Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the short story of the week. This is from a collection called Altered States that’s meant to be a bit more intense and expressionistic. At
the latest piece is by , who - among other things - writes very eloquent personal essays.Best,
Sam
WEAK MAN
His idea had been to deal with life in its entirety. These were campus thoughts, high thoughts. When he got into a groove with girls junior year, averaging about one a week, a girl in his house, very prim, called him ‘a pure hedonist.’ He was pleased even though she’d meant to insult him. “I think I’m more of an aestheticist,” he said with appropriate gravity.
The slate of girls trooping up the creaky stairs of his off-campus apartment, having a shot of whisky from the bottle he kept next to his record player, was exactly what he had been hoping for from school and pretty much how he was envisioning the rest of his life, but it turned out maybe his prim housemate was right, he’d run into the hedonist trap, he’d spend the whole week waiting for his fix and if he didn’t get it, a flat party on Friday, a desultory bar crawl Saturday, he’d spend the night gnashing his teeth, pounding on the pillow.
When he met Desi, at 25, she wasn’t at all interested in his history of exploits. They were at a party in New York. She was new to the group. She asked him how he knew people. She was very sexy in a low-cut orange dress, and you could see all the way to her throat when she laughed. She struck him as completely uninhibited. Grandly, he pointed around the room. “Slept with her,” he said. “Slept with her. With her only a makeout session, but I feel that more is on the way.”
Desi raised her eyebrows, pursed her lips, she seemed very carefully to assess the girls he was pointing to, who were dancing, playing beer pong. “You need to work on your game,” she said and turned directly on her heels, marched to the handsomest guy in the room, who happened to be a rival of Jason’s, and cut in on the conversation he was having with a girl.
Much later on, when he was really wasted, he ran into her on the fire escape. She was gloomily smoking a cigarette. His personality changed very much when he was drunk, he was suddenly a chain smoker, he reached out beggingly to her and she pursed her lips. “Oh alright,” she said, “but only one.”
She turned out, by a landslide, to be the most extraordinary woman he’d ever met. She wasn’t so well-educated, she’d been brought to the party by somebody who thought he was slumming it, who thought she’d be an easy pickup, but her mind was like a steel trap, she remembered everything, intuited everything, she was a step ahead of him in every argument, she sometimes called him out in a lie or an evasion even before he’d spoken it. And she was sexy, she really was like napalm in bed, just an endless desire, really past what he could provide. And she talked filthily to him afterwards, in this dreamy way, describing all the things she wanted that they would work up to one day, toys and pain and bondage.
“That’s a lot you’re putting into sex,” he told her. “It’s like how many things can one person throw into sex?”
She got very serious, as she always did when sex came up, no flippancy, she had a way of running her fingertip along the napkin in front of her, along the seam of the sheet, whatever was at hand, and kind of addressing someone that he took to not be quite him – God, the angels on Judgment Day, he couldn’t quite make it out.
“I just think there are no limits,” she told him or maybe the angels. “That’s all. I just have a feeling that, somewhere in sex, there’s a place of no limits."
***
As he would have expected, she was seeing other people at the same time. It seemed like a form of sophistication to not ask her about them, but she talked about them, filthily, he knew about their cocks and their preferences, it was always “this guy I saw earlier this week, he had this move where he shoved my head down into the pillow, there was this moment when I thought I was going to suffocate – and then when I came back up, it was like, I don’t know, it was like being born for the very first time.” And she would hint, gently, and then she would tease, and he sort of tried, he got as far as grabbing her head thickly in his palms like he was about to dunk a basketball and then he came out of it, acted as if he’d been meaning to pet her the whole time. She was fine with that, she was fine with everything, the presumption was that everything in sex was good, he suspected her of reading too much Dan Savage, but it wasn’t that. “I just had this moment,” she told him, “it’s hard to talk about, just a moment where it clicked for me. There were no fireworks, it was actually just in class – I was daydreaming – and suddenly I felt my destiny lock into place like all the pieces of a puzzle fighting together.”
“BDSM?” he said.
She rolled her eyes. It was a different mode now, not dreamy or exploratory, she had propped the pillow on the headboard and was sitting up against it, her eyes were flashing.
“Just that I would live my life to the maximum. Anything that anybody could do I could do too. That’s not some kind of philosophy or motto,” she clarified, “it was something that made sense to me – just me – just the feeling of like, this is you, this is what you’ve been dealt, now off you go.”
