A Crafty & Devious God
by Ted Krever
Published by Ted Krever at Smashwords
copyright 2010 Ted Krever
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual places, events or persons, living or dead, is entirely fictitious.
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Cover photograph by Jessica Schroer-Smalley
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New York Times, July 18, 1998:
Shares of Broadcast.com, a small three-year-old company that streams live news, radio, music and other programs over the Internet, more than tripled in value yesterday in frenzied trading—the best opening-day gain of any company in Wall Street history…
Investors have clamored for Internet stocks all year long…but even the underwriters who priced shares of Broadcast.com for public consumption failed to anticipate the ravenous investor appetite for them…
The shares had been priced at $18. Soon after they began trading, Broadcast.com shares shot up to $68 on the Nasdaq stock market, then soared as high as $74 before closing at $62.75, a nearly 250 percent gain that made Broadcast.com a $1 billion company in a matter of hours…
The [founder] of the company, Mark Cuban…is now worth about $300 million.
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Preface
I’d love to say I knew she was trouble right from the beginning, but I’m not that smart.
After moving out of my marriage, I have this plan. Not much of a plan but just enough to keep me from throwing myself off a rooftop the first few nights.
I move back to the Jersey shore—Seaview, an hour’s ferry from New York City. I grew up just a few miles away. I move into this little house a seawall away from the Atlantic Ocean, I run three miles a day up and down the beach and wangle myself as anonymous a job as I can find, repairing TV’s and computer equipment for the only person on the Eastern seaboard who seems less interested in meeting people than me.
And on a breezy afternoon, a week or two into this orgy of denial, this girl comes into the shop and says, “Any of you guys know something about the Web?”
“Something,” I say. “You having trouble getting connected?”
“No, I need a server set up at my house so I can host my own site. I need something strong enough to host streaming video. Live video.”
“I can make you a machine that’ll host video,” I told her. “Multiple processors, if you want, lots of storage. You’ll need a separate machine for the video server, in addition to your regular Web server. But I’d really recommend you hire an outside company to send out the video—let someone else do the work, unless you want to put in a generator and hire a staff to watch things 24 hours a day.”
“You know who I could hire?” she asked.
“I can make a list of the usual suspects,” I told her.
Her voice dropped half an octave. “Okay,” she nodded. “Let’s talk.”
We went to the coffee shop down the corner and discussed what she needed. She agreed to outsource the video server, but she wanted a Web server built from scratch, and wrote me a check on the spot for half the cost of it. I took it to the bank and waited two days until it cleared. Then I bought the parts and put it together.
I was a technical manager at a television network in the city—first in traditional TV production and then, the last few years, in what is now called ‘new media’. So I got to know machines. Cameras, editing equipment—and in the last several years, computers. I tinkered with them and fell in love with them.
I built a few websites, for myself and friends. I wrote a novel and put it up on the Web, a chapter at a time, with linked pages and little animations that illustrated the story. Nobody visited the site, but I got some satisfaction from it.
So while I’d never actually put a computer together, I knew what parts were needed and what to tune. I decided I could build it myself, and was delighted to discover I was right.
Once I was comfortable the machine was solid and fast, I called and told her it was ready.
“Come on up—I need it installed,” she said.
I hesitated for a moment, wondering if I should ask for an installation fee.
“I’ll pay you to do it,” she offered, and I smiled the whole way over.
Her house was a severe two-story modern with windows all around. It was dusk as I reached the place. The lights were on inside—the glow leaked out the windows like a bell jar full of fireflies.
Almost all the living space was on the second floor, and most of it was wide-open glass, with a deck that wrapped around all four sides of the house. A living area filled most of the floor, overlooking Ocean Ave and the beach at one end, with a view of the river—looking over the roofs of some shorter homes—on the far side. There was a bar on the back wall, with three bedrooms behind and a sparse kitchen across from it, partitioned out of the living space.
“I‘ve got everything cleared out for you,” she said as we came upstairs. I set the boxes down and started unpacking my equipment—her equipment.
I tend to have tunnelvision when I’m working, but she kept parading back and forth, moving things around and then moving them around again in front of me, until I couldn’t miss her. She wanted to be noticed. I hadn’t looked at a woman since I left home. But now, I looked.
She was gangly a few years ago—it was evident in the self-conscious way she walked. But there was nothing gangly now—now she was just lanky. A little gawky swing lingered in her arms and legs, a funny, uncoordinated pulse that took the edge off her, made her funny instead of intimidating—made her more real, somehow.
There was exercise equipment in a corner, and it showed—her body was athletic and girlish, nothing extra, but all the right equipment in good proportion. Her flax hair picked up the red in the sunset. Her face was long, but the eyes were big and the whole effect of her was open, girl-next-door friendly.
Friendly, but at the moment, rather strange. She continued to straighten things she’d already straightened and strike poses that work in photos but never in real life unless somebody’s working pretty hard.
Well, let her pose. I didn’t get the sense she wanted me to do anything but watch. And watching wasn’t bad. I got a rise out of it—it was nice to know how that felt again. To feel like a man, even a rusty middle-aged one.
Once I had the system set up, I called her over and showed off a little, playing some video from files I’d placed on the hard drive for demo purposes. She stood close to me for a moment. She smelled good.
Then she lugged a huge tripod from the other side of the room and said, “Okay, here’s the camera.” She pointed to a camera on the floor by the bar, and I knew we were in trouble.
“Whoa!” I said. “I thought you were talking about consumer camcorder stuff. This is a professional camera.”
“I told you I needed top-of-the-line equipment,” she declared.
“This is. The computer has a $500 video card. The next step above this is $3,000. Nobody makes professional video for the Web. It’s a postage-stamp sized window on the screen, and you’ve got a $30,000 video camera here.”
