The New Yorker, September 18, 2006 P. 69
In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but, embarrassingly enough, we had parents. I even had two. They would never have let me go, so I didn’t say goodbye; I packed a little bag and left a note. On the way to Pip’s house, I cashed my graduation checks. Then I sat on her porch and pretended that I was twelve or fifteen or even sixteen. At all those ages I had dreamed of this day; I had even imagined sitting on this porch, waiting for Pip for the last time. She had the opposite problem: her mom would let her go. Her mom had gigantic swollen legs that were a symptom of something much worse and she was heavily medicated with marijuana at all times.
We were anxious to begin our life as people who had no people. And it was easy to find an apartment when we got to Portland, because we had no standards; we stood in our tiny new studio and admired our door, our rotting carpet, our cockroach infestation. We decorated with paper streamers and Chinese lanterns and we shared the ancient bed that came with the apartment. This was tremendously exciting for one of us. One of us had always been in love with the other. One of us lived in a perpetual state of longing. But we’d met when we were children and we seemed destined to sleep together like children, or like an old couple who got married before the sexual revolution and are too embarrassed to learn the new way.
Next we focussed on employment; we went hardly anywhere without joyfully filling out an application. But once we were hired—as furniture sanders—we could not believe that this was really what people did all day. Everything that we had always thought of as “The World” was actually the result of someone’s job. Each line on the sidewalk, each saltine. Everyone had a rotting carpet and a door to pay for. Aghast, we quit. There had to be a more dignified way to live. We needed time to consider ourselves, to come up with a theory about who we were and set it to music.
With this goal in mind, Pip came up with a new plan. We went at it with determination—three weeks in a row we wrote and rewrote and resubmitted an ad to the local paper. Finally, the Portland Weekly accepted it; it no longer sounded like blatant prostitution, and yet, to the right reader, it could have meant nothing else. We were targeting wealthy women who loved women. Did such a thing exist? We would also consider a woman of average means who had saved up her money.
The ad ran for a month and our voice-mail box overflowed with interest. Every day we listened to hundreds of messages from men, waiting for that one special lady who would pay our rent. She was slow to appear. Perhaps she did not even read this section of the paper. We became agitated. We knew that this was the only way we could make money without compromising ourselves. Could we pay Mr. Hilderbrand, the landlord, in food stamps? We could not. Was he interested in the old camera that Pip’s grandmother had loaned her? He was not. He wanted to be paid in the traditional way. Pip grimly began to troll through the messages for a man who sounded gentle. I watched her boyish face as she listened and I realized that she was terrified. He would have to be a withered man, a man who really just wanted to see us jump around in our underwear. Suddenly, Pip grinned and wrote down a number. The woman’s name was Leslie.
The bus dropped us off at the top of the gravel driveway that Leslie had described on the phone. We’d told her that our names were Astrid and Tallulah, and we hoped that Leslie was a pseudonym, too. We wanted her to be wearing a smoking jacket or a boa. We hoped that she was familiar with the work of Anaïs Nin. We hoped that she was not the way she’d sounded on the phone. Not poor, not old, not just willing to pay for the company of anyone who would come all the way out to Nehalem, population 210.
Pip and I walked down the gravel path toward a small brown house. A woman stepped onto the porch. Her age was difficult to determine from our vantage point—a point in our lives when we could not bring older bodies into focus. She was perhaps the age of my mother’s older sister, Aunt Lynn. And, like Aunt Lynn, she wore leggings, royal-blue leggings, and an oversized button-down shirt with some kind of appliqué on it. My mind ballooned with nervous fear, and I looked at Pip, and for a split second I felt as though she were nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied my leg to hers before jumping off the bridge. Then I blinked and I was in love with her again.
Leslie waved and we waved. We waved until we were close enough to say hi and then we said hi. She said, “Come on in,” and we went in. Pip asked for the money right away, which was something we’d decided to do beforehand. It is always terrible to have to ask for anything. We wished we were something that needed nothing, like paint. But even paint needs repainting. She told us that we were younger than she’d expected. We sat on an old vinyl couch, and she left the room. It was an awful room, with magazines piled everywhere and furniture that looked as if it had come from a motel. We didn’t look at each other or at anything that was reflective. I stared at my knees.
