We went to a peep show known for its humane and feminist work environment, where we poured quarters into slots so that a dismal panel of lead would rise, revealing naked girls dancing and showing their genitals behind a thick pane of plastic.
I came home very drunk. I turned off all the lights and lay on the floor, listening to music. I thought of Erin and Frederick and Kenneth. I sang along to the music. I thought of the boyfriend whose death I had learned of the night I met Frederick. He had once shown me a photograph of himself as a baby, held against his father’s shoulder. He rose eagerly out of his father’s arms, grinning like a wolf cub. Everything in him went up and outward in a bright, excited rush. In its raw form, what he’d had was beautiful and good. But it hadn’t helped him. Probably he’d never even known it was there.
Frederick had that fierce upward movement in him, but more muscular, less bright. I had sensed it when I put my hand on his midsection; it had felt angry, and bitterly wounded, but also vigilant, dignified, and determined to preserve its form. He was a lot like me, actually. I thought of a medieval painting I had once seen of a young man holding a torch high over his head, his eyes focused upward into darkness. Frederick had dishonest, petty meanness, but he also had an idea of honor, and if he had put these qualities together in an odd, tacky combination, then that combination must have held some deep, secret sense for him. He was certainly no more odd or tacky than I, a woman who would debase herself trivially, for sport, and yet who sought, in the sheltering darkness of her debasement, passion, depth, and, most ludicrous, even tenderness.
Erin’s image suddenly shimmered through my thoughts, dispersing them. I saw her smiling, radiating her sweet, skewed gold light. Then, more faintly, I saw Kenneth, his face focused and busy, as if bent on the pursuit of his stuff, a pursuit that held some deep, secret sense only he could see.
My young cat approached, sniffed me cautiously, then walked away. I fell asleep on the floor and woke an hour later, disturbed and anxious, with a buzzing head and a dry mouth.
The next day I wrote Frederick a letter. I didn’t try to describe the things I had thought about the night before. I just said I felt bad about our last meeting. I said I knew I had behaved strangely and that I had done so because I had been afraid. I said that even though what happened between us had been uncomfortable, I had felt touched by him and hoped that if we met again, we could be nice to each other.
I didn’t think Frederick would answer my letter, but writing it nonetheless made me feel pleased and relieved. I pictured him reading it. I pictured him reacting to it with uncertainty and maybe even slight agitation, but I also pictured him being secretly pleased and relieved by it as well. I looked in the phone book and found the address of the computer consulting firm that employed him. After I sent the letter, I bought two expensive cookies from the deli next door and sat on my porch steps and ate them.
Erin called, very excited, to tell me about her cutting experience with the dominatrix.
“We took it slow,” she said. “We had a few coffee dates and got to know each other, I explained about being too vulnerable for sex, and she understood. I told her I’d never been cut before, so the first time she took it really easy. Just a little bit on my stomach.”
Her voice was jubilant, even triumphant.
“But last night she made me beg to be cut and stuff. And then she carved this whole elaborate pattern on my butt in the shape of a snake curled into an S—for ‘slave,’ I think. Want to come see it?”
I went to her house and she dropped her pants. The snake had fancy diamonds all up and down its back. Its mouth was open, and a happy little tongue popped out.
“Is it permanent?” I asked.
“No. She did it shallow, so it’ll fade in a few months.” She pulled up her pants. “I took some pictures,” she said. “So I could look back on it.” She pointed to the bulletin board, to which Polaroids of her cut buttock had been affixed. Her expression as she pointed had the minor, easy pride of a workman indicating a newly repaired phone or dishwasher.
Kenneth called two or three times a week, often late at night. Usually I let him talk into my answering machine while I stood in the hallway, listening. Sometimes I answered, and we would talk for an hour or more. He offered to find furniture and other stuff for me, for my household. “I could help you upgrade your apartment,” he said.
“There’s nothing wrong with my apartment.”
“Well, no, I’m not saying there is. I’d just like to make it better.” He paused, and I could feel him tensing, as if before a jump. “I’d like to make your life better.”
I rolled my eyes.
