Maidenhead (20 page)

I think it would have been my mother, though, not my father, who’d be the most shocked at this scene: an older man, a Rastafarian vegetarian in a white angel robe, MYRA’S LOVER, twirling around in Neil’s curtain-walled, stinky, unnatural fort.

Elijah was pulling up a bunch of files. He seemed to know what he was doing.

‘Don’t do that!’ I said. ‘It’s my dad’s stuff.’

‘Your daddy watches
Girls Gone Wild
?’

‘Don’t,’ I said again, going closer to the screen. I was getting worried about Elijah fucking up all the programs.

‘Looky look,’ Elijah laughed.

A photo came up on the screen full-size: it was a twenty-year-old girl in a bright pink string bikini who was using one red-nailed finger to pull the elastic away from her thigh. Elijah clicked. Another photo came up of that girl with the red-nailed finger inside herself. Her teeth were ridged. There was this blurry naked guy in the background holding a beer.

‘Cum shot,’ Elijah said, talking to the screen. ‘Fuck her. Fuck her.’

‘What is that?’ I said.

I knew what it was. My fucking computer upstairs was overrun with it too.

‘Your family photos?’

Elijah laughed again. I didn’t believe that my father was looking at this. Elijah kept clicking, there were thousands of pictures and videos too of college girls in bikinis rubbing oil on their tits. I remembered that porn in Key West, my very first porn. Oh god, my father. I was going to throw up. Me in his fort and our porn was a revolting kind of link.

‘I can find Gayl on here too,’ Elijah said.

But now a blond girl in a bright pink bikini danced with her top hanging off and her fingers digging up in another twenty-year-old’s bikini. Their tits were touching, they were rubbing and giggling.

Sweat prickled under my arms. Elijah twisted around in my dad’s swirly chair and got me to sit on the edge of his knee. Our basement had walls that looked like wood.

‘Who are these girls, is this all from the States?’ I don’t know why I pretended I didn’t know about porn.

‘Yeah, Angel. Key West, maybe.’

Is that why we could find Gayl in the porn?

Elijah pulled one of my hands behind me and stuck it on his crotch. His cock was bulging under his robe. With my arm twisted back, the videos kept playing. Bikini tops off, the bottoms off too. I could see inside the girls, they were parting themselves. I felt myself slipping off Elijah’s knee. Those girls didn’t have any hair on their vaginas. I was happy when I started growing hair down there.

Elijah whispered in my ear: ‘Someone in this house has a very dirty mind.’

I didn’t know why the video was making me horny. It was fucking disgusting. It was my
dad’s
. I felt like Elijah was going to fuck me right then. I was totally queasy, horny and queasy. Elijah put his hand on my tit over my shirt and he was squeezing and pinching my nipple with one hand and using his other hand on the mouse. We swivelled in a semicircle closer to the screen.

Then someone walked into the screen and I whipped my head away.

‘Come on, come on,’ Elijah laughed. With his forehead, he butted me back.

In the video it looked like my father. My father taking off his pants over the girl on the floor. It looked just like him, puffy eyes and hairy chin. His moss-and-mould-covered skin, naked and hairy like a troll. There was a man like my father and a girl on her hands and knees. Her pink bikini top hung from her neck.

‘I can’t,’ I said.

‘You can. You can.’

There was another older guy in the video now with the man who looked like my dad. I was forced to the screen like eyelid torture. A college girl in some wrung-out bikini with two old guys, one in front of her and one behind. She opened her legs and she opened her mouth. In porn they make fathers screw daughters with other fathers. The girl with the bikini around her neck didn’t look sad. She looked like she was going to have an orgasm. I leaned back into Elijah. I was going to vomit.

‘You’d like that too? Two guys with you? Huh, you’d like that, Myra, wouldn’t you? Gayl would too. But she’s better at this shit. She’s a real artist.’

I leaned over to the side and hacked. It burnt the back of my throat. Elijah didn’t care.

‘It’s okay that you like it, it’s okay you like it, that’s okay ... ’

That’s what Lee had said to me too.
It’s okay that you want these things to come true
.

Yeah, well, now everything was true. My life was here. And it was friendless and looking at porn with a phantasm of my father, thinking of Gayl the Artist on a cock-hard lap.

§

I was writing my essay, writing easily now. I didn’t have a reader anymore like Lee or Chris but I imagined that I was writing for them both. Maybe I was writing for anyone who could fucking stand me. I’d changed my title to
The Pornography Liberation Narrative and Sex Slaves: A Synthesis.

‘Pornography is exhilarating and revolting simultaneously,’ I wrote, thinking of my father’s stash of porn that had morphed at the end into Rent-A-Maid sites.

‘Pornography links up the internal, the external and the fantastical ways that we are not yet in the world with the ways that we might very well be.’

Me and Elijah made out that night with the porno sounds on. He wanted me to start at his feet. I kissed his toes and travelled up under his robe to his big-eyed, big thick, all-seeing cock. I sucked him off under there the best that I had ever done it. Elijah moaned
goddamn, fucking Christ, shit, my lord.

‘Pornography shows us things that are only at the edges of our imagination,’ I wrote. ‘Pornography shoves this edge at us violently.’

Before he left our house that night, Elijah told me something that I replayed and replayed, the way Lee did when her teacher told her how hot her body was. ‘Myra, you are my favourite little actress,’ Elijah said. ‘It’s your little hands, you’re so greedy, you grab at me. You really want me, don’t you?’

