Girls

by Nic Kelman

  You are out with some friends, celebrating a done deal. You go from bar to bar, slipping money to bouncers. Everywhere is hot and crowded and smoky. Everywhere is loud with music and shouting and decor. Everywhere there are pretty girls in miniskirts or backless shirts or cutoff tops but the prettiest ones are always the ones serving you — the bartenders, the waitresses, the hostesses.

  And after a while, after you’ve all had more than a few drinks, after more than a few of you have gone home, one of your friends says, “Hey — we’re right around the corner from my new place, you guys wanna come up and see?” And it seems like a good idea so you all go upstairs.

  And his girlfriend opens the door, a girl only a couple of you have met and even then only once or twice. She’s not angry, he must have told her he’d be out late, she just decided to wait up for him. “Hey guys,” she says sweetly. She’s wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt and no shoes. Not something she’d wear out but not something that looks terrible either. She doesn’t have any makeup on, her hair is pulled back in a ponytail. She still looks pretty though, just not that pretty — the light in his apartment is not dimmed or neon.

  “You look fat,” he says, as he walks in. But you all ignore him and his comment as you scatter to look around, see the view, the kitchen, the media setup. You all know he’s just showing off.

  Preferring to be near people who speak their language, the great majority of army veterans live within ten miles of an army base. We can use this information to derive a divorce rate for veterans by looking at the divorce rates in the counties in which army bases are located.

  When we do so we discover that these rates are more or less the same as the national average. Which should make us wonder not why the divorce rate for veterans is not higher than the national average, but why the divorce rate for civilians is as high as that for veterans.

  You said it when your hands had long since ceased to ever smell of ground coffee or chopped garlic. You said it as we returned from the mountains.

  We had taken the small gauge rail high up to a village where you had somehow heard all the locals bought their chests. It was a tiny place, ten houses or so with eaves that reached to the ground because of the snow. But there was no snow when we were there. It was a warm summer day and displayed outside were dozens of wooden chests. They were beautiful, hand-painted with folkloric designs of reindeer and men and women in traditional clothing, hand-painted in reds and greens and whites. We bought half of them. You were thinking of opening a shop.

  Then, as we boarded the train, as the sun began to set, you said, “This is what you want, you know, somewhere completely unspoiled.”

  Or perhaps it wasn’t the mountains. Perhaps it was the coast and the carpenters were fishermen. Perhaps the chests were nets hung from the cliffs to dry. Perhaps you weren’t even thinking of opening a shop. But that was what you said. And that was when you said it.

  After the Iliad, the Odyssey is inevitable. And it should come as no surprise that artful Odysseus survives while mighty Achilles does not.

  And so if we are watching our son or daughter at a swim meet, with that chlorine smell and dampness and haze in the air, with that fear of slipping as we walk to our seats or to get a soda from a vending machine, and they beat their own personal best time in their event but they still come in last, we give them a hug. We say, as they stand there and shiver with a towel around them, with their wet hair disheveled from the cap, as they look at the winners receiving their medals, we say, “Don’t worry about it, you beat your best time, right? You should be proud of yourself — what more could you have done?”

  And they say, “I know, I know.”

  Because they do. They know it doesn’t matter if they are fast, only if they are faster. They know virtues are virtuous only by comparison. They know if they are fast but everyone else is faster, they are slow. They know if they are fast but everyone else is faster, they come in last. They lose. They know if they’d been faster and not just fast we would have said, “Way to go! You won! That was great!” and taken them out for a special dinner where there’d be laughter and one of their friends or even the whole team.

  And if they don’t know this, if they weren’t in the swim meet or the science, bowl or the battle of the bands, if they weren’t somehow competing to begin with, we know it’s our job to teach it to them.

  So they can never give us what those young girls we fuck do. Because they are our daughters, not someone else’s. It is not enough that they are beautiful. It is not enough that they like to have fun. It is not enough that they are alive, but that they survive.

  And this is why we feel like failures as parents if we see that our children don’t think they have anything to prove. Why when they say not, “I want to be a professional surfer,” but simply, “I want to surf,” even the most understanding of us — even sometimes those of us with enough money that we don’t have to worry about them making a living — why we look at them and wonder, just for a second, how this thing that came out of us could be so unlike us, so far away from us, wonder, just for a second, if they are, in fact, ours.

  This is why, if we are good parents, we teach them to swim as soon as possible. We teach them for their own good. We teach them even though we know it is in keeping our heads above water that we drown.

  And yet not all vampires are men, far from it. In fact after Vlad the Impaler the next most classic model for the modern vampire legend is the sixteenth-century Hungarian countess Erzsábet Bathory. She believed that human blood could maintain the skin in a state of “youthful perfection.” So she had peasants brought to her boudoir where they were killed and had the blood drained from their bodies. Then, while it was still fresh and warm (naturally, since, if kept for any period of time, it would have coagulated), the countess would bathe in it. For this purpose, before she was brought to trial and executed, she had six hundred and thirteen people murdered.

