Green Girl (5 page)
This is strange to think perhaps but if I saw you would I know who you were you could be hidden like a stranger in a crowd the Greeks thought that strangers could be gods in disguise are you my god in disguise? Would I recognize you? How could I not recognize someone who so regularly occupies my thoughts? Perhaps now you have facial hair (did you have facial hair)? I close my eyes I attempt to resurrect you conjure you up I can’t make you out for the life of me maybe you are not you. Maybe you are someone else.
The green girl is infused with Desire.
Obsession—
Parfum pour femme
.
She shakes her head no at the fliers thrust at her, like a parade of flying legs in a variety show, except clothed in gloves and coupons for Sainsbury’s. Sometimes it is easier to just take the flier thrust at you rather than go through the motions of mumbling no, no thanks, although Ruth has learned to blow right by them, rehearsing the same cool look of decline that she has come to know as English in nature. She shakes her head no, doing that quick smile where she doesn’t show any teeth. There’s the smile, now it’s gone. A grimace, not really a smile at all. There was a meaner version as well, practiced on those who did not take the first hint, who gathered closer, urgent and insistent.
Down Charing Cross, past red phone booths with the faint waft of men’s genitalia littered with escort calling cards, postcard Sirens luring in men walking by. Ruth shivers. She wonders what it would be like to prostitute herself. To be a beautiful young girl fed to the lions. Like a sort of martyr. Sometimes she fantasizes about this. A state of utter depravation. Except it is a Hollywood version she dreams of, like Jane Fonda in
Klute
.
She prays to be preyed upon. She is a deer standing in the middle of the forest road, knees buckling, begging for a predator. And Bambi has no mommy. The mean hunter has a sexy glint in his eyes. This is why she cannot forget HIM. HE was not fooled by her face of innocence, by her pale pinchedness. HE used her and abused her and she begs for a repeat of this experience. When HE would come over for their nocturnal couplings she would plead for HIM to destroy her, murder her, pound her back into the nothingness from which she began and which she knew deep down she would inevitably return.
She hadn’t known she had desired a beast. Someone to destroy her.
That first meeting ended in bruises that she would lovingly watch yellow over the weeks.
The rain lets up. It will descend again soon. She wanders down the cobblestoned streets of Soho, past the dark sticky alleys of peepshows girl mannequins blankly bearing whips naked boy mannequins wearing plastic grins holding hands of other boy mannequins. Glass windows revealing rows of pastries crowned with whipped cream.
She walks past a shop she had worked at when she first came to London. Ruth had liked the idea of working in a sex shop, the vulgar aspect of it. She liked to slum, to place herself in humiliating circumstances. She didn’t know why. The work itself was rather dreary, shelving bottles of lubricant, lining up dildos like wriggly, neon soldiers, picking up handcuffs from the floor, ringing up meekish customers, alone or in pairs.
The manager at the sex shop gave Ruth the creeps. Thin, oily, folded into a crisp suit, a handlebar mustache tickling tight lips. When he walked her around giving her the tour, he seemed to get satisfaction out of trying to shock her. Does it bother you to look at this? He would point to a TV monitor showing a long black penis sliding into a gaping red hole, in and out, in and out. A headshake no. How about this? A phantom penis ejaculated like splattered candle wax over a brunette’s massive breasts, as she groaned and writhed about. Trying to shock the American girl with the innocent face and the little girl voice.
We’ll try you out he had said to her. As if he was a pimp and she was a prostitute. We’ll try you out. A trial period. We’ll see if you like us and if we like you. That’s what they always say—but what they really mean is we’ll see if we like you. The part about you liking them is actually immaterial. And one learns not to care. One learns to deaden oneself and to hold one’s breath and wait until it’s all done with. This is Ruth’s philosophy for many aspects of her life.
She had lasted at the sex shop for two weeks. She hadn’t even picked up her paycheck. Ruth had a talent for quitting jobs. Often she would simply not show up, and then they would call and call and she would erase and erase the urgent where-are-yous. She has even been known to just walk out. Oh, the freedom of just walking out, the no-thanks, the not-for-me, the push of the door and pull back into herself.
What I am writing is something more than mere invention; it is my duty to relate everything about this girl among thousands of others like her. It is my duty, however unrewarding, to confront her with her own existence.
— Clarice Lispector,
The Hour of the Star
Dreaded Saturday crowds. The grandiose door spits shoppers in, spits shoppers out. They are indistinct. They come in waves. An exodus of
the masses.
