Because They Wanted To: Stories

by Mary Gaitskill

  Afterward, we lay against my throw pillows, cuddling and drinking chocolate milk. “Well,” I said. “I guess that was us.” She giggled and rubbed her nose on my stomach. My feral kitten crept round the bedroom door and peered at us, her wide eyes wistful, curious, and scared.

  Later in the week, we took a nighttime walk. We walked uphill to Noe Valley, talking through strained waves of breath. She talked about a book she wanted to publish, even though the author was a nut who called every day to pester Erin with questions about how best to advance her career. Her stride was long and confident, but the inclination of her head was mechanical and deferential. She asked me if I would ever again dress the way I had dressed when she’d first seen me. I said probably, but not to take uphill walks. She told me that a previous girlfriend, who had been molested by her father when she was little, had liked Erin to pretend to be her father while they were having sex; she asked me if I thought that was creepy. I said it definitely didn’t seem like they were relating directly as their real selves. She laughed and said it sure felt real to her. She pushed me against a car and tried to make me turn around. I snapped at her to cut it out; there was hurt feeling in her retraction, and I put my arm around her.

  We walked downhill and came upon the slovenly burghership of Twenty-fourth Street. People dressed in floppy clothing and carrying lumpy handbags walked up and down in complicated states of distraction. Two men were standing on the corner, each with a telescope, offering people the chance to admire the planets for fifty cents. One telescope was labeled “The Moon” and the other “Venus.” A group of children stood around them, looking as if they were willing to be delighted but weren’t sure that the moon and Venus were quite delightful enough.

  “Do you want to look?” asked Erin.

  I said yes because I could tell she wanted to. I did enjoy waiting in line with the kids; their hope for enchantment, glimmering just faintly through their premature disaffection, was poignant in its secret tenacity. Their mothers sat drinking cappuccino on the out-door bench of an expensive coffee shop, looking pleased to see their children engaged in such a good, simple activity. The moon was cold and beautiful.

  We held hands as we walked back up the hill. The city was sparkling and calm in panorama. Erin told me that she’d fantasized about adopting kids one day, but she knew she needed to “work on” herself before that could happen. She asked if I’d ever wanted to have a family.

  “No,” I said, “not for its own sake.” I paused, watching my shoes crease with each steep step. “If, when I was in my twenties, I’d fallen in love with someone and he’d loved me, I would’ve wanted to have children with him. And I probably would’ve loved it. But that didn’t happen, and I’m not going to be running around trying to get pregnant just to do it.”

  “It doesn’t make you sad?”

  “No. Although sometimes, when I hear friends talk about their babies, or other friends talk about how they desperately want to have babies, I wonder if I’m really sad and am just pretending I’m not.” My breath chugged earnestly. “I think I’m sadder that I don’t write poetry anymore. Although I’ve been thinking lately that I might start again. Not now, though. Maybe when I’m old.”

  “Cool.” She paused. “I just felt like pushing you up against a car again. But I won’t.”

  Erin shared a large flat with a former girlfriend named Jana and Jana’s girlfriend, Paulette. The house had a tiny yard full of saucy flowers. Erin’s two large cats sat on the pavement or bounded and promenaded about the area. I loved coming to Erin’s house. Every time I rounded the corner and saw it, I felt I was approaching a place where tenderness and good humor prevailed.

  One night I came unannounced, surprising Erin in her lavender thermal pajamas. We sat together on her bed and enjoyed the garish comfort of her electric fireplace. To entertain me, she brought a large cardboard box out of the closet and showed me what was in it. There were somber albums of family pictures (tiny, troubled Erin in a ruffled swimsuit, handsome Dad looking absently at something outside the frame, towering, pissed-off Mom), a plaque that had been awarded her in a high school photography contest, a track team trophy, a bracelet her brother had made for her in junior high, love letters, an artificial penis made of rubber, an apparatus with which to strap it on, an odd assortment of small plastic animals, and some Polaroids of Erin naked except for a dog collar and leash around her neck. She explained that the pictures had been taken by a heterosexual couple whom she had met when she’d answered their advertisement for a “slave girl.”

