The Appetites of Girls

by Pamela Moses

  James smiled, indicating my present. “Is that for me?”

  “Yes, yes. Oh, I forgot—” As he took the candle from me, I could feel, to my shame, a slight sticky dampness where my palms, despite the cool weather, had left perspiration on its plastic wrapping.

  “Come in,” he offered. “I was just opening a bottle of Chardonnay, and I’ve ordered Indian food. There’s a great place in town that delivers.” He ushered me through a dim hallway to his kitchen. On one crowded counter lay a brown paper bag filled with takeout containers, beside it an uncorked bottle of wine. He poured a glass for me, then a slightly fuller one for himself. Through his kitchen I could see a small dining nook. James had already set the narrow table and had laid between our place mats a wreath of pinecones and autumn leaves, which I imagined he had gathered himself. He placed the candle I had brought in the center of the wreath and lit it.

  In high school, though I had attended a number of my classmates’ late-night parties, I had drunk only partial glasses of alcohol, tiny sips, afraid the odor on my breath would give me away when I returned home, a habit I had broken only now and then during the last year. So the tall glass of wine James poured me began to make my lips tingle before I had even finished its contents. When I answered his questions, my words sounded garbled in my ears. So I was grateful that he seemed to know much about many subjects and that I could remain fairly silent as we settled into our chairs and began our meal. He understood things that were happening in places I knew only vaguely: revolts in African regions, ethnic wars in Eastern Europe, the names of diseases that ravaged lives in faraway towns and cities. He was familiar with the cuisines of many countries and the beverages that complemented them. He knew the history of Brown and its founders, the best places nearby for hiking, kayaking, antiquing. And when he began to speak of orchestras and musical events on campus, I still did nothing more than smile and nod, worried that if I opened my mouth, something foolish would tumble out.

  Though James did most of the talking, he managed to consume large portions of food, many times more than what I had eaten. “You have a bird’s appetite,” he laughed, pointing with his fork to my partially finished serving of lentils and spinach, the round of flatbread, the chicken curry remaining on my plate. “I guess that’s how you keep your petite figure.” He smiled broadly, and heat rose to my cheeks as I felt his eyes learning every inch of me.

  • • •

  Always my suitemates and I had spent our Saturdays together, but James began to invite me to his apartment Saturday afternoons and then evenings, and soon he began to call on weekdays, as well. More than once, when Francesca and Opal had other plans, I thought about inviting Ruth to join James and me for a walk into town or for lunch, knowing how she disliked eating in solitude, but I wondered if this would make her feel lonely, watching the two of us together, seeing that I had someone who was eager for my company. James asked for a copy of my course schedule so that he would know when I was free. Sometimes the telephone in my suite would ring just minutes after I’d returned from class. “Setsu, can I see you? Will you come over? I miss your face.”

  Then Opal would roll her eyes as I put down the phone. “Didn’t you see him about five minutes ago?”

  “Jesus, Setsu, aren’t you in charge of your own life?” Francesca would look up from her Baudelaire reading or from Paris Match. “James isn’t God, you know. His requests are not holy commandments!”

  Until this point, I had always shared in their jokes, never before been the object of them. But I only laughed, too happy to care. My heart racing, I would throw my books on my bed, tear off my bulky sweater and jeans, and stand before my closet, searching for the clothes I thought James would find prettiest. Now and then, Opal would peek in, hesitating in my doorway, then giving some excuse about missing her hair clip or wondering if a piece of her mail had been mixed in with mine. But I knew why she’d really come. “You know, if you do this for yourself, it’s one thing.” She would gesture toward the spread of clothes on my bed. “But if you’re doing all this—” And her chin would stiffen as if there was something unpleasant she did not wish to say.

  “You all worry about me too much. It’s like living with three mother hens!” I teased, but I was beginning to feel annoyed by my suitemates’ preaching. I had seen the time Opal had taken before our evenings with Clay and Andy, as much as we had dismissed them. So if she’d had a boyfriend, certainly she would go to all the same measures.