Suddenly she’s uncertain. “This is too much?”
“It’s a nuclear reactor to boil water,” I told her.
She shrugged. “I’ll return it. What should I get?”
Then we talked equipment for an hour. It was a fun conversation for several reasons, not least the fact that her nipples kept playing hide-and-seek through her sweater.
But after an hour, I’m fascinated by her. She knows six different ways to set up Hollywood lighting, to use machinery to get the right emotional effect. We have a ten-minute conversation about George Hurrell, the ancient Hollywood master who perfected cheekbones with Garbo and Claudette Colbert. She’s got his techniques down pat, but somehow, she doesn’t know how to plug a microphone into the camera.
I realize she’s a good student. If she can get it out of a book, she knows all about it, no matter how difficult. But she’s not worldly at all—obvious things, those not found in books, are out of her realm. She doesn’t try to figure them out. She doesn’t take a chance on being wrong.
“So you trade that camera in for a good DV machine,” I advise. “The picture will look just as good, for one-tenth the money.”
“I’ll go tomorrow and get one,” she says. “Want to come with me?”
“That’s my consultant hat,” I answer, feeling a little giddy from the nipples. “That’s twice my computer handyman rate.”
“Okay,” she bites. “Tomorrow, 10am. Meet me here. Four hours, tops. It takes longer than that, I don’t pay.”
She starts straightening things and striking poses again. I take another good look at her and head home. On all counts, I’m on a roll.
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Peapatch 4 West
I live in a house with a name—Peapatch 4 West. A name is an affectation for a house, usually reserved for those rich enough to properly display their affectations.
Mine, however, is just a little weathered plaque, paint flecking at the edges, fastened over the door by two ancient screws. The screws fasten to roof tiles bleached from the years and exposure to the sea air. Misaligned, chipped and torn at the edges, the tiles are an exemplar of the state of my house—the place is a wreck. Nonetheless, it comes with a name—when you’re missing a compass, you don’t turn down a weathervane.
When my marriage broke up, I moved down here. I knew a house like this existed before I’d ever seen it, and I searched until I found the properly diminished location for the next chapter in my life.
And here I sit, blanket on my lap, watching through the steaming window as the seagrass blows in that stiff autumn wind, and the spray flies over the seawall across the street. I slouch in my desk chair and write letters to myself, waiting for the sun to rise, the whistle of the radiator and the start of another day.
I call the house to talk to my son. Ring ring—no answer. His voice on the answering machine. I leave a message. Call me back, buddy, I love you.
I’ll disconnect the modem before I shut down tonight—I worry that a bolt of lightning or a power surge will blow the computer out. T he power here sucks. I ran a test when I first moved in and found surges to 145 volts. So I’ll unplug it—later, but not just yet. It’s my lifeline to the world.
I spend a lot of time on the Video Voyeur pages. Kids eating pizza, watching television, reading the paper, getting naked. It’s much like my marriage—lots of leading up to getting naked and very little actual nakedness.
I watch the fishcam, one of the first things I ever watched on the Web, and the coffeecam—an unblinking view of a coffee machine in an office in San Francisco. I can tell you by sight who takes milk and who takes sugar. One afternoon, I saw an older woman—a woman my age, I guess—get two cups at once, distracted by a pile of her own belongings she’d placed on the counter. Staring at her as she stared at her things, I realized she’d just been fired and had cleared out her desk—thus the pile on the counter. The wind doesn’t only blow cold in my neighborhood. I’ve seen birds die in the aviary cam in Atlanta, and the crowds swell and dwindle at the Hong Kong zoocam.
And I’ve watched Kelly and LeopardGirl. Many nights in the past month, I’ve watched them fiddling with their blouses, sitting around in their panties and bras watching tv, and then watched them fiddling with themselves on camera.
Virtual sex is OK—not as good as real sex, but without the headaches. But I want to earn my orgasms. LeopardGirl makes you wait a while before she unbuttons her blouse. There’s a little suspense, and that’s how God intended voyeurism to work.
I jog morning and evening. I’m stubborn. The sand gets heavy this time of year, from the seaspray and the autumn air soaking in at night but still I run. Over the seawall, footsteps creaking on the wooden steps, then onto the thick beach. Watching the gulls, picking up shells and stones, smelling the air and stretching my muscles, such as they are.
There aren’t many muscles in me that don’t need stretching. .
I told my wife I was unhappy; she told me there was nothing wrong. Then she told me that whatever was wrong was my fault—I was too angry, too loud, too argumentative, too analytical. So I became more moderate, quieter, gentler, less argumentative—analytical stayed, despite yoga and zen. But her complaints never lessened.
She was right—in that marriage, I really was a bad, mean person. But I realized somewhere along the line that, outside that marriage, I didn’t have to be. The problem was not either of us; it was the two of us together.
So I left, in a spasm of optimism and now, every minute of the day, I curse myself a stupid fool for believing anything would change.
I hate...you name it. I hate the front door for sticking, I hate the neighborhood dogs for barking at me as I jog by. I hate the two gay guys across the street, who barbecue every weekend—even in this autumn weather—and play music I like way too loud. I hate my boss here when he makes no provision for my recent tragedies and for condescending to be nice to me when he does.
I haven’t contacted anyone since I moved out. I’m not ready yet, I tell myself. I have a little money saved and there’s a kind of healing I need no doctor can offer. I need to start over, to get my own footing. I have unfinished business with me yet.
Or maybe I’ve just reached a dead end.
My wife’s last words to me as I walked out of our house were “You’ll never see your son again.” She said them knowing there was nothing that would terrify me so much. Every day I call without an answer, just his voice on the answering machine, those words echo louder and louder in the back of my mind, until the echoes are louder than any sound produced by the outside world..
