Carrie Pilby

by Caren Lissner

  I press the button to skip to the next one.

  “Hi, H-Heather. M-my name’s A-Adam. I just l-left a m-message but I think it might have been too l-long, it cut me off and I don’t know if you got it. Anyway, I’m usually not this spastic. Heh, heh. W-what I said l-last time was, I’m nice and I like movies, and I really liked your ad, so I hope to meet you…”

  I skip to the last ad.

  “Hi, I know you might find this unusual, you didn’t state an age range in your ad, but maybe we can at least be friends. My name’s Don, and I’m forty-six, and I own a coupla computer stoahs in the city. I don’t remember back to my test scores, but I do pretty well when I watch Wheel of Fortune. I’m basically looking for a lady to take around, show her a good time. I like opera and the finer things, and I’d like to spend money on a classy lady like you. So give me a cawl.”

  I hang up. Something about “lady” bothers me. I know that it’s considered un-P.C. to say “girl” these days, but “woman” makes me think of the full-figured diagrams that used to be in the pamphlets we got in elementary school sex ed entitled “Your Body and You.” And “lady” is worse. There should be age ranges. “Girl” goes from one to thirty. “Woman” goes from thirty-one to a hundred. “Lady” goes from forty to a hundred, but she has to work in a casino.

  I believe I’ve done some good work today. I have the urge to put the phone numbers away until later.

  But I think of Matt. He seemed better than all of them. I admit that I’d sort of like to see him.

  I go to the dictionary to look up his favorite word, “doozy.” It says that it may have come from Duesenbergs, which were luxury cars in the 1930s. I’ve heard them mentioned in old movies. That’s really cool. I’d like to tell Matt about it. But I know I shouldn’t call him.

  Maybe Michael or A-Adam from the personals will be just as interesting. It’s worth giving them a shot. So I press *67 on my phone to protect my confidentiality, then return phone calls from both of them. But of course, neither is home because it’s during the workday. I don’t leave messages. I’ll try again later.

  At night, I’m not sure what to wear to meet Kara at the club. I’m not going to wear what girls who go to clubs wear: clothes so flimsy they freeze. They spend the evening walking bent over with their arms crossed in front of themselves. I’ll be warm and unsexy.

  When I get to the club, it’s dark and crowded. I feel nervous, but then I see Kara, aka Deviated Septum, rounding the corner. “Traci blew me off,” she says. “She’s a flake. I’m so tired of people who are like that. Let’s go upstairs.”

  We have to walk single file because it’s so crowded, and I fear losing Kara, but she continually looks back at me. It’s nice. Everyone seems tall, and lots of people are wearing black. The second level is quieter, and there’s a strange blue light hanging over everything, cigarette smoke wafting into it. The tables are lit with round red candles. At one, a man is clasping a woman’s hands in the middle and staring at her. Neither of them is saying anything. They’re either madly in love, or extremely drunk. If there’s a difference.

  Kara sits down, opens a matchbook and strikes a match. A tall black waiter with a shaved head arrives and bends over. “What’ll you ladies have?”

  Kara looks at me. “I’ll have a Cosmo,” she says. I don’t say anything, so she adds, “Sex on the Beach.”

  “What’s in that?” I ask.

  “You’ll like it.” She waves the match out and takes a drag on her cigarette. “I guess you can get it without alcohol, but what’s a virgin Sex on the Beach?”

  I shrug. “How’s Dickson, Monroe?”

  “One big party,” Kara says, and then she laughs.

  “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “Hey, I admire your optimism.” She looks around. “No cute guys here tonight. Or girls.”

  “I met one yesterday.”

  “Girl? Or guy?”

  “A guy. We had dinner together. I’m not sure about him. He’s…stuck on an old girlfriend.”

  “Forget it,” Kara says. “You’ll never measure up. And don’t believe it if he says he wants to stay friends with her, either.”

  The waiter delivers our drinks. “The guy I had dinner with doesn’t drink at all,” I say.