  However, not just any peasant would do. According to the countess the only blood capable of performing this miracle was that of teenage girls.

  There is that one incident you’ve never talked about with anyone even though everyone knows about it, even though every now and then you still overhear people gossiping about it, people new enough they don’t think to check the stalls before they gossip about the CEO the day he’s visiting their office.

  You’ve never talked about it with anyone even though it happened, what, ten, fifteen years ago? More? Less? In fact, no one’s even tried to talk to you about it since the night your wife found out and she said, “Do you want to talk about it?” and you said, “No,” and she said, “OK, well let me know if you do.” Sometimes you wonder what would happen if you called her up now, in Oregon or Hong Kong or wherever she lives now, and said, “OK. Now. Now I want to talk about it.”

  You wonder that when you can’t help thinking about it. When it is late and you are alone. When the other people on your plane are asleep and the blinds are down and all you can hear is the faint noise of the jets, faint because it’s a very expensive plane, and you only stop thinking about it because your stewardess says quietly, “Can I get you another one?” When because it is a nice night and you haven’t walked in a while you dismiss your driver after dinner and tell him you’re going to walk the thirty-four blocks home. When you cut your hand on the coral almost right away and have to come up so it’s just you and the captain and the mate on the boat while everyone else is still down there and the mate comes over to you with some gauze as you stare down into the water at the reef just ten or twenty feet below and says, “It’s too bad you can’t see her, she’s a beaut. . . .”

  When you think how he said, “I’m going to fight you on this.” The man you’d known for years, the man you started the damn company with in the first place, the man you couldn’t have done it without, the man who knew how to push those Turks around the way they needed to be pushed around to get your export taxes low enough, the man who held down the fort those five months Jillian
was sick, the man who realized the key benefit wasn’t actually what everyone, even the consultants, thought it was.

  When you think how you said, “OK, but you’ll lose, I already persuaded the board,” and he said, “We’ll see,” and he put up a really good fight, found some really great lawyer with a Bombay accent, but he lost anyway because all that really mattered in the end was that the judge, some stern and haughty bitch with eyes like blue slate or grey sky, wanted in on the IPO of a company spun off by a guy who owed you and only you a favor.

  When you think how when she announced her decision, he actually stood up and said, “Goddamn it! You fucking bitch!” and actually threw his table over, actually had to be restrained by three bailiffs, how even though he was one of the largest men you’d ever seen, it didn’t matter in the end.

  When you think how long it took for the news to reach you, how you didn’t hear for more than five days, how when you did hear, the first thing you thought was, “I wonder where he got a gun?” How when you did hear, even though you felt bad, you refused to feel guilty. How you still tell yourself you did the right thing, the only thing, a thing you’d do again if it was as necessary. How you still tell yourself you’re not a bad man, just a man who sees things clearly.

  When you think how you’ve never talked about it with anyone because the one person you could have talked about it with, the one person you wouldn’t have had to talk about it with, is the one person you couldn’t talk to now even if you wanted to.

  And yet it was to avenge his companion Patroclus that Achilles finally entered the battle.

  And yet, in the end, it was not glorious Hector, but craven Paris who killed him.

  You have been walking the crowded streets of Cairo, eating a handful of dates one at a time, looking for quality rugs. You have been riding horses in the Andes and come into a village for a lunch of fried guinea pig, papas fritas, and Fanta. At dawn, a Sherpa has been slowly driving you out of town in an open Jeep to head up to the monastery in the mountains. You have left a meeting in Tokyo and been stepping into your limousine.

  In all these places a pair of teenage girls has walked past wearing less than they should be. In all of these places you have turned your head to follow them. In all of these places you have looked up from them and met the eyes of another man. And in all of these places you have smiled at each other with absolute understanding. In all of these places it has been this that you could share with other men.

  In the chariot race in the Iliad, Eumelus says nothing about his bad luck, it is Achilles that takes pity on him of his own free will. But in the Aeneid, Eumelus’ analog complains that he was robbed by fortune and deserves a prize anyway, which he gets.

  Likewise in the Iliad, Menelaus says he will take care of Antilochus’ cheating himself and Antilochus, afraid of Menelaus, immediately gives him the prize he won unfairly. But in the Aeneid, when the opponent of Antilochus’ analog complains of cheating, that opponent is given a special prize because of his complaint, allowing Antilochus’ analog to keep the prize he won unfairly.

  Back when we only had one car you had to drop me off at my job on the way to your job. And everyday you would kiss me good-bye at the same stoplight two blocks away from my building. You knew you couldn’t kiss me as I got out of the car. Someone might have seen.

  The earliest known use of the word “cunt” in its modern form and meaning is in 1230 A.D. In that year it appeared in Ekwall’s Street Names of the City of London as part of the name “Grope Cunt Lane.” It is not difficult to imagine what trade was plied there.

  The origin of the word, however, is something of a mystery. Prior to this use it appears only in Medieval Latin in the form kunte, which has led some scholars to speculate it came into the language from Old Norse since it resembles an Old Norse word in form. However, there is no equivalent to the word in Old Norse.