Meanwhile, the people I meet remain proximate strangers—the grocery store owner, the mailwoman, the fat man next door with the grey hair and the collection of checked shirts, sitting on his front porch waving to the cars on Ocean Avenue all day long. I live among them, but not with them, running my penitentiary time up and down the beach, doing odd jobs that will never pay the bills, and sitting long into the night with cheap wine bottles, some old tunes on the stereo and the mesmerizing boredom of the web girls.
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Dancing
I walk the mile and a half to Livy’s house. She’s perched on the deck as I pad down the street and in the driveway when I arrive, warming up a yellow vintage Jeep. She is wearing sunglasses, a thin pink blouse tied above her navel, and shorts. My guy radar tells me there’s no bra under the blouse, although two sizeable pockets in front obscure the proof.
I get in the passenger seat and we take off. She clearly doesn’t like anybody ahead of her. She works around car after car, in a series of lurching moves, bursts of speed and nerve. We narrowly miss seven accidents—but we do consistently miss. As we bounce along, I can enjoy the cleft where the bottoms of her breasts meet her torso. You take your job perks where you find them, I always say…
When we get to the store, she takes my arm and drags me inside.
“Okay, Mr. TV—show me what I need,” she demands, smiling.
They have a row of camcorders set up, sending pictures of a still-life—a vase of flowers with a thick-patterned tapestry draped behind—to large monitors overhead. It’s a good display. I walk the row, pointing out the best models and how to tell a good picture from a bad one on the monitors. I can see her repeating the details as I feed them to her, watch the information entering her personal knowledge base.
“I’m surprised,” I say, “that you don’t know cameras. You were encyclopedic about lighting yesterday.”
“That was performance,” she says. “This is tech. I’m the director, not the cinematographer. I’m interested in anything that enhances the performance. You worry about the camera for me.”
She buys two of the big cameras and two mini, top-of-the-computer types. I have to convince the kid salesman to search for a multi-box and switcher to plug them all into, so Livy can use them all on the site.
“I didn’t even know we sold this stuff,” the kid salesman says.
When we tote up the damage, she’s dropping about $20,000 in equipment. Either she’s using up her trust fund or has very expensive taste in hobbies.
As we carry it all back out to the car, I ask, “So what are you shooting?”
“Me,” she answers.
Back at the house, I set everything up. She knows exactly where she wants it all—a minicam on the computer in the living room, another on the dresser in the bedroom, and the two bigger cameras on tripods converging in the living room.
I run cables and extensions all over, taping them to the baseboards, making sure the wires don’t cross so the audio doesn’t pick up an interference hum—all the geeky TV things I haven’t done myself in years. It’s fun.
“OK, let’s run through,” I say, once it’s all connected.
I patch the camera output into the big TV on the wetbar, so she can see the picture from anywhere in the room. I hand her the remote control for the switcher. It’s tiny—she can wear it hanging from her wrist and switch cameras with one finger action.
“You’ve got 4 cameras,” I show her the keypad on the remote, “—Camera One on the computer, Two over by the kitchen facing the deck, Three by the deck facing the kitchen and 4 in the bedroom. Push the number on the remote, that camera shows up on the monitor. Pretty simple.”
I approach new experiences cautiously at first. It’s how I managed to grow up in the Sixties and still have a few brain cells left.
Not Livy. She starts pushing buttons, one after the other, watching the results in the monitor. Working without letup, as though her first impulse is to see if she can break something. She stands in the middle of the room, where the camera views converge, and stares at herself as each camera view clicks through, rapidly, in turn.
She rotates slowly, figuring the angles. It’s performance, I find myself thinking. She’s blocking out her moves.
After a minute of walking slowly about the center of the room, she grabs up a tripod and carries it five feet to a new location—a different angle. And a better one. Okay—she’s got an eye.
Now she begins to move again, pawing the floor with a dancer’s light step, toeing forward and backward, eyeing the cameras warily, switching from one to the next, as she moves. Turning them from adversaries to allies, judging from the look on her face—mastering their territory, channeling these electrons in the ether.
There’s a pattern emerging in the way she switches shots, and it’s not what I’m used to, not what I was taught. I learned traditional camera technique, where one angle is chosen as ‘the best’ for conveying the scene. For Livy, one angle works off the other; one view complements the next, and the story is told by the cacophony of images as much as by the content of any one of them.
She’s halting at first. But gradually, something clicks in and then she’s bouncing, flashing, around the room, twirling and switching from one camera to the next, faster and faster, lighter on her feet with each second, the shots banging kaleidescopic as she flies closeupflashingby, stretched head to toe, a dervish of motion...and beautiful. Beautiful and free and joyous.
Then I type her domain name—www.seaviewgirl.com—into the Web browser and a clean shot of the living room couch appears on screen.
“Voila,” I exclaim.
“I’m in business,” she says, smiling.
She has a funny smile, I notice now for the first time—a smile like two veils. There’s a real smile somewhere underneath, and it’s open and relaxed, the way she wants to appear—maybe, the way she wants to be. But there’s another layer, a layer that isn’t quite so open or relaxed, that always seems to be looking for the fine print, and that layer hovers in front of whatever is going on inside her.
The sun is bouncing off the windows on the far side of the street. Behind the stores, the darkness is moving in over the ocean, the eastern edge of sky, the darkness ready to take over so quickly this time of year.
She’s beginning to move under the lights again, checking out the cameras online now. And I give in to the moment, to my stupid impulse to do the job right, to my endless dull conscientiousness.
“You know, we have to fix your lighting,” I tell her. “You don’t have it set up right for dancing.”
I’d found myself thinking about it after I’d gotten home the other night. She’d concentrated her lights in just a few places around the room, to get dramatic effect for her close-ups, I guessed. That didn’t leave enough in the central part of the room, where she did her dancing.
