His words gave off a high, sterling tingle. I felt they should’ve touched me, but they didn’t. Still, I noticed them, tingling.
The restaurant was a plain rectangular room muffled in white. The many people seated in it ate with great energy. A woman’s sharp nose and tense posture, combined with a glimpse of someone else’s long, nimble fingers, gave me an impression of cutting fineness. The waiter who seated us smiled as if he was glad to see Kenneth arrive with a date, and his warmth was startling in the midst of the arranged enjoyment. We studied our menus and selected our food. That out of the way, Kenneth folded his hands and leaned slightly forward with dense shoulders. “You wanted to know about me,” he said, “so let me tell you some things.”
He had gone to Harvard, where he had studied literature. He had been a founding member of SDS. He had started a rock band and, with the band, had moved to San Francisco, where he helped preside over “acid tests,” or public LSD festivals, about which I had read a book and seen a TV special. He had played music and handed tourists paper cups of Kool-Aid with LSD in it, which, to his amazement, they drank.
His voice when he told these stories was oddly perfunctory, as though he were answering a job description. I thought of his phone voice: complexity crushed into a ball. I realized that across from me sat an unknown person, full of thoughts and feelings I had never had. But it seemed that to get to them, I would have to pry them out of their balled shapes. I wondered if I felt the same to him; maybe everybody over the age of thirty balled up without realizing it.
As he talked, I imagined him standing around the Marina with his guitar, handing Kool-Aid to happy, receptive tourists. When I was fifteen, a stranger had given me a tab of acid, but I’d at least known what it was. We were alone in a room together. He sat next to me, watching my pupils dilate. His body seemed both insensible and grossly live, filled with the ignorant majesty of his breath. “If I wasn’t such a nice guy,” he said, “you could really be getting screwed.” I tried to figure out what he meant by that. Eyeless homunculi suddenly spilled out of his nose and sat on his upper lip. The radio sang “I feel free.”
The waiter brought wine to our table. Kenneth tasted it and made a small frown of approval. The waiter filled our glasses.
In 1971 Kenneth married the girlfriend of a Yippie celebrity. He went to medical school at her urging. They traveled all over the world together and had children. They were still friendly with the Yippie celebrity, who was now a public relations consultant for environmentally responsible businesses. The food arrived.
We traded information and opinions as we ate. Kenneth ate with fine, tight manners. He ate as if he expected his food to be exquisite, and as if he was almost irritated to find his expectation duly met. He said he’d read my poems and thought they were good. He wondered why I didn’t write more. He described a story he had read recently and admired. It was about a man who wanted everything he did, even the smallest gestures, to be perfect. If they weren’t, he’d repeat them until they were, which meant that the author had devoted a lot of space to descriptions of such acts as the man repeatedly taking his comb out of his pocket and putting it back.
“I hate that kind of thing,” I said. “It’s an art school concept.”
“I suppose it is,” said Kenneth. “But I thought it an elegant description of compulsion.”
“Compulsion isn’t elegant,” I said. “It’s ugly as hell.”
This seemed to startle him. “Well, yes, it’s an, um, illness, I guess.” He sat poised over his plate, his utensils suspended in a slight, cute angle of ineptitude, like a pretty girl with one foot turned in. “But the story is also describing a wish for perfection that I share to some extent.” He smiled. “In a compulsive kind of way.”
“Well,” I said, “it is after all possible to be elegant and ugly at the same time.”
“I thought you’d understand.” He paused. “You know, that dress you wore at the party was a real knockout. I was hoping you’d wear something like that tonight.”
When I got home I felt agitated and vacant at the same time. I changed into my thermal pajamas and lay on the floor, eating a candy bar and lulling myself with a television fashion special that was mostly models walking back and forth while music played and high-speed graphics flared and dissolved. I went to sleep at three, and immediately had a nightmare. I was in a room full of strangers with muffled, half-frowning faces that I couldn’t quite see. I couldn’t hear most of what was said to me, nor could I make myself heard. The room was close and hot, and it was difficult to breathe. I walked around, trying to find an exit, until I realized that there was none. When I woke, I had to turn on the light and sit up, my hand on my rushing chest.
