Back in college, during a junior-year pause between boyfriends, I sometimes logged onto an anonymous webcam site, unpaid, and helped men get off. I used ChatRoulette or one of those places that gave you a random companion when you clicked the "Next" button at the bottom of the screen. The routine stayed pretty consistent: I wore a Mardi Gras mask over my eyes to conceal my identity, positioned myself in front of the old 2012 MacBook Pro I once spilled half a 40oz into after a party turned sour, and rolled the dice. Men, dicks in hand, begged me not to refresh once I landed on their webcams. I loved that. Haughtiness has a numbing quality, I wrote down, a very 21-year old thing to think. This is one of those sad stories women only tell to other women.
I didn't have daddy issues. I wasn't abused or a sex maniac. I wasn't feigning empowerment in any way. I knew I was doing this to feel wanted and desirable. I was fully aware of my pathetic self-objectification, the fetishization of my youth, of every problematic element that accompanied me in this particular task. My blood at the time coursed with so many antidepressants it took an hour or so for me to come. This gave me enough time to lend a hand to a dozen or so different men trying to find pleasure in the otherwise unfeeling internet void of other men beating their meat, each with the hope that a woman would be on the other end of the Next button. I didn't mind it, and while it brought me no pride, I experienced little shame. No one knew who I was because I wasn't anybody yet. I enjoyed playing different characters: daddy's girl, insatiable slut, shy first-timer. I liked to act, to lie. It was nice to make those men feel happy.
I won't pretend this behavior was either simple or harmless. Lurking beneath this whole webcam folloy was the spectre of Ennis. Ennis, my boss at the university library's archive where I organized files on a part time basis. He was twenty years older, single, overweight, religious and lonely. He dressed in clothes bought from Belk in 2005 and went to some obscure Baptist church on Sunday. Ennis possessed one of those southern drawls that took the word library and turned it into 'liberry.' I owed everything to him. He employed me, took me under his wing, taught me the delicate art of working with documents. He demonstrated kindness during a time it otherwise eluded me. Tough classes. A loud and very messy breakup that severed me from my social life. A bad roommate who blamed the flea problem on my cat and not on the couch her deadbeat boyfriend brought in from the curb. Ennis was a good man. He did nothing wrong. I loved him very, very much.
I got the job at the archive my sophomore year. Ennis spent long afternoons with me back in the archive's tall windowless room stacked to the gills with books and boxes, first to train me then to hang out. Two lonely people seeking refuge in one another, or so I made it seem. Inherently tragic. At first I was perplexed by my feelings for Ennis, then disgusted by them, but I'd always been drawn to sad stories, and to the idea of love as mercy, as pity. Self-pity and pity for others. To be piteous towards another was to hold a modicum of power over them. I wanted Ennis to pity me too, to see me as I saw him.
Everything in my life as a literature student became a thinly-veiled code for Ennis. Every assignment, every interpretation of every novel, every final theme, poem, and project. I became trapped in the existential oscillation of his affection and disdain. By junior year, my constant badgering and smothering insistence started to innervate him and I knew that Ennis, a goody-two-shoes both with God and the administration, was deathly afraid of any kind of accusations of impropriety. Still, I wanted to make Ennis crack, to make him smart with desire even if it ruined both of our lives. I thought I was a very big girl for wanting something like that, a forty-year-old man, a torrid affair, a devastating ending. I thought I could will such a thing into existence without acting on it - I would never act on it - via the intensity of my very presence. I sat there beside him in quiet servitude. I confessed with my eyes. I spoke in soft voices. Ennis knew, surely. But God's will was stronger and he was no fool.
