“Tell them,” urged her friend.
“He said I ought to just lick his balls while he jerked off.”
Everybody went “Oooh” or “Gross!” The plain girl stared at Margot, her speculative gaze a light tease. Margot blushed.
“Tragically, many people who are depressed don’t realize it,” the psychiatrist was saying. “Luckily, there are symptoms.”
“Okay,” said Patrick. “Let’s click on that.”
The psychiatrist, froze, with her mouth open. A box materialized over her, and then a man in a suit within the box. “Hello,” he said. “I’m here to discuss key symptoms of depression.” He projected out of his box like an enthusiastic dog on a tight leash.
“Patrick,” said Margot, “this is absurd.”
“Most common is lethargy,” said the man. “You are lethargic if—”
Patrick hit a button, and the man froze with his mouth open. “All right,” he said. “Tell me why you think that.”
“For starters, it’s condescending. You reinforce people’s feelings of passivity when you encourage them to think they don’t even know what they’re feeling and that somebody has to tell them. And it’s mechanical—”
“But a lot of people don’t know. I’m surprised at you, Margot, that you—”
“Do you actually think this abstract thing is going to help people? It’s so detached and . . . it’s just like the shrinks at work who give out meds instead of trying to connect on a human level.”
“Oh, barf.”
“It’s barf, all right. Patrick, you can’t even deal with your own sister—what the hell are you doing?”
He sat silently, in profile, staring at the static gray psychiatrist. “I can’t help my sister,” he said. “I’ve tried.” There was a tiny electrical hum in the room.
“Patrick,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
He didn’t answer.
“I was out of line.”
He didn’t say anything. He seemed trapped in his cross-legged position. Margot put her hand on his knee. He reached forward and ejected the CD-ROM. “It’s okay,” he said. “I should’ve known: it’s not your kind of thing.”
He turned to face her; he was smiling.
“I know it doesn’t have anything to do with Dolores,” she said. “But it seems. . .”
Still smiling, he extended his legs to the side of her. He took her hand and pulled her toward him. She went. She lay against him and put her hand on his chest. He felt sparkling and agitated, like someone who is trying so hard to tell you what he means that he is almost incoherent. She looked up at him. His face was smiling, but his eyes were tired and sad. Still, his expression was clear and deep—as if he was looking at her all the way from the bottom and, even more, inviting her to look in. He bent to kiss her.
“Patrick,” she said, “we don’t have that kind of—”
“Yes, we do.”
“What do you mean? We—”
He pulled her close. She pushed away. Too heavily, he stroked her hair and her face; his touch would’ve seemed imperious had it not felt so needy.
“Patrick,” she said, “stop.”
“I just want to hold you, okay? Please, just let me—”
“Don’t!” She sat up and put her hands over her ears. “Don’t,” she said again.
He lay back. She felt him take distance. “Okay,” he said.
She put her hands in her lap. They looked at each other in silence. His face looked strange to her. His forehead was heavy, almost oppressive; it seemed weighted with information that the rest of his face didn’t know about. His eyes and nose were arrogant and ignorant, his mouth was sensual and nervous, wanting to please. But his forehead was powerful, discerning, and strange. She felt she was looking at something very familiar and very unfamiliar at once. He reached for her carefully. He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand, barely touching her. His expression deepened a shade. The unfamiliar thing eclipsed the familiar. She could sense it more than see it. He was trying to show himself to her, to explain something. He didn’t have the means, but he was trying, silently, with his eyes. And she was trying too. It was as if they were signaling each other from different planets, too far away to read the signals but just able to register that a signal was being sent. They sat and looked at each other, their youth and beauty gone, their selves more bare and at the same time more hidden.
Gently, Patrick took the tips of her two forefingers. “I’ll drive you home,” he said.