  “What a weirdo,” Kara says. She accidentally tips over her drink, then picks it up. “As you can see,” she says, “I’ve already been drinking.”

  I look back at the couple who’ve been staring at each other. Suddenly I notice that one of them is wearing a ring. Is it a wedding ring? The guy notices me staring, so I look away. I ask Kara, “What do you think of people who cheat on each other?”

  She shakes her head. “I think that’s so low, cheating.”

  “You don’t approve?”

  She stubs her cigarette in a clear brown ashtray. “I do not. I’m pretty liberal, as you know, but cheaters are the lowest of the low. I mean, how do you justify that?”

  I just shrug.

  “You’re going to cheat, don’t get married. Don’t have a boyfriend. No one’s putting a gun to your head. People who complain about their significant others make me sick. No one forces you to commit to a relationship.”

  This amazes me. Even people like Kara, who seem to advocate doing almost anything, will still come up with rules to stick to and to judge others on. I guess their sticking to some moral code makes them feel like they’re good, even though they flout so many others.

  “You know how you can find out if someone’s having an affair with someone?” Kara asks.

  “No.”

  “Ask her if she knows his middle name.”

  “Oh.”

  “It always works. When people are in love with someone, they always want to know their middle name. Women especially. Men don’t do it as much. Women will always want to know the middle names of men they like so they can use them to tease them. What was your English professor’s middle name?”

  “Lance.”

  “See?”

  I smile. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Did you ask him?”

  “What his middle name was? I guess I did.”

  She laughs. “Once I was dating this guy and I found out his middle name was Seymour. I couldn’t be attracted to him after that. I don’t ask anymore.”

  She stands two matchbooks up like tepees. It’s funny the things people will do with paper when they have nothing else to do.

  “This guy you met yesterday,” Kara says, “did you sleep with him?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Do you want to?”

  “I…I don’t know.”

  “Remember,” Kara says, pointing to her nose. “Deviated septum.”

  “Got it.”

  “But you never rush in, right?” she says. “You haven’t been with anyone since professor…what’s-his-name?”

  “David. Harrison.”

  “How can you stand it? That was years ago.”

  I shrug. “I’m asexual, I guess. I’m just not obsessed with it.”

  “You haven’t met anyone in the meantime who you’d just want to throw off your clothes and jump on top of?”

  “No. And way too many people do that. If you just do it to do it, why does it mean anything?”

  “Why does it have to?”

  “Because…it should.”

  Kara waits for more.

  “Because you can get diseases. Because you’re reducing it to nothing. And people can still get pregnant because of it. It’s immoral for a reason. Not just something in the Bible, and I’m not a religious person, anyway.”

  A guy bumps into my chair, then keeps walking. The music downstairs ebbs a bit.

  Kara shrugs. “You’ve said you’re asexual. But then, if you don’t have urges to do things, how do you know that you’re really moral?”

  “If I had them, I’d try to control them.”

  Kara shakes her head. “Everything in the world is based on feelings, or level of feelings. If you had a gr
eater sex drive, you might not think people were sex-obsessed.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Well, consider this,” she says. “It does make sense to do everything based on logic, but no one in the world does. No one. It doesn’t matter what they say. If we thought everything out and acted according to our conclusions, there would be no murder. Why does a guy kill or steal or rape? His urge to do it, or desire to do it, overcomes him. He doesn’t think it’s right. Okay, maybe in some cases he does think it’s right, but usually he knows inside that it’s wrong. There are basic things we do that make no sense. Next time you have an urge to do something, even something small, like put on the radio, stop yourself. See how it feels. Maybe you can stop yourself for a few seconds. But if you really, really want to hear the radio, you won’t be able to stop yourself for very long. Now, there are some things we are lucky enough to have built up a moral aversion to, and then our thoughts become part of our feelings. We find killing someone for no reason not only cruel and immoral, but repugnant. If I tell you I’m going to step on a baby, you have a visceral reaction. You don’t have to compute it mathematically and tell me it’s bad. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Where does this come from? Socialization? Maybe. But maybe it’s a part of us. We are all made with different kinds of urges. Some of us love to cook. Some of us love to swim. Our differences keep the world running. Some of us have monster sex drives. Some of us can get along without it. Some of us are attracted to both men and women. Some are only turned on by young boys.”

