What She Saw...

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  In most ways, it still was.

  “What do you say we get the fuck out of here?” he asked Phoebe with an insouciant lift of his cleft chin.

  But it was less a proposition than a declaration. He was already zipping his jacket and walking down the front steps. He must have known the answer would be yes, and it was. She threw her arms around Humphrey’s narrow waist while he revved the motor of his vintage Norton. The accordion pleats of his kilt billowed out on either side of him as they pulled away from the curb.

  It wasn’t clear if he was wearing anything underneath. “SO HOW COME I’ve never seen you before?” he wanted to know over a cheeseburger deluxe at the twenty-four-hour greasy spoon.

  Phoebe took a deep breath. With his black Doc Marten tie-ups with yellow overstitching, Humphrey was bound to be a harsh critic of the Greek system. (College was easy that way. You could tell everything about a person’s politics based on his or her footwear.) But then, she couldn’t lie about everything— or could she? “I was in jail—I mean a sorority,” she said, trying to make the best of the truth.

  It must not have been good enough. Humphrey made a face as if he’d just tasted something rotten. “You were in a sorority?”

  “Until three weeks ago,” she confessed. “That’s when Holly kidnapped me. Now I’m living at her place.”

  “Well, congratulations on getting out alive. Aside from rendering heterosexuality compulsory, sororities promote a nefarious kind of intragender rivalry—all under the deceptively magnanimous guise of fraternity and philanthropy.”

  For a moment or two Phoebe was speechless. She’d never heard a guy speak this way. It was so uncool it was cool. It was Spitty Clark’s worst nightmare. In light of her recent deactivation from Delta Nu Sigma, it only made Humphrey Fung that much more attractive to her. (The crowning blow had been Homecoming Weekend, during which time Phoebe had found herself upside down in a miniskirt being carried out of Chi Zeta Phi by an irate bouncer who’d taken umbrage at her lack of a hand stamp.)

  “It sounds like you know a lot about sororities,” she offered.

  “I recently became a women’s studies major,” he told her by way of explanation.

  “A women’s studies major? You’re joking.”

  “I only joke when it’s funny, and there’s nothing funny about gender discrimination.”

  “Maybe not. But I didn’t know you were even allowed to be a male women’s studies major.”

  Humphrey shrugged. “It hasn’t been easy. A lot of the women in the program don’t take me seriously. They think my politics are a front. They think I’m a total poser just ’cause I’m good-looking.”

  Phoebe didn’t let on that Holly had used the exact word. “I don’t dismiss you as a poser,” she sought to reassure her prospective devirginizer. “I mean, I wouldn’t even know who you were posing as.”

  “Well, thanks,” he said.

  “People don’t take me seriously either,” she added. “Then again, I’m not sure if I want people to take me seriously. I mean, to be perfectly honest, I don’t take myself very seriously.”

  “You should,” said Humphrey.

  “Why?”

  “Otherwise, people will step all over you. And besides, for too many years women have been treated as entertainment, objects, decoration, wall hangings, toys, tools, playthings . . .”

  Humphrey’s talk excited her. She liked the idea of aligning herself with a male feminist—if only because she couldn’t imagine going to a tailgate with one. But the idea of being a play-thing aroused her even more. She wasn’t ready to grow up and become a player, never mind a woman. She was just getting used to being an object of desire—just starting to enjoy it.

  And wasn’t that what she was to Humphrey Fung—an object of his desire? It certainly seemed like it on the way out of the greasy spoon. It was on the sidewalk out front that he first asked to kiss her. She didn’t say yes, she didn’t say no. She thought her closed eyes and parted lips would speak for themselves.

  But Humphrey wasn’t the kind of guy who felt entitled to presume. He said, “For too many years men have read women’s silences in a self-interested way. So I’ll ask you again. Do you want me to kiss you before I drive you home? Or do you want me simply to drive you home?”

  “You can kiss me,” she told him.

