He hadn’t taken his eyes off my face for a moment. He really looked at me. He stepped closer. His breath was warm on my face and smelled faintly of bourbon. He had the deep creases around his eyes of a man who, no matter what the weather, drives fast and with the window down just to feel the rush of wind on his face, the confirmation of hurtling forward. Escape.
“Listen,” he said, running his hand over his mouth, absently feeling his lips. “There are people here I have to talk to, boring shit, but maybe we could get together later, get a group together?” Then he added, “It’ll be a party.”
“All right,” I said a little breathlessly, surprised and pleased at his invitation, but hoping I didn’t look it. He studied me for a moment more, then turned away to find himself immediately chest to chest with another man, an overly tan man with liquid-blue eyes who half hugged Michael and whispered in his ear, causing him to laugh and shake his head, then he disappeared back into the crowd.
Wait, did he say he wanted me to get a group together? No, he must have said I’ll, or we’ll, meaning perhaps him and some of his friends, maybe other famous writer friends. He couldn’t mean me, who did I know that he’d want to talk to? Did he mean for me to round up some other students, some other women? Well, I wasn’t going to. What if he didn’t come back, and I’d arranged for a bunch of us to go out with him? That would be embarrassing. And anyway, I knew hardly a soul at the reading, and I wasn’t about to share Michael Morris with a bunch of sensitive, earnest English major types with their long hair and flowy skirts all trying to engage him in pseudo-lit-crit chat. No way. Maybe it would be a big noisy affair with lots of interesting strangers, the people who populated his books: intellectual men with clean fingernails and dirty souls, crazy women who drank too much and took pills. I spotted him undulating through a throng of women wearing different shades of brown, lavender and cream. Poets. They alone kept the makers of purple ink in business. He stopped and talked to a young woman with strawberry-blonde hair and a gold nose ring. Her whole body washed in pale freckles. He talked to her for what seemed to me a long time. Was she an old lover? A student? He laughed. She laughed and waved flirtingly at him as she moved away. Was she going to meet up with us at the bar? I wondered, would there be other young women like me there? Was I behaving like some groupie? Maybe this was just some cattle call, and he’d choose the prettiest one to sit close beside him. Why hadn’t he just asked me to go alone with him? Not that I would. I wouldn’t. But it was like I wasn’t enough. If the way he was working the room was any indication, the party would be huge. I made my way back to the bar, taking care to pass through his line of vision so he wouldn’t forget about me. Wouldn’t forget that he had invited me along. His gray silk shirt was sticking to the middle of his back, but still he seemed to move easily in his skin, like a big cat, prowling around the crowd shaking hands, clapping men on the shoulders, and laughing loudly.
The crowd was thinning out, but I didn’t see him anywhere. I picked at the top of my plastic wineglass and thought about leaving. What mattered was I met him. He might not have meant it about the drink anyway, and I wasn’t going to stay here and wait for him, only for him to forget me. Maybe I had misunderstood. Perhaps he meant, if I can get a group together we’ll all go out and have a drink. I knew he was in pain over his wife leaving. I was sure of that, the way he got so close to me so quickly, like he just wanted to be near a woman. I thought about calling my boyfriend. I’d take over Chinese food and some rum raisin ice cream. His favorite. Then later we’d have comfortable, familiar, forgettable sex. First, though, I’d tell him about Michael Morris and how he wanted me to go out for a drink with him, but I didn’t go. Instead I came to his apartment. Because I missed him. Because that’s the kind of girl I am. That would be the hard part, saying why I missed him. That part I couldn’t do. I couldn’t go to his place. It wouldn’t work. I know me. He’d seem dull and immature in comparison to Michael Morris, and for no good reason I’d hate him and I’d leave him in a bad mood, such a bad distracted frustrated mood I wouldn’t even kiss him good-bye. I didn’t want to play out that scene. I should just quickly and invisibly disappear into the night. Go home and write my paper on why the Madonna’s face, so perfectly symmetrical, is so often green in Renaissance paintings. Go home and hang with Mary Beth. After all, soon we’d graduate. God I hated that thought. I’d miss her.
Then I felt Michael Morris’s hand on my shoulder, his fingertips pressed down into my clavicle like a claim. “Looks like it’s just us two. It’s a work night,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I trust that this isn’t a problem,” he said as though if it were a problem, he didn’t want to hear about it.
“Perfect,” I said in a voice lower than my own.
In the dim light of the bar his eyes were intensely brown, like something melted down—maybe the leather interior of an expensive car or a dense cube of black hash. Something foreign. His eyes were darkly oily like that. Slowly they glided in his sockets as he traced my body in front of him, rolling up languorously to smile at the buxom Latino hostess, who smiled back, like they knew each other. “We want to sit out back, in your garden,” he said, his gaze moving down her face and over her breasts.
He ordered a double Jack Daniel’s. Up. “Get whatever you want,” he said. I ordered a white wine spritzer.
“I thought only suburban ladies in espadrilles drank those.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Well, I guess I’m proof that’s not true.” His remark, of course, tapped into all my insecurities. I was a suburban girl, I did once wear espadrilles.
The waitress, a bored-looking beauty, narrowed her eyes at me. “Can I see some ID?”
I fumbled in my purse for my wallet, pulling it out upside down so my change clattered on the floor and my credit cards shot out across the table. My driver’s license was AWOL in the murky nether regions of my bag. I could feel my cheeks burning.
“You’re of age, right?” she said, annoyed. Michael grinned, he was flattered by the question, which just enhanced his virility. The waitress walked away.
