Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a short story.
Best,
Sam
THE SEDUCER
He had never been a particularly good-looking or attractive guy. When he was a teenager and the world around him seemed suddenly to be run by this bizarre sorting mechanism, choosing a few and discarding the rest, he had stared in a mirror just as intently as anybody else, found his features to be more or less symmetrical, his skin smooth for his age, had decided that he must be at least passable-looking, but then when he endured the usual range of teenage humiliations, dances without dates, girls making flimsy excuses when he asked them out, and then just the endless stretch of time of being unapproached, invisible, feeling that he was for no-very-clear-reason a pariah, he assumed that he must have been wrong, the mirror had been deceptive, he was after all not an impartial observer, he must be hideous or at least mediocre and it was better just to not even think about looks, to wear the schoolboy standard outfits, jeans and sweatshirts, he had enough other talents and interests to occupy himself, and as for girlfriends that would somehow take care of itself, whether it was kismet or a shy girl by the drinks’ table.
That was how it was for him for a while, startups and lots of time behind a laptop and enough drinks’ tables and kismet that he didn’t feel he was missing out on anything, and then when he was about 28 it felt as if the ground shifted under him, as if rooms were oriented differently when he was in them. At parties lonely women would be sitting alone on couches; duos of girls would suddenly have some question they wanted to ask him and then one of them would suddenly remember something she had to do and wander off. He was at a loss to explain it. He was the same as he had always been, it wasn’t like he had started a workout regimen or switched to a new cologne. He was floppy-haired the way he had always been, impervious to combing, instead of sweatshirts he now wore button-downs and occasionally sports jackets, but that didn’t explain it, he’d gotten lasik, that counted for something, he’d learned to cook, he’d improved his small talk, and he had money — that was the main thing. He didn’t advertise it, he didn’t wear it, but they could sense it on him, just that everybody else was aspiring, everybody else was oily, and when he walked in a room he wasn’t looking to make a contact, to sell something or other, he didn’t need anything really, and that was enough, the gravity of the whole room shifted in his direction.
He was at a party and a drunk guy came up to him and out of nowhere said, “Look at you, you’re good-looking, you’re educated, a lot of girls will look at you and see the complete package, and there’s nothing wrong with that, there’s nothing wrong with that, but remember — you have to remember that these are delicate creatures.”
This was somebody Nico knew a little bit, one of the oily ones, a guy who was always at the margins of some deal. He didn’t need to pay too much attention — apparently, this guy was among the species of drunk that suddenly decide they’re prophets. He watched the way the guy opened his mouth, bared his teeth, the grotesque way he said ‘delicate creatures.’ The guy also wasn’t really controlling his spit as he talked.
But, like all drunken prophecies, that rattled around in the back of Nico’s mind longer than he would have expected. It was summer and he seemed to have developed a technique that went with it. A lot of the parties were on rooftops. He found himself leaning on ledges with somebody or other looking at the skyline. He liked asking about passions, even about past relationships. It surprised them, it wasn’t the usual stand-up routine that they had gotten so bored of. It was a different pace, ruminative, midsummery. He almost never pushed his luck, usually just, demurely, at the end, asked if they wanted to exchange contacts, although sometimes they’d walk around the block or drift further down the rooftop, away from the noise and the party. On one heady occasion, they left in separate cars, she following him, signaling the turns when he did, and he waved her into a parking space in front of his apartment.
He met Rachel in roughly that circumstance and that mood. They were talking, ostensibly, about whether art was a universal or a culturally-specific domain. This was far from Nico’s comfort zone — he had seen a book in her handbag, had playfully reached out for it, and the conversation had careened along from there — but he discovered himself to be surprisingly articulate about it. They had wandered far down the roof. “It’s one of these fashionable-sounding things to say that art is universal,” he told her, “but I don’t know what that could possibly mean. It’s the kind of thing that sounds good to liberals — like this idea that nobody can possibly be left out of anything. But it doesn’t matter how beautiful that book is, it doesn’t mean anything to somebody who doesn’t speak English. It doesn’t matter how beautiful a piece of music is, it doesn’t mean anything to somebody who’s deaf.”
She knitted her eyebrows in concentration. She said, “I don’t know how you can just say something offhand like that, about whether art is or isn’t universal, something that you haven’t thought about and studied.”
