Gentlemen Prefer Bitches

Short Stories

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a short story. I posted this earlier — back when the Substack was pretty much blood relatives only. Sorry that this is on the long side.

Best,

Sam

GENTLEMEN PREFER BITCHES

From ‘New Yorkers’

Audrey was the kind of person who had theories of everything, theories about relationships, theories about men. Zach, in particular, inspired her theorizing and that, really, was the basis of their friendship. He came over, often it was between meetings with other people, he always seemed to be slightly buzzed or slightly stoned, always apologized for being late, for being forgetful about the time they were supposed to meet, and Audrey told him everything that was wrong with him.

They both loved this topic. He was in his mid-20s, underemployed, hemorrhaging the money his parents sent him, still hanging on to his college friends, who were really dissolute, really rich and irresponsible, and, because he was tamer, occasionally tutored kids, etc, had a false sense of security towards them, didn’t think they were holding him back, as they obviously were. He was seeing a girl named Erin, who was very pretty and treated him badly. Essentially, he was immature – willfully immature, dragging his heels against adulthood – and didn’t respect himself and had a good nature and so allowed himself to be manipulated by people who were more conniving than he realized.

These were the central themes Audrey tackled in his visits, usually starting from whatever disaster had mostly recently befallen him – an unrepaid loan to a friend, a credit card lost at the bar – and working her way back towards her overarching points like a mathematician cutting away the excess to demonstrate the clean beauty of a theorem.

Also, he wasn’t very bright, although she never worked that into their chats. He was very thin and blond, with wavy hair, like a high school drummer, which, actually, he had been, and his former bandmates, some of whom were still around, were a frequent target of Audrey’s critiques. He nodded effusively at almost everything Audrey said. He agreed verbally, enthusiastically, as she was talking, as if they were at a prayer meeting, and he bowed his body forward, bobbing his shoulders, as if hit by the impact of just how accurate Audrey’s analysis was. This kind of over-the-top agreeability was clearly part of the reason he had so many friends, why he was constantly getting invited to parties and ‘jams’ and ‘get-togethers’ by people Audrey had never heard him mention, why he was constantly getting entangled in hard-to-rationalize predicaments. He nodded along and said things like “That’s exactly it,” “That’s something I really need to get a handle on,” “I don’t know why I keep doing that to myself,” and, still vigorously shaking his head, wandered to her kitchen window or onto the fire escape to smoke his thin cigarettes and said, “Keep going, I can hear you clearly from here.”

The question of intelligence was something that really bothered Audrey. That wavy, ethereal quality made him seem uniquely hapless, like the kind of kid who would sniff glue or jump off a bridge on a dare, but there was a sly humor about him, which was uncannily similar to hers, and sometimes in the middle of a long winding story, about, for instance, his rich friends borrowing a pair of jetskis from a rental place, refusing to leave an ID on some bizarre pretext, then riding off with the jetskis like they were Bond villains, forgetting in their getaway that the rental jetskis would have only a small amount of gas and then getting washed back by the tide to the very same rental house they had tried to rip off and bellowing across the water to beg for a tow, somewhere in there, as he was recounting everything, there would be something in his eyes that was jaded, detached, disapproving, that gave her the clear impression that underneath his hapless agreeability he thought just as she did about his band of fops – which raised the possibility that, just as, in a sense, she kept him around for laughs, as a character in her life, that he was doing the exact same thing with his friends, that for him they were comic relief and his real self was somewhere entirely different and just starting to come into focus.

While his attitude towards his friends was, in a certain light, reassuring, Audrey had real doubts about Erin. They had met once or twice, when Zach had had her come by wherever he was hanging out to hand her a CD or a piece of rock candy that for some inexplicable reason he thought was important to give to her, and Erin had been a creature on a cell phone standing off to the side. She was statuesque, in that effortlessly toned way which, in the last few years, had driven out all the svelte waifs, with hair that reached midway down her back, a dark, kind of Gothic look with her elongated eyelashes and her white lipstick.  

“That’s a move,” she told Zach, whose eyebrows shot up in surprise, who started nodding fervently as if all the lightbulbs were going off at once. “Being remote, that’s something girls develop as a trick to get what they want out of men. They figure it out when they’re about 12 or 13, they’re starting to get bullied, teased by other girls in school, they’re not developing self-esteem, confidence, on their own, so instead of doing it, instead of doing, you know, the hard inner work themselves, instead of trying to connect with other girls, they put all their energies into seducing men, they get really into outfits, makeup, they doll themselves up, and they have a pout – that’s a practiced move, you can read about that in Marie-Claire or whatever – and it works, it really works, guys feel bad for them, guys always sort of figure out that they’re available, they stand out from the crowd, but the thing is that they’ve left their development incomplete, they still haven’t figured out actual self-confidence.”