Naturally, my unyeilding, stultifying want for Ennis morphed into a kind of Lolita complex. In an odd twist, I found it surprisingly difficult to picture, in concrete images, what it would be like to sleep with Ennis. (Perhaps true love is so pure as to not be thusly defiled.) Hence I began to instead fantasize about hooking up with more conventionally attractive, significantly older men; men who perhaps no longer thought themselves capable of snagging a girl like myself, intelligent, pretty, and most of all, young. There's no more classic a porn protagonist than a young blond girl who wants your dick specifically. I imagined these men being so grateful for what I would give them. I pictured them as experienced and capable of taking way better care of my needs than selfish men my own age did. For the fantasy to work, the magnitude of their devotion had to be on par with that of my charity. In my daydreams, these men would come twice as hard, begging, begging, thanking Jesus Christ for looking down on them in this moment. One last co-ed. I searched for men around Ennis' age on the webcam roulette, but webcams are a famously millennial diversion. Most of the "Nexts" were Pakistani guys who could barely speak English, jocks who should've been able to find some girl to plunge into, teenagers seeking to alleviate boredom, and fistfuls upon fistfuls of dicks of indeterminable origin or age.
It is important to note that this underground life of mine took place in total secrecy, something not that difficult to obtain. Bereft of friends, I wandered around campus like an eccentric and misplaced animal. A bear in a suburb. The only person I saw most days outside of class was Ennis, and sometimes I'd skip class just to be with him for longer so I could study every crevice of him, so I could feel the distant proximity of his heat in the chair beside me. I hope nobody's daughter ends up like the person I was then.
Uncomfortable things always happen to girls like me if they stay long enough on the path I was walking. I remember that specific evening with some clarity. Mid-winter. Blithe, damp North Carolina winter, where the ceaseless presence of night mist formed coronas around every streetlamp. I kept the light low in my room, kicked the cat out. Got into the party mask, a night gown and underneath the nightgown, my only pair of lacy underwear. I entered the chat. The night started slow, so slow I opened a can Schlitz from the case I kept on the balcony outside my window and finished it before landing a hit. Kids. Bot. Guy in a Darth Vader mask. Fake webcam. Fake webcam. No webcam. Picture of Spiderman. No webcam. Hands, protruding from the teal sleeves of an old sweatshirt. Hands. I stopped. Hands, atop a white desk, slightly leathery, aged, gentle-looking. An equally gentle, southern voice pleading, "No, please don't go. Stay for just a second." I took my hand off the trackpad.
"I'm staying," I said.
"What are you doing on a site like this?" There wasn't the expected flirtation or disparagement in his voice. I heard it as bereft of answers.
"I don't know. Why are you?"
"I'm a nice guy, you know. I'm just kind of lonely. I'm not gonna ask anything bad of you."
"Alright, well, what are you going to ask me instead?"
The hands moved slightly. "I guess, how old are you?"
"Twenty-one." I decided to choose honesty. I closed my eyes and pretended it was Ennis talking to me. Of course I did. But like a record played slightly below tempo, the timbre wasn't quite right.
"Gosh, that's young. Twenty-one. You probably don't want to know how old I am."
"No," I urged the hands, "I do."
"Forty-two. I s'pose you'll change the channel now."
"That's not so old," I said, with great tenderness.
"I'm glad you think so. You know, you look very pretty dressed up like that."
"Thank you. I wish I could see a little bit of you too."
"Well I admit, I had my pants off but now I feel a tad embarrassed by that, talking to an actual person."
I waved him away. "It's ok. Can I see your face?"
"I'm a little nervous. You promise you won't hang up on me?"
"I promise."
He tilted up the webcam. The hands belonged to a clean-shaven man, his hair mostly gray. He possessed the appearance of a teacher or some other medium-income white collar worker. Generic, though behind his specatcles, his eyes betrayed a great and present sadness. Or at least I imagined it to be so. I realized the only thing that made him a more pathetic subject than myself was the fact that most of his life would soon be behind him while mine lay mostly ahead. This thought only amplified my initial tenderness. He seemed kind and a little lost, perhaps even in the same way I myself was lost. The least I could do was make his night.
"You're handsome," I told him. "What's your name?"
"Arthur. Kind of a silly name. My grandpa's. What about you?"
"Leslie," I answered truthfully. "Also kind of a silly name."
"It's cute on a girl."
"Thanks."
"If you can see my face Ms. Leslie, can't I see yours?"
