Girls (16 page)

Since you both sat down, she has ignored you. She has been sitting next to an empty seat. It was the calculator. The laptop alone would have been fine, she would have leaned back just a little to see what you were doing, who you were. But when you produced the calculator, began to add things up for your-self, you disappeared. Then she overheard your conversation and said, “Are you going to Guangzhou?”

And you laugh because it is a direct flight.

She tells you her name, you recognize it, can place her now. She is a model, has been a model for as long as models can be models. She is not as young as she used to be. You have a friend who would call her “used up,” especially if he saw her now, under the cabin’s fluorescent lights. She asks you where you’re staying in Guangzhou. “Oh,” she says. “What a coincidence! That’s where I’m staying!” It’s possible it was, that she isn’t going to go to the bathroom in a minute and get her agent out of bed and make him change her reservation. There are only three world-class hotels in Guangzhou, so it’s possible.

She wants you to ask her what she, a world-famous model, is doing in Guangzhou, an industrial port in mainland China, so you do.

“I’m doing a spot for the World Wildlife Fund at the Zhang Bird Sanctuary,” she says. This makes sense, you think, they often do things like that after thirty, when their careers are faltering, when the crevasses are too deep for the lights and the makeup to shallow out. It lets them hang on to the public eye, may even lead to some acting work.

But then, as she continues talking, you realize you are wrong. She really does love birds, can talk for hours about them. She tells you about the white-tailed eagles that live at the sanctuary. “They look like little Roman soldiers or something,” she says, “stocky little soldiers with worn-out plates of brown armor all over them.” She tells you how she watched a pair build their nest once, that the female — larger than the male — supervised the construction, that it made her cry. When the next round of food comes, a noodle soup, she tells you how chopsticks always remind her of the Eurasian spoonbill, this beautiful bird — as beautiful as a crane — with a spectacular crest but with a bill that looks like someone stuck a pair of chopsticks in its face. “Like this,” she says, holding the chopsticks they have given you up to her mouth. With them jutting out from her face, she turns, extends her neck, holds her head up high, displays an elegant profile, and makes a sound like a duck. Her eyes come alive when she does this. In spite of yourself, you are amused. Even though this is not something she is doing just for you, is something she has done before, and in front of other men.

This part of her is actually quite charming. This part of her that she has held on to since she was a little girl. This fascination with birds that has somehow escaped destruction. How did she do that? How did she shield even that tiny piece of herself? Or was it simply chance, simply a building left standing in the rubble after an atomic blast?

Suddenly, in spite of your disinterest, you find yourself wondering if she is bisexual like so many of the models you’ve fucked, find yourself wondering what she would look like with your cock in her mouth. You lose the thread of what she is saying, something about land reclamation near the sanctuary, about the expansion of Guangzhou chemical plants encroaching on the reserve, about migratory patterns becoming altered, about poisoning. Something about extinction. But she finishes with a “Don’t you think?” and so you are able to say, “Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more,” with confidence.

When you land, she pretends not to see her own car, thinks you won’t notice, complains nonchalantly that her car isn’t there. So you play along and invite her to share yours. Then at your hotel, if her agent hasn’t managed to change her reservation yet, she makes a big fuss, is very good at pretending they’ve made a mistake. When she’s standing at the front desk, as the bellhops take your bags upstairs, you notice that she really does still have a fantastic ass. So, wondering how many hours a day she devotes to exercising her ass alone, you tell the hotel she’s a friend of yours, ask them if there isn’t something they can do. She has a room within minutes. Someone else will find themselves without a room tonight.

She thanks you, of course, says, “I don’t know why they didn’t have my reservation,” tells you her room number even though she must know you heard it at the desk.

You spend all of the next day looking at the plant under construction, from very early until very late. You decide what has happened, the extra costs are Nathan’s fault. Nathan who’s worked for you for three years. Nathan who, you noticed a couple of weeks ago, just put pictures of his new son on his desk. You decide it’s Nathan who’s going to have start faxing out rásumás.

