Girls (8 page)

Eventually I teased you about it and you said, “It’s because anywhere will be wonderful if we live there together so it doesn’t matter what it’s like.” I let you choose in the end, I also didn’t think it mattered what it was like.

Before we moved the furniture in, you insisted we have sex in every room. “To baptize it,” you said. “To make it special.”

“‘A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much. Nothing is won for me, now that my heart has gone through its afflictions in forever setting my life on the hazard of battle. For as to her unwinged young ones the mother bird brings back morsels, wherever she can find them, but as for herself it is suffering, such was I, as I lay through all the many nights unsleeping, such as I wore through the bloody days of the fighting, striving with warriors for the sake of these men’s women. . . .

‘All the other prizes of honour he gave the great men and the princes are held fast by them, but from me alone, of all the Achaians he has taken and keeps the bride of my heart. Let him lie beside her and be happy. Yet why must the Argives fight with the Trojans? And why was it the son of Atreus assembled and led here these people? Was it not for the sake of lovely-haired Helen? Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful, loves her who is his own . . . as I . . . though it was my spear that won her.’” — Achilles,
Iliad
9:320

You look in the mirror — you take care of yourself but you still have those ridges now, they have grown above your pelvis. They are not ugly, exactly, but they are weight. You cannot make them go away.

One out of every two marriages ends in divorce.

Four out of five spouses admit to cheating on their partner — we don’t know how many of the remaining 20 percent are simply not admitting it.

Thousands of people are employed by sports teams and film shoots and companies, by men with enough money, to “look after” wives. Ostensibly their job is to make sure the wives are happy and comfortable and get taken shopping, whether it’s to exclusive local hand-painted scarf boutiques or to remote villages known for their blue-glazed pottery. But in reality their job is to assist in keeping the wives away from the husbands when the husbands want to “play.” And, truth be told, the majority of the wives know precisely what these “assistants” are being paid for, the majority of the wives have no illusions.

So who is it, exactly, that we think we’re fooling?

She lets you — no, wants you to take dirty pictures of her. “Come on!” she says. “Just for you,” she says, “you know, for when we can’t be together.”

So there you are. Hiding from your wife. On a Wednesday night in one of your eleven bathrooms with your Armani pants around your ankles. A forty-two-year-old man worth hundreds of millions of dollars, a king, masturbating like a schoolboy over a single page torn from
Hustler
because you can’t wait for the weekend.

Except it isn’t a page from a magazine. It’s a Polaroid of her on the beach. You have others but this is your favorite. She is leaning back against a large rock. It is craggy and ferrous, an enormous glossy clot. Just to the left of it, at the edge of the picture, in the distance on the white beach, people can be made out sunbathing, families. The beach is so white they seem like drawings on a piece of paper. You don’t remember framing the picture so they could be seen, you’re almost certain you didn’t mean to. She is wearing the bikini you bought her, the $340 bikini that is mostly little ropes. With her right hand she is lifting her left breast up and out of the bikini, towards her tiny mouth, her extended, curled tongue. Her head is bent down as far as it will go, her blond hair cascading, veiling the right side of her body down to her stomach. Her eyes are closed. Her left hand is thrust inside her bikini bottoms. Her hair and her tongue glisten as do the most polished, most metallic edges of the rock forming a drunken spider’s web behind her. If you look closely, and you have, you can see the sun reflected in her tongue stud. A brilliant, painful point.

There are so many things about this picture that can make you cum. The fact that her eyes are closed as if she were in a deep and dreamless sleep. The metal in her tongue so close to the puckered, pink flesh of her nipple. Her tan right arm curving across her body, striped like a tiger by her hair. And, perhaps most of all, her bikini bottoms raised into ridges by her fingers, the highest peak the bump of what you know is the middle joint of her middle finger, poised to push into herself.

