by Nic Kelman
At one point two of the boys head for the bathroom, arguing about what you meant by something, but, finding it full and unable to wait, they go outside to pee.
And they come back in saying, “Dude! Is that your car out there?! It’s awesome!” And the girls see that the boys they were so impressed by a few hours ago are impressed by you, by the fact that a certain thing belongs to you. They ask them about it, what is so special about it. And the boys talk about it, know its specifications far better than you do. Except the gas mileage, the one specification you do know, the one specification you have calculated. For the gas mileage they only know the fictional figure written in the handbook. One of them mentions the price among the list of numbers he reels off. Of course, he forgets to include the tax, and the import fees, and the fact that these cars are so hard to get that the dealer asked 15 percent over sticker on yours, he forgets these numbers the sum of which would be enough to pay for a year of his college tuition and living expenses. The other, in response to a question from one of the girls, says, “Let’s just say that that’s more power than you could ever possibly need.”
Then one of the boys, one who didn’t go outside, asks if they can sit in it. And you are surprised, strangely thrilled. “Sure!” you say. “If you want to.”
And everyone troops outside to see the car. The girls stand back a little while the boys crowd around. As they take their turns sitting in the driver’s seat, you notice the mud on their shoes but don’t say anything — you don’t want to seem too uptight, uncool. Then you remember the box of cigars you had taken up to Boston, illegal cigars, cigars that each cost more than these kids would probably spend in three days on food. And you get it out and unseal it and offer them around. The boys each take one, the girls share one.
Back inside, the boys look at you after their first drags, after they hold their first drags in their mouths too long, and nod and say, “Wow,” and “Great,” as if they knew. And they stubbornly finish them even though one of them looks a little green by the time he is done. The girls don’t even finish the one between them, it ends up smoldering, an abandoned wet little stump with rings of clashing lipstick.
And maybe, just maybe, you catch one of the girls looking at you, the one who saw the movie once, catch her not joining in the conversation around her, looking at you with a serious expression. She looks away in a hurry. And later you see her friends teasing her quietly. And maybe, just maybe, as it gets late, she asks if you’ll take her back to campus. You agree — after all, why not, you’re not too drunk to drive. You wouldn’t do it if you were, you’re not irresponsible, you don’t want to go to jail.
And as you drive, she talks to you. She is done with questions about you, she knows everything about you she needs to know, wants to know, would even understand. Instead she begins to talk about herself incessantly. And for some reason you are fascinated, not bored as you are when women your own age talk like this. You could listen to her talk about her problems endlessly, about her grades, about her parents, about her teachers, not just because her problems aren’t really problems, not just because you know everything will be fine, but, you realize, because her problems have nothing to do with you, because her life has nothing to do with your life. And when she talks about her hopes, about how she wants to be a veterinarian, you can listen and smile and nod and say “that would be exciting” or “I’ve been there, it’s beautiful in the spring” because they are still hopes, because they have not yet become worries. Because her hopes remind you hope exists at all.
And maybe, just maybe, she asks if you want to see her room. And that’s the moment when you realize you need to make a decision. That’s the moment when you ask yourself what you are doing here, what you are going to do here. That’s the moment when you realize you haven’t been thinking about the “SNAFU” since you started playing pool, when you realize you haven’t thought about the front door to your house opening since you started talking to this girl and her friends.
But when you actually find yourself in her room, her room with a poster of some obscure independent film and a stuffed koala on her bed, her room with a picture of only her mother and her siblings on her desk, her room with the former family computer, you have second thoughts, feel awkward, out of place, like you shouldn’t be there, like you should be ashamed to be there. You begin thinking that maybe you’ve made a mistake, that this is undignified. But then in one smooth, practiced motion, she slips her dress off over her head, reveals those breasts that look like they are actually trying to leap free from their confinement, walks over to you in her underwear and stands on tiptoe and sticks her tongue in your mouth while she starts to undo your belt and you forget all about that.
And maybe, just maybe, underneath her panties, she has a tattoo of a red teddy bear walking in profile on its hind legs. And maybe, just maybe, seeing how crazy it makes you, she jerks you off on it. And then maybe she scoops up some of your semen and, looking right at you, licks it off the ends of her fingers. It has been years since your wife — your wonderful, understanding wife — has done anything like that.
“‘For as I detest the doorways of Death, I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another.’” — Achilles, Iliad 9:312
And even the nicest girls we sleep with, the ones we find the most charming, the ones our families ask us about, say, “What happened to Jenni — she was so nice.” Even they love it when we abuse them in bed. Yes, abuse them. Even they ask questions like, “Am I your slut? Your whore? Your dirty bitch?” and then shudder when you say, “Yes. . . yes.” Even they ask us to tie them up, to blindfold them, to use them.
