On Craigslist Voyeurism
♠
I
Winter and a love grown lazy make for drowsy desire. Cuddling reigns supreme, the goal is warmth. Needs are milder, more quietly satisfied. It is a time for surreptitious, gentle frolics below covers. Move if you must, but do keep in the warmth.
Not so for me. My ears are ill attuned to the harp, my sleep is more agitated. I know winter as a time for secrets. The special privilege of man: he may walk, fully awake, in the dead world. And so, quite naturally in my opinion, I am an unseasonable man. I drink kirs royales and cook with morels in the slushiest months. I wear turquoise.
Is this a failure of the instincts? I don't see why it must be so—if April is the cruelest month then October is the luckiest. The giddy pangs we feel in fall are nothing more than excitement at a very special privilege. All will die except us, we will sit and observe. The long trek from gatherer to farmer to yuppie has earned man his immunity—as far as winter goes, we are above the law.
Winter gives rise to man's natural voyeurism. A natural thing, I say, and neither the fetish nor the psychological cul-de-sac it is made out to be. As for myself, I am quietly busy in these months. Like some eccentric squirrel, I spend the frigid evenings storing up nuts for the spring - fantasies, phone numbers, jpeg images. Craigslist is my windfallen orchard.
Among Craigslisters I am something of a dilettante. I've met in person only once, and it was a short-lived adventure. My emails are so consistently fictitious that one cannot even say it was I who wrote them. I play one evening an ex-quarterback changing his pace at NYU, another as this or that sort of middle-aged heir. Architects have achieved a sort of gold standard status; their appeal seems universal. I hover and come and go like a sort-of frisky, fawning ghost—hiding myself in mirrors, watching my subjects pucker and preen.
My proclivity is for older women. They are most likely to be on the up and up and their fantasies are robust.
For example, Adrienne. Divorced, Jewish, long, tan and lithe. Adrienne is a realtor. A femme fatale nearly to the point of caricature, all four of her photos are centered around dark, enormous sunglasses. Adrienne gives the notion that were she a suburbanite, she would rule the hearts of the local husbands with cruelty and relish. Here in
Adrienne’s fantasy is professional. She longs, it seems, to make love to a Jewish man as they negotiate the purchase of a summer home, or as documents are signed for a refinancing loan. My first thought was that Adrienne’s desire was more professional than fantasy – a hard thing to discover charmingly. Her response was characteristically light-hearted; the romp would occur in her apartment on
Eight years, eight years since that breathless moment in a movie theater, and she still had not found relief. I asked her how many men she had met. “A few. None even brought a pen, they thought they could bait and switch, that I would be up for anything, or that I was a hooker. You can tell immediately when they don’t get it.” She signaled her laughter. “So, what’s your equity going to look like come April?”
Ah, what a scene! What an afternoon it could be! I would smile and save the emails and wander off with my thoughts. There in the living room, my girlfriend pestering the cat nearby, it was a sharp windblown night – cocoons within cocoons.
The types of posts were manifold, some immeasurably vulgar, many fake, others heartbreaking. Then there were the lapis lazuli, those that were typed over days and days and showed the labor. Utterances of fantasies held mum for years, decades, perhaps since the first burgeoning of erotic thought. Yet here they were dangling like so many lures, waiting for reality’s terrible fish to rise up from the inky deep.
There were 50-year-old women in search of daddies, and policewomen who sought ex-cons. The prevailing rule was that of inverted power structures, the sweet surrender to the loathed, other side. Older, tiny Asian ladies sought sissy boys to dominate, the taller and whiter the better. Young black women seemed the most democratic in their lust, often listing emotional attributes alone. Gay boys sought straight middle-agers, and a mature woman in search of a boy-toy could survey an entire Grecian phalanx, hopping over each other in guttural display. I would know.
But none of these, and I do mean none, compared to Vanessa. She of the kind heart and crystalline kink, the same who placed this wonder before the collective eyes of the world two Thursdays past:
Envision: A tall, slim, pretty brunette, her perfectly round rump spread eagled at the foot of your bed. The Miu-Miu handbag sits in tissue near the pillow. She grips the sheets with her hands and a stray tear escapes her eye as she gasps and moans. "Look at it," you say, "Look at it you little slut. Is it pretty? Do you like it? You little whore." You're forcing your average cock deep in her ass, roughly. It's really tight. You grab her hair and pull back and tell her to beg for everything; the bag, your cock, as you come all over her face and tongue. She sobs, and does.”
This sort of thing, while viscerally arresting, is not really to my taste. Pynchon’s orgies and Calvino’s Japanese interlude had sent me to private rooms more quickly. But nothing on this earth is more erotic than verisimilitude, and this was no mere erotica: it was a proposal. Already I had emailed the text to myself under the heading “dear lord.” I lilted over the perfect detail of the tissue paper. The bag still sat on the bed, perfuming the room with the scent of dearly wrought leather—she had not even finished opening it! This young lady had used the word ‘slut’ and a proper semicolon in the same paragraph. But it was not until the end of the message that I felt the need to contact her.
Variations are possible. I've never been violently fucked with a roll of 20s shoved in my mouth.
So. Me; pretty, normal seeming, smart, dinner party material. I’m ethical, friendly, the works. I’m a vegetarian, I do volunteer work, read NYRB, etc. The more degraded you can make me feel the wetter I'll be. You will be tall, of a decent build, and write well. I cannot fuck a man who cannot write well.
—V
My head shot back over my shoulder: my girlfriend had lapsed into bed and the television was on. Was I being had? Could it be her? Retribution for my ill-favored habit? How much could she know? The post had been written midday, so the odds were in my favor. I responded.
Vanessa was true to her word. Her pictures revealed a beautiful girl—bright-eyed with a wide, white smile. She was far more eloquent than her populist post had let on, and she wooed my better angels with talk of the ethical divide between fantasy and action. That good people like us suffocated upon our desire for the subversive, how wonderful her mother and father were, how immaterialistic her upbringing had been. “I don’t want to build a second life,” she said. “I want a safe place to crush the things that I live for, and I want to cum as a result. I want it once. Then we will see.”
We had read the same books, and had the same reservations, similar anxieties, and similar boasts. I was in trouble. My ghost was taking on flesh, and a passion was quickly ensuing. I took down her phone number and stored it under the letter V. The wind howling outside felt closer, more articulate. My girlfriend had fallen asleep.
II
The morning passed with brazen speed, the subway ride was an affair of a moment. I perspired profusely into my winter parka. How would I get through the day? The emails alone would kill me. My officemate would ponder over my trembling fingers. I would sip water constantly and pee twice an hour. It was the most terrible sort of balmy, lust-curdled day. My lungs quivered, I sweat and shook, and I missed the interval of a long walk signal.
The brick fell 275 feet, and had achieved, to my estimate, a velocity of nearly 150 miles per hour before it crushed the hood of a town car. I was 20 feet away. A gush of electric blood cleared me of all gumption and I dropped my cell phone mid-street. Only a few others had stopped and I stood there, stammering at them. It was the construction, moron. I scooped up the phone and scurried underneath an awning.
I was of one thought as I stared at the thing in my hand. That would’ve been me. That would’ve been the evidence of what I was, what my last thoughts had been. That, and my computer. I had left no journals, no photographs. There it was. How terrible, what a lie! Oblivion! It was undeniably, completely, chock-full of Vanessa.
Shaking, noticing for the first time that spring had arrived, I removed my coat. My finger clicked the cursor down to V, and then to erase. I would be a seasonal man.
—AFR