She’s mad to take risks like that, crazy. Masturbating behind a rock on a crowded beach and letting you take pictures of her. Doesn’t she understand she — you — we — could get caught? Doesn’t she understand exactly how close to the edge we all are? But then, she has nothing to lose. And it is because she is mad that you must be with her. Because her madness is infectious.

When you are done you are suddenly filled not with guilt but with terror. You are afraid someone might somehow find the pictures. Afraid you will go to jail. Afraid you will lose everything you have. But most of all, you are afraid of the embarrassment. No one will understand everything she is to you, that she is everything to you, that she is worth the risk, that without her everything you have is nothing. No one will understand any of this. You will just be someone who made an underage girl pose for dirty pictures, someone who collected child pornography.

And you swear to yourself you’ll get rid of the pictures first thing in the morning. You swear to yourself that this time it’s just for the night you’re putting them back in their strongbox which is itself in the safe in your study.

And you may even keep your promise. It’s possible that your resolve will in fact remain in the morning. That you’ll burn them.

But a few weeks later, she’ll convince you to take some more in the back stacks at a public library. And she won’t have to try very hard.

“‘I have many possessions there that I left behind when I came here on this desperate venture, and from here there is more gold, and red bronze, and fair-girdled women, and grey iron I will take back; all that was allotted to me. But my prize; he who gave it, powerful Agamemnon, son of Atreus, has taken it back again outrageously. Go back and proclaim to him all that I tell you, openly . . . wrapped as he is forever in shamelessness; yet he would not, bold as a dog though he be, dare look in my face any longer.

‘I will join with him in no counsel, and in no action. He cheated me and he did me hurt. Let him not beguile me with words again . . . not if he gave me gifts as many as the sand or the dust is, not even so would Agamemnon have his way with my spirit until he made good to me all this heartrending insolence.

‘Nor will I marry a daughter of Atreus’ son, Agamemnon . . . not if she matched the work of her hands with grey-eyed Athena . . . . For if the gods will keep me alive, and I win homeward, Peleus himself will presently arrange a wife for me. There are many Achaian girls in the land of Hellas and Phthia, daughters of great men who hold strong places in guard. . . . And the great desire in my heart drives me rather in that place to take a wedded wife in marriage, the bride of my fancy, to enjoy with her the possessions won by aged Peleus.

‘For not worth the value of my life are all the possessions they fable were won for Ilion, that strong-founded citadel, in the old days when there was peace. . . . Of possessions cattle and fat sheep are things to be had for the lifting, and tripods can be won, and the tawny high heads of horses, but a man’s life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth’s barrier.

‘For my mother Thetis the goddess of the silver feet tells me I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death. Either, if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans, my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting; but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers, the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life left for me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly.’” — Achilles,
Iliad
9:364

You are visiting St. Peter’s with your wife. You haven’t been married very long. You bought a new camera for this little vacation. It is impossibly small, a spy camera, very expensive. In the basilica, your wife overhears a couple about your own age speaking English and asks them if they’d take a picture of you. When she hands the woman the camera, she is fascinated by it. She can’t believe how small it is. “Look how small it is!” she says to her husband. They are dressed differently from the two of you, in clothes sold in large stores where entire families can shop. He just nods and says, “Uh-huh.” Then your wife, thrilled with the camera to begin with, eager to show it off to someone else who appreciates it, says, “Isn’t it great? And look — it does this and this and this.” And she shows the other woman all the things this camera does, this camera that is so well machined it resembles the eye of some kind of surgical robot. At last the other woman says to her husband, “Honey — we have to get one of these!”

And before he replies he looks at you and shakes his head slightly and rolls his eyes, then he says without looking at his wife, flashing his eyes and his eyebrows briefly up to heaven, “Oh sure, honey, no problem, we’ll pick one up this afternoon. . . .” And she laughs but you know he’ll hear about that camera for some time. And always when he least expects it. And you know he’ll never be able to buy her one. And you suddenly feel very bad for him. You suddenly want to take him aside and slip him the money for the camera — nothing to you, almost spare change — and say, “Here, here you go, get her the camera.” But you know you could never do that. You know that would be even more embarrassing. You know that would damage his pride. You know that would change his camaraderie to resentment, that that would destroy the moment the two of you shared when, without speaking he said, I don’t hate you for being able to give your wife something my wife wants because I know your wife wants things you can’t give her. I know that no matter how much we have, it is never enough. I know that if she had the camera, she’d want your tennis court.” So you just feel bad for him and leave it at that.