For a long time we didn’t know where she was, and then slowly I could feel that she was standing right behind us. I realized this just before she pulled her fingernails through my hair. I hadn’t been able to imagine her as the sexual type, but now I realized that I didn’t know anything. It had begun, which meant that every second brought us closer to the end. I told myself that long nails meant wealth; the idea of wealth always calmed me down. My head relaxed and I did that exercise where you imagine that you are turning into honey. My mind slowed to a rate that would not have been considered functional for any other job. I was alive only one out of every four seconds; I registered only fifteen minutes out of the hour. I saw that she was standing before us in a slip and that it was not really clean and I died. I saw that Pip was taking off her shoes and I died. I saw that I was squeezing a nipple and I died.
On the long ride home neither of us said anything. We were kites flying in opposite directions attached to strings held by one hand. The money we’d just made was also in that hand. Pip stopped to get a bag of chips on the way home from the bus station and then we had $1.99 less than our rent. It seemed obvious now that we should have charged more. Pip put the money in an envelope and wrote Mr. Hilderbrand’s name on it. Then we stood there, apart, bruised, and smelling like Leslie.
We turned away from each other and set about tightening all the tiny ropes of our misery. I decided to take a bath. Just as I was stepping into the tub I heard the front door close and I froze mid-step; she was gone. Sometimes she did this. In the moments when other couples would fight or come together, she left me. With one foot in the bath, I stood waiting for her to return. I waited for an unreasonably long time, long enough to realize that she wouldn’t be back that day. But what if I waited it out, what if I stood there naked until she returned? I had done things like this before. I had hidden under cars for hours. I had written the same word seven hundred times in an effort to alchemize time. I studied my position in the bathtub. The foot in the water was already wrinkly. How would I feel when night fell? And when Pip came home, how long would it take her to look for me in the bathroom? And would she understand that time had stopped while she was gone? And, even if she did realize that I had performed this impossible feat for her, what then? She was never thankful or sympathetic.
I left the bath and paced around our tiny room. It didn’t even occur to me to go outside; I had no idea how to navigate the city without her. There was only one thing that I couldn’t do when she was with me, so after a while I lay down on the couch and did this. I closed my eyes and ran through my memories from our childhood. We were under the covers on her mom’s foldout sofa, or on the top bunk of my bunk bed, or in a tent in her back yard. Every location was potent in its own way. No matter where we were, it would begin when Pip whispered, “Let’s mate.” She’d scoot on top of me; we’d clamp our arms around each other’s backs and rub ourselves against each other’s small hipbones trying to achieve friction. When we did it right, the feeling came on like a head-rush of the whole body.
But just before I got there I noticed a clicking noise in the air. It was distractingly present, quietly insistent. Above my head, our five Chinese paper lanterns were rocking slightly of their own accord. As I reached toward them I suddenly realized why, but I was too late to stop myself. I shook a lantern and cockroaches came pouring out. They were crawling on each other even as they fell. They were determined and surviving as they passed each other in the air. They were planning the conquest of wherever they landed before they had even touched down. And when they hit the ground they didn’t die—they didn’t even think of dying. They ran.
When Pip finally came home, we agreed that the Leslie job had not been worth the money. But a few days later we saw Nastassja Kinski in the movie “Paris, Texas.” She was wearing a long red sweater and working in a peepshow. I thought it looked like a pretty easy job, so long as Harry Dean Stanton didn’t show up, but Pip didn’t agree.
“No way. I’m not gonna do that.”
“I could do it without you.”
This made her so angry that she did the dishes. We never did this unless we were trying to be grand and selfdestructive. I stood in the doorway and tried to maintain my end of our silence while watching her scratch at calcified noodles. In truth, I had not yet learned how to hate anyone but my parents. I was actually just standing there in love. I was not even really standing; if she had walked away suddenly, I would have fallen.
“I won’t do it—never mind.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“I’m not.”
“It’s O.K. I know you want them to look at you.”
“Who?”
“Men.”
“No, I don’t.”
“If you do that, then I can’t be with you anymore.”
This was, in a way, the most romantic thing she had ever said to me. It implied that we were living together not because we had grown up together and were the only people we knew but because of something else. Because we both didn’t want men to look at me. I told her that I would never work in a peepshow, and she stopped doing the dishes, which meant that she was O.K. again. But I wasn’t O.K. In ten years we had touched only three times, not including the thing with Leslie. It seemed as though we’d stopped mating on the day we learned what fucking was.
