by Abha Dawesar
After two glasses of Madeira the conversation had taken a turn toward people on television shows and Harvard’s array of provosts and deans.
“I’m in no mood to socialize. I don’t know why I came,” she said in his ear.
“Me neither. But I can think of something that would make me feel a lot better.”
“What?”
“You really want to know?” he asked, arching up an eyebrow.
“Yes. By the way, I like your deep blue glasses. Very intellectual.”
“Well, I’d feel a lot better if you fondled your breasts.” Struck by the polemics of Boutin’s latest novel, Johnson launched into an articulation of Boutin’s theory. You see, all women, whether they admit it or not…
“What have you been drinking?” she asked when he was finished with a long-winded explanation of the thesis. Her startlingly white teeth came into view as her mouth stretched open in a broad smile.
“Same as you.”
“And why should I fondle my breasts here? In plain English this time, please.” She looked around the room as she spoke.
“You’re going to enjoy it. You want to. The idea that it gives you pleasure will give me pleasure, and the idea that it gives me pleasure will give you pleasure.”
“I may not enjoy it.”
“You will by the end of this evening. Look, there’s nothing else to do. Would you rather talk about Neil Rudenstine and David Letterman?”
“But what will people think?”
“No one cares. No one is looking. Look at C and D,” he said as he pointed to the other two girls on the couch.
She was silent. She was trying to think this through.
“Look,” he persisted, “you’ll do a really good deed. I’ve been thinking about this for over twenty-four hours now.”
“You didn’t even know me before this party. And you didn’t know I’d be here.”
“No, not you specifically. Just a woman fondling her breasts in public. I haven’t been able to get any work done. I even missed my French lit class this morning because I couldn’t snap out of this.”
“Does it really mean that much to you?” Her eyes had an innate kindness. Johnson felt they were changing color and softening as she contemplated what he had said—a lot like the reaction of the woman in Boutin’s novel.
“I know making this suggestion to a stranger is not very acceptable. I hope you won’t take me amiss,” Roger said, feeling formal all of a sudden. He got quiet.
They sat in an awkward silence. Johnson pulled out the cushion from behind his back, laid it on his lap, and played with it. He stroked it, rubbing the tip of his finger over the raised red stitches on its surface. Soon he was running his whole hand over the cushion and caressing it as if it were human. The girl fixed her stare on his hands.
“Please stop that. It’s driving me crazy,” she finally said, breaking the silence.
He looked at her and smiled. “So you’re thinking about what I told you?”
“Tell me what triggered it other than Boutin’s new book.”
“Maybe I miss my mother. But then again, my mother doesn’t have breasts like yours.” He looked at the mass of human comfort a few inches away from his chin.
“Thank you,” she said, blushing.
“So what do you think?”
“I need some more alcohol in my system.”
“You’ll enjoy it,” Roger said. “You’ll see how much pleasure your fondling yourself will give me, and you’ll enjoy it.”
“I need more alcohol.”
“You should try it sober—it’ll be so much better. I’m getting myself a ginger ale. What should I get you?”
“Another glass of wine.”
When Johnson came back from the corner of the living room where the host had set up the bar at his college desk, Breasts was talking to C and D.
“Here,” he said, handing her the glass and sitting down.
“I was just telling them about what you said.”
“No, you were not!” Roger remained standing.
“It’s really fascinating,” C said sarcastically.
“Amazing. We’re where now? In the nineties? And you think that a middle-aged French misogynist has the best pulse on a woman’s inner sexual desires?” D had stood up and was poised with a hand on her hip, her knuckles digging into her body, accentuating the thin bony structure of her pelvis. No breasts.
“Maybe it doesn’t work for you, but it might for others.” Johnson looked at Breasts.
“You’re making her uncomfortable,” C screeched.
“I think she can speak for herself. No?” Johnson challenged. He looked at Breasts.
“I want to leave. Will you walk me to my dorm?” Breasts asked Johnson.