When I woke in the morning, I lay in bed for a long moment, feeling the agitation of the night, now faint and slow, with lots of empty space between pulses. I got up and made myself a mug of tea with a tablespoon of honey in it. I sat in the living room in a pool of live, swarming sunlight, drinking my tea. I thought that maybe I would write a poem about my dream. In the poem, Erin would be my companion in the dark room, a blind companion whom I could not fully see or hear but could feel in bursts of secret radiance.
Kenneth called a week after our date. He called at ten thirty at night. I ensconced myself in bed and we talked about our day. I described a class discussion of a long prose poem about a girl with “peanut-butter-colored hair” who gets gang-banged in a public pool by a band of boobs. The author of the poem, a likable young fellow, wondered guiltily whether it was wrong of him to portray the banged girl as a shallow fool. A subdiscussion had ensued about whether the character was in fact a shallow fool, just because, prior to the pool incident, she’d prattled about doing it with a local musician who later became famous. I told them it was mean-spirited and ill-advised to make a harsh judgment based on so little information, in life or in poetry—mainly because, if I were a teenage girl, I’d prattle about it too, and I wasn’t a fool, now, was I?
Kenneth, for his part, had just come from a trying dinner with his two teenage sons and one of their ridiculous friends, a dour young man with unattractive tattoos on his head, who’d gone on about how certain of his tattoos meant something sacred and private to him and then pulled up his shirt to reveal them. Kenneth thought it was stupid, but he had secretly enjoyed the fellow’s posturings, as well as those of his eldest son, John.
“John’s such a handsome kid,” said Kenneth. “He’s charming and he plays the guitar and girls just fight over him.” He sighed worriedly. “Poor Tom, on the other hand, just doesn’t have any of that. He’s smart and everything, but he’s never even had a real girlfriend, except for one back in high school, and she jumped off a fifteen-story building.”
“Well, I was kind of like that in high school,” I said.
“You jumped off a building?”
“No. People thought I didn’t have anything. Then I wrote a book of poetry that people liked. Gee, do I have something or not?”
We changed the subject. He asked me if I would like to go “on a run” with him that weekend, to scour the flea markets and antique stores for extraordinary stuff. I said no, but when he asked if I would like to have dinner with him again, I accepted.
The restaurant he chose for our second dinner was elegant and quiet. A couple in early middle age sat next to us, handling their cutlery with the careful, vaguely grateful manner of people unused to eating in restaurants. The man was like a happy animal in his suit. The woman’s hair flared up and her loud, finicky skirt flared out.
Kenneth fussed over the wine menu. His forehead sweated faintly in the light. “So,” he said, “there has been one other person I’ve been on a date with besides you—it was a year ago, when I first started the divorce. It’s a story I think would interest you.”
The woman next to us kept stiffly brushing imaginary crumbs from her skirt. She had a brittle, wounded sweetness that the man seemed very solicitous of.
“I was really anxious because I kn
ew I didn’t want to be in the marriage anymore, but I was afraid that I couldn’t find anyone else. I looked around; there was nothing.”
“But there’s a ton of single women who want—”
“You always hear that, but really, there aren’t.” He ordered our wine. He spread his napkin in his lap and made an expansive reach for the bread. “My friends asked me, well, who did I want to meet? And I said, ‘Uma Thurman.’”
“Really.”
“And you know, like magic, that’s who I met! Well, not really Uma, but a twenty-four-year-old model who looks just like her!”
He had met this extraordinary young woman at a gallery opening. Her pale-blond hair was piled upon her head. Her loose, cream-colored pant legs wafted with her stroll. She wore white open-toed sandals, and her toenails were painted pink. She frowned at a piece of sculpture and toyed with the raised mole on the back of her perfect neck. “Oh,” said someone. “That’s Zoe. She’s either an actress who’s trying to model or the other way around.”
Kenneth secured an introduction; with a graceful grimace, she told him that, although she supported herself as a model, she wanted to be an actress, and that she was studying to be a lawyer too. He thought he felt her gently score his palm with her fingernail as she slowly withdrew her hand from his grasp.