And Zach, who had wandered over to the window, was sucking anxiously on his cigarette, as if he needed to be bolstered from this round of revelations, nodding along with virtually every syllable, now pointed his cigarette towards her, said, “I hear all that, I really hear it, and I know that’s true for a lot, a lot, of girls, but here’s the thing about Erin – it’s not like she was excluded from middle school or something, that was never the issue, it’s that she had a really tough, a really traumatic childhood, there were some things that she – that I probably shouldn’t tell you about, that make it very hard for her to trust men, and so when she’s, as you say remote, when she puts up a wall – ”

“When she’s mean to you,” Audrey said, supplying the words for him.

“Yeah, yeah,” Zach said laughing, grateful to her as always for putting things so crisply, “when she’s mean to me that’s a lot of what’s going on, she can’t really trust, she can’t put her guard down easily, she needs to feel like she’s in control, like the person she’s with is going to be understanding, isn’t going to freak out if she asserts herself a little.”

“And when she insisted that you walk ten feet behind her every time you went out together, when she locked you out of her apartment at two in the morning and you had nowhere to go,” Audrey said carefully, Zach laughing from his shoulders as he acknowledged the truth of these memories, “is that ok, is that just asserting herself a little? I mean, is there a line, is there a point where something like that starts to be inexcusable?”

Zach put together his most serious face. “She’s been burned a lot,” he said. “If she hadn’t been burned she wouldn’t be cruel. She’s a good person – deep down, she’s a very good person. Anything she’s thrown at me, I can handle. Maybe she’ll throw more at me but everything so far it’s been to see if she can drive me away, like a test. That’s something she has to do, given her history, to know that she’s made a right choice. And everything so far, it’s been something I can deal with.”

His cigarette was out. His phone was starting to blow up. He was raising his eyebrows towards the front door, starting to put on his shoes.

“Listen,” Audrey said. “There’s something you have to understand. A lot of men – a lot of men – they like girls who treat them badly, they like bitches. It eliminates choice, it eliminates their having to figure things out for themselves, it makes them concentrate all their energy on making this one girl happy – and because that one girl is never going to be happy, at least not because of them, they can spend literally all their time, their whole lives, trying to do that and not getting it to work.”

He was still nodding along, but he had his shoes on, the door half open, was waiting for her to sum up.

“You’re a wonderful person, I care a lot about you,” Audrey said, “I just think you deserve the best, I don’t want to see you become one of these types of men.”

That point really hit him. For a moment Audrey thought he might cry. Instead, he pursed his lips, wrapped his arms around her, kissed her on the cheek. She felt his hand pressing tightly on the hair on the back of her neck as he held her to him.

***

She herself was not a bitch, she was sure of that, although she could be strong-willed, even, she’d been told once or twice, domineering. She was somebody who seemed to be born to nurture and to manage. She was 26 – only a few months older than Zach, a fact that both of them found astonishing. At work, she had already been given management of a small team, and she had found that work, ostensibly a corporate layering position, to be startlingly rewarding, the way that, on a conference call, she might throw a particular question to the team knowing that a timid analyst, always too shy to volunteer on these calls, was the one who had the answer, and she had the private pleasure of a backstage impresario when that analyst, taking the spotlight for the first time, hit the answer out of the park. And that quality of hers, her ability to take her ego out of the equation, to really listen, to get beneath the surface of things, find potential in what was around her, had started to extend into her personal life. She’d always been a good confidant and crying shoulder, to her family, to a somewhat self-pitying girl group in high school, and in the last year she’d actively fostered dogs from a rescue agency. She found that the dogs resembled the analysts she worked with – just in a more naked form. She met them outside of shelters or in cases passed off to her outside her building. They were shaky, wide-eyed creatures. Whatever security they had had in the world – some horrible kennel, their abuser, wherever they’d been – had been stripped away from them, they had no sensation except terror and then with it, in equal proportion to the terror, a need to be held, to be petted and loved. She was very strict about how they entered the apartment, there was a whole protocol she’d worked out with the rescue agency, how they had to pause on her doormat and, no matter how shaky and confused they were, how much they begged with their eyes to not be given any tests, she made them wait there until they sat or lay down, some way of showing obeisance, and then she led them in, made them sit again, gave them treats that were a real extravagance on her salary, watched them slaver over the treats, over their dinner, watched how they were restored to some kind of trust-in-the-world, something to look forward to, and then, satisfied, how they looked around for their benefactor, wandered over to where she’d been watching them from a distance, curled up in her lap, sat at her feet. She didn’t have the problem of attachment that bedeviled most foster parents, she knew that she had a unique set of skills, that her best use was as a conduit for recently rescued dogs that could be adopted somewhere down the line.