I conceded that his request was only fair and removed the mask, making more of a show of it than was probably necessary. This represented what I assumed would be the nadir of my self-regard, my self-preservation. In that respect, I would have a long way still to go.
"You're beautiful," Arthur said in a kind of breathless way.
"You really think so?"
"Yes. It's amazing that I'd find you here in a place like this. I never expected it. It's usually just a parade of dicks over and over again."
"But you held out."
"Yeah," he chuckled, "I did. Lucky me."
"Lucky you." I watched him think of something else to ask me.
"Are you a student?"
"Yeah, in literature."
"You must read a lot."
"Not as much as I should."
A bemused chuckle. "Gosh, are you even old enough to drink yet?"
"Barely. My birthday wasn't even a month ago."
"So young. Surely a pretty girl like yourself must have a boyfriend?"
Oof, touchy subject. "Not right now. What about you?"
"Divorced."
"Sorry 'bout that."
"It's life. Can I ask you something?"
"Go ahead."
"Why are you wearing such a sexy little outfit?"
My pulse quickened. "Same reason you're not wearing pants."
"But you seem like such a good girl. Why would you do a thing like that?"
"Same reason as you. Lonely."
Arthur only nodded.
"Do you want to see me, Arthur?" I was being genuine.
He closed his eyes and sighed. "I would like that very much. But you don't have to."
"Something about you makes me want to."
"Can't imagine what that would be."
"Stop saying things like that." I sucked in a deep breath. "How do you want me to do it?"
"Oh, I'm not so picky. You don't have to do an elaborate show for me. Just go slow. Do you want to see me too?"
"Of course."
Arthur slid the keyboard roller back into his desk. He was already half-hard, and surprisingly hairless. His small belly heaved with long, slow breaths.
"I want to see your face, too, not just your dick," I told him.
"That's romantic of you," he smiled, crows feet forming lines around his eyes. I slid one strap of my nightgown down, then the other, holding the garment close to my chest. I rolled the broad slope of my shoulders, watching him as he pawed casually at himself.
"Don't be shy," he murmured. He seemed truly smitten. I let the nightgown pool around my hips, my hands still covering my chest, until I decided he'd suffered enough and revealed my breasts to him. Arthur made a soft sound, an "Oh, goodness." I kicked off the gown, spread my legs. He kept saying over and over again, "What a pretty girl. Beautiful girl. Oh, you're going to show me that?" I couldn't tell whether his innocence was sincere, but his delight I did not question. When I pulled my panties aside, he marveled and cooed, stiff in his hand. This was what I thought I wanted, this profound desire, this longing from across the unbridgable chasm of age, accompanied by the apocryphal power a young woman has over an older man, apocryphal because I relinquished my dignity, my only leverage, in exchange for it.
"Touch yourself for me, pretty girl. Yes, like that. Does it feel good?"
I told him it did. I couldn't look away from him. I derived great pleasure watching this helpless man with a mortgage and a concluded marriage and a real job in the outside world where adults lived, look at me, a person who had only just begun life, and use that difference to coax himself closer and closer to the edge of bliss. I traced the movement of his hands, those hands which seemed so familiar and so gentle. What would those fingers feel like inside of me? Accompanied, of course, by a mouth above moaning "I'm so happy. I'm so happy." Tears streaming down his face. I'm so happy. After it was over, I watched him still and go limp. Catching his breath, he cleaned himself off with tissues from a box. I could hear the headphone jack's static in the long, resulting silence. It was around midnight then.
"I don't want you to go just yet." He spoke quieter and more vulnerably, with a hint of shame. "Don't feel bad about this. You didn't do anything wrong. I really liked it. Did you like it?"
"Yes," I reassured him, "I liked it."
"When you hang up this call, we'll disappear into the void forever. I won't ever be able to find you again."
"That's true." I felt sorry about that. I knew he would try to talk to me longer.
"What are you reading right now, Leslie?"
"Some books about the 2008 financial crisis. About mortgage-backed securities. CDOs. Moral hazards, all that stuff. Tranches."
