HungryMen
Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey
8/18/94
Jennifer knew from early childhood who she was, and who she was going to be: A traitor to her sex.
Her mother had been a traitor to women, and everybody in the town knew Jennifer would be the same. Jennifer’s mother had had a life’s pursuit/obsession/whatever for sleeping with other women’s boyfriends and husbands; before, during, and after her brief marriage to Jennifer’s father. As soon as Jennifer was old enough to answer the phone, she was taught a system of codes to help her mother keep track of calls from past, present, and nasceant lovers. Jennifer helped her mother change the bedsheets at least once a day, sometimes twice. Later on, she learned the importance of looking and feeling sensual at all times. More importantly, she learned the fine art of ignoring the judgmental stares and remarks given off by other girls. She learned to walk proud, head high, eyes straight ahead, mind focused. If the other stupid girls wouldn’t stop giggling and whispering about her, Jennifer would take their rejection and turn it into a force of pride.
Among the things Jennifer was proud about was that she was, to her knowledge, the first girl in her class to rid herself of that horrible state known euphemistically as virginity. She already knew from her life with mother that a woman’s sex life was, like anything a woman did well, an art and a discipline. It was the fools who held their inexperience as a dubious asset, only to give in at the height of seduction in the stadium parking lot with some 20-year-old, who turned into pregnant dropouts. Jennifer knew better. She knew about birth control since the week after her first period. She knew from observation how to lure, get, experience, and politely drop a guy. She first put her knowledge into practice at an interschool say-no-to-drugs assembly. She scoured the gym for the perfect target. Sure enough, he was there in the fourth row. He had glasses and a flannel shirt on, along with the kind of jeans that the ads said were in last year. He was the kind of guy you’d most likely see at a say-no-to-drugs rally and the kind you’d least likely see using drugs. She maneuvered herself to bump into him after the rally, and to get herself invited to his after-school computer science study group. During the group’s meeting three late winter afternoons later, she made sure to listen attentively even during the long bouts of technical jargon; she made no giggly little-girl apologies for her ignorance of advanced PC lore, but at least pretended to pick up every piece of knowledge she heard. She got her would-be victim to drive her home after the group. It was no hard trick for her to “mistakenly” give one wrong direction, getting him hopelessly lost amid the recursive maze of curving suburban roads while darkness quickly fell, until she harmlessly suggested they stop at a cul-de-sac whose houses were still unfinished. The act of seduction itself went remarkably quickly, thanks to herself having a pronounced self-esteem edge. As she ripped open her first non-practice condom package, Jennifer thought about how the boys back at her school had symbols and code words to boast of their sexual exploits, but even in the ’90s the girls in her backwards town kept quiet about such things until they got pregnant or got an STD or both. Jennifer thought up her own little way of telling the world she was A Woman now, without having to actually tell anyone. The next time she was at Fred Meyer, she got herself a scarf in the closest shade to scarlet they had. She wore it to school all the next week. That, and her even-cockier-than-normal attitude, were enough to let on to the girls that she’d done what they just teased and giggled about.
As the high school years dragged on for Jennifer like a jail sentence, she continued to emotionally distance herself from the immaturity and stupidity she saw in the other girls. Besides, not thinking of the girls as people just made it easier for her to seduce their boyfriends.
But after graduation, she had a change of heart. Or rather, a change of tastes. Three years’ worth of studs, hunks, football players and popular boys left her with a jaded feeling. She decided to recapture the excitement she’d had the first time, when she pretended to be as experienced as she now was, when the wide-open eyes of her immensely grateful fellow virgin could have lit up the twilight sky.
So her adult sex life became a series of what she called to herself “Hungry Man dinners.” She found it easy to spot Hungry Men in bars, restaurants, supermarkets. They were the men without a woman to tell them not to wear THAT shirt with THAT tie, without a woman to tell them not to buy THAT soap or not to drink another drink on an empty stomach or not to laugh that loudly at such an obviously bad joke. Once picked up, they were putty in her hands, to mold into the perfect lover, or as close to the perfect lover as she could mold them into before she tired of them (between three and thirteen weeks, including a few two- or three-man overlap periods). Their technique usually left something to be desired, and they mostly didn’t know how to dress, speak, or comport themselves in the right way to lure or please a woman; but they were always so eager to learn! Occasionally she’d run into a former lover in the store or on the street; he’d often now be happily married with a kid and another on the way, happily living with a dead-end job in some dying company. Such visits confirmed her resolve not to get emotionally involved with any of these nice guys, though she sometimes found herself worrying that by making them perceptively more sexually valuable, she was setting them up for some less-altruistic woman to capture them for a lifetime of suburban ennui, to raise kids just like the suburban girls she’d once hated so much.
