This Is Pleasure

Life is too big for anybody, and that’s why we invent stories.

“She’s a girl,” she said. “I don’t think she enjoys watching her father flirt with every woman he meets any more than I do. Didn’t you notice the way he was with the waitress?”

“Did it turn you on to hear about it?” I asked.
“No. Not especially.” His tone was dry, nearly judicial. “But it interests me. It helps me understand her. Knowing that, I feel I’m better able to help her with her marriage. They’ve been having trouble lately.”
He said this with perfect seriousness.

The time we attended a reading by a young female writer and Quin, on being introduced to her, stuck his hand in her face and said, “Bite my thumb.” The self-possessed young woman looked at him with disgust and turned her back. I said, “Why did you do that?” He wasn’t fazed. “She’s cute,” he said. “But she’s not game.” He shrugged.

Most people are starved for perceptive questions, and the chance to discover their own thoughts. This is especially true of young women, who are expected to listen attentively to one dull, self-obsessed man after another.

Once, when I couldn’t reach him, I called Todd, the man I married, instead. Quin was outraged. “You called him? He doesn’t know anything about planes!”

By some tacit understanding, we did not go shopping again and I never touched her again in quite that way. But at lunch, sometimes, or even in my office, we held hands while we talked. I liked that a lot.

I didn’t know most of the women who had spoken out against Quin. But I knew one, a novelist named Regina March, one of his minor discoveries from some years back. I’d seen her at Quin’s parties and liked her; she was a warm, opinionated forty-year-old, who, I remember, always hugged Quin goodbye. I was astonished to see that she was one of hundreds of women who’d signed the petition naming multiple “abusers” and demanding that no one ever hire them again; they specifically threatened to boycott any publishing house or media company that did hire one of them. Essentially, this intelligent, delightful woman was threatening the livelihood of the man who’d first published her!

I wonder, if those girls were girls now, would they describe themselves as “assaulted” if someone put his hand on their knee? Would they say that they were too “frozen” in dismay to stop him?
What a different story we told about ourselves then. How aware we were that it was a story.

A few years ago, Quin told me that a friend of his was experiencing recovered memories of childhood sex abuse. He was skeptical of this process and so tired of the subject that he found himself avoiding her.