When you get back to your room, you have a message. Before you retrieve it, you know who it is. And you’re right. She wants to know if you’d like to go out to the sanctuary with her tomorrow, if you’d like to see the eagles she told you about.

You are supposed to be leaving in the morning but you call your assistant and see if there’s any reason you couldn’t stay an extra day. You don’t even know why you are trying to rearrange your schedule. She’s still beautiful, certainly, still worthwhile if you didn’t have other things to do. But she’s not worth changing your plans for, is she?

Then you realize why. It’s her interest in the birds, her concern for them, the way they can still delight her as if she were five years old. That’s why you’ve decided you’ll let her try to fuck her way into your heart.

So the next day she takes you to the reserve, shows them to you, the eagles, the spoonbills, points out how even from the middle of the sanctuary you can still see the smokestacks of the refineries, how the water changes color near the protected area’s boundaries. She points all of this out to you, then, after a dinner at a remarkable restaurant reserved for party officials and rich foreigners, after she bores you with the details of her flagging career, of her agent spending less and less time on her, then, after that, she fucks you anyway. She fucks you even though you are building one of the chemical refineries that is killing the only thing she loves. She fucks you anyway.

In college, you wouldn’t have had the courage to ask this girl for her number. Now, the next morning, knowing you are leaving that day, she volunteers to give it to you — her cell number she points out, the most personal of her numbers. She has to ask you for yours. You give her your card, tell her that’s the easiest way to get in touch with you.

But when she calls two weeks later, and again two weeks after that, you don’t return her calls. You lost interest after fucking her once. That undamaged part of her was so small, it was only good for one night. Nothing more.

“There is nothing worse for mortal men than the vagrant life, but still for the sake of the cursed stomach people endure hard sorrows. . . .’” —
Odyssey
15:343

You’re out with an old friend of yours. He started his own company a few years ago and it’s been doing well. He’s only thirty-five and he’s worth a few hundred million, you’re not sure how much. He’s only thirty-five and his hair’s grey. He called you up and said he wanted to go for a drink, that he needed “to vent to someone outside the industry” so he wouldn’t “have a problem later.”

You meet him at a bar and you catch up for a few minutes and then you ask, “So what’s up?”

And he looks around suspiciously, as if in this crowded, noisy, trendy New York bar anyone would be listening. And then he moves over to your side of the booth so he can talk to you without being easily overheard and he says:

“OK. Are you ready for this one? When we first started the company we needed a little eye candy in the web development department so we pick this girl from Brazil out of the applicants. She wasn’t the most qualified in terms of skill or talent — in fact she was hardly qualified at all — but she was more than qualified in the ways we wanted. We figured we could teach her what she needed to know and meanwhile we’d have something nice to look at in a department where you’re usually lucky you’re not turned to stone, right? And besides, what harm could she do? It was all VC money we were paying her and we could just assign her to noncritical stuff until she knew what she was doing.

“So everything’s going fine. She learns the ropes, after a few months she can actually do the occasional thing we need her to do, she still looks pretty — doesn’t flab out or anything — and, bonus for her, she meets this IB guy at one of our parties and ends up marrying him and — boom — green card. So she’s sitting pretty and we’re happy.

“Then last month we needed a new head of web development. So we bring in someone from the outside, someone who really knows what they’re doing.

“And now — you ready for this? — now, out of the blue, she’s fucking suing us! Not only is she stupid enough to think she’s actually qualified for the job — which she isn’t, not even close — but she thinks she didn’t get it because she’s a woman! I mean, can you appreciate the irony here? This dumb fucking cunt who only got her job, her green card, and all her fucking skills because she’s a hot chick, is suing us for discrimination.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” you say. “That’s fucking crazy — God that’s such bullshit!”

“I know,” says your friend. “And we’re going to have to settle if we don’t want the whole thing to go to court and we can’t even fire her because that’ll give her more leverage. It’s ridiculous — she basically just said ‘give me a check for fifty grand’ and we have to give it to her.”

