Speaking with Strangers by Mary Cantwell

Author:Mary Cantwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Age—he was about ten years older than I—and alcohol had taken its toll of the balding man, and although he was never impotent, he was demanding. Neither the athlete his publicity claimed nor the sexual Goliath his reputation promised, he was more myth than male. That may not have been true when he was young. “The first time I ever had a girl, mah Mary, I couldn’t wait and neither could she. So I took her on the kitchen table, only a room away from where her parents were sitting. Oh, mah Mary, I wish you’d known me then.” But by the time we met he needed fantasy. I was Scheherazade.

Unless having read The Story of O counts, I had only a nodding acquaintance with pornography. Once, a friend who was an incurable scavenger had picked up a pile of paperbacks from the floor of the office elevator (“The guys in the mailroom,” she said darkly) and carted them to her apartment on a night we were dining together. While she was in the kitchen, cooking, I was in the living room, reading about a woman who preferred stallions, so hypnotized that I forgot my cigarette and it burned a small hole in her couch.

For the balding man, though, I became a teller of tales of Great Danes and girls’ reform schools and female warders and whippings and frightened virgins on all fours, urged onward by his murmured “That’s good, mah Mary, that’s real good.” Once I would have felt myself degraded by my nasty, nimble tongue, but not now. Telling stories to him so that he could make love didn’t seem all that different from telling stories to my children so that they could sleep. “You don’t need fantasy, do you?” he asked. “No,” I said, “you’re the fantasy,” and snuggled along his magic back and slept.

Years later, marooned in someone’s summer house, I picked up a copy of The Pearl and laughed to see that I had the mind, and the limitations, of a Victorian pornographer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.