Linda sits up and opens her eyes. “For me?”
“Yes. From the Venusians. They’re very interested in you, Linda. They ask about you a lot.”
“How flattering,” says Linda. “Extraterrestrial attention. What’s the message?”
Suzette’s hair is the color of the knight’s helmet and surrounds her face like an aura. “They said not to do anything they wouldn’t do.”
“Suzette,” says Linda, smiling at her, “tell them to relax. I never do anything.”
Dudley Petersen passes. Linda knows he sees her, but he goes in another direction. Still brooding about his ferns. But Mrs. Kirk joins her, carrying her beer in a pewter mug with a hinged lid and a glass bottom. “Marvelous party,” says Mrs. Kirk. “No hippies. Just a lot of nice young people enjoying themselves.”
“I’m not enjoying myself,” Linda tells her. “I’m having a terrible time.”
“It’s because you’re not drinking. Kenny! Kenny!” Mrs. Kirk waves a plump hand and her bracelets ring out commandingly. “Linda needs a beer!”
Kenneth supplies one, giving her an empty glass wrapped in a paper towel at the same time. “The glass is a gift from Dave,” he informs her. “And Dave says not to handle it too much. Would you like to tell me what’s going on?”
Linda takes the glass and her spirits lift ridiculously. But briefly. “It’s evidence,” she says. She watches Kenneth weave his way back to Dave. Kenneth wants to invite the police department, any off-duty officers and anyone they are willing to let out of jail. He argues with Dave about it. Dave is holding the phone clamped tightly together and refusing to release it.
“Hey, Linda.” It’s Fred Zukini. “You still haven’t seen my car. You want to? I got a tape deck, now, and I put a lock on the gas cap and I put sheepskin on the seats.”
Linda takes a long drink of her beer and then sets it and the empty glass back under the seat where they’ll be safe until she can retrieve them. She follows Fred to the elevator, passing through a nasty, acrid smell by the couch where Ben Bryant is smoking a pipe. With tobacco in it.
Fred doesn’t seem the sort to seduce her in the basement. Too much risk to the car, for one thing, and Linda doesn’t like him so she is relaxed and calm, picking her way through the couples who have opted for romantic subterranean lighting. Fred stops at a polished red VW bug and runs his hand over the curves of the trunk. “I got extra locks on the doors, too,” he says. “Because of the tape deck. I’m going to get leather for the steering wheel.”
Linda leans over, peering into the car’s interior. Above the soft and snowy sheepskin, next to the steering column, a set of keys dangles. “You’ve left your keys in it,” Linda tells Fred. “Anyone could take it.”
Fred pushes her roughly aside, pressing his forehead against the window. “It’s locked.” His voice breaks. “It’s all locked up. The keys are locked inside.”
“Oh,” says Linda. She thinks for a moment. “Maybe you could get in with a coat hanger. I’ve seen that done.”
“Linda, the windows are closed. And it’s got special locks.”
“Oh.” Linda thinks again. “I guess you’ll have to break a window.”
Fred runs a hand through his hair, but it is too short to be disarranged. His face is anguished. “Could you let me think this through?” he requests. “God, Linda, could you be quiet and leave me alone for a bit?”
Linda makes her way back to the elevator, the heels of her shoes snapping on the cement floor. A white-faced cadet stumbles across her path. He moans once, a pathetic, suffocated sound. “Oh, no,” he says. He falls against the first of the washing machines, claws it open, and throws up into it. He looks at Linda and throws up again.
There is a message here, Linda decides. A message from the Venusians. The message is to go home. Go home to her roommates who were so right when she was so wrong, and Linda feels that all she will ever ask for the whole rest of her life is not to forget and wash her clothes in the first machine or spend another second with anyone named Fred or Frank or Kenneth or—
The elevator opens slowly, suspensefully, and Dave is inside. “I thought you might need rescuing,” he says. “Mrs. Kirk gave me the keys to the penthouse. She says you can see all of San Francisco from there. Want to come?”