“Man,” you say and take a sip of your Martini.

Your friend just nods and takes a sip of his own Martini and then he says:

“You know what really gets me about this stuff? You know what really burns me? It’s not the hypocrisy or the double standards like this you see every fucking day, it’s not that they want us to play by one set of rules but use another set for themselves — it’s the idea that life is supposed to have rules in the first place. I mean, where the fuck did anyone get the idea that life is some kind of track meet?

“Really — can you imagine the board asking me why we delayed the release of some product that was going to drive our competitors right out of the market and me saying, ‘I thought they should have time to get their version ready, it wouldn’t be fair otherwise’? Or what about me going to the Supreme Court and saying, ‘Hey, my predecessor didn’t realize how important the Asian markets were going to be so I was wondering if you could pass a law that says I get a share of those markets equal to my competitors’ — it’s only fair.’ It would be like standing up in the middle of a war and saying, ‘Listen, we ran out of ammo can you give us a day or two to get resupplied?’

“I mean, I don’t know anyone who thinks life is fair, so how did so many people get the idea it’s supposed to be fair? Christ, it’s not like there’s anybody watching, it’s not like there’s a goddamn referee!

“That must be why people like her think it makes sense to accuse people like me of cheating — they don’t understand there’s no such thing.

“They must think I think like them — not that that’s not what everybody does — contrary to popular belief that’s why the world’s so fucked up: not because everyone sees things differently but because everyone thinks everyone sees things the same. They must think that, like them, I don’t just have a goal but also some effed-up set of rules I made up for myself defining how I have to get there. Which must be why they think it makes sense to accuse people like me of racism and discrimination — they must think I give a fuck about something other than winning to believe that if I found some squad of ugly, black, femi-nazis who pumped out code better than a well-paid
Trek
convention I wouldn’t hire them because they were ugly women or because they were black or both. They obviously have no clue exactly how ridiculous an accusation like that sounds, the idea I’d turn down some competitive advantage because of some fucking belief of mine — it’s crazy!”

And he looks at you and you look at him and you realize he’s not talking anymore and you say, “Sorry, say that again — I thought those girls were getting pissed off at us but they aren’t, they’re checking us out.”

And he says, “Really? Which girls?” and turns around.

Because in ancient Athens, to get to Plato’s academy you had to walk through the public cemetery for those killed in war.

Because the Peloponnesian War began in 431
B.C
.,
The Trojan Women
was written in 415
B.C
.,
Lysistrata
was written in 411
B.C
., and Athens lost the Peloponnesian War in 404
B.C
.

Because the great vanity is not thinking we can win, it’s thinking we don’t need to fight.

And there was that time when I had the flu but was supposed to give an important pitch the next day. That time you stayed up with me almost all night. You couldn’t help with the work but you made me tea and toast and soup and made sure I was warm enough.

And the next day when I left, uncertain if what I’d done was enough, uncertain that I could pull things off because I was sick, you really did say, “Don’t worry, everything will be fine.” And you really did kiss me.

“I love you,” I said. And, right there, right then, I did.

“‘. . . there is no suppressing the ravenous belly, a cursed thing, which bestows many evils on men, seeing that even for its sake the strong-built ships are handled across the barren great sea, bringing misfortune to enemies.’” —
Odyssey
17:286

You are watching TV on a Sunday afternoon. Flipping through the channels you stop briefly on a women’s talk show. The hosts are women, the audience is women, they are discussing women’s issues.

It takes you a minute to figure out what they are actually discussing but it seems like some famous supermodel in her twenties just married some man in his eighties worth a few hundred million. The hosts and their guests and the audience are all taking turns saying how disgusting it is. And then one of the women in the audience gets called on and stands up and says, “I’ll tell you one thing — if I was going to marry an eighty-four-year-old man, he’d have to be worth a lot more than three hundred and forty million dollars!”