The result was that, instead of any detail, the dances showed a smearing, streaky movement, a representation of what was happening, instead of the thing itself.
So now, I start moving a few lights around to show her. To show her I can make it better.
“Don’t do that,” she says. “I like it the way it is.”
I insist on showing her how it would look. I’ll show her I can make it better. And the skeptical voice in my head says, I’ll show me, maybe. I’ll show me I can still do something.
She dances a little for me, once the lights are set up ‘properly’.
The pictures are crystal-clear. They show every false step, every movement off the beat. They show the frayed edges of her shawl, the dirty dishes stacked in the kitchen sink and newspapers in a pile near the deck.
Then she plays back the tape of her dance the other night. The dim light is moody, mysterious. The shawl is a cape and jet exhaust. She cuts a ghostly figure, the smearing video tracing her movements and stylizing them all at once. I begin to see this isn’t dance, not in any traditional sense. It is movement for the camera, and for a fuzzy Web camera at that. She has invented something that works for this new form.
“You’re right—it’s better your way,” I say, and start moving the lights back where she had them.
She grabs a light, to help. Then she arches an eyebrow and says, “Did I tell you my first boyfriend was 18 years older than me?” and I nearly stop breathing.
Is this thing coming on to me? I quash the question instantly—there’s no sense to it, on any level beyond my own vanity.
“I’m doing my first Webcast tonight,” she says now. “Would you hang out and make sure I don’t have any problems? I’ll pay you for the time.”
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In The Light
The next thing I know, I’m sitting in a pile of Chinese takeout containers and wine bottles, spooning assorted dishes into plates for us to pick at.
She comes out of the bedroom in a red spaghetti strap dress, her hair brushed behind her ears, looking innocent, friendly and seductive all at once, just the look that got me married once and in trouble several times before that.
She pads around in front of Camera One and turns on the TV. She flops down on the couch and plays with the remote for a few moments, finding a channel she likes. She picks up a plate and eats, slowly, a bit at a time, for about fifteen minutes.
Then she stands up. One of the straps falls off her shoulder. She makes no effort to lift it again. She holds up the plate and says, “Can you give me some of the vegetables and plain rice?”
I spoon some out on her plate and she eats, again, slowly and very deliberately. For a skinny girl, there’s no problem with her appetite. After a few minutes, she pulls a magazine off the floor by the couch and lays it on the table. She reads for a while—maybe ten minutes.
I can see her on the couch—and, if I turn my head, in the large monitor atop the bar. The camera is rolling, and, as they say in the TV business—my business—the clock is ticking.
Finally, I ask, “Um, is...this it? Shouldn’t you do something?”
“Such as?”
“I’m not sure—you dance, right?” Then I gather the question together a bit more precisely. “What do you actually do?”
She laughs. “There—I laughed”, she says. “That should buy me another ten minutes.”
She sits a little longer, and now I can see she is aware of the camera. She’s just biding her time, building to something, like Hitchcock showing us the field, the bus, and the distant neighbors, before the crop duster plane finally appears to try to skin Cary Grant.
Finally she gets up and steps lightly around behind the couch. She touches a button on the CD and music fills the room. She throws a glance at me and the audio console near me—is this going out? I adjust the level on the sound so I can see the green ribbons dancing on the console—yes, the music can be heard by anyone on the Web with speakers attached.
She sits on the couch again, but this time sitting up close to the edge. The strap is still hanging off her shoulder, the dress drooping a little at her breast. Now she begins to bop, just to sway to the beat, sitting on the couch.
Then she says to me, “Would you mind...sitting out on the porch? You can take food or whatever you want with you?”
This hits me in the face a bit. “Would you rather I leave--give you some privacy?”
“No—I want you here in case something doesn’t work,” she says. “But...could you sit on the porch? That would just really help me out.”
She’s very friendly and apologetic about it, but she knows what she wants. That seems to be the rule with her. I smile politely and take the red wine onto the porch.
There are two chairs out there. I take one over to the sliding door and sit.
She begins, once again, to dance. Lithe movements, stretched out, on the tips of her toes, lightly at first, and then with more emotion. Clearly, there’s no choreography here. She’s making this up out of the air—out of her gut.
There’s a hunger, an urgency here that isn’t necessarily pretty or comfortable to watch. There’s a look on her face that is gripping and grasping, something that wants, wants bad. The same note is struck by her bounds and leaps, her body continually reaching for something just beyond her grasp. It isn’t classic, but it’s moving and very raw. Both the abstracted, smeared, shimmering image on the tube and the panting, athletic young woman crossing back and forth in front of it—the Siamese mirror twins of her.
My head swivels as she bounds around. Finally, she settles onto the couch again. She’s disheveled and sweaty, but she tosses her hair and throws it over a few times and suddenly she looks terrific.
And then she starts peeling off the red dress. The straps come loose and she crosses her arms in front of her and peels it upward—that magical moment in a man’s life—to reveal her breasts.
They are not large—just my taste—and exquisitely formed, conical and upturned, with a nipple like a dab of paint. The skin is soft but the shape is lovely. A sculptor could work a month on one of those curves and not get it right.
She stands, giving a delicious glimpse of a flat stomach and a lovely mound barely covered by tiny red panties.
She’s motionless in front of the camera for a moment. Expectation and payoff, all at once. Then she reaches behind the couch and pulls out a cut-off t-shirt. She pulls this over her head, hesitates a moment—as if to say goodbye—and pulls it down over her breasts. The material is flimsy—her nipples push right through.
Now she gets up and goes over to the treadmill and begins to run there. She works it for twenty minutes, switching cameras to give several views. The view is very good.