“Why not?” Linda answers coldly. “As long as I’m in the elevator anyway.” She joins him. They face front. No one’s shoulder touches anyone else’s. The elevator does not move. Linda jabs the topmost button. And again. The elevator gives a startled lurch upward. About the third floor, Linda asks where Suzette is. Maximum aplomb. A casual, uninterested question. She is merely making conversation.
“Sitting on Frank’s lap. Apparently he’s a very old soul. A teacher. A guru, would you believe it? He has a yellow aura. Suzette just about died when she saw it.”
“Too bad for you,” says Linda. The elevator has stopped, but its door is sticking. Linda has to wedge her foot in to force it open.
“I’m not interested in Suzette.” Dave sounds surprised. “Linda, the woman communicates with Venusians.” He fits Mrs. Kirk’s key into the lock. “You’re not drunk, are you? I mean not even a little. You hate beer?”
“Yes.”
“Just a lucky guess.”
“But I’m working on it,” Linda tells him. “I’m growing. I’m changing.”
“Oh, no. Don’t do that,” says Dave. They enter the penthouse and are attacked by a mob of affectionate cats, escaping to the terrace with their lives and a quantity of cat hair. The evening couldn’t be more beautiful, absolutely clear, and the lights on the hills extend all the way to the water, where Linda can actually see the small shapes of the waves, forming and repeating themselves endlessly over the bay. The air is cold, and somewhere below she hears the sound of breaking glass.
“Did that come from the basement?” Linda asks with some interest.
Dave shakes his head tiredly. “The apartment. That’s what I get for leaving Kenneth in charge.” He moves closer to Linda, putting his hands around her shoulders, making her shake. She can’t think clearly and she can’t hold still. The entire attention of her body is focused suddenly on those places where his hands are touching her. “My apartment is full of drunks and it’s after curfew,” Dave says. “I’m going to kiss you now unless you stop me.”
And what Linda feels is just a little like fear, but no, not like that at all, only it is so intense that she is not quite able to participate in the first kiss. She does better on the second, and by the third Dave has moved from her mouth to her neck and is telling her that he fell in love with her the first time he saw her, that first day in the elevator, when he saw she had Jack Lemmon’s chin.
• • •
WELL. THERE WE ARE. This seems to me to be a natural breakpoint, and although I can’t deny that we could learn a great deal more by going on here and, time permitting, we may return and do this later in the term, for now I want to bring this experience to some sort of close. The course is, after all, Romance and the focus is courtship, not mating, and let me add that the process of absorption is rather—well, untested in situations involving actual chemical changes in the subject’s physical system. We don’t want to find ourselves as subjects in someone else’s lab test, now, do we? Of course we don’t. Let’s let the lab work this out first.
We did go far enough with Linda to make some final observations concerning women and the physical aspects of romance. These are the sort of concerns which will continue to occupy our attention, as we determine whether or not they are universal, specifically female, or merely manifestations of a particular personality type.
I’m speaking, more specifically, of the body/mind split which occurred at the moment Dave touched her. I thought it was very pronounced. Did anyone not feel this? Yes, very pronounced. Linda’s body began to take on, in her own mind, a sort of otherness. Partly this was inherent in
her conscious decision to feel whatever her body was feeling. A decision to be physically swept away is a contradiction in terms even when carried out successfully, and I feel Linda was relatively successful. But this is only the most straightforward, simplest aspect of the split.
Linda’s arousal was dependent upon Dave’s. Not upon Dave himself. Upon Dave’s arousal. Did you notice? In the earlier encounters we didn’t find this. Linda responded to his hands, to his face, to his voice, to various secondary male characteristics. She found him attractive. Mentally and physically. But toward the end she was much more aroused by the fact that he found her attractive. I don’t want to get into a discussion of evolution or of psychology. I merely point this out; I ask you to consider the implications. We have a sort of loop between the male and the female, and the conduit is the female’s body. It has been said—and we will be trying to determine, as we move on to other subjects, different ages, different sexes, whether it has been oversaid—that any romantic entanglement between a male and a female is, in fact, a triangle, and the third party is the female’s body. It is the hostage between them, the bridge or the barrier. At least in this case. Let’s be cautious here. At least for Linda. I’m ready for questions.
