Because They Wanted To: Stories

by Mary Gaitskill

  It felt very natural for her to call him and leave a message on his answering machine, inviting him to come to her apartment and have a drink. It must’ve seemed natural for him too, because he called her back that night, sounding bright and enthusiastic, for him. He said he’d just enjoyed several martinis but that, as usual, “I don’t feel a thing.” She asked him if he’d like to come to her house the following evening and not feel a thing with her—that is, to have a glass of wine after work. He said yes, he’d like that.

  When she described the evening to Alex, the magazine editor, she said that she’d grabbed the dentist and reached for his fly, but in truth that never happened; she was just trying to make a good story of it. Alex and she had just cautiously reconciled, after all, and she had wanted to feel close to him. He had started the conversation by telling a story about his unrequited passion for a beautiful young lap dancer, and her lie about the dentist seemed to follow naturally. “No!” said Alex. “You didn’t!”

  “Well, why not?” she replied testily.

  “My God, Jill, you probably frightened him to death. Couldn’t you have been more gentle?”

  She was taken aback; she would’ve expected a comment like that from Joshua, but Alex was an outrageously self-confident and rather jaded fellow. “But I wanted him to know how much I liked him,” she said.

  “In that case, hold his hand, don’t grab his dick.”

  “Really? You think?”

  “Yes! He probably felt totally unmanned. He sounds like the type who needs to feel in control, and you took that from him.”

  It was a nice observation, and probably an apt one even though she’d exaggerated the events of the evening.

  They had spent the first hour of their “drink” in stop-and-start conversation. They talked about Truman Capote and sexual harassment on the street. The dentist expressed outrage at the latter. Jill told him a story about a boy on the street who’d recently grabbed her breast, and how, although she’d turned around and kicked him in the butt, she actually had a certain perverse sympathy for the kid.

  “Oh, Jill,” said the dentist, “you think you’re so perverted, but you’re really not.”

  “I didn’t mean perverted, I meant perverse. It’s different.”

  “Even so. I’ve seen things you’d never even think of.”

  This remark so puzzled her that she disregarded it and raced ahead to describe how she could imagine that if she were a boy and she saw a pair of tits coming down the street, looming out of the dark in a skintight white shirt, she’d probably feel like grabbing one too.

  “You mean that was okay with you? Somebody just grabbing your body?”

  Under the propriety of the words she felt the other thing move. “George,” she said, “I’ve got to ask you something.”

  The dentist stood. The expression on his face and his eyes sank inward until nothing showed. “What?”

  She stood too. “Do you have sexual feelings for me?” she asked.

  When she described what had followed to Joshua, she said it was as if they were from different cultures, or that each of them was so involved in projecting onto the other that they weren’t actually addressing each other. But it was worse than that.

  He said he had never really thought about her sexually. He said he had to spend a lot of time getting to know a person before he had sex. He said this was all very unexpected and he needed to digest it. He asked if she would like to see a movie with him next week. She understood his words. She understood the sentiments that would seem, at least, to lie behind his words. But she felt something beneath those words that she didn’t understand. She said she didn’t want to see a movie. She said that if they got to know each other, they probably wouldn’t want to have sex. She told him that if she’d waited to get to know people before having sex, she’d probably still be a virgin. She didn’t understand what moved beneath her own words. It seemed too big to be chipped off in word form, but it didn’t matter; she kept talking until the dentist stepped forward and embraced her. She closed her eyes and extended her face upward, to kiss him. There was no sexual feeling in her body, and she didn’t feel any in his. That made her want to press against him all the more fiercely, as if she were pinching numb flesh to feel the dull satisfaction of force without effect. Then he bent his head and kissed her on the lips. She glimpsed his face; it was infused with tentative lewdness. A thin shock of sexual feeling flew up her center. It scared her as much as if it had been a tongue of flame shooting out of thin air, and she stepped away as quickly as he did. She almost said, “George, I’m scared, I’m so scared.” But she didn’t.

  “I’ve gotta go,” he said.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. She put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him down on the couch, except the pressure she exerted wasn’t enough to properly be called a push. Even so he sat, with a little affectation of imbalance; a sensualized shadow of benevolent goofiness passed over his face. It was familiar and dear, this shadow, and she couldn’t have it. In truth, she probably didn’t even want it, and he probably knew that. It occurred to her that he couldn’t have it, either, even though “it” was him. She sat down and curled her body against his. He put his arms around her.

  “Do you think this is strange?” she asked.

  “Am I supposed to think it’s strange?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s strange.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re not my type at all.”

  “Then why . . .?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was as false and cute as that of a ventriloquist’s dummy. But her real voice wouldn’t come out. She put her head against his chest. He stroked her hair. He said, “I have to go, Jill. I have to feed the dog. I’ll call you. I know I always say that, but I will this time.”

  On his way out, he complimented her on her choice of wine.

  She boiled some asparagus, poured salt on it, ate it, and watched TV She watched a show about a crazy middle-aged woman who seduced teenage boys and then made them kill people. About halfway through it, it occurred to her that the dentist was her type after all.

