Because They Wanted To: Stories (29 page)

I was not only ashamed for myself, I was also ashamed for him, so much so that I was virtually paralyzed by it—yet I still hadn’t noticed it.

“I used to have a lot of relationships like that,” I said heavily.

“Like what?”

“With men who didn’t respect me. And I can tell you, without even knowing her, that this woman doesn’t respect you either. That kind of shit goes both ways.”

He looked puzzled, then wary. He retracted one hand slightly along the edge of the table.

“At the time, I would’ve told you that I loved these men,” I said. “But really, I didn’t even like them.”

“So why were you with them if you didn’t like them?”

“Those situations are often erotic. And it’s complicated. I mean, why’d you go to this girl’s house if you were so uninterested in her?”

“Oh, it’s definitely erotic. But I don’t like it.” He looked vaguely into space. “I don’t like it,” he repeated. He hesitated. “I want to be a nice person,” he said. He looked at me, expectant, almost childish. He looked as though he wanted me to tell him that he was a nice person, and although I would’ve liked to, I found I couldn’t. Silently, I lowered my eyes. The pause was terrible.

The conversation was over and we both knew it, yet neither of us wanted to admit it. With a great effort we changed the subject and lurched into a discussion about books, horror movies, and the construction of Frederick’s web sites. When one of us stumbled, the other would clumsily lend a hand, so that we gamely, even chivalrously,
pulled each other along. The peculiar thing was, I think we actually liked each other—not that it did us any good.

“I was thinking,” he said. “Maybe you could suggest some poets for me to read. I don’t know anything about poetry.”

“I don’t know you,” I said. My voice was clipped and hard. “I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what you might like.”

There was another silence. I felt a shift take place in him. If he had been straddling something before, he had now chosen a position. He looked at his watch; he said he had made plans to go meet another woman. “We have some time,” he said, “so I can walk you home.” He stood and swung his jacket around his shoulders. “With leisure and pleasure.” His voice was voluptuous and charmed by itself.

“I just said that to somebody last week,” he added. “Only then I said pleasure and leisure.”

I wondered if he’d gotten the phrase from a Japanese merchandising outlet on cable, which went by the same name. I had noticed it on TV on the channel featuring the electronic program guide; it had a functional bleakness that was almost poetic. Numbly, I admired Frederick’s ability not only to appreciate the phrase but to use it as an implement of self-indulgence that doubled as a small, sharp weapon. I remembered his kindness as he held me in his arms just before he left my apartment; it was a feeble, flickering sense memory, and it quickly died.

He insisted on holding my jacket so that I could put it on. Two girls who had just entered the bar admired his gesture. I took his arm and we went out onto the street. He said he’d really enjoyed our evening together and that we would have to do it again. “The time went by so quickly,” he said.

“Well, there wasn’t much of it,” I replied.

We arrived at my apartment building. Frederick kissed me as if there were a television camera trained on us. I responded in a perfunctory daze. It was chilly, but his neck was bare and unprotected, like a little boy’s. “So,” he said, “what are
you
going to do with the rest of your night?”

“Read, I guess.” With the most hopeless gesture of the evening, I stretched up and brushed his exposed neck with my lips and nose.
Faintly, but alertly, he stiffened; I could feel him remember our strange intimacy with a swift, barely perceptible inner twitch. In the dark, I felt his eyes dart uncertainly. “Goodbye,” I said. I turned and walked up my front steps.

“Wait,” he said. “Do you . . . do you have your keys?”

“Yeah.” I half turned to answer him; my voice trembled with anger. “I have my keys.” I went in and shut the door.

I went immediately into the bathroom and knelt over the toilet, thinking that I might be sick. But I could not discharge the bad feeling so easily. I sat on the floor and held my face in my hands. I uttered a soft animal moan. My old cat came and sat next to me, looking at me anxiously. “It’s all right,” I told her. “Don’t be afraid. It’s not a big deal.”

For the next several days, the memory of my encounter with Frederick lingered like a bruise that is not painful until, walking through the kitchen in the dark one night to get a drink of water, you bang it on a piece of furniture. I would be talking animatedly with someone when I would suddenly realize that I was really talking to and for Frederick, as if he were standing off to the side, listening to me. This was a nuisance, but a mildly advantageous one; my efforts to communicate with the phantom Frederick gave my conversation a twisted frisson some people mistook for charm.