Her experiences with managing teams and fostering dogs – and, really, everything else in life – had given her an ironclad theory about how things are accomplished: through patience, gentle pressure, a firm intention, and a flexibility about the methods of getting there. Her biggest fan, at the moment, was Rosie, her primary contact with the rescue agency. “I’m telling you,” said Rosie every time she brought a new dog to Audrey, “sooner or later you’re going to get a man here and it’s going to be the best relationship of all time.” She had an unpleasant habit every time she was in Audrey’s apartment of walking from room to room, inspecting the dishes in the sink, the clothes strewn on couches, as if she were a detective looking for clues that that man had materialized. “Nobody your age, your generation, knows how to tame a man,” she said, “but you’ve got it figured out, you know just how to do it.” And here she looked Audrey right in the eyes, with a closeness and intensity that disturbed Audrey, said, “And they all need to be tamed. Remember that. They’re like wild beasts, every one of them, no matter what they’re like when they’re trying to charm you. They all need taming.”

But, Audrey had started to find, older people, older women especially, had a way of being unreliable sources when it came to telling her about love. Either they had a long view of things and time worked differently for them or else they just remembered everything wrong. Rosie, just like her mother and her closest aunt, always spoke of imminence whenever they were analyzing her romantic prospects. “Any day now,” Rosie liked to say, which made Audrey seriously think about connecting to a different rescue agency just so that she wouldn’t have to deal with these prophecies.

To Zach, and to her close friends, she’d made it clear that she wasn’t looking. She was putting a life together – that was a full-time job. She had matured very quickly, definitely before her female peers with their crying jags and their eating disorders, let alone the boys with their baggy jeans and their video game addictions, that was something she’d had to get used to, the loneliness of the precocious, and, unfortunately for her, the boys still hadn’t caught up to her, this whole generation of porn addicts and quasi-alcoholics, these skinny jeans Lotharios.

***

Zach called her at 10pm on a Sunday, having been kicked out of Erin’s and needing a place to crash. She had gotten this call before, and was grateful that this time it wasn’t at two in the morning. It also seemed to be more of an orderly exit now. The time before he had gone out to smoke a cigarette, his way of cooling down from a fight, and she had simply bolted the door and gone to bed and ignored his frantic pounding, even ignored it when an upstairs neighbor in futile desperation at the noise had hurled a houseplant onto the street. Audrey had taken the call, patted him dry – it had of course been a rainy night – found some boxers and a t-shirt that her brother had forgotten when he was last there, turned her back as Zach changed into them, made up the couch.

This time Erin had been in a black mood all day, had gotten into what Zach had previously called her ‘catatonic state’ – “how can you tell you the difference?” Audrey had said joshingly – in which she sat on an armchair or the lip of the bed and stared vacantly in front of her, completely inaccessible, completely indifferent to Zach’s offers of assistance. And when she came out of it suddenly started ripping Zach apart, not at all in the way Audrey did, which was sympathetic, loving, and constructive, seeing everything ultimately from his perspective, but treating him simply as a nuisance.

“Why are you here?” she had said to him. He had looked at her searchingly, trying to guess the answer she had in mind. “Nobody asks you to come, nobody asks you to stay, nobody asks you to squat forever, for months, in my apartment,” she said. He tried to point out, as gingerly as possible, that she was the one who had invited him here, she was the one who had said she couldn’t stand to be alone, had asked him to spend as much time as possible there, to not worry about helping with rent or anything like that, also that they were together. She looked at him like she had never seen him before in her life. “We’re not together,” she had said, and the way she pronounced that word made it sound disgusting. “I can’t imagine that – you and me together? What in the world gave you that idea? You’re just somebody that needs a place to stay, and I was nice to you for a bit, and now you’re going to need a new place.”

He looked at her for a long time with a very straight face, like they were playing the staring game and he was waiting for her to break into a smile first, and then she raised her eyebrows and gestured underhanded towards the door, like he was a courtier who had overstayed his audience, and he scrounged around, grabbing his clothes off the bed and the floor, spiking them unfolded into the duffel bag that he brought everywhere with him. Erin had reverted to her catatonic state. He made a point of slamming the door behind him.

