Fucking Daphne by Daphne Gottlieb Page B

those hazy eyes almost out of focus, like she’s some unearthly creature, or like she’s seeing stuff the rest of us don’t see, or looking above us somehow. Maybe she’s finding metaphors everywhere, plucking them out of the air, consuming them and rolling them around on her palate and thinking them over— considering them. Maybe that’s what poets do, and she’s the kind of big-shot writer who’s just kind of writing all the time, even when she’s just walking around or buying a forty-ouncer at the corner store or hanging out or whatever. Like her body’s on autopilot and her mind is roaming free and crazy in all these special, fancy writerly places normal people can’t get to, and the way she seems so absent—even when she’s present—makes me want to smack her in the face really hard, to get her to really look at me.

    Because I’m real. I’m not some dumb fucking metaphor. I’m real. If I hit her, she’d look me in the face and really see me, I think.

    I know it’s wrong to talk about hitting women. I’m sorry. I think at this point I should probably warn you that I’m a very bad person, a hitter of women—well, I’ve never done that for real, but I think about it all the time. Hitting girls; making them cry.
    And if that’s going to bug you, or if you’re gonna get mad about it, thinking I’m encouraging abuse or whatever, I think it would probably be best if you just skipped the rest of this story.
    I’m sorry. I know it’s bad.

    What you should know about my hometown is this: Seattle is small, and you meet the same people over and over again, in the same places. If you fuck someone, odds are you’re gonna be fucking her ex next week. It’s gross and it makes you want to keep your junk in your pants, because hauling your shit out and trying to fuck someone always turns out to be an exercise in embarrassment when you find out the person you’re backing up against the wall is best friends with your ex-girlfriend and you know they’re gonna be giggling about it the next day. New girls in town always get mad play because they’re fresh meat and they haven’t accumulated the kind of body count you get just by leaving the house, or going on a few dates, or whatever. This town makes me sick like that sometimes.

    And I hear San Francisco—Daphne’s town—is the same.
    If you fuck too many girls in Seattle, you can drop down to S.F. for a while and screw around there, where you’re new goods. And S.F. girlies come up to Seattle for the same reasons—to distance themselves from their own indiscretions and bad decisions; to be fresh and desired and without baggage, no matter how many times they’ve skipped around the block back home. But word gets around if you pull that shit too many times, flipping back and forth and trying to reinvent yourself as someone New and Mysterious each time. Word always gets around, because the one thing girls do is gossip.
    Even girls who fuck each other. Especially those girls.

    So yeah, there’s that BACK IN FIVE MINUTES look in Daphne’s eyes—a sign hung out that makes her head a private space, a members-only club that you’re not invited into—and that’s frustrating.
    And everyone talks talks talks about Daphne’s height, and her long hair, and her tattoos, and they make it sound like she’s some kind of swashbuckling superdyke, like she Strides into the Room with her clumpy hair all flying out behind her, wearing big boots that stomp, and she kind of sucks all the oxygen out of the room because she’s such a bright candle, burning so hard and fierce with the force of her own brilliance and charisma.
    My feeling is that the hotness of Daphne Gottlieb isn’t that she’s tall, or that she’s got some ink on her arms, or her long hair, or anything like that. I think the hotness of Daphne is