A Stranger on the Planet

by Adam Schwartz

  Finally we head Abe’s orgasmic victory cry: “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  “A regular Molly Bloom,” I commented.

  “Who?” Sarah said.

  “Never mind.”

  “Look, Seth, you do need to apologize to Abe about that Pride and Prejudice business.”

  “I know . . . but I can’t stand it when Mom lies like that about me. You don’t know how many times I’ve asked her not to tell people I know Saul Bellow.”

  “She’s just proud of you.”

  “You’re not going to tell me I have to apologize to Hortense too, are you?”

  “No, you don’t owe Hortense any apologies.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “Aaron told me he had seen a copy of Mom and Dad’s divorce agreement. Apparently Mom really did get reamed. According to Aaron, Dad hired the top divorce lawyer in Boston, who thoroughly kicked the ass of the mediocre lawyer Mom had hired.”

  “Jesus,” I said. My father had committed adultery and had left a wife and three young children. I always presumed a judge would have awarded my mother anything she asked for. “I mean, I believe it, but still. . . .”

  “Seth, why do you think we had to live in a tiny apartment and he’s lived in that huge house?”

  We were both silent for a moment or two. Abe said something and my mother laughed. I thought I heard her say, “I love you too.”

  “Do you ever wonder how Mom and Dad could have possibly gotten married?” Sarah whispered to me.

  “All the time,” I replied.

  When I thought about how my parents might have come together, I imagined their second date, a Sabbath dinner at my mother’s home on Long Island. My father’s mother had died when he was twelve, and when he crossed the threshold of my mother’s childhood home that night his orphan’s heart was probably no match for the scene that greeted him: a dining-room table set with a white linen cloth, beautiful china, a braided challah, a silver kid-dush cup. The Sabbath candles illuminated my mother’s adoring gaze and my grandmother’s radiant warmth. I imagined my grandfather, unctuous and conniving, calling him “Dr. Shapiro.”

  Like me, like Sarah, my father was looking for another family he could belong to.

  “I think that’s why it’s so hard for me to get my bearings in life,” I said. “They pull me in such opposite directions. Maybe that’s why I don’t know how I’m supposed to act most of the time.”

  Between the distant poles of my mother and father, I felt as if I were trying to navigate my way in the middle of some vast white tundra. I only had my sister, my polar opposite, my North Star, to guide me.

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  “So, are you going to see Aaron again?” I asked.

  “Not after what I just heard his father doing.”

  “Too bad. I can tell you like him. He seemed nice, not like his parents.”

  “Not a big deal,” she said.

  I didn’t believe her—not any more than I believed that she had a mouse in her room, or that she had been a virgin before that night.

  “What are you going to tell him if he asks you out?”

  “I’ll think of something. I always do.”

  I might have been the writer in the family, but my sister was the most accomplished liar. It was the way she kept the peace, and inoculated herself against the meanness of the world.

  Virgins

  • JANUARY—JUNE 1979 •

  Rachel and I became lovers during the winter quarter of our senior year. We were enrolled in a seminar on Tolstoy and sat next to each other on the first day of class. Professor Krzyzowski announced that we were in the right city but the wrong season to read Tolstoy. “We ought to study Tolstoy in the spring and Dostoevsky in the winter,” he said ruefully. Chicago was the right city, of course, because of its Slavic spirit—the green-domed Catholic churches with ornate spires, the pierogies and pastries, all those Polish, Croatian, Ukrainian, and Russian names crowded with consonants, the broad blond faces one saw throughout the city.

  During the first month of the term, we continued to sit next to each other, exchanging smiles and small talk before and after class. I knew that Rachel had been anointed as the top English major in the college. She had won every department award and was Professor Hall’s research assistant. The author of a famous book of literary theory, Edmund Hall was the most prestigious professor in the English Department. So I wasn’t surprised when I went to a department meeting for students interested in graduate school and saw Rachel sitting on a couch. She beamed radiantly at me; I went over and sat next to her.

  The professor who ran the meeting tried to dissuade us from going to graduate school. The job market for PhD’s in English was at its lowest ebb in the history of the profession, he explained. He told us to expect to spend six or seven years completing our degrees without any guarantee of a decent job. He also strongly advised against applying to graduate school at Chicago. We ought to study with different professors; the department was looking for new blood; moreover, he reminded us, Chicago, unlike the other top graduate programs, didn’t hire teaching assistants or provide support for every PhD student. Despite everything I heard, I was still planning on applying to the graduate program at Chicago. I was also applying to the program in religion and literature at the Divinity School, where admission was not as competitive and financial aid was more generous. I loved the university, loved Hyde Park, loved Chicago; I couldn’t imagine a better life than cocooning myself in Regenstein Library and sitting around seminar tables in classrooms with dormered windows on the upper floors of Cobb Hall for another six or seven years.

  When the meeting ended, I asked Rachel where she was applying. She told me Stanford and Berkeley.

  “Not here?” I had heard rumors that Professor Hall had appealed to her to stay on, promising her a prestigious fellowship.

  “No, I don’t like Chicago very much.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “A scholarship I couldn’t turn down. How about you?”

