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A

She had the name of a Greek goddess. I suppose her parents gave it to her, but this is LA and people name themselves, too. We met at the Viper Room. I’d gone because it is where River Phoenix overdosed. The California of the modern youth, where stars can be born and die.

We had a moment on the beach, like a moment from a film. It was after dark. Santa Monica, with the waves, it seems safer than it is. She sat on my lap, and her hair fell over my face, and I thought I knew why I’d come to California, to LA, to planet earth. I though I knew everything. Life wasn’t about much more than this, my back in the sand, the tiny waist in my hands, the good smelling hair.

She had a kitten; it was dying. Those straight LA suburb streets, tree lined, and the lamps softly illuminating everything, so that if you ever leave there, if you ever go back to what you’d once called home, the realreal darkness, it scares you. There are the hills, the Hollywood sign, houses called bungalows tucked away, and fruit, lemons, oranges, it really grows by accident on trees in backyards.

We’d been to dinner; you carry a pager around until it goes off and your table is ready; then there was the beach; now her apartment, the kitten, very small, gray, in a box. It was misery embodied. The vet couldn’t tell her what was wrong. There was test after test. Blood drawn directly from its shaved belly. Every couple of hours or so, she had to force turkey paste into its mouth. She’d quit her job to take care of it. A makeup artist. There would be other jobs. There would be other kittens.

This one, it wasn’t supposed to be alive. If it could have thought like that, it wouldn’t have wanted to. Sometimes, at least for awhile, it would mew.
I remember when she called, the same night we met, her voice on the phone. My friend, J, we weren’t roommates yet, had not yet fucked, she was over in that late night, we were making noodles, and A called, and J told me: I like her voice, I like her name.

The night of our dinner, of the beach, A never took the kitten out of the box. I guess she was used to it. I couldn’t get off of my mind. She was in her bra and panties, on the bed, a big kind, high off the ground, all comforter and pillow, her body was beautiful. This is why you come to California, everything is perfect, everything except the kitten.

I’d write about it later, turn it into a story. In the story, the narrator goes with the girl to the vet. Indeed, the next morning, I went with A. I held the kitten. It was dry, despondent, light. I thought it was a shame that she was forcing it alive; all these tortures of blood extraction and feeding; it made her, A, ugly to me, naked in her need. In the story, I hold my thumb over its nose. It claws my hand, but weakly. We’re at a light. I say to her: the kitten has died. She asks me What? I hand her the kitten, and I get out of the car.

She wouldn’t let me finish undressing her. I liked her name too. And her voice. I liked the way she looked in her bra and panties, and how she kneeled over me on the beach. I liked the promise of her body; what I could see of her x beneath the panties; that I had to imagine the rest, and that it would come to me. I would touch it, infiltrate it through her, cement myself to the city and to her.

I liked most of California.

I didn’t kill her kitten. But I remember, in the car, with it in my lap, feeling bound by it to her, or by her to it, feeling because of it, I was in something over my head, this girl who wouldn’t let die what no longer pleasured from living. She was pretty beside me, her name, her voice, but there was her desperation. And I began feeling an urge I’d have often afterwards, almost any time there was any kind of real connection, when you get past the surface, when the woman isn’t a picture, isn’t an idea, isn’t just the tips of her hair or the inside of her x, but a full on woman, and what you face is intimacy, and what you mean to do, it is to flee.

z

Her theory was that we could go to a mosque and be married; I was leaving that part of the country, Michigan, soon, and after I’d gone, the marriage would be naturally dissolved. Her therapist had told her she needed to have an affair, or so she said. So here she was, working a loophole in her religion, and though I understood her desire to cheat on her husband, a monster as she described him, less so as I begin to intuit, I did not really want to accept why she thought I would.

My wife was in our apartment, several months pregnant, asleep. I’d met z with a friend, M, at a club. M, the tall, not very attractive Australian with lots of money; after my wife and I divorced, he would forsake our friendship to try to seduce her. Of course, she would reject him. That intimacy of friendship one mistakes for a different kind of affection. I’ve never been brave enough to be so blind.

In any case, I meant for him to have z, and I tried to arrange it. This was probably an impulse to have the vicarious experience. This time in my life when I was most settled on being settled. They went out once or twice. She had twins, little boys; her husband, Lebanese, as she was, worked all the time, she said. He hated her. She hated him. She wanted to be out in the world, out of the marriage, but it was complicated.

Sometimes, she would come to our apartment and spend a night or two. There was a mattress I’d put on the living room floor. My wife, the anti-insomniac, asleep by nine, z and I watching television. They were friends, in the way that women sometimes relate like friends without seeming to be really connected.

Will you hold me? she asked.

And afterwards, I told myself and my wife I didn’t know where it would go. I didn’t imagine what could happen. The little kisses on my neck that I could allow to go on for so long because they were so light they felt almost not like kisses at all.

But then it became impossible to pretend I didn’t know.

Come outside, I told her. We stood in the woods, on the path on which I walked our dogs, z and I, and she held me again. She kissed my mouth and told me we had to fuck. I put my hand down the front of her pants, into her panties, I felt the hair, the wet, little else. A thin girl with a neck so tiny it disturbed me to touch, tall and with slightly bulged eyes, fine cheek bones, a pretty mouth.

