A Stranger on the Planet

by Adam Schwartz

  “I don’t either. It was just the opposite. I knew she would have wanted to hear all about my sex life.”

  “You don’t think I’m being like Mom now, do you?”

  “No, Seth, you’re not like Mom.” She enunciated her reply with exaggerated slowness. These words were like a personal catechism between us, something we always needed to say to each other in order to be reminded that all was right with the world.

  “So you never saw Aaron Zelman again?”

  “No. I wrote him a letter and told him I didn’t feel right about seeing him since he was suing my father.”

  “Do you think he believed you?”

  “I don’t know. But what was I supposed to say? I don’t fuck men if their fathers are also fucking my mother?”

  “Yes. I think it would have made him feel better to know the truth.”

  “You’re being like Mom.”

  “You’re so cruel.”

  “You’re so strange.”

  “I know. You’ve told me that about a zillion times.”

  “No, I mean really, really strange. Every man I know would be foaming at the mouth over the chance to have sex with a beautiful, well-educated virgin, but you’re acting like a drama queen about it.”

  “Are you saying I’m gay?”

  “No, if you were gay, you wouldn’t be so strange.”

  THREE WEEKS INTO OUR RELATIONSHIP, Rachel and I finally made love. I had never used a condom before—the other women I’d had sex with all used diaphragms or had been on the Pill—and I practiced putting one on without Rachel around so I would know what to do when the time came. I spent a long time going down on her, hoping that she would bear the pain of my penis more easily if she was really wet and close to an orgasm. She barely let out a sigh or groan when I finally did enter her. Actually, she never made much noise at all during sex, even when I brought her to orgasm with my tongue, which I had become quite skilled at during the three weeks I had been avoiding intercourse with her. Usually I knew she had climaxed when she shuddered slightly and then told me I could stop.

  “Does it hurt? Are you all right?” I asked as I eased myself in.

  “I’m fine,” she replied.

  “Really?”

  “Seth. Quiet.”

  I came a minute later. When I pulled out I was afraid that my sheathed penis would be gleaming with bright red blood, but I only noticed white viscous matter; the condom had slipped about halfway up my penis.

  “Oh, God, I hope I used the condom the right way,” I said.

  “What’s the matter?” Rachel asked.

  I turned on the bedside lamp and aimed it at my penis. I directed her attention to the unsheathed part.

  “Do you think this whitish substance is from you or from me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, but she didn’t seem especially concerned.

  “Maybe you better do a pregnancy test just to be safe.”

  “Seth!”

  “What?”

  “Could you try being a little more romantic?”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. I turned off the light, and she cuddled up next to me.

  “Do you feel any different?” I asked.

  “Not especially,” she said.

  “Do you feel like you have a deeper, finer understanding of Anna Karenina?”

  Years later, I had a girlfriend who told me I was the only man she’d ever slept with who became more talkative after sex.

  “Seth, can we just go to sleep now?”

  RACHEL WAS MY FRST SERIOUS GIRLFRIEND. We spent every night together, though we had sex only once a week, usually after a movie on a Saturday night, as if it were a requirement to complete the evening. Our sex life reminded me of painting by numbers: uninspired, technically satisfying, vaguely therapeutic. Most nights we lay next to each other in her single bed reading and discussing Anna Karenina until well past midnight. As winter turned to spring, and the scent of lilacs wafted in through the open Gothic window of Rachel’s dorm room, I read the chapter in which Levin has spent all day scything hay in the meadow with the peasants. At the end of the long day, Levin hears their songs and laughter, their joy in life, and realizes that he has found his purpose, that he is ready to renounce all his other wants—marriage, social reform—for this pure and simple life. I found myself powerfully moved. Rachel and I were soul mates, and what could be more divine than lying next to her in the nude every night and reading Tolstoy out loud?

  “I feel exactly like Levin. I couldn’t be happier than I am right now,” I confessed.

