In Praise of Messy Lives (7 page)

Over the summer the boy came to visit me in New York. I remember him standing in the doorway to my room, grinning, with an army-green duffel. Had we pretended it was a platonic
visit? It seems far-fetched that he would have come all the way from New Hampshire to New York to see a casual acquaintance, but I have a feeling that was what we told ourselves. We climbed up to the roof of my parents’ building and watched the boats go by on the Hudson, the sun silhouetting the squat water towers a dark silvery green.

I am aware, even now, of some small part of me that would like to say that it was worth it, some adolescent, swaggering side that would like to claim that the sexual moment itself seared the imagination, and was worth, in its tawdry, obliterating way, the whole friendship. It was not.

Of the act itself, I remember almost nothing at all. It seems that when one is doing something truly illicit, not just moderately illicit but plainly wrong, the sex itself is forgettable. The great fact of the immorality overshadows anything two mere bodies can achieve. All I remember is that he was gentle, in the way that sensitive boys were supposed to be gentle. He brought me a warm washcloth afterward, which sickened me slightly, and embarrassed me.

Stella, red pencil tucked behind her ear, would notice that I haven’t described the actual seduction. That I’ve looked politely away from the events, because they are incriminating and, more important, banal. I wouldn’t want to debase my great betrayal, my important, self-flagellating narrative, with anything so mundane as what actually happened. That’s how she would see it, anyway. Two people taking off their clothes, however gloriously wrong, are, in the end, just two people taking off their clothes.

But really, the problem is that my mind has thrown up an elegant Japanese folding screen, with a vista of birds and mountains and delicate, curling trees, to modestly block out the goings-on.
And it does seem after all of these years, that a blow-by-blow would be anticlimactic. I can say, in a larger sense, what happened, which is this: I didn’t care about him, nor did I delude myself into thinking that I did. I had enough sense to know that what I was experiencing so forcefully was a fundamentally trivial physical impulse. And that’s what makes the whole situation so bewildering and impenetrable. Why would one night with a boy I didn’t even particularly like seem worth ruining a serious and irreplaceable friendship for?

I suppose, in accordance with the general and damaging abstraction of those years, I was fulfilling some misplaced idea of myself. I was finally someone who took things lightly. I thought a lot about “lightness” then. Even though I wasn’t someone who took things lightly at all, I liked, that year, to think of myself as someone who did—all of which raises another question in my mind. Was at least part of the whole miserable escapade the fault of the Milan Kundera book everyone was reading,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
? That sublime adolescent ode to emotional carelessness, that ubiquitous paperback expounding an obscure eastern European profundity in moral lapses? The more I think about it, the more I think it’s fair to apportion a tiny bit of the blame to Mr. Kundera. (Here Stella would raise her eyebrows. “A book forced you to do it? How
literary
of you, how
well read
you must be.…”)

I suppose, also, in some corner of my fevered and cowardly brain I must have thought we would get away with it. I must have thought we would sleep together once and get it out of our systems. It turned out, however, that the boy believed in “honesty,” an approach I would not have chosen on my own. He called Stella at the soonest possible second and told her. It was not hard to
imagine the frantic look in Stella’s eyes when he told her. Stella looked frantic when she had to pour cornflakes in a bowl. I hated him for telling her. I couldn’t bear the idea of her knowing. Strangely enough, I felt protective of her, as if I could somehow protect her from the threat of myself.

I don’t think I grasped right away the magnitude of what I had done. It felt like waking up in the middle of a René Magritte painting and finding tiny men with bowler hats suddenly falling from the sky. It didn’t make sense, even to me, and I was startled, in a way, to find that it was real. To have the boy in my house the next morning, wanting coffee, and to have his soft blue-and-green flannel shirt spread out on my floor, was for some reason extremely startling. Cause and effect were sufficiently severed in my mind that I had not apprehended the enormity of the betrayal. In the light of day, it seemed a little unfair that I couldn’t take it back.

