Because They Wanted To: Stories (32 page)

“We inhabit a nest of vipers,” he said, with a happy little movement of his neck and chin.

“Low-grade vipers,” I agreed. “But vipers nonetheless.”

He vaguely smiled and turned away. I walked through the room, having partial conversations. The public faces of these people were so familiar to me that they were as abstract as a word repeated too many times in rapid succession. Their half-expressions—the gradations of approval or attention or retraction in their eyes as they politely nodded or scratched their noses—were like the surface of quick-moving water, all shiny, slippery pieces. A woman’s bright dress flashed with her efficient strides. A department chair from yet another university tucked one arm protectively about her soft, protruding abdomen, while her other arm flailed the air valiantly to exaggerate the argument she made to a man apparently in complete agreement. He laughed with stiff, gaping jaws.

I was seeing them in pieces, and I knew it. I knew that under their
words and gestures they must be whole and deep-rooted, with faces and voices I did not know. I stood still, my wineglass a prop in my tense hand, and tried to feel them more fully. I imagined the gesticulating department chair asleep in her bed, her face in the mild fur-rows of middle age, her body private and innocent as an almond in its special shell. I imagined her, even in sleep, tunneling her way through phantom problems, twisting and turning and valiantly arguing. I knew that she was divorced and that she had a young child; I thought of her at breakfast, touching her child’s upturned face with her palm. I pictured the child struggling to make sense of the conflicts surging under her mother’s absent, tender gesture.

Meanwhile, light ran and flirted on glass and silverware. Intellectual discussion rose and devolved. A salsa band had arrived and was assembling itself in a slow and professional manner. A pleasant fellow with a hirsute face replaced a part on his horn and frowned as if to frown were delicious. His bandmates moved behind him with sleek, sensory ease.

The classics professor made right by Prozac came up beside me and put an arm about my waist. “I wanted to tell you how good it is to see you,” she said. “I like you so much, Susan.”

I was surprised to hear this, as we barely knew each other. Still, I put my arm about her. There was a little roll of fat at her waist, which felt sweet as cake.

“You’re like me,” she continued. “You think for yourself. You see life as it is.”

“Life as it is?” My fingers rested gingerly on her sweet fat. “What do you mean?”

She faltered and slightly retracted her embrace. “You know, no bullshit. You aren’t fooled by bullshit.”

I furrowed my brow.

“Oh, I can’t tell you what I mean right now,” she said. “I’m a little drunk. But you know.”

Her face was uncertain and fractured, but that little fat roll was live and full of feeling. The hell of it was, she was probably on a diet. I withdrew my arm from her, and we changed the subject.

When I got home, my apartment felt pleasing and almost festive in comparison to the party. I lay on my red couch and ate ham and white bean soup from a Styrofoam container. My cats sat happily with their little chests out. I thought of Erin. I wished that I could ask her to visit and that we could lie on the floor together. I remembered her blunt, full-throttle kiss, and a tiny, grateful love flowered in my chest. It had been a month since our stumbling, drunken affair had ended, and Erin was, tentatively, my friend. I could call her, but she probably wouldn’t be home. She had just fallen in love with a rambunctious girl whom I had once glimpsed in a crowd, insouciantly bare-legged in a tiny skirt and cowboy boots. She had dumped a glass of ice down Erin’s shirt and hopped back laughing, switching her bossy skirt. I smiled and put down the empty soup container. I lay on my back and held a small maroon pillow against my chest. I relished the slight soreness of Erin’s memory overlaid with that giddy burst of glimpsed laughter and bare, dancing legs; I felt the laughter almost as if it were mine.

The next day the screenwriting philosophy professor called me to ask if he could give my phone number to a friend of his who had noticed me at the party, a sociologist named Kenneth.

“Normally I wouldn’t do this,” he said. “But he was quite taken with you.”

“How? I mean, we didn’t talk.”

“He loved your red high heels and your dress. And he . . . well, he noticed this little bruise on your leg, and he thought it was striking against your skin.”

“I don’t even remember him,” I said.

“Well, let me tell you. He’s extraordinary. He’s a brilliant sociologist, and he’s very influential, very respected. And he’s a lot of fun. Every weekend he drives around to flea markets and finds the most amazing things. He’s got a real gift for it; people beg to go with him on his runs because he can find things nobody else could unearth. He’s separated from his wife—”

“I don’t date married men.”

