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[...] She knew the world of people who anxiously hunt down pleasures and don’t know how to wait for them to arrive on their own. And it was so tragic: you only had to look around a nightclub, in the half light: it was the search for pleasure that doesn’t come by and of itself. She’d only gone with some of her men from the past, maybe two or three times, and hadn’t wanted to go back. Because the search for pleasure, when she’d tried it, had been bad water: she’d put her mouth on the tap, which tasted like rust and only gave two or three drops of lukewarm water: it was dry water. No, she’d thought, better real suffering than forced pleasure. She wanted Ulisses’s left hand and knew she wanted it, but she did nothing, since she was enjoying the very thing she was needing: being able to have that hand if she stretched out her own.
And now she was the one who was feeling the desire to be apart from Ulisses, for a while, to learn on her own how to be. Two weeks had already passed and Lóri would sometimes feel a longing so enormous that it was like a hunger. It would only pass when she could eat Ulisses’s presence. But sometimes the longing was so deep that his presence, she figured, would seem paltry; she would want to absorb Ulisses completely. This desire of hers to be Ulisses’s and for Ulisses to be hers for a complete unification was one of the most urgent feelings she’d ever had. She got a grip, didn’t call, happy she could feel.
But the nascent pleasure would ache so much in her chest that sometimes Lóri would have preferred to feel her usual pain instead of this unwanted pleasure. True joy had no possible explanation, not even the possibility of being understood — and seemed like the start of an irreparable perdition. That merging with Ulisses that had been and still was her desire, had become unbearably good. But she was aware that she still wasn’t up to enjoying a man. It was as if death were our great and final good, except it wasn’t death, it was unfathomable life that was taking on the grandeur of death. Lóri thought: I can’t have a petty life because it wouldn’t match the absoluteness of death.
During the first days Lóri was bothered because she was sure Ulisses was waiting. It pained her for the roses to wilt and for him pathetically to replace them with others that would wilt too. It consoled her to think that his wait wouldn’t be too painful for him, since he was an extremely patient man who was capable of suffering. So she calmed down. She thought now that the ability to bear suffering was the measure of a person’s greatness and saved that person’s inner life.
In reading Lispector’s books, I learn about the structure of the relationship between a human and God, between a human and herself, and between a human and the other; in this case, both the other who is just another person one has slept with and lost desire for, and the Other who holds your life’s happiness in their hands. This second Other is the elemental force that drives the life of the loving one, while the other other has no power at all and might as well not even exist. Why is life like this? How can so much importance (for the one who loves) be concentrated in a random, Other, singular individual, while diffused among the rest is nothing, and we are able to stride past them with complete indifference?
What is this Other capable of that the other other could never do? In one sense (unhappy as this is to write) the Other is the one who circumscribes our limits. With the choice of who to love, we end up in a city, with a side of the bed on which to sleep, and a certain set of friends (growing further apart from those who are not invited over because one’s partner does not like them). We watch certain shows, not others. And the Other circumscribes our limits metaphysically, too. Maybe this procedure is necessary, in order for our lives to have a form. Just as the art-impulse must take a certain form — a sculpture, a play, a novel, a dance — so does the election of a specific Other shape our blobbish life-impulse into a specific form. I am now thinking of the part of the novel where Claire writes, “Lóri had a kind of dread of going, as if she could go too far — in what direction? Which was making it hard to go . . . There was a certain fear of her own capacity, large or small, maybe because she didn’t know her own limits. Were the limits of a human divine? They were.”
All love stories must have their obstacles: religion, parents, a stone wall. The obstacle in this book is that we may be unfit for love, plain and simple: because we haven’t lived in such a way that we have let ourselves be fit for it; we haven’t even lived in such a way that we have made ourselves fit for life. For God. For sex. For anything! We slack off on the spiritual level, always. We guess no one’s going to see it. Who’s looking? Even we are not. Then someone like Ulisses comes along and says, You cannot have me until you do the difficult work of being a human that you have been putting off. (And inwardly, the man says to himself, I am also not worthy of her, and cannot have her until I make myself fit for love, too.)
