(no subject)
Hedwig tries to pretend, in her own mind, that she's working for the Resistance, but really it feels more like the Stasi. She is charming businessmen out of secrets, which she then turns over to the devil for some unknown purpose--for all she knows there are vast underground storerooms of infernal files on every man, woman and child ever to live.
The cosmology doesn't worry her much, though. What does is the painful awareness that everything about herself, these days, is utterly fake.
But she knows what it means to be a woman.
In her experience, proven again and again in her current line of work, men want either a whore or a mother. With just a few minutes of conversation, she can figure out which one, and that tells her which tactics to use to get to their secrets.
(The men who want a whore want some woman to be impressed by them, to marvel at their endowment both literal and metaphorical. If she acts impressed by danger, turned on by less-than-legal activities, by the horrid ways they have treated other people, they'll think she is one of them, and tell her even more in an effort to get her clothes off. The men who want a mother, on the other hand, may feel some guilt over what they have done, and look to her to comfort them, to tell them that it's all okay, that the guilt they have felt is quite punishment enough and they are absolved from feeling bad about their indiscretions in the future. She isn't sure what group to find more distasteful.)
So there she is, working out of a cabaret in Seattle--another bit of falseness, but the spirit of rock, tawdry bitch that she is, should still not be tarnished by association with this, and anyway the idiom appeals to her. She does not perform her own songs, nor use her own name; she pretends a life that is not her own, having conversations that are not the slightest bit grounded in reality. This body is not hers, and she's not sure her soul is entirely her own either. Only her voice is the same.
Womanhood is an oil slick in a rain puddle, beautiful but poisoned. Womanhood is a sandcastle on the beach, trying not to crumble, dreading the return of the tide. Womanhood is a fly in a spiderweb--
This is what it means to be a woman. All that matters is the surface, so that surface must be a carefully-polished one. Be charming, don't worry about sincerity; but above all, be accomodating, to other women but especially to men. A lady is gracious.
She has never felt more masculine than she does now.
The devil did not ask her to sleep with the men she is sent to investigate, but she tends to anyway. It's closeness, of a sort, and there's no reason for her not to do it--she can't catch anything, and it's not like it could hurt her reputation, and anyway she'd spent so long unable to do much of anything that she figures she is owed it. It's yet another way to be accomodating.
Sometimes her charms work too well; sometimes the men come to see her after she has found out their secrets. Sometimes they bring her gifts, and sometimes those gifts are paid for by embezzlement. She feels a perverse sense of triumph when that happens, as though she'd found some money on the sidewalk and decided not to even try to find its owner.
The man tonight is named Patrick, and he is a thirty-four-year-old executive at a consulting firm that, as far as she can tell, produces nothing measurable but charts. He has plied her with champagne, which she has dutifully pretended to like, and she has gone back to his apartment with him. He seems nice enough, but dull, and his apartment decor radiates the sort of smug irony that has always annoyed her--her trailer had contained cheap furniture and decorations because that was all she could afford, not because the style that year was to look like a church rummage sale circa 1976.
(At first she had tried to find something to dislike about each of her targets, but she hadn't liked how bitter that was making her, so she had switched to plain indifference. It's easier.)
Hedwig knows he is the type who wants a mother, but she will not rush into anything; men need to be handled with a certain amount of delicacy, or they get suspicious. So they drink, or rather he does and she half-pretends to, until he's in the right frame of mind for her to start in with invented stories about her past.
She offers up stories about an older sister and the usual sibling rivalry; wild teenage years and lying to her mother about where she had been the night before; and all the things she'd had to do to get by in New York, as a struggling musician. In return he tells her of mistreatment of a childhood pet; of the lies and smoke-and-mirrors that had gotten him his current job; of a string of infidelities in relationships continuing to this very night, as he has a girlfriend.
So she comforts him, offering him absolution exactly as he needs it. He doesn't cry, which pleases her--she feels guilty when they cry. And when he has fallen asleep, the sound sleep of the drunken and at peace, she dresses again and goes to finish her assignment. There isn't much worth noting in his closet or medicine cabinet, though she finds and photographs some papers of interest in his briefcase, before letting herself out of the building and walking up the block toward a nearby hotel to call for a taxi.
And she knows what it means to be a man.
Generally, she prefers soldiers to businessmen. There's a rawness, a vitality, sometimes a brutality, to men who are intimately aware of the consequences of their actions, rather than men whose work deals solely in numbers and abstractions. But she prefers artists and thinkers most of all: men who think about causes and consequences, connections and hidden truths.
This is what it means to be a man. One must be action rather than thought. It doesn't matter what is done, as long as something is, as long as there is movement. Be the cause of what happens around you, and people will look to you as a leader. Do not admit weakness--a man is strong, and does not need help.
Manhood is a rocky cliff, hiding its cracks and flaws until it suddenly falls. Manhood is a fire burning out of control in the wilderness, threatening to engulf a city. It is the tallest tree in a thunderstorm--
And she is still both.
