Girls

by Nic Kelman

  And you said, “Those idiots — they recommended the same place to me — that’s where I’m staying!”

  And she said, “You’re kidding!” and you both laughed when you were supposed to be saying, “Good luck — maybe I’ll see you in the City sometime.” And when you were done laughing for some reason you looked at each other like a couple of high school kids on a doorstep and there was a pause and for some reason you leaned in to kiss her and she didn’t stop you but she didn’t respond either but then her lips began to purse but then she pulled back and said, “No, no — bad idea.”

  And you weren’t even disappointed, you just stood up again and shrugged and said, “Yeah, you’re right.” And you said good-bye and as you walked over to your car you said, “Good luck — maybe I’ll see you in the City sometime,” and she said, “Maybe — you too,” but then before either of you got in your cars she said, “You know we might as well share a car.” And you said, “Yeah, I guess you’re right” and then you both looked at each other for a moment waiting for the other to come over but in the end it was her that dismissed her driver. And on the ride back to the hotel neither of you said anything, you had said all there was to say for just then.

  But when you fucked it was no good. It took you a long time to come and you weren’t sure if she came at all. She was still in great shape, her skin was still smooth for the most part, you really only thought about her age when you saw her hand around your cock. And it wasn’t for lack of skill, when she blew you she looked at you as she deep-throated you, caressed that spot just behind your balls, had long trails of saliva running from her mouth to your cock. It was that you both produced condoms and you wore the one from the box you had, not the one from the little metal case in her purse. It was that when you pulled out of her from behind and tried to turn her over on her back, her hip pushed back against your hand and she said, “Don’t stop.” It was that she thought she was fucking you and you thought you were fucking her.

  And then, after she left your room to go back to hers to sleep, you didn’t see her or hear from her until you called her office on a whim a few months later and played phone tag with her for a couple weeks and eventually had dinner on the Upper East Side. And at first neither of you was sure why the other had come but you were the one who had made the first call so it was up to you to make the crack about your “unsuccessful merger” as soon as possible and then you both knew why you were there and suddenly had plenty to say and had a perfectly pleasant dinner that ended with you accepting her invitation to “bring someone” down to her restored deco penthouse in South Beach over Labor Day.

  And that weekend turned out to be a lot of fun because right after you arrived the girl you had brought said she wanted to get a new swimsuit right away but you didn’t feel like going because you wanted to have a drink first so your host said her boyfriend wouldn’t mind showing your girlfriend where to go and the two of you sent the two of them off and as soon as the door closed you had looked at her with one eyebrow raised and said, “Enrique?!” and she had looked at you the same way at the same time and said, “Tiffany?!” and then you both laughed although this time it wasn’t like a couple of high school kids on a doorstep. That weekend turned out to be a lot of fun because when you went out to dinner and the waitstaff assumed the two of you were married and that Tiffany was your daughter and therefore, because of his skin color, Enrique was her boyfriend, you both thought that was funny too although if you hadn’t both had someone to share it with it would have irritated either of you. That weekend turned out to be a lot of fun because Sunday night when she said to you, “I think Enrique fucked Tiffany this afternoon when we left them alone,” you said, “I don’t care, do you?” and she said, “No, I don’t care — I thought you might.”

  And after that you saw her as much as you saw anyone and you learned as much about her as you learned about anyone. You learned that she dates as many young boys as you do young girls although she’d never let them dress her, or read anything they recommended, or let them decide where they were going for the weekend. You learned that even though she dates as many young boys as you do young girls, she wouldn’t consider marrying any of them any more than she’d consider marrying her scuba gear or her favorite squash racket or any other toy. You learned that when they ask her for something she says, “Maybe,” not, “Of course.” You learned that when she calls an escort service she also specifies that they be as young as possible but that for her it is nothing more than an aesthetic choice, she simply prefers having sex with younger men or, as she puts it, “If I’m going to drive a car just for the pleasure of driving a car, that car better be mint. . . .” You learned that when she wants to indulge herself, she takes mineral salt baths, she treats herself to a day spa. You learned that “pampering” herself makes her feel “100 percent better,” “reborn,” “like a new woman,” “like she can breathe again.”