  “Are you saying that’s right?”

  “Not at all,” she says. “Because it’s not fair to the kids. But for a second, think about someone who is only turned on by young boys. What if that really is the only thing that turns him on sexually in his entire life? Think about someone who has to go eighty years without fulfilling any sort of desire toward something that turns him on. And believe me, being turned on, and actually fulfilling that feeling, is the most amazing rocketship ride in the world. But what if, because of the way you are, the only thing that can bring you to that height of all heights is forbidden? What do you do?”

  I don’t know what to say to that.

  “Get counseling? Maybe. If the only thing that turns you on is something that can hurt another person, yes. But we think that a kiddie sex abuser, in our society, is the lowest form of human imaginable. The kind that not a soul has sympathy for.”

  “And you do.”

  She shakes her head. “No.”

  “So…I don’t get the point.”

  “The point is, there are cases where urges can hurt innocent people, and we have to be careful about them, but there is middle ground, and there are times when moral laws can’t govern everything. Like the antiquated wait-until-you’re-married-for-sex deal. How can you blame people for wanting to feel good?”

  The bar has framed covers of New York tabloids on the wall. There’s one of the Yankees winning a pennant. There’s one of men landing on the moon. There’s a cover of a Spanish newspaper with a picture of Joey Buttafuoco above the words, “Me acuesto con Amy.”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Tell me,” she says. “Tell me one thing that really turns you on.”

  I’m tired of people wanting me to tell them my sexual secrets. As if I owe them.

  “It doesn’t have to be sexual,” Kara says. “I mean anything. Why do you get up in the morning?”

  I think about it.

  “I don’t,” I say.

  A smile crosses her lips.

  She leans in toward me. She has a pert nose. Pert is the only way to describe it.

  “Wouldn’t you like to open your eyes in the morning,” she whispers, “and have a reason to lift your head off the pillow?”

  The music from downstairs gets louder. “Like what?”

  “Like some raging, monster drive you can’t control.”

  She stares at me for a second, then sucks in her lips. “Tell me what I asked before. What are some things that turn you on? Nonsexually. Just things you like.”

  I think of my top-ten list for Petrov. “Starfish. Cherry sodas.”

  “Okay,” she says. “What if I said, you can never see a starfish, you can never drink a cherry soda. What if, suddenly, they became immoral?”

  “You’re acting as if I said people can’t have sex,” I say. “If you’re careful about it, and you’re not hurting someone, or cheating on them, then I’m not condemning that. If you’re lousing up your body, which we’ll all pay for later, or you’re peer-pressuring other people to do what you do, and bringing down the standards for everyone, then there’s a problem.”

  “But you say that people are too sex-obsessed,” she says. “Well, do you think we’re also food-obsessed? Or sleep-obsessed?”

  “Sleep obsession doesn’t hurt anyone,” I say.

  “Sex does?”

  I know there’s an answer to this, but I can’t think of it.

  “It doesn’t,” Kara says. “If it’s between consenting adults, it doesn’t.”

  “If you give someone a disease…”

  “Then it does. Other than that, it doesn’t. You shouldn’t do anything that hurts other human beings, I agree with you. But you should feel good during your eighty years of life, even if it offends people who cling to some Victorian standard that arose a hundred years ago because people falsely believed masturbation gave you hairy palms and that God didn’t want you to knock boots. You’re not a religious person. If you were, then we’d have to argue differently because you could say you believe in the Bible and that temptation comes from Satan. But you don’t believe in Satan. You believe in reality.”