“He’s getting divorced.”

I rolled my eyes, but at the end of the conversation I said that the
sociologist could have my number. I put the phone down, feeling flattered and at the same time slightly embarrassed by my willingness to talk to someone I didn’t remember whose attention had flattered me secondhand. I watched guiltily as the two feelings paired up and slunk off together like snakes. Well, maybe I would like him.

The next day I called Erin. I could hear in her voice that she was glad to hear from me. She invited me to a tiny night haunt where Paulette, Lana, and Gina would be performing as The Better Off Dead Poets Society, which entailed Paulette and Gina’s reading poems with titles like “Just Because Your Strap-On Is Big and Brown Doesn’t Make You Denzel Washington” while Lana did ironic dances in a leotard.

There were several other acts up before the Poets appeared, so Erin and I refreshed ourselves with beer and Jägermeister. She said her new girlfriend, Dolly, was going to arrive in a few hours. They were going to pretend to be strangers, and Erin was going to try to persuade Dolly to go home with her, which Dolly might not consent to do. Considering the theatricality of their date, it seemed okay for Erin and me to make out, so we did. Her body greeted me with a loyal flicker. Her little hipbone was guileless and friendly against my fatter flank. A woman got on the stage and began to talk about spanking her girlfriend while their friends watched.

“I hope you don’t mind,” murmured Erin. “It just feels so good to go from you to Dolly.”

I said I understood, and I meant it. I imagined Erin rolling voluptuously between two large, fluffy, and unstable masses, blindly nuzzling with her little nose, enjoying the instability as much as anything. I put my hand on her supple low back. She released a burst of tender heat. The woman onstage described how she and her girl-friend had spanked and sexually tormented a third woman while some other people watched. Erin and I smiled nervously; we separated and she took a long drink of beer. She began telling me about her developing relationship with Dolly. The sprightly twenty-one-year-old, the disaffected member of a wealthy family, had already traveled throughout the world and shown in a local art gallery. She had never had intercourse with a man, which to Erin gave her the
martial allure of a warrior princess. She had, said Erin, taken to the role of femme top with startling enthusiasm.

“Last night she whipped my upper back, right between my shoulder blades,” said Erin. “It hurt so much it was like she was whipping my heart. It connected me with all this deep mom pain and I really cried. My therapist described it as a moment of integration with the primary feminine.”

“That’s pretty fancy,” I said. “Is that what you think?”

She shrugged and drank from her bottle of beer. There was a noise from the front of the room, and she turned sharply. The line of her cheekbone was stark and pure against the darkness. The darkness was like an animal about to lick her with its rough tongue. Her posture was calm, but her mouth was pulled tight and the iris was hard and bulging in her eye. Her rough gold hair was declarative as a flag. Impulsively, I stroked it. She smiled at me, and through all the darkness and declaration I felt something small and intrepid respond to my stroke.

I rose from my bed late the next day, in an unstable mood. I was teaching a summer class that had just begun. I ate my apple and buttered roll without wanting them. When I emerged from the BART station in Berkeley, I purchased a large cardboard cup of tea from a little take-out venue pervaded by an enervated mechanical hum. I loaded it with sugar and cream and drank it as I walked to my classroom, soothed by the sweetness of the tea and mentally tickled by the mechanical hum. I arrived in the classroom several minutes early and sat brooding over my material. While I was sitting there, two boy students came in. They sat and began to talk about another boy, whom they hated.

“And all the girls love him!” said one.

“Oh, no!”

“Yeah! They’re, like, all over him!”

“That’s disgusting!”

I smiled. “I know just the kind of guy you mean,” I said. “They always get, and they never deserve.”

“Really!” They looked at me curiously.

“I fall for that kind of jerk myself,” I said, “sometimes.”

“No! Not you too!” But they looked interested.

“Only sometimes. Mostly, girls get over that when they get older. It doesn’t age well.”

“Yeah?” One of them looked at me with touching receptivity. He was an overweight kid with responsive eyes. He had an avid, artless delicacy that was striking in contrast to his big, ungraceful body and made him seem vaguely helpless, even though he was probably quite strong. He didn’t write very well, but he was a passionate student and so was a favorite of mine. He took me in with a wistful, subtle movement of his eyes. I felt him accept my fondness and shyly give it back. Without knowing it, he comforted me.

