"Donna Wirthman came in really upset. It seems Conlon stepped over barriers in all kinds of ways. He and Donna"s daughter had an affair: she has letters to prove it. That"s bad enough. But he gave Amber a s.e.xually transmitted disease, and now it"s possible she isn"t going to be able to have children. The Wirthmans are talking lawsuits. Big-time, Joe."
I knew better than to ask the president what he thought we should do. That was why he"d come to me; if he"d had any good ideas, the matter wouldn"t have gone any further than his office.
"Set up a meeting, Joe. You, me, and Conlon. And get Larry Casper. Don"t say a thing without him being there."
Larry Casper was the university counsel. I"d be glad to have him in the room.
I don"t know whether Tom Conlon suspected what was wrong, but if he did, he didn"t dress for an occasion that might be serious. He was wearing jeans and a workshirt; his boots were spattered in paint. He didn"t make eye contact with the president or Larry Casper; he looked to me as if he considered me the one ally in the room. I didn"t know how I felt about that. Or no, that"s wrong; I did know how I felt. I wanted to say to Tom, "Don"t look to me for help. You got yourself into this mess, get yourself out of it." Then I thought of Bertie.
"Amber Wirthman"s parents have been in to see me," the president said.
I had to give Tom credit; he blushed. "OK," he said. "That can"t be good."
"It"s unfortunate," Tom said. "But she"s an adult. She was twenty-three last July. She works half-time for her father; that"s why it"s taken her so long to get her degree."
"Her age is neither here nor there, nor is her degree status," the president said.
"Well, actually, Mort, it"s better that she"s not a minor," Larry Casper said.
"You understand we"ll have to ask for your resignation. You"re not tenured, so we can do that. I"m sure you understand why we would want to. I"m hoping that will forestall a lawsuit, but I can"t promise."
"You"re saying I could be completely wiped out; I"m losing my job; and then they could sue me on top of it? Well, the good news is I haven"t got a cent. What are they going to take, my car? I suppose they could put me in debtors" prison."
"I think you fail to understand the gravity of the situation," the president said. "You committed a very serious breach of student-teacher trust. You"ve betrayed your position; you"ve betrayed the values of this college."
"Save it," Tom said, getting up. "I"ll pack up my gear, but I don"t want any bulls.h.i.t about students and teachers. She"s an adult. I"m an adult. I didn"t hurt her."
"She may be unable to have children," I said.
"That"s a crock," he said. "Lots of people have chlamydia and do just fine."
"I wouldn"t suggest taking that line with the Wirthmans," Larry Casper said. "I would have no contact with them without an attorney present."
"Are you my attorney?" Tom asked.
"No, I represent the college."
"How am I supposed to pay for a lawyer?"
"Maybe you should have thought of that before," Larry Casper said.
When I phoned Bertie to ask if I could take her out for coffee, I was hurt by the eagerness in her voice.
"To what do I owe this incredible pleasure, loe?"
"A sticky issue, I"m afraid, Bertie," I said. "I can"t talk about it on the phone."
She ordered a mocha frappuccino with whipped cream. I had a double espresso. After I left Bertie, I had to go to a faculty budget committee meeting. I needed straight caffeine.
"It"s about Tom," I said.
"He"s all right, isn"t he," she asked, looking alarmed. "He"s not sick or anything? He isn"t hurt?"
I explained the situation to her.
"I don"t believe it," she said. "The girl is trying to frame him. She was probably infected by some rich boy who can afford expensive lawyers and the parents know Tom"s an innocent, a babe in the woods, an easy mark."
"Your brother hasn"t denied anything," I said.
"Why would he do something like that with a student? He has Andrea to keep him on the straight and narrow. It doesn"t make sense. He"s too old for all of that; he"s put all that behind him. Let me talk to the girl and her parents; I"ll get to the bottom of this."
"I can"t stop you, Bertie, but I don"t think it will do any good. You have to consider the possibility that they might be telling the truth."
"I won"t consider it for a moment, Joe. And I"m surprised that you would. I"m going to leave now." She walked out of Starbucks like she"d like to set the whole thing on fire, with me inside it.
