BODY OF WORK

“I want to be small. I want to be rich. I want to be a man. I want to be an old man. I want to be

Larry David. I want to be Larry David, and I want to crawl inside a woman and make my home there, inside her. I want to feed her with my dollar bills, from the inside. I want to die inside her; force her to carry me around forever.”

“That’s so hilarious. I’m happy you shared,” Phoebe says, in full support of me.

I want to tell her it’s a joke, like the whole thing is a joke, but her sincerity is overwhelming.

“Thank you,” I say.

She is braiding my hair. Phoebe is the only woman I’ve ever had sex with. She smells like pineapple and I still look up at her sometimes, to make sure I’m doing everything correctly. We aren’t together. It’s not like that. What we are is more than together.

I write, and so does she. This is not simple. We are in her bedroom, which is decorated mostly in primary colors. It looks like the bedroom of a child; a child with affluent parents, a child who wants desperately to appear creative. Her sheets are always clean, which is why we go to hers instead of mine. I don’t have a dining table, so my bed is full of crumbs.

1 She cracks her toes against the hardwood floor as she gets up from the bed. She does this because she used to dance. We both used to dance. We danced together, from ages eight to eighteen. We try not to discuss how long we’ve known each other, as there are usually more exciting things to talk about. Now, instead of dancing, we write, because we weren’t good enough to dance. We probably aren’t good enough to write, but we’ll see.

“I have something I want to show you too,” she says. She offers me the stapled manuscript, without blinking, observing me. This is the truest form of intimacy, but immediately I dry up.

Something about the expectation turns me off.

The story is about a woman named Carole King who collects dead butterflies. I’m not sure if the

Carole King in the story is the Carole King, but I assume she is, at least in the same way that

Larry David is Larry David in the poem I just read. Carole King pins the butterflies down with little needles and keeps them safe under miniature sheets of glass. At the end of the story, Carole

King eats all her dead butterflies. I tell Phoebe I love it.

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

I don’t love it.

2 “What are you going to title it?” I ask.

“Butterfly Eater.”

“How long have you been working on it?”

“I wrote it yesterday, I don’t know. I just felt like I needed to say it. How long did you spend on the Larry David piece?” she asks.

“My whole life.”

This is her short-term project, she says; her long-term project is rewriting the Bible. Phoebe’s inner-life is more complicated than I even want to know, but she performs an eager simplicity, which has never made sense to me. Most people perform complexity, rarely do people try to seem easier to understand than they are. Most of her accomplishments seem effortless. This is one thing I am jealous of. I don’t know much about myself, but I know nothing I do seems effortless. The eager Phoebe and I are close, but whatever is underneath, whatever she really wants me to understand, I wink at from a distance. I have a flirtation, a kind of affair with understanding her. It’s sexier that way. I hope she thinks it’s sexy.

We are close now, physically. Her head rests on my stomach as I look over her story again, out of boredom and respect. Phoebe looks at me, as if waiting for me to acknowledge something new about her. I stare at the paisley pattern of her quilt.

“Can I tell you something?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say.

3 “I’ve been feeling insecure lately, about myself. Insecure about myself, I’m not sure in what way in particular,” she says.

I try to look sympathetic. She can tell I’m trying and tosses herself to the other side of the bed, to convey the seriousness of the situation. Phoebe is rich. Phoebe was raised rich, in this way we can never fully sympathize with each other’s problems, at least not the meaning of each other’s problems. It is not her fault, and it is not mine. Different things are important to us.

“Aren’t we all insecure?” I say.

She gets up from the bed and begins to look for her phone.

“I want so badly to be someone else’s definition of the word girl, or woman, even. If I am one of those I will be closer to every other word I want to be,” Phoebe says.

“Like what?” I ask.

She keeps her laugh in the back of her throat, muffled.

“You know, only the good words. All the good words.”

I want to tell her she looks like girl to me. She looks like woman. And I’m Larry David. She is woman and I’m Larry David and I will crawl up inside her. She is open for me, I know.

4 I want to tell her I have a secret. This might be the one thing keeping our intimacy stunted. I want to tell her I have another piece of work to show her. I want to tell her I’m not ashamed.

The secret is essential to me, to my relationship with myself, and because she seems so fully given to me. I’m not ashamed, and that is the truth. Though if I were to tell Phoebe I’m not ashamed, she would already be thinking about shame, and me in the context of shame.