The Blanket
Valerie had been celibate for two years when she met Michael, and sex with Michael was like a solid left hook; she reeled and cartoon stars burst about her head. The second time he came to her San Francisco apartment, he walked in with two plastic bags of fruit, extending a fat red tomato in one outstretched hand, his smile leaping off his face. “I brought you things,” he said. “I brought you fruit to put on your windowsill, and this.” He handed her the tomato and said, “I’m a provider.” His voice was full of ridiculous happiness. He was wearing shorts, and one of his graceful legs was scuffed at the knee. He was twenty-four years old.
Valerie was thirty-six. Michael couldn’t actually provide for her, but she didn’t need him to do that. She loved that he’d gone to the grocery store and roamed the aisles of abundant, slightly tatty and unripe fruit so that he could bring her bags of it. His impulse seemed both generous and slightly inept, which she found sweeter than generosity straight.
Michael himself was a little surprised by his beneficent urges, surprised and pleased by their novelty. It occurred to him that it had something to do with her physicality, although he didn’t know quite what. Valerie was pretty, but she was not beautiful. Her arms and neck were fine-boned and elegant, while her hips and legs were curvy, fatty, almost crudely female. She embraced him confidently, but her fingers sought his more delicate places—the base of his head, the knobs of his spine—with a tactile urgency that was needy and uncertain. After their first time together, on the floor of her living room, she’d put on her underpants and stood over him, posing with her hands on her hips, chin lifted, one hip tilted bossily—but she held her legs close together, and her one bent inturned knee had the tremulous look of a cowed animal. “Woman of the year,” he’d said, and he’d meant it.
It was only their second time together when she suggested that they “role-play.” “You know,” she said. “Act out fantasies.”
“Fantasies?” The idea was a little embarrassing, yet it also intrigued him; under the cheesy assurance of it, he felt her vulnerability, hidden and palpitant. Besides, the fantasies were fun. She would be a slutty teenager who’s secretly hoping for love, and he would be the smug prick who exploits her. He would be the coarse little gym teacher trying to persuade the svelte English teacher to let him go down on her after the PTA cocktail party. She would be a rude girl with no panties flaunting herself before an anxious student in the library. Feverishly, they’d nose around in each situational nuance before giving in to dumb physicality. Then she’d make them a dinner of meat and salad and a pot of grains, and they’d eat it with their feet on the table.
When he left her apartment, Michael felt as if the entire world loved him. He walked down the street, experiencing everything—scraps of trash, traffic, trotting pets, complex, lumbering pedestrians—as a kind of visual embrace. Once, immediately after leaving her, he went into a bookstore and sat down on a little stepladder to peruse a book, and he was assailed with a carnal memory so pungent that he opened his mouth and dropped a wrinkled wad of gray chewing gum on the page. He stared at it, embarrassed and excited by his foolishness. Then he closed the book on the wad.
For the first week she wouldn’t let him spend the night with her, because that was too intimate for her. But he would get in bed with her and hold her, cupping her head against his chest and stroking the invisible little hairs at the base of her spine. “My girlfriend,” he would say. “My girlfriend.” His chest was big and solid, but under her ear, his he
art beat with naked, helpless enthusiasm.
When he held her that way, she felt so happy that it disturbed her. After he left, it would take her hours to fall asleep, and then when she woke up she would feel another onrush of agitated happiness, which was a lot like panic. She wished she could grab the happiness and mash it into a ball and hoard it and gloat over it, but she couldn’t. It just ran around all over the place, disrupting everything.
Valerie made a fair living illustrating book jackets, which meant she worked at home, which meant she was pretty susceptible to disruptions anyway. When Michael appeared she had just started a jacket for a novel by a well-known hack, which required that she draw prowling leopards. It should’ve been an easy job, but she could not bring her sensory apparatus to bear on the leopards. She would draw for minutes and then spend nearly an hour pacing around, listening to overblown love music or obnoxious sex music. Her thoughts were fragmented. Her feelings buzzed and swarmed. She remembered sitting on the edge of the couch, him kneeling on the floor, her underpants dangling from the tip of her high-heeled foot. Finally, the gym teacher had gotten the English teacher to come across! Aggression surged between them in bursts, but he’d paused to bend and press his cheek against her thigh.