These were the three times:
When she was eleven, her uncle tried to molest her. When she told me about it, I cried and curled up in a ball for forty minutes until she uncurled me. I kept my eyes shut as she pulled my knees away from my chest, and I knew that if I didn’t open my eyes it would happen, and it did. She slid her hand under my tights and felt around until she had located the thing she knew on herself. Then she shook her finger in a violent, animal way. When it was over she told me not to tell anyone and I didn’t know if she meant about this thing with me or about her uncle.
When we were fourteen, we got drunk for the first time and for a few minutes everything seemed possible and we kissed. This encounter felt promisingly normal, and in the following days I waited for more kissing, perhaps even some kind of exchange of rings or lockets. But nothing was exchanged. We each kept our own things.
In our last year of high school, I momentarily had one other friend. She was just an ordinary girl. Her name was Tammy. She liked the Smiths. There was no way I could ever have fallen in love with her, because she was just as pathetic as me. Every day she told me everything that she was thinking, and I guessed that this was what most girls did together. I wanted to talk about myself, too, but it was hard to know where to begin. So I just hung out, in a loose imitation of Pip. Pip did not think much of Tammy, but she was mildly intrigued by the normalcy of our friendship.
“What do you guys do?”
“Nothing. Listen to tapes and stuff.”
“That’s it?”
“Last weekend we made peanutbutter cookies.”
“Oh. That sounds like fun.”
“Are you being sarcastic?”
“No, it does.”
So Pip came along the next time I went to Tammy’s house. As predicted, we listened to tapes. Pip asked if we were going to make peanut-butter cookies, but Tammy said that she didn’t have the right ingredients. Then she threw herself down on the bed and asked us if we were girlfriends or what. An appalling emptiness filled the room. I stared out the window and repeated the word “window” in my head. I was ready to window window window indefinitely, but suddenly Pip answered.
“Yeah.”
“Cool. I have a gay cousin.”
Tammy told us that her room was a safe space and we didn’t have to pretend, and then she showed us a neon-pink sticker that her cousin had sent her. It said “Fuck Your Gender.” We all looked at the sticker in silence, absorbing its two meanings—at least two, probably more. Tammy seemed to be waiting for something, as if Pip and I were going to obediently fall upon each other the moment we read the sticker’s bold command. I knew that we were a disappointment, meekly sitting on the bed. Pip must have felt this, too, because she abruptly threw her arm over my shoulder. This had never happened before, so, understandably, I froze. And then very gradually I recalibrated my body into a casual attitude. Pip just blinked when I sighed and flopped my hand onto her thigh. Tammy watched all this and even gave a slight nod of approval before shifting her attention back to the music. We listened to the Smiths, the Velvet Underground, and the Sugarcubes. Pip and I did not move from our position. After an hour and twenty minutes, my back ached and my hand felt numb and unaffiliated with the rest of my body. I asked Tammy where the rest room was and then ran out of the room.
In the powdery warmth of the bathroom I felt euphoric. I locked the door and made a series of involuntary, baroque gestures in the mirror. I waved maniacally at myself and contorted my face into hideous, unlovable expressions. I washed my hands as if they were children, cradling first one and then the other. I was experiencing a paroxysm of selfhood. The scientific name for this spasm is the Last Hurrah. The feeling was quickly spent. I dried my hands on a tiny blue towel and walked back to the bedroom.
I knew it just the moment before I saw it. I knew that I would find them together on the bed; I knew that I would be stunned; I knew that they would spring apart and wipe their mouths. I knew that Pip would not look me in the eye. I knew that I’d never speak to Tammy again. I knew that we would all graduate from high school and that Pip and I would live together as planned. And I knew that she did not want me in that way. She never would. Other girls, any girl, but not me.
Now that we had paid the rent, we felt entitled to mention the cockroach situation to the landlord. He told us that he would send someone over, but that we shouldn’t get our hopes up.
“Why not?”
“Well, it’s not just your apartment—the whole building’s infested.”
“Maybe you should have them do the whole building, then.”
“It wouldn’t do any good. They’d just come over from other buildings.”
“It’s the whole block?”
“It’s the whole world.”
