The Devil Tree by Jerzy Kosinski

like the next,” she said. “At dinner, whatever man I was with would help himself to the food first and talk too loudly. Then he would suggest that I have champagne with him on his boat. I would smile sweetly and say, Tine, but I’m not going to bed with you.’ I hate slick seduction scenes. In East Hampton, I drank iced mint tea, ate sherbet, and smoked hash. Finally, one summer, I ran into Sean, a handsomeson of a bitch whose teeth were so white they seemed to emit light. When Sean smiled, people put on their sunglasses. And everything else about him was just as perfect, just as beautiful—and I fell for that Moby Dick of the bedroom. I’m such a sucker for good looks—they symbolize life and health and love for me. Only in my erotic fantasies am I sodomized by vile old men who do to me what nobody else would dare.
    “On the back of the photograph of himself that he gave me he wrote, ‘Sean, age 27, no makeup, naturally perfect powermaster.’ The naturally perfect powermaster had grown up in a shack in West Virginia. His family didn’t have an indoor toilet until he was eighteen. At nineteen he left home, which broke his father’s heart. When he was twenty-two he had an affair with a fifty-one-year-old nurse. There was nothing about healthy or unhealthy sex that she didn’t know. She was a nympho and a swinger who liked it all, making up in bed for what she lacked otherwise, but eventually she wised up and decided to settle down with a well-to-do man who wanted to marry her. This left Sean with nobody to fuck or live with. Except, that is, his older sister, whom he liked a lot but who was married. He moved in with her and her husband, but after a week or so the sister’s husband threw him out. According to Sean, the husband wanted to make it with him, but Sean refused to betray his sister. The truth was that Sean was too perfect to be just an ordinary heterosexual, and he hoped to draw the husband into an arrangement that would provide him with a home and meals, but the husband didn’t fall for it. That left Sean on his own again, forced to rely on his good looks, even though he was convinced that it was his prick that helped him to survive.
    “He once said to me, ‘Let’s face it. I may not be too smart, but I’m the best goddamn fuck this side of the Mississippi. My prick is above average, and in the sack so amI.”’ Then Karen got down to what she really wanted to tell me: “Not only his looks, but his direct approach really worked with me. I always want to give in when a man convinces me he’ll do whatever he wants with me. I guess I don’t like men who treat me with restraint. They make me feel slowed down, and then I blame myself for slowing them down. Just before you got back I had a date with a guy who was superliberated. He kept moaning about how sad it was that men depersonalize women and make them into playthings. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I told him, ‘I can’t help it if I don’t turn you on. Just tell me if I don’t, but if I do, for God’s sake don’t give me all this crap. Just take me to bed.’” She paused. “When you first went away, Jonathan, I wondered whether or not I should screw around and if I could actually get myself to do it. I knew I was vulnerable, so I tried to be cautious and rational. I’d heard about women getting fucked over by sex without love. After a few affairs, I tried to avoid having sex altogether because it drained me. I used to worry about being promiscuous, or becoming that poor moron of a woman I once portrayed in a medical advertisement captioned, ‘Can a woman who’s unhappy with one contraceptive find happiness with another?’ How many men am I attracted to each year? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? Eventually I might choose only three or four. When I’m attracted to a man, I say to myself: I like him, I desire him. I imagine getting laid, the touch of his skin and his muscles; I imagine breathing his breath and feeling him inside me.