Look At Me

By Lauren Porosoff Mitchell

1. Intelligent, lyrical and frankly sexual, this first novel by a young woman lawyer speaks to her generation about the clash between easy sexuality and the yearning for emotional fulfillment. 2. Its use of magic realism in a contemporary urban setting evokes a young Alice Hoffman. 3. Illuminates the world of MTV generation women for those generations whose whose lives are dissimilar but whose needs are the same. 4. First novel by a brilliant twenty four year-old talent. --Compare to A Girls Guide to Fishing and Hunting

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leapfrog Press
• Release date: Aug 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781935248590

Book preview

Look At Me

A Novel By

Lauren Porosoff

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Leapfrog Press

Fredonia, New York

Look At Me © 2000 by Lauren Porosoff

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a data base or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in 2000 in the United States by

The Leapfrog Press

PO Box 505

Fredonia, NY 14063

www.leapfrogpress.com

Distributed in the United States by

Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

St. Paul, Minnesota 55114

First Edition

The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead,

is coincidental and not intended by the author.

E-ISBN: 978-1-935248-59-0

Contents

A Note of Introduction

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

Acknowledgements

The Author

A Note of Introduction

We began Leapfrog Press with the idea of publishing out-of-print favorites as well as new works by established writers and those just starting out. While we’ve covered each category in the few short years we’ve been in business, it was with some surprise that the category we included last, and which we assumed we’d publish the least of, has given us so much pleasure to produce. Publishing [e-mail] by Arne Tangherlini, seemed to open the floodgates to an outpouring of new submissions by first novelists that we could not ignore and which has become an exciting direction for Leapfrog, one in which we’ll be introducing bright new talent.

Look At Me is a fresh, edgy, sexy first novel by a young woman still in law school. It is a frank story of promiscuity, of the clash and intermingling of sex and love, of the struggle with and acceptance of family legacy.

The style moves from the matter-of-fact to magic realism as Lauren Porosoff explores the adventures and the mind of her protagonist, Dana.

Dana’s childhood is evoked for us, her loving and charismatic mother with some of the powers of a witch, and her father, the super rational scientist. Her parents had a passionate marriage abruptly broken by the mother’s death far too young. Dana is caught between the different pulls of her mother and her father. She is a geneticist, a scientist like her father, but her life outside of work is far from rational and controlled, and far from the warm nurturing atmosphere her mother created. As Dana puts it, a man of science wedded to a sorceress—what kind of daughter indeed can issue from such a mixed heritage?

Since childhood, sex for Dana is as much a matter of control as pleasure—her ability to pull men toward her as her mother could pull objects through the air and her ability to dismiss them when the brief adventure is completed to her satisfaction. She is comfortable with the ‘slut’ side of her nature, but less so with her own desire for love. Love frightens her unless she can build it into a myth she controls. She has a compulsion to prove her ability to attract, again and again, but the objects of her conquest lose their own desirability quickly.

This is an odyssey through Washington D.C., through clubs and coffee houses, through bookstores and airports, through actual and imaginary flying, through drugs and the mornings-after of a young woman trying to understand her past and her present and to grapple with the contradictory urges and needs she finds in herself and acts out.

Since childhood, Dana has felt herself a sort of freak who could not easily make friends with other women or with men. She has used sex to grab attention and to relieve her loneliness while leaving it intact afterward. As a woman scientist, as a sexual aggressor, as someone without emotional ties, she finds herself still as much an outsider as the little girl whose imagination took her into other realities when school bored her.

After all the faceless men who service her for a night and whom she expels with a well-worked out routine in the morning, she meets two who compel her attention, whom she cannot dismiss: Jonas, the married astronomer from San Francisco she meets on a plane and cannot forget; and Iain, a photographer with a cocaine addiction and dangerous lifestyle, but a man of great compassion and tenderness. Afraid of his gentleness and accessibility, Dana keeps him at arm’s length, sorting through the tensions and pleasures of measured friendship while she pursues Jonas and the memory of an extraordinary night in an observatory where she could not remain the detached observer and indeed saw stars.

Dana is a contemporary young woman, at home with her sexuality but at odds with her emotions. Her quest will strike a chord with many her age who are struggling to understand their own identities and desires. Look At Me will also illuminate the lives of young people for those of generations whose lives were dissimilar but whose needs were not. It is a striking first novel I was delighted to pull out of all the unsolicited manuscripts that arrive at our press daily. Lauren Porosoff is indeed a talent to watch.

—Marge Piercy

ONE

I brought another one home tonight. This one had a small birthmark behind his left earlobe and cool skin that smelled of coconut milk and lemon leaves. I catalogue them this way, by the most minor of their physical details, because otherwise they are not prone to distinction. The drink is always the same; though the color varies from pink to clear to amber, its effects are consistent. It convinces him that he is the one luring me away from the bar to a more private place—my bedroom, with its bare walls and white bed, antiseptic as a hospital and well-trafficked as Union Station. But private, yes. The walls of my apartment are insulated, so when I get on top and ride one of the men my neighbors don’t hear. I am screaming, grunting. Sweating as my body rhythmically contracts. I rip pleasure out of them, one at a time, evening by evening. And by day I ignore the oily feel of them that does not wash off.