  And if you continue to remain friends, if you manage to avoid butting heads over a client at some point, if you can avoid stabbing each other in the back (an event which has always seemed inevitable enough that while you tell each other what you do you never tell each other what you want), if you can do that for long enough maybe eventually you will learn that those times when there’s no one else in your house or apartment and you say “thank God,” and pour yourself a scotch and sit in the media room and watch a DVD, those times are the same times she sits in her empty dining room and forces herself not to cry.

  All’s fair in love and war.

  You know what time the high schools let out. It’s not something you researched, you didn’t look it up or wait outside one all day long. You just happened to be passing one one day as it was letting out and you happened to notice the time. You don’t make special visits. You don’t go out of your way. But if you are passing by, you do check the time. Just to see if you should linger a moment or two.

  Immortal Poseidon, God of the Sea, God of the Earthquake, God of Fast Cars.

  Royal Odysseus, Man of Twists and Turns, Formula One Engineer.

  Alexander, Caesar, de’ Medici, Richelieu, Napoleon, Victoria. Although it would be too unpopular to admit, these are our real heroes, the ones who did what they needed to do to get what they wanted. Not the peacemakers, not the meek.

  Although we could never mention it as anything but a joke, Genghis Khan’s saying “The three great pleasures in life are: to crush your enemies, to ride their horses, and to take their women to bed” is one of our favorites.

  And even though we do confess that we love that bit in The Godfather when Michael Corleone says, “Don’t ever ask me about my business,” even though we may openly claim we prefer Grendel to Beowulf, Vader to Skywalker (and yet not Paris to Hector nor Hector to Achilles), we can only do so in these cases because they are fictional.

  Although it would be too unpopular to admit, we don’t wish we could be ruthless, we wish we could get away with being ruthless.

  You once read that vinyl dissolved in seawater.

  You once read that too much fish oil could be toxic.

  You once read that your face would stay that way.

  But later, one way or another, you learned that none of these things were true. They were just devices. They were just fiction. They just made a good story better.

  I saw you by so many columns and arches, I saw you in so many sacred places.

  In Cuzco, the leopard-shaped city, you ran your hand over a wall. You wore no rings, not one, not yet. “It’s so smooth,” you said. “Even where the blocks meet, it’s so smooth it’s amazing.” The guidebook said that before the Spanish came it had been sheathed in gold. As we walked away, as we walked towards a stand that sold yellow Inca Kola in glass bottles, you said, “It must have been very beautiful before the conquest.”

  And I said something about the sacrificial victims probably not agreeing with you and you laughed. “Very funny,” you said. This was when I still said things to make you laugh and you still laughed at thing
s I said. We bought some soda and you tossed your hair back and threw your head back and you drank. Even though the bottle had been reused so many times, even though its ridges and buttons were worn away, it still winked in the sun.

  In Paris we looked at the shape of Notre-Dame. Recently damaged by a violent windstorm, its exterior was hidden by metal frames and blue tarpaulin that snapped and cracked in the breeze. You held your hand up to your forehead to block the sun from your squinting eyes. By then you wore jewelry. “That’s a shame,” you said. “Still, we can always catch it next time.” Even though we could see our breath, you suggested we cross the bridge to Île Saint-Louis and buy some gelato at that place where you said you’d heard everyone went for gelato.

  In Amarna you made me stand still for scale. You walked far, far away and you took a picture. It was of three temples stacked like bricks. An excavation around a mosque had revealed it was built on the roof of a Roman church in turn built on the roof of an Egyptian temple. I came out as a tiny red dot.