This kind of easy dynamic continued for a while. She saw him maybe once a week, maybe more like once every other week, she was the one to initiate it, to text him usually that day, to say something like, “Plans fell through. Steal a few hours?” And then, once, when he was in his kind of round-robin, half-watching a show on his laptop and chatting on apps and toggling between that and porn, he got a text from her saying, “Downstairs,” and he went down to retrieve her as if she were a package, she was in a slick rain jacket and had pressed herself to the side of his building. In the apartment, she disrobed, just dropped the jacket onto the floor of his hallway. He was trying to remember if somewhere buried in his chain of messages she had mentioned that she was coming over.
She seated herself on the foot of his bed like it was a stone slab. Her back was at an angle, her palms pressed into her temples.
“Do you mind,” she said, “if for a little while it’s just you and me?”
Over the course of the next few nights he teased out what had happened. Her dating pool had turned out to be less far-flung than he had somehow thought – involved but everybody she was seeing, pretty much, was somebody he knew. There was the guy who brought her to the party – he should have figured that out – and there was the rival, also a theater director, whom she’d chatted up at the same party and who had also taken her number. And her sex stories, so vivid in his mind in terms of anatomy and positions and quality of performance, had to rearrange themselves now that they were attached to faces, and to people, he had known for years.
This wasn’t necessarily traumatic or even off-putting. There was something cool about it, the web of sex, more tightly-raveled than he would have anticipated, and the foot of his bed being the place where she pressed palms to temples and unloaded. The issue was Ian, Jason’s rival. He had a very kinky side, as it turned out – more so even than Desi had been letting on. And, kneading fingertips into temples, she told him, They’d bought a whip together, apparently spent several happy hours together on Amazon shopping for and reading reviews of the right whip. And then there had been the feeling of pushing things – he had wanted anal and she had let him do that. “I had the feeling that, with him, I wanted to go all the way,” she said. But then the sticking point had been the time he wanted to video them and she had agreed and then, leaving his place in the morning, the usual giddy walk home, forgoing the subway in order to not break the flow of it, a sudden world-collapsing feeling; not just a pit in the stomach, a sense of sky reddening, a sudden convulsive sense of the entirety of the future as some kind of terminal sentence.
She texted him ungrammatically, said, “What we did lst night – delte please please.”
And he wrote back, “You’ll have to talk to the internet about that.”
When she called him, he was still laughing – it was a tease, he hadn’t actually sent it to Kazaa, he said, or whatever the kids are doing now – but, no, he wouldn’t delete it, it was backed up in his memory, on his cloud, that was the fantasy he’d always had, he wasn’t going to give it up just because of some Sunday morning remorse. And her tone was switching to something else, something unrecognizable, a shriek, a plead, the kind of tone she’d spent her life up to that point desperate to avoid. Their relationship till hen had been based on banter, back-and-forth, a giving and withholding of power. He was still laughing. He told her there was nothing to worry about, there hadn’t actually been a cameraman – this time – her face for the most part wasn’t recognizable.
“Listen to me. Listen to me very clearly,” she said. And, suddenly, everything around her was threatening, she had to make sure she was on a patch of sidewalk where there was nobody around her. “If you do not delete that video in the next five seconds from everywhere, I mean everywhere where anybody can access it, you will never, I mean never ever, never ever see me again. Is that clear?”
There was an asymmetrical pause. He seemed to be listening head cocked, the way somebody does when they’re expecting the other person to break character. “Oh yes, I will,” he said. “I’ll see you every night, any time I want.” And, teasingly, hung up.
Jason had always known that Ian was a dipshit – this had been a major talking point of his group well back to college. And it was both kind of nice to have that unequivocally confirmed and, in its way, to have Desi, finally all his, in a way that she had probably never been anybody’s before, by now completely folded into herself, a side of the bed all hers, nails into pillow and fists into hair, Desi now no longer withholding, no longer toying with him, Desi now very much committed, very much expressing herself.
In the next few days, in which they were separated basically only to go to the bathroom or to pick up delivery, he was careful not to ask too much about the chain of events that had brought them together – whether, for instance, the guy who’d brought her to the party was dispensed with just as much as execrable Ian – but once, when they were hand in hand, between morning croissants and a spot for lunch that he’d been eager to show her, he asked if he should do anything.
“Like what?” she said.
“Oh, who knows, a duel. Some kind of torture scenario.”
She walked about a half-block without saying anything. When she did, it was very chill.