  It therefore seems much more likely that the word is a Norsification of the Latin word cunnus, meaning “female reproductive organ” (the Latin word vagina, which we adopted as a euphemism for the unmentionable cunnus, actually meant “sheath for a weapon”).

  The origin of this word is not in doubt nor particularly interesting. It comes from the Greek word kuo of the same meaning.

  However, once we realize this, what does become interesting is Homer’s coining of the term kunopis or “dog-faced.” He uses this term only in reference to women, to Helen in particular but also to others, both gods and mortals, and it is clear from later usage that the term was intended to imply shameless, reprehensible, deceitful behavior. What is interesting about his use of this word is that it is compounded from the female form of the word for “dog,” kuon. Kunopis was a pun. It meant “with a face like a dog” but it would also make listeners think of the female reproductive organ. As a “writer,” he could not have chosen a more perfect word.

  But he also could not have foreseen that so long after his death, because his work had become so familiar to both the later Greeks and the Romans after them, this whimsical association he had made would carry on. So it was that even after the word kuo had become cunnus in Latin and the word kuon had become canis, even after it was no longer a pun, Latin authors still referred to women as “dog-faced.”

  And once we understand this, we can solve another supposed etymological mystery. The derivation of the word “cunning.”

  Again, it is speculated that this word comes from Nordic roots, in this case from the Anglo-Saxon verb “to know,” kunnan, and again this seems unlikely. After all, the vixen knows nothing but is no less cunning for her ignorance.

  So we look more closely and what do we find? That in Old English, “cunning” meant “to have had sex with,” as in “I had cunning of her.” And that the first recorded usage of the word “cunning” in English occurs in 1325 in The Proverbs of Hending where it is used in the epigram, “Directly equal is the cunt to cunning. . . ” When we look more closely we find that once again the more likely parental candidate is cunnus.

  And is it really so hard to imagine the origin of the words “cunt” and “cunning” is one and the same? Words that appeared in English usage at a time when anyone literate would have become so by reading the classics in Latin? Is it so far-fetched to believe both words are derived ultimately from the word kuo and its Homeric associations? The one meaning the internal female genitalia; the other meaning sly, crafty, skillful in deception?

  And perhaps this would be less credible if not for the fact that at the time of the appearance of both of these words, at the time when the shift was being made from written Latin to written English, there is evidence that the word “dog” maintained its associations with cowardliness and worthlessness (1325 A.D., Coer de Leon). Perhaps this would be less credible if we did not have this evidence that in the thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries A.D., “dog” still carried the same implications it did to Homer, possibly because of Homer.

  And perhaps this would be less credible if not for the fact that today we still use “dog” to mean both “ugly woman” and “something that performs below expectations,” if not for the fact that we still use “bitch” when, supposedly unaware of the redundancy, we mean “cunning cunt.”

  And perhaps this would be less credible if not for the fact that the word “pussy” (as an alternative to “cunt”) was first coined not only by a woman, but also at the beginning of the women’s suffrage movement. Perhaps this would be less credible if not for the fact that so many women dislike the word “cunt,” if not for the fact that so many women prefer the word “pussy” but never seem to know why. Perhaps this would be less credible if not for the fact that after 3,000 years without a voice, the word women have spoken for themselves means “cat” and not “dog.”

  You have one friend that’s a woman. You’ve known her for years. For a long time she was your enemy — you were in engineering, she was in marketing. You used to go home sometimes and your wife would just have to look at you to know “that fucking bitch” ha
d done something else.

  But then you both left and started your own companies and almost forgot about each other until you bumped into each other at the Four Cats in Barcelona.

  You were eating alone at one of the tables on the balcony or the mezzanine or whatever they called it in CataluÑa, looking down through the railings, and you saw her come in. And you watched her sit down by herself and you finished your bisque but no one joined her so in between courses you went downstairs and walked up to her table and said, “This is a coincidence.”

  But it turned out it wasn’t. After she eyed you suspiciously and you dispensed with formalities about health and marital status and children you discovered you were both there to give a bid to the same company, a company that had told you both they weren’t looking at anyone else yet. And she said “son of a bitch” and you said “motherfucker” and you had them bring the rest of your meal to her table and you noticed you were attracted to her even though by now she had to be at least fifteen years older than the girl you fucked the night before you left New York, you noticed that, in fact, you had been attracted to her all those years before but had never wanted to admit it could be anything more than a “hate fuck.”

  And you talked and compared scars and apologized to each other, both said you hadn’t understood where the other was coming from back then but that now you did because you’d both had to deal with problems from all the departments. And you would have shared a bottle or two of wine except that you drank scotch and she drank vodka.

  And afterwards you didn’t bother to exchange cards because you’d known how to reach each other all these years if you’d wanted to and you walked out to your cars and as the crisp night air hit the two of you, you restored the conversation to its appropriate formality now that you were departing, you asked, “So where are you staying?”

  And after she told you she looked at you and said, “What?. . . What?”