Walking down the row women poised like flierers handing out scented sticks of paper.
Desire? Care to try? Desire? Desire? Plastered smile, pink ornament of pastel scent at attention. Ruth does not even register the constant throb of gloves and shoes and clipping walks. She feels the pastel globe weigh on her hand. It is covered in silver netting, which pierces her palm.
She has to display this bottle of perfume at chest height for an indeterminate period of time, like those Vanna Whites displaying prizes on game shows, a spokesmodel who only has one line to speak, until the powers-that-be allow her to take a break, where she will escape to the employee toilet and lock herself in a stall of porcelain white, feeling the silence of her own breath.
To last throughout her shift she escapes outside of her body and lets it do all the work. She asks woman after woman, all strutting by like robins in their winter wear, if they would like to sample Desire. Desire? Desire? She is on repeat. The silver is starting to wear off, sparkly silver on her hands, the glitter buried deep in her palm. Angry women swinging their angry purses. Holding the hands of British children, freakishly precocious like tiny adults.
Sometimes she is struck by the sense that she is someone else’s character, that she is saying someone else’s lines.
At the end of her day her throat is dry from her constant spiel. Her feet and her calves ache from standing. Her cheeks ache from pretend smiling. The very top of her second finger on her right hand, the uppermost joint, aches from pressing up and down, up and down.
Point. Squirt. Hand. Point. Squirt. Hand.
(My Ruth. I write on her bored.)
The piped-in sounds of pop music. Manufactured, packaged, digestable. A song by the starlet whose perfume she’s shilling. Cooing sultry come-ons, breathless promises. On a track, repeating over and over again. The landscape of shopper’s ringtones. Music that’s not music. The buzzing and the coo. Ruth has swallowed all of these noises. She doesn’t even notice them anymore.
The horrible head sometimes walks by and snaps his thick sausages in her face. Look alive. He doesn’t even say her name. She is nameless. She is an unknown. He had begun to walk by her station just to see whether she was awake, to the delight of the terrible girls. You should be offering Desire to everyone who walks through that door. He points at the door, and then points at the globe carelessly cupped in her hand. The world that exists inside her sweaty numbing palm.
You’re a salesgirl. You’re supposed to be selling. Are we clear? Ruth smiles blankly. In a fog. Not there. Not really there. Watch her, he points at Noncy, who throws up her hands at him. Ruth imagines her pulling him aside. Those temps, they’re not too bright you see. They’re only temporary.
Poor Ruth, parroting away like an automaton. Ruth feels tremulous handing out the sticks of scented paper, uncertain, passive. Desire, would you care to? Desire?
She is now supposed to squeak out, Have you ever experienced Desire? The horrible head recently came up with this. But she only does it when he is around, watching her.
Have you ever experienced Desire?
During dead stretches of time she fantasizes about the past the forbidden.
I can see us, fighting like wet cats, clawing at each other, on the street unable to help ourselves, in front of your car, you unable to drive away, in bed at the latest hour, the birds beginning their appeal, knowing the next day to be already ruined. We would suck on each other’s mouths as if to drag the life from each other.
The green girl necessarily pines for the past, because the present is too uncomfortable to be present in and the future, unimaginable. The need to long, to desire that which she cannot have, that which has eluded her, because she deceives herself that it was this person, this chance, where she would have found happiness. It would have been this boy, this ordinary boy with his ordinary cruelty, who would have unlocked the key to herself, a self mysterious even to her. The One and there is only ever One so if you missed out, sad for you.
I can see you, red chapped elbows propped up against my pillow, cigarette between lips like a bemused farmhand with his blade of grass.
Have you ever experienced Desire?
She felt ridiculous saying this, like she should be selling herself on
late-night TV.
Their job was to sell, sell, sell. There was no official script, officially. All in the delivery. Forceful, yet knowing when not to push too hard. Tell them whatever they would like to hear. The best salesgirl is a liar. The best salesgirl talks a fast game, and isn’t afraid to switch tactics when it isn’t working. The best salesgirl sizes up the customer and feeds their ego.
would you like to try?
you won’t regret it.
just a second of your time.
you look lovely today.
it’s a lovely scent
a brilliant fragrance
brilliant brilliant
now take a deep breath
let it draw you in
it’s a bit fruity, isn’t it?
flowery
so pretty and so French
musky
peppery