  “Yes,” Rachel said, “but in the next moment Kitty rides by in the carriage and Levin realizes that he’s deluding himself. He can’t be happy without her love.”

  EVERY NOW AND THEN RACHEL SAID she wanted to read some of my fiction, but I still hadn’t showed her anything and the winter quarter was nearly over. I was embarrassed to admit I hadn’t written another story as good as “Two by Two.” I had attempted to write stories during the summers, but I felt uninspired, every sentence echoing the sentences of the writers I loved. Writing essays for my classes was easier. I loved shaping arguments, and locating the right tone and language for a paper was not nearly as difficult as writing fiction. Most of all, I loved receiving high grades and high praise.

  When I finally confessed to Rachel that I hadn’t written anything better than “Two by Two,” she replied, “So let me read that!”

  “But I wrote that in high school.”

  “So? It has to be decent if you won that prize.”

  I finally relented and gave her a copy one day in my room. She read the story sitting on my bed; I was at my desk, my back to her, trying to read a book, but I kept turning around to look at her.

  When she finished, she just stared at me for a couple of seconds. “Seth, this is really good,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes!”

  “You’re just saying that because you’re my girlfriend,” I replied, though I was actually disappointed she wasn’t more ecstatic.

  “I’m being completely straight with you. I was so concerned I wouldn’t like it and wouldn’t know what to say. I think it’s funny and moving. I love it. You ought to be writing fiction.”

  “Do you think my fiction is better than my essays for class?”

  “That’s comparing apples and oranges.”

  We had been exchanging drafts of our papers throughout the term. I had been curious to read Rachel’s essays. Would I really be able to tell the difference between my papers and the papers written by the person regarded as the brightest star in the English Department? I knew the answer after reading just one paragraph of one of her essays. Her ideas were more sophisticated and argued with greater authority and clarity. I didn’t feel competitive with her; in fact, I liked being the boyfriend of someone so smart and accomplished, but reading her essays reminded me of my limits.

  “Come on. I need you to be honest with me.” I had just shown her a term paper I had written for my seminar on the modern British novel: “Voyages In and Out: A Comparison of the Forms of Female Heroism in To the Lighthouse and Middlemarch.” I had received an A on the paper. “Do you think this story is better than my To the Lighthouse and Middlemarch paper?”

  “I enjoyed the story more.”

  “So you’re saying that a story I wrote in high school is better than a senior seminar paper I wrote at the University of Chicago?”

  “I’m just saying I enjoyed the story more.”

  • • •

  AT RACHEL’S URGING, I signed up for Kadish’s advanced creative writing course in the spring quarter. On the first day of class, Kadish read a story titled “My First Fee” by an early twentieth-century Russian writer named Isaac Babel. No one in the class had heard of the story or of Babel. The story was about a twenty-year-old proofreader and would-be writer who goes to an older prostitute named Vera for his first sexual encounter. But when they get to Vera’s room, the young man becomes despondent when Vera removes
her clothes and he sees she’s not nearly as beautiful as he had imagined. Vera senses that he’s lost interest, and the young man explains himself by inventing a story about having been a boy prostitute. Vera is visibly moved by the story and pays him a high compliment: “So you’re a whore. A whore like us bitches.” The young man bows his head and replies, “Yes. A whore like you.” Kadish had read those lines with great emotion and laughed at other lines in the story as if he were sharing a private joke with the writer. No one in the class seemed to understand the story except for one girl, who laughed along with Kadish. She had a mass of tousled hair, dark circles under large, round eyes, and full lips. She fidgeted and sniffed a great deal. Kadish asked the class what we thought of the story. No one said anything. Then the girl who had appreciated the story along with Kadish raised her hand.

  “Yes, miss. . . ?”

  “Katz. But you can call me Cat.”

  “Miss Katz.”

  “I love the way Babel compares writing to sex.”

  “Yes. How so?” Kadish queried her.

  “Well, the boy in the story gets his cherry popped. For real, with Vera, but also as a writer, right?”