Yeah, yeah, I do! I am your
favourite
.

‘I like that it’s no act, my hot little actress.’

I was an actress, his favourite hot greedy little actress!

‘Pornography is a mirror of us, a mirror of our self-consciousness,’ I wrote, ‘our master self-consciousness and our slave self-conscious that comes together and rips into the way we were born. Pornography is the liberation narrative that takes us out of the family pen. It synthesizes the secret and the domestic, the explicit and the implicit, the master and the slave. This is a synthesis that we must absorb in our lives.’

Elijah likes me. I’m his favourite. I desperately had to tell the whole world.

‘In literature,’ I wrote, ‘synthesis is a technique of open interpretation or postmodern analysis, wherein we analyze a text from a multiplicity of viewpoints. In history, this is called Dialectics. Hegel said that history is a dialectic, a constant struggle between factions. Pornography and the innocence of it is a mode of learning, a constant struggle, that synthesizes our understanding of the opposites within ourselves.’

I was an actress not acting. A being
being
.

§

Wils set me up another big hit from the bong. Aaron looked angry and I knew he hadn’t wanted to see me. ‘You’re driving me to alcoholism,’ he’d said on the phone. ‘I’m a pacifist pothead and you’re driving me to drink.’

But I needed to see them, I was lonely. It was 4 a.m. Lee wasn’t there, apparently she’d just left, and our silence continued.

‘I always wanted to be the prettiest person in a room,’ I began my story to Aaron and Wils, feeling desperate for their attention, like a runaway. Lee was prettier than me. She was a better girlfriend. ‘Or I always wanted to look like other girls, someone else, not myself, there was always someone who looked better and more beautiful than me.’

Aaron took a swig of rum. ‘I think you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,’ he said.

‘Once in Grade 8, listen to this, you guys: I slapped my best friend Jen across the face. She was the most popular, most good-looking girl in the school. I slapped her because she was laughing hysterically. She’d started laughing so hard at her own story about some guy, I don’t even remember what the story was, and her laughs became yaps, like hysterical air-swallowing. I just wanted her to shut up so badly that I slapped her. Her ponytail swung from side to side but even that didn’t stop her yapping for a second. You get what happened? I mean, right after I smacked her? She started
really
laughing after I slapped her cheek. My slapping had actually made things worse. I mean, she couldn’t stop that terrible laughing-crying-yapping for another ten minutes!’

Wils was smiling at my story but Aaron was grim.

‘It felt good to slap her,’ I said. ‘To slap the most beautiful girl to attempt to stop her self-destruction ... ’

‘Yeah, Myra? What’d she think? Did she like it too?’

I ignored Aaron’s spite. ‘We didn’t talk about it afterwards, I mean, after she finally calmed down. She was shocked, I think, but she wasn’t mad. Jen held her cheek and there were tears on her face, but she couldn’t stop staring at me in total relief. It was like she knew that she needed it. Maybe if she’d said anything afterwards it would’ve just been
thank you. Thank you for slapping me into myself.
Me and Jen were best friends for four years after that.’

‘That’s it,’ Wils said slowly. ‘That’s totally it. People don’t really know what other people need anymore.’

Aaron got up to go to the bathroom.

Smoke hovered in the room between me and Wils. I did not miss being friends with Jen.

I lay down on Aaron’s lumpy pillow and I looked up at Wils. ‘See, I guess Gayl knew what I needed when she slapped me.’

When Gayl slapped me, she shocked me out of a dream, my old way of thinking. My needs were bigger than my family’s needs. I needed Gayl, I needed her slap to crack out of my world.

Aaron staggered back into the room. Wils stood up to block him because both of us saw he was suddenly rabid. ‘I can’t take this, man, I can’t take her anymore. I can’t take your stories. I don’t want to see your face. Get the fuck out of here! You’re driving me to the abyss, Myra. Can you leave, man? Now. Jesus. I can’t see you ever again, I can’t see her for a while ... ’

Aaron’s two black eyes were fixated on me.

‘I think you should go,’ Wils whispered at me. He had his arm around Aaron, holding him up.

‘Yeah, go live your life or something. Go fuck a pole. You’re fucking me up.’

Aaron leaned his head on Wils’ shoulder. He took his book, his coverless bible – Weil’s
Gravity and Grace
– and whipped it across the room at me. The book hit the wall. Aaron closed his eyes. Wils was whispering to him.

I picked up the book and I left the room like the lone fucking wolf with a Bible in its teeth. I was off to tie Little Red Riding Hood to a tree.

LEE: Watch her run, watch her run through the woods.

GAYL: Yeah, watch, we’re getting climactic.

§

By the time I got to Filmore’s, I was stoned in a bubble of Weil. ‘A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.’

The pages were falling out of the book. I folded loose pages between other pages.

The door of their room was half-open. Gayl slept twisted up in her sheets. The other bed was empty. Quietly, I went to the bathroom. Elijah was there under fluorescent lights, eyes closed, his beard a maze of tiny black chains. His robe was half-off. His chest was a bull’s chest, slick with sweat. I felt dizzy at the doorway, like I should just leave. I didn’t know why he was sitting in there. Was he waiting for me? Elijah shivered and he opened his eyes.

‘I miss you when you’re with your family,’ he said.