And if they don’t like it, if you use those words and they stop moving, put their hand on your mouth, say, “Don’t say that — don’t use that word — I don’t like it,” if they say they don’t want to try being handcuffed to the towel rack in the bathroom, they’re never any good in bed. They may be brilliant. They may be nice. They may be witty, charming, etc., etc. They may be doing something for women’s liberation (over what? over whom?). But they’re never any good in bed.
And it’s not because we feel threatened, it’s not because they’re taking control. It’s not because of that and that’s not what they’re doing anyway. Every man likes a dominant woman once in a while, a woman to order him around, to tell him what to do in bed, to say, “Eat my pussy,” and, “Good. Now fuck me. But don’t cum until I tell you to.” Some men like that all the time.
No, it’s because they want there to be a balance of power. They want things to be equal. It’s because they don’t understand good sex has nothing to do with equality.
It may seem like a minor thing when we tip a waitress a little more because she smiles.
It may seem like a minor thing that corporations employ more beautiful women in sales than in other departments.
It may seem like a minor thing that being a centerfold has become a perfectly legitimate route to celebrity.
These all may seem like minor things.
And when we began looking for a house, you loved everywhere. You loved the place where the kitchen was too small. You loved the place with no land. You loved the place next to the school yard.
Eventually I teased you about it and you said, “It’s because anywhere will be wonderful if we live there together so it doesn’t matter what it’s like.” I let you choose in the end, I also didn’t think it mattered what it was like.
Before we moved the furniture in, you insisted we have sex in every room. “To baptize it,” you said. “To make it special.”
“‘A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much. Nothing is won for me, now that my heart has gone through its afflictions in forever setting my life on the hazard of battle. For as to her unwinged young ones the mother bird brings back morsels, wherever she can find them, but as for herself it is suffering, such was I, as I lay through all the many nights unsleeping, such as I wore through the bloody days of th
e fighting, striving with warriors for the sake of these men’s women. . . .
‘All the other prizes of honour he gave the great men and the princes are held fast by them, but from me alone, of all the Achaians he has taken and keeps the bride of my heart. Let him lie beside her and be happy. Yet why must the Argives fight with the Trojans? And why was it the son of Atreus assembled and led here these people? Was it not for the sake of lovely-haired Helen? Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful, loves her who is his own . . . as I . . . though it was my spear that won her.’” — Achilles, Iliad 9:320
You look in the mirror — you take care of yourself but you still have those ridges now, they have grown above your pelvis. They are not ugly, exactly, but they are weight. You cannot make them go away.
One out of every two marriages ends in divorce.
Four out of five spouses admit to cheating on their partner — we don’t know how many of the remaining 20 percent are simply not admitting it.
Thousands of people are employed by sports teams and film shoots and companies, by men with enough money, to “look after” wives. Ostensibly their job is to make sure the wives are happy and comfortable and get taken shopping, whether it’s to exclusive local hand-painted scarf boutiques or to remote villages known for their blue-glazed pottery. But in reality their job is to assist in keeping the wives away from the husbands when the husbands want to “play.” And, truth be told, the majority of the wives know precisely what these “assistants” are being paid for, the majority of the wives have no illusions.
So who is it, exactly, that we think we’re fooling?
She lets you — no, wants you to take dirty pictures of her. “Come on!” she says. “Just for you,” she says, “you know, for when we can’t be together.”
So there you are. Hiding from your wife. On a Wednesday night in one of your eleven bathrooms with your Armani pants around your ankles. A forty-two-year-old man worth hundreds of millions of dollars, a king, masturbating like a schoolboy over a single page torn from Hustler because you can’t wait for the weekend.
Except it isn’t a page from a magazine. It’s a Polaroid of her on the beach. You have others but this is your favorite. She is leaning back against a large rock. It is craggy and ferrous, an enormous glossy clot. Just to the left of it, at the edge of the picture, in the distance on the white beach, people can be made out sunbathing, families. The beach is so white they seem like drawings on a piece of paper. You don’t remember framing the picture so they could be seen, you’re almost certain you didn’t mean to. She is wearing the bikini you bought her, the $340 bikini that is mostly little ropes. With her right hand she is lifting her left breast up and out of the bikini, towards her tiny mouth, her extended, curled tongue. Her head is bent down as far as it will go, her blond hair cascading, veiling the right side of her body down to her stomach. Her eyes are closed. Her left hand is thrust inside her bikini bottoms. Her hair and her tongue glisten as do the most polished, most metallic edges of the rock forming a drunken spider’s web behind her. If you look closely, and you have, you can see the sun reflected in her tongue stud. A brilliant, painful point.
There are so many things about this picture that can make you cum. The fact that her eyes are closed as if she were in a deep and dreamless sleep. The metal in her tongue so close to the puckered, pink flesh of her nipple. Her tan right arm curving across her body, striped like a tiger by her hair. And, perhaps most of all, her bikini bottoms raised into ridges by her fingers, the highest peak the bump of what you know is the middle joint of her middle finger, poised to push into herself.