And then, once the picture’s taken, as you part ways and wander off towards the dome, your wife says, “They seemed like a nice couple, didn’t they?”

All over the world, we see dead people. Everywhere we go, we visit graves and cemeteries and cities of the dead, we take excursions to tombs or pyramids or burial mounds or stupas, we make a point of seeing at least one monument, one cenotaph, one cromlech, one battlefield before we take our leave. Even on vacation we not only can’t get away from death, we seek it out. Even on vacation, there are epitaphs everywhere we look.

In New Orleans, you sit outside at the Café du Monde. White paint peels from the pillars around you as it would in any formerly Spanish territory. Their shadows are long across the small metal tables, long, but growing shorter. You drink chicory coffee, eat beignets that send clouds of powdered sugar into the air. You are always surprised at how many of them you can eat without feeling ill. You must always actually tell yourself to stop or you never would.

When you see her you don’t recognize her at first. Instead, you suddenly smell rose jelly, black tea. You look around but of course the Café du Monde serves neither. You smile to yourself and wonder why you think you smell those things here, now, things you have not tasted since you were in Istanbul, since the last time you saw Elena. And it is in remembering her that you recognize her. It is her across the street by the light. It is her waiting to cross Decatur.

Yes, she is wearing the same kind of oversize aviators she made famous so long ago. Yes, she is even wearing a vintage miniskirt and halter top of the kind you shot her in so many times. But she is still hard to recognize.

You watch her cross the street, watch her walk onto the Café terrace, but you do not say anything. You think she has seen you but does not recognize you. She sits near you, perhaps even at the table next to yours. Still you say nothing. What is there to say? When her coffee and beignets arrive, she takes off her sunglasses. Anyone who bothered to look would see she has been crying.

As you watch her sip her coffee, more of Istanbul comes back to you — a coffeehouse across from the Hagia Sofia dense with the violet smoke of apple tobacco and the clac-clac-clac of backgammon, the men staring at you, at her, the only woman, the shout of the muezzin coming from the mosque — more of Istanbul and the other times you saw her during those two years you were both in Europe. The time in Paris with the balcony doors open when, through the iron railing, across the street, you could make out a woman doing her ironing as you fucked her. The time in the Aegean on the deck of Sergei’s yacht when, after everyone else had gone to bed, you had to cover her mouth with the palm of your hand before she drowned out the slap of the waves against the hull. And, of course, the first time, the time you tried again just to be sure.

You were outside Barcelona. On a beach of black sand and flashing mica, a beach that looked nothing like the night sky, you took pictures of her. It was the last day of the shoot but she wore sunglasses as she had every other day. That was her thing, why people called her. That was the summer those glasses became popular. Everyone had to have them in their shoot; no one made them look as plausible as her. Hidden, her face launched dozens of summer lines. And after that last day was over, a half day, the two of you walked through the medieval part of the city. That was when you tried again. Even though she’d rebuffed your first couple of attempts, you tried again just to be sure. After all, this wasn’t just another model. This was a girl Daimon Lake had chosen to be seen with more than once. Even if she hadn’t been a model, even if she’d been ugly, you still might have tried. Those things mattered to you then. So on the steps of the old cathedral you said, “Just a minute,” and, “May I?” and you reached out with both hands and took off her sunglasses. Then you took a picture of her on the steps, in the setting sun, took a picture of her and said as you lowered the camera, “It’s a shame. It really is. A shame.” After dinner, in an armchair near your bed, she fucked you for the first time.