  In Petra you said, “This is what I wanted to see.” You were looking up at the capitals of the columns of the great temple. They had only recently been reconstructed. On their corners, they had elephant heads. “These are the only elephant-headed columns in the world,” you said. “None of our friends have seen anything like this.” That night we slept in tents but had Bedouins to bring us dates and figs.

  On Easter Island we spent the day walking among the supplicant moai, their eyes scattered or missing altogether. There was one wall there they thought had been somehow built by an Inca and you had me take a picture of you in front of it. Then, years later, you came to me with it in your hand as I reviewed some process flowcharts and said, “Hey — look at this, that’s weird, one of the pictures from Peru got in with the batch from Easter Island!” And I looked at the picture and I said, “No, that was from Easter Island — that one wall, remember? The one they think was somehow built by an Inca? Besides — look how old you are there. You were much younger in Peru.” And then you looked at the picture more closely and said, “Oh, I think you’re right — now I remember.”

  In Kenya it was Kilimanjaro; in Turkey, Ararat; in Japan, Fuji. In Greece it was Olympus I saw you on the slopes of.

  Eventually, you said, “Everything is sacred, isn’t it?” By then I couldn’t have disagreed more.

  The brilliance of the name Odysseus is that it can mean either giver or receiver of pain.

  You are at a cocktail party a friend of yours is having, a small, informal affair, just a few people. And he introduces you to a man and his boyfriend. The man is your age, the boyfriend in his late teens, early twenties. The three of you chat for a while, you and the older man are in the same field, get along well. Eventually the boyfriend goes to get more hors d’oeuvres. And when he walks off you say with a smirk, “How old is he, anyway?”

  And the other man looks at you and grins and glances at the floor, at the wall, anywhere he can avoid your eyes, and then looks up at you and squints and bites his bottom lip as if he’s in pain and says, “Nineteen.” And you chuckle and shake your head and wag your finger and he raises his eyebrows and nods his head. And it is then, as — still smiling — you both take sips of your drinks, you realize it doesn’t matter if someone’s gay.

  Why did you decide ceasing to tolerate our lovers was a better course of action than simply taking your own?

  She takes you to a concert at a nightclub. It is loud. Concerts were loud when you had the time to go to them more often, your ears would still ring the next morning, but not like this. Here, they hit certain chords that resonate with your skull, with your inner ear, certain distorted chords that make you lose your sense of balance. And you are not alone in this, you can see everyone become dizzy when they play one of those chords. Everyone begins to reel, this has nothing to do with the fact that you are one of only about seven men there over thirty, one of only about seven men there with girls half their age or less.

  The band plays electronic dance music with a pounding, driving beat. The lead singer, probably just a front, is a woman in her late twenties. Although not especially pretty, she is far from ugly and is tremendously appealing because she seems so slutty. As the show goes on, she changes outfits constantly, one thing more revealing than the next, and as she performs she humps a chair, squats near the front of the stage with her legs spread wide open, rubs the microphone cord back and forth between her legs. And there is also an S&M stage show, a variety of things. A man is wheeled out hanging by handcuffs from a metal bar and she whips him while she performs. Two girls are brought out in metal bustiers, chained to crosses and have circular saws applied to their breasts by men dressed as butchers, their faces hidden in leather masks. The saws send arcs of brilliant white sparks out into the audience.

  You feel a little awkward, you never liked to dance very much unless you were really drunk. You’ve never felt so self-conscious about your baldness. For the third or fourth number they play a song you know from college, from when this kind of music was new, from only — what? — fifteen, sixteen years ago? They announce it as a “classic.”

  While the band and the crowd warm up, you find yourself scanning the room, looking for girls who didn’t qualify for a wrist-band. When you find one, you examine her. So much exposed flesh here, so many of those stomachs with pierced belly buttons, stomachs that would hang if the girls weren’t sucking them in but that still look appetizing because even though they’re not muscled, even though they’re chubby — but not flabby, not yet — even though they have no waist, they don’t need any of those things. You tremble when you look at those bellies and their boyfriends’ hands crawl across them. You find you are staring at girls that you would never look at if they were closer to your age, never look at if they were in their late twenties even, girls you and your friends would make fun of among yourselves if they were just slightly older and you saw them on the street dressed the same way — cutoff leather halter tops, exposed garter belts, rubber spiked dog collars, latex evening gloves.