  At which point he felt entitled to lean her up against a telephone pole and press his lips into her lips, his hands gripping her butt, his kilt brushing her thigh. But the moment was short-lived, thanks to a carful of drunken Tau Upsilon Gamma brothers who throttled by to the tune of “Dyke it up!” and “Leave it to Beaver!” They must have thought Humphrey was a girl. Phoebe quailed in embarrassment. She was the only one. “Sexist homophobes!” Humphrey screamed back at them at the top of his lungs. Then he turned back to Phoebe with a selfsatisfied grin on his face—he seemed to thrive on conflict—and asked her, “Would you like me to drive you home? Or would you like me to drive you back to my bivouac and tent down for the night?”

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  “Okay what?” he said.

  “Okay the latter.”

  “Okay cool.”

  LAKEVIEW HOUSE WAS the only anarchist cooperative at Hoover. Humphrey lived on the second floor. The walls were painted black. The bookshelves were filled with Nietzsche and Conrad. Fugazi played on the stereo. Or maybe it was Fishbone. A hand-painted banner reading IF THERE’S NO DANCING, I DON’T WANT TO BE PART OF YOUR REVOLUTION extended from one side of a marble fireplace to the other. The line was attributed to Emma Goldman. She was one of Humphrey’s current heroes. Phoebe sat down on a plaid couch, pulverizing several renegade Cheerios in the process. Humphrey sat next to her. There was no sign of a bed, but there was a deerskin teepee in the corner. “How come you live in an anarchist cooperative if you’re not an anarchist anymore?” she asked him.

  “Convenient to campus,” he answered. “Plus, the chef’s superb. Also, I signed a lease through June.”

  “If you were a real anarchist, you wouldn’t mind breaking it.”

  “We live by our contradictions. Would you mind if I took off my shirt?”

  “That’s fine.”

  He took off his shirt. He had a runny, half-bitten-looking A tattooed in blue on the small of his back. “I’m having it reworked,” he said. “By next week it’ll be a sideways F.”

  “For fuck you?” said Phoebe, suppressing the urge to giggle.

  “Actually, feminism,” Humphrey corrected her. “However, should I ever become closely aligned with the antifur movement, I figure I’ll be covered.”

  “Or the country of Fiji.”

  “Less likely.”

  “Why?”

  “Tropical climates make me break out in hives. By the way, I’m extremely attracted to you. Would you mind if I took off your shirt?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “What about your pants?”

  “That’s fine, too.”

  “And my kilt?”

  “Sure.” Phoebe couldn’t believe her bad luck. It was Spitty Clark all over again—asking permission with every new body part he uncovered. She half expected him to start throwing up his bacon and eggs.

  But he managed to maneuver her into his teepee without further incident, pausing only once to ask, “Just out of curiosity, have you ever done this before?”

  “There was this guy I used to go out with, Paul,” she mumbled in terror, because she’d waited so long for this moment it had taken on the quality of a dream.

  But it wasn’t like a dream at all; it was blinding like the first glimpse of morning.

  And because she couldn’t bear for Humphrey Fung to know the truth about her lack of sexual experience. But it wasn’t just Humphrey. It was everyone. And everything. She considered herself undercover. Always in costume. Just like Humphrey. Though if Humphrey feared his good looks rendered him a poser, Phoebe feared she was good-looking only because she was posing as such—as a dandelion blown sideways in th
e suburban breeze, resigned to a life spent watching her flower turn to dust, if it wasn’t first truncated by the ruthless blade of a lawn mower. That was the romance of her waifdom: that her fate was an essentially tragic one. That she’d accept what was given her. That you could cut her down and she wouldn’t complain. She’d keep growing back for more.

  In fact, behind her ditsy demeanor, she considered herself a calculating bitch, a murderer in the making. At night she dreamt of strangling each and every last Tri Pi with her bare blue hands. During the day, meanwhile, she tried to have no discernible personality at all. And wasn’t that what guys, even anarchist-feminist guys, wanted—a projection screen for their own delusions of grandeur? And didn’t everyone like the sound of his own voice the best? “Whatever,” said Humphrey. “For too long, women have been identified by the company they keep.”

  As if he didn’t believe her. And why should he have? She was just lying there waiting for it to be over. It wasn’t that easy. It took three tries before he even got it in. That’s how much it hurt. It hurt so much it sent shivers up her spine. And the pain it provoked seemed to be mocking the significance she attributed it—a significance that had nothing to do with the present and everything to do with its future completion. Such that when it was finally over—it seemed to go on forever—she breathed an audible sigh of relief.