"You like banking? I never met a woman interested in those things."
"I'm interested in failure. There was no bigger failure than that one. Global failure. It's a literary failure but one in which the bad guys win and the good guys go home with nothing."
"What a fascinating take. Truly that of a well-read person." He asked me some more questions. I explained the financial crisis to him as I saw it, which should have ended with the CEOs of all the major banks in jail. We spoke for another three hours like this, talking about predatory investment banking. After what had transpired, I needed to prove to him that I was smart, too. That I was a full person, vibrant and alive, with beliefs and aspirations, not just a body. At the end of our conversation, he asked me where I lived. I told him, vaguely, I lived in North Carolina. So did he. Where? In Greensboro. We lived in the same city. Urgently, he gave me his phone number.
"I want to see you again. Let me take you to dinner. I promise no funny business," he blubbered, "We don't need to have sex or anything. I just want to see you."
"Alright," I said, albeit without commitment. "I'll see you." I sent a text to the number he typed into the chat and his face split into a smile.
"Oh, that's you? Excellent. I'll let you go now. I'll let you go. Thank you so much for this. You have no idea. Really. Goodnight, goodnight," he kept repeating."Goodnight."
I turned out the light. By then, night had turned to wee morning. My body didn't make such a distinction, nor did sleep. Right as I was dozing off, my phone screen lit up. A text message consisting of three heart emojis. I didn't need to investigate further. I knew who it was from.
Arthur picked me up the following Wednesday at 8. He drove a big, black Suburban that barely fit in the apartment's driveway. I wore a normal outfit, jeans and a sweater with a conservative neckline. By all accounts getting in a car with a 42 year old divorcee you met on a random chat website is a bad idea, the kind of scenario campus safety seminars warn you about, or one that predates a sad story on the news. But I wasn't scared of Arthur. I considered him harmless. We were bound by a very specific - and to some extent neutralizing - mutual sordidness.
I'm not sure what I expected from him. He sent me a handful of "good morning beautiful" texts the previous week (to which I replied only in emojis.) I found this behavior embarrassing and desperate. Besides, I'd already to some extent cooled on the idea of Arthur the morning after our session. Enough titillation remained, however, for me to at least meet him. I wondered if I would find him as tempting face to face, another way of asking myself whether these desires of mine held root in human reality where hands touch and consequences have meaning.
The afternoon before my date, I told Ennis I was taking the evening off, baiting him in the hopes that he would ask me, "For what?" And I would tell him. This seemed like a rational bet seeing as I almost never missed work. But instead Ennis slumped in his chair and shook his head, scrolling through Gmail.
"Thanks for letting me know. I'll find someone else."
I stood in the doorway and looked at him for a little bit, waiting for him to acknowledge me. If he paid even a modicum of genial attention to me, I would have forgotten about Arthur. I knew that. But Ennis merely sighed, a real weary sigh.
"Is there anything else you need from me, Leslie?"
"No," I said tersely, and left.
I think that winter marked a real low point in my life. Whatever camaraderie me and Ennis developed over the course of two years I seemed incapable of preserving. I knew the growing distance, the ensuing frostiness, was my fault. I walked home blistering with more of that same selfish, indulgent pain. For someone to cling to an unrequited love longer than a couple of months is a clear indicator of a special hankering for suffering. Longing, after all, begins unreasonably, reaches a point of clarification and either is sustained or perishes. Yet by acknowledging this, I had no choice but to stop feigning a lack of agency. I controlled my feelings. I chose to yearn.