“Sex is sex,” she said. “Nobody’s themselves in sex. Those were the rules of what we were doing – I agreed to all of them, he was just being himself. It was me really – my problem, I was the one that changed.”
***
In spite of the all-encompassing days they spent together, he knew, as he had when he’d met her, that she was uncontainable. She went back to her place eventually for a change of clothes and she stayed there for the better part of a week. She was responsive-ish to text messages. He wrote and asked what she was doing. She replied, “Feeling stupid.”
It was a reversion to how they’d been for the long preliminary phase of their relationship. There seemed to be wildly varying protocols for scheduling and for commitment. At some point, out of sheer confusion, he just couldn’t take it anymore, wrote, “I mean, deal with what you have to deal with, but just curious – just to make it about me for a second – are you thinking we’ll be together?”
And quickly, after the dots on his screen took just a moment to compose themselves, to flicker, she wrote, “Yes. Together.” That was the last he heard from her for several days.
When she next materialized, it was with shoulders strapped with duffel bags. She created a corner for herself. “I’ve sublet my room for a couple of weeks,” she said. “I’ll still keep it. It’s just, at the moment, being at that place is not good, being by myself is not good, and if you can take me for a bit – if you can put up with me, me and what I’m dealing with, that’s something I would really like. And if not – there are friends I can crash with.”
No, he told her, and his face, he felt, rose perfectly to the occasion. There was no need to crash with friends.
That seemed to be the pattern for a while, a happiness that startled both of them when they were together, and then these periods when she vanished, back to the apartment, sometimes, a bit inexplicably, to crash with a girlfriend. It was all hard to predict, hard to understand, a lot of guys, he felt, would have pulled the plug a long time earlier, but he had committed to a certain ideal, a certain way of seeing things, and he wasn’t going to be put off by a few mixed messages, a bit of volatility. Some clarity would be nice and he asked for it at one point, they had had sex, it was raining, it was the period of time where, as per routine, they chatted freely, windingly, until the moment when he announced that he was ready to resume. They were talking about love, kind of abstractly, about times they’d been in love, the way love could be an inconvenience to independence – this being his point – and at some point he felt that he’d been talking too much and told her it was her turn.
“Well, I love you, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said.
Was that just a figure of speech for her, did she love other people – the guy who’d brought her to the party, for instance, venomous Ian?
“No,” she said, like somebody treading carefully to avoid an ambush. “That was something different. You, I love – I really do – and it’s not an inconvenience to independence or anything like that, not a conflict, just a fact – you, and I’m not really sure why, to tell you the truth, but you I love very much.”
He thought about that, considered implications, it seemed to be his turn to look out for ambushes. “I love you,” he said eventually and sincerely. “I really truly do.”
She kissed him on the lips. She reached to check on the status of his cock. She smiled a bit at his need to keep refracting. “You see,” she said. “Simple in a way, nothing too complicated. Nothing needs to be difficult when you have love.”
And, after coffee in the morning, she went to meet with a friend and then to check on her apartment. She was gone for a week after that. She did text very often, talked about the glow she was in because of him, talked about feeling that he was always there with her – that was the best part. And, with her, he just had no idea if everything was true or if nothing was. It was anybody’s guess what she was up to, if she was prostrate in her room thinking about this recent misfire in her life, this pushing too far of boundaries, or if she was shooting a whole compilation with Ian.
He had gradually wound down the other flings he had, although he still texted, was still friendly. One of them, who was pretty but very boring, somebody he’d met in college and slept with occasionally since then, was in town and she texted to see if he’d like a catch-up dinner. That was fine by him. They had sushi and several sakés. She talked about her plans for her business – there seemed to be some difficulty figuring out which city she should base herself in. He paid for the check and they went to the street. “Hey,” he said, when they were out of the restaurant and she presented him with her mouth.
When they had kissed, and remembered the ways they kissed, she said, “I didn’t know if that would happen. I thought you might be with someone.”
He was trying to think of how to talk himself out of that but he took too long and she saw the truth right away. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not like you think it is. It’s not like – it’s not like anything I’ve experienced before.”
She looked at him very steadily, a look that used to annoy him so much, like she were looking through his cranium and following the movement of his thought. “I just don’t want to get in the middle of anything complicated,” she said.