  “He does indeed,” Kadish said.

  Every student in the class was required to submit two stories during the term. I decided to use “Two by Two” for my first workshop. I wanted to buy myself some time and to protect myself from Kadish’s annihilating comments by turning in something that I knew was decent. I did wonder whether it was ethical to turn in a story I had already written, so I consulted Rachel.

  “Does the syllabus say that you need to turn in stories written expressly for the course?” she asked me.

  “No.”

  “Then I think you’re fine.”

  EVERYONE WAS SITTING AROUND the seminar table with purple mimeographed copies of my story, waiting for Professor Kadish. Tall and bedraggled, he typically showed up to class five minutes late, half his shirt outside his pants, his necktie crooked, and looking vaguely annoyed, as if he had been having sex and suddenly remembered that he had to teach a class. He found his copy of my manuscript, moved his enormous eyeglasses to the crown of his head, and examined the story for a couple of minutes with a look of brutal concentration. Then he moved his glasses back down over his nose and said, “Well, Mr. Shapiro, consciously or unconsciously, is clearly paying hommage to Saul Bellow. But this story is more imitation than inspiration.” Kadish began all the classes this way. He would deliver his verdict and then let the students say what they wanted.

  For a couple of seconds the class was silent. Then one of the students said that he agreed with Professor Kadish. The story was too old-fashioned. “It’s like he’s trying to write in the style of a different era.” Two or three more students raised their hands.

  “I think the story is too Jewish.”

  “How so, Mr. Cantor?” Kadish asked.

  “The names. Abraham. Isaac. Chaya?” Some of the students laughed. “I mean, isn’t that a character from Fiddler on the Roof?”

  The whole class was laughing.

  “I agree,” said another student. “The Old Testament references are so jejune.”

  Then one of the students commented that she didn’t find Isaac very likeable, and that criticism opened the floodgates. Nearly everyone in the class said that they felt the same way about Isaac, that they didn’t like him very much and couldn’t sympathize with him. None of the characters were all that likeable except for the grandmother, said a number of students. Then Cat shot her hand up.

  “Yes, Miss Katz,” Kadish said.

  “I think this business of whether or not we like a character is bullshit,” she declared. “We’re supposed to be interested in characters, not like them. I mean, I think that’s the problem with most of the stories we read in this class. Everyone is trying too hard to create characters we’ll like, and that’s just boring. This is the only story we’ve read in this class where I really wanted to turn the pages. That’s important, don’t you think, Professor Kadish?”

  Kadish nodded his head. “Yes, the story is extremely well told. Mr. Shapiro, do you have any questions for us?”

  I was seething, but cautioned myself to hold it together. “Hommage? Jejune?” I said. “I think I might find the criticism more useful if people expressed themselves in English.”

  All the students stared at me, but Kadish actually smiled, and then Cat nearly keeled over laughing.

  When I received my manuscript from Kadish, I turned to the last page to see his comments. Poor man’s Bellow. Technically capable but try writing in your own voice for the next story. B. I went back to my room and reread “The Old System.” I hadn’t read the Bellow in four years, and each page sent waves of relief and shame through me—relief that the judges who awarded me the Scholastic Prize had probably not read “The Old System” and shame that my achievement was totally fraudulent. I had read the Bellow story so many times when I was in high school and had so thoroughly internalized the story’s prose rhythms that the result was just the same as if I had been typing “Two by Two” with one eye on an open copy of “The Old System.” Perhaps I ought to have felt relieved that Kadish hadn’t brought me up on charges of plagiarism, for surely he had read “The Old System.” Then I would have been facing expulsion just before I graduated. The university would never grant me a degree if they found out that I had been admitted on the basis of a plagiarized story.

  I met Rachel for dinner in the dining hall. She asked me how my workshop had gone.

  “Bad.”

  “But I thought you were going to submit ‘Two by Two.’ How could anyone not like that story?”

