Slouching Towards Dicklehem by Katharine Coldiron

We are all laughing about something when he comes over to us. He is drunk, drink in hand. He slurs and grins. —Hey there, ladies!

We stare at him silently. I hope that, working together, we can set him on fire with our minds.

—Whatchoo up to in there?

Actually, we’re kind of busy in here, I say.

—Hey, you know what? You know what? He touches Marissa’s leg to get her attention.

Excuse me, says Anna. Excuse me. No touching allowed. You don’t get to touch her.

—What?

You’re not allowed to touch her.

He pauses for a moment. Jeans. Ratty t-shirt. Hair like broken chaff. Then he flaps a hand at us and stumbles off.

Then he tosses a hand at us.

Then he waves a hand at us.

What he does is dismissive. Fuck it. Hell with you. You’re not worth chatting up. You’re not worth my precious time.

Dismissive to us.

We laugh at him. We laugh, with each other, at him.

We are all four of us in a circular waterbed with an exterior shaped like a strange sea creature – red and metal. Something we have determined is the inside of a vagina. Were we stuffed in like Jazz Agers in a phone booth, we could probably fit six or eight of us in here. Round waterbeds inside vaginal sea creatures: this is actually true. On a rooftop in Los Angeles. A Brutalist plinth of a structure called the Standard (except “Standard” is upside down on the hotel’s signage). Which is as funny as whatever we were laughing about before the drunk tried to get our attention, because if anything, the hotel is standard, it is heterosexual to the utmost, it is not variable in any detail from The Way That Things Should Be.

Slip it in, say the keycards.

The hallway is sheer Kubrick. Red and narrow, like a throat.

He flaps a hand at us. Because we are not worth his time.

I imagine his mental process. I imagine him deciding to walk up to us, hoping to…what? What was his purpose? What did he want from us? To interrupt our fun? To draw some of our laughter onto himself? To interact with us, merely? To sleep with us?

I know he wanted our attention. I know he did. But he determined that we were not worth it when we asked him not to touch us. When we set boundaries with him.

He did not comprehend that we dismissed him before he even came up to us. We are married, all four of us. We are happily married. Even if we were not, we are currently, just for now, married to each other. We are here alone together; we are not here for the rooftop. We do not need male attention to be whole.

We do not need male attention to be whole.

§

There are no box springs. The mattresses lie directly on the floor. Both mattresses rest on a raised dais; the theme of this place (aside from the obvious one) could easily be “varying levels.” (The sofas in the lobby are tri-level. One of the levels is at my shoulder; another at my calf. A man lounges on the top level, while a woman sits at the edge of the lowest, gazing at her phone, her body folded on itself.)

The mattresses offer surprising comfort. In the scratchy wool blanket is woven a pithy, insincere statement: “All people are multidimensional.” This is not something anyone could have comprehended from the hotel itself, without it literally being a readable message.

All people are multidimensional. Breasts feature prominently in a four-part mural in the lobby. Everyone we saw coming in was beautifully dressed, and all of them seemed to be thin, handsome men looking over the tops of our heads. The edges of their garments were sharp and colorful. Their shoes vintage-new.

All people are multidimensional. Unless they are women. Then they are two-tone cutouts of secondary sexual characteristics plastered on murals in the lobby.

The shower is a glass cubicle with no curtain at all. The toilet sits in its own oblong room, and the rolls of paper are stickered closed. The stickers depict a human figure shitting on the ground in a small heap. Because toilet paper is not used for peeing by anyone the Standard has ever considered in its room design.

It’s a fuck-room. The mattresses on the floor mean a soft landing for a woman’s knees. The shower means free access, free gazing. The decals on the wall offer something for fuckees to look at.

I play Beyoncé in the room, tinny from my phone, just to push back against the energy. It seems to work, a little.

§

Actual science has dictated that babies do not like the color yellow. It makes them cry more than other colors do.

In the restaurant, the menus are covered either by men’s faces or the heads of dogs. A chihuahua dominates the dessert menu. The men look very happy, or surprised. The dogs look like dogs.