I don"t know what happened with Bertie and the Wirthmans, but they decided not to sue. Tom"s gone back to New Haven. Andrea"s stayed in the apartment. I don"t know if she considered going east with him or not.
I really don"t get to speak with Andrea anymore, because I don"t have a lot of contact with Bertie. When Bertie has some business at the college, she makes a point of going over my head. Sometimes I think of talking to Andrea about the situation- offering my condolences, or something like that. But why would I say condolences? No one died. Anyway, what could I tell her? About a situation like the one with Tom and Bertie, I don"t think there"s much that can be said. And what could I ask her? I saw her once, in a parking lot- I think it was the supermarket, or it may have been the mall. It was late September; she was pushing a shopping cart, but it didn"t look like it had much in it. The light was clear and it fell straight onto her; her hair looked golden; she was wearing a red jacket that looked quite wonderful that day. But I didn"t say anything to her; I didn"t even wave; I don"t know if she even saw me.
What would I say to her? I would have liked to say, "I miss you and Bertie. I miss the two of you terribly." I would have liked to say the words accompanied by some gesture; I would have liked to put my hand on her shoulder; I would have liked to touch her hair. I would have liked to say, "How are you, the two of you? Are you all right? Tell me how you are, what has happened to Tom. How has Bertie taken it all?"
I understood very well that there really wasn"t anything I had a right to know. I wasn"t close to anyone involved. I hardly knew Andrea, and I would be the last person Bertie would want knowing the details of her life.
I sometimes wonder what Bertie said to Tom. I could imagine her saying something like "Forget it, Tom, it"s over, go on with your life. No one appreciates you like I do. No one understands you but me."
And there"d be no one, no one at all, to tell her she was wrong.
Walt.
I own a famous store. In the back of the store, we cook the food that people buy, the food we set out in the showcase. Our food is created as much to be looked at as tasted: it is a thing of the eye as much as the palate. More of the eye, perhaps, because it"s food that"s meant to be more representative than nourishing. People bring home my food so that in solitude or in their two-person families they can feel bountiful, part of the generous world.
Sometimes we cater parties, and I often wonder whether the hosts pretend to have cooked the food themselves. Now that my food is so famous and desirable (we couldn"t possibly serve everyone who wants us) I"m more and more curious about whether or not people acknowledge that the food that they are serving came from me. It"s questionable now whether people would receive more praise, would be seen as doing more for their guests, for having cooked the food themselves or having had what is required- luck? wit? discipline? connections?- to be among the ones I choose to serve.
From time to time I cook on television. I did today. This morning I woke up at four to be ready for the limo they were sending at five. It could have been dangerous, out on the street at that hour, but I didn"t feel in danger. I"m often on the street at four, four thirty, on my way down to the market for what is to me the most pleasurable and most important part of my work. I love everything about the market: the hum and buzz of money changing hands, insults, praise, the sound of tearing paper, barrels sc.r.a.ping across pavement, s.n.a.t.c.hes of song, curses, the glazed eyes of fish, the redness of radishes, whiteness of cauliflowers, dewy cabbages with the pallor of a damp summer moon.
This morning I wasn"t dressed in jeans, workboots, and sweatshirt, my market garb, but in a long, wide skirt and a teal-colored silk shirt (for television it"s important to have a well-defined neckline). Everything I was experiencing made me feel a rich and blameless joy. Innocently as a child, I reveled in it all: the deep breeze that lifted the hem of my skirt, exposed my legs to the damp air, then chilled them; the dark limo jetting through the half light; the new smell of the car"s upholstery; the cavernous backseat where I could doze for the half-hour ride.
From the moment I got into the car, there was a while when everyone I saw was uniformed, beginning with my driver, proceeding to the guards of the television station: a series of underemployed young men directing me down corridors as if I were an astronaut and they were showing me the way to outer s.p.a.ce. Even the receptionists wore blazers with the network"s symbol on the breast. Among them, I always felt alone. I knew that I was neither one of them nor important enough to engage their imagination. Later in the morning, politicians, actors, sports figures would arrive. They would be important to the uniformed ones; they would receive their smiles, their engaged nods, their grateful gestures. Sometimes one of the young women would say: "My mother made that cheesecake you did on the show last month," or "One of these days I"m going to try that cabbage soup." That was the most I"d ever get.