Before I went out, I considered leaving a note on my desk professing my love for Ennis in case I turned up dead. That way he'd have no choice but to think of me. This petty thought frothed to the surface as I left the house, drawing my coat around my body. Arthur waved from behind the windshield. I didn't wave back, choosing instead to open the passenger door, climbing into the tall vehicle with some difficulty. The first thing I noticed was the specific smell left behind by young children. Milk products, spittle, candy stickiness. Cheerio remnants lingered in the cupholder between me and Arthur. I craned my neck over my shoulder pretending to look out for the bump at the end of the driveway and indeed confirmed my suspicion of a carseat suckered to one of the back seats. Arthur himself smelled a bit like milk. My stomach tumbled. He babbled on about how he couldn't stop thinking about me, his hands rapping atop the steering wheel to the rhythm of the Red Hot Chili Peppers song on the radio. We disappeared out of College Hill's web of stately Victorians via Lee Street which dumped us out over by the highway. With each passing sign, I feared he'd abscond with me down 85 to somewhere with fewer streetlamps and sparser exits. Instead he slowed at a stoplight and made a left toward the mall, pulling into some place called Darryl's. It had the boxy, manufactured appearance of a chain restaurant though I knew of no other extant franchises.
When he got out of the car, I took another look at him. In real life, he had a small stoop to his shoulders and a geeky complexion. He did not touch me. In fact, he seemed nervous. Darryl's was a kind of fern bar-esque place with brick walls, wooden interiors, and a colonnade of wood-fired ovens in which food was cooked for show. On one of the walls, old radios were displayed like game trophies. The hostess seated us and handed us two recently wiped down pleather-bound menues. She must have thought I was out with my dad. I thumbed through the thick, plastic pages, trying not to look at Arthur. The fare was very TGI-Friday's. Ribs and burgers. Pasta for some reason.
"Are you gonna drink?" Arthur asked.
"Probably not," I decided, to be on the safe side.
"I won't either, then."
The waitress arrived swiftly. They always do at joints like these. I ordered a Sprite and the ribs. Arthur chose a burger. I got the strange sensation the waitress, a woman Arthur's age, knew exactly why we were there. I felt her eyes on me which only exacerbated my creeping and finally delivered shame. As soon as she left, Arthur pulled out his phone, scrolled through it a little bit, then turned it toward me.
"That's Allie. That's my little girl," he said, beaming. The girl in the picture was about four, dressed in a flowery cotton dress, a typical gap between her little grinning teeth. She didn't look much like Arthur.
"She's so cute," I feigned. I wanted to leave. I wasn't going to be the trophy mother to some old man's little kid. Ex-wife rage bait.
"It's not too weird that I have a kid, is it? Maybe I should have mentioned that before."
I wanted to say, "You're forty-two. Why the fuck would it be weird?" But instead I shook my head.
"What do you do, Arthur? You never told me."
"I'm a pilot. FedEx." Now I kind of understood why he was divorced.
"Wow. That must be really interesting."
"To be honest I'm more of a glorified truck driver," he complained. "But it's cool to fly a plane. I live near the airport. Originally I wanted to be in the Air Force, you know Top Gun, but I didn't like the part about killing people so I went to pilot school instead. More expensive and no USAA. But it did the job."
I could not reconcile the image of frumpy polo-shirt Arthur with Top Gun. He told me more about his work, how he started out as an agricultural pilot dumping pesticides on crops. It never occurred to him to fly passenger jets. Too much responsibility, too many lives. Never had a scary moment in the driver's seat, he said. No fun stories. When the food and drinks arrived, I wolfed both down just to avoid further conversation. This whole scene, me, Arthur, this dorky suburban restaurant, the sticky kid residue in the SUV, the little girl's picture, the jerking off on fucking ChatRoulette, it all formed a tapestry of ugly sadness. I hated that I was present enough to realize this almost as much as I hated the truth of it. Most of all, I hated myself.
I don't even remember what else we talked about at the restaurant because it was meaningless babble, directionless. Arthur at one point tried to bring up the financial crisis again but I merely sat there and picked at my soggy fries wondering why I came to be in this situation. The only saving grace was Arthur's terminal, sexless shyness, expressed moistly in his pathetic, pleading eyes. This would go nowhere except back to my apartment, where we'd part ways and I would never speak to him again.
During the interlude between clearing the table and getting the check, Arthur got a phone call. His face lit up as he announced, "That's the nanny." A loud tinny voice came through the phone even though it wasn't on speaker, cooing "I think someone wants to see daddy." They switched to FaceTime.
