Because They Wanted To: Stories (35 page)

I examined the decorations on the buffet next to the table. They included vases, little books upheld by bookends, several different kinds of matchboxes, and statuettes of animals and girls. They had the potential for the kind of luxuriant aesthetic spewage I enjoy, but they were positioned with a stifling judiciousness that ruined the effect. Amid the fuss, I noticed a small framed photograph of a very handsome young man. He had long hair and wild eyes and an open, imperiously yelling mouth. He looked as if he were riding a roiling, swift-moving current of joy and triumph and satiety, yelling out his pleasure as he rode.

“Kenneth,” I said, “is that your son?”

“No,” he said. “That’s me. Almost thirty years ago.”

Sherbet was served, with slices of mango. Kenneth put on a CD. As each song played, he told us about each musician who played it, his history, his technical strengths and weaknesses. Then he told us about each of the instruments. Then he discussed the sound quality of each cut on the CD as opposed to vinyl.

When we finished eating, he said, “So. Are you ready to look at some stuff?”

We followed him upstairs, past darkened rooms full of furniture and boxes heaped together. He took us to the spare bedroom, where he had been sleeping since the separation. There, he kept the small things: drawers filled with sunglasses, cupboards of slumbering hats, boxes of jewelry in grand knotted lumps—gold, silver, glass, and plastic—ashtrays, matchboxes, paperweights, and figurines that fussed and promenaded. There were bags of shoes, chests jammed
with women’s underwear, a deep closet full of suits and dresses. In the corner, a small, hard bed stood assailed by the teeming stuff; I wondered how he could sleep in such an uproar.

We walked through the room with cordial exclamations of delight. Kenneth rummaged magisterially, concentrating on finding things that each of us might especially like: an Armani suit for Phillip, a velvet gown for Laura, gray suede shoes, cuff links, scarves, an amber necklace. He kept saying, “Here, this is perfect for you.” He handed me a pair of sunglasses with elegant, winged eyes, a fey spray of rhinestones on each wing, the occasional bare indentation where a stone had dropped poignant as the bad teeth of an aristocrat. “Take them,” he said.

Phillip went into the bathroom with the Armani suit and came out wearing it, pleased and resplendent as a child at his own birthday party. Laura took a purple silk blouse and a zebra-striped handbag. Somewhat guiltily, I pocketed the sunglasses and an enormous pale-blue glass ring.

“Here, Susan,” said Kenneth. He went into the closet and emerged with a big gold coat in his arms. He unfurled it and held it out to me; it was a ridiculous, beautiful coat. “When I met you, I pictured you wearing this,” he said.

I looked at the coat and felt the same shy, greedy pleasure I had seen in Phillip’s face, as if I were a kid receiving a treat simply for being myself. “Thank you,” I mumbled. I turned around and offered him my arms. He put the coat on me, and his hands briefly closed on my shoulders. I turned to thank him; his face was private and mundane, but his eyes were full of emotion that was shallow and deep at once. The mixed quality of it reminded me of the expression I had seen on Frederick’s face when he passed me on the street, even though it was not the same mix.

During the drive home I asked Phillip and Laura why they thought Kenneth was so dedicated to collecting stuff. “It seems kind of compulsive,” I said.

Laura snorted mildly. “Oh,” she said, “you think?”

Phillip spoke, his voice insistent, almost bullying, and at the same time absolutely defeated. “When Kenneth was at Harvard, he was a
leader,” he said. “He was at the center of a charmed circle. He had parties that were legendary—to be invited, you had to be extraordinarily intelligent or beautiful. He went through girls like they were nothing. They used to come crying to me afterward, and I’d say to him, But she’s a lovely girl, don’t you want to give her a chance? And he’d laugh. He’d just laugh.” As he spoke, the insistence gradually drained from his voice, leaving only the defeat. His hands on the steering wheel looked helpless and somehow hurt.

The summer term ended. My students brought a bottle of tequila to class, with lemon and salt, and we shared it while we talked about poems. They were full of themselves and affectionate, and tensed to fly away forever.

That night I celebrated with Erin, jana, and Paulette in a bar crowded with women and girls. Erin and I stood on the edge of the dance floor, arms about each other’s waists, drinking and basking in the vibrancy of the dancing girls. She felt so light in my half-embrace, as if she were made of bright, fluxing atoms, forming and disintegrating in secret patterns, determined in their private purpose and delighted if it made no earthly sense. I imagined lying on top of her, supporting myself with both elbows, so that I could look into her eyes. I imagined cradling her head in my hands. “My sweet girl,” I said. “You don’t deserve to be hurt. You don’t deserve to be cut. You don’t have to beg for anything, ever.” I imagined her looking at me with the scared, disbelieving eyes of a small, starved wild thing looking at a dish of proffered food, one paw extended forward, the rest of the body poised to fly. I pulled her into a corner, and she pressed herself against me. Full on, she felt too quick and light, as if she were racing inside, gathering speed to blow apart and scatter in a burst of sparkling motes. We kissed.