After every TV appearance I make, two things happen. Business increases and somebody from my past reappears. This morning, after the TV show was done, I was in the back of the store going over the books. I do this now more than any other work. It"s surprisingly pleasant, so different from the rushed, hot work done in the kitchen, the room of white tiles and stainless steel industrial-style appliances. Different, too, from the subtle, ingratiating work of selling that goes on in the front of the store: consisting as it does of the offering of samples, along with a word suggesting a paradisiacal outcome that can only be effected by the customers" giving up more money than they"d like. As I was working in the back, the young man from Argentina who was serving customers up front knocked on the office door. "An old friend of yours is here," he said to me.
At first I couldn"t believe it was really Walt. I"d feared seeing him for so long that the reality of him was rather rea.s.suring. Often, on the street I"d think I"d seen him, but I"d turn away, convincing myself that it was impossible for us to be living in the same place. Although we both were born here.
"I thought it was time I came to see you."
It sounded like a threat, but I knew he didn"t mean it as one. He never meant to seem dangerous; he wouldn"t have understood if I said he"d often frightened me. "I only did what you wanted. That"s all I would ever do," he"d say if I told him he"d frightened me. But that"s just the kind of idea that can set many horrors in motion. Certainly with somebody like Walt.
The way I"ve just been talking about Walt and me gives you the wrong sense of us. The wrong historical sense. And this story is very much of its time. The way I was starting to tell it is the way people told stories for only a few years: 1958-65. At that time there were a lot of stories about mysterious girls in sungla.s.ses and sheath dresses, wearing very pointed shoes with very high heels, walking around Paris waiting to be killed. Pointlessly killed by strangers. They would walk into dark bars in Rome or Paris saying, "I only live for death." And some dark man in a cheap suit would kill them. Probably they would have s.e.x first. These girls always had the right kinds of cars. The cars were very important. The ominous sound of an expensive car door slamming in the empty, monumental street.
In 1965, these stories stopped being told; these films stopped being made. People became expansive. Their mysteriousness was drug-induced, communal. No one dreamed of wearing chignons or sheath dresses or high heels, except parodically. What happened to all those mysterious girls? What did they become when it was chic to be happy with wild hair and loose but transparent clothing?
You had to be young then, in the sixties. There were older women who wore black velvet pants and boots and white peasant blouses with brocade vests, or red crushed-velvet shirts. We pitied them. They wore too much makeup. When they got stoned their mascara smeared, and it reminded us of middle age.
Not everyone enjoyed the sixties the way people think. You needed some money or flexible plans. Walt and I had neither. We were both the first in our families to go to college. My father repaired TVs; he had a little shop in the town in Queens where we lived, Maspeth. After the store was broken into several times, he decided to get a guard dog. A German shepherd whom he kept chained in the store bas.e.m.e.nt, tying him to a post in the middle of the small plot of gra.s.s in the back lot of the store so the dog could pee and s.h.i.t three times a day. The dog never walked free. It was the nearest thing to a pet we had.
My mother, who"d lived above the store the first years of her marriage, was in love with her house, and the idea that its surface might be marred by an animal was unthinkable to her. She was so afraid of dust and grime that there were no carpets in the house. A speckled linoleum covered every inch of floor s.p.a.ce: bedrooms, kitchen, living room, bathroom. Wherever you were in the house, if you looked down at your feet, you saw the same thing. At three o"clock every day, my mother would begin cooking: stewed meats, recipes made from ground beef, overcooked vegetables, some form of potatoes, a dessert. All her cleaning was done by noon; she prided herself on that. The hours between noon and three were spent on errands, or on mending or ironing. I don"t think she ever sat down to read the paper or to make a phone call or to have a cup of coffee with a friend. Sometimes I would come upon her standing in the middle of the room wringing her hands. She was both honored and overwhelmed by the task of keeping house.
Certainly, she cared for me, perhaps even with some tenderness in the years before my memory, but it was clear to me from early on that we would not have much to do with each other. She didn"t seem to have the time, and anyway, we shared no interests. My father came home from work at five fifteen, exhausted, even less communicative than he had been in the morning. At five thirty we ate in silence. We were finished by five forty-five, glad to be away from the table. My mother and I washed up. My father sat in front of the television. After washing the dishes, I went to my room.