As they stepped out into the night, Johnson saw a shudder run through her.
“Are you cold?”
“No.”
“I wish you hadn’t told them. It makes me seem like a bigger schmuck than I am.”
“I didn’t think they’d react that way. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it.”
“And?”
“Why this stipulation to do it in public? I’ll do it in private for you.”
“No, this is about an extreme and complete display of one’s sensuality. To revel in it, one has to exhibit not privately for one person—who can be seen as some sort of extension of oneself—but a group large enough to be a collective, to be other.”
“I’ll do it for you alone in my room,” Breasts offered again, standing at the threshold of Winthrop House.
“I’d better be going.”
Johnson planted a chaste kiss on the side of her cheek and came back home to have another look at Boutin’s significantly more successful fictitious scene.
The next afternoon when Johnson went to the office of The Advocate, White, one of the editors, told him he was in trouble. C and D had spent the rest of the night in an indignant fury claiming that it was guys like Johnson and girls like Breasts who were responsible for the patriarchal order that prevailed to this day.
“Dude, if I were you, I’d lie low.”
Johnson slumped into an upholstered chair in the corner.
“The Advocate is having a board meeting to discuss this impropriety—that’s what it’s been deemed to be—and to decide if you get to stay on the board.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Didn’t they tell you about date rape and sexual harassment your freshman week, man?”
“But this was neither. It developed as a conversation. I didn’t ask to touch her breasts, and even when she practically made an offer last night for me to come to her room, I didn’t accept. And most of all I think she liked my suggestion.”
“It’s the other girls. They say that men like you make the space unsafe for women.”
Johnson shook his head and stared at the floor mutely.
“Look, you better be going. One of us will call you and let you know.”
“Let’s take it up to Student Affairs. I am sure I will come out totally clean.”
“We’d rather not do that.”
Johnson was told that The Advocate had decided to wait for the noise to die down. C ran a militant feminist magazine on campus and had threatened to “out” The Advocate, as she put it. D said that she was sure she could convince Breasts to testify against Johnson for sexual harassment; a girl on two or three glasses of Madeira on a comfortable couch talking to an intellectual man two years her junior was hardly responsible for his wily seductions. White told Johnson that they had decided to postpone printing his name in the magazine until the spring issue, when the storm had blown over.
Johnson called Breasts to have a chat, but she never called him back. A month later Johnson saw a short story in The Advocate by C about touching her breasts in public and empowering herself. A woman’s sexuality was her weapon against the phallic symbolism of every flagpole and belfry of New England; it was her way of telling men that her body was fundamentally a sou
rce of pleasure for herself and only then for men. The litcrits on campus were divided as to whether C’s story was a takeoff on Pascal’s novel, written from an internal point of view, or if it was a challenge to the patriarchal perspective that Boutin presented. After having failed to get on The Advocate her freshman and sophomore years, C was listed as a board member along with Johnson in the spring issue.
Soon every coed was fondling her breasts at keg parties, in the otherwise-uninspiring library stacks, while conducting acid-base titrations in the lab, and even at the public telescope at the Science Center that Harvard ran as a service for the local community. Far from enjoying this overweening display of female sexuality, Johnson, still reeling from the personal affront of that night early in the year, kept a low profile, turning out draft after solid draft about a boy intent on becoming an astronaut for Zuckerman’s Creative Writing class.
It was not until he moved to New York City with a paralegal’s job, money to spare, and a litclit-free (as he called the postmodern hyenas of the literature department) social milieu that he reclaimed his baser instincts. With a short-lived but spectacularly liberated girlfriend—and he did not use this word in its intellectual sense—Johnson was finally able to express his own sexuality. At a rooftop shindig teeming with investment bankers and hotshot lawyers, Johnson got to the edge of the railing and peed over Lafayette Street, screaming, “I piss on your tits.”