I don’t say anything. Instead, I kiss her breast.

•

I was living outside Atlanta when I shot the video. I live inside Atlanta now. I was twenty. I am twenty-three now. I wore boots and denim shorts and a big smile on my face. I smiled for the same reason I smile now; to appear harmless, to seem nice and invisible at the same time. When

I got to the address I knocked, but no one came.

I kept my mouth shut and opened the door.

I expected it to be a studio or a hotel room, but it was a half-empty apartment, much like my own. I was not with anyone else in the scene. It was just me, the camera, the carpeted floor, and the blank wall behind me. I expected a costume. The director gave me a white shirt, told me to take off my bra and everything else. Then he looked me over. He told me to dance, and I danced.

“Can we put on some music?” said the director to a woman, who was sitting beside him and the camera. She was smoking a cigarette and reading something on her phone.

5

She nodded without looking at him or me, her eyes still on the phone. She wore big glasses, those glasses that make the wearer’s eyes look three times their real size. In the reflection of her glasses were images of bikini-clad women, and bowls of fruit, though I was not close enough to see what kind. I tried not to look at her for too long, but I was curious. I was a real half-naked woman right in front of her. I wanted to say, look at me. But I said nothing.

She was his assistant or his wife, I couldn’t tell. I expected her to be prettier. She turned on a radio that was covered in children’s stickers. It was static until she settled on the oldies station.

The director laughed but didn’t ask her to change it. He told me to get on all fours and bark.

“Woof,” I said.

“Good,” he said, “more of the same thing.”

We continued for one more hour. There, supporting myself on both my knees and one hand, I rubbed. I didn't feel anything; it seemed impossible, it was so cold, but I twisted just the same. I twisted and yelped. Bent over, I couldn’t stop looking at myself in the reflection of the camera lens and the oversized glasses of the assistant. I felt the director’s eyes on me but refused to look his way. I wasn’t scared of him, I was just having a moment with myself.

“Good, Dog,” the director said.

“Thank you,” I said.

6 “You have the most rhythmic breathing,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said.

Once I had finished, he gave me the money in cash and kissed me on the cheek.

“Will you be able to see my face?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. It’s for subscribed customers. Really niche stuff.”

“That’s nice,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. Then, I left.

Two days after, I bought a subscription to the website. I wanted to know if I’d be frontpage material. I wasn’t. It was only thirty minutes long even though I had performed for much longer.

This hurt me more than not being frontpage material. Next to the video were ads for content with women who looked much more appealing than me. Or at least appealing in the same way that an advertisement for food looks more appealing than the food itself. I was a real thing, even in the images of myself. I was tangible. I wondered who, man or woman, would want to watch it and what they would get from it. What about this got anyone off? Did the director get off on this?

The assistant? Man? Woman? I wanted to get off on it.

I watched it on repeat, trying to identify the moments they had cut. I compared my own memory of the events to what I saw captured on the small screen of my laptop.

7 My knees against the carpet of my bedroom, one hand supporting me, the other one making circles below my white shirt, I came. I thought about nothing except myself and those moving images of myself, of Dog. I recreated the video exactly. Except this time, it was real. Each time I did it, it got realer and realer. This became a regular activity. I watched the reflection of myself watching myself in the blackness of my TV. Complicated, I know. I laughed at myself.

I watched interviews with pornstars, tried to justify my behavior, not to myself but if I ever needed to talk about this habit to someone else, I wanted to be able to justify it in the most solid terms possible. Some said they watched their stuff back, most said they didn’t

Since the video, I make all the men I’m with, sexually, call me Dog.

In bed, I make Dog my name again, for the encounter. It is like playing. I am Dog because I say I am Dog. I am oriented around the word. I am oriented around myself and the word, the word and myself. But Dog is not a real dog.

It is not about being a dog, it is about being a woman dressed up as Dog. It doesn’t really make sense. I don’t try to rationalize it. Like all things having to do with sex, with burning, it resists inspection. It is like being hungry. I can’t describe being hungry. Everyone knows what it’s like.

The men understood, or I assumed they did, and if they didn’t, they never protested. I haven’t slept with a man in almost six months. I have never made Phoebe call me Dog.

8 •

“I want to tell you something before you watch it,” I say “I’m not ashamed. But he calls me a word in it.”

“What word?” Phoebe asks.

“A word you might not like. I don’t want you to think I don’t respect myself. Because this is a part of myself. And I respect myself, so I respect this. Does that make sense?”