I told him never mind, then, and got off the phone before he could hear Pip hammering. We were making some renovations—specifically, we were building a basement. Our apartment was small, but the ceilings were high and there was a tantalizing amount of unused space above our heads. Pip thought that lofts were for hippies, so even though our studio was on the second floor, she had sketched out a design that would allow us to live on a low-ceilinged main floor and then, whenever we were feeling morose, descend a ladder to the basement. We would leave the really heavy things down there, like the couch and the bathtub, but everything else would come upstairs. We could both picture the basement perfectly in our heads. It had a smell—damp, mineral—but was not entirely uncivilized. Warmth and beams of light seeped through the ceiling. Up there was home. Dinner was waiting for us there.
One of the many great reasons for building a basement was our access to free wood. Pip had met a girl whose father owned Berryman’s Lumber and Supply. Kate Berryman. She was just a year younger than us and went to the private high school by Pip’s grandma’s house. I had never met her, but I was glad that we were using her. We practiced a loose, sporadic form of class warfare that sanctioned every kind of thievery. There was no person, no business, no library, hospital, or park that had not stolen from us, be it psychically or historically, we’d concluded, and thus we were forever trying to regain what was ours. Kate probably thought that she was on our side of the restitution when she struggled to pull large pieces of plywood out of the back of her parents’ station wagon. She left them in the alley behind our building, honking three times as she drove away. We hauled the wood upstairs, convinced that we had hoodwinked everyone. We were always getting away with something, which implied that someone was always watching us, which meant that we were not alone in this world.
Each morning, Pip made a list of what we needed to do that day. At the top of the list was usually “Go to bank”—where they had free coffee. The next items were often vague—“Find out about food stamps,” “Library card?”—but the list still gave me a cozy feeling. I liked to watch her write it, knowing that someone was steering our day. At night we discussed how we would decorate the basement, but during the day our progress was slow. Mostly what we had was a lot of pieces of wood; they leaned against the walls and lay across the couch like untrained dogs.
We were trying to nail a post into the linoleum kitchen floor when Pip decided that we needed a certain kind of bracket.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I’ll call Kate and she’ll bring it.”
Pip made the call and then went to take a shower. I continued hammering long nails through the post and into the floor. The post became secure. It was a satisfying feeling. It wouldn’t bear any kind of weight, but it stood on its own. It was almost as tall as me and I couldn’t help naming it. It looked like a Gwen.
The buzzer rang and Pip ran damply to the door. It was Kate. I looked up at her from where I was sitting on the kitchen floor. She was wearing a school uniform.
“Where’s the bracket?” I said.
With panic in her eyes, she looked at Pip. Pip took her hand, turned to me, and said, “We have to tell you something.”
I suddenly felt chilled. My ears were so cold that I had to press my hands against them. But I realized that this made me look as if I were trying to avoid listening, like the monkey who hears no evil. So I rubbed my palms together and asked, “Are your ears cold?”
Pip didn’t respond, but Kate shook her head no.
“O.K. Go ahead.”
“Kate and I are going to live together at her parents’ house.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’m sure Kate’s dad doesn’t want you living in his house after we stole all that wood from him.”
“I’m going to work at Berryman’s Lumber to pay him back. I might even make enough money to get a car.”
I thought about this. I imagined Pip driving a car, a Model T, wearing goggles and a scarf that blew behind her in the wind.
“Can I work at Berryman’s Lumber, too?”
Pip was suddenly angry.
“Come on!”
“What? I can’t? Just say I can’t if I can’t.”
“You are purposely not getting it!”
“What?”
She raised Kate’s hand clasped in her own and shook it in the air.
Suddenly my ears were hot, they were boiling, and I had to fan my hands at either side of my head to cool them down. This was too much for Pip; she grabbed her backpack and marched out of the apartment with Kate following her.