“Well it’s not a peer-reviewed statement,’ he said. “I’m just ad-libbing. It’s just an opinion.”
“I don’t know, I’d have to put a lot more thought into it.”
“That seems like too much thought for a rooftop party.”
“No, it’s interesting, I’d like to think about it,” she said, and he stepped forward and kissed her. She looked surprised and kissed him back. “Why did you do that?” she said.
She was narrow and small-boned. Her features were very clear, very defined, he was fairly sure she was pretty although not complete positive. Her hair was tucked primly behind her ears. She was wearing a tight black dress — he could somehow imagine the emotional turmoil that went into deciding to wear it.
“It felt right,” he said. “It was a non-sequitur in the conversation — ”
“That’s true.”
“But it didn’t feel completely unmotivated. Something about the look you had when you were thinking hard.”
That made her frown more and he wondered if he had really misstepped.
“Is that alright?” he asked. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“If I did,” she told him in a very still voice, “I probably wouldn’t have wandered with you down the roof.”
In bed he found her to be somewhat inscrutable. She never initiated anything, but whenever he reached out to her, say when they were having drinks in his living room and he suddenly extended his hand to her cheek or when he was already dozing off and in his haze stroked her fingertips down her flank, she never turned him down. Sometimes when he was licking her or inside her she arched her head back and let her lips slide open. A couple of times, in the middle of kissing or sex, he found her cheeks damp with tears and felt it was best to not ask her about it.
She was more animated during the drinks phase in his living room and, on the couple of occasions when she slept over, during coffee the next morning. She had the same earnestness that she’d had on the rooftop. She liked to ask questions and then puzzle over the answers. Nico felt as if he were a popular lecturer hosting a diligent student at office hours. He had to fight an impulse to be flippant and paradoxical with her.
She seemed particularly fixated on Silicon Valley, on what she described as the ‘contradiction’ that a guy as bright as he was — she called him that several times — would work in tech, for corporations. Surely, she said, there must be so much else he could contribute to the world.
“First of all, I don’t think I’m exactly that bright,” he said. It was the morning. He’d made some half-hearted eggs and toast and served it with coffee. He was in a bathrobe and she had borrowed his workout clothes. It felt like all they needed was a newspaper to complete the picture. “I can’t seem to learn to cook or to draw a picture or to chisel a piece of wood, but I happen to have a good mind for systems. A closed system, something like math or certain kinds of engineering, makes sense for me — but I don’t think there’s anything really special about it, any more than you would be all that impressed by somebody who happened to have perfect pitch or from the date could calculate what day of the week it was. So, basically, that’s why I ended up in Silicon Valley, because it seemed like a match, I had this very particular skill set and that’s what they were looking for — and for some weird, totally fluky reason, that was also the skill set and the type of mind that the economy really wanted, that everybody was willing to hand out big paychecks for, and it seemed like one of these coincidences that was too good to pass up.”
She seemed disappointed and annoyed. He noticed that she never seemed to eat in the middle of a conversation, was always too intent on what was being talked about, wolfed down her food at the end of a meal when it was already cold. “But you also had a choice in the kind of work you could do, if you have this special mind — or some specific part of your mind that’s very special — you could go to a lot of places with it, you could go to some start-up that’s doing, I don’t know, some kind of social enterprise, you don’t have to work for a corporation that’s also one of the biggest corporations in the world.”
He was suddenly very tired. It felt like the breakfast had started to drag. He liked to move in the morning, especially after a night of sex, and it suddenly bothered him that she hadn’t even touched his eggs or coffee. Besides, he was already familiar with the point she was making: it felt as if half of San Francisco had tech jobs and the other half just sat around and criticized the techies for having the jobs they did.
It wouldn’t be fair to say that he discarded her or ghosted her or anything like that. She kept up a fairly steady stream of text messaging and gchatting. She sent him gifs and updates on herself and occasionally theoretical articles she had been reading — it had amused him greatly, on their early dates, to discover that she was part of a Marxist reading group. And he wrote back to her, he told her about how busy he was at work, which was usually true, he commented on the book she was reading or the movie she had just watched; somehow, he seemed always to have already read the book or seen the movie. If he had a date, he just didn’t answer her message until he had a free moment — there was no obligation really, but he always had some instinct to tell her he was sorry for being so delayed in his response.