  “They totally loved me,” she said. “It was great, but I got tired of it before they did. They dragged it out too long. They kept making it a big deal that he was eventually going to fuck me with his cock—the way they went on about it, I just lost interest.”

  I looked at the Polaroids. I was slightly discomfited by her thinness; her ribs showed and her eyes looked starved and abnormally luminous.

  “I forgot they even took those pictures until they sent them to me a month later.” She put them in a pile and placed them back in the box. She indicated the rubber penis. “I was going to use that on you,” she said. “But it reminds me too much of Jana. You deserve your own cock.”

  Maybe because she had told me a story, I told her one about myself. It was something that had happened when, as a teenager, I had tried having sex for money. I told her the story to excite her, and I could see right away that it did. At first it excited me too; I had never told anyone about it before.

  “He didn’t want me to take my panty hose off, he just wanted me to bend over and pull them down to about midthigh, which sort of embarrassed me. But I did it, and then I bent over and waited, and he didn’t do anything.”

  “Yeah?” We were lying together, Erin up on her elbow, her eyes dilating slightly as she went into the rigid psychic suspension required by fantasy. She was, I thought, the only person I could tell this story to.

  “On one hand, I was embarrassed on account of the panty hose thing, but on the other hand, I was very matter-of-fact—I guess teenagers just naturally are. I said, ‘Um, are you, like, doing some-thing or what?’ And he didn’t say anything, so I said, ‘Well, what are you doing?’ And he said, ‘Shut up. I’m doing what I gotta do.’”

  “Which was?”

  I realized that I was not excited anymore. I was not embarrassed, either. I didn’t know what I felt.

  “What did he do?”

  I put my face against her chest.

  She ruffled my hair. “C’mon.”

  I tilted my head up and whispered in her ear.

  Erin yelped with glee. “He jerked off on you?” She fell down on her back and roared with laughter. We rolled around laughing, me tickling her, her little chin pointing at the ceiling. Then she grabbed me and held my head against her chest, and I felt, under her quick breath, her radiant tenderness; it was as if some secret part of her had come out to touch me gently and had then drawn back into its hiding place.

  The next day I was shopping in a clothing store and daydreaming about Erin, when a pop song on the sound system took my imagination in a facile grab. It was a flimsy love song, sung in a high, caressing register. There was real feeling in it, but the singer had tortured it into deformed and precious shapes that debased his own emotionality with a methodical viciousness that was quite breathtaking and gave the bland song an odd, obscene jolt. It reminded me of Frederick and the artificial civility just veiling his furious contempt. It also reminded me of Erin, offering her flowers to no one. These images seemed opposite each other but at the same time locked together in an electrical stasis, each holding the other in place.

  It was a very popular song. I had seen the singer interviewed on TV. He was a foppish young man who seemed thoroughly disgusted to find himself so liked.

  We no longer talked about trying to have sex as “ourselves.” Some-times this was all right with me; we could find a little slot to occupy and frantically wiggle around in it until we were both satisfied.
Other times I felt disgruntled and ashamed of myself. On those occasions I was aware that I was offering her only a superficial tidbit of myself, a tidbit tricked out to look substantial. It was dishonest, but our tacit agreement to be dishonest together at least allowed a tiny moment of exchange that I wasn’t sure was possible otherwise. And perhaps it was not fair to call her behavior dishonest, since she was so used to it that to her it felt true.

  We saw each other two or three times a week, usually for dinner or a movie. Sometimes we went out with her friends. They were loud, lewd, exhibitionistic, and kind. They were a comedienne, an office worker, a photographer, and a waitress who wrote acerbic short stories. They were mostly ten years younger than me, and in their presence I felt enveloped in bracing female warmth that I did not experience with most people my own age, certainly not with my august colleagues. I loved standing around with them in the dark of some bar, talking sex trash. They made fun of me for having sex with men, although most of them occasionally did too.