In fifth grade, an art teacher famished for appreciation discovered that I had a talent for drawing. A talent for anything made me alien to my parents and their world, but drawing- creating things that were of no use- made the breach even wider. When I was much too young for this, my parents began to feel inferior to me. They stood back, so as not to be in my way. Eagerly, yet full of shame, they accepted Miss Jackson"s offers of free art lessons and working trips to the museum. One night, when I was in high school, she made a drunken phone call to my parents, telling them I was a rose among thorns, that they didn"t deserve to have me, but that she did, she"d never had anything, why should they have something and she nothing at all? After that call she never spoke to me in school, and there were no more trips to the Metropolitan. But by that time, I knew how to find my own way. I bought the New York Times and the New Yorker. I would read "The Talk of the Town" as if it were in a foreign language and think that the day when I could understand its references, I would have arrived. I went to the Guggenheim and the Modern and the Frick; I walked around Washington Square; I found my way to the Thalia. Long before I started N.Y.U., I had left home.
That was my journey out. Walt got out by being good in math. During the Sputnik years, there were a lot of opportunities for boys like him; his teachers, Christian Brothers, saw to it that he took the opportunities. We both took what was offered us, which would inevitably remove us from our parents, who were abashed even at our high school graduations, hearing our names called out in the auditorium, watching us step up for medal after medal. On the first day of college, they helped us bring our things to the dorm then left as quickly as they could. They didn"t even say: "Don"t let us down." They didn"t need to. We knew we never could. They had worked so hard. Whatever we did, we would never work as hard as they had.
Walt was in the Socialist Workers Party, and he said that to talk about your family was a bourgeois affectation. The only things he said about them- that they lived in the Bronx, that his father worked on the docks- were offered as evidence that his working-cla.s.s roots were grittier than mine: the soil of struggle still clung to his; mine had been rinsed. We met in a cla.s.s on Eastern religion. I think of him whenever I hear the word Zoroastrianism. It was the beginning of the course, when we were studying Zoroastrianism, that he first asked me out.
He wasn"t at all what I wanted. Even his name seemed wrong; it was impossible to do anything with it that would make it sound hip, or sharp, or new. It sounded like a limp, white, tasteless vegetable: watery cauliflower in a chipped bowl, peeled boiled potatoes without salt. But from the first time he spoke to me, I knew I was exactly what he had in mind. He wanted to go home.
I was angry that I was so legible to him; I was trying hard to hide the clues about my past. I"d jettisoned all my new clothes- Villager dresses, Pappagallo shoes (the working-cla.s.s idea of what the middle cla.s.s would wear, all wrong as it turned out). They"d cost a month"s salary from my summer typing job, but I didn"t care. I started to wear jeans and out-Ian dishly colored shirts or short dresses. How did he recognize me in that costume? He always wore olive green work pants, desert boots, and a white shirt. The white shirt always seemed very clean, very well pressed. The boys I wanted were wearing work shirts and boots, heavy and dangerous looking; you felt that if they stepped on your foot your toes would be crushed, your arches flattened like flounders. You"d be happy to have them try it, just to let them know you didn"t mind.
He kept wanting me to read what he thought were Marxist cla.s.sics. Every time we went out he"d give me a new book: The Master and Margarita, a multivolume biography of Lenin by Rok. I took pleasure in refusing to read these books. I was reading Siddhartha, and Walt Whitman, and Rilke"s Letters to a Young Poet."Why don"t you ever read anything real?" he"d ask. I"d shrug in a lazy way that he found s.e.xually inflaming. "I just want to kiss you ... I just want to kiss you," he would say. Firmly, I would shake my head no. "I don"t want to give you the wrong idea," I"d say. But everything about my being with Walt was wrong. I kept telling him that, but I continued to go out with him.
Sometimes we"d go to demonstrations together, and, taken over by a wave of political fervor, I"d let him hold my hand. He would a.n.a.lyze, in cla.s.s terms, our relation to the demonstrating crowd. We were further away from them, he kept trying to remind me, than from the cops who were trying to beat us on the head. "So what?" I"d say. "So everything," he"d reply. But he was always so anxious to touch my hair, to put his arm around me, that he couldn"t keep his mind on his arguments, and they lost their force.