Is this book a fantasy, in a way? While some writers might fantasize about a man coming along who will shower a woman in diamonds and install her in a penthouse, Clarice Lispector, the great mystic, spins a fantasy of having an explicit reason for doing the most difficult labor a person is capable of: the work of becoming an actual human being in this world. Here, the motive to do the work is to win the love of a man. (But a man is not just some guy; he represents one of the elemental forces of the universe — the masculine force that sets the difficult task in motion, of impelling the feminine force, which would otherwise sit, roundly, alone. What woman has not felt that unfortunate thing, that some man, not yet won, was “like the border between the past and whatever was to come”? Yet in a way, isn’t Ulisses asking Lóri to find the masculine force within herself, before coming to him? Or to find it in herself so she doesn’t come to him seeking it, then get bored of what she’s found, like any woman who goes from man to man, never satisfied because she’s mistaken about what she is looking for, really? Yes. Any woman wanting any sort of lasting happiness has to realize that she can — and must — be the impelling force that moves herself through the world.)
“I have to say that each time I visit with you, I am left wanting to see you more,” he wrote after that. I heard this sort of thing all the time, often in more ardent forms. The sentiment came from married men, single men, men who were divorced, men a few years or a few decades older than me, men who were wealthy and men who were rich, men living under secret, crushing debt. Some cried over how much they felt for me, wrote me songs and poems, daydreamed aloud about marrying or impregnating me. I felt highly desired, and I was, verifiably, highly desired. Coveted, even. There was proof: the messages, the money, the affirmations. I became a sex worker because I suspected, and hoped, it would be this way: a private, minor form of celebrity. An alternate version of myself.
After a year together, he told me he didn’t want to hire anyone new anymore. A lot of clients, lying, said the same. Men seemed addicted to pledging monogamy and then violating their unsolicited promise. I think the lie made them feel important, or they thought it was necessary to access something otherwise denied—condom-less sex, lower rates. But I believed Roger. From the start of our relationship, I didn’t doubt that he told me the truth. He was reflective enough to understand his motivations, and he shared them with me because his own gratification impelled him to. (For the international date, he encouraged my intervals of solitude and freedom “so that the time we are together is the best possible.”) Since he found fulfillment in psychic and emotional unburdening, deceiving me was not in his self-interest. It would have been closing a door he needed open.
MEN HAVE AN EASIER time respecting prostitutes than women who hate prostitutes care to admit. There’s a line in a Lorrie Moore story: “Her father is of that Victorian sensibility that deep down respects prostitutes more than it does women in general.” Men can think more highly of the former than the latter because unlike a civilian woman, a prostitute is direct and therefore honorable, ballsy—forthright, like a man. That’s how they see it, anyway. She’s forgone weaponized emotions and commitment-focused schemes in favor of an explicit exchange. By acknowledging sex as transactional, she divorces it from perpetual obligation. Isn’t there a cliché about husbands who cheat with unpaid mistresses to disastrous effect before they wise up and turn to pros? If not, there should be. The mistress is a lover who must be wooed and tended to. Her demands are mood-influenced, unpredictable, insatiable. She wants the man to forfeit too much for her: his home, his marriage, his good name. She can easily become his enemy and undoer. But the prostitute is not a burden. She only wants cash. She says so up front, then leaves. In her apathetic constancy, the whore is man’s “accomplice,” says writer Virginie Despentes, who worked as one.
Prostitutes are more public than civilian women, too: public like men because we negotiate with men and because we’ve refused to play what men see as other women’s games, using sex to engineer family and parasitic security. Despentes says that when men dream of being women, they imagine themselves as whores, not as housewives, because they can’t fathom giving up their freedom. The whore can roam the streets, stay out at night, sleep late, sleep around, while the wife is burping the baby and washing dishes. Many of my clients liked to imagine being in the position they imagined I was in. I know because they said so, amid their rote leading questions: Didn’t I love doing this? Wasn’t this an inconceivable delight? This would be their dream job, they said, if they were women. But because they were men, it was not.
My male friends proved that hunch right. They were everything I thought they’d be and more. Nothing prepared me for the contagious ecstasy of their pubescent masculinity—not previous experience nor avid reading nor extravagant daydreams. They were perfect human beings to me, godlike because they were limitless, meaning they acknowledged no boundaries or rules. And they were cute, unbearably cute, even—especially—when they were wasted, when they slurred and doled out emphatic affection, put their arms around my shoulders and leaned in heavily, murmured unintelligible words against my ear as they staggered toward another blackout. When the night wound down and we clumped together like littermates on floors or beds, I hoped the next day would never come.
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