I could not let her leave the building. I ran down the hall and threw myself on her. She shook me off; I locked my arms around her knees. I was sobbing and wailing, but not like a cartoon of someone sobbing and wailing—this was really happening. If she left, I would become mute, like those children who have witnessed horrible atrocities. Pip was prying my fingers off her shins. Kate kneeled down to help her, and I was repulsed by the touch of her puddinglike skin. I wanted to puncture it. I lunged at her chest. Pip took advantage of this moment to scuttle down the stairs and somehow Kate was behind her. I ran after them, watched them scurry into Kate’s car. Before they pulled away, I shut my eyes and hurled myself onto the sidewalk. I lay there. This was my last hope—that Pip would take pity on me. I heard their car idling beside me. I listened to the traffic and to the sound of pedestrians stepping carefully around me. I could almost hear Kate and Pip arguing in the car, Pip wanting to get out and help me, Kate urging her to leave. I pressed my cheek against the pavement in prayer. A pair of high heels clicked toward me and stopped. An elderly woman’s voice asked if I was O.K. I whispered that I was fine and silently begged her to move on. But the woman was persistent, so finally I opened my eyes to tell her to leave. Kate’s car was gone.
I slept for three days. At intervals I’d open my eyes just long enough to remember. Then I’d drop back into unconsciousness. In dreams, I was tunnelling toward her—if I could only dig deep enough I would find her. The tunnels narrowed as I crawled through them, until they became impossibly knotted strands of hair that I could only tear at.
On the afternoon of the third day, the phone finally rang. It was Mr. Hilderbrand. In some bizarre alternative reality, the rent was due again. A month had passed since we had lifted Leslie’s dirty slip. I hung up the phone and looked around the room. My post was still standing in the kitchen, tactfully silent. A dangerously tall tablelike structure wobbled in the middle of the room. It was the first square foot of the upstairs. I crawled underneath it and imagined Pip and Kate eating dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Berryman. It was the kind of scenario she had often described. We could never walk past a fancy house without her presuming that its owners would want her to live with them if they only knew that she was available. She saw herself as a charming street urchin, a pet for wealthy mothers. It was a scam. There was nothing in the world that was not a con—suddenly I understood this.
I went to the bathroom and threw handfuls of water on my face. I took off the jeans and T-shirt I had been sleeping in. Naked, I crouched on the floor and sliced the legs off my pants with a box cutter. I put on what was left of the pants and they were itty-bitty. Itty-bitty teeny-tiny. I sawed through the T-shirt, leaving “If You Love Jazz” on the floor. “Honk” barely covered my small breasts, but hey. Hey, I was leaving the apartment. I was walking down the hall, and there was a small basket of old apples in front of the neighbor’s door, with a sign that said, “For my neighbors—please take one.” I was starving. I took an apple and the door swung open. I had never really met this neighbor, but now I could see that she was a junkie. An old junkie. She told me to take another one and then she asked for a hug. I hugged her hard with an apple in each hand. A week before, I would have been afraid to touch her, but now I knew that I could do anything.
I had no money for the bus, so I walked. It was an incredible distance. A horse would have got tired galloping there. When birds flew there, it was called migration. But it wasn’t difficult; it just took time. It was a new experience to walk across the city in tiny shorts and a half shirt that said “Honk.” People honked without even seeing the shirt. I had the feeling that I might be shot in the back with an arrow or a gun, but this didn’t happen. The world wasn’t safer than I had thought; on the contrary, it was so dangerous that my practically naked self just fit right in—like a car crash, this kind of thing happened every day.
The place I was walking to was in a strip mall, between a pet store and a check-cashing place. I asked the man at the counter if they were hiring, and he gave me a form to fill out on a clipboard. When I handed it back, he stared at it without moving his eyes, which made me think that maybe he couldn’t read. He said that I could start that night if I wanted to come back at nine. I said, “Great.” He said that his name was Allen. I said that my name was Gwen.
I hung out in the strip mall for three hours. The pet store was closed, but I could see the rabbits through the window. I pressed my fingers against the glass and an ancient lop-ear hopped toward me wearily. It looked at me with one eye and then the other. Its nose quivered and for a moment I felt that it recognized me. It knew me from before, like an old teacher or a friend of my parents. The rabbit’s eyes darted across my clothes and sniffed my wild, sad urgency and guessed that I was up to no good. I stood up, brushed off my knees, and walked back into Mr. Peepers Adult Video Store and More.
The “and More” part was in the back. Allen left me there with a woman named Christy. She was sitting in a green plastic patio chair and wearing a pink OshKosh overall dress. Looking at the sturdy brass overall fasteners, I wondered if everything familiar was actually part of a secret sexual underworld. Christy showed me into a booth and began packing dildos and bottles and strings of beads into a sporty Adidas bag. Her tools were laid out on an old flowery towel that smelled like my grandmother. She wrapped the towel around a small empty jelly jar.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“Pee.”