I wondered at the time whether it was to get more information about my cla.s.s status that he showed up at my house, unannounced, one day during spring break. He called me from a phone booth in the candy store on the corner and said he happened to be in the neighborhood. n.o.body ever just happened to be in my neighborhood: they either lived there or they were visiting someone. But it was an hour subway ride from the Bronx, and I felt I couldn"t send him back.
My parents never had visitors, and even someone requiring so little impressing as Walt made my mother feel inadequate and unprepared. She went to a lot of trouble to serve us "a nice lunch": tuna salad sandwiches with sweet pickles mixed in. She wouldn"t let me lift a finger. "You kids are tired from all that school," she said. I didn"t try to change her mind. Afterward, when I walked Walt to the subway, he said, "Your mother is a worker, and you oppress her like any boss in any factory anywhere in the world." I was outraged by that. I felt like an exceptionally dutiful daughter since I visited my parents ten times more than any of my friends whose families lived in brownstones right in the Village or in large, cool apartments on the Upper East Side. I also felt a mixture of pride and resentment in not taking any money from them. "I don"t take a cent from them," I said. He said that was nothing. He could see the real story. He wasn"t like the rest of my fancy friends.
To these new friends I proffered my past as a sort of exotic plumage that would make me worth their interest. I would imitate the men on my block who shouted at war protesters: "Why don"t you go back to Russia where you came from." I would make fun of the foods they ate (ambrosia: a mix of sour cream, canned mandarin oranges, coconut, and baby marshmallows), the pictures on their walls (waif-eyed little girls or toreadors), the TV shows they watched (Wunnerfulla, wunnerfulla, I would say, like Lawrence Welk). I prided myself on how far I"d come, and I knew I could never go back. Walt denied the distance. When he finished college, he was going to be a labor organizer. I pointed out how reactionary American labor was, how racist, how war-loving. He insisted that was not their essential nature but a perversion of capitalism, relatively shallow, easily changed. "Besides," he said, "it"s easy for you not to be a racist, you never see any blacks. I bet there wasn"t one black kid in your high school cla.s.s. Your whole idea of race is a big bourgeois fantasy."
He snickered when I told him that I"d accused my cousin of committing a sin when he said he wouldn"t "use a toilet a n.i.g.g.e.r had just used."
"Well, aren"t you a real little liberal," he said. When I got mad and walked away from him, I saw the panic in his eyes. "I"m sorry," he said. "I just want you to be real."
It frightened me that he seemed to know so readily what was real, to be able to discern so easily when I was being unreal or not real, or whatever the opposite of real was. I wouldn"t have dared to say to Walt what I only half believed, that what you hoped to be was as real as what you came from, maybe even what you were. He would have said that was bulls.h.i.t, that what you were was what you were, everything else was a fake. I was always afraid when he talked like that, as if he were in danger of smashing and then stealing the ruins of what I was painfully trying to create and protect. I was always afraid that I would let on too much, give him the wrong clue, and he"d move in and defoliate the territory I was only tentatively exploring. I knew that at any moment I might let something drop and he"d pounce on it. So I had to be very careful of what I told him. If, for instance, I began to feel safe one night and told him my childhood fantasy of a black friend, he"d have made me feel like a fool.
But that story was one of the ways that, in my childhood room, I could know myself as heroic, different from those among whom I lived. Each night after the TV news of the desegregation of the Little Rock schools, I would make up stories of the children I had seen, brave little girls in stiff dresses and tight braids, walking like the saints past fat-bellied and brutal men who would have been quite glad to shoot them, to set their dogs on them, to blow them up. I pretended that one of these girls was sent to my cla.s.s to get her away from danger. But I was the only one in the cla.s.s who would befriend her. One day in the playground, someone pushed her off the swing. A deep cut formed, running from her elbow to her wrist. The teacher said that one of us would have to give her blood, would have to have his or her arm opened identically to hers so that the blood would flow from arm to arm. I stood up by my desk. "I will do it," I said without flinching. Awestruck, my cla.s.smates watched as I pressed my arm, vein to vein, against my friend"s and saved her life. My blood mixed with hers. After this, we held hands every day in the playground. The other children wanted to play with us, but we had nothing to do with them.