  How was Humphrey to know the reasons for her joy? “It’s been a pleasure pleasuring you,” he declared.

  “Same here,” Phoebe told him before she slid out from under his dead weight and disappeared into his anarchist bathroom, where she lifted one naked thigh onto his toothpaste-encrusted sink, rinsed off what little blood there was with a damp piece of toilet paper, caught her reflection in the mirror, found she looked the same, and experienced a wave of bittersweet regret at the thought that now she was just like everyone else.

  Just another girl who’d had sex.

  EXCEPT ONCE YOU had sex, Phoebe found, you had to keep having it. And you had to enjoy it. You had to make little noises to let the other person know how good it felt. Even if it only felt okay. Even if you’d just as soon be having a cup of tea or reading or smoking or talking on the phone. And you had to say, “Yeah,” when the guy asked you, “Did you come?” Even if you’d never had an orgasm in your life. And you had to worry about getting pregnant, and getting cheated on, and getting all kinds of weird diseases with acronyms instead of names.

  But having sex with Humphrey Fung—it wasn’t something Phoebe was inclined to say no to. Because it turned out that a lot of girls in Gerald Stevens’s circle were hot for Humphrey. And he wanted Phoebe. And that made her hot by association. And she’d always dreamed of being the girl who other girls dreamed of being. Except that being hot turned out to be as stressful as sex—maybe more so. Because once you were hot, you had to stay hot twenty-four hours a day. So you wouldn’t be found out for the dreary blob, the unmitigated dork, the drooling dullard you really were.

  Oh, but he found out anyway, Humphrey did. “Where’d you say you grew up?” He was always asking her that. He asked that the night Phoebe lit the wrong end of her cigarette. It made a terrible smell, a chemical, rancid smell. He already knew the answer.

  She told him anyway: “New Jersey.”

  “That’s a fucked-up state,” he said. “I mean, what’s with those jackboots the troopers wear? And why can’t they call them towns? Townships. That’s what they call them in South Africa. A coincidence? I don’t think so.”

  “Canada has townships, too,” offered Phoebe.

  “Canada is a special case,” objected Humphrey.

  Phoebe let it go. She’d spent enough time with Humphrey to know that he grew surly when others called his opinions into question, even though he himself called those same opinions into question every six months or so.

  Oh, but it was worth it—worth placating Humphrey Fung, Phoebe found—and not just on account of the status he conferred upon her, but (ironically enough) on account of the opportunity to conform to age-specific conventions he allowed her. At nineteen she’d never been anyone’s girlfriend before. Which is to say, she’d never partaken in the corny pleasures of holding hands on the streets; of buttering two bagels instead of one; and of wearing his sweaters (and occasionally skirts) over her own. And she took to the job with all the gusto of a drag queen— spent half her waking hours primping and prettying herself for Humphrey Fung; always made sure her underwear matched, and that her stomach was flat, her legs skinny, her skin soft, her aplomb undeniable. Just as she found the photographic record of his childhood endlessly revealing and hopelessly endearing, and sat through countless hours of soporific home videotapes dating back to his competitive karate days.

  EXCEPT THE MORE doting Phoebe became, the more distant Humphrey grew. Though his frostiness was often difficult to disentangle from his feminism. Take, for example, the breezy April morning Humphrey’s pathologically jealous housemate, Dave Injun, walked up to her right in front of Humphrey and said, “You know you want me to fuck you.”

  “You’re disgusting,” Phoebe told him. What else could she say?

  But the rattle in her voice only fueled Dave Injun’s rage. “Hey, Humphrey, my dick is hard,” he carried on. “Let me fuck her. You won’t mind, right?”

  At which point Phoebe looked over to Humphrey. But he wouldn’t even look up. “For too many years, men have tried to rein in women’s sexuality,” he mumbled from inside his comic book. “So don’t let me be the one to stand in the way of anyone’s fun.”

  And later, when Phoebe tried to talk to Humphrey about it—about how she was wondering if he wouldn’t mind telling Dave to leave her alone—he made it out to be her problem. He said, “That’s just Dave. It’s you who have to change. You’ve got to learn how to defend yourself. Here, let’s practice. Go ahead. Tell me to fuck off. Go ahead.”