The week after I met Frederick, I went to a party celebrating the publication of a book of lesbian erotica. I was talking to two women, one of whom was facetiously describing her “gay boyfriend” as better than a lover or a “regular friend.” She said he was handsome too, so much so that she constantly had to “defend his honor.”

“You mean he’s actually got honor?” said someone.

“One should always maintain a few shreds of honor,” I remarked. “In order to give people something to violate.”

“I don’t know if that qualifies as honor.”

“It’s faux honor, and it’s every bit as good for the purpose I just described.”

“Can I get you a drink?” There was a woman standing off to the side, listening to me. I was startled to see that she was the woman who had taken a Polaroid of Frederick and me. Even in a state of apparent sobriety she emitted an odd, enchanting dazzle.

“Yes,” I said. We took our drinks out onto the steps. A lone woman was sitting there already, smoking and dropping cigarette ash into an inverted seashell. When she saw us, she said hello and moved to the lowest step, giving us the top of her head and her back. Because she was there, we whispered, and our whispers made an aural tent only big enough for the two of us.

“I wondered if I’d see you again,” she said. “I wondered what happened with you and that guy.”

“Nothing,” I said. “It was a one-night thing. We didn’t even have sex.”

“I also wondered if you like girls.”

“I definitely like girls.” I paused. “Why did you want to get me a drink just now?”

“What do you think? Because I like your faux honor.”

“Because it has cheap brio and masochism?”

“Exactly!” I felt her come toward me in an eager burst, then pull away, as if in a fit of bashfulness. “But we shouldn’t be so direct,” she said. “We should maintain our mystery for at least two minutes.”

I felt myself go toward her in a reflexive longing undercut by the exhaustion that often accompanies old reflexes. “I’m Susan,” I said.

Her name was Erin. She was thirty-two years old. She was trying, with another woman, to establish a small press and, to this end, was living on a grant that was about to run out. She was reading a self-help book called
Care of the Soul
and
Dead Souls
by Gogol. She had been taking Zoloft for six months. She seemed to like it that I’d written a book of poetry, even if it had been ten years ago. She said that she sometimes described herself as a “butch bottom” but lately she was questioning how accurate that was. I told her I was sick of categories like butch bottom and femme top or vice versa. I said I was looking for something more genuine, although I didn’t know yet what it was. She said she thought she probably was too.

“That picture you took of me was sad,” I said. “I look sad in it.”

I expected her to deny it, but she didn’t say anything. She reached
between my legs and, with one finger, drew tiny, concentrated circles through my slacks. It seemed a very natural thing. It seemed as if she thought anyone could’ve come along and done that, and it might as well be her. This wasn’t true, but for the moment I liked the idea; it was a simple, easy idea. It made my genitals seem disconnected from me, yet at the same time the most central part of me. I parted my lips. I stared straight ahead. The silence was like a small bubble rising through water. She kissed the side of my lips, and I turned so that we kissed full on. She opened her mouth and I felt her in a rush of tension and need. I was surprised to feel such need in this woman; it was a dense, insensible neediness that rose through her in a gross howl, momentarily shouting out whatever else her body had to say. I opened in the pit of my stomach and let her discharge into me. The tension slacked off, and I could feel her sparkle again, now softer and more diffuse.

We separated, and I glanced at the woman on the steps, who was, I thought, looking a little despondent. “Let’s go in,” I said.

Inside, we were subdued and a bit shy. We walked around together, she sometimes leading me with the tips of her fingers on my wrist or arm. Being led in such a bare way made me feel mute, large and fleshy next to her lean, nervous form. I think it made us both feel the fragility of our bond, and although we spoke to other people, we said very little to each other, as though to talk might break it. We assumed she would walk me home; when we left, she offered me her arm, and I fleetingly compared her easy gallantry with Frederick’s miserable imitation of politeness.