She joined Kenneth at a small dinner party, and at the end of the evening, she allowed him to drive her home. He invited her to go out on a run with him, and she said yes.
“It wasn’t just that she was beautiful,” said Kenneth. “She’s an aristocrat—quite literally, from Poland. She speaks six languages. She can converse intelligently on virtually any subject. And she’s got flawless manners. If she needed some salt at dinner she wouldn’t just ask you to pass it. She’d say, ‘Excuse me, do you mind if I ask for the salt?’ Or if she had to go to the bathroom she’d say, ‘Please, do you mind if I use the bathroom?’ Everything was special with her. I took her to the same restaurant we went to. The waiters went crazy over her.”
The man at the next table glanced at Kenneth and then at me. He saw me notice his glance.
Zoe had told him on their first date that she liked to have friendships with “old men” because she knew that they wouldn’t “come on” to her. He had found this remark irksome, but it didn’t matter; just to be in her presence made him feel reverent and sensitive. They went on run after rapturous run, and he bought her carloads of stuff.
“Being with her was like nothing else,” he said. “It was like having a beautiful Cartier watch on your wrist.”
I wondered if he was trying to disgust me. I wondered if I had any right to be disgusted. The bald spot on his head appeared oblivious and vulnerable in the overhead light. The woman seated next to me sighed restlessly.
But then, he went on, he began to notice subtle character flaws. Once, when they were out on a stuff run, she asked him if he thought she should get breast implants. “It shocked me,” he said, “because I thought she didn’t take that modeling stuff seriously. I thought she wanted something more genuine. I told her that, and she didn’t really have an answer.”
It only got worse. They went to a dinner party and, on being introduced to “a European has-been director,” Zoe virtually dropped Kenneth and spent the evening fawning on the director. On another occasion, he was sure he saw her trade lewd winks with some absurd boy. Then, when they went to an art opening, she abruptly canceled their dinner afterward because someone she had just met had invited her to a screening. When he complained, she got snippy. “I decided I wasn’t going to see her again until she called me and apologized,” he said. “And she never did, so . . . like Phil put it, Cartier watches don’t hurt your feelings.”
“Cartier watches don’t have feelings, either,” I said. “Please, would you mind if I—excuse me—go to the bathroom?”
I sulked in the rest room, loathing Kenneth. My loathing was grating and frustrating. It made me feel like a small animal trapped in a maze as part of a science experiment. I thought about how everybody tried so hard and how it never worked. I thought of the woman at the next table brushing at imaginary crumbs. I remembered my mother standing in front of a mirror, trying to pull her short jacket down over her protruding abdomen, her face anxious and sad. I remembered the way Frederick had first looked at me, as if beholding an object that ideally filled a perpetually empty place. I remembered how I had touched him in quite the same spirit, except that my touch had been even more peremptory than his look. I pictured Kenneth pulling a comb out of his pocket and putting it back, over and over again. My loathing depressed me. It seemed arrogant and stupid.
I returned to the table. The people sitting next to us had gone, leaving a dainty wreckage of cutlery and waste. Kenneth looked diminished and sad, picking at his fancy dinner. He looked up mournfully. “You think I’m an asshole, don’t you?” he said.
“No,” I said. “No.” I sat down. “I just—”
“I told you that story because I thought you would like it. Believe me, I know I made a fool of myself over that girl. I learned my lesson. I thought you’d appreciate it.”
“I do. I mean, I understand.” My tone was obnoxiously kind and judicial. “I can fall for superficial things. Sometimes I wish every-thing could be like a pop song, like fine, like white sugar. But it just doesn’t work that way. And besides, that Cartier watch thing was a bit much.”
“But what I meant was that she was like magic. I mean, since I met her, I open the passenger door for every woman who gets into my car. It’s a tiny thing, but things like that create a sense of dignity and—”
“It’s just that pop song thing. Also, how come you like her exaggerated manners and you don’t like it that she wants fake boobs?”