Our conversations were much like the one we’d had about the model who wanted to be a lawyer or an actress. They were amiable and opinionated, and sometimes he said things that irritated me, but the irritation didn’t stick: first I wanted to tell him what was wrong with him, then I felt foolish, then I accepted him, and then I lost interest. Under the awkwardness and the arrogance, I knew there was generosity and kindness and that he was trying to give it to me. Not because he wanted anything in return, but just to give it. Still, I couldn’t feel it. I tried. But I couldn’t.
I was walking on the street one afternoon when I saw Frederick again. I was with a colleague, a likable, loudmouthed creative writing teacher named Ginger. We were gossiping so avidly that I didn’t see Frederick until he was right before me. He was with a big man who had a hard, void face. Frederick’s face was also hard, but when he saw me, his eyes became startled and alert, almost fearful. I looked at him, and the expression in his eyes became shapelessly emotional while his face and body retracted and became harder. For a moment, his nonfeeling and his emotionality ran quickly parallel, and again he matched me. Then his eyes hardened too, and as he walked by me, he quite unmistakably sneered. “Hi, Susan.” His voice was soft and caressing, but he said my name like an insult. I was hurt and shocked beyond any sense.
“What was that?” said Ginger.
“This guy I had a one-night thing with.”
“Jesus, Susan, how old is he? He’s not a student, I hope.”
“God, no. I wouldn’t do that.”
Ginger looked over her shoulder. “He’s looking back this way,” she reported. “Guy looks like a fourteen-year-old skeezer.”
“Don’t,” I said. “I liked him.”
She was quiet, and I thought I could feel puzzled embarrassment in her silence. She put her hand on my back and rubbed me. “Sorry,” she said.
I didn’t answer, because I felt terrible. I experienced my tenderness for Frederick as a gross, gushing thing that had oppressed and offended him. It occurred to me that he had sneered precisely to make me feel that way. I hoped that wasn’t true. But even if it wasn’t, it seemed that I had been very stupid to see such complexity in what had happened between us. It seemed equally possible, though, that he was even more stupid not to see it.
Kenneth invited me to have dinner at his house with Phillip and his girlfriend Laura, a young blond woman with a small face full of timid hope. Kenneth’s wife, with whom he still shared the house, was away for a month, and he wanted to celebrate. We sat in the kitchen and drank wine while Kenneth prepared steaks and salads. The kitchen was gleaming and precise. Every bright knife, every cork and dish and bag, was meticulously and aesthetically arranged. Kenneth washed and dried the lettuce; his hands were white with cold from the water.
Phillip harangued us about President Clinton. He said he knew his presidency was a disaster when he tried to make the army accept homosexuals. Had he succeeded, Phillip went on, it would’ve been an unprecedented cultural cataclysm, a fact that no one but religious nuts would acknowledge.
“It’s not that I have anything against them,” he said. “I don’t care what they do. You see them in the Johns all the time—who cares?”
I hated his words, but his voice and face had a desperate, emotionally distended quality that made me involuntarily sympathetic. I did not think he belie
ved what he was saying, yet he continued to expel words as if from a violently churning pot.
“But if homosexuals ever become truly accepted, just normal like everybody else, do you know what will happen? Heterosexual men and homosexual men will band together, and male power will be felt in this society like never before. Women will be knocked off their pedestal and ground underfoot. Then we’ll see sex for the horror it really is. There’ll be no romance, no—”
Laura frowned and picked up the cork from the wine bottle. Her pale hair fell forward and covered her face; she tucked it behind her small, very red ear. Kenneth concentrated on the lettuce.
“Phil,” I said carefully, “you aren’t making any sense.”
“Have you read Thomas Aquinas or Aristotle? Because you should have. Even though they’re dead white males.” His dignity rasped horribly. “Do you know the story of the warrior who had a cute little slave girl that he kept around for fun, and then there was the man he truly loved? And—”
“Spell it out,” I said. “What are you trying to say?”
“That all these stupid liberal women who think they have some kind of alliance with gay men don’t understand. Gay men aren’t interested in women. They care about men.” He looked at me as if he hated me, except that his eyes were focused inwardly.
