Because They Wanted To: Stories (31 page)

It was a very popular song. I had seen the singer interviewed on TV. He was a foppish young man who seemed thoroughly disgusted to find himself so liked.

We no longer talked about trying to have sex as “ourselves.” Some-times this was all right with me; we could find a little slot to occupy and frantically wiggle around in it until we were both satisfied. Other times I felt disgruntled and ashamed of myself. On those occasions I was aware that I was offering her only a superficial tidbit of myself, a tidbit tricked out to look substantial. It was dishonest, but our tacit agreement to be dishonest together at least allowed a tiny moment of exchange that I wasn’t sure was possible otherwise. And perhaps it was not fair to call her behavior dishonest, since she was so used to it that to her it felt true.

We saw each other two or three times a week, usually for dinner or a movie. Sometimes we went out with her friends. They were loud, lewd, exhibitionistic, and kind. They were a comedienne, an office worker, a photographer, and a waitress who wrote acerbic short stories. They were mostly ten years younger than me, and in their presence I felt enveloped in bracing female warmth that I did not experience with most people my own age, certainly not with my august colleagues. I loved standing around with them in the dark of some bar, talking sex trash. They made fun of me for having sex with men, although most of them occasionally did too.

“When I have guy fantasies, I want it to be a frat boy thing,” said Gina, the robust waitress. “I want them to call me bitch and make me suck their cocks and all that.”

“I like something more refined myself,” I said. “Cruel but refined.”

“I’m the reverse about guys,” said Lana. She was a curvaceous girl with loud clothes, severe hair, and signifying glasses. “Women can degrade me sometimes, if I really like them. But if I’m with men I want them to get on their knees and worship it. And they have to mean it.”

Their talk was like a friendly shoving match between giggling kids, a game about aggression that made aggression harmless. Although I wasn’t sure that it was completely harmless. It was fun to say that I liked something refined and cruel, but under the fun was an impatient yank of boredom and under that was indignation and pain.

One night Gina wore a rubber cock strapped onto her body under
her pants. She clownishly pressed it against the rumps of men, who laughed and jovially explained that she was doing it wrong. She pressed it against my thigh, and I cooed and groped the rubber thing, arching my back and butt in a satire of narcissism and subservience.

“I’ll give Erin ten dollars if she’ll get on her knees and suck Gina’s cock,” said Donna.

Erin smiled and began to move forward. “She doesn’t need ten dollars,” I said.

“Just for you, baby,” said Gina.

“She doesn’t need it,” I said, and put my arm around Erin’s waist. Erin’s smile stuck, and she halted uncertainly.

“Aww, Susan loves Erin,” said Donna.

We all went to dance, our movements sloppily describing friendship, sex, display, and animal warmth, all in a loop of drunkenness that equalized every sensation. The bar was saturated with dumb, lurid kinesis. Mischievous entities with blearily smiling faces peeped from behind corners. I loved these young women.

But the next day, our posturing seemed stupid. I sat in my office between hours, thinking of the moment when Donna had offered Erin ten dollars, and I felt embarrassed. I imagined my officemate, a hale critic in her fifties, witnessing the exchange in the bar. I imagined her smiling gamely, eager to approve of these young women who were, after all, “gender bending.” I imagined her smile faltering as she registered that Erin’s eager response had nothing to do with sex, or even with fun. I imagined her frowning and turning away. I closed my eyes and felt this imagined rejection. I wanted to protect Erin from it, to make my officemate see her in all her different aspects—her brave flowers, her swagger, her private tenderness. That way I made my oblivious officemate bear the discomfort I didn’t want to feel.

When I got in bed that night I thought of Erin erotically, but my thoughts quickly became inarticulate. I pictured her staring at me like a frightened animal. I imagined a deep, perpetual moan that racked her body but did not come out of her mouth. I pictured the organs in her abdomen dry as old roots, parched for lack of some fundamental nurture that she had never received and was trying futilely to find.

The next night we had dinner together. She pulled my chair out for me, as she always did. Her gestures and expressions were piquant and feisty, but for me they were occluded by the way I had imagined her the previous night. What I saw in front of me and what I had imagined both seemed real, yet one seemed to have nothing to do with the other. I was appalled to realize that I didn’t want to see her again.