I don’t remember if the boy called Stella from my house, or if he waited a few hours and called her from a phone booth in the train station. I do remember him reveling in his abject abasement. I couldn’t believe how much he reveled. He was, among other things, a religious nut. But back to Stella. It’s funny how even now my mind wanders back to him. This man I did not even delude myself into thinking that I cared about. This man I did not even
like
.

Stella, needless to say, was furious, mostly at me. I’ve noticed, in these cases, one is always furious at the person of the same sex, and one always finds the person of the other sex contemptible yet oddly blameless. To further complicate things, Stella and I were supposed to be roommates in the fall. This made everything infinitely
worse: undoing our roommate arrangements proved to be more arduous than one would think. We had to disentangle ourselves officially in the eyes of the bureaucracy, and on paper: it was like getting a divorce.

Before I go any further, maybe I should say something about self-destructiveness in those years. That warm July night, there was the pleasure of destruction, of Zippo lighters torching straw huts, of razing something truly good and valuable to the ground; there was the sense, however subliminal, of disemboweling a friendship. I remember filleting fish that I caught with my father on the docks, and seeing liver, kidney, roe, splayed open on the slick wooden docks, for all to see. There was something thrilling and disgusting about it. Tearing open my friendship with Stella had the same effect. I felt sick. I felt the freeing thrill of ruining everything.

And then again, it may be deceptive to talk about this whole phase of life in terms of feeling. Maybe the problem was the absence of feeling. Maybe the problem was a kind of annihilating rage that swept through me. Maybe I did what I did because, at that age, I couldn’t yet feel the way I wanted to feel, the way Stella felt, about a man. A few lines of Wallace Stevens were starred and highlighted in my Norton anthology: “Knows desire without an object of desire, / All mind and violence and nothing felt …”

From this vantage, the story is a little chilling. I would like to say something in my defense, but what could I say? This is, by its very nature, an act that cannot be defended. I will say that my sense of morality shifted, that the last remnant of childhood, that last puritanical streak of self-righteousness, vanished, that I
learned to be less rigid, because you never know. Fundamentally nice people have done deplorable things in their pasts. Fundamentally deplorable people change.

One could say that the seeds of the end of my friendship with Stella were embedded in the beginning. I met both her and the boy at once, after all; and I may have been attracted, in a way, to both of them at once, to the impossible, unwieldy triangle as it was being assembled. Stella may even have known, on the long nights the three of us spent together sitting around her fireplace, him slumped down on a chair, long legs gracefully crossed, listening to the whine of the Velvet Underground, that she was creating a problem; the temptation was that rooted, that inherent in the situation.

But back to the girl standing next to a tall boy by the water towers. The seconds before she leans into him, or he leans into her. The sky a glowing navy blue. How would the girl herself have explained? I am afraid that she would have come out with something like “It felt like the right thing.” (I can hear Stella launch into this one: “It felt like the right thing. Of course it felt like the right thing. But did you stop to think for one second in the midst of all of this exalted feeling?”) I am aware of how feeble this sounds, how predictable, how mundane, but I am trying to be as accurate as I can. In the moment it felt like one of those exceptional situations that rises above conventional morality, “in the moment” being another of those phrases one heard all the time back then. In the moment one is not thinking; in the moment the physical takes precedence; this is, of course, the businessman’s excuse with his secretary, the politician’s excuse with his intern, the tired cliché, in fact, of every single adulterer with the
gall and the paltriness of spirit to try to explain himself, and yet it is true: in the moment, it did not feel as if there was a choice.

Afterward, I tried to wheedle my way back into Stella’s affections. I had great faith in my wheedling back then. I wrote her a series of elaborately contrite letters. I remember quoting Auden in one of them: “In the deserts of the heart / Let the healing fountain start.” But the heart remained a desert, as it tends to. Ornate apologies, overly flowery expressions of the self-contempt I did, in fact, feel, would not do. This, of course, is because nothing would do.