And she is still neither.
And she is still looking for the Garden.
The cosmology doesn't worry her much, though. What does is the painful awareness that everything about herself, these days, is utterly fake.
But she knows what it means to be a woman.
In her experience, proven again and again in her current line of work, men want either a whore or a mother. With just a few minutes of conversation, she can figure out which one, and that tells her which tactics to use to get to their secrets.
(The men who want a whore want some woman to be impressed by them, to marvel at their endowment both literal and metaphorical. If she acts impressed by danger, turned on by less-than-legal activities, by the horrid ways they have treated other people, they'll think she is one of them, and tell her even more in an effort to get her clothes off. The men who want a mother, on the other hand, may feel some guilt over what they have done, and look to her to comfort them, to tell them that it's all okay, that the guilt they have felt is quite punishment enough and they are absolved from feeling bad about their indiscretions in the future. She isn't sure what group to find more distasteful.)
So there she is, working out of a cabaret in Seattle--another bit of falseness, but the spirit of rock, tawdry bitch that she is, should still not be tarnished by association with this, and anyway the idiom appeals to her. She does not perform her own songs, nor use her own name; she pretends a life that is not her own, having conversations that are not the slightest bit grounded in reality. This body is not hers, and she's not sure her soul is entirely her own either. Only her voice is the same.
Womanhood is an oil slick in a rain puddle, beautiful but poisoned. Womanhood is a sandcastle on the beach, trying not to crumble, dreading the return of the tide. Womanhood is a fly in a spiderweb--
This is what it means to be a woman. All that matters is the surface, so that surface must be a carefully-polished one. Be charming, don't worry about sincerity; but above all, be accomodating, to other women but especially to men. A lady is gracious.
She has never felt more masculine than she does now.
The devil did not ask her to sleep with the men she is sent to investigate, but she tends to anyway. It's closeness, of a sort, and there's no reason for her not to do it--she can't catch anything, and it's not like it could hurt her reputation, and anyway she'd spent so long unable to do much of anything that she figures she is owed it. It's yet another way to be accomodating.
Sometimes her charms work too well; sometimes the men come to see her after she has found out their secrets. Sometimes they bring her gifts, and sometimes those gifts are paid for by embezzlement. She feels a perverse sense of triumph when that happens, as though she'd found some money on the sidewalk and decided not to even try to find its owner.
The man tonight is named Patrick, and he is a thirty-four-year-old executive at a consulting firm that, as far as she can tell, produces nothing measurable but charts. He has plied her with champagne, which she has dutifully pretended to like, and she has gone back to his apartment with him. He seems nice enough, but dull, and his apartment decor radiates the sort of smug irony that has always annoyed her--her trailer had contained cheap furniture and decorations because that was all she could afford, not because the style that year was to look like a church rummage sale circa 1976.
(At first she had tried to find something to dislike about each of her targets, but she hadn't liked how bitter that was making her, so she had switched to plain indifference. It's easier.)
Hedwig knows he is the type who wants a mother, but she will not rush into anything; men need to be handled with a certain amount of delicacy, or they get suspicious. So they drink, or rather he does and she half-pretends to, until he's in the right frame of mind for her to start in with invented stories about her past.
She offers up stories about an older sister and the usual sibling rivalry; wild teenage years and lying to her mother about where she had been the night before; and all the things she'd had to do to get by in New York, as a struggling musician. In return he tells her of mistreatment of a childhood pet; of the lies and smoke-and-mirrors that had gotten him his current job; of a string of infidelities in relationships continuing to this very night, as he has a girlfriend.
So she comforts him, offering him absolution exactly as he needs it. He doesn't cry, which pleases her--she feels guilty when they cry. And when he has fallen asleep, the sound sleep of the drunken and at peace, she dresses again and goes to finish her assignment. There isn't much worth noting in his closet or medicine cabinet, though she finds and photographs some papers of interest in his briefcase, before letting herself out of the building and walking up the block toward a nearby hotel to call for a taxi.
And she knows what it means to be a man.
Generally, she prefers soldiers to businessmen. There's a rawness, a vitality, sometimes a brutality, to men who are intimately aware of the consequences of their actions, rather than men whose work deals solely in numbers and abstractions. But she prefers artists and thinkers most of all: men who think about causes and consequences, connections and hidden truths.
This is what it means to be a man. One must be action rather than thought. It doesn't matter what is done, as long as something is, as long as there is movement. Be the cause of what happens around you, and people will look to you as a leader. Do not admit weakness--a man is strong, and does not need help.
Manhood is a rocky cliff, hiding its cracks and flaws until it suddenly falls. Manhood is a fire burning out of control in the wilderness, threatening to engulf a city. It is the tallest tree in a thunderstorm--
And she is still both.
And she is still neither.
And she is still looking for the Garden.