The waiter has a gorgeous, near-spherical ass. He is the epitome of bubble-butted. (I find it possible that he’s wearing a prosthesis.) He has tiny diamond earrings and milk chocolate skin and is as rude, careless, and snobby as a French waiter in a bad rom-com. He asks us if we want drinks and then looks out the window, at nothing, at empty tables on a concrete patio, while we answer. He looks at Kelly as if she has two heads when she asks for sparkling water with lemon in a wine glass. He all but laughs at me when I ask for a large glass of water rather than the child-size tumblers we are given. —A large glass? he repeats, and points to a cluster of thin tumblers behind the bar. —That’s the largest glass we have.

Our requests may not be ordinary, but they are not alien, and we are in a fancy hotel in downtown Los Angeles so I have my doubts that they are the weirdest he’s ever heard. Showbiz people are picky and eccentric. No matter how weird the desire, no one deserves to be ridiculed for requesting what she wants.

But we are all women.

We are all wives.

We are not surprised or happy men, and we are not dogs.

At first, discomfort about the waiter settles, palpable, around the table. Let’s go somewhere else is in Marissa’s mind, so strong I can hear it when I look at her forehead. But I am not willing. I want to piss in the snow next to this waiter, and see who can write the longest name. (I have four names. Two of my mother’s, one of my father’s, and one of my husband’s. They all belong to me now, and I will not ignore them because of this restaurant’s tableware. I want a large glass. I will fill up my bladder and I will write.)

I attempt to convince the wives that this is an adventure. That the waiter and the situation are actually hilarious, not hostile, and that we should see how far this goes. That we should be sly and play tricks. What would Solnit do? Before long, the spirit has spread, and we giggle like girls. The garden salad, but please separate the greens by size. I’ll have the primavera risotto, but I want it served cold. Three of us decide we want the Skuna Bay salmon, and Anna says we should order it one after the other, using the same words, with no expression and no acknowledgment that all three of us are getting the same meal.

I’ll have the Skuna Bay salmon, please, Anna says.

I’ll have the Skuna Bay salmon, please, I say.

I’ll have the Skuna Bay salmon, please, Marissa says.

For some reason this, and this alone, unseats the waiter from his high chair. He nods and listens to us and meets our eyes. —All right, two of the salmon. All right, three of you. Right, okay. Um, do you–do you want any sides?

The food is fine. Unexceptionally tasty. I ask for refills on my water.

People begin to filter in for early dinners. Virtually no sound-absorbing elements (carpet, acoustic tile, soft wall hangings) have been installed, so even a small amount of people-noise redounds and makes it difficult for me to understand the woman sitting farthest from me. The noise is amplified somehow by the decor in the restaurant. The tables are yellow. The chairs are yellow. The walls are yellow. The floor is yellow. The lamps are yellow. The bar is yellow. The barstools are yellow. The counters are yellow. The doors are yellow. Silver and white have been used (stingily) as contrast colors, but the entire room roars YELLOW as loudly as an F-16. This, too, is true.

Yellow on yellow on yellow on yellow. Mothers are not welcome here, because their babies will cry.

I ogle the waiter’s spherical ass while he runs our credit cards at the station a few yards away. Despite how much fun we have slurped out of it, this restaurant is repugnant, and I can’t wait to leave. I don’t even want to stay for drinks. I want to gather my wives and run as far away as I can, horizontally or vertically, from this yellow disaster.

So we go to the rooftop. At the elevator, Marissa and Anna have to show their keycards to a breathing cliché, a burly security guy shifting from foot to foot. He eyes us. We have just been through a long day at the convention center with 12,000 other humans. My eyeliner is probably completely gone, three of us carry book-laden tote bags, and we appear not to have even heard of club clothes. There is nothing Standard about us.

—Have a good night, he says, and lets all of us up. I wonder if he would simply have nodded if a man – one of the clean, beautiful, shark-eyed men in the lobby – escorted us in.