Walt would have listened to that story with a knowing sneer on his face, mocking the idea of heroism, of mixed blood, of the danger of death.
He"d say, "But it never happened. You only made it up." He would know that I"d forgotten that. And that was what scared me: he knew.
He believed only in the visible. Like my parents, he was interested only in what was of use. One of my new friends loved to quote Baudelaire about the bourgeoisie: "Lovers of utensils, enemies of perfume." I smiled dreamily every time he said this, which was often. I hoped that, when the time came, I would choose the scent of gardenia over a carrot peeler, but I wasn"t sure. I knew what side my parents were on. That was Walt"s side. He had read even more books than I had and made choices that were like the ones I knew I had to flee.
His reasons for them were una.s.sailable: he hungered and thirsted after justice, but he insisted he was interested only in practical measures, things that would "work." If he"d ever had heroic childish dreams, he would have denied them, and, anyway, at that time I would have been unable to believe that he"d experienced anything like me. Rather, it was important to me to believe that he had not. I said I was interested in beauty. But I knew that, when it came to it, you had to say the most important things were to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give shelter to the shelterless, stop the war. I marched and marched for all these things. But when the time came, what I hoped was that the revolutionaries wouldn"t take over the Metropolitan Museum and that they"d give me time to draw. Walt said, "You have to keep your eye on what"s important." But I knew that whatever he said were the most important things to him- justice, a workers" state- he would have given anything up for me. Knowing this, I was able to dismiss his a.n.a.lysis of my new values and my friends. I could leave him and go back to them and to the work which they convinced me was of greater importance than anything else in my life. Or should be. You have the gift, they said. I only half believed them.
I thought I was a painter then. I was working in a style that imitated the medieval. Bestiaries. Illuminated letters. For my friends" birthdays, I would invent composite mythic animals that expressed the nature of the one to whom I gave the gift. Or I would ornately design their first initials, and within the letter I would place the friend"s ideal city, containing all his or her pleasures. This required thorough studying of them, which was easy for me: I was studying them to learn from them. Their code, so easy for them, all the things they had seen and had, which were so far away from me I feared that when they came my way I wouldn"t even recognize them. It was crucial that I attend closely to the details of their lives. Having done this I could easily render what I"d learned. So, for example, I would put in my friend Charlie"s C a plump white cat, green grapes, a hint of Venice, and rowing the gondola a thickly muscled, barrel-chested boy. Daria had Paris, steaming bowls of cafe au lait, croissants, baguettes, a tiny Seurat, Belmondo and Seberg running in matching striped shirts. I was never sure whether my friends liked what I did because they admired the looks of it, or its technique, or because they so enjoyed having been so thoroughly attended to. Walt would watch me sometimes working on one of these drawings.
"Can I just sit and watch you draw?" he"d say. "I"m reading. I"ll be quiet."
I"d shrug my shoulders, as if to refuse him was too much trouble. But I knew he wasn"t reading- he was watching me. His foot would jiggle with the surplus energy of his frustration. He would run his hands back and forth over his mouth. I knew exactly what was going on, and it excited me to make it happen. I would cross my legs so that my skirt rode up to my thighs. Sometimes, pretending absorption, I would sit with my legs outspread. I would lean over, not wearing a bra, so that if he peeked he"d be able to see my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Then, when I caught him peeking, I"d pull at the neck of my shirt impatiently.
"What the h.e.l.l do you think you"re looking at?" I"d say.
"Nothing," he"d say, abashed.
"Well, watch it."
A few minutes later I would languorously scratch the inside of my calf or stretch my arms above my head and leave them there an extra second. He would struggle like a guilty child not to look. But he would never win.
Once, he asked me if I"d make him one of those letters for his birthday. He told me it was coming up soon.
"I doubt it," I said.
"Why not? I"d really like one. I"d really like it."
"I don"t think of it as your thing."
"You"re wrong. You"re wrong about me. I really want one."
