Body of Work

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.

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