Girls

by Nic Kelman

  And yet sometimes it is not condescension, sometimes we really do enjoy their company. Sometimes, when they talk about their three-month stay on a Navajo reservation or their volunteer work on emissions control, we find them endearing. Like a child noticing fire hydrants or telephone lines and pointing them out to us.

  And also like that child they make us see what we haven’t seen in years, what we couldn’t remember ever seeing until they pointed it out. And in the seeing is rejuvenation, for what is being a child if not seeing like a child?

  And that is why we follow them sometimes, why we let them lead us around, why we let them do that even when our friends start saying, “You?! You’re going to a pro-choice rally?! She really has you whipped, doesn’t she? Of course, I don’t blame you — if I had a piece of tail like that I’d do anything she wanted too.” But they’re wrong. It’s not that you’re doing what she wants it’s that she makes you want what she does, reminds you that you used to want those things too, reminds you not everyone was always the way you are now not even yourself, makes you feel like there is a point to those pointless battles she has the energy to fight, makes you feel good about yourself again, makes you think once more that maybe your life could have some meaning after all. Like your high school soccer coach once made you believe you could win the last game after you’d lost all season, she makes you believe.

  But if your own daughter came to you, your own daughter who is, you’ve calculated, older than she is by fifteen weeks, if she came to you and said she wanted to spend the summer before her senior year working for the Red Cross outside Calcutta, you’d tell her she was being ridiculous. You’d tell her it was a waste of time, that she had to take the internship you arranged for her at your attorney’s firm. You’d tell her the sooner she knew what the real world was like, the sooner she knew what it took to survive, the better. You’d tell her not everyone is lucky enough to have the opportunities she does.

  The Lamia is considered by many to be the first example of a vampire in folklore and mythology because she drank the blood of her victims.

  The Lamia, however, killed her victims out of spite, not necessity.

  The Lamia was not a revenant.

  The Lamia commanded no supernatural talents, she could not, for example, change shape at will, she did not possess enormous strength.

  The Lamia was not able to pass as a member of society.

  In fact, if we look closely, the Lamia is really part of that mythology to which the Harpies, the Scylla, and eventually the New England witch belong, that mythology in which a monster in the form of the opposite sex threatens to destroy us. If we look closely it is, in fact, obvious that the Lamia is not part of that mythology in which a monster draws something from contact with youth (usually sexual contact and preferably virginal youth) that will give it power, or, at the very least, sustain it in a state of undeath. It is difficult, for example, to trace a line between the Lamia and the immensely popular modern Japanese hentai manga or anime in which normal men are transformed into demons by the sight of schoolgirls whose prompt rape gives them the strength to remain materialized.

  It was when we stopped going to museums. For years we had gone almost every weekend, almost every weekend there was something, somewhere we wanted to see. Then, one weekend, there wasn’t. That was when it was over between us. When we stopped going to museums.

  And yet we stayed married for years after that. Years. Why did we do that?

  . . . “‘and Idas. . . was the strongest of all men upon earth in his time; for he even took up the bow to face the King’s onset, Phoibus Apollo, for the sake of the sweet-stepping maiden . . . ”’ — Iliad 9:558

  You remember your first report card from high school. Your home room teacher had written under the general comments section, “Less Romeo, more study.” Your mother and father told you to listen to what she said, that it was good advice. So you began to study more, you began to do well. And your parents were proud of you and told you so and told all their friends how smart you were, how well you were doing in school.

  But that first report card was the only one your father ever actually took out to show his friends.

  If you talk to enough porn stars and strippers, or if you read enough interviews with them, you start to realize there is only one thing that is true about them all.

  They are not all bimbos. Many are quite witty and more than a few are actually very bright.

  They do not all hate their work. Some actually quite enjoy it, think it’s fun, can’t believe they can get paid for having sex.

  They are not all drug addicts. In fact, since HIV, most are strongly against drug use and will refuse to work with anyone who is an addict.

  They do not all have low self-esteem. Many are precisely the reverse — very proud, very sure of themselves, so self-reliant for so long, so used to establishing boundaries so often, they don’t take shit from anyone, least of all the men they sleep with.

  They did not all grow up in broken homes or homes with drug or alcohol problems or homes where they were sexually abused as children. (Although one or more of these things tends to be true in over 95 percent of cases.)

  No, the one thing that is true without exception about every porn star or stripper is that they grew up poor.

  You are in Amsterdam and you can’t believe your virility with this girl. Resigned, long past shame, you had asked them for the youngest girl they had. It is legal to prostitute girls over the age of fifteen in Amsterdam. Some people go there for the legalized drugs. Not you.