Still, I invited her into my apartment. We sat on my living room rug, and I brought us dishes of tapioca pudding that I had made. There was subtle discomfort between us; I wondered if she had seen the change in me or if there had also been a change in her. She tried to kiss me, and I said I wasn’t sure I wanted to have sex. She said okay. We ate our desserts and talked. I said I didn’t think I wanted to stay in San Francisco. I said I thought my apartment was beautiful but that it seemed to me like a way station.

“There are so many doors and hallways in this place,” I said. “It makes it seem like a crossroads.”

“Is that how you think of me?” asked Erin.

Her question startled me. I said no, and took her hand and kissed her, but I wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth. She kissed me back as though she knew this. Kissing, we toppled onto the floor. The moan I had sensed in her was nearly palpable, but I knew she didn’t feel it. My kiss became an escalating slur of useless feeling. I kissed her to locate her, but it was no good; she was all in fragments. I took her wrist. “Don’t slap me,” I said. “I don’t want that.” She disengaged her wrist and pulled up my skirt. I knew I should not let this happen. She pulled my panty hose and underwear down. Inwardly, I rushed forward, trying to engage her, to find one tiny place we could wiggle around in together. She flew by me in an electrical storm. She had discovered that I didn’t want her, but she was ignoring her discovery. Without knowing why, I ignored it too. I rifled my memories of her, all her different faces; none of them stayed with me. She handled me roughly. Tomorrow, I thought, I would tell her I didn’t want to be intimate anymore. I closed my eyes. She was doing something strange. I opened my eyes.

She slapped my crotch with a handful of tapioca.

Jerkily, I sat up and stared. “Erin,” I said, “what are you doing?”

“Sorry,” she said. “It just felt right.” She giggled nervously and contracted herself. Her open hand sat in her lap, wet with beads of tapioca.

Absurd tears came to my eyes. I felt almost as if someone had thrown a pie in my face, but that wasn’t why the tears had come. “What a gross, inconsiderate thing to do.” But that wasn’t right, either.

“Oh, Susan, come on.”

She reached for me, and I pulled away. My stingy tears went dry. Erin shrugged and self-consciously ate some tapioca off her hand. Then she rubbed her nose with the back of it.

“I’ll get some paper towels,” she said. “I’ll clean the carpet.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said. “I’m going to take a shower.”

When I returned, Erin was seated on the couch, her limbs held tight into her body. Even in the dark, I could see she wore the starved face I’d seen in the Polaroids the swinging heterosexuals had taken of her.

“Do you want me to go?” she said.

“I don’t know.” I knelt and put my hand on her foot. “I think so.”

“I’ll go if you want. But I don’t want you to think I’m a jerk. I didn’t do that to be a jerk.”

“I know, Erin,” I said.

“You know, you seem so vulnerable,” she said. “You say you want to be real. But you don’t. Not really.”

I took my hand off her foot and turned my head away. The silence held varied beats and long, slow pulses.

When she left, she held my face in her hand and kissed me. “I probably won’t call you for a while,” she said. “But you can call me, if you need to process.”

After she was gone, I lay on the floor until I noticed that my old cat was eating leftover tapioca from a dish. I got up to put the dishes away, and then got in bed. I had a puzzling sensation of triumph at finding myself alone, a sensation that took me happily into sleep.

But I woke in two hours, sweating and throwing off the blankets. I wondered if Erin had thrown the tapioca at me because she had been angry. Or perhaps what had felt like anger was just the random
overspill of a ceaseless internal spasm. I imagined the terrible moan inside her, like an endless, coughing dry sob. I imagined it so acutely that I was transfigured by it. The pain of it was so ugly it was almost revolting, and yet there was something desperately vital about it. I tried to think what “it” was. My kitten woke and touched me with her small muzzle. She allowed me to stroke her; even in her slumberous state, her small body was quick and fierce with life. She felt her life all the way down to the bottom. Everybody wants it, I thought. Erin has it, but she can’t bear it. Again, I saw her low internal organs, parched but tough and fiercely alive, holding on.