  “Where am I applying, or why did I come here?”

  “Both.”

  I told her I was applying to Harvard, Yale, and Chicago. Then I told her the story of how I had been an average-to-poor student in high school but won first prize in the Scholastic Magazine high school short story contest.

  “That’s amazing,” she said. “You say really smart things in class. Why do you think you didn’t do well in high school?”

  “I guess I didn’t take myself very seriously.”

  “What do you think changed?” she asked. She had pulled her knees up under her chin and was facing me, one arm extended in my direction along the back of the couch.

  “I put a thousand miles between my mother and me.”

  Rachel laughed. “I had to put two thousand miles between me and my mother.”

  “Yeah, but you were probably a star in high school too.”

  “Well, I think it’s far more interesting to be a misunderstood creative type.”

  “I bet your mother isn’t nearly as bad as mine,” I said.

  “My mother punched out my stepmother at my bat mitzvah. Can you top that?”

  “When I was twelve my mother married a man she had only known for two weeks. Their marriage lasted four months. He broke my nose and stole my mother’s car and jewelry.”

  “Let’s call it a draw,” Rachel said, a smile lighting up her face.

  Then she asked me if I still wrote stories.

  “Not so much,” I said. “My sophomore year I took Kadish’s introductory course in creative writing. In the margin of my story he wrote, ‘This sentence is a disgrace to you, the university, and to the country.’” I laughed but Rachel looked appalled.

  “What an ass!” she exclaimed.

  “Oh, he’s not so bad. He’s had to labor under the shadow of Saul Bellow, and I think he feels that his life is a bad imitation of Bellow’s. His surliness is just part of his serious writer act.”

&n
bsp; “I wouldn’t be so sympathetic to a professor who wrote something like that on one of my papers.”

  “Well, I’m actually very close friends with his daughter, Wendy, so I know what he has to deal with. She’s a student here too.”

  Actually, the main reason I was sympathetic to Kadish was because I had read his novels. I thought they were artful miniatures, but not the grand canvases created by Saul Bellow. Kadish, so brutally honest, had to know that he would never be as famous as Saul Bellow when he faced the blank page every morning.

  “When I was in Kadish’s class, Wendy and I went out briefly. Now that was strange. To be sleeping with your professor’s daughter. Maybe I ought to enroll in his advanced creative writing class and write a story about that.”

  “But you’re still close friends with her?” Rachel asked, as if that interested her more than my idea for a story, or the fact that I had slept with a professor’s daughter.

  “Yes. Very close.”

  “That’s so unusual.”

  “Really?” I said. “To tell you the truth, it’s actually easier for me to be friends with girls than to be their boyfriend.” I immediately wanted to kick myself for saying that, for neutralizing myself.

  “I’m the same way,” Rachel replied.

  “It’s easier for you to be friends with girls than to be their girlfriend?”

  I smiled but she didn’t smile back.

  “No, with men.”

  Everyone had left the room. Rachel and I were alone. I wanted to ask her out, but if she said no—if she said something about having a boyfriend or being too busy—I’d still have to sit next to her three times a week for the remainder of the term. She put her coat on, getting ready to go.

  “I’d really like to read one of your stories sometime,” Rachel said.

  “Where are you going now?” I asked.

  “I think I’ll get some lunch. How about you?’

  “The library. . . . Well, I guess I’ll see you in class,” I said.

  “I really enjoyed our conversation,” she replied.

  That night I tried phoning her in her dorm and was relieved when the person who answered the phone said she wasn’t in. The next afternoon I noticed Rachel sleeping in one of the comfortable reading chairs by the windows in Regenstein. I sat in the chair opposite her, opened my biography of Tolstoy, and waited for her to wake. After about twenty minutes she opened her eyes and looked at me happily, as if she had been hoping to see me when she awoke. I asked her if she wanted to go to the coffee shop in the basement of the library.

  Over coffee, we found ourselves in an intense discussion about Sonya Tolstoy, the great writer’s muse, collaborator, and sacrificial wife. Rachel said that Sonya was a classic example of a woman who had subordinated her creativity to enable a male artist. I countered that Sonya certainly had a genius for life—managing the books, the estate, the hordes of children; transcribing her husband’s manuscripts; serving as a literary midwife for the great novels. Rachel replied that this showed that men’s and women’s creativity was differently gendered. Gendered? I didn’t know whether we were arguing or agreeing. Besides, did I really want to go out with someone who used the word gender as a verb?

  “Look,” I said, “would you like to go out on Saturday?”

  Rachel’s face relaxed, as if she were relieved that I had changed the subject. She said she would love to go out with me.

  On Saturday night we went to Theresa’s, a blues bar in a blighted neighborhood only minutes from the grand houses of Hyde Park and Kenwood. The place was dim, hazy, and crowded. I counted only four other white people—probably also students from the university—but everyone was solicitous and friendly. The barmaid who brought our drinks offered us chili dogs, free of charge, and the musicians, most of them elderly black men, asked us every now and then how we were enjoying the music. Rachel had suggested coming to Theresa’s, and I was glad for it. We didn’t have to discuss literature or our mothers. We drank beer, slow danced, and held hands as we listened to the music.