  “Fuck off,” she obliged.

  “Try it again.”

  “Fuck off!” Now her frustration was real.

  “That’s a lot better,” said Humphrey. “Try it once more.”

  But this time, Phoebe didn’t respond. She was too busy wondering if wishful thinking—at least, on Humphrey’s part— wasn’t at play.

  AS THE SPRING progressed, it began to seem more and more that way—that Humphrey would happily have dispensed with her like an old razor had his politics not prevented him from doing so with a clear conscience. But he’d never come right out and admit it. Then he stopped admitting anything at all. It happened shortly after school had let out for the summer, on the Fungs’ tiny, private island off the coast of Maine. Humphrey and Phoebe had driven up for a long weekend. It was a ten-minute speedboat ride from shore. Dr. Fung greeted them at the dock. He was a short, trim man in a Katmandu T-shirt and belted safari shorts.

  “Do you think I could use your bathroom?” Phoebe asked him.

  “Why, of course you can,” he answered, steering her gaze toward a gabled shed on the edge of the woods. “It’s right over there.”

  There was no toilet paper inside, and there were spiders everywhere. And you were supposed to cover your excrement with peat moss. Phoebe couldn’t get out of that outhouse fast enough. By the time she did, Humphrey was gone. In his place stood a broad-shouldered blonde in a patchwork caftan. She introduced herself as Greta Fung. Then she led Phoebe inside a two-story clapboard cottage with no electricity or running water.

  The Fungs were so casual about sex, they’d assigned Phoebe and Humphrey the same room, a bare-bones attic partition right next to their own. Maybe that was the problem. There wasn’t enough in their way; there wasn’t enough for Humphrey to rebel against. He was busy unpacking his toiletry kit. He didn’t even look up when Phoebe walked in. “That outhouse was so scary,” she began, recalling how Humphrey relished every opportunity to mock his parents’ Peace Corps idea of a good time. “There were only, like, a million spiders in there!”

  But to her shock and dismay, Humphrey shot her a withering look and spat, “Spider
s have just as much right to be in there as you do!”

  He spent the rest of the weekend reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex on a flotation device off the dock, pausing every now and then to burst into obstreperous laughter.

  So Phoebe played badminton with Professor Kling, a biology department colleague and friend of Professor Fung’s. And she helped Mrs. Fung peel potatoes and shuck corn. And she fielded insults from Dave Injun, who was nicer to her that weekend than he’d ever been before (or ever was again). And she talked agrarian reform with Joanne and Jacob, a mother-and-son marijuana-farming duo. And she went canoeing with Humphrey’s robotic older brother, Harry. Saturday turned into Sunday, Sunday into Monday. Then it was time to go.

  Phoebe and Humphrey drove the eight hours back to Hoover in virtual silence. (Dave Injun was continuing on to the resort town of Kennebunkport in his own car; he said he had a few things he wanted to relay to President George Bush about what President George Bush could do with his, Dave Injun’s, genitalia. ) Indeed, it was only after Humphrey struck down a small, furry creature that ran out in front of their rental car on a local road near Harpswell that he deigned to open his trap in any significant manner—though not (horrifyingly enough) to speak. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation proving futile, however, he climbed back into the driver’s seat with tears in his eyes and resorted to his earlier sullen incommunicativeness.

  “Do you want to stop for something to eat?” Phoebe asked him.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he muttered back.

  “Do you want me to read you the crossword puzzle?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Do you want me not to talk to you, is that it?”

  “Do what you want.”

  It went on like that.

  NOR WAS THE situation improved back in Hoover, where Phoebe sat on Humphrey’s plaid couch in Humphrey’s black-painted bedroom, leafing through Humphrey’s junk mail, trimming a pencil point with a plastic sharpener in the shape of a boat, watching the shavings disappear into his coffee-brown carpet, wondering what she’d done wrong, while Humphrey, seemingly oblivious to her presence, picked out Smiths tunes on his guitar (“Girlfriend in a Coma”), the heat festering around them, the fan blowing hot air in their faces.