“It does.”

It had been almost a year since the last time I watched it, but my credit card information was still saved on the website and I remember the title exactly. I open my laptop and immediately go to the search bar. I type for a few moments until the thumbnail of the video blinks onto the screen.

“Here you go,” I say, passing the computer to her.

“Thank you,” she says.

“You’re welcome.”

While she watches the video, I go use her bathroom. Sitting on the toilet, I open my mouth and pretend to scream. Or I guess I screamed silently. It was one of those silent screams where all the heat of a real scream goes to your head but all that can be heard from your open mouth are the small bubbles of your own saliva, popping.

9 •

A month after I shot the video, I had to go to a wedding for the first time since I was a child. I bought a red dress and drove two hours to my parent’s house.

“Red is sometimes an inappropriate color for weddings,” my mother said, after I tried on the new dress for her, “it makes you look like a bullseye.”

“Is that a rule?” I said.

“No, not exactly.”

I spent most of the wedding sitting down, inhaling white table cloths and the problems of other people. Old men, who all had some kind of ambiguous familial relationship to me, performed monologues pertaining to my natural aging process. They treated the fact that I was no longer an embryo or baby, or acne covered preteen as if I had grown an extra limb. My inherent biological processes were all at once perplexing and pleasing to these older men. As they talked at me, I tried to count every small whisper of a hair left on their heads. I thought about responding, but they never meant for it to be a dialogue. They were the observers and I was to stay observed.

I wanted to tell them about the video, just to gauge the reaction of a different demographic.

There were rumors that my great grandmother had worked as a pinup model. I was continuing the legacy, I thought. I wanted to glamorize the experience, glamorize the image of myself on the floor, glamorize my new name. Bettie Page but her name is Dog, Pamela Anderson but her name is Dog, Marilyn Monroe but her name is Dog, Angelina Jolie as Dog.

10 •

Recently, I have been obsessed with consuming the concepts of things. I go to the websites of dictionaries or encyclopedias and I look at words without reading their definitions or learning how they are pronounced. I spend my nights and mornings like this, scrolling, just glancing over the structure of things. I watch hours of videos documenting the diet and lifestyle of women with thin wrists and brightly colored notebooks. I don’t watch these videos during the day, as the sun somehow reminds me of how distant my life and body are from those women who, despite my own better judgment, I listen to like tiny disciples. I wonder if I consume enough of their petite sincerity my life will whittle itself down until it can fit into the small video player on my computer screen. They make me feel cleaner. They’re the entertainment equivalent of showering or going to church. I don’t think I need to repent, but the idea is nice.

I also watch videos of ugly things. Music videos featuring a forest floor decaying, or taxidermized animals. I shallowly pride myself on my knowledge of edgy music, something to bring up in conversation when I talk to people who perform difference. They are always surprised that I know what they’re talking about, they always try to teach me something new about whatever they were surprised I knew about. I pretend I am being taught, though I am almost always familiar.

•

My phone has become such an extension of myself that when someone exhales quickly I mistake it for the hum of a notification. How strange words can become, like notification.

11 •

It was morning and I was scrolling. Usually, I don’t like anything. I imagined if I liked something, someone somewhere would see that I liked it and make some kind of assumption about me. That tiny empty heart suddenly turning red, signaling my values or jealousies.

Oh, that’s what she likes. Oh, that’s who she is. Oh, that’s who she wants to be.

A saturated picture of a bulldog slid past my index finger. Right after the bulldog is a video of a girl I used to know. Her name is Rachel. She is dancing. Rachel and I used to dance together.

Rachel and Phoebe and I all danced together. In high school, the relationship I had with those two girls bordered on the deepest romantic love anyone has ever experienced, or so I imagined.

We were there for everything. I remember when Rachel got her first period all over her tights, in the middle of pointe class. We took care of her, though she didn’t need much help, just someone to hand her fresh paper towels. Blood is relatively easy to get out tights. This is something you learn fast, as a dancer, as a girl. We had class every weekday, after school. During the winter, we went to competitions together on the weekends. I never won anything higher than bronze.

Sophomore year Rachel got platinum, which was the award above gold.

We spent hours, collectively, resting our heads against each other’s stomachs. Hours listening to mumbles of someone else’s hunger. We massaged backs and feet. We saw each other’s dirty laundry. We knew each other’s bodies like we knew our own, like we knew our mothers.

