I'm Sorry You Feel That Way (17 page)

Instead, I commented on how many triangles I could find. The bend of a knee is a triangle, and the crook of an elbow. “There are so many triangles in these pictures!” I said. I wondered if it is just me. If I am too much of a prude to appreciate the human body, a woman’s body, the beautiful thing that it is. I don’t want to be a prude, but maybe I am.

One of the models looked just as good clothed and in person. I know because she ate Thanksgiving dinner at my house last year when she and Andrew were still a couple. Her name was Lauren; she was twenty-one years old, a college junior who had once been Andrew’s student, and during the entire turkey celebration, Lauren hardly spoke. She sat at the table with the other guests, but she didn’t contribute to any conversation unless a specific question was directed at her. She spoke only to Andrew, and she let Andrew speak for her. I didn’t hold this against Lauren then or now: it probably was unnerving to have dinner at a stranger’s house, it probably was intimidating, it probably was embarrassing that the person at Thanksgiving dinner closest to your age was the hostess’s thirteen-year-old son. It probably took every bit of courage Lauren had to come up to me and say what she said.

What did she say?

I’m still not sure. It came out sounding a lot like chirping. Like tweet! tweet! tweet!

“What?” I asked her.

“Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!” Her voice was high-pitched and squeaky. Like a little bird.

That night, she and Andrew went back to Andrew’s duplex, where a “photo shoot” took place.

In December, Andrew spent hundreds of dollars buying her Christmas gifts: designer clothes, silk lingerie, high-heeled boots.

In January, he was talking about marrying her.

By March it was over. Lauren—quite inexplicably, Andrew thought—broke things off. She wouldn’t return his calls. She wasn’t interested in his broken heart. She may or may not have been involved with someone else, and all Andrew had left was her image on black-and-white film. “I don’t understand,” he said. He was sitting at my kitchen table with his half a Summit and a jar of garlic-stuffed olives. He looked terrible, unshaven, unshowered, like he hadn’t slept in days. I felt really bad for him.

“I’ll tell you what I didn’t understand,” I said, and I did what I thought a friend should do: I bad-mouthed the person who caused him such pain. I told him about Lauren chirping at me on Thanksgiving. “Tweet! Tweet! Tweet! I didn’t understand a word of it,” I told him.

I thought it would make him feel better, but it didn’t. “That’s really mean,” Andrew said. “You’re really catty to talk about her like that. She thought you were so nice. I can’t believe how cruel you can be. That’s pretty shallow of you.”

 

 

 

 

 

As a pre-celebration celebration of Andrew Boyle’s thirty-eighth birthday, we went to The Wooden Nickel. Andrew and I sat at a table in Robyn’s section, and as he watched the little pixie blond waitress serve drinks, he sighed. He said he just knew that people think he’s a dullard, that he comes off as a man with a very dull personality. He seemed sincere about this self-perception, he seemed glum. I told him I don’t think he’s a dullard, which is true, I don’t. I said I thought he was a weirdo.

This perked him up. “Really?” he said. “Tell me why!”

I considered telling him I actually think he’s more of a pervert than a weirdo, but he was smiling so nicely, expectantly, and I could see the boy in Andrew Boyle, the sweet, smiling kid in blue footy pajamas waking up happy on the morning of his birthday knowing that there would be a cake and lit candles and a chorus of loved ones singing him a birthday song. “The scarf!” I said.

“What scarf?”

“That gray scarf you wear. You take off your coat, but you keep that scarf wrapped around your neck. It’s very jaunty. You wear a scarf indoors, Andrew. Where I come from, men don’t do that. Men don’t wear scarves in a blizzard, let alone indoors.”

“I’d get beat up where you come from, wouldn’t I?” said Andrew.

Yes, I told him, he would most definitely get beat up. He would get the shit kicked out of him.

He didn’t seem insulted or displeased. In fact, he took it more as a compliment. “I guess I’m not very manly,” he said. He was scanning the crowd at The Wooden Nickel. He reminded me of myself, examining every chocolate in the box of Whitman’s Sampler, wanting the one that was caramel, but convinced someone else had gotten to it first. Andrew fixed his gaze on a beautiful, willowy blond twenty-year-old. “I won’t go talk to her,” he said, “because I think she won’t be interested in me. I mean, what could I say that won’t sound like a line?” His shoulders slumped and I resisted the urge to tell him sit up straight! Don’t slouch! “I won’t ask her for a date,” he continued, “but maybe I can ask her to model for me. She won’t be interested in dating me, but she might be interested in modeling for me. The point is, I got a girl to talk to me.”