So what’s absolutely predictable now is that, while the view Livy’s presenting isn’t all that revealing anymore, the whole atmosphere is charged. All is sex; sex is everywhere. Those few seconds undressed have fired the whole evening with possibility.
She spends another half-hour on the couch, sewing a button onto a dark blue dress. Demure as could be, except no one—not me, not the audience, however few of them there are—can view her that way anymore.
And I’m having a real hard time with this, all of a sudden. An hour ago, sitting in the living room with her, if she had gotten naked, I would have enjoyed the view but I would have been working. Really. It would have been uncomfortable, but I would have understood my role as a business consultant. Now, sitting on the porch with an empty wine bottle, my Chinese containers and a glass sliding door between us, I feel like a peeping tom. Like the audience.
And I am feeling the cold, the evening September chill. I take it as long as I can, but my knees and ankles are protesting loudly. So I go to open the sliding door, to head back inside. I tug at it—locked. I tap on the window. Then I bang on the window. No response, even though she should be able to see me from where she’s sitting.
Finally, I lower myself off the side of the deck, holding on for a moment to gauge the distance, and drop to the dune below. I head home angry and frustrated. I pull her up on the web and warm myself up for a time before falling asleep in my chair.
~~~~
Unlocked
The next morning, I woke in a foul mood. If I had a cat, I would have kicked it. I would have gone looking for it, so I could kick it.
I ran and everything gave me trouble—my knees, ankles, feet, neck—all stiff, creaking, aching, binding. Old, old, old, old and old.
My run takes me by Sylvie’s house. The world is still at that hour, except for Sylvie and the birds cawing and pecking. Forces of Nature at work. As I mount the dune below her place, pushing at the sand to get my footing, I catch a glimpse of her above, scurrying around like a crab in her light, stiff stride.
“Don’t step on anything,” she advises me severely.
Sylvie taught me about lacquering stones, and grouping them.
Sylvie lives right on the beach at the very edge of town. She says she remembers this place when it was show business refugees and gangsters, God knows how long ago that was. Sylvie showed me how simply painting on a coating of lacquer would keep the lustre of shells and beach stones. She’s been making displays of them for years. I am beginning to photograph her collection. Maybe I’ll do some myself eventually—it’s very peaceful. If they come out well, I’ll put them on my webpage. I’ll dedicate it to Sylvie.
But the pictures won’t capture the gentle movement of her gnarled hands, the way her eyes look squinting through those bottle-cap glasses of hers, as she demonstrates her technique. She makes the arrangement of stones in a bowl into art.
“I made a lot of money with these things, in the Sixties and Seventies,” she rasps, moving stiffly to the counter to get some seagrass for a garnish. “ Arthritis is hell. I just can’t place things anymore like I could. The hell with cancer—once you get it, you’re dead anyway. They should spend millions on a cure for arthritis.”
“Ever hear of Advil?”
“Can’t take pills—they powder your lungs. You take too many, soon you can’t breathe anymore.”
She is working on one of her projects. Pulling clumps of weeds from the top of the dunes, she has arranged them, fan-like, on the weathered blue decking behind her house. Then she adds what seems like a random collection of shells, crabshells and seahorses on top, and photographs them in the bright seabouncing light.
Once finished, she hefts the whole artwork as a piece and dumps it unceremoniously back out on the dunes.
She does this three times before muttering “Time to move on.”
Then she disappears into her shed, a little tumbledown rectangle the same greyblue color as her enormous Nathaniel Hawthorne house. She emerges with a can of paint and a wide brush and proceeds to varnish the shed. Same color as before, but shinier.
She works the brush, bobbing up and down, putting her shoulders and back into the strokes. This way and that, up and down, sideways, filling the cracks, overpainting and painting hard, really laying it on with passion.
I find myself smiling, watching her and thinking back on her as I jog back to my Peapatch house. She does art like work, and work like art, I think. Not a bad approach.
I call home—no answer. My son’s voice on the answering machine. It’s Daddy—call me back. Please. Hang up.
As I said before: when I feel this way, I take action. The action doesn’t really have to fix anything, or even lead to a fix—it just has to neutralize the hopeless feeling till it fades. In the past, I’ve gone looking for a new job on days like this. I’ve run ten miles. I’ve finally returned library books from 1975.
In this case, I decided to look for a girlfriend.
We’re weird creatures, we humans. Any degree of lyricism we manage in this life comes wholly despite ourselves. Underneath all that civilized posturing, there’s a set of scales—an incredibly savage, harsh, honest, shrewd, predatory level of judgment—judgment of ourselves. I was suddenly aware of a scale of self-measurement I’d never know existed before.
Without any forethought, I found I knew my value on the open market as a man. I knew it intimately, and impassively, as though it was in no way connected to me. Underneath all the other craziness I’d preoccupied myself with, I’d been keeping score.
I knew what I could afford. I needed a schoolteacher, or a legal secretary, or a ruffian artist with a couple of love children running around her studio.
I wanted someone with kids—I knew that in my life, I hadn’t discovered my real feelings, or understood the real value of things, till Daniel came along. I wanted that in anyone I was going to spend time with. Besides, kids made it harder to get dates—I could probably get a prettier girl than I deserved if she had kids.
I’m not a cynical person, really. It was kind of astonishing to hear these thoughts rising so easily in my head, but I recognized that this sudden outburst of shrewdness was a pretty useful survival instinct at work. I was coolly sizing up my prospects for success. I had a goal, an objective. I was on a mission.
There was a good-looking woman of about 40 in the little market near my house. Ten year old kid—no wedding ring. A prospect. But she spoke with those Connecticut rounded-tones, and she threw seven live lobsters into the cart.