I drew my hand away. Later, I’d tell myself it went there without conscious effort. That I didn’t know what I was doing. What she was doing.

She knelt on the woodchips and unzipped my pants. It was spring, not overly warm, a mosquito landed on my neck, I could feel it dipping into me, and I wanted not to slap it.

She took out my x, just the tip of it. She looked up at me and she said, This is all we can do for now.

I said nothing and she took me, just a little of me, in her mouth. After a moment, I tried to lift her. I said, You’re degrading yourself, though that is not what I meant.

It was me degrading me.

She didn’t understand my half refusal. Even as I carried her things to her car, loaded her up, told her she must go, she talked about the marriage at the mosque, the way that God would acknowledge us as holy so we could fuck, the way it would fade away and leave us to the rest of our lives.

I told my wife. I confessed it not the way I do here, but like a person who had been overwhelmed, who had gotten in over his head.

z called the next day and my wife told her that she felt betrayed. z said it as my fault, that I’d been looking at her since I met her, that I’d related to her sexually, that even if I hadn’t asked her explicitly, she could see it in my all the time, that throbbing question. My wife hung up.

I wanted to think as my wife did, that z was wrong, that she had projected her desire on to me, but the fact is, I knew then as I know now that I do it, without meaning to, or at least barely meaning to, that many of my interactions with women, are consciously and unconsciously, craftily and instinctually, guided by the desire to seduce.

l

It may bore you.

She herself may bore you.

She tries not to and this makes it worse. She is too young to know many men who aren’t entranced by the credential of her beauty and the drawing power of her x. Some women almost never outgrow that.

Nude, her breasts are small, her ass slightly slack. You get too old to tell a woman what she wants to hear. This makes her want to hear it more. There are men by the hundreds in any bar, and there is nothing extraordinary about you but your inattention. This is not a tool, but a fact, and your acceptance of it is a meridian. A thing inside of self to fear, like any change.

She comes to your apartment once, twice, three times. She wants to make her father small. She means to take from you what she can mistake for the semblance of his full on acceptance.

This is your green couch and she is small on it, her practiced smiles, the phrases with which she means to shock you, as if you haven’t heard someone so blunt or quick before, but this confidence is a put on, and you’re tired. She needs you to ask her for the gift of her body, but for you it is no gift and so eventually she needs to ask you to ask her, and she goes about all of it like most any girl who has yet to walk through the fires.

But you will not play.

Annoyed, you tell her each time to go. The first time, your hand beneath her bare jeans, on her ass. Lunges, you tell her. Your body won’t keep. It’s not keeping all ready.

What you’re not attracted to in her is not the way her ass feels. Don’t see her wrong. She is that kind of lovely that will begin to creep away at twenty five. But this is her at twenty three.

What the real problem is: you’ve reached the point where you can’t stand a spoiled girl.

And so you see the absolute limit of a bonding. It will begin with a fuck and end with one, little more. There will be the mechanics of it for you, and what will she have then.

But hand on her ass, cold words coming out of your mouth, you know the truth. You know the little lies you tell yourself: that if you stand there with your knife and your bloodlust and she finally throws herself on it, have you done wrong?

Second visit. She works in a Victoria Secret and she asks you to see her panties and bra. She kneels on the bed. How does it look? You can’t see like that any more, the way most men see, not this girl, not at this moment, not most girls. You watch a woman drink a soda and you can imagine the sugar in her blood, in her guts. There are layers even to physical beauty, not to mention the other.

It gets harder for one to be beautiful in front of you.

The attraction is base. That’s not quite the same as saying nothing is there. Her breath is slightly foul, as if from a stomach disorder. The bones of her face are very fine, her cheeks like airbrush inventions. Her waist very narrow; her skin dark and smooth; her eyes prettprety. She takes a good photograph, leaning forward, the first night, her blue shirt, her bared shoulder, eyes down cast, her gentle smirk, but it is all illusion, the picture better than the sum of her, and on the bed in her bra and panties, a pornographer’s dream, and I have the heart of a pornographer, but I do not further undress her. We lie there for a long time in the silence and the dark, my back to her, and she tells me all the secrets she thinks will make me admire her.

You could fuck her then, you almost do, the third night; this time she comes unbidden, and she stumbles through her vision of seduction. You sit above her with your knife, your bloodlust, but beyond the ecstasy of the death itself, you will both be disappointed by what you don’t take here.

Her belly still sunken. Her hips bones still visible. Her x small and slightly open, lines of wet running through the dark cats eye of it; you go in with your fingers, with your tongue. You feel overly somber and you know what this will be like for her, a wound to carry afterwards, a reminder of a man she thought she was taking possession of only to see that she herself had been possessed and left behind.

In the end, you do not fuck. It feels to her like rejection, and she is bitter leaving.

In days, in an email, she’ll tell you that she’s finally agreed to her boyfriend’s proposal, that she’ll marry him. You should wonder as if it is a legitimate question how she’s been broken. You should realize that the apparent virtue of your freezing does not so clearly reflect on your desire to protect any her; in the end you must recognize that it wasn’t for her at all that you weren’t fucking, not really.

In the end, you're always trying to save yourself from something, even the smallest thing...say the ennui of fucking a girl you've already known by type over and over.