  I knew my roommates thought me silly, but it was they I felt sorry for, in their T-shirts and woolly socks, with no plans for the afternoon aside from watching Oprah Winfrey on our common room TV. I particularly pitied Ruth with the stack of molasses cookies she had taken from the Ratty, pushing them away as if she’d thought better of it, then breaking off new chunks. When she was partway through the stack, she would bring the remaining cookies into her lap, as if she thought none of us would notice that she gobbled down what would only make her larger. She seemed always to convince herself that an exercise walk down to the water with Opal later in the day would undo the damage. For some reason, her wordless watching, as I dashed from my room to the bathroom and back, was far worse than the others’ nagging.

  I would brighten my lips with pink gloss and brush my hair facing the tabletop mirror I had placed on my desk, thirty strokes on either side of my part to bring out the silkiness, as Opal had taught me. Then I would stare into my black-brown eyes and whisper, “When did you become such a lucky girl, Setsu?”

  • • •

  As I was growing up, my father and Toru had paid little attention to the way I dressed. But James seemed to notice every detail of the clothes women wore. He critiqued the costumes of the actresses in old movies we rented and on mannequins in store windows when, on occasion, we drove to Boston. And he liked to give me gifts—diaphanous scarves, an angora sweater, a pair of ivory-colored hair combs, stockings embroidered with a pattern of rosebuds. “You are so feminine, so dainty, Setsu. You deserve to be adorned in lovely things,” James insisted whenever I hesitated to accept one of these extravagances. He bought a silver bangle bracelet with a small turquoise stone and clasped it around my wrist. “Now you have something to remind you of how much I care,” he murmured in my ear. “Promise to wear it always.”

  “Yes. Oh, thank you, yes.” And I did as he asked, never removing the bracelet, not even when I washed or slept. At unexpected moments, it would catch at me from the corner of my eye or its clasp would rub my skin, and I would shiver with happiness.

  To increase our time together, as James suggested, I began to skip the stop at my suite before heading to his apartment after my last afternoon class. We met on his front porch, bundled in our barn jackets and scarves, and drank the flavored coffees he had picked up at Peaberry’s on Thayer Street. Seated on his wooden porch swing, we watched people hurrying along the sidewalk. Dog walkers, RISD undergrads in drab black and gray, their bulky canvases balanced awkwardly under their arms. Brown students, many of whom I recognized by face if not by name, some with their feet bare-toed in clunky, buckled sandals even in the late-fall weather—shoes we wouldn’t choose in any season, we agreed. Sometimes James would point out the girls whose hair hung half-tangled, who had allowed a coating of dark stubble to cover their legs. What exactly were they proving? Who would be impressed by their deliberate unattractiveness? His mouth curved as he slurped his Madagascar roast. Was it any surprise they walked alone? How fortunate we were, we felt, to have each other.

  When we grew chilly, we moved inside for warm soup and baguettes. On several occasions, I offered to reciprocate, volunteering to serve a meal at my place instead. If my suitemates only had the chance to spend time with James beyond the quick interchanges when they ran into the two of us on campus, then certainly they would realize their concerns had been misplaced. But always James refused, smiling as if my invitations amused him. “Wouldn’t you rather be here, where we can have privacy?” he would ask, leaning down to kiss the top o
f my head. “Here we can enjoy each other without interruption.”

  So the regular meals I had shared with Fran and Ruth and Opal grew less frequent. And sometimes days would go by without my seeing any of them. It seemed strange at first, a little like my first nights at sleepaway camp, when I would wake feeling there was someplace I had forgotten I was meant to be. But this would not last. I would hear my roommates rustling sleepily in their sheets as I slipped out for my first early class or find notes they left on our memo board—Setsu, your lab partner, Jillian, called. She has a question for you. Setsu, this is your week to clean the common room—this followed by a lopsided smiley face. But after a time, their messages grew shorter and sloppier, as if they had tired of writing so many reminders in my absence.