12 Still staring at the blue screen, the generic indie song Rachel was dancing to repeating without permission, I watched Rachel’s lanky body twist and fan out. She wore only a purple sports bra and black spandex shorts. The description underneath the video reads “Some evening movement in the living room…. cause Why not.”

The capitalization error was a harmless mistake, but still something I could hold against her. The dancing wasn’t bad but wasn’t as good as it used to be. I couldn’t tell whether it was because she was trying to stay in frame, or if her skills as a dancer had worsened, but something about her extensions seem stunted.

I double-tapped. The empty heart filled.

She was always better at it than me, but she acted like she wasn’t, which I appreciated. Rachel didn’t go to college. Instead, she moved to Europe after graduating from high school and got a job at Disneyland Paris. “How fun,” my mother said unironically when I told her the news, “you should’ve done that!” I have not talked to Rachel in the years since she moved.

I clicked on Rachel’s icon, which led me to her profile. I navigated through washed-out pictures of the Eiffel Tower, her and her friends holding bottles of cheap champagne in neon clubs, quaint

“throwback Thursday” shots of the America she had abandoned, until, finally, I found the last picture taken of the two of us. It was taken at graduation. We were both so drunk off of Smirnoff and orange juice our smiles take up almost the entire picture. Expanding white grins. Rachel had a gap tooth, which was her only flaw, though she always said she had a big nose. I stared at that

13 small piece of darkness in her mouth, the rest hidden by teeth. I wanted to fall into it. I still had braces then. I tried not to look at myself. Our plan was to all go to college together, all three of us. We would travel around campus, around the adult world, as one fused body, or a singular grouping of bodies. One girl, one her or she. Girls don’t mind being nameless in this way. Girls want to be each other, in a way some people understand as shallow, but it is more about the sharing of muscles, the sharing of pain, the sharing or distribution of some kind of knowledge.

Or at least that’s how I think about it.

This, Rachel and her profile, is how I find the director, how I get hired for the video.

In Rachel’s bio, right at the top of her profile, underneath the number of people who followed her and the number of people she followed, was a link. It was a link to a production company. At this time, I had no money and bad habits. Though these habits were shared with most of the people I knew, they were still bad, and expensive. It was the 27th of the month, and there had been suggestions from my landlord that if another check bounced they could take legal action. I doubted they would, but I thought it might be nice to enter the first of at least one month out of the year without that anxiety pressing into me. I’m not justifying what I did, because I don’t think there is anything that needs to be justified, I just want to provide the fullest picture possible.

Of course, Rachel didn’t do the type of videos that I ended up doing. She did only partially nude solo dancing. It was really tame stuff, and she didn’t hide it. There were plenty of videos on her

14 public profile that seemed to be from behind the scenes. Her, in lingerie, dancing, next to nondescript sofa. Her, blowing kisses to the camera, to me.

The production company had locations in New York City, Miami, Atlanta, and then a long list of major European cities, which was where they were based.

In the top corner of the website, on the right, there was a blinking advertisement. It had big pink letters. Their logic must have been, if they were targeting women, pink is the safest color. Pink would assure these women that they were one of them.

Don’t be afraid!

We just want to videotape you!

We are just like you!

I clicked on it. Under each city was a list of casting calls, with a tiny description of what would be expected upon employment. Under Atlanta, there was only one listing.

“Woman needed for solo play. DEGRADATION. HUMILIATION. No previous experience needed. We provide food and water for the models on site. Payment will be provided after completion. Please send photos or videos to [email protected].”

•

“I go to a party. There, resting on a couch, I spread my legs wide, so they act as white gates, opening, inviting someone somewhere. A woman, dressed mostly in black and her own libido,

15 kneels and bites her way up my left leg. She does it with such intention I want to thank her for the affection. I don’t ask her why. I don’t ask her to stop. I lean back until I am almost flat against the cushions and her face, wet with sweat, is pressed into the center of me. The eyes of the other people at the party push against me, compressing me and the woman until we are one solid statue. I look at them looking at me. I look at them looking at her. They look away. She lifts her head and our eyes meet. In her gaze, I see the reflection of my limbs and face.”

Once I’m done reading I clear my throat, trying to humble myself. I respect Phoebe’s opinion more than my own. She is kneeling in front of me, on her bed. This is the first piece I have shown her since she watched the video.

“That’s great,” Phoebe says.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Is it the beginning or end of the story?”

16