An acquaintance of mine, a philosophy professor at a neighboring university, had finally succeeded in selling one of the many screen-plays he had bitterly toiled over and was giving a big party to celebrate. Friends of his, a married screenwriting couple, gave me a ride to the party. The woman was a thin, excitable person who appeared to be keeping a strict inner watch on an invisible set of perfectly balanced objects, lest any of them fall over or even fractionally shift position. The man seemed to inhabit a benevolent, functional daze. It apparently disturbed the woman that I was single. “You can’t just stay at home,” she said, gripping the seat back as she torqued herself around to face me. “You’ve got to go to classes and lectures and meditation groups, places where there might be single men.”

“I’m really not interested in that kind of thing,” I said. “I’m more of a drinker.”

She released the seat back and adjusted herself face-forward. Rather testily, we discussed the current cinema.

The party took place in a spacious studio in Palo Alto. Splendid vases of celebratory flowers stood on short white pillars shaped like building blocks. Almost immediately upon entering, I became engaged in a conversation about antidepressants, which I inadvertently started by casually remarking that I thought a certain administrator
at Berkeley was so cranked up on Prozac that he didn’t know what he was doing.

“Prozac doesn’t crank you up,” said a classics professor. “Prozac makes you like you should be.”

Her voice was plaintive but resolute. She told me that if it weren’t for Prozac, she wouldn’t be alive. I told her that sometimes I felt so unhappy that it was hard to live, but that I preferred to sit through it.

“It’s like being your own mom sitting beside you on the bed when you’re sick,” I said.

The woman who had given me a ride poked her head around the corner. “Is one or both of your parents depressed?” she asked.

“I don’t know if they’re depressed, but they’re certainly miserable.”

“Then it’s genetic and you should take Prozac.”

I excused myself and sought out the host. I don’t really like him, at least not in the usual sense. In our first conversation, he had asked me why I’d never been married and then told me that he had been married four times, even though he never wanted to get married. He had done it, he said, only because “they wanted it so badly.”

“How could you get married for that reason?” I asked.

“Haven’t you ever done anything you didn’t want to do?” He’d virtually snarled the question.

“Not four times,” I’d snarled back.

Whenever I see him socially, I experience a violent psychic hiccup that finally makes me wave my arms and loudly tell him off, even though I’m alone in my apartment and it’s days later. Then when I see him again, the bodily memory of the disturbance is roused and starts feebly moving its little feelers, trying to engage the source of the problem and straighten it out. He grabs the tips of those little feelers and locks on. It’s an emotional bond, sort of.

I noticed that his two children, each from a different marriage, had come to the party and were standing around, as if presenting evidence of his good and fruitful life. The handsome teenage son lounged affably in a corner. The daughter, a stoic young woman from the particularly ugly first marriage, was serving hors d’oeuvres. A mournful tendril of brown hair played limply against her cheek. I felt a quiet throb of affection for her. I had met her before, at another party. She had gotten drunk and told me that her father had
said to her, when she was fifteen, that if he ever found out she’d had an abortion, he’d kill her. “He’ll do that,” she said. “He’ll just spew shit out. It doesn’t mean anything, but it’s pretty awful anyway.”

I said hello to her and selected a canapé with turmeric on it. Her father was standing nearby, railing at some people who were nodding in accord. He was complaining about how nobody wanted to be responsible anymore, particularly those people who went to “therapy” instead of squarely facing the truths of Freud. “They talk about ‘really getting to know themselves,’ as if they can come up with a little answer for everything,” he said fiercely. “As if any of us can know ourselves, as if any of us can ever explain the brutality of sex. If we ever ‘got to know’ ourselves, we would be sickened. It is the essence of decency to acknowledge that and keep going.” His jaw seemed about to split sideways in a rictus of frustration.

I turned away and fell into gossiping with a fellow who had made his reputation by proving that male and female genitals are really a social construct. He had once been quite a hotshot, but he had since gone to seed in the manner of an old cat who knows where to find the food dish. He entertained me with the details of a spat between two linguistics professors, one of whom had thrown a glass of wine at the other at a recent barbecue.