in which a fictional woman hoards power

The Profit Motive

She knew she was beautiful. It was a simple fact, not a distracting one. Her expenditures on clothes and accessories were investments, investments free of any apparent risk. She could see this in the forcibly suppressed jealousy of other women, and in the pitiful complaisance of men.

There were a handful of men she kept around. They all seemed happy enough to spend money on her, happy also because she kept them all unaware of each other’s existence. Each thought himself indispensible to her; each remained inexplicably convinced of his own importance. They offered of themselves in pride, and she accepted their offerings with an artful sense of grace.

She had a younger sister who lived at home and took care of their sickly mother. The old woman’s descent into ill-tempered senility strained not only her relationship with her two daughters, but also the reationship between the daughters themselves. The younger sibling nursed hidden feelings of frustration and resentment, which began to manisfest themselves in the brusque manner with which she questioned her elder sister’s way of life.

“When are you going to settle down and lead a reasonable life? You aren’t getting any younger, you know.”

“Women aren’t built for monogamy. I don’t need a husband. Men have their own needs, and as far as I’m concerned, they can keep them.”

Some of the men she saw were rich and successful, while others lived in contented poverty. She knew how to keep them satisfied, and allowed them to believe that they satisfied her, although none was interesting enough to sate her restless thirst for fresh diversions. She sometimes suffered twinges of a nameless desperation, but she never felt powerless. She didn’t know how to explain this to anyone. There wasn’t anyone she wanted to explain it to.

“It’s not fair to treat people like that,” her sister complained. “You should be honest with them. You owe them that much, at least.”

“Men lie to me in order to sleep with me. I don’t owe them anything. I give them what they want, but I hide them from what they don’t want to know.”

“Which is what? That you don’t really care about them? That you’re stringing them along to amuse yourself?”

She answered questions like this with a crooked, sardonic grin.

Sometimes she pondered the men she knew: their thin, shallow senses of bravado that always collapsed like sand castles beneath waves of lust and wishful thinking. None of them wanted what they pretended to want; they preferred instead to dissimulate, to repeat rehearsed fantasies in order to make themselves seem interesting. Who did they think they were fooling?

On good days, such delusions amused her; other times, she found it difficult to conceal the disgust with the fact that these men had long since rendered themselves incapable of self-respect. The haze of pornography and video games clouded their vision. They stank of self-perpetuating ignorance.

“You’re not even being fair to yourself,” her sister scolded. “It’s not healthy that you can’t stand the thought of being alone. What kind of person are you going to be, ten years from now? You can’t decide what you want, and if you keep everyone around you in the dark, when you finally realize you can’t figure things out for yourself, no one will be able to help you.”

“I know what I want. I want power.”

“I remember how you used to be,” she continued, shaking her head sadly before turning to look her sister directly in the eye. “You used to be happy.”

“I remember too,” she replied quietly. Unable to meet her sibling’s steady gaze, her own eyes drifted away, up toward the ceiling. “I used to be a lot of things…”