Still, I felt disgruntled when I returned to my apartment that evening. The cats walked around with heavy paws, looking as if life with me was taxing their animal tenacity. When the phone rang I picked it up only because I was expecting Erin to call. It was Kenneth, the sociologist.

“Have I caught you at a bad time?” he asked. “You sound a little . . . I don’t know. . .”

His voice was tight and complicated, like something faceted and finely wrought that had been compressed into a ball. Making this phone call had probably been difficult for him; I thought I should reassure him, but instead I did the reverse.

“Is it true that you were into the bruise on my leg?” I asked.

“I . . . what?” His voice sprang free from its wad a tad. “That’s absolutely ludicrous. I would never . . . I wouldn’t—that was Phillip on one of his imagination jags.” His voice expanded again, and I sensed a vast array of personality tensed to unfurl itself. “I just said I liked your dress. And your shoes.” He paused. “I did notice the bruise, though.” The last was said with a meticulous humility that I found endearing.

I told him I probably sounded nervous because I thought the situation was strange. “We haven’t really met after all,” I said. “Maybe you could tell me something about yourself.”

There was an unhappy little pause. “Well, let’s see. You know I’m a sociologist. And, uh, I collect stuff. I go out every weekend and find . . .” He coughed. “Look, I’d rather at least meet. It just
seems. . . I mean, would you want to describe yourself into the phone?”

I wouldn’t. I told him that I knew he was married, and that if we did meet, it would have to be for friendship.

“Well, then,” he said, “how about a friendly dinner?” The hint of moroseness in his voice was like a slight, perseverant sigh.

I spent the two days between this conversation and our dinner in a satisfying ennui of classes, laundry, pointless walks and telephone calls. At night I would sit on the couch and read my students’ poems, with my feet on a chair and the old cat on my lap. In my bland contentment, the presence of the sociologist gave off an obscure little throb, an insignificant signal that nonetheless had to be monitored.

On the evening of our date, I decided to wear the dress I had worn for my two-hour appointment with Frederick. I noticed that when I put it on this time, it made me feel stately and secure. I had complicated thoughts on the relationship between one’s outer garments and one’s inner state, and the mysterious ways that each can affect the other. The doorbell rang.

Kenneth was tall and had close-cut blond hair like worn wool. He wore an exquisite suit. His shoulders were squared, but his neck and head were habitually in a posture of focus on the ground just before him, and because of that he seemed to be peering up at me when he was actually peering down. I invited him in. He cordially tucked his gaze back down and followed me. I told him I would only be a minute. He asked if he could look around my apartment and walked into my living room. From the back he looked smug and immaculate, but I doubted that he felt that way. He turned sideways; his spine was stiffly curved, and his chest was still and tense. “You live like a kid,” he said. But his tone was wondering, not unkind.

He opened the car door for me with a jaunty gesture, and there we were, close together in a small, sealed place. He said he hoped I liked French food. I said I did. He drove down the streets with what seemed abnormal care. There was vacuous delicacy between us.

“Does the situation still seem strange to you?” he asked.

“Yes, but it’s okay. It’s less strange than meeting somebody through a newspaper ad. It seems all dates get funny after some point in your thirties. It’s probably unprecedented and maybe even
unseemly, all these middle-aged people with problems out on dates.”

“Do you have problems?” he asked.

“Oh, none at all.”

In silence, we recovered from my attempt at levity.

“I don’t care if it’s strange,” he said. “It’s just a nice thing for me to be on a date at all.”

His words gave off a high, sterling tingle. I felt they should’ve touched me, but they didn’t. Still, I noticed them, tingling.

The restaurant was a plain rectangular room muffled in white. The many people seated in it ate with great energy. A woman’s sharp nose and tense posture, combined with a glimpse of someone else’s long, nimble fingers, gave me an impression of cutting fineness. The waiter who seated us smiled as if he was glad to see Kenneth arrive with a date, and his warmth was startling in the midst of the arranged enjoyment. We studied our menus and selected our food. That out of the way, Kenneth folded his hands and leaned slightly forward with dense shoulders. “You wanted to know about me,” he said, “so let me tell you some things.”