Even pee was in on this. She showed me the price list and the slot that money would come through. She raised the flat of her hand in the air as she described how the curtain would roll up. She cleaned a telephone receiver with Windex and a paper towel and warned me never to leave it sticky. Then, with hasty efficiency, she pulled her long, thin hair into a ponytail, swung the Adidas bag over her shoulder, and left.
The store suddenly felt very quiet, like a library. I sat on the green plastic chair and adjusted my shirt and shorts. The fluorescent lights droned with a timeless constancy. I looked up at them and imagined that they, not the stars, had hung over the long creation of civilization. They had droned over ice ages and Neanderthals, and now they droned over me. I walked into my booth. I didn’t have anything to lay out on a towel; I didn’t even have a towel. All I had was the key to my apartment. If I didn’t make any money tonight I would be walking all the way back there. At night. In this outfit. I was in the unique situation of needing to give a live fantasy show in order to protect my personal safety.
I practiced taking the phone off the hook. I did it five times, quicker and quicker, as if this were the skill I would be paid for. I thought about the words that I would have to speak into it. I had never said any of those words, except as swear words. I tried to think of them as seductive. I tried to say them seductively into the receiver, but they came out in a swallowed whisper. What if I couldn’t say them? How awkward would that be? The man would ask for his money back and I wouldn’t get to take the bus. In a panic, I said all the dirty words I knew in one long curse: Cock-sucking ball-licking bitch whore cunt pussy-licking asshole fucker. I hung up the phone. At least I could say them.
I sat in the plastic chair for more than three hours. During this time, two different men came into the store. They both peeked at me over the racks of videos, but neither of them walked to the back. After the second man left, Allen yelled out from behind the counter.
“That’s the second one you’ve let go by!”
“What?”
“You’ve gotta be more aggressive! Can’t just sit on your ass back there!”
“Got it!”
Twenty minutes later, a man in a black sweatshirt came in. He peered over a rack of magazines at me and I rose to my feet and walked toward him. His sweatshirt had a picture of a galaxy on it with an arrow pointing to a tiny dot and the words “You are here.” The man looked up at me and pretended to be surprised. I imagined him instinctively pulling off his hat in the presence of a lady, but he wasn’t wearing a hat.
“Are you interested in a live fantasy show, sir?”
“Yeah. O.K.”
He followed me to the back of the store. We parted for a moment and reunited inside the booth with the curtained glass between us. I heard a Velcro wallet ripping open, twenty dollars fell lightly into the locked plastic box, and the curtain rose. He already had his penis in one hand and the phone in the other. I lifted the receiver. But, as I had feared, I was mute. I stood paralyzed, as if on a rock over a cold lake. I was never good at jumping in, letting go of one element and embracing another. I could stand there all day, letting the other kids go in front of me forever. He was pumping it up and down, and it was a strange sight, not something you see every day; in fact, I had never seen this before. He said something into the phone, but I didn’t catch it. Despite how close we were, the reception was not very good.
“Excuse me?”
“Can you take off your clothes?”
“Oh. O.K.”
From the start, one is trained not to take off one’s clothes in front of strangers. Keeping one’s clothes on is actually the No. 1 rule for civilization. Even a duck or a bear looks civilized when clothed. I pulled down my shorts, slid off my underwear, lifted my shirt over my head. I stood there, naked, like a bear or a duck. The man looked at me with grim concentration, my pale breasts, the puff of hair between my legs, back and forth between these poles. And he checked occasionally to make sure that I was looking at him. I diligently stared at his penis and hoped that this was enough, but after a few seconds he asked me if I liked what I saw. Again I was on the rock; kids splashed below me yelling “Jump!” I knew that jumping was like dying. I would have to let go of everything. I considered what I had. She hadn’t called, she wouldn’t call, I was alone, and I was here—not in some abstract sense, not here on earth or here in the universe, but really here, standing naked before this man. I pushed my hand between my legs and said, “Your big hard cock is making me so horny.”
At 5 A.M., I was gliding through the night on a bus. The bus was just a formality, though—actually I was flying, in the air, and I was taller than most people are, I was nine or twelve feet tall, and I could fly, I could jump over cars, I could say “cock” ravenously, gently, coyly, demandingly. I could fly. And I had three hundred and twenty-five dollars in my pocket. Standing with one foot in the bathtub until Pip returned wasn’t just a way to stop time—it was also a ritual to bring her back. I would be Gwen until she came home.