Once she asked if she could spend the evening at his place — no date first — and he told her, truthfully, that he had a project to do, she was welcome to be there, share his takeout food with him, but he wouldn’t be able to spend very much time with her. She said that was fine. He had his workstation, typed away on his laptop. She had her sketch book in front of her. At one point she said, “I don’t know how you do it, how you manage to be working constantly.”
“It’s a job,” he said. “It’s what I’m supposed to do for my job.”
“I feel like, for me, everything I do takes all kinds of preparation and deliberation. I can’t just sit down and draw a picture, I need to gather, I need to be in the right state of mind, it has to feel right to me before I can begin.”
“I’m not drawing a picture. What I’m doing is functional.”
“But it takes a mental architecture, it takes skill and expertise.”
“That’s true,” he admitted.
“And I don’t know how you could be in a state of mind where you just sit down and do something that has artistry in it, without preparing yourself, without even breaking really — maybe in what you do, I don’t think I could do it in drawing.”
“I feel drawing would be perfect for it,” he said. He was typing while he spoke. “I would love to be able to draw it. Just have a sketchbook and sketch everything around me.”
She got her puzzled, eyebrows-knitted look. “To me that would feel haphazard,” she said.
Thai food came and they half-talked, half-worked through dinner. He was really enjoying himself actually. His womanizing — his private word for it — could be a bit deceptive. He spent most evenings very much alone. There was delivery, take-home work, the various techniques, games, shows, videos, that he had for eventually tiring out his mind and putting himself to sleep, and it was nice for once to share that sort of evening with someone else. After some time, she gave up on drawing, she wandered over to his bookcase, took books out at random, and asked him about them. And this again was pleasant, he liked to tell her about things he’d read, he’d read almost everything there, for essentially a quant guy his interests were surprisingly wide-ranging, he could synopsize and critique books while he continued to type away. After some time reading the introductions and bending back the covers, she gave up on that too and played on her phone. He finally finished a little before 10, groaned, burrowed the backs of his hands into eyes. He came to where she was sitting, folded-up, on his love seat, her feet tucked under her, her back hunched forward. She was scowling at something on her phone.
He put one arm around her shoulder. He grazed the backs of his fingertips down her arm in a way that he’d discovered she liked. “You see what it’s like,” he said. “It’s not always the most fun.”
She kept still in her familiar way, which he had a hard time reading. He squared up to her. He brought his fingertips around the perimeter of her face. He kissed her. She had her serious, puzzled look. She stood up.
“I’m going to go,” she said.
He had had a progressive-enough education, had been trained in deferring to women’s wishes. He didn’t try to argue with her, just watched as she stomped her feet into her slip-on shoes, gathered her jacket from the closet where she had so delicately placed it.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “You texted me this afternoon, you said you would be in the neighborhood. I really had a lot to do — please don’t think I was ignoring you or something.”
“It’s not that,” she said. She had collected everything. She looked around the apartment quizzically — she had the look of someone who was intent on not leaving anything behind. “Goodbye Nico,” she said.
He lay on the couch. He checked his phone for any response to what he’d submitted. He pulled the curtains aside, watched to see that she really was leaving, walking determinedly towards the BART. He had the usual remorse and self-recrimination when he’d blown it. His work, to be honest, had been a little less than diligent that evening. There had been plenty of time reading newspapers. Once, he had even played a game, tilting the screen discreetly away from her. He had enjoyed himself, he really had, her in her own restive world, the companionability of it, the suspense.
Her text messages the next days were a bit searing. She told him that he took her for granted, that she was another toy to him. It was hard to disagree with her. He just took issues with a few of the more trenchant accusations, tried to soften the edges of it. Then she just stopping texting and he didn’t press the point.
The summer had been Nico’s time for dating. In the fall the rooftop parties seemed to disappear, as did that drifty midsummery mood when anything was possible. His bosses returned from their mini-vacations at the end of August and suddenly he truly was incredibly busy, his projects seemed to take him until about 11 at night, he felt like it was constantly finals week, there was lots of Thai food in plastic containers, sometimes just a thirty-minute sitcom on his laptop before he went to sleep. He spent time on his apps but the conversations there had started to feel increasingly hypothetical, like he was putting in practice time.
