Because They Wanted To: Stories (34 page)

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.”

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 believed 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.