  She didn’t think of him that night. But in the nights that followed, she did. In her thoughts they did not have sex. They did not talk or look at each other. He only touched her in order to pierce her genitals with needles. She did not look at him or talk to him or touch him.

  Jill described these thoughts to her therapist. She said she wouldn’t consider them problematic if the dentist had been willing to put them into practice with her, but that it had become increasingly clear that he was not. She asked the therapist why she had encouraged her to be friendly with the dentist, pointing out that everyone else she knew had warned her off him. The therapist said that what Jill had described sounded like a fairly typical man who was perhaps a little bit frightened and immature, and that she thought Jill’s friends were simply “speaking out of their defenses.” Jill said that even if that were true, it was clear that her attraction had devolved into a masochistic compulsion and that the dentist himself appeared to be in the grip of some ghastly, half-conscious sadism. The therapist said that just because Jill had been hurt by the dentist didn’t make him a sadist, and Jill conceded that this was true.

  “The thing is, I didn’t want it to be about a piercing fantasy,” she said. “And I don’t think he wanted it to be this way, either. So I don’t understand what happened.”

  By the end of the session, it was decided that Jill projected her fears onto the dentist and then judged him, and that the more she judged, the more fear she felt. “I’d like to encourage you to stop taking a victim stance,” said the therapist. “Why don’t you show some compassion?”

  Pamela thought the therapist sounded like an idiot. She thought that the dentist was a secret sadist; even Joshua, who still maintained that the dentist was just “a scared guy,” thought he’d acted like a jerk. Doreen said he reminded her of a guy who had raped her some years back. Jill reminded her that the
dentist felt he didn’t know her well enough to rape her.

  “Well, this guy didn’t technically rape me, either,” said Doreen. “It was more of a head trip. He was like a poodle on my leg for months, even following me into my house to bug me. So finally, the last time he did that, I said, ‘Look, I don’t give a shit. You want it so bad, you can have it. Just do it and then get the fuck out of my life.’ And I took my pants off and just lay on the bed. I thought he’d be too embarrassed to do it, but he wasn’t. He fucked me.”

  “Did he at least get lost after that?”

  “Yeah.” Doreen laughed and blew smoke. “That was the good part.”

  She decided to write the dentist a note. She wrote that she was very confused about what had happened between them. She wrote that she had deeply appreciated the respect and kindness he had shown at the beginning of their relationship and that she didn’t understand why he now disrespected her by not calling her when he said he would. If he wanted to break off contact, she understood, but she would prefer him to do so in a spirit of kindness. She went to his office and left the note with his secretary, who smiled at her conspiratorially.

  “He actually called about the note,” she said to Lila. “He seemed like he really wanted to talk. His voice sounded different and everything.”

  “Yeah?” Briskly, Lila wrapped a piece of cellophane around Jill’s chemical-treated hair. “How was his voice different?”

  “More feeling. Softer.” Like he was having the pleasure of an emotional experience that would cost him nothing. “He said he had just been sorry that the tooth experience turned out so badly and that’s why he loaned me the computer. He apologized for not communicating and said he wasn’t very emotionally connected but that he liked me a lot. I said, Well, do you want to fuck or not?”

  “Hah!”

  “I guess it was kind of obnoxious. Anyway, he said, no, he didn’t think so. He said he couldn’t do it just like that. He said he was from the Midwest and that they were gentlemen there. He said he had to go but that he’d call me, which of course he didn’t.”

  “You should’ve told him that gentlemen call ladies when they say they will.”

  “Yeah, and anyway, what does he mean, that he’s too much of a gentleman to do it with me?”

  “Oh, no, I doubt it. Men are just funny. You remember that Italian guy I was with? I had a totally different situation with him. It was almost all sex right from the beginning.”

  “Was it nice?”

  “It was. . . gymnastic. And it was nice for a while, but then I began to feel like he was treating me like a whore. So I told him that. And he said, You know, you’re right.” Lila nodded with a satisfied equanimity that was augmented by the smart, nimble movements of her working fingers. “That was pretty much the end of the relationship, which was too bad in a way. We actually liked each other a lot. But the sex thing just went over the top.”

  They were silent while Lila attended to Jill’s hair. Jill enjoyed being enveloped in women’s voices and canned music and hair dryer noise. She loved being in a room of women engaged in personal bodily rituals meant to fulfill the need for understandable public signals. The women who worked here had a slightly beat-up, stalwart air, and there was a gallantry to their little pieces of jewelry, their inexpensive but smartly belted and accessorized outfits, their fussy fingernails, the jiggling curls one wore on either side of her face.

  “Lila, you used to be in Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, right?”

  “Yeah, for a year and a half. Why?”

  “My therapist suggested it. She said they make you promise to not have sex with anybody until you’ve known them for six months. But I don’t see how that would help. If you’re going to be compulsive, it seems like you could easily drag your compulsion out for six months. I know I could.”