He made it back to a party sometime in late September. It felt like less of the sort of orchestrated campaign, which was how he had treated these things over the summer. It was more like a watering-hole, a chance to stand close to the drinks table and toss back beers. The party’s host put his arm around him, had the usual chat about not having seen him for awhile, about how they had to catch up. He said a group of them were going to the hospital that week to visit Rachel and did he want to come. Off Nico’s incredulity, he had this look as if he were rapidly calculating something — he must have been trying to remember if Nico and Rachel were linked, or if he had gotten something mixed up. He explained what had happened in broad strokes, he shrugged his shoulders a lot, he kept saying it wasn’t really a big deal but it was very sad of course.
Nico went by himself. He stopped at a flower shop and bought her a beautiful bouquet. She was awake when he was there. It wasn’t the horror show he had expected. There were gauze and bandages on her forehead. He’d gotten all the grisly medical details — her coma had been a full week but she was out of it now. She seemed unsurprised and unmoved to see him. She smelled the flowers and he put them down on a shelf with the rest of her haul. She was such a small person and she looked completely overwhelmed by the bed. He sat in the chair next to her with his hands clasped.
“Rachel,” he said, “I am sorry, I am so so sorry.”
She shrugged drily. “Why would you be?” she said. “It had nothing to do with you.”
So that’s how this was going to be. At the party his friend had warned him about this.
“I guess it’s a figure of speech,” he said, “I feel terrible about it — that’s what I mean.”
“You shouldn’t say it if it’s just a figure of speech,” she said.
Her eyes were no longer working in tandem. One fixed on him while the other seemed to scan the room. That had been part of the intel he’d gotten from his friend at the party. It was maybe something he wouldn’t have noticed immediately himself but now that he did he could think about nothing else — it made him imagine her fall, the impact of it. Her personality was very different than it had been. There were none of the hesitant questions, the puzzling together of the world piece-by-piece. She was dry and sure of herself. To be honest, he liked her much better this way.
“I’m glad to see awake, doing ok,” he began again. “I mean this sincerely, I care for you, I was really shaken when I heard what had happened.”
She nodded in this new, dry way of hers, as if she already had all the answers. He became aware of the listlessness of hospitals, the way time functioned there, the nurses’ trays and chatter way off in the corridors, and then the time-span she was in, the light gaining and diminishing outside the window, and the days otherwise without punctuation.
“I don’t know what you were dealing with in the last — the last however long it’s been since I saw you,” he said. “I’m so sorry if you were unhappy. I’m so sorry if I contributed in any way to it.”
She puffed out her lips in this new way of hers. “I think I was fine since I saw you,” she said, as if she were straining after a distant memory. “Trust me, I couldn’t have possibly spent less time thinking about you.”
He nodded at the wisdom and justice of that. It was also a relief to hear.
“And I wasn’t unhappy,” she said in this very weary voice like a child made to recite a speech. “I was painting the September light. I was sitting on the ledge of the window and I fainted. I’ve fainted before, it was a mistake to be so near an edge, but the light was so beautiful.”
She seemed to have reached the end of the conversation and she turned towards the wall. He accepted his dismissal with good grace. He would have liked to place his hand on her elbow or to kiss the top of her head, something to show that she had mattered to him in the way that she had mattered, but he knew it wouldn’t be received well — they were nothing to each other really.
He went through the corridors and down the elevator of the hospital with the same contrition that he would have liked to have poured out to her. Nothing would change — he knew that well enough, he would be back on his projects, and when he would have a break, he would be on an app and at the parties, and he would trot out the same canned lines, the same shtick that had finally started to really work. It didn’t mean that he wasn’t penitent. He was bad, he knew that, he had been a nice guy for so long and he had taken that for granted and been accustomed to that but it wasn’t the case anymore — he would have to forget about that. He had wanted girls for so long, wanted that more than anything, and now he had it, and part of it was that he would be a menace to them, it was inescapable, he knew that somehow, it was part of what he had signed up for.
Social satire, with an aspect of horror. I think an editor would keep reading.
Your stories really do get to me. I read somewhere that you've also written a novel, which I'm however unable to find anywhere... I would be very grateful if you could point me somewhere to get it! Best