  Back in her room, Rachel and I kissed on her bed for about ten minutes. Then I began to unbutton her shirt. She smiled shyly at me and unbuttoned mine too. We kissed and fondled in the nude, but I felt as if I were sipping a soda without any fizz. Then Rachel yanked my penis like a cow’s udder.

  “Not so hard,” I said, placing my hand on hers.

  She gave me a plaintive look. “I’ve never done this before,” she said.

  I was surprised, shocked, really. She was attractive and sociable, a daughter of liberal parents, a child of Berkeley, circa 1969.

  “Any reason why?” I asked.

  “I never met anyone I liked enough.” I stared into her eyes and she looked away; we both knew her answer didn’t explain why she was in bed with me on our first date. I surmised that she didn’t want to be a virgin when she graduated, before she returned to Berkeley, and had decided that I was her last, best chance.

  “I suppose I’m honored,” I said. She looked up at me, placed a hand against the side of my face.

  “I felt I could trust you,” she explained.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You think it’s really strange that I’m still a virgin,” she said.

  “No, not really,” I lied.

  “I do,” she replied.

  “Why?”

  “Because how can I pretend to know anything about literature or life if I’ve never been in love or had sex? I feel like a fraud discussing and writing about Anna Karenina when I’ve never experienced any of those feelings.”

  “Experience is overrated,” I said. “I’d rather discuss Anna Karenina with you than with anyone.”

  “Even Professor Krzyzowski?”

  “I’d rather discuss Anna Karenina with you in the nude than with anyone,” I said.

  Rachel laughed and kissed me on the mouth. She went under the covers and put her mouth on me. I was completely flaccid, and Rachel wasn’t moving her head, just keeping her lips suctioned over the head of my penis. I tapped her on the shoulder.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “We can just go to sleep tonight.”

  “Was I doing that the wrong way?” she asked.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell the truth. “No, that felt nice. I just think I’ve had a little too much to drink.”

  She cuddled up next to me. “Next time you can show me what to do.”

  “I’m happy we could get nude and talk,” I said.

  “Me too,” she said. “I like talking to you in the nude.”

  Rachel bought some condoms the next day, but in bed that night I said we ought to wait a couple of weeks before having intercourse, wait until we were really comfortable with each other’s bodies; the experience would be nicer that way, I explained. Then I put my hand between her legs and parted the inner terrain very lightly, as if handling the petals of a rose. “I like to be touched this way too,” I said to her. Of course, I hadn’t known how to touch a woman until Jane had shown me, until she told me that I didn’t need to try to fit my whole hand into her vagina.

  “Thank you for being so nice about this,” Rachel said.

  I felt like a phony. The truth was that I had never had sex with a virgin and couldn’t bear to think about the blood and the pain. I had read The Bell Jar when I was a senior in high school and had literally become ill over the scene in which Sylvia Plath hemorrhaged after she lost her virginity. The morning after reading it, still thinking about that scene, I became so light-headed in the shower that I had to drop to one knee before I fainted completely and fell through the glass door.

  Two weeks after we began sleeping together, Rachel and I still hadn’t had sex. Until I met her, I had just presumed that I could happily live out my life without ever having sex with a virgin. Reluctantly, I called Sarah at Rutgers.

  “Hello, Sarah.”

  “What’s two plus two?”

  “Um . . . five?”

  “Hi, Seth.”

  This was the
game Sarah and I always played when I called her: My voice sounded exactly like our father’s, and she always gave me a math quiz so she would know whether it was me or him on the other end.

  I told her I had a new girlfriend.

  “Nice,” she replied.

  I could already sense the vibe between us was weird. Usually we phoned each other only to complain about our parents, almost never to discuss our love lives, especially since the night we had heard Abe Zelman fucking our mother.

  “She’s still a virgin.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Is she fifteen or something?”

  “No! She’s my age.”

  “Is she ugly?”

  “No, she’s very attractive.”

  “Is she from Alabama or someplace like that?”

  “No, Berkeley.”

  “So, what’s the problem?”

  “I’ve never had sex with a virgin before.”

  “Congratulations then.”

  “I think I have some type of phobia about having sex with a virgin.”

  “Why?” Her voice was a little more sympathetic.

  “Did you read The Bell Jar in high school?”

  “Seth, every girl my age read The Bell Jar in high school.”

  “Well, that scene when Sylvia Plath hemorrhages after sex really traumatized me. I’m afraid of all the blood and pain.”

  “Seth, you’re not the one who’s going to be bleeding or in pain.”

  “Look, when you lost your virginity, how bad was it?”

  “Not so bad. More uncomfortable than painful.”

  “Did you bleed very much?”

  “Not so much. Nothing like in The Bell Jar.”

  I was silent for a moment.

  “Feel better?” Sarah asked.

  “Yes, somewhat. . . . Since we’re on the topic, I’ve always wondered whether you were really a virgin that time we spent the Fourth of July at the Zelmans’ summerhouse.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “So why did you tell Mom you were a virgin? I don’t think she would have been upset.”