"Hi sweetie. Daddy's with a special friend right now and can't talk long."
A clumsy voice asked "What special friend?" And I thought, oh no, please, please no. But my pleading went unanswered and Arthur pointed his phone at me.
"This is Leslie. Can you say hi to Leslie?"
"Hi Leslie," she squealed.
"Hi," I repeated weakly. Arthur grinned again, looking at me with so much hope. He told his daughter to be a good girl and to brush her teeth, made small talk with the nanny and then hung up. Childrearing is nothing but scripts, I thought, a bunch of lists of things to say. Maybe languate itself was little more than a list of words and idioms. Little plays we acted out with each other. I really couldn't imagine having a child, stretching my body to limits which used to kill women in the past. I had an IUD my ex always insisted he could feel even though there was no way his dick was big enough to reach the strings. I did not want to be a mother. The waitress brought the check wearing that same wary glance. Another person I couldn't look at. If there was a mirror nearby, that'd be a third. Arthur paid. We returned to the car. I remained silent on the walk out except to inform Arthur that I'd had a long day and wanted to go home. He informed me with too much enthusiasm that he was a gentleman and that this was fine with him. We never once spoke about what transpired online between us as though it happened somewhere else to different people.
On the ride back, I watched the mid-size sprawl of Greensboro disappear and re-emerge from behind foliage, recognizing even in darkness the familiar landscapes from all those trips I took with my parents to and from campus. I had not yet exited that period of life in which one's parents are still benevolent authority figures who could swoop in and rescue you at any moment because you weren't quite grown yet. Somewhere in between teenager and adult. And Arthur wanted to fuck me. It began to rain. He missed the turn onto Tate Street and had to cirle back around on West Market. I lived on Carr, a little side street smothered by the scale of the car we were in. Arthur pulled into the driveway. He told me he had a nice time and I lied, replying the same. Then he put his hand on my shoulder. I let him kiss me, smelling that same milky smell. His mouth was soft, parental. Goodnight, Arthur, I said. I got out of the car and went back up to my apartment on the second floor of an old house. The lights were off. My roommate, thankfully absent. From the bedroom window, I watched Arthur drive away. When he got to the end of the street, I sat down on my unmade bed, removed my phone from my purse and blocked his number.
It took me some time to process all this, to take stock of my feelings. In describing them, I could only come up with the word cheap. The cheap thrill of toying with a stranger's emotions, the cheap restaurant, the cheap way I treated myself and my body instead of growing up and moving on from such ordinary sources of misery. Worse things could have happened to me. So much worse. I almost wished they did. My brain circled around each potentiality like a a murder of crows. I decided I wanted a shower, mildly convinced I could still smell that milky child smell on my clothes. I ran the water scalding hot, smoothed my hands across my body in some kind of restorative ritual recalling that this was a common behavior of rape victims, at least in crime fiction. Perhaps also in real life. None of this is very serious, I reminded myself, spooked. Not everything is. The clock on the kitchen stove lied and said it was 10 which meant it was really 11. Damp-haired, I climbed back into bed and opened my laptop so I could clear my browser history. An act of finality banishing Arthur to the Recycle Bin. I cleared that too, scattering his ashes into the digital void.
Shortly before I graduated, I was accepted into a library science grad program in Boston, thus fulfilling the adolescent fantasy of leaving town and forgetting as much as I could about a place I was ready to quit. Even about Ennis, though we ended on alright terms once I became more concerned with graduating on time than ill-fated romance. In the end, I never told anyone about any of this - about Ennis, Arthur, the webcam stuff. Not my therapist, not my parents, not my friends, not the kind man I'd eventually marry at the appropriate age of thirty. On my final day in Greensboro, right when I'd just about finished boxing up my stuff and was clearing out the leftovers, I found that Mardis Gras party mask tucked away in the back of my underwear drawer. I picked it up and looked at it but only for a second. Next, I thought, as the thick plastic made a thud where the black trash bag met the hardwood floor.
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