Sometimes I am drunk, and I awaken with a headache to find one of them asleep in my bed, his hair daubed in sweaty clumps to his face. Then I rise from my bed and sit at my laptop in the next room, typing in the dark until the sky bleeds vermilion. It is this light or the clicking keys that wake him; I do not know which. He sees me like that, writing in the morning light, spread out naked with one foot up on either corner of the desk, and I watch as the shame passes through his body. He goes soft. He feels he has violated me somehow, that he has transgressed some essential privacy. I observe with interest as he considers his own voyeurism, and I think every time it is silly, he probably still has the taste of me in his mouth. And yet he is afraid, inadequate, discovering me like this in the dying dark. He puts on his smoke-stinking jeans and sweat-damp polo shirt. He stumbles putting on his expensive sneakers that were flung in the entryway the night before. All the time I watch him. I don’t stop watching until he half-kisses me and leaves and shuts the door softly behind him. Only then do I delete the page of Os and Js and ampersands and percent symbols, make pancakes, and start my work.

As children, we hide under the blanket and the monsters are gone. From the outside, what is visible is a safe heap of comforter, smooth and placid, hiding the child tiny and quivering inside. Night by night we convince ourselves that there are no monsters, until we can sleep serene in our knowledge that we are safe. Pretend we are protected, and the protection becomes real. The monsters cannot hurt you anymore because you deny their power.

There are no monsters, you say? But it is not an act of convincing ourselves that they are false but of enlightening ourselves that they are products of our minds: controllable, secured, innocuous, yes, but only by virtue of being real.

One Saturday afternoon, when I was fifteen, an older boy from school called me and asked if I wanted to go out. The trees were woven into pale budded webs against a peacock blue sky, the lakes rippled with wind, and I was exuberant in a new skirt and too much lipstick. The boy picked me up in his deteriorating station wagon, drove around for a while listening to his music, then pulled up in front of our school and asked if I wanted to walk around. He took me into the woods behind the school and inserted his crude dirty fingers into my vagina. Then he hoisted me up and fucked me against a big rock that felt rough against my young ass and for days after I had scratches and bruises and I avoided him in the school hallways. Two weeks later one of his best friends called me in the middle of the night and asked me to meet him behind his house and suck his cock. But these boys, these imbecilic boys with their hormones and superiority complexes and competitive inclinations, were unable to see the naked, intractable, and wily girl who seemed ready to pleasure them. Naked I was most beautiful, but they never saw me. They never once looked for what lived in the contours they loved to grope. They saw something, some gathering of shapes and light, but it was not my body. They felt something, time after time, thinking it was my body. But it was not.

So you see, the monsters are real.

Now I wake up, often in a bed damp with the juices of angry lust. I pretend to write until my interloper flees. I make breakfast, write furious words until it is time to go to the science tower at the university and analyze usually flawed genetic material and squelch the hopes of optimistic parents-to-be. I go home, go to the bar, choose another candidate to take home and screw. Sundays I spend in solitude.

Our senses are endlessly deceptive. The visible spectrum of light wavelengths, for example, goes from violet to red, or from 400 to 750 nanometers. We have the words infrared and ultraviolet to describe colors we cannot see, and beyond those we have trouble imagining what other colors might look like if we could see them. And even with this very limited range of vision, we focus, project, stabilize, and otherwise distort the image, which is saying nothing of how the brain reinterprets it to become something else entirely, a fish into a flower. And we have words, fish or flower trying to describe this cocktail of images we sense, certain that we see not many things but one, not a gathering of light but a meaningful organism. A child sniffs a peony and says, Pretty pink flower. Perhaps this is all we are capable of understanding.

We group the world; we like to reduce it to its lowest terms. We swallow it, one tablet of information at a time, rewarded for this effort by seeing a coherent world and one logical line through space-time. And even the psychologists, physicists and poets who are vaguely aware of what exists beyond these parameters can get up, get dressed and have breakfast in the morning without being stunned by the proliferation of brightness.

And certain forms of madness involve not being able to think straight. We are used to the one line; we call it by reassuring names like sobriety and sanity. Those who feel the weight of its limits try hallucinogenic drugs to experience the world beyond this line, but really these worlds they conjure are only a different distortion. We taste the real world, oddly enough, only in faint, almost imperceptible brushes with imagination. And if you look at it with your eyes, it vanishes like an afterimage or a ghost.

I would like to be able to tell you to trust me, but this is my version of the story. And while I know now that he was not one of my characters, I warn you that I have never learned to convey what is real, that even if I experienced him as real, I extrude something else, and again you see it differently. So do not trust me but listen anyway. It began on a train.

So? Are you the devil incarnate?

He has been leaning casually on a kiosk at the metro. I have been watching him, trying to be discreet. He steps onto the red line train with the grace of a glittering Pavlova, sits red-eyed in the first row. The train is empty. From the wide selection of seats, I choose the one perpendicular to his, so that when I cross my legs and my long black dress slides up to my thigh, the bare white skin almost touches him.

What? He is hazy, but his ice-blue eyes have been fixed on me, though he has been trying not to allow me to notice. The hot breath of the train saturates the subway car as its doors open for the next station.

It may be that he has been crying, hard, all day, but I suspect drugs. Marijuana probably, maybe even cocaine. His body is air-spun, made of nothing, and to cover this wispy presence, he is wearing thin fraying jeans and a shirt printed with Sanskrit letters and a hammered metal necklace, on which is mounted a tiny paper bearing the words that are the subject of my inquiry.

Your necklace. It says ‘the devil incarnate.’ Are you? I am being more flirtatious now. From my inventory of voices I have selected the quiet one with a provisional innocence veiling what I know they know is a lurid interior.

Oh, and he fidgets with the pendant. My friend made this for me. She sells jewelry at the Eastern Market. I work there too, some weekends. Sundays.

I can’t believe I’ve never noticed you. I go to the Market sometimes.

The small talk that ensues is not important. By definition, it is small. What is important is the way he stares at me with huge, blue, bloodshot eyes. The way I cross and re-cross my legs,