The Man thinks perhaps sex should come later in the book. Or not at all.
They are all there now. Lacan. Freud. The Holy Father. The Publisher. The Editor. The Boy. M1. O. M2. The Writer too, sitting slightly apart wearing the hunted look of a man who suspects he may be called as a witness and have to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So help me God.
The Man is also worried. He still thinks that sex was innocent. Or rather he thinks it is the one part of his life that was innocent. The bit underneath everything else. Not a symptom. Not a theory. Just pleasure. Warmth. Relief. A body. A room. For a few hours, no need to think.
But the more he thinks about it the less innocent it becomes.
The room at Plac Bankowy appears again. December 2010.
Not as diagnosis. Not yet. Just the room.
The Miners’ Hotel. The curtains. The bed. The smell of old carpet and central heating. The absurdity of the name: the Miners’ Hotel.
There he was.
Waiting.
Always waiting.
The room had become a kind of theatre.
The Man in the room. M somewhere outside it, moving through her real life. The other men perhaps. The life to which he did not belong and which he increasingly suspects he never really wanted to belong to.
Then the text.
I’m coming.
The Boy looks confused.
“Why didn’t we just go to her place?”
No one answers.
Because that was the point. There was no her place. Or rather there was, but not for him.
He was her place.
The room where she could briefly become another version of herself. Desired. Then, coat back on, lipstick reapplied, back into the life from which he had been carefully excluded.
The Man stayed behind in the room afterwards with the chipped glasses, the sad little sink, the carpet and the sheets.
“Romantic,” says the Editor.
“Transactional,” says Lacan.
The Man wants to object because he hates the word. It sounds cheap. A phrase used by men in therapy who say “boundaries” too often.
But there had been a transaction.
He provided the room. The waiting. The admiration. The worship. The body. The certainty that she was desired.
She provided the gaze.
That was the real currency. She looked at him as if he were alive, attractive, dangerous, chosen.
For a while he paid for that look with availability, with secrecy, with humiliation, with endless patience, with texts, with fantasy, with entire days spent in bed thinking.
The Boy looks stricken. “You mean she used us?”
“No,” says the Man quickly. But even as he says it he is unsure.
Because perhaps what she saw in him was not a man exactly. Perhaps she saw a child. A longing, available child with a room and an adult body.
The Editor is horrified.
“You cannot possibly put that in.”
“Why not?”
“Because it makes you sound pathetic.”
“I was pathetic.”
“No,” says the Editor. “You were romantic.”
“Same thing,” says Lacan.
The room becomes more crowded. Because now the sex workers arrive too.
Their rooms.
The Man had always imagined himself there as a little tragic, a little charming. A man who talks too much and wants, absurdly, to be liked.
But what did they see?
Lacan shrugs. “Two hundred and fifty złotys.”
The Editor looks wounded. “Surely a bit more than that.”
One of them once called the Man sweet. Another called him handsome. Another looked at the clock.
He remembers thinking he preferred the ones who lied best. Because that too was a transaction. He gave money. They gave a version of himself back to him.
And the hour ended.
And the room at Plac Bankowy, he realises suddenly, was not entirely different.
Only there he had become the prostitute (sex worker. ed). He was the one waiting in the room. On call. Available.
Paid not in money but in attention, messages, glances, the occasional “I miss you,” the promise that this meant something, that he meant something.
The Boy looks shocked.
The Editor looks fascinated. “This is becoming a book I can sell,” he thinks, now on the phone to the Publisher.
Then, in the next moment, the Man rethinks his position.
No. I am a sex god, he decides.
The room bursts out laughing.
The Boy looks interested.
“So we can do it?”
“You mean by it it? “
“Yeah, it it. You know, IT.”
“I guess yes,” says the Man.
“Then what goes wrong?”
The Man thinks for a long time.
Then he says:
“When you don’t get it.”
“I don’t get it,” the Boy says.
Because the confidence is fragile, the Man says, unusually clearly. “It works beautifully until it is not returned. Then the old panic comes back. The waiting. The fury. The humiliation.”
If she delays replying, he feels ridiculous. If she withdraws, he becomes angry. If she wants him less than he wants her, he turns first into a little boy and then, to conceal the little boy, into a prosecutor.
She is selfish. Cold. Cruel. Manipulative. Snobbish. Performing. Churchy. Impossible.
Perhaps all this is true. But it is also convenient. Because blame is easier than humiliation.
Lacan is delighted.
“Excellent,” he says. “At last.”
“At last what?”
“The aggression.”
The Man looks confused.
Lacan shrugs.
“You wanted to possess her entirely. She would not allow it. So you called her names and made her into Poland.”
The room goes quiet.
Because that is unfair, but true.
The Man thinks of all the times he turned her into a symbol. All to avoid the simpler, more embarrassing fact that he wanted her desperately and she would not quite give herself.
Outside the Miners’ Hotel, the world is doing it too.
The squirrels. The toads. The peacocks even.
Bodies everywhere.
“Even the migrants are having sex in the woods,” says the Editor.
“Steady on,” says the man in cloth.
But he is thinking it too.
The Man thinks of M.
With the husband she was dutiful, he muses. With the church she was good. With the child she was needed. With the Man she could be desired. Admired. Obeyed. Feared a little. Pursued.
Lacan is in the case now.
“M needed to be loved. By several people at once if possible. She needed men who would stay weaker than she was. So she withheld. A little distance. A little mystery. A delayed message. A reproach. A withdrawal.”
“Each absence raised the price. And the Man paid it. With texts. With longing and patience and rage. The rage was part of it too.”
“The more he wanted her, the angrier he became that she remained free. That was what empowered her. Because she needed him to need her more.”
“She was very good at it,” says the Editor.
“She didn’t even know she was doing it,” says the Boy.
“Oh, I think she knew,” says Lacan.
The Man thinks suddenly of M’s prince. Another man arranged around absence.
She had needed him too. The secrecy. The intensity. The certainty that she was special.
Until he withdrew.
Then, perhaps for the first time, she was the one left waiting. The one looking at the phone. The one furious. The one humiliated.
“We all have the fantasy that somewhere, in some room, someone will finally look at us in the right way and the rest of our life will disappear,” Lacan adds.
“Will it?” asks the Boy.
“No,” says the Man.
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