  “Well, they all hated it,” I said angrily, as if it were her fault. I showed her the manuscript with Kadish’s comments.

  “He’s an asshole. Anyway, didn’t you tell me his life and writing was a bad imitation of Saul Bellow’s? He’s definitely projecting his own self-loathing onto you.”

  “He’s right about my story, Rachel.”

  “Seth, don’t do this to yourself.”

  “Come to my room. I want you to read something.”

  Back in my room, I gave Rachel “The Old System” to read. I sat anxiously at my desk while she lay on my bed and read the story. I felt as if I were revealing my deepest, most shameful secret to her, a feeling that became more intense as I looked over my own story. I could hear Bellow in every sentence.

  Rachel closed the book and said she liked my story better.

  “Oh, come on, Rachel. I virtually plagiarized that story.”

  “I can see the similarities, but you write about women much more sensitively. The women in Bellow’s stories are all grotesques, opening up their vaginas to intimidate small boys or bending over and showing off their pudenda.”

  I stared at her, wondering for the first time whether we were really right for each other.

  “Thanks. I didn’t think of it that way.”

  “Seth, stop punishing yourself. You didn’t do anything bad. Come here,” she said, patting the bed.

  I went over to her. She began unbuttoning my shirt, reminding me that I didn’t do anything wrong. “You’re a really good person, Seth,” she said, as she unbuckled my belt.

  IN LATE MARCH, we heard from graduate schools. Rachel was admitted to Berkeley and Stanford and offered a full scholarship and stipend for both programs. I was rejected by Harvard and Yale and accepted to the University of Chicago graduate program but without any financial support. The Divinity School had admitted me with a full scholarship and stipend. I tried to look on the bright side—I was graduating from the University of Chicago magna cum laude; I would be supported for another four years of study at the university I loved—but this view didn’t hold up for very long. My rejection from the top graduate schools validated Rachel’s judgment of my potential as a scholar, and despite her praise of “Two by Two,” I knew I had been admitted to the university on the strength of a plagiarized story. I felt like Cinderella at five min
utes to midnight. At graduation, I would change back into the person I had always been—mediocre, average, a nobody.

  One night, not long after we had heard from all the graduate schools we had applied to, Rachel and I were lying next to each other in bed, and I asked her what was going to happen to us after graduation.

  “I don’t know,” she replied.

  “We can spend Christmas vacations and summers together,” I said. “I could transfer to a graduate program in California.”

  “Seth, baby, we have three months before we need to have this conversation. Let’s enjoy the time we have.” She touched my cheek. “You’re going to look so handsome when you’re older,” she said.

  “Don’t you think I’m handsome now?” I exclaimed.

  “Of course I do,” she said. “I just mean when you’re a hotshot professor, and married with children, you’ll look especially handsome.”

  What an odd thing to say, I thought. But I understood she was conceding the limits of our relationship, the limits of her love for me.

  I STILL NEEDED TO WRITE another story for Kadish’s class, and the next night at dinner I asked Rachel about a story she had told me not long after we met. When she was twelve she had wanted to leave her mother and live with her father. Her mother, Joan, a therapist in Berkeley, was impulsive and irresponsible, and Rachel couldn’t bear living with her anymore. She wanted some boundaries and normality in her life. Her father was a suburban rabbi and had remarried a woman much closer to him in temperament. Her mother didn’t want to let Rachel go, and Rachel’s parents had waged a custody battle over her. As the case was drawing to a close, the judge presiding over the case had interviewed Rachel privately in his chambers. After questioning her for about twenty minutes, the judge had asked Rachel whom she really wanted to live with. “My mother,” Rachel replied.

  “Why do you think you changed your mind so suddenly in the judge’s chambers?” I asked her.

  “I just felt I belonged with my mother. Why?”

  “I think it’s a great premise for a story.”

  “Seth, you are not writing a story about that!”

  I was shocked by the vehemence of her response.