  “Yeah, well, frankly, I came to the same conclusion.” With a graceful slouch, Lila reached for the cup of coffee amid her implements. “Although I also saw people do a lot of growing and sharing.”

  The last time Jill saw the dentist, she went to his office. She went when she knew he would just be finishing his office hours. She expected the secretary to be there, but she wasn’t. When Jill saw her empty desk, she hesitated. A door opened and the dentist emerged. He looked at her with the same neutral calm he had worn when he was tearing her tooth out piece by piece.

  “Hi,” said Jill. “I was in the neighborhood and I thought I’d drop by.”

  He said he was glad to see her but that the automatic surveillance system was just about to go on, and if anyone was in the room besides him, it would arouse the hired security.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I just dropped by on my way to an early movie.”

  “Oh?” He sounded curious. “What are you seeing?”

  “Just some silly thing this friend of mine’s ex-wife is in. She wouldn’t have sex with him for a year before they got divorced, and in the movie she’s playing opposite her new girlfriend, who in the movie apparently fucks the shit out of her with a strap-on. You’d think her ex-husband would be jealous, but I guess he’s just so proud of her for getting the part.”

  “Well, like I said, the system’s about to go on.”

  “Yeah, okay. I just wanted to ask you something.” She got distracted by the cup of cold coffee on the secretary’s desk, its red lipstick impress weak and melancholy in the harsh office light. The dentist followed her eye, and they both stared at the cup. “The last time you were at my house, why did you say I thought I was so perverted, when I’m really not?”

  “I don’t remember saying that.”

  “You did. You said you’d seen things I couldn’t even imagine, and I just wondered—”

  “I don’t remember, but I’m sure it didn’t mean anything.” He removed his white coat with such agitation he got his wrist stuck in one sleeve.

  “But people usually mean—”

  “I don’t mean anything! I’m a very simple person! I’m bland and I have a low level of emotional vibrancy and I like it that way!” He wrested his wrist free, then frantically fooled with his tie.

  “But—”

  “Why are you always saying these strange things to me? What do you want? Why are you always talking about sex?”

  “I’m not talking about sex right now. I—”

  “I didn’t say you were! But you—you’re—I’m just trying to be—”

  To her grief, she saw it was true: he was apoplectic with fear.

  Oh, honey, she thought. Oh, darling.

  “Call me tomorrow,” he said thickly. “I can’t talk anymore now.”

  This incident made a very funny story. Everyone laughed when Jill told it a few nights later, at a dinner with Alex the magazine editor, his friend the television producer, and an assortment of writers eager for a free dinner and an assignment. Most of the people at the table knew each other only tangentially; they had been assembled through an acquaintance of the producer’s, on the grounds that they were the most interesting people in San Francisco.

  “So at that point I was, like, this guy is kooky, so I just said goodbye and went to leave. And so he follows me out and holds the door for me and says, ‘Sorry I had to kick you out. But the rules are the rules.’ Referring, I suppose, to the automatic surveillance system.”

  “He really does sound peculiar,” said Alex.

  Alex and the television producer had come from New York on business. Most of the writers present were also “sex workers,” although one of them, an earnest bald woman, handed out cards advertising a therapy by which to recover from sex abuse. The television producer, a melancholy person with whom Jill once had a minor telephone flirtation, confided in her that Alex had arranged this dinner in order to meet Cindy, a determined and impish woman who published a stylish sex magazine. She had apparently written an article about anal sex which had gotten under his skin and provoked a correspondence. She seemed very nice, but Jill wondered why Alex couldn’t find anyone to have anal sex with in
New York.

  “Why do you like this guy?” Cindy asked. “Is he sexy in any way?”

  “Not in the normal ways.” Jill imagined the dentist standing before these people, and the bewildered looks on their faces. “Except I could feel. . . I’m convinced he’s a secret pervert and that he just doesn’t know it yet.”

  Cindy smiled appreciatively. “You think if you could just get him into a sling, he’d be fine?”

  “No, I don’t think he’d ever actually get into a sling, whether he wanted to or not. I think he’d just keep getting into slinglike positions in inappropriate situations.” Jill had of course just described herself, but Cindy didn’t know that, so she laughed. Jill wondered how Cindy would’ve reacted if she’d said, “Because I thought he was kind.”

  Several of the guests began to discuss the politics of the various strip clubs around town, one of them denouncing “those corporate strippers” who were really just middle-class girls who thought it was cool to be a sex worker. Someone else expressed disdain for those who said sex workers had all suffered child abuse and did such work as a result. Another got irritated over the negative portrayals of sex workers in the media. The woman to Jill’s left was muttering darkly about her desire to infect the water supply with chemicals that would sterilize the population.

  Longingly, Jill thought of the dentist at home with his entertainment center. As if reading her mind, Alex said she should’ve invited the dentist to the dinner this evening. “He wouldn’t have come, of course. He would’ve driven up and down the street looking in the windows over and over again, wondering whether or not he should come in. It would’ve driven him crazy.”