  One time, a few years ago, you had paid a hooker — a former Playboy centerfold — fifteen thousand dollars to go to Key West with you for a weekend. She was, without a doubt, worth every penny. She was spectacularly beautiful, the kind of girl you and your friends thought you would only ever dream of having when you were teenagers. She was highly skilled too, knew how to do everything just right. She had nice clothes, seemed well educated, was not embarrassing at dinner with your friends and their girlfriends and wives. Most of them, the other women, assumed she was your girlfriend. The men, even the men you didn’t know at all, knew better. It was your interactions that gave you away. You were too comfortable around her, too relaxed. It was obvious you didn’t care what she thought about anything you said or did, obvious you were unafraid of repercussion, unafraid of not getting what you wanted. The two of you were so goddamn friendly with each other. Like two men who have just met but immediately discover they like each other. Yes, she was perfect. And that whole weekend you came maybe, what, four or five times. Certainly by Sunday you were so uninterested you sublet her out to a friend of yours and his wife.

  And yet here, in Amsterdam, with this girl, in one night you have cum three times already. This girl they sent up really is young. It’s possible she’s not even sixteen. The traces of childhood are gone — the gangliness, the spindly limbs and neck, the overlarge eyes — but just barely. Her hips have hardly swollen enough to give her a waist, her breasts will still develop a little more. But God is she sexy. She has the most beautiful eyes, the fullest lips. When you opened your door the thought that she might be too young flashed through your mind for a second, just for a second, but then you dismissed it, asked yourself what that meant anyway, by whose standards, by where’s standards, she was capable of carrying a baby wasn’t she? In Egypt she would already be a married mother of more than one child. And God is she sexy, you thought. She was squinting slightly as she looked at you, had her face slightly lowered and turned to the left, was looking up at you just a little bit, pouting just a little bit. You couldn’t control yourself. You pulled her inside the room, closed the door, and fucked her right there, right up against the door, her clothes still on. And she kissed you. Really kissed you, opened her mouth wide, shoved her tongue in your mouth, couldn’t kiss you enough. She wasn’t very good at it, messy, unpracticed, your teeth collided, but they were the best kisses you’d ever had. And hookers never kiss you, or if they do, it is controlled,
unabandoned, designed to produce a particular effect. It is not for its own sake. This girl, this young hooker, still kissed for its own sake.

  And when you were done, you actually felt a little guilty, even you. You looked at her (she looked right back, looked right into your eyes with your cock still inside her, with her arms still around your shoulders, looked right into your eyes and shoved her hips forward and when you nearly collapsed because she did that, when your knees nearly gave out because you were so sensitive, she opened her mouth wide and laughed a hard, happy laugh, smiling and snarling all at once, all with her mouth open wide) you looked at her and thought, “This girl has a problem. This girl is addicted to sex. This girl likes fucking strange men and if she gets paid for it, so much the better.” You looked at her and thought, “This girl was probably repeatedly molested when she was a child.”

  But then she pulled herself off you and walked over to the bed, leaving her skirt hiked up around her waist, not bothering to pull her skirt down, it not even occurring to her that there’d be anything about her body you wouldn’t like, that she should be ashamed of anything about her body, showing you that her legs, at least, were fully developed, were very long compared to her torso. But then she undressed and got into your bed. But then she rolled around under the expensive sheets, enjoying their feel against her body. But then she turned over at last and pulled them back to make a space for you and showed you her naked body lying stretched out on its side and beckoned you with one finger and you found you were already getting another erection, found that you were ready to fuck her again. “She must think it’s her,” you thought as she pulled you into bed by your cock. “She must think men can do it over and over with her because she’s sexy or because she’s a great fuck. I wonder if she even knows we’re not always like this, not always capable of this? If she doesn’t, I wonder what she’ll think in a few years when her clients start wanting to fuck her only once, maybe twice, and then want her to leave, don’t want her to stay the entire night?” You thought all this in a second and then lost yourself in her.

  And that time and the last time, after you were done, again the guilt came back, the concern for her. Yes, concern. But then you put your hand on the bone of her hip, saw the curve of her ribs on her side beneath her right breast, saw the back of her knee, and you had to have her again. And every time you reach over to take her again, she laughs that laugh, that cold, hard, satisfied laugh.

  Each time the time in between grows longer, to be sure, you worry about her more, but you still manage to fuck her five times that night. You can’t believe it. You haven’t cum five times in one night since high school.

  When she leaves the next morning, sore, walking carefully, her pussy like a wound, you give her double what you agreed on. You do it because she was good, because she earned it, but also because you want to make her life better. Because you do feel sorry for her. But when she takes the money, she is not surprised that you have given her twice what she was supposed to get. She doesn’t even think you’ve made a mistake.

  “‘. . . but the gods put in your breast a spirit not to be placated, bad, for the sake of one single girl. Yet now we offer you seven, surpassingly lovely, and much beside these. Now make gracious the spirit within you.’” — Telamonian Ajax to Achilles, Iliad 9:636

  This is why we find those accents so charming — the Southern, the Scottish, the Russian — anything remote, anything that might suggest the ignorance is reinforced, that geography has made it even more extreme than it would have been otherwise.

