It was a very unsettled summer. The hot weather had come
and you tried in the day to walk in the shade and at night slept
without even a sheet to cover you. But there were also far too
many days of atmospheric disturbance – electricity in the sky
and a strange metallic taste in the mouth – when it was oppressively
humid and heavy clouds massed very slowly through the
long afternoons. People complained of headaches. And as the
night came the clouds made final sense and broke, and you felt
you had been holding your breath all day and could breathe
again, and you went out onto your balcony, if you had a view,
and looked across the city at the spectacle of inundation, and
you nearly wanted to laugh at the cat scuttling across the road,
caught in the white lightning flash, the city lit up and trembling
with thunder and wetness, the horizon crackling with electricity.
It was quite beautiful.
Unfortunately, coming home one of those humid afternoons,
his clothes a damp weight, wishing it would happen, whatever
it was, he found a bulky brown envelope in the postbox. He got
in the lift, pressed the button for his floor and opened the envelope.
On the first of several typed pages was written, in very
large letters:
HOW I BECAME A WHORE
He read the first few lines. It was a story, it seemed. He looked
at the envelope again and recognized the handwriting. They
had been together for several years and he had left her the
previous summer. So, now she was writing stories. Well, many
people did. And poems. To get their feelings down. He smiled.
He did not expect much of the story. But at least it was short,
and she had chosen a good title. There was no accompanying
letter. Not even a note. The lift stopped.
He stuffed the pages back into their envelope and entered
the apartment. He put the car keys and the envelope on the
hall table, took off his tie, went to the bathroom and urinated.
He splashed cold water on his face, took off his shoes and left
them in the hall. He stripped and took a quick cool shower. He
put on shorts and a t-shirt and padded barefoot to the kitchen
and took a bottle of beer from the fridge. He uncapped it and
immediately drank a third of the contents. Then he picked up
the envelope, which he had not forgotten while he was freshening
up, and took it to the living room.
He arranged the cushions on the sofa, put his feet up, took
a pull of beer and read the story.
It went like this: It described, from the perspective of his exgirlfriend,
one of the several times they had split up and him
saying a number of banal things over a bottle of wine in a bar.
The girl in the story hides her feelings of anger and humiliation
and does some quick thinking. She offers the man sex for money.
She plays the whore. The narrator is at this point no longer his
ex-girlfriend, strictly speaking. She has become a character in a
story, as these things happen in dreams, where forms and identities
are shifting and provisional. And, of course, he is no longer
entirely himself either.
The female character has decided to gratify a fantasy the man
has long had. Or she is pretending to do so. In any case, the
man takes the bait. They play the game. He has to show her
the money in his wallet. They do the dialogue. He accompanies
her to her place and admires it, saying business must not be
bad.
He was reading eagerly towards the end, anticipating the sex
scene, when things got slightly complicated.
They are in her kitchen (‘with all the knives’) and she has
offered him something to drink, and he is drinking the red wine,
smoking and engaging in the foreplay of pre-sex talk, and the
narrator – her – says:
I once prepared a rabbit. I marinated it well in red wine and herbs, then
cooked it slowly.
I looked at him and offered him another glass. He nodded readily and I
poured. He was excited and edgy. Like a rabbit scared of being caught. On
the wrong foot. He was all shiny-eyed, looking forward to fun.
It’s coming, bunny. The fun is coming.
The story ended there. He had no idea what was supposed to
happen next.
He masturbated quickly. Afterwards, cleaning up, he was a
little surprised at having reacted in such a way to words on a
page. He resumed his seat and continued drinking the beer and
wondered was it the strange weather that made him want to
play a hard game of tennis, or break something. He went and
got another beer and sat drinking that, still thinking about what
he had read. It seemed a good story. Or possibly it was simply
that in reading it he had imagined himself in it, and that was
what made it good.
The ending was clever, certainly; the conflation of a sexual
fantasy and a dance of revenge. He did not recall ever having
any interest in the prostitute thing, but imagining playing the
game with her, the author, had aroused his interest. Pure sex.
None of the personal and situational complications that compromised
desire. And maybe this was her way of extending an
invitation. Perhaps they would go on to meet weekly, playing
the sex game. He checked inside the envelope, thinking he
might have missed the note. No, there was no message. He
looked out his window, which had a view, and the world looked
interesting. The clouds suggested they were not prepared to
procrastinate much longer. But they had been saying that for a
very long time.
He considered phoning her, but suspected he was being toyed
with, like the character in the story.
The humid air was congealing into high solid banks of
raincloud.
He swigged the beer down and burped gently. His present
girlfriend was coming over later and he did not want her to see
the story. He arose and slid the pages under a pile of old
magazines and decided he would get rid of it shortly. It would
be wiser to forget it.