We ate our food and discussed the complex allure of the artificial. He said he didn’t think his attraction to Zoe was entirely false, because he’d respected her law studies and her desire to excel mentally. I said I thought that was just another objectification, and he seemed to consider this. We were beginning to be excited by each other. The waiters enjoyed our excitement. When we finished eating, they brought us small, festive balls of cotton candy on cardboard sticks for free.
We walked back to his car, a subtle membrane of feeling spanning the air between us. With a sudden movement, he took my hand and held it. His palm was fleshy, but it felt brittle anyway. I held it and tried to ease its brittleness. But later, when we stood on my front steps and said good night to each other, he tried to kiss me on the lips and I turned my head. I glimpsed his limpid, bewildered eyes as his mouth lighted on my cheek and then drew back in an open, stifled purse. He coughed and looked away. “I’ll call you again,” he said.
A blurry impress of his eyes and his lips, open and moving away, was still on me when I lay down to sleep, and that may’ve been why I dreamed of kissing a boy I had known when I was thirteen. In life, he had looked down on me because I had been shy and plain, and I, in turn, thought him an empty-headed snot. But in the dream we were in love. We sat together and kissed. Our hands were at our sides, our shoulders just touched. He came near and drew away and nervously played with his honey-colored hair. His T-shirt had a rip under one faintly pungent armpit. He extended his mouth again, stretching his long, supple throat. He brushed his lips against my cheek, and the dream slowly fell into nothing.
I rode to Berkeley in a state of melancholy. The passenger seated sideways in front of me on the BART was a slouching, unhandsome young man with pale-brown hair and a weak, somehow derisive chin. Still, there was something pleasing in the dull brown stubble on his thin white skin and the sardonic loll of his head against the rattling plastic window of the car. He turned, met my eyes, then looked away, and I remembered my dream with a funny rolling sensation, almost as if, half asleep, I had turned over and rubbed my face against an unexpected softness. I remembered Frederick then, and to my embarrassment and mild sadness, it occurred to me that the dream had been at least partly about him. How maudlin, I thought, to
have conflated two drunk, unhappy adults who had casually mistreated each other with tender, kissing children. I remembered how Frederick had touched my cheek, his hand sensitive and bare as the paw of a friendly animal. The memory was plain and blameless as a glass of water. It made me remember my fear and shame, also as something plain and blameless. Then it occurred to me that the dream had been, in some less clear way, about Kenneth as well.
Erin decided to stop seeing Dolly, because she had revealed herself as a shallow brat who “jerked people around.” We discussed it over drinks at a crowded boy bar.
“She decides she wants to see other people and we have to have this interminable discussion of it and I’m crying and tearing my hair and finally I agree. Then next week she wants to be monogamous. Then two days later she’s fucking some bitch down the street. Who needs it?”
Her voice was defiant, but her eyes were stunned and fixated, her chest hard and shrunken. She wore black cigarette-leg pants that were too short at the ankles and a black leather shirt that was too short at the waist, and the clothes made her look desiccated, almost ridiculous.
I remembered my glimpse of Dolly, dumping ice down Erin’s shirt; with a slight shock, I intuited her vagina, a rude girl that would’ve stuck out its tongue if it could.
“It’s really painful,” continued Erin, “but I’m trying to work with it in a creative way. I’ve done all these healing rituals with candles and shrines and stuff. I tore up the whole backyard and planted a garden with petunias and snapdragons and, um . . .” She looked into the room, trying to remember what she had planted.
“Is it helping?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I know it’s going to hurt for a while, and I don’t want to wallow in it. But I don’t want to run away from it, either.” She brightened. “Last week I ran a personal ad in the Guardian. I answered a few too. I’m not looking for sex; I feel too vulnerable for that. I just want somebody to hurt me and humiliate me.” She took an enthusiastic drink. “It’s harder to find than you would think,” she said. “I’ve met a few women for coffee dates and they were nice, but I didn’t really want them to do anything to me. I’m supposed to meet a dominatrix from Germany tomorrow. Mainly, she’s into cutting.”
Because They Wanted To: Stories Page 26
