Animal

by Lisa Taddeo

She was Austrian and garishly beautiful—blond pompadour, black Dolce & Gabbana suits, excessive filler. She trained me in the art of sexual combat. She told me that women must deploy all their strengths in order to prevail. People will call you names, she said. They are only hating themselves.

I KNEW WHERE TO FIND Alice, but you should never engage a stranger until you understand her world. Don’t let anyone have an advantage.

When I woke there was the mean little pain of missing someone’s laughter. There was also relief. I had no one for whom to care. No one to fear losing.

Through the glass door I saw her. At first I saw only the back of her head and I was struck at once. Sometimes you can be struck by the back of someone. You won’t have to wonder if that person is as striking from the front. When she turned, I gasped. She had the kind of look that you saw very rarely, even in a place full of beautiful girls. She was so unequivocally flawless that I wanted to hit her.

The sunlight was white in Beverly Hills, whereas in Topanga it was orange and gaseous. I was learning that Los Angeles is made up of distinct countries that are merely minutes apart. Not even countries but ecosystems. The homeless beg differently from town to town.

I was still wearing the same white dress. It made me feel young. I wore also a canvas cross-body bag. On my feet were old dirty sandals. Women can tell another woman’s worth by her shoes and bag. You can wear a tarp across your body, but the shoes and bag have to pass.

—Hey, kid, he said, looming. —Oh, hey. —Rolling solo? —I wasn’t feeling a group situation. —Me neither. Mind if I intrude? I had with me a Departures and wanted badly to be alone. I knew the precise color I wanted my coffee and how to have an orgasm in under thirty seconds. I needed everybody in the world—including waiters—less than they needed me.

I didn’t say anything for a long time and held the phone to my ear and my hand to the mouthpiece as the waiter poured me a glass. He smiled at me conspiratorially, like here we were being bacchanalian and the person on the other end of that line was probably folding laundry.

In the beginning I cooked for Vic all the time in my apartment. You shouldn’t do that. If you cook for a man, and you cook very well, as I did, they will think you belong to them.

When you’ve suffered as much as I have, you begin to see everything in perspective. You know exactly the ways in which people will move on and you know that they will laugh again. It makes their present suffering seem prosaic.

—I’m sautéing broccoli with garlic, red pepper flakes, and bread crumbs. —Sounds spicy. —Are you one of these old men who can’t tolerate spice? —You have some cruelty in you. Let me tell you: men love cruelty. It reminds them of every time their fathers or mothers didn’t think they were good enough. Cruelty looks better on a woman than the perfect dress.

I asked about Lenore because it soothed me to hear people talk about love like it was real. I want you to know about Lenore, about the women who men make you feel are better than you. I want you to know about everything I may not be able to teach you.

—Let me tell you something, he said, looking into my eyes like an asshole. If a man takes longer than two, three months to ask you to marry him, he doesn’t love you. He won’t ever love you.

He came from a wealthy family. Now he was worried about air conditioners but that is how all old people end. More surely than we fly toward death, we go to parsimony.

Big Sky had been in the bathroom or making a phone call and I’d thought of nothing but him, but also I had tolerated other people’s conversation because the first day you meet someone like that you still have your self-decency, you still can have an interest in life beyond every tendril of their hair.

When men tell you they are pieces of shit, when they tell you they are scumbags, they do it because they subconsciously know that you are hooked. It hooks you more. They push you away to pull you in and the most terrible thing is they don’t even do it on purpose.

There’s nothing more sensual than a woman who makes you work to make her smile.

I imagined even my phone was through with me. It hungered for a more self-assured owner.

Alice was pitched forward in her seat. It felt good that someone understood the passion, that it was possible to feel strongly about a man after only one and a half meetings. —I didn’t reply to him for three hours. I showered and blew out my hair and applied an eye mask. Finally, at five, I wrote, Sure. I’ll come by. Great, he wrote right away. I’m walking down there now. —Good for you for waiting so long. But isn’t it terrible? This is how we applaud ourselves. I bet you wanted to hit him and fuck him at the same time. What did you wear?

—He sounds like a fucker. I love fuckers, too. Tell me the rest. I need another cigarette.

Morality is uninteresting. I’m intrigued by the idiocy of trust.

One of the best things about childhood is the lack of choices. Your parents make choices for you that you must inhabit. Even better is your lack of awareness. You have no conception of all the wrong choices that might have maimed you. Take the road to the left and you won’t get run over by the car that will kill you if you take the road to the right.

I think about it all the time. How the fancy place of my youth could seem cheap to me now.

A cherry air freshener dangled from the smudged rearview mirror. It smelled like the 1980s and everything that was the color red.

Why do some straight women need to be beautiful in front of other women? If men were wiped from the planet, how long would that need linger? At what point would we just focus on becoming strong?

—The Indian culture is more meatless than any other, Alice said, but you boys look like you could use some. Meat. She said the word meat very softly. But not sensually. I watched the rape in them shrivel up.

It’s funny to think how many corporate dollars are spent so that one man can fuck one woman.

I had certainly told him more than a woman has ever told a man who loves her about another man she’s been fucking. And Vic said, Is he a total stud? And I said, Yeah, in a sort of strange way. He’s unthreateningly assertive. Now, this, of course, was the thing that most drew me to Big Sky, but Vic, like every man, didn’t care about that.

Even when my mother yelled at me or locked me out of her bedroom, it was because I had the power to infuriate her. It was because she loved me. It could be argued that my learning it when I did, at the age of ten, was perfect timing. Old enough to have experienced cozy solipsism for many years, young enough to change the way I walked through the world. To be cautious.

We never used condoms. He always pulled out. He was good at it. There are men who don’t know when they are about to come, and those men shouldn’t be allowed to fuck.

When you’re in love with a married man, the truth is that you are in hate with a married man, and you have to take succor where you can find it.

She’d removed herself from my life but not out of spite. She simply didn’t want to be near me. That’s the most awful thing someone you love can do.

I had to confront what protective meant—whether I had, in fact, been protected. Physically protective was one thing. Any father could own a shotgun.

How can I explain her power? It was a magical thing. She was cold but her body was warm; even today, even after everything, I would give both my arms to be held in hers.

You can tell a lot about a woman by her bath products, by the range or the minimalism.

Listen, you must always be the first one to dress. This is obligatory. I didn’t know to do that. Gosia hadn’t lived long enough to impart that wisdom. We lie there naked after the other person rises because we can’t bear to leave the space. We can’t leave the sweat and the warmth because we love it too much. We love it more, nearly, than we love the asshole rising to put on his t-shirt. Don’t be the fucked one. Be the first to rise.

She took me out of the house and to the Caesars Pocono Resort. Now it’s renamed something seamier, Palace Stream or Lovers’ Delight, but it was always one of those honeymoon fuck forts with the champagne glass bathtubs and the fruit salad breakfasts. I’ve always wondered who is turned on by that, who wants to fuck in heart-shaped tubs. Men with blond beards, women who love baby’s breath in their bouquets of red roses.

I looked like a young girl in the mirror. Perhaps it was a trick of the light. My eyes shone with the absurdity of it all. I felt peace, you see, because I’d embraced the madness. And yet I don’t believe it was madness. I use the word as shorthand. The world will call it madness. You can’t convince normal people otherwise. There’s a simple small line at the mouth of hell. It’s not a big deal when you get there. It’s just another step is all. If you ever cross it, as I did, you will see that black things become the most honest ones of all.

He looked a little wounded and I realized that true power came from not caring about anyone.