Chameleon On a Kaleidoscope (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) (18 page)

I had become that most
dangerous of propositions; a beautiful girl with the mind of a man.
Actress and Agent, Ho and Pimp. And as such I conformed
effortlessly to men’s stereotype of women;
All women are
basically sluts who barter their bodies to get what they want
.
No wonder I met with such universal approval. One guy sent email
after email after email. What did he think? That I hadn’t received
the others? That he’d catch me at a weak moment and I’d let him
fuck me? Far from being flattering, so many uninvited emails were
frightening. It was as if he was trying out lines on himself.
Finally I deigned him worthy of reply; “The book is about an older
guy who becomes obsessed with a young photographer’s assistant, you
might pick up some tips.”

“
Ok…” he
replied, ”I’ll get it today…I need some new fiction.”

He was already taking part
in some.

Another guy wrote three
weeks after he’d bought the book.

“
I’m still
interested in getting to know you, what do I have to
do?”

He was a sad-looking
little guy. Bald of course. Probably wanking off over pictures of
my lovely girlfriend’s ass. Of course he wanted to fuck her. So did
I. He’d have to get in line. One guy was on the right track with
call me paranoid, but are you the author?
I thought he was
onto me until he began to unspool a vertiginous scenario where he
suggested Francoise was the French girlfriend mentioned at the end
of the book and that she had written it anonymously pretending to
be the oxygen thief. I sidestepped; “So you think I wrote the book?
I wish.” Two days later he sent a glowing review. I think he
enjoyed it all the more for having been introduced to it in such an
unusual way. It certainly helped that the book talked about sex,
dating and booze. Hardly a difficult sell on a dating site. In fact
I was very often thanked for recommending it even when they knew
they would never get inside my pants. A pretty girl hinting that a
guy should buy something was seen as normal. The guy expects the
girl to make him pay for something. To prove he’s a good provider.
Not only is he expected to pay he wants to. It’s understood that
the woman requires a token gift in return for her company. Tickets
to the opera, or a concert, or a movie, cab-fares, dinner, flowers.
All she is expected to do in return is look fabulous, nod a lot and
smile as if she’s enjoying herself.

These men were
professional well-spoken highly cultured men, occupying some of New
York’s top positions in the arts and media. They were what we
referred to in advertising as opinion-formers. These guys were even
more sought-after than the target audience because these were the
people the target audience listened to when they wanted to know
what was cool. You can feed a dog organic vegetables and over time
he’ll adapt, but put a steak in front of him and his true nature
will show. These cosmopolitan journalists, artists, architects,
web-producers, lawyers, copywriters, designers, artists and
entrepeneurs were salivating at the prospect of a superior piece of
French ass. But even though the photos plainly showed a half-naked
girl with a beautiful body they had learned through years of
conditioning that they needed to feign indifference to her
sexuality and compliment her photographic technique instead. What
would a photographer’s assistant want to hear? She’d obviously want
to hear how well her photos were composed. They were supremely
confident they could dupe this inexperienced little fawn. At only
twenty-three years of age she was obviously confused about how much
flesh she should show, she was probably some rich French guy’s
daughter who had no idea how to behave.

Someone was going to fuck
her so why not be that guy? Jerome Feerce, the award winning
Creative Director of PDB and well-known author of sci-fi books,
wanted to be that guy. A fifty-seven-year-old Swede, sniffing
around the beautiful ass of my thirty-six-year-old American
girlfriend, posing as a twenty-three-old French girl. I looked him
up and yes he was married with three kids. Well so what? He was a
bestseller wasn’t he? He’d made it to the top hadn’t he? This was
Manhattan wasn’t it?In reality, we were just two old ad-guys
trading copy.

Meanwhile I’d look at
Marian when she turned up to meet me and I’d have to pinch myself.
It was as if I was going out with a model. A moody model. She was
even more beautiful now that I was losing her. I was that one guy
amongst thousands lucky enough to be with her and she could hardly
bear it when I touched her. She visibly flinched before I even made
contact. I had caused this in her? She said it was a relief to talk
to her doctor about a neck-ache because at least he didn’t roll his
eyes waiting for her to finish. This was a dig at me and I blushed
in acknowledgement.

But I had never really
been able to follow her thread when she spoke because she jumped
around from point to point without warning and when I asked for
clarification she became irritated because in her mind she had
already supplied this information and if I was asking such a
question it meant I hadn’t listened the first time round and if I
hadn’t been listening then it had to mean I didn’t care about her
and if I didn’t care about her why was I trying to touch
her?

I decided to pretend
harder.

But pretend to be what? I
couldn’t trust my perceptions any more. Did I only want to be with
her because she was such a great sales tool or did I love her for
who she was? Would she leave me in disgust as soon as she realised
what I was doing? I couldn’t even trust the enthusiastic responses
to the book emanating as they did from libidinous men who would say
anything to get into the pants of the girl who had made the
recommendation.

The was only one
irrefutable truth. The sales.

And yea they were
plentiful. I kept two pages open on my computer screen; one showing
Francoise’s profile with its constant supply of eager supplicants
and another adjacent page showing the corresponding sales on
Amazon. The main profile picture of Marian in her thigh-high
stockings was like something by the French photographer Guy Bourdin
and so I claimed it was a self-portrait paying homage to him. My
book was now inseparably associated with two of France’s most
enduring style icons. Jame Birkin and Guy Bourdain. And all three
were Googled accordingly.