I bought a lime-green negligee, a dildo, which I de-virginized myself with, and a bobbed chestnut-colored wig. I hated my job, but I liked the fact that I could do it. I had once believed in a precious inner self, but now I didn’t. I had thought that I was fragile, but I wasn’t. It was like suddenly being good at sports. I didn’t care about football, but it was pretty amazing to be in the N.F.L. I told long involved stories that revolved around my own perpetually wet pussy. I spread open every part of my body. I told customers that I missed them, and these customers became regulars and these regulars became stalkers. I learned to stay inside until the moment before my bus came, and then dash past anyone who was waiting in the parking lot, waving and yelling, “Come see me on Thursday!”
And I missed her terribly.
One evening, the bus was late and a customer followed me out to the curb. He stood beside me at the bus stop and I ignored him, and then he started spitting. First he spat on the pavement, then more generally in the air. I felt tiny wet specks blow onto my face and I pressed my lips together and stepped back. His harassment relied on a logic so foreign that I felt disoriented. I couldn’t gauge whether this was terrifying or silly, and it was this feeling that told me to go back inside. I walked, then ran, slamming the door behind me. Mr. Peepers was not exactly a safe haven, though, and I couldn’t stay there forever. I asked Allen to go outside and see if the customer was still there. He was. Couldn’t Allen tell him to leave? Allen felt that he could not, because (a) he wasn’t breaking the law, and (b) he was a good customer. Allen thought that I should call a friend or a cab to pick me up.
I had been waiting for this moment, and I marvelled at how organically it had arisen. I usually imagined poisoning myself or getting hit by a car. Someone official—a cop or a nurse—would ask me if there was anyone I wanted to call. I would gasp her name. “She works at Berryman’s Lumber and Supply,” I would say. This situation was not as dire, but it did involve safety, and, more important, it hadn’t been my idea to call her. I had been ordered, almost commanded, by a superior, Allen.
I called Berryman’s Lumber quickly, almost distractedly, modelling myself on the kind of person who would have a question about replacement saw blades. But the moment the line began ringing my senses dilated, winnowing out everything that was not the sound of my own heart.
“Berryman’s Lumber and Supply. How can I help you?”
“I’m trying to reach Pip Greeley?”
“Just a sec.”
Just a sec. Just two months. Just a lifetime. Just a sec.
“Hello?”
“It’s me.”
“Oh, hi.”
I knew this wouldn’t do. This Oh, hi. I couldn’t be the person who elicited a response like this. I straightened my wig. I smiled into the air the way I smiled when customers unbuckled their belts, and I made my eyes laugh as if everything were some version of a good time. I began again.
“Hey, I’m in a bind here and wonder if you could help me out.”
“Yeah? What?”
“I’m working at this place, Mr. Peepers? And there’s this really creepy guy hanging around. Do you have a car?”
She was silent for a moment. I could almost hear the name Mr. Peepers vibrating in her head. It described a man with eyes the size of clocks. She had devoted her whole life to avoiding Mr. Peepers, and now here I was, cavorting with him. I was either repulsive and foolish or I was something else. Something surprising. I held my breath.
She said she guessed she could borrow a van and could I wait twenty minutes until she got off work? I said I probably could.
We didn’t talk in the van, and I didn’t look at her, but I could feel her looking at me many times with bewilderment. I usually changed my clothes and took off my wig before I went home, but I had been right not to do this today. I looked out the window for other passengers in love with their drivers, but we were well disguised—we feigned boredom and prayed for traffic. Just as her former home came into view, Pip made a sudden left turn and asked if I wanted to see where she lived now.
“You mean Kate’s?”
“No, that didn’t work out. I’m living in this guy I work with’s basement.”
“Sure.”
The basement was what is called “un-finished.” It was dirt, with a few boards thrown down here and there, islands that supported a bed and some milk crates. Pip waved a flashlight around and said, “It’s only seventy-five dollars a month.”
“Really.”
“Yeah, all this room! It’s more than fifteen hundred square feet. I can do anything I want with it.”