I would imagine that being told you had a nice chin was about as exciting as being told you had nice teeth. But this is just a guess. Linda was hardly listening at this point.
They went to Dutchman, a movie in which a white female seduces and destroys a black male. It made for an uncomfortable evening. Yes?
Well, the Joey Heatherton choice would have been problematical, too. No, I understand your interest. We’ll look at Lauren more later. I promise.
Nobody has a clue as to what the lyrics to “The Weight” mean. I doubt that the man who wrote it could answer this question. He was probably just making it rhyme.
Are there any more questions?
Anything at all?
Then I’m ready to dismiss you. Be thinking about what you’ve absorbed. Next time we’ll begin to look for common themes and for differences. It should be enlightening. The course is Comparative Romance. The point of view is female. We’ll start next time with questions. When you’ve thought about it some more, I’m sure you’ll have questions.
GAME NIGHT AT THE FOX AND GOOSE
The reader will discover that my reputation, wherever I have lived, is endorsed as that of a true and pure woman.
—Laura D. Fair
Alison called all over the city trying to find a restaurant that served blowfish, but there wasn’t one. She settled for Chinese. She would court an MSG attack. And if none came, then she’d been craving red bean sauce anyway. On the way to the restaurant, Alison chose not to wear her seat belt.
Alison had been abandoned by her lover, who was so quick about it she hadn’t even known she was pregnant yet. She couldn’t ever tell him now. She sat pitifully alone, near the kitchen, at a table for four.
YOU’VE REALLY SCREWED UP THIS TIME, her fortune cookie told her. GIVE UP. And, in small print: CHIN’S ORIENTAL PALACE.
The door from the kitchen swung open, so the air around her was hot for a moment, then cold when the door closed. Alison drank her tea and looked at the tea leaves in the bottom of her cup. They were easy to read. He doesn’t love you, they said. She tipped them out onto the napkin and tried to rearrange them, YOU FOOL. She covered the message with the one remaining wonton, left the cookie for the kitchen god, and decided to walk all by herself in the dark, three blocks up Hillside Drive, past two alleyways, to have a drink at the Fox and Goose. No one stopped her.
Alison had forgotten it was Monday night. Sometimes there was music in the Fox and Goose. Sometimes you could sit in a corner by yourself listening to someone with an acoustic guitar singing “Killing Me Softly.” On Monday nights the television was on and the bar was rather crowded. Mostly men. Alison swung one leg over the only empty bar stool and slid forward. The bar was made of wood, very upscale.
“What can I get the pretty lady?” the bartender asked, without taking his eyes off the television screen. He wore glasses, low on his nose. Alison was not a pretty lady and didn’t feel like pretending she was. “I’ve been used and discarded,” she told the bartender. “And I’m pregnant. I’d like a glass of wine.”
“You really shouldn’t drink if you’re pregnant,” the man sitting to Alison’s left said. “Two more downs and they’re already in field goal range again.”
The bartender set the wine in front of Alison. He was shaking his head. “Pregnant women aren’t supposed to drink much,” he warned her.
“How?” the man on her left asked.
“How do you think?” said Alison.
“Face mask,” said the bartender.
“Turn it up.”
Alison heard the amplified thwock of football helmets hitting together. “Good coverage,” the bartender said. “No protection,” said the man on Alison’s right.
Alison turned to look at him. He was dressed in a blue sweater with the sleeves pushed up. He had dark eyes and was drinking a dark beer. “I asked him to wear a condom,” she said quietly. “I even brought one. He couldn’t.”
“He couldn’t?”
“I really don’t want to discuss it.” Alison sipped her wine. It had the flat, bitter taste of house white. She realized the bartender hadn’t asked her what she wanted. But then, if he had, house white was what she would have requested. “It just doesn’t seem fair.” She spoke over her glass, unsure that anyone was listening, not really caring if they weren’t. “All I did was fall in love. All I did was believe someone who said he loved me. He was the liar. But nothing happens to him.”