“Yeah,” I said, “and lesbians are a lot more interested in women than in men. In fact, sometimes even straight women, frankly—”
“I’m interested in women,” said Kenneth brightly, “whether or not they let gay guys in the army.”
“Phil,” said Laura. She looked at him with all the focus and force she could put in her little face. She looked as if she was trying to remind him of something he had accidentally forgotten.
Abashedly, he dropped his eyes, coughed, and turned his chair so that he faced her, not me.
We moved into the dining room, to eat around a big table. We all helped to set the table and bring out the food, and those gestures of goodwill made us seem like friends. The thick, rare steaks were served on large, expensive plates. Laura said that her mother, who lived in Kansas, would be glad to hear that Laura had eaten a steak dinner, because she thought Laura and Phil ate too much pasta. Her voice included us all in its bright, gentle touch. The men looked at her almost gratefully, as if glad to be reminded of the special place where mother and food were. Phillip began talking about the scourge of political correctness and how it had made honest talk impossible in the academy.
I examined the decorations on the buffet next to the table. They included vases, little books upheld by bookends, several different kinds of matchboxes, and statuettes of animals and girls. They had the potential for the kind of luxuriant aesthetic spewage I enjoy, but they were positioned with a stifling judiciousness that ruined the effect. Amid the fuss, I noticed a small framed photograph of a very handsome young man. He had long hair and wild eyes and an open, imperiously yelling mouth. He looked as if he were riding a roiling, swift-moving current of joy and triumph and satiety, yelling out his pleasure as he rode.
“Kenneth,” I said, “is that your son?”
“No,” he said. “That’s me. Almost thirty years ago.”
Sherbet was served, with slices of mango. Kenneth put on a CD. As each song played, he told us about each musician who played it, his history, his technical strengths and weaknesses. Then he told us about each of the instruments. Then he discussed the sound quality of each cut on the CD as opposed to vinyl.
When we finished eating, he said, “So. Are you ready to look at some stuff?”
We followed him upstairs, past darkened rooms full of furniture and boxes heaped together. He took us to the spare bedroom, where he had been sleeping since the separation. There, he kept the small things: drawers filled with sunglasses, cupboards of slumbering hats, boxes of jewelry in grand knotted lumps—gold, silver, glass, and plastic—ashtrays, matchboxes, paperweights, and figurines that fussed and promenaded. There were bags of shoes, chests jammed with women’s underwear, a deep closet full of suits and dresses. In the corner, a small, hard bed stood assailed by the teeming stuff; I wondered how he could sleep in such an uproar.
We walked through the room with cordial exclamations of delight. Kenneth rummaged magisterially, concentrating on finding things that each of us might especially like: an Armani suit for Phillip, a velvet gown for Laura, gray suede shoes, cuff links, scarves, an amber necklace. He kept saying, “Here, this is perfect for you.” He handed me a pair of sunglasses with elegant, winged eyes, a fey spray of rhinestones on each wing, the occasional bare indentation where a stone had dropped poignant as the bad teeth of an aristocrat. “Take them,” he said.
Phillip went into the bathroom with the Armani suit and came out wearing it, pleased and resplendent as a child at his own birthday party. Laura took a purple silk blouse and a zebra-striped handbag. Somewhat guiltily, I pocketed the sunglasses and an enormous pale-blue glass ring.
“Here, Susan,” said Kenneth. He went into the closet and emerged with a big gold coat in his arms. He unfurled it and held it out to me; it was a ridiculous, beautiful coat. “When I met you, I pictured you wearing this,” he said.
I looked at the coat and felt the same shy, greedy pleasure I had seen in Phillip’s face, as if I were a kid receiving a treat simply for being myself. “Thank you,” I mumbled. I turned around and offered him my arms. He put the coat on me, and his hands briefly closed on my shoulders. I turned to thank him; his face was private and mundane, but his eyes were full of emotion that was shallow and deep at once. The mixed quality of it reminded me of the expression I had seen on Frederick’s face when he passed me on the street, even though it was not the same mix.