In the meantime being with
Marian was becoming impossible. There were too many subjects that
couldn’t be talked about. The silences grew longer and more
impenetrable until they overlapped. We lied to each other by
omission. The strange thing is that I got the impression we could
have gone on like this for years. After all I didn’t want anyone
else. To me she was the perfect woman. Yes of course, I saw
attractive women everywhere but compared to Marian they were just
unknown accumulations of organs and limbs. They would never
represent the bitter-sweet unknowable concoction that only she had
about her; that exquisite confusion. Being touched by her had been
a triumphant luxurious sensation. It was so flattering that she
should even want to cause me to feel pleasure that somehow my guilt
dissolved into gratitude under her touch. And there was that
bottomless lust I felt for her, a spiritual longing that no mere
physical exchange could extinguish.

But even as the sales
soared and the reviews enthused I knew we had to make a clean break
of it. No contact. It was the only way. We’d be friends, yes of
course, but just not yet. It was too soon for that. For two days
the relief was euphoric until suddenly an entire civilization
seemed to burn down inside me.

Devastation.

In her cavernous absence I
replayed and blinked away the awful moment she confronted me about
the email. This would be my punishment. As the weeks turned into
months we never got the chance to discuss anything because we were
too busy I suppose, recovering from each other. In fact, this book
is the closest I’ve come to letting her know what actually happened
and why.

The previous year when
things were still good we’d had a lovely day wandering around
Williamsburg. It was one of those weekends where her roommate
visited her parents and we’d had the entire apartment to
ourselves.We had just had fabulous sex, or least I had, and Marian
looked so effortlessly beautiful it seemed like we had stepped onto
the hundred-acre set of a commercial for jeans or sneakers or maybe
even a romantic comedy with an edge. The Williamsburg Bridge poked
into every picture I took of her and we laughed knowingly at the
very idea that even here so deep behind the Irony Curtain it was
possible to be “in love”.

I mentioned in passing
that I played piano, that I had taught myself to play on a crappy
old upright we had at home in Ireland an the fact that she thought
I was joking seemed to indicate she hoped it was true. We found a
music store but there was a sign saying
no live music
which
still seems fucking stupid to me today but they probably

had so many people jamming
in there they had to ban it. With great ceremony I invited her to
step into a pair of headphones. Bowing her head she stepped forward
into the coronation. I plugged the lead into a digital piano and I
began to play. All I could hear were the keys fumbling and clicking
as my fingers stumbled and drummed across them. I had no way of
knowing if she was enjoying what she heard or if indeed she could
hear anything at all but I kept playing anyway. Wary of missing a
key I darted look at her.

The effect on her face was
magical.

She had transformed into
an amazed little girl. Her mouth had fallen slightly open and her
eyes were wide in wonder. All the self-consciousness had peeled
away leaving an innocence so pure it made me want to dance. I felt
like I had at last found a way to communicate with her. As I sit
her typing this I am reminded of that day.

I’d like to
speak to the person who put this profile together.

It was from a forty-five
year old entrepreneur who had posted pictures of himself relaxing
on what looked like a yacht in what could have been the
Mediterranean. He was onto me. Some guys might be very pissed off
if they knew that their romantic attentions were in fact being
pitched not at hot French twenty-three-year-old with an ass to
match but a bald middle aged Mick in his underpants. Actually, I
didn’t even wear underpants most of the time.

As I see it
there are four possibilities:

1. You are the
French girlfriend of the author mentioned at the end of the book
and you are using your skills to help him sell the book. In this
case using datemedotcom as a social media platform to generate an
audience which is really impressive. You are beautiful and I'm sure
it's working very well. You certainly got me. I would love to hear
from you and meet you both.

2. I'm wrong.
You really are Francoise a stunningly beautiful and sexy
photographer who happens to be a fan of this book. I am not like
the author, I've had different issues in my life which I would be
happy to talk about. I would love to hear from you and I would very
much like to meet you.

3. You wrote
the book. If that's the case you are a talent of unmitigated
genius. You see, I too am the Creative Director and partner of an
ad agency-production-company-internet hybrid, we have worked on
similar if not the same accounts. The ad world is represented
perfectly. My career parallels the timeframe in the book, I'm
certain I would know your work and it's quite possible that we met.
I thank you for exposing the book to me and for this exchange. It
has been very engaging.

4. You are the
creation of the author entirely. FUCKING GENIUS! I am apoplectic. I
can't tell you how impressed I am with the book but surrounding
that content with this hook which brought me into it! Awesome. And
the experience of engaging with you in this way via this character,
spectacular. With the utmost respect, and if necessary -
discretion, I would love to shake your hand and see if we might
work together.

I hadn’t thought about
using this technique for anything other than selling my own book
but it suddenly occurred to me that in the same way an ad agency
could advertise any product as long as the approach was well
conceived so could I with this more subtle method of infiltration,
sell anything to anyone. Would it work?

You tell me.

THE END

*****

francoise, just picked up
the book this evening. looks like an easy read. I'll get back to
you with my thoughts soon….so yeah, I guess i‘m game….k

*****

listen, I would have
written before but - uh - your profile says you're looking for a
woman
....which sort of threw me off because now you're all
flirting with me. i'm sooooo

*****

francoise…
so, I'm also a big fan of films and sex.
.and I design books for a living, which makes me an automatic fan
(speaking of which. . .I just tried to order diary of an oxygen
thief andit says they’re sold out !!. .and I hate ordering things
from Amazon).
anywho, i'm intrigued, how is your
tuesday so far? best vince

*****