This Is Pleasure: A Story by Mary Gaitskill

Author:Mary Gaitskill [Gaitskill, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Contemporary, Feminism, Fiction
ISBN: 9781524749132
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: 2019-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

M.

There are so many funny/awful stories that it’s hard to stop telling them. The nineteen-year-old who texted him every time she (a) took a shit or (b) had sex with her boyfriend. The girl who texted him to describe her fantasies every time she masturbated (“OK, it’s hard to type right now, because my hands are shaking…”). 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.

Grotesque, but at the same time paired with such peculiar, delectating joy. Once, when my husband and I were feeling down, we talked about how everyone we knew seemed ultimately unhappy, or at least discontented. “Except Quin,” I said. “Except him,” Todd agreed. And, putting on his Quin-the-pervert face, he quoted, “Where the bee sucks, there suck I!” We laughed, then sat there, contemplating Quin’s abnormal happiness.

And why wouldn’t he be happy? He had a gorgeous wife and an exceptional child, and he was an excellent editor, who published some of the best writers of the moment. They tended to be clever niche writers rather than heavyweights, but the quality was undeniable and some of them had devoted followings. Many of them were writers whom no one else in publishing had believed in at first. Quin did believe, passionately, even morally: “She’s marching for goodness,” he might say, or “He’s marching for sexuality” or “marching for truthfulness.” (Morality was, oddly, important to Quin. He analyzed and criticized people based on their moral traits; “self-centered” was one of his harshest accusations—an irony, given how much he encouraged people to talk about themselves.) Quin would take up these marchers, pay them advances that were all out of proportion, and exult when they succeeded. Which happened often enough that even writers whom everyone believed in—that is to say, bid on—finally came to him too, without his making much of an effort to land them.

I remember going with him to a publishing party for one of them, a young black man (“Marching for justice with humor and style!”) whom Quin had positioned for celebrity. The party was held in an art gallery that was showing work by someone who painted imitations of hoary masterpieces, in which she had replaced the original Caucasian figures with famous people of color. I met Quin in his office; I was wearing a skirt and heels and carrying a shopping bag and a little purse. He insisted that I let him carry the shopping bag, because, even though I would check it at the door, he thought it spoiled my look—plus he would enjoy being “at [my] service.” I agreed, and then he said that he thought I should also dispense with the purse, because, although it was small and very nice, it made me look less free.

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