  One girl who can’t be more than thirteen wears a shirt that says BEAT ME, FUCK ME, EAT ME, WHIP ME, CUM ON MY TITS AND THEN GET THE FUCK OUT! The first thing that comes to mind is, “What tits?” and only then do you wonder how she got in here, why a girl that young would be wearing a shirt like that.

  “Can you get me a drink?” the girl who brought you here shouts. You nod, push your way through the crowd to the bar. You only hear questions like that when you’re out with girls her age. And it’s not because they’re too young to buy alcohol for themselves, which they are. It’s because they are the only ones who aren’t constantly trying to figure out what they can do for you. Because they are the only ones who aren’t afraid of you. Because they are the only ones who don’t yet have anything to lose.

  At the point where you manage to squeeze up to the bar, there is a pretty girl leaning against it watching the stage, her elbows resting on the wooden lip behind her. Her hair is dyed black, her lips painted dark red, her face powdered white, her eyes heavily kohled. She has a metal stud below her lower lip. She wears a PVC bodysuit that ends in gloves and four-inch stiletto heels. She has it unzipped to just below her sternum but it is so tight on her she is in no danger of exposing anything more than the inner side of each breast. This is more than enough to set your heart pounding. You wonder if she could actually zip the suit up any more even if she wanted to. You also notice she isn’t wearing a wristband. You make eye contact and raise your eyebrows, purse your lips in a smile. Her only reaction is to look away.

  As you wait for the bartender, facing the opposite direction to her, you can’t help yourself. You have to glance down her front more than once. The bartender comes over to you quickly, ignoring several people that have been waiting longer than you, people that are younger than you, people not as bald as you.

  As you order you take out your ostrich-skin Gucci wallet. What you order makes the girl glance over her shoulder at you, at your wallet. She
turns around. Leans on the bar by bending at the waist instead of slumping her back. You glance at her ass, thrust out into the crowd, the colored lights forming shining bands on the glistening rubber, bands that follow the curve of her body. Every man that walks past looks at this part of her. Most, coming across her in the middle of the dense crowd, look surprised. Their heavy eyes widen, they throw their heads back a little, their eyebrows raise. It is almost as if they narrowly avoided stepping on a snake in dense brush. Almost, but not quite. There is no fear. With one exception, the men that don’t react are with women. They look, but it is a quick glance, nothing more. The exception is the youngest, a junior high kid. The girl he is with, heavily made up but probably about twelve, punches him in the ribs.

  “Awesome, huh?” the girl in the bodysuit shouts at you.

  “Yeah, awesome!” you shout back, nodding, watching the bartender. He brings your drinks, says, “That’ll be twenty-seven fifty.”

  When you open your wallet, the girl glances in. It is a quick look, subtle, but you catch it anyway. When you take your change, she looks one more time, thinking you can’t see her do it out of the corner of your eye. If you weren’t already here with someone, with a girl calling herself an “aspiring model,” a girl a friend of yours who runs an agency set you up with . . .

  You pick up the two drinks, and, taking a sip from yours, nod at her. She nods back, starts to say something, but is cut off by a guy in his early twenties who forces his way between the two of you.

  As you walk off, you hear him order three drinks, hear the bartender tell him that for three drinks he needs three wrist-bands. As you walk off, you wonder why he didn’t say something similar to you.

  And you know she watched you walk away, cursed because the guy cut her off. Later you see her near you in the crowd, see her examine the young blonde you are with, the young blonde that reeks of old New York City wealth even in her motorcycle jacket and temporary tattoo. Later you see her walk away.