He narrated all this sitting on the edge of Audrey’s couch. She had a new pug she’d been fostering, fresh in from Alabama, and she was very worried about how the two of them would interact, that was what she’d mostly been telling him during his phone call from outside Erin’s, her tips on entering the apartment, while he trudged towards the subway, the duffel bag hoisted over his shoulders. But once in the space, he was perfect, crouched down, the back of his hand extended, the dog sniffing and then following him docilely to his spot on the couch – which he went to reflexively as his spot – where, leaning forward, his hands on his temples, he told her, word-for-word, the way he’d been seen through, found wanting, discarded, how he’d been (exaggerating only slightly) left homeless. That was the first point Audrey seized on when he finished – how it been a grievous blunder to turn over his apartment, really more of a room, to one of his ex-bandmates, who said he needed it for a few months. The bandmate had been the first person Zach had called from the sidewalk outside Erin’s, but he had a date over. “It’s a delicate time,” the friend had said, “third date, they don’t forgive you if you screw it up this early.” Audrey was livid about that – what kind of friend did he think this guy was – and livid with Zach’s reply that the guy had really needed a place to stay in the city, that he’d been happy to help him out. “Of all the people you should be giving charity to,” she was saying, “don’t pick a guy with a family home in East Hampton and a second home on the Vineyard,” but Zach with a light swat of his hand waved the argument away.

“Anyway,” he said, and he sounded very tired, “she was bad for me. You told me that and you were right about that and I see that now. She’s very magnetic, there’s something very special about her, but there’s something, deep-down, it’s like her heart’s just not in the right place.”

There was a lot that Audrey could have said to that, but she just looked down at him, the way he was slumped over, his elbows on his knees, said, “She’s very pretty. I can see why somebody can be taken in by that. I’m really glad, though, that this chapter is closed.”

She offered him tea, or something to eat, tried to tell him about what time she would be up in the morning, both to walk the dog and to work, how she hoped that wouldn’t disturb him. “That’s fine,” he said, “anything is fine. Thank you for taking me in.” She went to the bathroom, brushed her teeth, flossed, moisturized, rubbed on a cleanser that she was usually too lazy to apply. She caught her reflection in the mirror, the harsh overhead light that, she was convinced, made her look worse than she really was. She could never quite get it to work, no matter the angles she tried, the expressions she workshopped, the quick flick by which she turned her face to the mirror and tried to ambush herself, to catch herself as she was when in motion, she never managed to look pretty to herself, her brow and chin too mannish, her large playful eyes wasted by the careless slope of her cheeks, the discomfiting fact of her nose.

And this night was no different. She padded to the bedroom. He was lying on the couch, still in his clothes, the crook of his arm placed over his forehead. He looked like a pietà. She changed quietly into her pyjamas, the pug curled up into its spot at the foot of her bed. She pulled her blanket snug to her neck, she was alert to every sound in the apartment, a cough from the other room – they were sharing a wall – a slight groan as he shifted probably onto his side. Once, when Rosie was being especially persistent about her single state and had demanded, “And there really is no one?,” Audrey had felt obligated to set Rosie’s mind at ease. She had said that there was someone on the horizon, a good friend and it was starting to turn into something else. Rosie had of course wanted details and she had described a man, who at first had sounded like a Ken-doll, tall and blond, and then as she kept going had found to her amazement that her description closely matched Zach’s, his gentle qualities, his love for music, his whims, the way that everybody he met seemed instantly to warm to him, to want him to be their friend. Time moved at a very different pace when Rosie was over, and she found herself continuing the story, describing a few telling looks that Zach had given her, the way that their energies seemed to align, that no matter what else was going on in their lives, how different they might seem, they got each other, it was like a tango, she said, as Rosie gurgled her approval, the way that, no matter how many feints or evasions there might be, they were drawn together.

She had been ashamed of herself that sleepy afternoon, Rosie unwilling to leave the apartment, as she spun out her fantasy, but she had also had the strange feeling, maybe it was Rosie’s hooded eyes or her murmurs of assent, like a witch doctor’s, that she was manifesting something, that some reality was taking shape in her mind and sooner or later it would breach the dam of this world and it would be there. A silly thought – a good reason to get some real friends, not this old woman who rescued dogs and always made a point of telling Audrey her daily horoscope – but she had felt it and now here it was, the tentative footsteps from the other room and then the tall frame in the doorway, and the pug growling its concern and then returning to its spot, and Zach with some silly line apologizing for imposing on her. And then here it was, him sitting on the bed patting her knee like she were a child who couldn’t sleep, him bringing the backs of his fingers to her cheek and then his fingertips tracing the shape of her mouth. And then it was his head bending over hers and her hands clutching at his neck and her legs scissoring upwards into the air and Zach with very little preamble, just checking with his fingertips that she was wet, which she was, sliding himself into her, and it felt like warm oil was sluicing through her all the way to her throat and it was impossible not to cry out, and they were breathing together, staring close at each other, and somehow she should have known that about him, that he was the kind of guy who insisted on eye contact during sex.