As we walked, she talked about people at the party, particularly their romantic problems. I listened to her, puzzling over the competence of her voice, the delicacy of her leading fingers, the brute need of her kiss. Her competence and delicacy were attractive, but it was the need that pulled me toward her. Not because I imagined satisfying it—I didn’t think that was possible—but because I wanted to rub against it, to put my hand on it, to comfort it. Actually, I wasn’t sure what I wanted with it.

We sat on my front steps and made out. “I’d like to invite you in,” I said, “but it would be too much like that guy—I meet you at a party, bring you home.” I shrugged.

She nodded solemnly, looked away, looked back and smiled. “So? I thought you said nothing happened anyway.”

“He made out with me and I sucked his dick, and then he acted like he didn’t want me.”

“That’s sort of harsh.”

“Yeah. He acted like he was being nice, and I believed him, but then when I saw him again, he acted like a weird prick.”

She embraced me sideways. “That sort of turns me on,” she said. She nuzzled my neck, and the feminine delicacy of her lips and eye-lashes was like a startling burst of gold vein in a broken piece of rock. I slid my hands under her shirt. She had small, muscular breasts and freakishly long nipples, and there was faint, sweet down all along her low back.

I invited her in. She entered the living room with a tense, mercurial swagger that pierced my heart. We sat on the couch. “So,” she said. “Do I get to be the bad boy? Are you gonna suck my cock?”

“Don’t,” I said. “He hurt my feelings.”

“Awww.” She knelt between my legs, with her hands on my thighs. Her fingers were blunt and spatulate, with little gnawed nails. “If I say something wrong, it’s because I’m not sure what to do. I’m not used to this. I want to please you, but you also make me want to . . . I don’t even know.”

“I’m not sure what I want, either,” I said. “I think there might be something wrong with me.”

She held my face in her hands. “Let me make it better,” she said. She looked at me, and her expression seemed to fracture. Abruptly, she struck me across the face, backhanded me and then struck me with her palm again. She checked my reaction. “Open your mouth,” she said. “Stick out your tongue.” I did. She started to unzip her pants, then faltered. “Um,” she said, “Susan? Is this cool?”

“Yeah.”

When we were finished, I walked her out the door onto the porch. Using her ballpoint, we wrote our numbers on scraps of paper torn from a flyer that had been placed on my doormat to remind me to fight AIDS. She held my face and kissed my cheek and left.

When I woke the next day I didn’t think of her but I felt her, and I wasn’t sure what she felt like to me. I was acutely aware of the artificiality of our experience. It felt like a dollhouse with tiny plastic furniture and false windows looking out on mechanically painted meadows and cloud-dotted skies. It felt both safe and cruelly stifling, and both feelings appealed to me. More simply, I felt as if some habitual pain had shifted position slightly, allowing me to breathe more easily. As the day went on, I thought of her, but gingerly. The thought was like a smell that is both endearing and faintly embarrassing. I remembered how she had knelt and said, “I’m not sure what to do,” and I remembered her reckless blow to my face. She seemed split in two, and the memory split me in two. But when she called me, I was happy; I realized that I had not expected to hear from her.

“I would’ve called earlier,” she said. “But last night was intense for me and I had to process. Like I said, I usually bottom.”

Her voice was bright and optimistic, but there was something else in it. It was as if she’d made an agreement with somebody to supply all the optimism required on a general basis for the rest of her life, and the strain of it had become almost anguishing. But when she opened the door of her house to greet me, it was with brash, striding movement, and she was elegant and beautiful in a sleek suit.

We went to a Thai restaurant for dinner. It was a cheap place that maintained its dignity with orderly arrangement and dim lighting. Little statuettes and vases invoked foreignness unctuously yet honorably. The other diners seemed grateful to be in such an unassuming place, where all they had to do was talk to each other and eat. Erin pulled out my chair for me.

A waitress, vibrant with purpose, poured us water in a harried rattle of ice. We ordered sweet drinks and dainty, greasy dishes. Erin’s smile burst off her face in a wild curlicue. I imagined her unsmiling, wearing lipstick, with her hair upswept, in a hat with a little veil; she would’ve been formidable and very beautiful. Her jaw was strong but also suggestive of intense female sensitivity and erotic suppleness. Then under that was a rigidity that made me think
of something trapped. I reached across the table and took her hand. We were both sweating slightly.