That ain’t happenin’. Men may be shallow about looks—women are shallow about money. Women marry up, and I wasn’t up for her. Hey, I didn’t choose this reality; I just live here.
Slim thirty-five year old with dark hair and glasses at the video store. Foreign film section. So far, so good. Get a little closer. She takes off her jacket—her entire back is covered with a tattoo of Isabella Rosselini in black leather. The three videos in her arms are all lesbian themes. Not likely.
Fortyish woman with child at the laundromat—probably straight, or at least bi, though the child could be adopted, of course, or a test-tube refugee. Lots of choices out there. Leaves the laundry to be done, instead of doing it herself. That’s a yellow flag already. Then she gets into an argument with the owner about how to divide the loads—which items must go with which other items—don’t you know this already? I walk away. Not what I need at this time, thanks.
And then there are the 13 other lovelies that I fall in lust with, walking the several blocks to the store. Pretty, bright, optimistic, in good shape, with good jobs and money in their pockets. Haven’t fallen on their faces yet in this life. Not a fit. I’ve fallen on my face recently—and not for the first time. I need someone who understands what that feels like.
And that’s how it goes. Too old, too young, too pretty, too successful, too difficult, just plain too weird. Lots of choices, same result.
I go to work, speak to no one and proceed to repair five televisions and three impossibly confused computer problems in two hours. Frustration can be a great source of energy. But I get no pleasure from it.
At 1 o’clock, I go out for a sandwich. Livy is sitting on the bench along the street, in a very girlish slip dress.
“You didn’t say goodnight, “ she starts.
“It got cold on the porch,” I reply.
“You should have come in.”
“The door was locked.”
She looks stunned. “I didn’t lock it—did you see me lock it?”
“I’m not saying you locked it—I’m just saying it was locked and I was cold.” I’m not sure if she’s serious or not, and I don’t give a damn either.
“Well, I’m sorry,” she says, apologizing for something she didn’t do.
“You did a good job,” she continues. “I know that camera setup is complicated. But it still isn’t quite right—will you have another look at it?”
She leans around to look me in the eye, since I’m childishly refusing to look at her.
“I’ll make sure the door stays unlocked, okay?”
I nod, and we head back to her place.
It’s sunny out, temperature in the high 50’s. The sun blazes through the windows of her big room. I work out some glitches in the camera-switching unit. She stands in the corner by the bar, painting. Spreading paint on a large canvas, to be more precise—there’s no artistic plan or passion behind it.
Then she shows me a radio transmitter she’s bought for one of the cameras.
“You know how to set up cameras—can you shoot?” she asks.
“It’s been a few years, but that’s how I started,” I said. “You don’t forget.”
“I thought maybe you could do some handheld camera for me,” she says.
I blush. I’m not aware of it until I see her reaction. But she smiles instantly, and I know.
“Umm—of what?” I ask. It’s an innocent question, really.
“I’m an actress,” she says, answering the question behind the question. “I’m an actress, a dancer, and a painter. I’m going to share my life onscreen. I want to share my ideas and my creativity and my feelings and—just everything!—with my audience. I want it to be spontaneous—but the thing is—“ she pauses, searching for the words, “—it’s not enough to be spontaneous…” and she sputters out.
“They have to know you’re being spontaneous,” I say.
There’s a sudden look of surprise on her face, and then an uncomplicated, unveiled smile.
“Yeah,” she says. “And if you’re trying too hard to show you’re being spontaneous—“
“You’re being contrived,” I finish, and she actually laughs. I do too.
“I spent ten years doing documentaries—it’s not as different as we’d like you to believe,” I explain.
“Right. So we’ve got to figure out how to walk that line—if you want to try?”
“Well, again—what am I shooting?”
“I thought you could shoot me while I dance. And move around me while I move around.”
“That sounds interesting.”
“Do you dance?” she asks, looking me over. Looking me over, not an unreasonable question.
“I’m an enthusiastic, but very bad, dancer,” I reassure her.
Her eyebrows go up, rueful. “Well, we’ll try it.”
She turns on some music—electronic sounds over insistent bass and drums. She takes a few steps. I move with her. She turns and moves the other way—I follow.
She stops.
“No,” she says, “That won’t do.”
I see a look of concern flit across her face. It is just a moment, veiled, filtered, the same as all her expressions. But I suddenly realize she’s worried I can’t shoot! Hell, I’ve been shooting video professionally since she was…
I suddenly become very determined to show her what I can do.
“I’ve been moving with you,” I say quickly. “That’s no good; it tones down your movements. I need to keep taking an angle to you—then your movements get accented, deepened.”
“Right,” she nods, fervent, and her eyes open up for me again.
She moves forward, a few steps. I move across her arc. She begins to stretch out her body, pulling her torso at an angle to the path her legs are taking. I move around her and stretch the camera out away from my torso, so it seems like she’s stretching, stretching beyond all physical possibility.
“Yessss!” she yips, and we’re rolling.
Now the music cuts back, idling, a little vamp. Livy stands in one place, pulsing, swaying, eyes closed. I let go, and now I’m swaying too, waiting, expectant, along with her. Then she pulses bigger and I stay put but I start to move the camera--in and out, closer and farther, her eyes filling the frame, then her face, her head and shoulders, arms and legs snaking back and forth, hair bobbing in the air.
And then the music picks up and she begins to move and so do I.
I’m light as a feather all at once, moving around her, following my own breeze. Her eyes open, she sees me surrounding her and a huge smile breaks on her face and I’m smiling too. I cut across in front, and she passes and circles round me, me turning to follow her.
We’re both laughing and grunting now, little yelps going back and forth, from effort and delight. She crosses my arc and I lift the camera overhead, shooting down on her as she passes.