Back in their apartment the same night, his compassionate girlfriend had lain in the tub and commanded Johnson to let his yellow stream flow over her mammaries, thus permanently erasing the trauma of Johnson’s freshman year.
To show Johnson that she didn’t judge him badly, Maya fed him dessert spoon by spoon and made out with him on the couch before taking him to her bed. She awoke early and remembered the e-mail she had sent to the guy pretending to be Prem. What if it was Johnson trying to have some fun? She logged on to her computer and saw another message waiting for her from Indian Man of Letters. The time stamp was during the night, when Johnson had been in her apartment. Maya heard the sheets rustle and logged off. Johnson was up.
“How about a walk together?” he asked after he had awakened with the strong cup of coffee she made for them. They headed out of Maya’s building in their light jackets, keeping a brisk pace and talking very little, turning westward one more avenue whenever they had a don’t-walk sign. In Central Park, against the dark black rocks carelessly jutting out of the earth, the yellow mimosas in full bloom looked dramatic. They meandered through a section of the bridle path and came upon the paved skating road. At that hour, instead of daredevil roller-skaters doing acrobatic routines to music, there were mothers pushing baby carriages.
“Look, their legs are up in the air,” Maya pointed.
“I don’t care if you bend your knee. I don’t care how you do it. Lift your leg high!” the instructor, a stocky man in his late thirties, was yelling.
The women brought their legs down, switched the hands with which they were pushing their carriages, and kicked up with their right legs.
“Now, big step forward and lunge.”
Everyone pushed their carriages a few feet and lunged.
“Right arm up all the way. Straight up, Michele. Good.”
The women held their lunges for several seconds, their right arms swaying overhead, their left hands firmly on their baby carriages. Maya and Johnson watched.
“Now switch,” the instructor barked.
“That’s going into my next novel,” Johnson said, looking at Maya.
“It’s going into mine.”
“We can’t both have it.”
“Whoever writes it first,” Maya said, shrugging.
“I might have an agent very soon.”
“For the novel you wrote in school?”
“No. I’m going to sell a collection of short stories first,” Johnson said.
“I’m going to try to get my novel done this summer.”
“In one summer?”
“Yes.”
“I think I’ll be getting to this story before you.” Johnson pointed to the mothers, who were all bending toward their toes.
“Point your tailbones high up in the air. Hold, one, two…,” the instructor counted.
“Don’t be so sure, mister,” Maya said without looking at Johnson.
“Do you think it’s fair for you to hoard the story when I might come out with it much sooner?”
“Not going to stop me from writing it.”
“Do you have an agent yet?” he asked.
“No. Who is yours?”
“I approached Rustum’s agent.”
“Good for you.”
“I don’t want to fight about our future stories. If we do things together, we’ll have common experiences.”
“Why don’t we take each step as it comes? I’m leaving for Paris pretty soon. You can have all your exclusives then.”
“You are? For how long?”
“Three months.”
“Are you going there to write?”
“Yes.”
“That’s great.”
When they had crossed over to the other side of the park, Maya took the B train back to her apartment. An old Indian man in his late sixties got into her car at Columbus Circle. He removed his backpack from his shoulder once he sat down and fiddled with it. When he closed the backpack again, Maya saw that it said “Harry Potter” across the flap. She looked at him and smiled.
At Times Square three Hasidic men about the same age as the Indian got onto the car. They sat together on the side seats that faced the aisle. Maya noticed one of them was carrying a plastic packet labeled “Le Bon Ladies Underwear.” The guy with the packet absentmindedly started to open it as he heatedly discussed something with the other two. Maya hoped he would open it before her stop so that she could see what was inside. Even as the train slowed to a halt, Maya debated staying on the train just to watch. The man reached inside and handed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to one of the other men, who got off with Maya at her stop.
I am Prem, and there’s only one way for you to verify. I propose the museum on Monday morning, when it’s not open to the general public.