Whenever Andrew Boyle follows a woman’s name with the words “model for me,” I don’t know how to feel. Maybe he’s not a pervert, maybe he’s just a lonely guy, full of self-doubt, worried that he’s not good enough for a woman to love, worried that he’ll never get married, have a kid, a family, and the camera is something for him to hide behind, that inviting a woman to model for him is a way to strike up a conversation with a woman he’d never dare speak to otherwise. Maybe the art-photo booby pictures are just about his very human insecurities.

Or it could just be me. I’ve never hobnobbed in Europe—I’ve never been to Europe; the most international I’ve ever gone is the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Maybe I am just a prude, an uptight American, sexually repressed, opposed to pleasures of the flesh, puritanical, and who am I to judge him? “You can’t fault me for my social choices,” he told me once. “I’m not breaking any laws. I’m not doing anything illegal or unethical. I’m not doing any harm.”

Or maybe it is him, Andrew Boyle. Maybe it has to do with the way Andrew Boyle talks about women, their bodies, their faces, their hair, their clothes. When a woman walks by, he can’t not comment on her appearance. He can’t not judge her by what would appear to be a very narrow aesthetic. Sometimes his comments remind me of the bitchy things I’ve heard girls say to each other about other girls. When a blond girl with big breasts and wide hips walked by, he said, “I’m not into dairy princesses.”

When a chubby girl wearing too-tight clothes, whose hair was pulled back into a high, tight ponytail, walked by, Andrew said, “That is international, my friends. The white-trash high-and-tight ponytail. You don’t just see that in America. I’ve also seen it in Britain and Spain.”

When a skinny brunette with straight hips and perky boobs walked by, and Andrew said, “I’d love for her to model for me,” I know there’s no way a woman like me can talk to a man like Andrew about another woman’s body without having it sound bitchy or insincere or prudish. I don’t have to wonder why he’s never asked me to model. I know why—I’m too old, too short, too soft—but I don’t feel competitive or jealous or worry that my own body doesn’t measure up. I stopped worrying about that the day I found a hair growing on my big toe.

The ickiness I feel when I’m around Andrew Boyle and he’s looking at women and talking about their bodies is a very old feeling.

It goes back to the morning when I was twelve years old, the morning I woke up with a pair of D-cup breasts and a va-va-voom swing to my walk that horrified my mother and enchanted perverts. As a little girl with enormous boobs, I had a body that attracted attention: from boys my age, of course, who behaved in all the ways one would expect, immaturely and in song, Paul Searle revising the lyrics of the Manhattan Transfer classic “The Boy from New York City” to a version that included my name and the words “has got,” “big,” and “titty.”

It was embarrassing but not nearly as strange and creepy and uncomfortable as the way grown men behaved. Carrie Laughlin’s dad circled back around the block to offer me a ride home from school and, in the car, put his arm around me, rubbing my back and squeezing my shoulder. The custodian at John F. Kennedy Junior High suggested I come back to school a little later and “visit” with him awhile. A man older than my dad asked me if I had some milk to go with that shake, did I have a porch to go with that swing. A very old man at the public library asked if I knew where they kept the Louis L’Amour books, then before I could say yes, I know exactly where the westerns are, he kissed me on the mouth, his breath smelling like a cherry cough drop, his tongue tasting like one.

It seemed to me all I was doing was walking down the hall, or down the street, or home from school, or I was looking for a book about magic tricks at the public library, but obviously I was doing something more. I was doing something dirty and wrong. I’ve never quite gotten over the idea that the body I live in could invite such attention. That something about me—the way I walked, maybe, or the way I chewed gum, the way I dressed, or those really great high-heeled shoes, or that I was such a little girl with such an enormous chest—invited men into thinking it was okay to let me know they wanted something from me, something I didn’t want to give them, but since I brought it on myself, maybe I had to.

Do I wear a shirt that’s big, bulky, baggy, or do I wear a shirt that clings? Do I hide my body under sweaters and sweatshirts and jackets or do I let the world know I’m female and as a female, I have breasts? Why do I feel so self-conscious anytime I wear a color other than black? Do I want to be looked at or not?

I don’t know.

It’s me. It’s them. It’s me. It’s Andrew. It’s me. It’s you. It’s any man with greedy eyes. I’ve never stopped wanting to kick you in the nuts. Hard. When you least expect it.