The kitchen table became littered with partial leopards.
“It’s like I’m so happy I can’t feel it,” she said to her friend Tanya. “It’s just sex, really; I mean, he’s too young for us to actually get involved. But the enthusiasm of him—I mean, he’s just right there.”
“How can he be right there if you’re not really involved?”
“We are involved, in a profound, sexually spiritual way. But we’re not going to be boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“But you like it when he calls you his girlfriend.”
“I do.” Valerie paused, thinking how she could best explain this apparent contradiction. “It’s like another version of the slutty-teenager fantasy. It’s real, but only in the erotic realm. I mean, we have feelings for each other, but they can’t be permanent.”
Michael was a bartender, but he also played bass guitar in a band. The band was a ramshackle affair, perpetuated by the dour perseverance of the lead singer and animated by the disproportionate loudness of the sound system. They were usually just a warm-up act in a good-natured dive, but Valerie was enchanted to think of Michael onstage with his guitar, one hip slung out insouciantly. “I think all twenty-four-year-old boys should play in bands,” she said.
It was a condescending thing to say, but he didn’t mind. He sensed that the luxury of such minor arrogance was new to her, and that she was trying it out, with a certain brittle excitement, just to see what it felt like. He would imagine her watching him from the audience as he turned away from them all, in private communion with his guitar, aloof and mysterious and secretly delighted in his role of admired object.
During the second weekend of their affair, the band went up to Seattle to play. Valerie thought she’d spend the weekend retrieving her equilibrium, but just hours after he left, she discovered one of his sweaty T-shirts balled up at the bottom of her bed and found she had to listen to loud music while she paced around with the shirt pressed to her cheek.
That evening he called her from the pay phone of a gas station while the rest of the band peed and raided the candy machine.
“I had to tell you this,” he said. “When we were driving through Oregon we went past this cornfield, and I was just staring at it and I saw this little white cat walking between the rows. It so much made me think of you. The way it walked was so intrepid and fine.”
He heard a quick intake of breath, followed by a soft, tremulous silence. He closed his eyes and took a long, ecstatic drink of grape pop.
Later that night, a beautiful girl threw herself at him. He was standing at the bar after the band’s last set, wiping his face with a wet cocktail napkin, when she emerged from the ambient murk. She had long black hair and a fancy little strut that suggested uncomplicated, competent sex. They made out against the wall, and she nonchalantly pressed her pubic bone against him. He was going to suggest that they go to her place, but realized, in the midst of speculating about what she might have in the way of food, that to do so would only increase his longing for Valerie. The girl stuck her hand inside his shirt and circled the rim of his navel with one cold finger. “I can’t do this,” he said. “I’m in love with this girl in San Francisco.” The irritated hoyden slunk off, and he slid to the floor, free to wallow in the thrilling abjection of his love.
The next day he called Valerie and told her what had happened.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said mildly. “That girl was probably really hurt.”
“Oh, she was just a groupie,” he said. “The point is, I didn’t care how beautiful she was. I wanted you.”
When they got off the phone, Valerie buried her face in the T-shirt, rubbing it across her lips and cheeks, helplessly nipping at it with her teeth.
His return was a festival of romantic lewdness. At four in the morning, as they lay on the rug in the irradiant caress of the television light, she invited him to sleep with her. At six in the morning, Michael slept like a healthy animal while she lay in a grim ball, tormented by overstimulation. The joy of the previous day seemed unreal, and even if it wasn’t, the outsize quality of it was bound to heighten the desolation she would surely feel when the affair was over. Valerie had not had many good experiences with men in her life, and as the sad sacks and malefactors of the past assembled for her mental review, her excitement over this boy began to seem pathetic. But each time she was about to sink into a restful misery, boisterous optimism surged up and kicked her into wakefulness.