She walked me between the beams, describing her plans. Then she slipped the flashlight into a hanging loop of string and a dim spotlight fell on her pillow. I stretched out on the bed and yawned. She stared at the length of me.
“You can stay here if you want—I mean, if you’re tired.”
“I might just nap.”
“I have some cleaning up to do.”
“You clean up. I’ll nap.”
I listened to her sweeping. She swept closer and closer, she swept all around the edges of the mattress. Then she laid the broom down and climbed into bed with me. We lay there, perfectly still, for a long time. Finally, Pip adjusted her shoulders so that the outermost edge of her T-shirt grazed my arm; I recrossed my legs, carelessly letting my ankle fall against her shin. Five more seconds passed, like heavy bass-drum beats. Then we turned to each other, and our hands grabbed urgently, even painfully. It seemed necessary to be brutal at first, to mime anger and concede nothing. But once we had wrestled deep into the night and turned off the flashlight, I was surprised by her gentle attentions.
So this was what it was like not to be me. This was who Pip was. Because, make no mistake, I kept my wig on the whole time. I believed it had made all of this possible, and I think I was right. The wig and the fact that I did not cry, even though I desperately wanted to cry, to tell her how miserable I had been, to squeeze her and make her promise never to leave again. I wanted her to beg me to quit my job and then I wanted to quit my job.
But she didn’t beg, and in fact Mr. Peepers was essential. Each night she picked me up in the Berryman’s Lumber van, took me under the house, and made love to me. And each morning I went home and took off my wig. I scratched my sweaty scalp and let my head breathe for two hours before getting on the bus to go to work. I lived like this for eight beautiful days. On the ninth day, Pip suggested that we go out to breakfast before I went to work.
“I wish I could, but I have to go home and get ready.”
“You look great.”
“But I have to wash my hair.”
“Your hair looks great.”
Our eyes locked and an unfriendly feeling passed between us. Of course it was a wig—I knew she knew this—but she was suddenly determined to call my bluff. I imagined for a moment that we were duelling, delicate foils raised high.
“O.K., then, let’s have breakfast.”
“I can drop you off at Mr. Peepers.”
“Fine. Thank you.”
Everyone knows that if you paint a human being entirely with house paint he will live, as long as you don’t paint the bottoms of his feet. It only takes a little thing like that to kill a person. I had worn the wig for almost thirty hours straight, and as I stripped and jiggled and moaned I began to feel warm, overly warm. But after each show a new customer appeared. By midday, sweat was running down the sides of my face, but the men just kept coming. It was a day of incredible profits. Allen even patted me on the back as I left, saying, “Good work, champ.” Pip was waiting in the van, but the walk across the parking lot felt long and strange. I thought I recognized a customer crouching by his car, but, no, it was just a normal man huddled over something in a cage. He murmured, “That’s right, we’re going to take you home.”
Pip put me right to bed and even borrowed a thermometer from her co-worker upstairs. But she did not suggest that I take off my wig, and in my fever I understood what this meant. I saw her in the clearing with a pistol and I knew without even looking that my hands were empty. But I could win by pretending to have a pistol. If I said “Bang!” and let her shoot me, I would win. If I died this way, as Gwen, would the rest of me go on living? And what was the rest of me? I fell asleep with this question and tunnelled through the night ripping at the knotted strands until finally the wig came off. I didn’t put it on in the morning and Pip didn’t ask me how I was feeling; she could see that I was fine. She didn’t offer to drive me to work, either, and we both knew that she wouldn’t be there to pick me up.
I sat in the green plastic chair under the fluorescent lights. It was a slow day. It seemed as if all the men in the world were too busy to masturbate. I imagined them out there doing virtuous things, solving crimes and teaching their children how to do cartwheels. It was the last hour of my eight-hour shift and I had not given a single show. It was almost eerie. I watched the clock and the door and began to place bets between them. If no customers came for me in the next fifteen minutes, I would yell Allen’s name. Fifteen minutes passed.
“Allen!”
“What.”
“Nothing.”
There were only twenty minutes left now. If no one came in the next twelve minutes, I would yell the word “I,” as in me, myself, and. After seven minutes, the door dinged and a man came in. He bought a video and left.
“I!”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
It was the final eight. If no customers came in, I would yell the word “quit.” As in no more, enough, I’m going home. I stared at the door. With each breath I took, it threatened to open. With each passing minute. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. ♦