  “Satan?” some guy turns around and says. He gives us the pinkie-and-index-finger-up sign, then smiles and goes back to his food.

  Kara rolls her eyes. “You want to go somewhere else? I mean, I know I’ve totally offended you….”

  “No, I’m glad we’re talking about this.”

  “I do hear some of what you’re saying,” she says. “I don’t agree with it all, but I respect that you’re willing to talk about it with me. I just think you have to live a little, stop setting such rigid boundaries. You’ll feel better.”

  Kara gets up, pays the waiter even though I offer, and I pull on my coat. I wrap my scarf around my neck. Kara looks at it.

  “That’s a nice scarf,” she says.

  “Thanks.”

  “It looks expensive.”

  “My father got it for me.”

  We make our way down the stairs and outside. “Do you get along with him okay?” Kara asks.

  “He’s all right,” I say. “I don’t see him much. He’s in Europe right now.” I don’t want to go through my whole family history. “Do you talk to your parents?”

  “No,” she says. “Not to be…well, I’m not trying to play on your sympathy, but I haven’t talked to either of them since college. They kept using me against each other, and I finally decided they deserved each other more than either of them deserved me. They wouldn’t even pay for college after a certain point. I don’t talk to them. It’s hardest on holidays, but in some ways, it’s easier.”

  “I’ve been parentless on holidays, too,” I say.

  She smiles. “Well, maybe on the next one we’ll put together a celebration and round up some of us orphan-types.”

  It’s cold outside, but there’s no breeze. A lot of people are staggering in the street, and a few are yelling.

  “Sometimes, when I’m getting ready for bed,” I say, “I hear all the people outside going to the bars, and I know they’re around my age, they all sound so jubilant and gleeful that I feel guilty being inside.”

  “Don’t.”

  A guy with a hooded gray sweatshirt walks past us and nearly trips over himself. He must be sloshed. Or stoned.

  I ask Kara, “Have you ever done drugs?”

  She shakes her head. “Just pot.”

  I take it as a given that
she assumes I naturally agree that pot doesn’t count.

  “You?” she asks me.

  I shake my head vigorously.

  Kara laughs. “I should have known. Even pot?”

  I shrug. “That’s a drug.”

  “I guess,” she says. “But it’s not addictive. If you only do it once in a while, it’s like taking a trip somewhere.”

  “No, it’s not. It must be illegal for a reason.”

  “Because of people who abuse it, and because of all the illegal activities surrounding it,” she says. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it if you’re responsible about it, which the government naturally assumes we won’t be. It’s like gambling. Or prostitution. It really has nothing to do with morality. As usual.”

  “Well, we all pay for the health problems that smoking or drugs can cause,” I say.

  “Maybe,” she says.

  Her block is quiet, with a lot of trees springing up from small round planted panels on the sidewalk. There are several hand-painted signs reading “No Dogs.”

  “You want to see my apartment?” she says. “It’s nothing much, but we can talk there. The only noise is when Pat and Stephen are singing.”

  “Pat and Stephen?”

  “Yeah. They live next door. Stephen’s this totally talented pianist, and the two of them have people over once a week and do sing-alongs. It’s so much fun. But the best part is, after everyone leaves except the two of them, it goes dead silent, and you know something’s going on next door because you can’t hear anything. It’s so romantic. You know they were waiting the whole time for everyone to leave so they could get their hands all over each other.”

  I make a face.

  “Oh, come on.” She brushes my cheek with her hand. “Admit you find that sweet.”

  “Yeah, it’s sweet.”

  “It is. Here’s my stoop.” She gets out her outdoor door key and indoor door key and walks up the stairs and turns the upper lock key and the lower lock key. “This is the place.”

  Each room is painted with light pastel colors, and on the walls, there are murals of the moon and stars. The bedroom is the biggest room. It’s got a queen-sized bed, a television, and a round table in front of a bay window that overlooks the street. Kara has left the window open slightly, and the pale curtains billow in front of it. “You want something to drink?”