Men that age were grandfathers. Unselfconsciously grandfatherly. There was no chance of the real Prem Rustum—an Indian like the one on the train, a grandfather like the man in the black coat and top hat—turning up on citylovin.com! Maya jumped up from her chair and grabbed By the Thread again and looked at his photo on the back cover. A photo that had been used for his last three books. It’s not you, is it? Maya tapped her finger on the nose of the photo. A Nobel laureate surfing the Internet to find a date! Maya laughed at her own gullibility and sat back at her computer.
I’ll only meet you in a public place. The museum on an off day doesn’t sound like it. How about a bookstore?
Notorious for shunning publicity and public appearances, Rustum was a mystery to the press. As he got older, he granted fewer and fewer interviews and mostly only in writing. He had allowed himself to be filmed only three times. Maya had tried procuring these tapes after she started reading Rustum. She accepted the impossibility of ever getting hold of a Delhi Doordarshan interview done in India in the seventies. She had written several times to DD on their website and even mailed the interviewer a letter to Doordarshan’s offices in India. The second was a program commissioned by BBC4 on the occasion of Prem’s Booker Prize. After repeated calls to BBC America and to Bush House in London, Maya had gathered that the tapes were available only on a broadcast basis to another commercial channel or for educational purposes. Maya had then tried to get the literary club at her old college to organize a screening, but the organization had become defunct following the expulsion of the club president due to a cocaine bust. Rustum’s only other celluloid appearance was in a French documentary about Pascal Boutin, where he had been interviewed along with Pedro Nicolas about Pascal’s work. Maya had already tried to procure a copy of this film in France her jun
ior summer, when she was researching her undergraduate thesis on Boutin, to no avail. Maya searched for the tape again in her Rustum phase and quite by chance, surfing the website of the French paper Libération, noticed that the program was going to be rerun. Half a dozen long-distance phone calls later, Maya arranged for a friend’s friend to tape the program and courier it to her. She had the tape converted to NTSC format for ten dollars in Little India and watched it. The documentary was eight years old, and at the time of its filming Rustum had been sixty-seven.
Maya’s own grandfather had aged overnight. On his seventy-fifth birthday he had still been youthful, jogging five miles a day and standing upright. Within months he had rapidly transformed into a fragile man, a faded man. Maya wondered what the eight years since the filming in France had done to Prem Rustum. The day before their date she rewound and watched the sections where the camera focused on his face. She observed the deep lines where his face contorted, as he closed his eyes to think of the best French words for an answer. She rewound the tape again for the arc of his beautiful hands as they cut through the air in rapid movements as he explained a nuance in Pascal Boutin’s work to the Canal+ interviewer.
At midnight Maya shut off the lights to sleep. In bed she told herself that she was going to meet some fat fifty-year-old loser who fancied he had the talent to write. Or thought he was like Rustum because he too was from India. Or hoped that by being twenty-five years younger than Rustum, he was thirty-three percent sexier than him. But what if, but what if, she had said all night to herself and as a result had slept little and woken up early.
Prem wondered if meeting an anonymous babe over the ether was such a bright idea. If all he had wanted was a fan, then there was no dearth of women who had filled his mailbox with snapshots and love letters. And then there was the small but not entirely improbable case that this woman was Judith Q herself. In some of her letters she had mentioned how hard she had tried to meet him, confessions that only succeeded in making her interest seem more sinister. Had he relied on Johnson’s information too much? Kenny had told him, when he was showing him how to save articles from the Internet, that people could save photos too. Anyone’s photo! But neither Pascal nor Edward had voiced misgivings about meeting women like this. As Prem saw Mrs. Smith set the table, he was conscious of watching a scene that had taken place almost daily for more than ten years. Prem felt like a bottle of juice entirely sedimented. Meeting this girl would shake things up a little. He might get a line or two for the next novel, which was refusing to take off. At any rate there was little to lose. If she wasn’t delightful enough for him, he only had to signal the car and take off.