Suddenly, she launches herself and grabs the camera out of my hands in mid-air. She dances a broadening, wobbly circle, spinning around the center of the room, the camera at arms-length facing her, the room a blurring ghost in the background, until she collapses to the floor in a happy, heaving, gasping mess.
I stand over her for a moment, not sure what to do next. Is she okay?
She is smiling like she’s more than fine. She looks more than fine. Does she want me to take pictures anymore? Not that I care, cause I’m feeling pretty fine myself.
“C’mere,” she says, and waves a hand at me from the floor, waves it like a limp rag, funny girl.
I sit down on the floor next to her. She has a goofy smile on her face and she’s still breathing hard. I feel kind of goofy—giddy—myself. She waves her hand at me again—she wants me to come down further. I lie down on the floor next to her now.
And she leans over and kisses me. Not just a girlie kiss, either—a real kiss. A kiss with intent. I was a Boy Scout—‘Be Prepared’, they teach you, but I’m taken completely by surprise.
She’s a good kisser, though. And she doesn’t stop with one. We start kissing in bunches, and now I’m breathing hard too, both of us caught in the moment.
Then she grabs my crotch! Jesus! I jump like I’ve been shot. She squeals a laugh and flashes me a look that says, ‘Yeah, I’m a dirty girl—so what?’
I can take a challenge. I put my hand purposefully on her breast and caress it, gently but firmly, with the bottom of my fingers and the palm of my hand. Hell, I’ve wanted to since the instant I met her, so why not? I shoot her a look back— ‘I’ll see your crotch grab and raise you a breast.’
She laughs again, but I don’t remove my hand. Her breasts feel good, and I haven’t touched a woman with intent in a long time—I’m not stopping until she tells me to.
Instead, she puts her hand back on my crotch, but now she’s caressing me, and she stays with it. She means it.
It takes a second to dawn on me that I am actually going to fuck this beautiful thing. Since leaving Marla, I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about the first time I would have sex. I have certainly fantasized about women over the years, and about Livy pretty much continually since I met her. It’s been fun, and it was all I had. But now, all at once, it is a little overwhelming to realize you’re there. And then there is that manly concern—it’s been years. I don’t know how much I really have to offer, so to speak.
But before I have a chance to get too nervous about this, it becomes clear there is nothing to get nervous about. I respond to her touch but quick.
And knowing that, I throw my remaining concerns out the window and start working on instinct. I kiss her neck and her breasts and then my hands are under her dress and finding no underwear there to restrict them. And then her dress comes off and my clothes come off and I just plain stop thinking.
We make love for five hours. We lie around on the floor after successive batches of spasms for ten or fifteen minutes and then we’re off to the races again. I just keep touching her in between, keeping her simmering, and then she gets excited enough to get me going again. We find out she can get me going pretty much anytime she wants to.
After five hours I know I’m done for a while. Like maybe a month. I drink half a gallon of water from the fridge. Then I join her, lying on the floor.
“I’ll tell you what—you don’t have to pay me for today,” I say, and she smiles. Then she rolls over to face me and fixes me in a serious glance.
“We’re not in love,” she states flatly.
“Fine—great—no problem,” I shrug. Like that’s a problem…
“Well, I should be a little more comfortable with you watching me now,” she murmurs. Then she rolls over and punches a button on the remote control on the floor next to her.
“Will you check the camera by the kitchen? It’s jumping when I switch to it.”
It suddenly occurs to me that this whole thing’s been on camera. That would have thrown me for a loop if I’d realized it beforehand. But now I’m about as relaxed as you can get without actually snoring standing up.
So I go check the equipment, butt-naked, then lay down on the couch and fall dead asleep while she dances for the ever-present audience—for now, just a glowing red light on a camera across the room.
They got a lot more tangible very soon.
~~~~
Magnetic Hypnotic
Okay, let’s get this out of the way now:
Yes, I was screwing a girl who was way too young for me, by any standard. And there’s no question but that even the standards that exist for these things are frighteningly lax.
Someone told me the standard for a man is ‘half your age plus seven.’ So, being 48, that would make a 31-year-old okay for me, I suppose.
Ha!
When you hear a standard for personal relationships that starts with ‘half your age plus’ anything, you know it’s a con job. The guy who came up with this was obviously moonlighting from his government job, developing tax loopholes and straightfaced usage of the term ‘civil service’.
And since the whole thing is such a joke to begin with, what’s maddening is the fury that’s been directed at me since this went public. I’ve been denounced for moral turpitude in Congress (who hasn’t? and who are they to talk?), in churches, synagogues and mosques around the country and on television by Oprah and even Geraldo Rivera (that takes some doing).
Now where’s all that coming from? Donald Trump almost ran for President a few years ago with the model-of-the-month on his arm and got merely a few sniggers. I demand to know--why was it okay for him and not for me? Because he’s got millions and I don’t? Because he’s been married several times to shallow pretty girls half his age, so we don’t expect anything better from him? How is that fair?
It seems to me I have the constitutional right to be as shallow as the multibillionaire down the block. I’m sure it’s in there somewhere. This is America, after all. My grandparents came here so I would have the opportunity to pursue the shallowest of goals just like the goyim. And I have.
It bothered me some, being so shallow. I worried about it at night, lying in bed with her after coming 17 times. I thought about it a lot. And this is the conclusion I came to:
An absolutely gorgeous 23-year-old woman has offered her body to me, in the interests of science, to test the limits of an average middle-aged man’s physical endurance and, more significantly, to test the philosophical quandaries of playing out an age-old and well-documented fantasy: great mindless sex with a woman young enough to be my daughter, who doesn’t want anything else from me—illicit, dirty, inappropriate and totally unacceptable sex. Tastes great, and less filling.