  “When I have guy fantasies, I want it to be a frat boy thing,” said Gina, the robust waitress. “I want them to call me bitch and make me suck their cocks and all that.”

  “I like something more refined myself,” I said. “Cruel but refined.”

  “I’m the reverse about guys,” said Lana. She was a curvaceous girl with loud clothes, severe hair, and signifying glasses. “Women can degrade me sometimes, if I really like them. But if I’m with men I want them to get on their knees and worship it. And they have to mean it.”

  Their talk was like a friendly shoving match between giggling kids, a game about aggression that made aggression harmless. Although I wasn’t sure that it was completely harmless. It was fun to say that I liked something refined and cruel, but under the fun was an impatient yank of boredom and under that was indignation and pain.

  One night Gina wore a rubber cock strapped onto her body under her pants. She clownishly pressed it against the rumps of men, who laughed and jovially explained that she was doing it wrong. She pressed it against my thigh, and I cooed and groped the rubber thing, arching my back and butt in a satire of narcissism and subservience.

  “I’ll give Erin ten dollars if she’ll get on her knees and suck Gina’s cock,” said Donna.

  Erin smiled and began to move forward. “She doesn’t need ten dollars,” I said.

  “Just for you, baby,” said Gina.

  “She doesn’t need it,” I said, and put my arm around Erin’s waist. Erin’s smile stuck, and she halted uncertainly.

  “Aww, Susan loves Erin,” said Donna.

  We all went to dance, our movements sloppily describing friendship, sex, display, and animal warmth, all in a loop of drunkenness that equalized every sensation. The bar was saturated with dumb, lurid kinesis. Mischievous entities with blearily smiling faces peeped from behind corners. I loved these young women.

  But the next day, our posturing seemed stupid. I sat in my office between hours, thinking of the moment when Donna had offered Erin ten dollars, and I felt embarrassed. I imagined my officemate, a hale critic in her fifties, witnessing the exchange in the bar. I imagined her smiling gamely, eager to approve of these young women who were, after all, “gender bending.” I imagined her smile faltering as she registered that Erin’s eager response had nothing to do with sex, or even with fun. I imagined her frowning and turning away. I closed my eyes and felt this imagined rejection. I wanted to protect Erin from it, to make my officemate see her in all her different aspects—her brave flowers, her swagger, her private tenderness. That way I made my oblivious officemate bear the discomfort I didn’t want to feel.

  When I got in bed that night I thought of Erin erotically, but my thoughts quickly became inarticulate. I pictured her staring at me like a frightened animal. I imagined a deep, perpetual moan that racked her body but did not come out of her mouth. I pictured the organs in her abdomen dry as old roots, parched for lack of some fundamental nurture that she had never received and was trying futilely to find.

  The next night we had dinner together. She pulled my chair out for me, as she always did. Her gestures and expressions were piquant and feisty, but for me they were occluded by the way I had imagined her the previous night. What I saw in front of me and what I had imagined both seemed real, yet one seemed to have nothing to do with the other. I was appalled to realize that I didn’t want to see her again.

  Still, I invited her into my apartment. We sat on my living room rug, and I brought us dishes of tapioca pudding that I had made. There was subtle discomfort between us; I wondered if she had seen the change in me or if there had also been a change in her. She tried to kiss me, and I said I wasn’t sure I wanted to have sex. She said okay. We ate our desserts and talked. I said I didn’t think I wanted to stay in San Francisco. I said I thought my apartment was beautiful but that it seemed to me like a way station.

  “There are so many doors and hallways in this place,” I said. “It makes it seem like a crossroads.”

  “Is that how you think of me?” asked Erin.

