Girls (11 page)

Where we crossed Seventy-second Street, two men were cleaning an asphalt cutter. It was an enormous metal wheel with blunt titanium teeth and mounted on its own vehicle. The men were facing the crosswalk and spraying the cutter down with a hose, their view of the crosswalk blocked. It was cold and the water was freezing where it pooled. As we passed the cutter a bit of spray caught you on your mink. You walked around to the other side of the cutter and said to the men, “Hey, come on, look —” you showed them the wet spot on your coat. “Just be a little careful, OK?” you said. You were trying to be a good sport, trying to let them know that the next person might not be as understanding as you.

I told you to leave them be.

And when we were children, why did we look up four-letter words in the dictionary? Did we think the words could tell us what the things were like?

“Toughen the boy up a little, see if he has what it takes to succeed.” You know this is always a good idea but you never think about what it takes or from where. You never think about the fact that, in the end, what it takes is all he will really want.

And yet it takes a puppy some time to become cautious in its approach to other dogs.

A friend calls you. He is younger than you. Not by much but by enough. He is, like you, single. He tells you about this model he’s been seeing, an eighteen-year-old he was introduced to by a friend of his. He used to be a model himself in college. He tells you a little bit about her, about how much fun she is, how she wants to “do all these things,” and you just keep saying, uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah, because you’ve heard all this before, you’ve already been where he’s been, because he’s telling you about a town you know like the back of your hand. Then he tells you how she just left to go away for a month but when she left she made him “pinky promise” that he’d return her calls when she got back. “Pinky promise!” he repeats. He somehow already knows this is something to boast about. And he’s right. It gets even you. “Are you serious?” you say. “‘Pinky promise’?! She said that? You lucky motherfucker!” You’re jealous because there are so many kinds of eighteen and from just those two little words you know he’s stumbled on the best kind of all, the still likes pizza kind, the still collects stuffed animals kind, the pinky promise kind.

“I know, I know,” he says, laughing, “but I feel bad, man.”

You tell him not to worry about it, that there’s nothing to feel bad about. You know he just doesn’t quite understand yet. But he will. And when he does, when he realizes this is something he not only needs but deserves, he’ll stop feeling bad.

And as you hang up you can’t help thinking how the girl must not understand either, how to have thought it necessary to exact an oath like that, she must think she’s lucky someone like your friend, with his money and looks and experience, is even talking to her, how she must think he couldn’t possibly be interested in someone her age, someone so inexperienced, someone so young, how she must think he has better things to do, more important things to worry about, how she must wonder what she could possibly give him that he doesn’t have already.

You know, as you hang up, she must not have even considered the possibility she has something to give him that he once had but has now lost. And you know this because if she had even an inkling of this possibility, she never would have thought it necessary to use those words in the first place.

And yet, if she didn’t think it necessary to use those words, then your friend wouldn’t be interested in her. If she didn’t think it necessary to use those words, she really would have nothing to offer him.

“‘Son of Atreus, was this after all the better way for both, for you and me, that we, for all our hearts’ sorrow, quarrelled together for the sake of a girl in soul-perishing hatred? I wish Artemis had killed her beside the ships with an arrow on that day when I destroyed Lyrnessos and took her. For thus not all these too many Achaians would have bitten the dust, by enemy hands, when I was away in my anger. This way was better for the Trojans and Hektor; yet I think the Achaians will too long remember this quarrel between us. Still, we will let all this be a thing of the past, though it hurts us, and beat down by constraint the anger that rises inside us. Now I am making an end of my anger. It does not become me unrelentingly to rage on.’” — Achilles,
Iliad
19:56

You are out with some friends, celebrating a done deal. You go from bar to bar, slipping money to bouncers. Everywhere is hot and crowded and smoky. Everywhere is loud with music and shouting and decor. Everywhere there are pretty girls in miniskirts or backless shirts or cutoff tops but the prettiest ones are always the ones serving you — the bartenders, the waitresses, the hostesses.

And after a while, after you’ve all had more than a few drinks, after more than a few of you have gone home, one of your friends says, “Hey — we’re right around the corner from my new place, you guys wanna come up and see?” And it seems like a good idea so you all go upstairs.

And his girlfriend opens the door, a girl only a couple of you have met and even then only once or twice. She’s not angry, he must have told her he’d be out late, she just decided to wait up for him. “Hey guys,” she says sweetly. She’s wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt and no shoes. Not something she’d wear out but not something that looks terrible either. She doesn’t have any makeup on, her hair is pulled back in a ponytail. She still looks pretty though, just not that pretty — the light in his apartment is not dimmed or neon.

“You look fat,” he says, as he walks in. But you all ignore him and his comment as you scatter to look around, see the view, the kitchen, the media setup. You all know he’s just showing off.

Preferring to be near people who speak their language, the great majority of army veterans live within ten miles of an army base. We can use this information to derive a divorce rate for veterans by looking at the divorce rates in the counties in which army bases are located.

When we do so we discover that these rates are more or less the same as the national average. Which should make us wonder not why the divorce rate for veterans is not higher than the national average, but why the divorce rate for civilians is as high as that for veterans.

You said it when your hands had long since ceased to ever smell of ground coffee or chopped garlic. You said it as we returned from the mountains.

We had taken the small gauge rail high up to a village where you had somehow heard all the locals bought their chests. It was a tiny place, ten houses or so with eaves that reached to the ground because of the snow. But there was no snow when we were there. It was a warm summer day and displayed outside were dozens of wooden chests. They were beautiful, hand-painted with folkloric designs of reindeer and men and women in traditional clothing, hand-painted in reds and greens and whites. We bought half of them. You were thinking of opening a shop.

Then, as we boarded the train, as the sun began to set, you said, “This is what you want, you know, somewhere completely unspoiled.”