  There is so much sociobiology I could bore you with. For example, I could point out that one would expect women and not men to lose their attractiveness with age since it is only women who lose their ability to breed. Or that the security older men can typically provide their offspring more than compensates for their deteriorated health. Or that most corrections to beauty are not, in fact, abstract aesthetic decisions but rather directed efforts to appear less congenitally hazardous. Or that until the last thirty-odd years (and even then only in developed nations), natural selection would have favored women with the ability to make men care more about protecting and supporting them than other women. You might even find it uninteresting that the more recently they have orgasmed, the better men perform on Mensa entrance exams. Yes, I could tell you about any number of dull things like the altruism gene or R selection or Occam’s razor. But I won’t. Instead I will just tell you this:

  We have known for some time that male mammals are separated from female mammals by a difference in genetic material of about 0.5 percent.

  But we have learned only recently that men are separated from mice by a difference in genetic material of no more than about 1 percent.

  Which has led us to believe that once we finish mapping the human genome along with those of the higher primates there is a very real chance we will-discover men share more genes with male gorillas than they do with women.

  We were on the Upper East Side in February about a year before we were divorced. It was a Saturday and we’d been to a classical Greek art gallery on Madison. They had a horse from the Homeric period someone thought I might be interested in. I liked it but pretended I didn’t. I was already thinking I might not want you to know about everything I owned, least of all a two-inch iron horse that cost more than a small house and could be easily hidden.

  Where we crossed Seventy-second Street, two men were cleaning an asphalt cutter. It was an enormous metal wheel with blunt titanium teeth and mounted on its own vehicle. The men were facing the crosswalk and spraying the cutter down with a hose, their view of the crosswalk blocked. It was cold and the water was freezing where it pooled. As we passed the cutter a bit of spray caught you on your mink. You walked around to the other side of the cutter and said to the men, “Hey, come on, look —” you showed them the wet spot on your coat. “Just be a little careful, OK?” you said. You were trying to be a good sport, trying to let them know that the next person might not be as understanding as you.

  I told you to leave them be.

  And when we were children, why did we look up four-letter words in the dictionary? Did we think the words could tell us what the things were like?

  “Toughen the boy up a little, see if he has what it takes to succeed.” You know this is always a good idea but you never think about what it takes or from where. You never think about the fact that, in the end, what it takes is all he will really want.

  And yet it takes a puppy some time to become cautious in its approach to other dogs.

  A friend calls you. He is younger than you. Not by much but by enough. He is, like you, single. He tells you about this model he’s been seeing, an eighteen-year-old he was introduced to by a friend of his. He used to be a model himself in college. He tells you a little bit about her, about how much fun she is, how she wants to “do all these things,” and you just keep saying, uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah, because you’ve heard all this before, you’ve already been where he’s been, because he’s telling you about a town you know like the back of your hand. Then he tells you how she just left to go away for a month but when she left she made him “pinky promise” that he’d return her calls when she got back. “Pinky promise!” he repeats. He somehow already knows this is something to boast about. And he’s right. It gets even you. “Are you serious?” you say. “‘Pinky promise’?! She said that? You lucky motherfucker!” You’re jealous because there are so many kinds of eighteen and from just those two little words you know he’s stumbled on the best kind of all, the still likes pizza kind, the still collects stuffed animals kind, the pinky promise kind.

  “I know, I know,” he says, laughing, “but I feel bad, man.”

  You tell him not to worry about it, that there’s nothing to feel bad about. You know he just doesn’t quite understand yet. But he will. And when he does, when he realizes this is something he not only needs but deserves, he’ll stop feeling bad.

  And as you hang up you can’t help thinking how the girl must
not understand either, how to have thought it necessary to exact an oath like that, she must think she’s lucky someone like your friend, with his money and looks and experience, is even talking to her, how she must think he couldn’t possibly be interested in someone her age, someone so inexperienced, someone so young, how she must think he has better things to do, more important things to worry about, how she must wonder what she could possibly give him that he doesn’t have already.

  You know, as you hang up, she must not have even considered the possibility she has something to give him that he once had but has now lost. And you know this because if she had even an inkling of this possibility, she never would have thought it necessary to use those words in the first place.

  And yet, if she didn’t think it necessary to use those words, then your friend wouldn’t be interested in her. If she didn’t think it necessary to use those words, she really would have nothing to offer him.

  “‘Son of Atreus, was this after all the better way for both, for you and me, that we, for all our hearts’ sorrow, quarrelled together for the sake of a girl in soul-perishing hatred? I wish Artemis had killed her beside the ships with an arrow on that day when I destroyed Lyrnessos and took her. For thus not all these too many Achaians would have bitten the dust, by enemy hands, when I was away in my anger. This way was better for the Trojans and Hektor; yet I think the Achaians will too long remember this quarrel between us. Still, we will let all this be a thing of the past, though it hurts us, and beat down by constraint the anger that rises inside us. Now I am making an end of my anger. It does not become me unrelentingly to rage on.’” — Achilles, Iliad 19:56