Just Some Body: On Lillian Fishman’s “Acts of Service”
Lillian Fishman | Acts of Service | Hogarth Books | 2022 | 240 pages
Early on in Acts of Service, Lillian Fishman’s debut novel, Eve, the novel’s narrator, describes a sexual fantasy of hers in which she is deemed exceptionally fuckable by an anonymous man:
I was naked, lined up in a row of twenty girls, a hundred girls, as many naked girls as would fit inside the room I was in…. Opposite the line of girls was a man who scrutinized us. I can’t tell you what this man looked like. He was nondescript, symbolic. I would never actually fuck him. After about thirty seconds he pointed, without equivocating, at me.
At this point in the book, we know little about Eve except that she is a queer, twenty-something, cisgender woman living in Brooklyn. Her girlfriend, a doctor named Romi, is “selfless, adoring, great in bed,” Eve tells us—an ideal partner.
But Eve isn’t satisfied. It’s not that she wants to see other people; it’s that she wants other people to see her. So one night, feeling particularly restless and anxious to be ogled, she posts her nudes online. She’s careful to keep Romi in the dark, choosing a website that “anonymized usernames and disguised IP addresses” to host three uncaptioned photos of her naked body.
Overnight, the images are inundated with comments. Sifting through them the next morning while sitting on Romi’s toilet, she is, to her surprise, unmoved by the gestures of lust, awe, and “occasional brutality” offered in response to her naked body. She wonders if perhaps the mutual anonymity and physical distance between her and her admirers have sapped the sentiments of any real power. But then a new comment appears at the top of the page: an invitation from a painter named Olivia to meet for drinks. Eve accepts, and the rest happens swiftly. With Romi again kept in the dark, Eve falls into a ménage à trois with Olivia and Olivia’s boss Nathan, who share an intense psychosexual connection.
But complications arise when Eve eventually learns that it was Nathan, not Olivia, who wanted to meet Eve and bring her into their bed. Olivia was simply the dutiful, if somewhat resentful, messenger. Eve is clearly stepping on toes here, but she can’t resist the heady feeling of being chosen—and chosen specifically for her sexual anatomy. From the outset of the novel, her body is a primary preoccupation. She’s dogged by the fear that her body, in its sexual prime, will go unused and unappreciated:
While I was brushing my teeth or stepping out of the shower I would see my own body and find myself overwhelmed with a sense of urgency and disuse. My body was crying out that I was not fulfilling my purpose. I was meant to have sex—probably with some wild number of people. Maybe it was more savage than that, that I was meant not to fuck but to get fucked. The purpose of my life at large remained mysterious, but I had come around to the idea that my purpose as a body was simple.
Nathan immediately gives Eve the purpose she’s looking for, assuring her that she was “made to be fucked.” The more she fucks him—and really, really likes it—the more she realizes that the kind of attention she craves is troublingly heteronormative: The male gaze turns her on. She struggles to square her perceived queerness with her budding desires. Has she internalized the patriarchy, or is she not in fact as queer—or, perhaps, as feminist—as she once thought she was? Olivia, who literally thanks Nathan while he fucks her, doesn’t seem to have any such misgivings. Watching Olivia go down on him, Eve concludes that what Olivia wants most is “abjection itself, becoming completely, and with ardor, the anonymous hole.”
The word “hole” here lands with a thud. A hole implies absence, lack, something missing. It also evokes a bit of mystery, both titillating and terrifying: a glory hole, a black hole—there’s no telling what’s beyond the threshold. Sartre, not exactly known for his feminism, broaches the matter as it relates to womanhood in his 1958 collection Existentialism and Human Emotions. There, he writes: “Woman senses her condition as an appeal precisely because she is ‘in the form of a hole’...the obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which ‘gapes open.’” But Sartre doesn’t see anything passive in this anatomy. “Beyond any doubt her sex is a mouth,” he writes, “and a voracious mouth which devours the penis.” The woman as Sartre knows her is not receptive but ravenous, vigorously absorbing a spare part into the larger whole.
Eve sees in Olivia a mind at total peace with the desires of the body, and she envies that peace. When Olivia fucks, she is “unencumbered by rhetoric, unencumbered by belief.” Meanwhile, Eve is troubled by how she wants to be fucked and who she wants to be fucked by. Her new sexual proclivities feel like a betrayal of her queer identity and a blight on her character. Why can’t she be more like Olivia: a woman who reconciles it all with ease, transforms herself at will from a person into a thing, from a whole into a hole, and back again.
“The millennial wants to be wanted or to be abjected,” writes critic and author Namwali Serpell in her landmark essay “Black Hole.” “Either way, the focus is on someone else’s desires and actions, and the appeal seems to lie in inciting a feeling in them.” Serpell later turns her critical gaze to the lyrics of Cardi B’s “WAP,” which posits a different kind of desire based solely on immediate pleasure: “Cardi issues her wants as demands, the directness of which bestows agency to her even when she’s on her knees.” Cardi, like Olivia, is at peace with her desires, no matter how debasing they may appear to the observer. In a vacuum, the result is empowering. But desire doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it happens in a world shaped irrevocably by history and politics.
Shortly after Eve meets Nathan in Acts of Service, he tells her how his affair with Olivia began. During a work trip, she knocked on the door of his hotel room and “insisted again and again that he let her suck him off.” He recounts her appeal: “Please, please, please, please, please, she said, please please please.” She issues her wants not as demands but supplications. The power dynamics here are stark and troubling to Eve and the reader alike. Is this what Olivia really wants? Is it what she thinks she wants? Or is this what she thinks she should want? What, in the end, is the difference? Eve can’t even answer the question in the context of her own situation. At one point she brings up to Nathan her concerns about the misogyny embedded in his and her sex life. “Why are you thinking about all that bullshit?” he replies, handing her a cigarette like a pacifier.
Eventually, Romi breaks up with Eve for reasons unrelated to her infidelity. Eve is devastated, less for losing Romi than for how the abandonment reflects on her: “Is it possible to nurture a love that is not a referendum on yourself?” she wonders. (Though sex, not love, seems to be the more important referendum on Eve’s worth anyhow.) But she doesn’t pretend that Romi was soulmate material; among Romi’s deficiencies as a girlfriend: “She didn’t love me for my body.” The threesome, like most, eventually implodes too, at which point Acts of Service loses all momentum. Fucking is the novel’s—and Eve’s—raison d'être. Once the fucking stops, everything falls apart.