And the familiar walk back to his apartment, she was on the small side, there was something nice about the way she folded into his frame, the sway of their movement together, the conversation that soothed him, relaxed him, the description of her various ventures, her family dramas. The meaningful pause as she stood to one side while he was fumbling for the key or in his room as she dreamily took her earrings off, waited for him to tidy his bed – the one time, he felt, that they really connected, the implicit contract, the sudden suspension of family dramas or of mission statements for her newest business. And then the sequence of positions, very packaged, very familiar, not comparable to Desi’s creativity, Desi’s hunger, the gasping sounds she made, which felt to him always like she were talking to a television that was in the room and that he was unaware of – but, look, if a person really were interested in totality, and this was a point that he’d made, tepidly, to Desi, you couldn’t just be a kind of junkie for the extremes, you had to take it all in, middle as well. And he had his middling sex and he dozed off and woke and checked his phone just as kind of the first step of coming into consciousness and there was a note from her saying, “Loneliness=terrible. See you in a few, ok?” And then another saying, “Let me know if you get this.” And then another, which emerged as he was staring at the phone, as if it were a figment of his terror, saying, “Downstairs.” And the girl next to him was breathing like a baby in her sleep. And it was plausible – completely plausible actually – that he had fallen asleep, hadn’t seen the messages, and he tried to remember how cell phones worked, and if the reading of a message generated any kind of info on the other end of the line, if the fact of reading was a kind of self-incrimination. And congratulated himself on his foresight or neglect – a certain compartmentalizing distance – that had kept him from giving her a copy of the keys.
But nothing happens easily, and Desi was, in all things, determined, and the residents of an apartment building, even at 1 in the morning, were amenable to a pretty girl adrift on the sidewalk. And she banged on the door, first casually, cutely, and then louder, and Maurissa, his girl, jerked awake and the fear in his eyes made her understand everything even without her move of trying to look through his cranium. She tried to remonstrate with him and he shook his head crisply. They sat upright against the headboard like they were the von Trapps hiding from the Nazis. She was shouting, calmly, unsuspectingly, he felt, just calling his name, like she were lost in fog and hoping for something to reach out and steady her. After she’d left, with one aggrieved slap at the door, they waited, exactly like you do when you’re a mischievous kid and you wait for the adults to move out of earshot before you put away your homework. She flipped over onto her side, she groaned the way you do when the end of a show lets you down terribly. According to her tenets, going backwards was a mistake – that was something that everybody who wrote dating advice always agreed on – she’d made an exception for him. Memo to self, lesson learned.
And in the morning, the flurry of apologetic text messages, the adamant denials. They met at their favorite coffee shop like it was a summit. He felt the upper hand, his alibi was watertight – he’d conked out, simple as that, no he hadn’t heard anything. She looked around, she seemed to be very interested in the conversations of other people, all the happy hipsters in a New York weekend. When she looked back at him she sounded very weary. “You’re not lying?” she said, her forehead crinkled. “You weren’t with someone else and you’re lying about it now?” She was so intuitive, she saw through everything in him, but this time he had the advantage of marshaling all his resources, all his willpower. “No,” he said, “I’m not lying, I promise you.” And she sighed and nodded to herself, it was a look he recognized from the foot of the bed, the taking-in of what Ian had done to her, the new reality. “Alright,” she said, “I don’t know whether to believe you or not believe you. But something like this – me standing like an idiot beating on your door, I’m tired, I’m a little burned out, I just need that to never happen again.”
“I promise you,” he said, and everything was marshaled, he was speaking with complete sincerity, “that will never happen again.”
She nodded off to the side, she considered things like she were listening to the terms of a plea bargain. When she turned back, she smiled tightly, to mean this doesn’t have to be talked about anymore, we can chat about news, can chat normally, about whatever you want. And he took her up on that, he told her about an outrage in government – something that, as it happened, he had heard about from Maurissa. He listened to the sound of his own voice, engaged, authoritative, the way he made his points, the little jokes he told. He did almost all of the talking, Desi was distant, very wary, very watchful. He rattled on. This is what it sounds like, he thought to himself, this is how a weak man sounds – not just for last night, for everything, every move of his, every decision, a symphony of cowardice, he would have to spend his life with his weakness. Worst part – the extent of it known only to him, himself alone with it.
Weak Man
enjoyed this.
Goes with the flow of this Am'can life. Begs the question why he is weak. 36 hours later it seems to me he would show up on screen as a sculpture. A cock eyed optimist, Donatello's David. I take it on faith in words there are types of people. But Americans are loose cannons exactly where thinking we are masters of circumstances. Everything has to be translated , we do it with friends. Types typos types. Typos.