The only problem is, Billy’s not really very good at the self-congratulatory mode. He’s just not capable of looking at an attractive woman and thinking that’s right, she digs me. He’s just not that particular kind of dude. He can always find some way to doubt it.
In this case, of course, it’s easy. The sex he had with Elisa doesn’t really fit with the kind of sex he usually has. The lead-up was all wrong. He and Elisa did not enjoy a meaningful gaze across a heap of half-consumed tapas dishes, no furtive hand-holding at the IFC theater, no lingering kiss at the steps of someone’s brownstone. It was just straight to the fucking. Hardcore animal fucking, in point of fact, which makes it all the easier to believe that he didn’t actually have sex with her. Not, like, her, For Real Her. You had sex with some kind of hell-wolf thing that she was stuck inside, he tells himself.
He notes that she hasn’t really spoken to him since.
He leans forward, sticking his head over the back of her seat.
“Hey,” he says. “Hey.”
“What,” she says. She does not turn around.
“Are we cool?”
“Are we cool?” Elisa repeats, soiling it somewhat with a note of incredulity. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” Billy says. “We kind of—had a moment back there, and I was—”
“A moment?” Elisa says, the note of incredulity becoming more pronounced. “We didn’t have a moment. We fucked.”
Jørgen turns up the radio incrementally.
“Yeah, I know, I was there,” Billy says. “I just—I just wanted to make sure that—that it was okay.”
Elisa cranes around in her seat to look at him finally.
“Yeah,” she says. “Of course it’s okay. I told you before we changed that I was going to want to fuck you. And then we changed, and we fucked. End of story.”
Billy frowns. “But—” he says. He lowers his voice to a hush.
“How did you know you were going to want to fuck me?”
“Because that’s the way it is, when you change,” she says. “You changed, you remember what it was like. It gets you turned on. It makes you feel like fucking is goddamn Job One. Now imagine having that experience every month for two years, every time the moon gets full, and not ever having another hell-wolf around. You climb the damn walls. Pretty much literally. I can show you claw marks in my apartment. So I knew that if you were going to change I was going to want to fuck you. It’s not because you’re you or anything. I mean, you’re fine and all, but that’s not why I let you fuck me. I let you fuck me because you were the first other wolf to come along.”
This stings Billy, lacerates his attempt at self-congratulation pretty much completely.
“That seems wrong,” he says.
“Wrong.” Elisa pronounces the word like it’s only vaguely familiar. “Come on, Billy. That’s the thing about being a wolf, or a hell-wolf, or whatever the fuck it is that we are. You don’t give a shit about what’s right or what’s wrong. You just do what you want. You’ve been there. You know it.”
“I only changed once,” Billy says. “I don’t know what it’s like or what it’s not like. I don’t know shit.”
Something in Elisa’s face relaxes a little, and she gives a half laugh. “Okay,” she says. “I keep forgetting you’re new to this. So you want to know what it’s like? What it’s really like? I’ll tell you a story. I owe it to you anyway.”
She gets up, clambers over the seat into the back. Jørgen seems to breathe a sigh of relief, focuses again on the road.
“It’s kind of a long story,” she says. “But we have some time, it looks like. There was this guy, Joseph. I met Joseph when I still lived in Philly. Six years ago now. I was at Penn at that time, and I was burning out. Just like done. I wasn’t even sure I was going to graduate. And then along came Joseph. We met on this post-punk forum. He’d dropped out of Princeton, was working as a shift supervisor at some record shop over in Jersey. And he was funny and smart but like totally decoupled from the whole academic treadmill—he just didn’t give a shit about it and that was so refreshing to me, at that time, like I was really hungry to hear that you could have a pretty cool life without being academically successful. So my final year at Penn I’m driving out to Jersey every weekend, hanging out with Joseph in his shitbox apartment which is crammed with records and lunchboxes and whatever else, and we’re getting high and listening to German punk reissues and reading our god-awful poetry to one another. And then I sleep on the couch. Because, I don’t know, Joseph is cool, I really did think he was cool, but at the same time he’s like super skinny and has this kind of dorky haircut and bad glasses and is just, like, not a guy who gives off much in the way of sexual confidence. And I start to feel guilty, actually guilty, about not fucking him, ’cause I can pretty much tell that he wants it to happen, and I even start telling myself that I want it to happen, like during the week, I’m at Penn, telling myself, all week, this weekend, you have to do it, you have to fuck Joseph. But then I get out there and I think about doing it and I’m just like Ugh. No.