She’s mad to take risks like that, crazy. Masturbating behind a rock on a crowded beach and letting you take pictures of her. Doesn’t she understand she — you — we — could get caught? Doesn’t she understand exactly how close to the edge we all are? But then, she has nothing to lose. And it is because she is mad that you must be with her. Because her madness is infectious.
When you are done you are suddenly filled not with guilt but with terror. You are afraid someone might somehow find the pictures. Afraid you will go to jail. Afraid you will lose everything you have. But most of all, you are afraid of the embarrassment. No one will understand everything she is to you, that she is everything to you, that she is worth the risk, that without her everything you have is nothing. No one will understand any of this. You will just be someone who made an underage girl pose for dirty pictures, someone who collected child pornography.
And you swear to yourself you’ll get rid of the pictures first thing in the morning. You swear to yourself that this time it’s just for the night you’re putting them back in their strongbox which is itself in the safe in your study.
And you may even keep your promise. It’s possible that your resolve will in fact remain in the morning. That you’ll burn them.
But a few weeks later, she’ll convince you to take some more in the back stacks at a public library. And she won’t have to try very hard.
“‘I have many possessions there that I left behind when I came here on this desperate venture, and from here there is more gold, and red bronze, and fair-girdled women, and grey iron I will take back; all that was allotted to me. But my prize; he who gave it, powerful Agamemnon, son of Atreus, has taken it back again outrageously. Go back and proclaim to him all that I tell you, openly . . . wrapped as he is forever in shamelessness; yet he would not, bold as a dog though he be, dare look in my face any longer.
‘I will join with him in no counsel, and in no action. He cheated me and he did me hurt. Let him not beguile me with words again . . . not if he gave me gifts as many as the sand or the dust is, not even so would Agamemnon have his way with my spirit until he made good to me all this heartrending insolence.
‘Nor will I marry a daughter of Atreus’ son, Agamemnon . . . not if she matched the work of her hands with grey-eyed Athena . . . . For if the gods will keep me alive, and I win homeward, Peleus himself will presently arrange a wife for me. There are many Achaian girls in the land of Hellas and Phthia, daughters of great men who hold strong places in guard. . . . And the great desire in my heart drives me rather in that place to take a wedded wife in marriage, the bride of my fancy, to enjoy with her the possessions won by aged Peleus.
‘For not worth the value of my life are all the possessions they fable were won for Ilion, that strong-founded citadel, in the old days when there was peace. . . . Of possessions cattle and fat sheep are things to be had for the lifting, and tripods can be won, and the tawny high heads of horses, but a man’s life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth’s barrier.
‘For my mother Thetis the goddess of the silver feet tells me I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death. Either, if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans, my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting; but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers, the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life left for me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly.’” — Achilles, Iliad 9:364
You are visiting St. Peter’s with your wife. You haven’t been married very long. You bought a new camera for this little vacation. It is impossibly small, a spy camera, very expensive. In the basilica, your wife overhears a couple about your own age speaking English and asks them if they’d take a picture of you. When she hands the woman the camera, she is fascinated by it. She can’t believe how small it is. “Look how small it is!” she says to her husband. They are dressed differently from the two of you, in clothes sold in large stores where entire families can shop. He just nods and says, “Uh-huh.” Then your wife, thrilled with the camera to begin with, eager to show it off to someone else who appreciates it, says, “Isn’t it great? And look — it does this and this and this.” And she shows the other woman all the things this camera does, this camera that is so well machined it resembles the
eye of some kind of surgical robot. At last the other woman says to her husband, “Honey — we have to get one of these!”
And before he replies he looks at you and shakes his head slightly and rolls his eyes, then he says without looking at his wife, flashing his eyes and his eyebrows briefly up to heaven, “Oh sure, honey, no problem, we’ll pick one up this afternoon. . . .” And she laughs but you know he’ll hear about that camera for some time. And always when he least expects it. And you know he’ll never be able to buy her one. And you suddenly feel very bad for him. You suddenly want to take him aside and slip him the money for the camera — nothing to you, almost spare change — and say, “Here, here you go, get her the camera.” But you know you could never do that. You know that would be even more embarrassing. You know that would damage his pride. You know that would change his camaraderie to resentment, that that would destroy the moment the two of you shared when, without speaking he said, I don’t hate you for being able to give your wife something my wife wants because I know your wife wants things you can’t give her. I know that no matter how much we have, it is never enough. I know that if she had the camera, she’d want your tennis court.” So you just feel bad for him and leave it at that.
And then, once the picture’s taken, as you part ways and wander off towards the dome, your wife says, “They seemed like a nice couple, didn’t they?”
All over the world, we see dead people. Everywhere we go, we visit graves and cemeteries and cities of the dead, we take excursions to tombs or pyramids or burial mounds or stupas, we make a point of seeing at least one monument, one cenotaph, one cromlech, one battlefield before we take our leave. Even on vacation we not only can’t get away from death, we seek it out. Even on vacation, there are epitaphs everywhere we look.