“It means I could never be a model.”

“What?” I had been investigating the shoes of the girl on the walk ahead of us. They were the kind of absurd affair one sees and recalls that the modern stiletto was invented by a man.

“One of my eyes, it turns down in the corner like a cat’s. It makes my face kind of asymmetric.”
“Tragic.”

The girl swayed, and I counted the seconds before she righted herself. Through the last hint of an already-sunk autumn sun pealed a chorus of male laughter.

“Stop guys,” she said with the affected lisp of the absurdly feminine. “Ohmygod stop.”

“Yeah, when you look at a model they aren’t necessarily always pretty. It’s just that their faces are so balanced.” Leah pulled out her cigarettes while I counted.

One-one-thousand. Two-one-thousand. “In that case I’m f***ed,” I replied. “One of my eyes is smaller than the other.”

“Well that’s true anyways because you’re short.”

“I already knew that.” B****. “Anyways, I have no interest in having a career being an object.”
“Oh please.” She rolled her eyes.

Three-one-thousand.

“It’s true.” But it isn’t. The truth is I’ve never told the truth about anything important or trivial in my life. Which basically amounts to I’ve never told something that wasn’t at least partially a lie. I used to do this thing where I would steal the pencil, say, or the hand cream of the girl next to me in school. Just right out of her desk when she wasn’t looking. Just because I thought that it was better than mine. It wasn’t, but neither was that the point. The point was that I couldn’t have it; therefore I had to have it. Even if it meant having the damn thing in secret. Pushed up between the pages of my math book until, eventually, I would forget it ever existed. That’s how I knew I would be the type of woman—the ideal woman—to do what I do. I could break a marriage and carry that fact around with me like a pencil or a bottle of hand cream. Put it down and forget about it.

Leah coughed. “They’re not objects. To be an object you have to be sexy, and please illuminate for me a universe in which a freakishly centered nose and no ass equates to sexiness.”

I chose not to reply. Simply nodded to the girl in front of us and the inverse relationship between the height of her shoes and the length of her skirt. One of her companions had his hand draped around her shoulders.
“It’s because you’re single you see it that way.” Now I was the one being cruel.

“Maybe I enjoy being single.”
“Don’t lie.”

The official 18th century answer to the question of the female libido was termed hysteria. Chinese men bound their daughters’ feet so they couldn’t run away from their future husbands. The first marketable form of birth control was a pill about the size of a horse tranquilizer. Two years out of grad school and I’d never f***ed a stranger on a whim. This seemed to be the first essential step as I recalled increasingly distant female sexuality classes, centered on the works of American expatriates and mustachioed recluses. This thing called life, said stunted Chinese women to Sylvia Plath, only comes around the one time. And so I did. The distant friend of a friend, and at the end of the night when he offered me a roll of bills for the cab home I took it without counting. Four blocks from my apartment later and I had to ask the cabbie if he would stop at the nearest ATM, as I doubted he could make change of a hundred.

Sex itself is the oldest trade in existence. But I wasn’t some child in lace up boots or a junkie in a back alley. I didn’t feel cheap. I was an independent, free-thinking woman with a liberal arts education and a veritable bouquet of student loans. I could count my romantic tumbles on one hand while adding up the money I owed to friends on the other. Who was I to complain, then, that this world wasn’t forward thinking enough to dispel the essential trope of centuries of human existence? Why shouldn’t I make a meal of it? In the end I donated the money to Goodwill and dreamt I was falling through an eternity of darkness.

“You never go out much. I never see you go out.”
We were flipping through absurd CDs at the thrift shop around the corner from my flat. My roommate had brought back something tattooed and pierced from the bar she tended and I had thought it best to make myself scarce.

“I get out,” I said defensively, picking up Classic Christmas with Barry Manilow. “Honestly, why would someone ever want to get rid of this?”
“You’re dodging.”

The second day after the cab incident I had skipped work, walked all the way to the Victoria’s Secret on 5th Avenue. I’d proceeded to stare at the tourists milling around the entrance for a good five minutes before walked all the way home again. The third I spent thumbing through the phone book at my desk, looking for the very specific commercial subcategory of “boudoir photography.” On the fourth I took a phone number down in permanent ink on the back of my hand but didn’t call. A week later I was having a lunch meeting at which neither of us ordered anything and I was told I had excellent tits. “I hope,” my companion had said with genuine regret. “You will not make us pixilate them.”

“We’ll go out. This weekend I’ll let you take me out.” This was clearly what Leah was after.
“I knew you had it in you. Look, I’ll pay for the first round.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got it.”
 
  Seven summers ago in Paris a friend and I agreed we would stop in one of the little tourist shops. The kind with the fluorescent naked women illuminated against sheets of black plastic like garbage bags. Across the street les deux moulins rotated and burly Malians spit dip and hawked miniature Eiffel Towers. Inside we would find American specialty films from the ‘70s and water bottles shaped like penises. We would thumb something vinyl and shake our heads dismissively at vanilla scented and strawberry flavored. Only of course we never did. Never even made it over the threshold, just giggled nervously on a sidewalk lined with dog s*** and recalled works by Gertrude Stein read and interpreted at the bottom of my yard, our forearms pressed hotly together on a shared hammock.

On the way back to our hotel we didn’t speak a word, just adjusted our summer scarves silently so the old women in pearls drinking absinthe at three o’clock in the afternoon wouldn’t know we weren’t fit to kiss their shoes.

In bed that night I lay awake, listening to drunks shout smutty things from atop cars and garbage piles in a language that was already poetry, wanting desperately to shout back what they thought of a night with an American girl.

If you’ve ever seen the Venus de Milo then you know two things. The first is that all mysteries eventually lose their attraction. The second is that you still desperately want to pull the sheet from around her hips. What you don’t know is that Venus, in her left hand had she one, is holding the golden apple that started the war for the most beautiful woman in the world.