Nude Men

open wide with surprise.
    “You’ve done this before?” I ask.
    “No,” she says, her voice filled with pride. Pride at her s kill , not pride at never having done this before. I explain this because I know it with absolute certainty, and it might be misunderstood.
    Yes you have, you lying piglet: This is a delirious thought on my part, with no foundation whatsoever and no thought behind it.
    “I don’t want to catch an incurable disease from you,” she explains. “Or an incurably fatal disease, or a fatally incurable one.”
    How romantic.
    “I thought of all the combinations,” she says.
    Yes, I see.
    “For that matter,” she continues, “I wouldn’t like to catch a baby from you either, because then I’d have to go on one of those TV shows with many other girls who have small numbers and who caught babies. I’m going to take your blindfold off now.”
    “No!” I cry. “I would rather not see your face.”
    “But I want you to see us.”
    “No, because I must not see your face.”
    “You’re so difficult, you spoiled little chicken,” she says, annoyed.
    She gets up. I hear her walking around the room, rummaging through things. She comes back to me, straddles me, and takes off my blindfold. I scream. Mickey Mouse is sitting on me. No, it’s just a mask. Sara is so ingenious. Now I don’t have to stare at her face, I can stare at Mickey Mouse. She puts me into herself. The mouse is grinning at me obscenely; he looks as if he’s having fun, but I imagine that under the mask, Sara must be squinting with pain, clenching her teeth. I do not take my eyes off the glimmering black eyes inside the mouse’s eyes, and they are fixed on me as well. I wish I could see her expression, to know if she truly is grimacing, as I imagine, or if it’s different. I can tell nothing. The mouse keeps smiling, and the music keeps playing, and she even knows that you’re supposed to move. I don’t move. I feel selfish not to, but it’s against my principles.
    She slaps my arm. “Move! I know you want to.”
    If she’s going to start beating me, I will not stupidly stick to my principles. That would be too much. So I move.
     
    A fterward I accompany her to her room, and I ask, “Did it hurt?”
    “Yes,” she says.
    I leave her and go out of the hotel. I walk in the night and I cry. I’m a pervert. Would a normal man have been able to get excited by an eleven-year-old girl, even if she threw herself at him? Probably not. I think about what will happen now. The little girl will tell her mother, the mother will tell the police, and the police will come and get me and put me in jail for the rest of my life, and I won’t fight them because what I did was horrible. It’s not as though I didn’t know it was horrible. Society pounds it into your head from your earliest days. I knew very well that it was a horror for little girls or little boys to have sexual intercourse with an adult, or with anyone. A horror. It’s called child molestation, even rape, when they’re that age and you’re that age. Because children do not come on to adults, they simply don’t, it’s a fact that everyone knows, unless it’s in total childish innocence that they come, to get the affection of a father or mother. But they do not think about sex at all, they do not have any sexual urges, they just have curiosity. I knew all this, but I chose to ignore it. I will not resist the police. I will simply wait for them to come and get me. Or maybe I should just kill myself now.
     

chapter seven
     
     
     
    T he next day we return to New York. No one says anything unusual, and my mother suspects nothing. Sara goes home, my mother goes back to her house in the country, and I go to my apartment. Charlotte greets me when I arrive. I had forgotten that she had moved into my apartment. I expected to be alone. She asks me how the trip went. “Good,” I say, and answer her questions absentmindedly.
    Minou is in the middle of her second heat. She peed on my kitchen counter. Thick, concentrated pee, in small puddles. I am much too preoccupied by the previous night to ask Charlotte why she allowed the pee to dry without cleaning it.
    I clean the counter and wait. It’s five o’clock, and I know that Lady Henrietta may call me at any moment, as soon as Sara finishes telling her what I did. Or maybe Henrietta won’t even bother to call. Maybe she’ll just send the police. I am a pervert, and I am waiting with relief for the police to