When they got up, they had mugs of tea with spoonfuls of honey in them, and then Michael pretended to be a sleazy boss dropping in on an unsuspecting housewife just after her naive husband has left for work. The boss was a terrible malefactor, but in the haven of fantasy, he was safely confined to her script. There was great drama as the poor housewife struggled to resist him, but to no avail: Valerie opened her eyes just in time to be a little startled by the look of almost demented malice on Michael’s young face as he ejaculated across her mouth and nose.
They lay in each other’s arms for a long time. Then Valerie got up and put on a tape of piano jazz and made them a big pancake breakfast. They ate it on a rickety table on her back porch. It was nice, except the sauciness of the jazz suddenly sounded so self-satisfied that she had to go in and turn it off. “I’m sorry,” she said when she came back out. “That music was making me feel like an asshole.” Michael laughed. He sat in his boxer shorts, with his long legs spread, exuding succulent boyness just faintly shaded with dim, inchoate cruelty.
They went for a genteel walk, up and down the hills of the Castro and Noe Valley. They admired the flowers with which residents had planted their yards. Michael told her that he had been fat in junior high and that other kids had made fun of him. Then he had lost weight in a dramatic growth spurt during the summer before high school and had returned to school eagerly anticipating what he assumed would be his new social status, only to have the same mean kids call him “Pig Dick” again.
“It made me think that people would just do that to me all my life, no matter what I did,” he said. “After the end of that day, I went into a deserted classroom and cried. I mean, I really cried.”
Valerie emitted a tender moo and embraced his hips with one arm. “I wish I could’ve come to you as a visitation from the future,” she said. “I would’ve held you and told you you were handsome.”
Michael stopped walking and hugged her against his chest. His heart beat like a proudly flying flag.
They went back to the apartment and had sex while imagining a heartless scene between Michael and the Seattle girl he’d rejected. About halfway through the fantasy, Valerie stopped being a bystander and became the poor girl. She pleaded with him to fuck her, but when he did, she felt a terrible rush of emotional pain that sho
cked her into tears. Mistaking her shudders for excitement, he became too rough, and she cried out for him to stop. They separated and Valerie turned on her side, just in time to see Michael’s expression of impersonal cruelty devolve into confusion and injury. He clasped her wet face in his hands. “Oh,” he said, “I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t mean it. . .” They started again and she cried more, but she didn’t want to stop.
When they finished, they separated and stared at each other, disoriented and almost shamed. “Well,” said Valerie, “and this is only the third week.”
“Holy shit,” said Michael. “You’re right.”
Again he spent the night. He slept curled around her from behind, his forehead butting against her shoulder blades, one hand on her breast. She lay wide awake, withstanding surges of happiness and fear.
The next day she was too physically sensitive for sex. Half joking, he pawed and cajoled her. His aggression ran in a giddy zigzag that grabbed her up and pulled her along, which was fun except that she didn’t feel like going anywhere. Like the sleazy boss, he mauled and grabbed, and under his clownishness she sensed the vicious look she had glimpsed the day before. Another time, the look might’ve excited her, but now it felt like an unfriendly finger poking a tender spot. “I need to be by myself,” she said. “Like, for several days.”
After he left, it occurred to her that he saw her withdrawal as a squeamish flinch from his carnal might, and that idea so irritated her that she walked around muttering sarcastically for several minutes. She was older than he was! Their fantasy life was her idea! She remembered that she had cried, but the memory seemed to be about someone else; the image of her weeping face was static, as if it were an abstract signifier of something just beyond her vision. She remembered Michael’s expression, as it went from malice to tenderness, with a piercing, secretive poignancy that was like a sore tooth. She felt like squirming.
She sat down to finish a jacket cover illustrated with the leafy branches of trees.
Because They Wanted To: Stories Page 10
