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You are undeniably a genius. I wonder: Is your terrible history tied to your genius? Did your history make your work great? Does a genius get let off the hook? Are you great because you’re sick? What does it even mean to be a genius? And why are we so willing to call filmmakers geniuses? I suppose because the rest of us—diffident, confused, female—can’t conceive of setting so many other people in motion in service of our vision. Symphonies and films—these are often called works of genius simply because their makers ask so many other people to do shit for them. A genius is, by nature, bossy. He is the boss of the people who work for him, but also the boss of the people who consume his art. The genius—like the alcoholic—overwhelms you with his vision. He requires that you see things his way. You walk out of the theater and the world around you looks noticeably different. More brutal, more kind, more filled with light or menace or love or dogs. Whatever the genius fills his movie with.
A darkly baroque, extremely grubby bookstore owned by a grizzled roué who hired only beautiful young women. It was said he was sleeping with all of them—how’d he pull that off? They sat behind the counter looking ineffectual and sleepy-eyed—maybe he fed them opium? Anyway it was known as a great place for shoplifting.
lol
North of the bookstore, a Santa Fe–looking stuccoed place to buy Birkenstocks and ponchos. A hangout for preppy bohemian girls, such as I was trying hard not to be. I wanted to be something more difficult, something other than what I was. I held a very deep misunderstanding about the world. I had this idea that if I wanted to be among people who were different from me, I should disguise my true self and become more like them. I perceived other people to be more authentic than me, and so in order to be more authentic, I became less what I was in the first place. I counterfeited in order to feel real or, more accurately, in order to hang around what seemed realer than the thing I started out as. You could call it class drag. But that was what the Ave was for, for some of us.
At first it was boys the same age as the subject, or only a bit older. The boys were brainy classmates from her progressive prep school, with Guatemalan spreads on their beds and climbing gear stashed in their closets and calculus textbooks on their neat desks. By the time the girl was sixteen, though, she had branched out. Her school was small, and she’d run through anyone of interest. It was easy to be picked up by men in coffeehouses—almost as if they were there waiting to be picked up by a teenage girl, which would have been terribly wicked of them. Though the subject was experienced beyond her years, she was too innocent to believe that wickedness like that could exist—though it was in fact exactly what was happening to her. The subject loved the power she held over the men. She loved the Moment: when the grown-up would turn to kiss her for the first time, and his eyes would go soft with lust, and she wouldn’t be feeling lust in return, just as she hadn’t with her first boyfriend. But now that emotional inequity felt like power, felt like control: to make a grown man go soft (and also: hard) like that! It made her feel kind of crazy with power. She saw it as a specific power unto herself, and didn’t or wouldn’t see that any ardent young girl would’ve sufficed. (There should be a specific name for this fallacy, the fallacy where you fit another person’s sexual proclivities very well, and feel that it’s because of some quality inherent solely in you, when of course it could easily be satisfied by anyone of vaguely similar shape and form. And age.)
All of these factors contributed to the subject’s sluttiness. But this study feels the most useful explanation, perhaps, is mythological. A mythology of sex itself. The subject infused the act of sex with unconscious mystical power. Why did she put that power into sex and nothing else? She wanted sex to achieve something for her, something outside of itself. This something could have a name: connection, redemption, purpose, pleasure, pure feeling. But really what she wanted was for sex to make her known. You have edges, you are something, you are here, you exist, defined by these hands, this mouth, this penis. Sex was supposed to do all that. It didn’t.
We take a package of Manner wafers from the case and throw it on the floor. The Seven Gables sells Manner wafers because they are European. “Oops!” we say. “Broken!” We put the cookies in the back room to eat later and get back to the business of scooping and selling.
But hush now, the previews are over and the film is starting. We pour some coffee and push through the maroon curtains into the theater.
cute
We kissed, more and more roughly, until he grabbed ahold of some of my belly fat and pinched it hard. “Oh,” I said, hot and embarrassed. “Sorry.” I was apologizing for the fat. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You’re beautiful.” I wasn’t. You couldn’t pinch beautiful, at least not in the waist. But I didn’t care. He was beautiful. He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I’ve since learned that—if you’re lucky—you get to go to bed with maybe three or four people in your life who are so big and so brilliant and so perfect they blot out the sun. They become the sun. He was one of them, for me. Even though his bed was narrow and he was inexperienced. Even though he thought I was a chubster. Like he said, it didn’t matter. You don’t get to choose when or by whom you are going to be illuminated and maybe even eclipsed—deliciously, filthily eclipsed. It just happens and who knows why. Who even knows what to do about it, except fuck and fuck until the whole thing blows up.
We had a lot of sex that spring, though I was still nominally dating Matthew, whatever that meant. He had always been withholding, so there wasn’t a big change when I began to spend all my time with Cassie, learning what it’s really like Down There. I liked the badness of it, but felt a curious sense of detachment from the sex act itself. What I really wanted to learn was her coolness, her remove, her ability to seem as if she didn’t care. She would fling herself at me, practically tear my clothes off, send me out of my head with her little fingers, and then roll over afterward and look at me with cool Antonioni eyes, like, Who are you again?
The spring grew hotter and more fecund-smelling. We lay in bed one night in late May, saying goodbye. She was getting ready to go back to San Francisco, to spend the summer with a despised stepmother, the latest in a string.
“Are you going to see Matthew this summer?” she asked.
“Probably,” I said. “I hope.”
And she started to cry, and I was so surprised.
When I needed to rest, I made my way not home but to the grand State Library of New South Wales, an imposing cream-colored pile on Macquarie Street. There were books, and a spare, elegant café, and other readers. I began to make my way through Tolstoy; I found his multitudinousness a good antidote to the emptiness of my new life. There was a sweetness and a purpose to my solitude in the library. Late in the afternoon I had to exit the cool gray dim into the hot afternoon and make my way back to Redfern. If I didn’t get home before six o’clock or so, I would have to take a cab that I could ill afford—I couldn’t walk around my neighborhood after dark.
sweet
It was a sweet existence in many ways. I had my loving and beautiful boyfriend Dave, who was sort of a rock star and also the nicest boyfriend I’d ever had. I had work—nude modeling and shifting boxes in a warehouse, not at the same time. There were shows and beaches and long days filled with nothing but reading. When I got restless or Dave was on tour, I hopped trains up and down the coast with a couple of daredevil pals I’d made. But I knew I was supposed to be a student. I wrote in my diary: “Last night I dreamt I was late for school—and how!” Which was funny, but I didn’t feel funny. I felt like I was twenty-two and a college dropout twice over and getting older every day in the wrong hemisphere. I truly believed I would live outside bourgeois society for the rest of my days, nude modeling and warehouse laboring. Maybe I would get promoted to forklift driver. There was nothing in me that believed that the normal things that happened to normal people were things that were going to happen to me. I looked like a free girl—after all, I stuck my thumb out and hitchhiked all the way to Queensland—but at this point I believed I was worthless, pretty much, except maybe my looks, and I don’t think a worthless-feeling person is a free person. I read exhaustively. From Tolstoy I’d moved on to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Thomas Mann and, of all people, Doris Lessing, who made me think in uncomfortably explicit ways about girls and freedom, and the difficulty of the novels was the only thing keeping me from falling into total despair. My brain was a little hammer, looking for somewhere to fall.