  One morning before I left, I found Opal waiting for me on the common room sofa. She sometimes woke before breakfast to do stretches at the athletic center, but even for her this was an unusually early hour. Moments before I had heard her speaking in a hush to Ruth, who must have risen to use the hall bathroom. I had waited until their voices ceased before emerging from my room, hoping to avoid being seen leaving, to avoid, especially, Ruth’s longing stare.

  “Do you have a minute?” Opal placed a hand on the empty seat cushion beside her.

  “Okay.” I wondered what the two of them could possibly have been discussing. If they missed me.

  “When I was fourteen,” she said, “just after we moved to Puerto Rico, Mother left me for three weeks with her boyfriend Paulo’s aunt, whom I’d met only once before at some birthday party. Mother and Paulo had tickets for a cruise down the Windward Islands. An adults-only cruise, so I could not be taken. She joked with me that she would come back if I was lucky. Twenty-one days I stayed in this woman’s house. She spoke almost no English, and I sat on her rocking chair on her front veranda in the choking heat and wondered if Mother would ever return.” Opal pressed her thumbnail into the groove between her two front teeth. Her face was pale. I could see the rivulet of a vein below the white of her cheek.

  “That must have been awful. I can’t begin to imagine how you felt.”

  Opal nodded. It was long minutes before she was able to speak again. “When a woman gives up everything she is for a man, she’s playing with fire.” Opal leaned her left arm against her chest, her fingers curled as if she were digging up the right words to make me understand. “You know, when you allow your own life to be swallowed up—” She stopped, her eyes looking into mine. “You’re very sweet, Setsu, but you have to protect yourself. You have to protect who you are. No one else in this world will.”

  When she had finished, I placed a hand on hers. “Thank you for sharing this,” I said. I smiled to let her know I understood what she implied. Still, my throat tightened with irritation. There was no reason to tell her she had wasted her time. But the comparison was preposterous. I was not Opal’s mother. And James certainly was not one of her mother’s sleazy boyfriends. Did the fact that I loved a man mean I was snuffing out some truer, stronger self? My situation was different in every way.

  • • •

  In the first months of that year, I had saved the colorful party flyers that arrived in my campus mailbox, sticking them with thumbtacks to the corkboard over my desk. But now, it seemed, James and I always had our own plans, and invitations became crumpled balls in my wastebasket. Two Wednesday afternoons, I even failed to show for my scheduled monthly meeting with Professor Yolen, my academic adviser, remembering only hours later, long after he’d left his office. James had surprised me on those occasions, finding me on my way out of Chaucer class. “Let’s take a drive.” He’d rattled his car keys. “The day is too nice to waste.”

  “You are turning me into a delinquent!” I said. But the missed parties, the stammered apologies to Professor Yolen, seemed a small price to pay for my blissful time with James. How good he was to me, always showering me with compliments, even claiming to adore what he referred to as my delicate appetite. Fondling my nape, more than once he confided that the way I had eaten during our first dinner together had endeared me to him. “Just like a tiny fawn or a gentle dove,” he said, licking the tips of my fingers. “Sweet, sweet Setsu, you are perfection embodied.”

  So when we shared lunches or dinners, I tried to measure the portions I placed on my plate—a single thin strip of filleted fish, two spoonfuls of rice, three small chunks of squash.

  James sometimes joked that the full glass of wine he poured for me each meal seemed out of proportion to my modest helpings. “I’m going to get fat spending time with you,” he would tease, gesturing to the mounds of food remaining on the table, filling his dish with seconds, even thirds, as if the small quantities I took fueled his hunger.

  And I was reminded then of how much older James seemed than most of the males in my classes or the nearby dorms. They were still boys in many ways, but James, at twenty-five, with his thick voice, his sure opinions, was unarguably a man, unafraid to ask for the things he liked. In one of his dresser drawers, he had placed a number of my belongings as well as several of the purchases he’d made for me. And as we grew to know each other better, he began to buy things exclusively meant for our time alone. A lace brassiere, a baby-blue garter belt. One night, after we had pushed aside our dinner dishes, our emptied glasses of wine, he took my hand, leading me down the hall to the cool of his darkened bedroom. “Would you?” He dangled the brassiere and a string of glass beads from his fingertips. “You’re so beautiful. Too, too beautiful to remain hidden.” He began to hum softly—Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose”—then lit my scented candle, which had made its way from the dining table to his bedroom windowsill. “Walk for me, Setsu,” he whispered. “God, you’re as lithe as a nymph. I love to watch you move.”