  Her question startled me. I said no, and took her hand and kissed her, but I wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth. She kissed me back as though she knew this. Kissing, we toppled onto the floor. The moan I had sensed in her was nearly palpable, but I knew she didn’t feel it. My kiss became an escalating slur of useless feeling. I kissed her to locate her, but it was no good; she was all in fragments. I took her wrist. “Don’t slap me,” I said. “I don’t want that.” She disengaged her wrist and pulled up my skirt. I knew I should not let this happen. She pulled my panty hose and underwear down. Inwardly, I rushed forward, trying to engage her, to find one tiny place we could wiggle around in together. She flew by me in an electrical storm. She had discovered that I didn’t want her, but she was ignoring her discovery. Without knowing why, I ignored it too. I rifled my memories of her, all her different faces; none of them stayed with me. She handled me roughly. Tomorrow, I thought, I would tell her I didn’t want to be intimate anymore. I closed my eyes. She was doing something strange. I opened my eyes.

  She slapped my crotch with a handful of tapioca.

  Jerkily, I sat up and stared. “Erin,” I said, “what are you doing?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “It just felt right.” She giggled nervously and contracted herself. Her open hand sat in her lap, wet with beads of tapioca.

  Absurd tears came to my eyes. I felt almost as if someone had thrown a pie in my face, but that wasn’t why the tears had come. “What a gross, inconsiderate thing to do.” But that wasn’t right, either.

  “Oh, Susan, come on.”

  She reached for me, and I pulled away. My stingy tears went dry. Erin shrugged and self-consciously ate some tapioca off her hand. Then she rubbed her nose with the back of it.

  “I’ll get some paper towels,” she said. “I’ll clean the carpet.”

  “I’ll be right back,” I said. “I’m going to take a shower.”

  When I returned, Erin was seated on the couch, her limbs held tight into her body. Even in the dark, I could see she wore the starved face I’d seen in the Polaroids the swinging heterosexuals had taken of her.

  “Do you want me to go?” she said.

  “I don’t know.” I knelt and put my hand on her foot. “I think so.”

  “I’ll go if you want. But I don’t want you to think I’m a jerk. I didn’t do that to be a jerk.”

  “I know, Erin,” I said.

  “You know, you seem so vulnerable,” she said. “You say you want to be real. But you don’t. Not really.”

  I took my hand off her foot and turned my head away. The silence held varied beats and long, slow pulses.

  When she left, she held my face in her hand and kissed me. “I probably won’t call you for a while,” she said. “But you can call me, if you need to process.”

  After she was gone, I lay on the floor until I noticed that my old cat was eating leftover tapioca from a dish. I got up to put the dishes away, and then g
ot in bed. I had a puzzling sensation of triumph at finding myself alone, a sensation that took me happily into sleep.

  But I woke in two hours, sweating and throwing off the blankets. I wondered if Erin had thrown the tapioca at me because she had been angry. Or perhaps what had felt like anger was just the random overspill of a ceaseless internal spasm. I imagined the terrible moan inside her, like an endless, coughing dry sob. I imagined it so acutely that I was transfigured by it. The pain of it was so ugly it was almost revolting, and yet there was something desperately vital about it. I tried to think what “it” was. My kitten woke and touched me with her small muzzle. She allowed me to stroke her; even in her slumberous state, her small body was quick and fierce with life. She felt her life all the way down to the bottom. Everybody wants it, I thought. Erin has it, but she can’t bear it. Again, I saw her low internal organs, parched but tough and fiercely alive, holding on.

  Stuff

  An acquaintance of mine, a philosophy professor at a neighboring university, had finally succeeded in selling one of the many screen-plays he had bitterly toiled over and was giving a big party to celebrate. Friends of his, a married screenwriting couple, gave me a ride to the party. The woman was a thin, excitable person who appeared to be keeping a strict inner watch on an invisible set of perfectly balanced objects, lest any of them fall over or even fractionally shift position. The man seemed to inhabit a benevolent, functional daze. It apparently disturbed the woman that I was single. “You can’t just stay at home,” she said, gripping the seat back as she torqued herself around to face me. “You’ve got to go to classes and lectures and meditation groups, places where there might be single men.”