“I was thinking about you,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“It upsets me that you do all this stuff. Like cutting and whipping and having to beg for whatever.”

“It
upsets
you?” She pulled back and looked at me almost with distaste.

“It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with it,” I said. “I’ve
done it, and it’s . . . it’s human and everything. But it’s like you want that stuff because you think you deserve it. And you don’t. You just don’t.”

She embraced me, and she felt solid and human, with a corporeal, beating heart. “Susan,” she said, “you’re so sweet I just want to tie you up and torture you. But that stuff is what gets me off. It’s not about self-hate or anything icky. It just gets me off.”

“I know,” I said. “I know.” But we were separating.

“Come back to the house with us,” she said. “We’re going to release the ladybugs.”

I wondered what she meant, and my wondering went in an aimless spiral. The music turned raucous and absurd. Two tiny, feverish girls in torn shirts slammed against each other, leapt apart, and slammed together again, giggling drunkenly. More girls moved through my line of vision, their private selves breathing through the lax shape of their drunken public presentations. A beautiful dark girl at the bar drank from a shot glass and urgently ran her mouth, shifting her big butt on the barstool and stabbing her finger at the floor as if ordering someone to kneel. As she spoke, her full mouth took harsh, abrupt shapes, as if everything had to be said with a lot of force and then chopped into pieces.

Erin came and took my hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Jana and Paulette were kissing on the hood of the car when we emerged from the bar. Jana wore chipped purple nail polish on her splayed, grabbing fingers; a beggar walking by said he liked her purple paws and then asked us for money. We lavished him with change. Erin and I got in the back seat, and she embraced me from behind. I took her hand and kissed it. I felt her subtly respond, as if a clear bell had sounded in her chest and passed its reverberation into mine. Paulette turned on the radio; they were playing the love song that had so grabbed my imagination at the clothing store, months before. This time it sounded harmless and childishly sweet. I pictured the pop star singing it into a microphone, his eyes closed and his nose thrust slightly up and forward as he reveled in his tiny loop of bliss. Vaguely, I wished him well. Jana sang the song out the window as we rolled through the noise and activity of night.

When I emerged from the bathroom in Erin’s flat, I found her
busily handing Jana and Paulette clear plastic bags filled with crawling bugs. She laughed at my perplexed face. “Didn’t you hear me? We’re going to release the ladybugs.”

I stared stupidly.

“For the healing garden!” yelled Erin. “These are special store-bought ladybugs, and we’re going to release them out into the garden to protect it from mites. Because it’s night, they’ll settle in to sleep and then wake up in paradise.”

We went down the rotted gray back stairs, each holding a bag of bugs. Erin’s cats came with us. My dalmatian-spotted fur shoes looked fey and ridiculous on the steps. When we stepped into the yard, my heels sank into the dirt and I almost fell over. Verdant and sibilant, the garden lurked in the dark. In patches of gray light, we could see leaves trembling.

“Wait,” said Erin. “I want to say a poem first.”

Jana belched, and Paulette shoved her.

“Shut up,” said Erin. “It’s Eliot.”

“Oh, well, then,” said Paulette.

Erin coughed and began to recite.

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.”

There was a soft, jumbled silence. Jana contemplatively sniffed.

“Shit,” said Erin. “There’s something more about a garden, but I can’t remember.”

“Isn’t Eliot that turd who made his wife think she was crazy?” asked Paulette.

“Yeah, I think so,” said Erin. “But it’s still a great poem. Anyway, come on.”

We went among the sleeping plants. The ladybugs tumbled from our bags and tooled about on petal and leaf with all their diligent legs. My friends giggled and joked. I dropped two ladybugs on the soft flesh of a petunia; it bobbed gently as the tiny creatures alighted. I thought how vast and deeply textured the surface of the flower
must be to them, how huge and abstract the garden. My imagination opened in one small deep spot. For a moment I felt I was in a limbo of shadows and half-formed shapes which would dissolve into nothingness if I touched them. I felt loneliness so strong it scared me. Then Jana laughed and Erin brushed by me, thoughtlessly caressing my spine with one hand. I was in a garden with my friends. I could not fully see what lay about me, but still, I knew it was there, abundant, breathing, and calm.

We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

 

Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Simon & Schuster.

 

 

 

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com