  The first few times he had requested this, I shook my head, shivering slightly in my state of half-undress. But James seemed impatient with my reticence. “Don’t be so modest, kitten.” The flame from the candle made elongated shadows of my limbs on the walls as I paced James’s floor. “Dance, will you?” James would lower himself into a corner armchair, then lean forward on his elbows. And I would hesitate, trembling now from nerves as well as cold. But even in the near darkness I could see such desire in James’s parted lips, could hear it in the quiet grinding of his teeth, and slowly, slowly I began to sway my hips, wanting, willing to do things for him I had never done before. This was part of what it meant to have a man, I told myself.

  Still, there were times when we lay together, bodies entwined in that most intimate way James had shown me, I felt I was no more than a child beside him. Pulling the sheets to my shoulders in sudden bashfulness, I would whisper these fears into the faint patchouli scent of his chest.

  “Oh, no, no, Setsu.” The things I complained of, he said, were the very things he most loved about me—the girlish dimple in my left cheek, the hips I managed to keep so slender, my tiny waist and thighs and breasts. And he would slide the sheet down, down, little by little revealing what I had shyly covered, then embrace the narrowest part of me where my stomach caved.

  One evening after James had held me in this way, he jumped from bed suddenly and pulled a pad and pencil from the canvas knapsack on his floor. “Oh, that’s so perfect. Don’t stir. Don’t move an inch.” And with a towel loosely wrapping his middle, he began to sketch me. My whole body flushed, and instinctively I drew my arms across my chest.

  “Please, please, Setsu. You trust me, don’t you? I haven’t done this in years,” he said, lifting his pencil slightly from the page. “But, God, you are so gorgeous. Like a rare and fragile flower.” And as he gazed at me, I saw, to my surprise, that his eyes were shiny with tears. So I agreed: for him, I would swallow my discomfort. I would even tie the band of lace around my neck that he had brought to me. He worked almost without ceasing for what must have been close to an hour, pausing only once to find the classical music station he liked on the radio. “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” was playing, and James inhaled slow
ly, eyelids fluttering as if breathing in the splendor of the music. “Do you know this piece?”

  I nodded wordlessly. Yes, I knew it, so well I could sing every note, so well my left hand recalled every fingering. I almost spoke this aloud, but for some reason it felt the wrong time, the wrong thing to say.

  When James was finished, he drew me close to him. And I stroked his back and shoulders, the tops of his thighs in the manner he liked best, wishing to make him happy.

  “Never before,” I murmured, “has anyone made me feel so beautiful or so loved.”

  • • •

  James had several friends who lived in Boston—teachers, artists, writers—acquaintances he’d made during the two years between college and graduate school, when he lived in Cambridge, working on the campaign of a Democratic state congressman and waiting tables. Coincidentally, two of them—Dominic and his girlfriend, Fiona—had known Francesca some years before in the New York art scene. And Fran had met Nicholas one summer at a resort in Saint-Tropez. One of them had suggested a collective evening out. “I can’t wait for my friends to meet you,” James announced one February afternoon as he reached for my face with his palms. “I keep telling them how wonderful you are. So they think you sound too good to be true. I can hardly wait to prove them wrong.”

  “I will be on my best behavior!” I had laughed at his compliment, but in truth, the thought of being introduced to James’s friends made my stomach jumpy. I had heard Francesca’s stories about her old crowd in New York, and I was sure I could never fit in. I wished, too, James had not praised me so highly, worried I would be a disappointment.

  “So what are Dominic and Fiona like?” I asked Francesca some days before we were to meet them. Francesca was sprawled on our couch, thumbing through some French magazine. We had just returned from the Brown bookstore together, Fran in need of a text for her philosophy class, I to replace two notebooks I had somehow mislaid in my trips between James’s place and mine.