During the drive home I asked Phillip and Laura why they thought Kenneth was so dedicated to collecting stuff. “It seems kind of compulsive,” I said.
Laura snorted mildly. “Oh,” she said, “you think?”
Phillip spoke, his voice insistent, almost bullying, and at the same time absolutely defeated. “When Kenneth was at Harvard, he was a leader,” he said. “He was at the center of a charmed circle. He had parties that were legendary—to be invited, you had to be extraordinarily intelligent or beautiful. He went through girls like they were nothing. They used to come crying to me afterward, and I’d say to him, But she’s a lovely girl, don’t you want to give her a chance? And he’d laugh. He’d just laugh.” As he spoke, the insistence gradually drained from his voice, leaving only the defeat. His hands on the steering wheel looked helpless and somehow hurt.
The summer term ended. My students brought a bottle of tequila to class, with lemon and salt, and we shared it while we talked about poems. They were full of themselves and affectionate, and tensed to fly away forever.
That night I celebrated with Erin, jana, and Paulette in a bar crowded with women and girls. Erin and I stood on the edge of the dance floor, arms about each other’s waists, drinking and basking in the vibrancy of the dancing girls. She felt so light in my half-embrace, as if she were made of bright, fluxing atoms, forming and disintegrating in secret patterns, determined in their private purpose and delighted if it made no earthly sense. I imagined lying on top of her, supporting myself with both elbows, so that I could look into her eyes. I imagined cradling her head in my hands. “My sweet girl,” I said. “You don’t deserve to be hurt. You don’t deserve to be cut. You don’t have to beg for anything, ever.” I imagined her looking at me with the scared, disbelieving eyes of a small, starved wild thing looking at a dish of proffered food, one paw extended forward, the rest of the body poised to fly. I pulled her into a corner, and she pressed herself against me. Full on, she felt too quick and light, as if she were racing inside, gathering speed to blow apart and scatter in a burst of sparkling motes. We kissed.
“I was thinking about you,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“It upsets me that you do all this stuff. Like cutting and whipping and having to beg for whatever.”
“It upsets
you?” She pulled back and looked at me almost with distaste.
“It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with it,” I said. “I’ve done it, and it’s . . . it’s human and everything. But it’s like you want that stuff because you think you deserve it. And you don’t. You just don’t.”
She embraced me, and she felt solid and human, with a corporeal, beating heart. “Susan,” she said, “you’re so sweet I just want to tie you up and torture you. But that stuff is what gets me off. It’s not about self-hate or anything icky. It just gets me off.”
“I know,” I said. “I know.” But we were separating.
“Come back to the house with us,” she said. “We’re going to release the ladybugs.”
I wondered what she meant, and my wondering went in an aimless spiral. The music turned raucous and absurd. Two tiny, feverish girls in torn shirts slammed against each other, leapt apart, and slammed together again, giggling drunkenly. More girls moved through my line of vision, their private selves breathing through the lax shape of their drunken public presentations. A beautiful dark girl at the bar drank from a shot glass and urgently ran her mouth, shifting her big butt on the barstool and stabbing her finger at the floor as if ordering someone to kneel. As she spoke, her full mouth took harsh, abrupt shapes, as if everything had to be said with a lot of force and then chopped into pieces.
Erin came and took my hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Jana and Paulette were kissing on the hood of the car when we emerged from the bar. Jana wore chipped purple nail polish on her splayed, grabbing fingers; a beggar walking by said he liked her purple paws and then asked us for money. We lavished him with change. Erin and I got in the back seat, and she embraced me from behind. I took her hand and kissed it. I felt her subtly respond, as if a clear bell had sounded in her chest and passed its reverberation into mine. Paulette turned on the radio; they were playing the love song that had so grabbed my imagination at the clothing store, months before. This time it sounded harmless and childishly sweet. I pictured the pop star singing it into a microphone, his eyes closed and his nose thrust slightly up and forward as he reveled in his tiny loop of bliss. Vaguely, I wished him well. Jana sang the song out the window as we rolled through the noise and activity of night.
Because They Wanted To: Stories Page 27
