her abusive mother and her experiences with bands and coke dealers. They talked of other things too, but variations of these stories always ran through the weave. Jill had heard them many times, but she still liked the way Doreen told them: as sad and absurd as they were, she brought them out as if they were exquisite silk prints that she fluttered before Jill’s eyes and then lovingly folded away. It was as if, in preserving and keeping the stories present, she was somehow preserving herself, even though the stories were often about situations that had hurt her and led to her decline. Doreen was sick with hepatitis C, which would probably kill her one day. Even in this state her face had a strong, bitter beauty. Her full lips were well defined and richly striated, so that they resembled thick, fleshy petals. When she listened to Jill, she kept her lips open in a tense oval, which made her look dramatically receptive.
Doreen thought the dentist sounded like a speed freak ex-boyfriend of hers, who had cruelly manipulated her and stolen drugs from her besides. Jill thought it was an odd comparison. But as she sat there amid Doreen’s paintings, watching her put her cigarette between her dry, beautifully striated lips, she imagined the strange, staring night face she had given the dentist, his actual stilted calm, his jovial, seducing phone voice, all in contrast to Doreen’s wounded, still-potent femaleness. Again, she thought of the killer and the weeping mother who willfully drew near him.
Which made no sense, she thought. Surely the dentist was not a killer. She walked up the steep hill to her apartment, the cool wind making her dried sweat feel matte and almost grainy on her skin. It was night, and the slim branches of flower bushes swayed against the city light of the sky, their silhouettes trembling eerily. She remembered the dentist at his office with his hands in her mouth. She was aroused, and the ridiculousness of her arousal embarrassed her. But that wasn’t the dentist’s fault, was it?
During the next two weeks she called him twice. He seemed delighted to hear from her. He asked her how “that tooth” was doing. He talked about his work. His tone was jolly and defeated, as if Jill naturally understood—as if anybody would understand—that defeat and boredom were inevitable, and there was something jolly and comforting about that. Jill told him about the masochistic performance artist, how he had suffered as a child and how that had informed his masochism. The dentist seemed interested. He said he liked “freak shows,” the old-style carnival ones. “A good geek is hard to find,” he said. Jill said that she didn’t think this particular masochist was about a geek thing.
“He encourages people to relate to him,” she said, “to see how his masochism is just a different way of dealing with pain that every-body has.”
“Yeah, well, I—”
“I mean, look at the flap about recovered memories of sex abuse,” she chattered. “As a subject, sex abuse had become a metaphor for a lot of different kinds of pain. The problem is—”
“But sex abuse isn’t a metaphor, it’s—”
“What I mean is, I think many people with these recovered memories are really describing psychic abuse when they say they were molested, only they don’t have the language to describe that even to themselves. Lots and lots of people have experienced some severe neglect or emotional disregard as children. So when their therapists give them these suggestions of sexual violation, it rings true to them. Even though they may not have been literally violated.”
“But that’s shit,” blurted the dentist. “Families are being destroyed over these accusations, because somebody thinks they didn’t get enough attention when they were five?”
Excited by this thrilling friction, Jill shoved forward. “I don’t know how you were raised, George. But in this culture, in lots of families the level of emotional vibrancy is so low and so bland, and there’s so much emphasis on conformity—”
“I hate it when people talk about this culture as if it’s worse than anywhere else,” he said.
“Well, maybe other places are like that too; I don’t know. I’m just saying that for really bright, open kids, that denial of depth and intensity—it’s like having their arms and legs chopped off. It is violent. Besides, a lot of people are literally molested, and a lot of them do forget it.”
“But they’ve done studies that show that kids almost never forget traumatic experiences. The more traumatic and painful it is, the more likely you’ll remember it.”
“Well, I was molested when I was five and I forgot it. I remembered it when I was ten, when I was watching some old cartoons with bad animation, where the lips on the characters moved really stiff and disconnectedly from the rest of the face. I think it was because when the guy molested me, he didn’t look at me while he was doing it—he kept talking about other subjects, like nothing was happening. So when I saw those weird, jerking lips I got so excited I had to go masturbate, and while I was masturbating, I remembered being molested.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone. Jill had the distinct sense that the dentist had not liked hearing about her masturbating as a child but didn’t feel he could say so. She felt him move away. She moved forward.
“So,” she said, “I think the reason those cartoons made me remember was that the guy who molested me—his mouth and eyes were totally stiff and disconnected.” She did not tell him how she had felt before she got up to masturbate, of her embarrassment, her t
errible sense of vulnerability, her feeling that everyone in the room—her brother, her sister, her father—could see what she was feeling. She did not tell him that after she had finished masturbating, her embarrassment became shame, and that the shame was so intense that she had gone to hide in her parents’ closet, way in the back, under her mother’s coat, where she held herself tight and tried to breathe.
Silence.
“George?” she said. “Does it make you uncomfortable that I’m talking like this?”
He said no, she could talk about whatever she wanted, but he had to go now. He said he would call her, except that he might be too busy.
Jill hung up feeling a little funny that she’d talked about being molested and the resultant masturbation. But she had wanted so badly for him to see what she’d meant. Since people talked about sex abuse all the time anyway, she had thought it was okay. But in retrospect, she thought, he’d probably just felt the intensity of her want pressing upon him without knowing what it was about, while being forced to think about her genitals. It must’ve been pretty confusing.
Late that night, she was startled awake by sounds that she thought might’ve been made by someone coming in the window. The first thought that followed her fear was that the intruder was the dentist, but there wasn’t anyone there at all. She lay back in bed and breathed deeply to slow her heart. It occurred to her that her feelings about the dentist were like the feelings she’d had when she’d seen those cheap, poorly done cartoons, that they were the echo of something that was not fully visible to her. Except that while the cartoons had nothing to do with her molestation, she couldn’t believe that the dentist’s almost morbidly bland public self had nothing to do with the increasingly alarming image she had of him. She felt she was sensing some secret part of him, something that was hurting him as well as her.
She had a lull in writing assignments. She watched TV a lot, mostly shows about crazy middle-aged women who were trying to kill the husbands who had left them for younger women, or shows about crazy perverted men who were trying to kill teenage girls who wouldn’t have sex with them. After she was finished watching TV, she sometimes went to bars and drank. She woke in the afternoon with slow, heavy headaches that were almost sweet. She met Joshua for dinner and Doreen for coffee. She talked to Pamela on the phone. At night, the dentist wafted peacefully above her head, close enough to keep her company but too far away for her to beat off about. That was fine with her. When he came into her mind during the day, she regarded him as a friend. She felt they’d gone through a lot together.
Because They Wanted To: Stories Page 17