M
y neighbor the Satanist goes up the stairs carrying groceries sacked in paper, not plastic. He comes down the stairs carrying dirty laundry in a wicker basket. He goes up with library books, Blockbuster rentals, a double-dip chocolate chip ice cream cone. He comes down with stacks of neatly bundled newspaper, aluminum cans, and glass bottles, which he loads into the trunk of his car and hauls off to the community recycling center.

The Satanist drives a burgundy 1993 Chevy Lumina. Though the Lumina still has his parents’ name on the title, they have all but given it to him. He keeps a red plastic El Diablo bobble head on the dashboard, its black eyebrows high and arched, its teeth white, its lips curled into a devilish smirk. An exotic dancer the Satanist was interested in taking out to the movies turned him down, and the reason she gave was that she didn’t care for his El Diablo. She was a Christian girl, she said, and that devil bobble head gave her the creeps.

The Satanist is twenty-six years old. He doesn’t smoke. Not cigarettes or cigars or a pipe. Not even marijuana—not even a single tiny hit at a party when everyone else is having some. The Satanist doesn’t do drugs. He’s never done drugs, doesn’t see the point. He’ll drink a beer or two—his favorite is Guinness, though Beck’s is a close second—but only when he’s out somewhere. He doesn’t drink to get drunk; he doesn’t drink at home; he doesn’t drink alone.

Every Sunday, the Satanist calls his parents in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. He asks what’s new with them. His mother teaches third grade at a Catholic school, and he likes hearing about the kids in her class, the cute things they say and do. He asks his parents how they’re doing, how they’re feeling, how’s Grandma? The Satanist’s grandmother is getting older; her health isn’t good, and his father isn’t well, either. He has Lou Gehrig’s disease, a condition that’s almost always fatal. The Satanist can’t help but worry about the people he loves. Sometimes he thinks about moving back to Cedarburg, moving back in with his parents so he can be there for his family, so he can be a help.

But other times, he thinks about taking a chance on his dreams. He wrote a screenplay about the mad monk Rasputin and Rasputin’s role in the fall of the Romanovs. Sometimes the Satanist dreams about moving to Hollywood, where he would sell his screenplay then make a career out of writing more. Other times, he considers applying to Ph.D. programs so he can work on a degree in film studies.

While he mulls over his next move, the Satanist has a regular weekend gig spinning records at wedding receptions. “People like to do the chicken dance,” he tells me. “They like polkas and the hokey-pokey and ‘YMCA.’ It’s irritating, but the Macarena has made a comeback.”

The Satanist’s mother hasn’t exactly been hassling him, but during their Sunday telephone conversations, she’s made her wishes clear. She is a practical woman, nice-smelling, more than a few gray hairs, an excellent cook, a devout Catholic, a loving wife and mother. She would like her son to find a job, a good job, one with a 401(k) plan and health insurance that includes eyes and dental. She thinks it’s high time he enter the real world.

The Satanist assures her: “Okay, Mom, okay! I’m looking for a job, okay?”

The Satanist wears a shark’s tooth on a cord around his neck that he bought at the Minnesota State Fair. He wears baggy jeans and he has a collection of baggy dark T-shirts. One of them has Marilyn Manson on it. Another says
666
in red letters. Another says
Team Satan
, while yet another has a little devil on it and a caption that reads
I’m horny!
One of his T-shirts has a great white shark on it—SHARK ATTACK! it says—and still another has the shark from
Jaws.

Although he doesn’t like getting up early—he’s not a morning person—the Satanist likes breakfast food. Juice, toast, potatoes. Bacon and eggs. I’ve seen him eat a tall stack of pancakes. I’ve seen him eat a ham and cheese omelet. On Monday, when we went out for breakfast, I didn’t ask him if he wanted my home fries, I just said move your toast and I slid them on his plate.

The Satanist is a big-but-not-fat, awkward-moving, sweet-looking guy with a round face, round glasses, and high, thin eyebrows that make him look both skeptical and surprised. He has a nice smile. He has big brown eyes. His hairline is receding. He has pinchable cheeks. I think as raw material, he has potential. He just needs a new wardrobe, better-fitting jeans, and T-shirts that aren’t black and faded and advertising things related to sharks or Satan. He needs to trim those fingernails. He definitely needs a better haircut. What he needs is a girlfriend. The love of a good woman is what he needs to forget all about this Satanism business.