Or perhaps it wasn’t the mountains. Perhaps it was the coast and the carpenters were fishermen. Perhaps the chests were nets hung from the cliffs to dry. Perhaps you weren’t even thinking of opening a shop. But that was what you said. And that was when you said it.

After the
Iliad,
the
Odyssey
is inevitable. And it should come as no surprise that artful Odysseus survives while mighty Achilles does not.

And so if we are watching our son or daughter at a swim meet, with that chlorine smell and dampness and haze in the air, with that fear of slipping as we walk to our seats or to get a soda from a vending machine, and they beat their own personal best time in their event but they still come in last, we give them a hug. We say, as they stand there and shiver with a towel around them, with their wet hair disheveled from the cap, as they look at the winners receiving their medals, we say, “Don’t worry about it, you beat your best time, right? You should be proud of yourself — what more could you have done?”

And they say, “I know, I know.”

Because they do. They know it doesn’t matter if they are fast, only if they are faster. They know virtues are virtuous only by comparison. They know if they are fast but everyone else is faster, they are slow. They know if they are fast but everyone else is faster, they come in last. They lose. They know if they’d been faster and not just fast we would have said, “Way to go! You won! That was great!” and taken them out for a special dinner where there’d be laughter and one of their friends or even the whole team.

And if they don’t know this, if they weren’t in the swim meet or the science, bowl or the battle of the bands, if they weren’t somehow competing to begin with, we know it’s our job to teach it to them.

So they can never give us what those young girls we fuck do. Because they are our daughters, not someone else’s. It is not enough that they are beautiful. It is not enough that they like to have fun. It is not enough that they are alive, but that they survive.

And this is why we feel like failures as parents if we see that our children don’t think they have anything to prove. Why when they say not, “I want to be a professional surfer,” but simply, “I want to surf,” even the most understanding of us — even sometimes those of us with enough money that we don’t have to worry about them making a living — why we look at them and wonder, just for a second, how this thing that came out of us could be so unlike us, so far away from us, wonder, just for a second, if they are, in fact, ours.

This is why, if we are good parents, we teach them to swim as soon as possible. We teach them for their own good. We teach them even though we know it is in keeping our heads above water that we drown.

And yet not all vampires are men, far from it. In fact after Vlad the Impaler the next most classic model for the modern vampire legend is the sixteenth-century Hungarian countess Erzsábet Bathory. She believed that human blood could maintain the skin in a state of “youthful perfection.” So she had peasants brought to her boudoir where they were killed and had the blood drained from their bodies. Then, while it was still fresh and warm (naturally, since, if kept for any period of time, it would have coagulated), the countess would bathe in it. For this purpose, before she was brought to trial and executed, she had six hundred and thirteen people murdered.

However, not just any peasant would do. According to the countess the only blood capable of performing this miracle was that of teenage girls.

There is that one incident you’ve never talked about with anyone even though everyone knows about it, even though every now and then you still overhear people gossiping about it, people new enough they don’t think to check the stalls before they gossip about the CEO the day he’s visiting their office.

You’ve never talked about it with anyone even though it happened, what, ten, fifteen years ago? More? Less? In fact, no one’s even tried to talk to you about it since the night your wife found out and she said, “Do you want to talk about it?” and you said, “No,” and she said, “OK, well let me know if you do.” Sometimes you wonder what would happen if you called her up now, in Oregon or Hong Kong or wherever she lives now, and said, “OK. Now. Now I want to talk about it.”

You wonder that when you can’t help thinking about it. When it is late and you are alone. When the other people on your plane are asleep and the blinds are down and all you can hear is the faint noise of the jets, faint because it’s a very expensive plane, and you only stop thinking about it because your stewardess says quietly, “Can I get you another one?” When because it is a nice night and you haven’t walked in a while you dismiss your driver after dinner and tell him you’re going to walk the thirty-four blocks home. When you cut your hand on the coral almost right away and have to come up so it’s just you and the captain and the mate on the boat while everyone else is still down there and the mate comes over to you with some gauze as you stare down into the water at the reef just ten or twenty feet below and says, “It’s too bad you can’t see her, she’s a beaut. . . .”

When you think how he said, “I’m going to fight you on this.” The man you’d known for years, the man you started the damn company with in the first place, the man you couldn’t have done it without, the man who knew how to push those Turks around the way they needed to be pushed around to get your export taxes low enough, the man who held down the fort those five months Jillian was sick, the man who realized the key benefit wasn’t actually what everyone, even the consultants, thought it was.

When you think how you said, “OK, but you’ll lose, I already persuaded the board,” and he said, “We’ll see,” and he put up a really good fight, found some really great lawyer with a Bombay accent, but he lost anyway because all that really mattered in the end was that the judge, some stern and haughty bitch with eyes like blue slate or grey sky, wanted in on the IPO of a company spun off by a guy who owed you and only you a favor.

When you think how when she announced her decision, he actually stood up and said, “Goddamn it! You fucking bitch!” and actually threw his table over, actually had to be restrained by three bailiffs, how even though he was one of the largest men you’d ever seen, it didn’t matter in the end.

When you think how long it took for the news to reach you, how you didn’t hear for more than five days, how when you did hear, the first thing you thought was, “I wonder where he got a gun?” How when you did hear, even though you felt bad, you refused to feel guilty. How you still tell yourself you did the right thing, the only thing, a thing you’d do again if it was as necessary. How you still tell yourself you’re not a bad man, just a man who sees things clearly.

When you think how you’ve never talked about it with anyone because the one person you could have talked about it with, the one person you wouldn’t have had to talk about it with, is the one person you couldn’t talk to now even if you wanted to.

And yet it was to avenge his companion Patroclus that Achilles finally entered the battle.