“Unfair is the way things are,” the man on her right told her. Three months ago Alison would have been trying to decide if she were attracted to him. Not that she would necessarily have wanted to do anything about it. It was just a question she’d always asked herself, dealing with men, interested in the answer, interested in those times when the answer changed abruptly, one way or another. But it was no longer an issue. Alison was a dead woman these days. Alison was attracted to no one.
Two men at the end of the bar began to clap suddenly. “He hasn’t missed from thirty-six yards yet this season,” the bartender said.
Alison watched the kickoff and the return. Nothing. No room at all. “Men handle this stuff so much better than women. You don’t know what heartbreak is,” she said confrontationally. No one responded. She backed off anyway. “Well, that’s how it looks.” She drank and watched an advertisement for trucks. A man bought his wife the truck she’d always wanted. Alison was afraid she might cry. “What would you do,” she asked the man on her right, “if you were me?”
“Drink, I guess. Unless I was pregnant.”
“Watch the game,” said the man on her left.
“Focus on your work,” said the bartender.
“Join the Foreign Legion.” The voice came from behind Alison. She swiveled around to locate it. At a table near a shuttered window a very tall woman sat by herself. Her face was shadowed by an Indiana Jones–type hat, but the candle on the table lit up the area below her neck. She was wearing a black T-shirt with a picture on it that Alison couldn’t make out. She spoke again. “Make new friends. See distant places.” She gestured for Alison to join her. “Save two galaxies from the destruction of the alien armada.”
Alison stood up on the little ledge that ran beneath the bar, reached over the counter, and took an olive, sucking the pimiento out first, then eating the rest. She picked up her drink, stepped down, and walked over to the woman’s table. Elvis. That was Elvis’s face on the T-shirt right between the woman’s breasts. ARE YOU LONESOME TONIGHT? the T-shirt asked.
“That sounds good.” Alison sat down across from the woman. She could see her face better now; her skin was pale and a bit rough. Her hair was long, straight, and brown. “I’d rather time travel, though. Bac
k just two months. Maybe three months. Practically walking distance.”
“You could get rid of the baby.”
“Yes,” said Alison. “I could.”
The woman’s glass sat on the table in front of her. She had finished whatever she had been drinking; the maraschino cherry was all that remained. The woman picked it up and ate it, dropping the stem onto the napkin under her glass. “Maybe he’ll come back to you. You trusted him. You must have seen something decent in him.”
Alison’s throat closed so that she couldn’t talk. She picked up her drink, but she couldn’t swallow either. She set it down again, shaking her head. Some of the wine splashed over the lip and onto her hand.
“He’s already married,” the woman said.
Alison nodded, wiping her hand on her pant leg. “God.”
She searched in her pockets for a Kleenex. The woman handed her the napkin from beneath the empty glass. Alison wiped her nose with it and the cherry stem fell out. She did not dare look up. She kept her eyes focused on the napkin in her hand, which she folded into four small squares.
“When I was growing up,” she said, “I lived on a block with lots of boys. Sometimes I’d come home and my knees were all scraped up because I’d fallen or I’d taken a ball in the face or I’d gotten kicked or punched, and I’d be crying and my mother would always say the same thing. ‘You play with the big boys and you’re going to get hurt,’ she’d say. Exasperated.” Alison unfolded the napkin, folded it diagonally instead. Her voice shrank. “I’ve been so stupid.”
“The universe is shaped by the struggle between two great forces,” the woman told her. It was not really responsive. It was not particularly supportive. Alison felt just a little bit angry at this woman who now knew so much about her.
“Good and evil?” Alison asked, slightly nastily. She wouldn’t meet the woman’s eyes. “The Elvis and the anti-Elvis?”
“Male and female. Minute by minute, the balance tips one way or the other. Not just here. In every universe. There are places”—the woman leaned forward—“where men are not allowed to gather and drink. Places where football is absolutely illegal.”
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