“No, you don’t!” She laughed wildly.
Then she would complain about her job, explaining the politics of the morning newsletter, the drama of lunch breaks, and what the new ownership meant for the editorial page. In those days we complained competitively, like athletes, spurring ourselves to greater and greater specificity.
On the best nights she would sit at the loom, clacking the harnesses, and I would sprawl out reading on the daybed, Cat nestled beside me. We could stay like that for hours, lost in our own projects, and yet sometimes I would say a name—Grogan, I’d call out, or that younger Sibley kid, the one with the freckles—and she’d say, he’s a real-estate agent, he married Morgan, actually, yeah, they’re still together, they live in Swarthmore. Oh, that makes sense, he was always kind of a homebody, I’d say, or, She likes to take care of people, and Lacie’d nod and agree.
“How’s Ian?” I asked one night, and she nodded eagerly, as if she’d been waiting for me to ask.
“He’s great, he’s good. He’s working on his show a ton.”
“Yeah? Have you guys been…hanging out?”
“Yeah, sure. It’s good.” She looked pensive, and I thought she might divulge something, but she only asked, “Have you guys been talking? He likes you so much, by the way. He thinks you’re great.”
“Oh, that’s nice.” Through a supreme act of willpower I avoided asking what exactly he had said. “Yeah, we were close at the Barn. We’ve been texting a little, but we haven’t really hung out. He seems busy.”
“He is,” she assured me.
In truth I was hurt that Ian wasn’t making time for me. When I had thought about moving to New York, I had counted him among the handful of people who would stop me from imploding of loneliness. But he had farmed the whole job out to his girlfriend. It surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. He could be careless with people.
I didn’t have a current boyfriend to dissect, so instead I told her about my past, the mild schoolteacher, the Dutch Deleuzean, the contracts lawyer who loved to talk metaphysical defiance and jack off into my tits. I told her, too, about the guy who had been freaked out by my pubes. “He was like, Oh my God, you’ve got hair. As if I were a freak,” and though I was trying to joke, raw hurt snuck into my voice.
“What an asshole.”
“I know.” I bugged up my face. “I can’t believe I was with him.” What I really meant was Don’t judge me for being with him. I wasn’t like Lacie, fat with male attention, assured of it, careless with it. I had been grateful this asshole wanted to go to bed with me. But I never could have said that aloud. It would be too pathetic, too nakedly begging for reassurances.
Now she sighed. “The whole shaved-pussy thing is gross anyway.”
“Yeah. It’s so transparently about porn. I’m like, Aren’t you guys ashamed that you want to fuck prepubescent children? Don’t you get that this is what this is about?”
“Yeah, it’s disgusting,” she agreed, and then, “Porn,” she mused, in such a speculative, leisurely tone, that I giggled. “No, I mean really. It’s a thing. It’s a”—and she put on her best newscaster voice—“it’s a force shaping our world today.” We both chuckled, loose from the red wine, and the air too was dilating, making space in our tipsiness for something to grow.
“This one time,” she said in a wondering voice, “actually, it was the first time I was with Ian,” and it was as though someone had lifted me up by the scruff of my neck, “I started to cry.”
“Wait, why?”
“He was just being so gentle, so tender. And it had been so long, you know? So long since someone had done something more than just put me through a series of porn positions.”
“Wow.”
“You know what I mean?”
“Yeah, no. It’s like a checklist. I had never thought about it that way before, but you’re totally right. It’s so mechanical.”
Always, my most showy displays of submission—me on my knees, me whimpering, me helpless, or with my shoulders pinned—got the biggest grunts of satisfaction from men.
“I mean, I’m sex-positive, I believe that for some people, kink is a way toward intimacy. Absolutely. But a lot of it just feels like misogyny dressed up in new clothing. You know? It’s like this massive collective fantasy of humiliating and overpowering women. And I’m like, actually? Being choked doesn’t turn me on.”
“No, it’s true. It’s depressing when I think about it.”
It was depressing, and I also felt—what? Proud of Lacie for noticing it? Proud of her for naming it? As a teenager she had been so adored by men that now I loved hearing her trash them.
“Pornification is real,” she declared.
It was real, but the tricky thing was that sometimes it turned me on. Sometimes I hated that it turned me on. My pride in Lacie withered to envy: yes, I envied Lacie, who hadn’t gotten all scrambled by culture, who could definitively say she didn’t want to be slapped or choked.
Tentatively I said, “This one time, I was having sex with this guy, and he kept spanking me. Just like, Wham! Wham! I mean, it hurt. And afterward I was like, Why do you like hitting me? And he said, it feels nice. And I thought, Really? It feels nice? We just met, we’ve never had sex before, and already it feels so boring you have to add spanking to the mix?”
Lacie was nodding. “Yeah, exactly. Good for you for asking.”
I flushed under the compliment. I didn’t deserve it: I had been stupid enough to be flattered by his answer. It feels nice. The truth was that I liked turning men on. I liked feeling them flush with pleasure. I liked feeling feminine and small and weak; I liked their gasps of disbelief. I couldn’t be cavalier like Lacie; I couldn’t afford her anger. The affection of men was too precious to me. But when I thought too much about that, I felt ill.
I wanted to ask—oh, how I wanted to ask—if Ian was still tender in bed. Wouldn’t it be normal to say? Why were we still talking on this abstract level? But I couldn’t find the guts. I didn’t want to smash the warm circuit between us.
Lacie yawned and reached for her phone. “I’m afraid to look at the time, but let me just see.”
Predictably, it was shockingly late. We groaned and chorused, “We have to go to bed,” setting our wineglasses in the sink. Outside Lacie’s bedroom we paused awkwardly. “Good night,” she said, giving me a tentative half-hug. “This is so amazing. We get to have a sleepover every night.”
I grinned at her. She looked so pleased. “Yeah. It’s the best.”