§

The woman on the roof dances like the women do in every music video any of us has ever seen. She is sexy, uninhibited. The dress she wears is black and strapless – or it’s got spaghetti straps in a complex configuration across her back, I don’t remember perfectly – but it’s definitely long, and she pulls it up and lets it fall strategically as she dances. She is not sober. Her very pores emit desperation. She dances across to the high edge of the roof and begins to boogie downward with open knees, her mouth ajar, her hair flashing across her face. Fuck me, she shouts with her body. Notice me. Fuck me notice me fuck me notice me fuck me.

One of the wives accompanying me in this terrible place dances for a few moments when the uninspired DJ plays a fair beat. Her body is not displayed like the dancing woman’s; she dances for her own pleasure. She squats and throws her head back and kicks and dives back into the vagina waterbed, and when her face is turned away, one of the men on the dance floor points to her, his mouth open in “Hey!” pleasure.

The Medusa in me rears up. Don’t you look at her that way. Don’t you dare. She is my wife, and she is her own creature, and your eyes cheapen her, lessen her, even when she doesn’t see you looking. Her body is not for you to point at, to enjoy, whether you find her funny or sexy or pathetic or bold or X. You’re not allowed to touch her.

My wife is multidimensional. She is a mother and a sex fiend. She is a body and a soul. She is a vast red beating heart, a fist of blood and air and water. She is an appetite for sin and substance.

She does not belong to you.

We stay in the vagina waterbed for well over an hour, I think, watching night descend across the skyscrapers, playing Douchebag Bingo with the people standing around drinking. We check our phones and take pictures and chat and laugh. And people never, never, never stop coming up to our sea creature to talk to us. —Come and dance. —Whatchoo up to in there?  —Heyyyy! How do you like the view? We push them off, politely or kindly or with stony silence or with conversation that is a house of mirrors. But they do not leave us alone.

What is so fascinating about us? I ask Anna.

Probably it’s our indifference, she replies.

This is the exchange that lingers in my mind for weeks, months: her tone, her lovely eyes, one of her artisan’s hands holding her phone and the other cradling her cheek, the background noise of the crap DJ and the men growling across their beers.

I didn’t mean to imply that we are not fascinating. We are. To each other, and to our husbands, and to our loved ones. But, as the security guard noted with his eyes, we are not Standard material. My skirt has velociraptors on it and the hem is coming loose, and my bra straps show. Anna is 47 and makeup-free. Marissa, her hair all messy, has the most stunning and eloquent bitch face I’ve ever seen, and no ability to hide it. Morgan is visibly uninterested in the rooftop scene.

Probably it’s our indifference.

It is not just that we are women who have all come into our own lives, our own bodies. It is not just that we are untouched by the same pheromones of desperation slathering most of the bodies in DTLA. It is not just that we are awake enough to know a male-designed fuck-room when we see it, or savvy enough to know a condescending dick when he asks us what we want to drink, or female enough to understand that this hotel, this entire structure, is wrong, in a fundamental, unsettling, hysterically funny way.

It is that we are indifferent. The plinth does not frighten us.

Later, when I consider this evening, I imagine the earth under Los Angeles as a living body. It breathes with the art poured into it, sinks under a century of raw, heavy ambition, rises with the sun across the San Gabriels. It shifts with singular tectonic rhythm, threatening us with destruction dreamed only by the ancients (and Irwin Allen). I imagine a creature something like the Sarlacc, from Return of the Jedi, but long and wide instead of circular, and much larger. I imagine it like a vagina dentata.

I imagine this creature rising from the earth on doomsday, or tomorrow night, while the Saturday crowd gyrates mercilessly on the roof of the Standard Hotel, and I imagine it consuming the plinth in one smooth motion. The music fails. The sea creatures bob and float. The security guards choke and sputter, breathless.

I imagine the plinth deflating, shrinking, hiding within the earth. I imagine the desperate dancing woman looking up at the pink mottled dome that now surrounds her. I imagine her blinking the film from her eyes, lifting her fist like Wonder Woman, and shooting up through the flesh to join us. We, indifferent, outside the maw and dancing for ourselves. We four wives. We women.

Katharine Coldiron‘s work has appeared in Ms., the Rumpus, the Collagist, Entropy, and elsewhere. She lives in California and blogs at the Fictator.