As it turned out, my efforts to explain myself bothered Stella to no end. I think, in retrospect, that all she wanted me to do was accept responsibility. I think the whole conversation about what happened exhausted her. Who cared why or how from her point of view? Who cared what particular frailties of character led me to be vulnerable to this sort of thing? What matters in the end is the irrevocable act. Even if I was able, through sheer force of will, to create a little ambiguity in a wholly unambiguous situation, there was something insulting, finally, about doing it. My impulse, it seemed, was to take the whole thing apart like a car motor, to take out the pieces and look at them together; of course, if I could engage her in this process, if I could get her to look at each one of these oily mechanisms
with
me, then I would be part of the way to regaining our friendship. It is the two of us doing something together, however awful. Stella, in her own way, sensed this and refused.

As for Stella, she hated me with aplomb. It was not a partial or forgiving hate. It was a deep, ardent hate. It was so seductive, this hate, that it pulled in other people who hated me too. Stella’s
emotions were charismatic that way. There were whole tables in the dining hall I had to avoid.

One could ask if I really wanted to save the friendship. I admit that I might not have. I admit that there may have been something in the friendship that was crowding me. Why else would I have done it? Why else did I have so few close women friends in the first place? I have four sisters, and it may be that I already had such an abundance of intense female love and ambivalence that my friendships with women seemed just the tiniest bit disposable. But this sort of psychoanalytic thinking has its limitations, especially when it comes to a nineteen-year-old. Because there may have been something entirely accidental in the crash-up of the friendship; it may have been a random act of violence, like someone taking out a gun in a school one day and shooting the principal’s secretary.

I remember once when I was five my class was going on a trip to Staten Island on a ferry. I had been looking forward to this trip for weeks. The morning we were leaving, I had the signed permission slip from my parents. I had my cheese sandwich packed in a paper bag, and my cardigan buttoned over my school uniform. And yet, when we got out onto the boardwalk, the wind blowing from the East River, holding hands in twos, like the little girls in the Madeline books, something happened. I started crying. The teacher stooped down, and I told her I had a stomachache. I was sent home, and I missed the boat ride. Why had I done it? my mother asked, somehow knowing that I was faking. But I didn’t know why: it was my first purely anarchic moment of self-sabotage.

But then again, there
are
reasons that I could go into. There are myriad possibilities as to why I would do something so patently
absurd: I could go all the way back to Teddy Fairchild, the first boy I liked, with shoulder-length corn-colored hair, who left a bag of Russell Stover hard candies in my locker at camp, to my enormous shock, and then, at the end of the summer, never answered my letters. Or Henry Powers, who had café-latte-colored skin and dark curls, and decided, after our idyllic romps through the dunes on Nantucket, that he would rather play with boys. If I wanted to I could delve further into the great gaping insecurity that is always responsible for this sort of bad behavior: when I was thirteen I was very ill, and in and out of the hospital for a year. By the time it was clear I was going to be all right, I weighed sixty-two pounds. While my friends were cultivating the usual romantic dramas, I read books, and resigned myself to not being part of the game; and this resignation, this astonishment that a boy would like me, lingered dangerously. It turned me into something of a monster for a little while. Somehow this feeling that I was outside the romantic comings and goings of my peers got mingled with the idea that I wasn’t going to live, that I was somehow outside of life. You can see where I am going with this. You can feel, in this explanation, the silent doctor nodding in the corner. So many exquisite explanations of appalling pieces of selfishness. And yet they are all true and not true; it may just have been a warm night and a beautiful boy.

If she were here now, Stella would say that all of this analyzing, all of this cyclical, wordy remorse, all of this endless trying to understand, or saying I’ll never understand, all of this throwing up my hands in the face of human nature, or extolling the self-destructiveness of the age, is just another way of making this about me, rather than her. She would be right, of course: I am stealing the boy all over again.

For a literary culture that fears it is on the brink of total annihilation, we are awfully cavalier about the Great Male Novelists of the last century. It has become popular to denounce those authors, and more particularly to deride the sex scenes in their novels. Even the young male writers who, in the scope of their ambition, would appear to be the heirs apparent have repudiated the aggressive virility of their predecessors.