"I guess I just really don"t know you well enough," I said. "I have to know the person really well. I have to think a lot about them."
"Couldn"t you try?" he asked.
"I don"t think so."
Didn"t he know that the more he seemed to want the drawing, the less likely I"d be to give it? How could he not know? He had to be able to see that what I liked was refusing him, and if he saw it why did he keep doing what he did? Didn"t he see that the reason I made these elaborate gifts for my new friends was precisely because they would never yearn for them, might even leave them on their trays in the cafeteria or in their rooms at the end of term? They were so used to receiving gifts that one more (and from me) could never mean that much.
Nothing excited me so much in those days as refusing Walt. I was going to bed with a lot of boys, without much pleasure, because I felt I should. But every night after I came home from a date with Walt, when I was taking off my underwear, I had to face the evidence: I"d been turned on.
But I didn"t think of going to bed with him until my friend Charlie said the words. I was mortified when I ran into Charlie while Walt and I were walking down the street. I barely said h.e.l.lo. "Well, I can understand why you wanted to keep that little dish to yourself," he said. "Personally, I wouldn"t let him out of my sight. I"ll bet he"s one of those tough, sc.r.a.ppy types that just goes on and on for hours."
Charlie"s talking to me in that way made me feel that he considered me more like him than like Walt. In on something that Walt wasn"t. At that point, I decided it was safe to go to bed with him.
He"d never even hinted that we go to bed. I think he felt he didn"t have the right to. We went out to movies and to dinner at a cheap Greek restaurant, and I always let him pay. When I went out with other boys, I always paid for myself, on the liberated understanding that if they paid for me it was because they were buying something, and since I was probably going to have s.e.x with them anyway, I didn"t want it to seem as if they"d bought me for the price of a movie or a meal. But I felt I didn"t have to have that scruple with Walt since I wasn"t going to go to bed with him. He was everything I was trying to get away from, and a large part of the point of going to bed with boys was to prove I"d got away from home. And it seemed to me he was lucky to be going out with me. I was giving him hints that could be helpful for his future escape. If he didn"t seem to want to take them now, well, that was not my fault.
After Charlie had put the idea of going to bed with Walt into my head, I knew it would be very easy. I"d just have to ask him. The signs of his wanting me were pathetically visible: his jiggling right foot, his hand wiped over his mouth, his touching me whenever it seemed possible. The important thing would be to do it but to let him know that it wasn"t important. Which was exactly what I said when I suggested s.e.x. "Look," I told him, "our not f.u.c.king makes it seem like such a big deal. I know you"re dying for it. I"m sort of into it. You"re like the only guy I know that I"m not f.u.c.king. That"s not gay, I mean."
He tried to seem casual, but he couldn"t wait. When he took me in his arms, he was trembling. I couldn"t help it; the pureness of his desire, its immaturity, its rawness, created ardor in me. I was in love with my own power to make someone want me. And he did want me, want me rather than wanting it, whatever it was: s.e.x, my s.e.x, the experience, the ability to recount it afterward. At that time, we were supposed to pretend it was an it we wanted. Girls like me had grown up listening to South Pacific in our bedrooms, but in a twinkling of an eye we were supposed to give that up for "I"m into f.u.c.king tonight if you"re into it."
My experience of s.e.x was mostly an extended pretense. I had to pretend to want s.e.x without wanting attention. The reality was usually exactly the opposite. I had s.e.x because it was the best way of getting attention from the boys I thought worthwhile. But when Walt"s sweaty, trembling hands ran over my body, I realized that for the first time I really wanted s.e.x. I wanted s.e.x and he wanted me.
He would never have said he loved me or used any of the language of romance. All that was a bourgeois trick to sell unnecessary products to the workers. It was blinding dust flung into their eyes by cynical tyrants to keep them from the vision of revolution. He may have thought he had his eyes on revolution, but I was the only thing in his sight. He never wanted not to be looking at me. When he got his first glimpse of me, coming up a stairway or entering a room, he always looked delighted, as if his good fortune in seeing me was more than he could bear. I was always moved by that look, but I would never greet him pleasantly. I always pretended that I hadn"t seen him at first, that I was looking for something else and he"d just happened to come into my line of vision.