The next few days were a magical, fairyland event. She went to work and was like an orchestra conductor managing her calls, calling on the different members of her team at just the right moments to answer the right questions, and she didn’t even mind the downtime so much, the hours at her desk reading The New York Times, trying to figure out how to be productive – she felt like she had a secret at home. He sent her text messages of different things from around the apartment, a photo of himself and the pug on their walk, the two of them had almost instantly become a pair, and then photos of various items, asking exactly how the filters should be placed in her coffee pot, whether the cream in her refrigerator could be used for cereal in the absence of milk. They had sex at least twice a day, in the evening, which was sort of the central organizing event of both of their lives, and then usually also in the morning, she would set her alarm clock half an hour early and he would still be, essentially, asleep, but would understand his duty, would perform in a kind of lazy, languorous fugue state.  

At the end of the week, when they were having dinner, he said, “It’s ok that I’m staying here? I know it’s your place and everything. But I already gave away the sublease on mine.”

And she had to concentrate very hard, she was serving herself a forkful of the asparagus she’d made, she sipped slowly from a glass of water. Everything, in a way, was riding on this. She had to see into him, see who he was, who he could become, who he was to her. “That would be nice,” she said, with a senatorial deliberateness, “it’s nice to have you here. But I can’t just put you up – you get that right? You’d have to chip in. Rent, you’d have to chip in for rent. We can talk about how much. For food, too, we should probably be even on food.”

She saw that, although he was trying to agree with her in his usual enthusiastic way, he looked stricken. He started to point out that he wasn’t making any money, just a few hours a week tutoring. It was fun money, supplemental money, it wasn’t rent money.

“You don’t want me to treat you as a freeloader,” she said. “You’re my age – almost. You’re smart, really smart, you have all kinds of ability, people really like you, people are drawn to you, that’s really rare. You’ve just been delaying things for a while, pushing things off, and you know that can’t last much longer, you know that you need to start stepping up, you need to be the kind of person someone can respect because you’re great, you really are, you’re so wonderful, but you’re not that right now, you’re not, and you’re always going to feel you’re missing something until you figure out that piece of it.”

She was being harsher than she’d meant to be. Zach was forgetting to agree with her, she saw his features sinking, saw splotches of embarrassment spread across his cheeks. She had been trying to be very flat with him, like a concerned parent, a sympathetic dean, but there was no way to keep this from stinging – and she noticed, actually, that she didn’t mind if he was hurt. Men prefer bitches, was the thought she had, well, she had it in her to be a bitch too.

Zach recovered quickly. He agreed that splitting food in half was more than fair. He hoped they could figure out the rent a little later. He’d take on more students – actually, over the past week, Audrey hadn’t seen signs of any – he’d make it work. As always, he said, he appreciated how honest she was with him.

They kissed, she leaning from her seat towards him, as their way of signaling that the serious conversation was over. They watched a TV show curled up in bed, ran their fingertips up and down each other’s sides and arms during the episode, but afterwards he didn’t initiate sex and she didn’t press it. He faced the wall, trying to sleep on his side, and she curled herself into the space his body created.

It ended a few days after that. He was shelling peas, helping her to prepare dinner, and his phone vibrated. He wiped his hands very quickly on a dishrag, she watched him hurrying out of the room, the phone cradled to his ear. She heard him slide into his shoes, the pug whining after him, the gentle way he pulled the front door shut, like a teenager sneaking out after curfew. She looked out the window and saw him arguing on the sidewalk, his arms spread wide in fury and exasperation. She saw him pacing, saw him lighting up one of his cigarettes as the call finally started to quiet down.

She was under no illusions – she knew that she would never be able to get him to react the way that Erin could. But she was strangely detached, strangely at peace with herself. Maybe it helped to have her vantage-point looking out the window, this ancient gesture, standing at the stove, seeing her lover disappear. She was doing everything right, she knew that, she felt just as Rosie did, that it was coming for her, getting closer all the time, if not Zach then the next one.