Thousands of men—no, forget that, millions of men—around the world were dying to be in my shoes. Well, maybe not shoes, unless they have that fetish thing—but you know what I mean…
Men who’d never heard of us were dying to be in…my place. I was their stand-in, their proxy. It had come to me, through no talent or virtue of my own, to represent the fulfillment of a dream for these guys.
In short: I had a social responsibility, a historic mandate even, to fuck this girl as frequently and creatively as I could.
That was my conclusion. It came to me in a blinding flash, and I wrote it down on a napkin next to the bed as fast as I could.
Did I take any of this seriously? Of course not. It didn’t deserve to be taken seriously. Livy was offering me the only kind of relationship I could have handled at that moment—anything with a second’s worth of seriousness, I would have had to decline. I didn’t have an ounce of sincere feeling in me that didn’t scare me to death. All I was capable of at that moment was sensation.
But sensation kept me going pretty nicely for a while.
If it makes you feel better, I will say it was strange at times, and not all of it was totally fun. Most of it maybe—the largest part—well, almost everything, fine, but—anyway…
There was a real poignancy for me in experiencing her flesh. Just the feel of it, the taste of it, was so different, so new and perfect and low-mileage. Marla was a pretty woman, but I’d forgotten what a young girl really looked and felt like. I felt like a vampire, stealing some of her youth and sucking it into me.
And I really did feel rejuvenated, in a much more literal way than I’d expected. I woke up all at once in the morning—Eyes open, and I’m up!!—as opposed to the endless, slow thawing-out process I had gotten used to. The proverbial spring appeared in my step, I ran harder, things that always annoyed me didn’t annoy me as much. I had a sense of perspective, all of a sudden.
All this, despite the fact that—after the first day’s orgy—the sex wasn’t actually all that good for awhile. That was a bit of a shock. It took me a while to admit she wasn’t really that good in bed—awkward and uncomfortable.
First, I thought it must be me. I must not be satisfying her, I thought. Or maybe she’s finally had a look at me and is turned off. But that’s a man’s shallowness, as I said—we worry about looks. Women are shallow in other ways.
What I realized was, she was an actress, one with the habits of a good student. She’d studied seduction—and honed it to the point of genius. I’d seen her that first night from the porch, and, I’ll admit, several other times in the privacy of my home, and she could stop your heart.
But seduction was something she could master all by herself. Sex—good sex, at least—requires opening up to the other person, feeling their needs and getting back excitement by getting them excited. It requires trust and self-assurance, some confidence in your own attractiveness, and it shocked me to realize that she wasn’t all that self-confident.
Once she had a blemish. It was the size of a dime, maybe, on one side of her forehead, but she spent the whole day contorting herself to keep it away from the camera. Of course, I was curious about what she was hiding—and she didn’t want me to get a look at it either. We must have made quite a puzzling scene for our poor viewers that day—the two of us ostensibly making love, while all the while, she’s twisting into a pretzel to keep one side of herself off-camera. Lovemaking by way of the WWF.
During a break after the fifth round, I caught her in the bathroom trying to put makeup on it and I burst out laughing.
Bad move—she thought I was laughing at her and she got pissed. She was about to stalk out or kick me; I’m not sure which. I grabbed both arms and said to her, “Nobody but you sees it; nobody cares.”
She threw my arms off and hissed at me, “I have to be attractive.” It was a lament.
“You don’t know how attractive you are, do you?” I said. “Sweetie, you can have twenty blemishes and they wouldn’t notice. You’re beautiful.”
“I’m not as beautiful as you think I am,” she said. It was a harsh line, harshly delivered.
But it broke through the barrier. Suddenly, I could see the way she saw herself, and I understood a little of what she was going through.
Her face was long and her nose was long. They were in proportion, and they suited her, but she wasn’t a classic beauty. Her lips were thin, not the Hollywood collagen style, and she had a little overbite. I thought it was cute. Her hair was straight and hung on the side of her head.
I found her both beautiful and overwhelmingly sexy—and clearly, we had a large and growing audience that felt the same way—but in a culture that tells women every month fifty new ways to remake their hair and tells them to learn how to make him beg, Livy was not immune to the fashion inquisition. She was mercilessly aware of every deviation from the ideal.
Sex appeal—anyone’s sex appeal—comes from confidence and self-assurance. And at that moment, she had none. I was staring at a frightened kid in a woman’s body. Over a blemish. I held her by the shoulders now and looked her in the eye.
“Livy, you’re approachable. You’re smart. You like sex. You have fun with it. You love that these guys are watching you, and they get off on the fact that you love it. You’re sexy because of the way you look into the camera and dare them to turn it off. You say ‘I’m going to bite off big chunks of life, chew ‘em up and spit ‘em out.’ You can have a bad hair day or a blemish or put on a couple pounds—you just keep feeding ‘em that attitude and they’ll keep coming back for more, period.”
She liked that. More important, she bought it, quickly. She went back out and ran the table the rest of the night. And that made me feel good, in a couple of different ways. It made me feel like there was some purpose I could serve, something I could do for her, and that gave me a surge of purpose and power.
The other way it made me feel good was that, once she bought it, she relaxed a little—and then the sex got amazing.
We made love in the shower, on the living room counter, the deck, the laundry room, every horizontal and several vertical surfaces in the house; we took a camera to the beach on a sunny day and worked the dune grass just off the seawall. We kept busy. Better than that, she was responsive now. I could play with her and she would play back. No thinking, no delay, no plan, just response building on response building on response.
The idea that I would be having sex with a woman in front of a camera was ludicrous—and not just because of my looks, either. I would have shriveled and died under any other circumstances. But she believed in it. Sort of. Maybe. In a way…
We’re susceptible animals—when we want to believe in something really bad, when we need to believe in something desperately, we believe. And who can say—before, during or after—where the borderline is between truth and need?