“You are of age, aren’t you, Evie?” Michael asked, his eyes glittering.
“Ha, ha,” I said, wishing my drink would arrive quickly. I hadn’t noticed earlier, but on Michael’s left eyelid he had a small mole. It kept his lid from fitting snugly back in the socket; it snagged, then relented. I’d never noticed it in any of his jacket photos. I tried to recall the various poses he was in. Was that side always facing away from the camera? It was amusing to think he was that vain.
“You smoke?” he said, shaking the pack with expert casualness so one cigarette poked out.
“Sure,” I said, even though I’d quit.
He lit the cigarette for me, drawing the smoke into his lungs. He handed it to me, his fingers touching mine, the filter moist. He lit his own and inhaled. He took a drag and sat back in his chair, rubbing his thumbprint slowly over the filter of the cigarette in tiny circles like he was thumbing a nipple, making soft circles over and over again after each inhale.
“You smoke grass?”
“Sometimes.”
“I was getting high before you were even born.” He smiled and picked a piece of tobacco off his lip.
“So?” I leaned into the table a little so that my blouse parted and he could see the tops of my breasts. I felt like I was channeling Mary Beth. I never talked like this. I liked it. I liked it a lot.
“You want to get high later? I’ve got some Thai stick in the car. It’s great shit. Nothing compared to the stuff I used to smoke with Ginsberg at Berkeley, but it’s good shit. If you can handle it. If you want to,” he said, sipping his drink, looking up at me from under hooded lids.
“Good to know,” I said, my mind conjuring up fanciful images of Michael Morris and Allen Ginsberg lounging on Indian pillows, passing a hookah, and rapping about Chinese poetry.
“You know you are pretty, don’t you?” he said. “I’ll bet men give you things, don’t they? You’ve got that kind of
face. The kind of face you give flowers to.” He kind of laughed.
He pulled his chair closer, as though I were a fire he was warming himself in front of, gazing at my body. I could feel the back of my neck becoming damp with perspiration. I wished I were on fire, then I could beat him back. I would be provocative and exciting, with the power to destroy him a little bit, the power to make a mark on him.
“Tell me about Evie,” he said. I was silent. It had been a long time since someone had asked me such an up-front question about myself. I didn’t know how to react. Was he just making small talk? Everything I knew about him made me believe that he was incapable of it. I had to choose carefully. What did I want him to know about me? How would he use it? I stalled. “Be more specific. What do you want to know about me?”
“The Evie no one knows. The one you don’t talk about.”
“Well”—I leaned back into the deep wicker chair and, slipping off my black sandals, tucked my feet underneath me—“what makes you think there is anything to tell? Maybe I just am, as I am.” He frowned slightly, then narrowed his eyes as if he was sizing me up. I smiled back at him. This was fun. I wouldn’t give anything away.
“Come on, just between you and me,” he said, “a pretty girl like you must have lots of stories. Come on.”
“Maybe,” I said.
The famous Michael Morris wanted something Morris-esque from me. He wanted something raw and personal—maybe even sexual—something I was ashamed of, perhaps. He laced his fingers together, steepling his forefingers, and brought them up to his lips so that it appeared he was kissing the barrel of a gun. He was greedy. My first impulse was to tell him not about me, but about my boyfriend. How he wouldn’t go down on me, how he ate his food off his plate in a counterclockwise motion, and how he didn’t remember the name of the woman he lost his virginity to. Or to steal from Mary Beth. I could say I’d had three abortions, that I might be pregnant right now. But those stories didn’t belong to me, and I sensed that wasn’t what Michael Morris wanted. He wanted something of mine. He’d know if I lied.
I would be lying if I said that I hadn’t fantasized about appearing in one of his books. I imagined how he would see me. I would be young, my blonde bob would be long and red with a shine like patent leather. He’d mention my breasts, which were really nothing special, comparing them to dollops of fresh white cream. My legs, elongated, would cut through space like scissors. I would be smart, but not too smart. I would be naive. Maybe he’d widen the gap in my front teeth. He would rewrite all his parts so he was obviously the one with the upper hand, and invent poetic dialogue fraught with tense and subtle metaphor. In that way I was sure he wasn’t honest. But I would be different. Like a man, I’d have him, and I would leave him. He would put me on the page, but I’d live outside it. I’d live longer than he.
Every time readers entered my page I would breathe, I would move, I would reach my arms out to them. I’d never die. He could make me immortal—if I was willing to play the game.
“All right,” he said, and ran his tongue over his lips. “Tell me what you’ve heard about me.” He smiled, running his finger along the wet rim of his glass so that it sang into his hand. “Go on. I want to know. I know you all talk about me.”
“Well, I’m in the art school, not the English department,” I said, waiting to see if this information disappointed him. If he’d taken me out just because he assumed I was an English major. If that was the turn-on.
“Ah, a painter, I bet.”
“That’s funny, how did you know?” Perhaps there was some kind of connection between us. All right, it wasn’t hard to guess painter; maybe I reeked of turpentine and I didn’t even know it. I was also more into drawing, and art history, but still. I’d love to be a painter. I just wasn’t as good as I wanted to be. I lacked the necessary passion.
“So, of course, nobody in your department even knows who I am,” he said, sounding amused.
“No, no, that’s not true. It’s just, well, you know what they say. You don’t need me to tell you.” I was afraid this might be the wrong way to respond, but he smiled, arching an eyebrow as if to concede the point. He knew what the stories were. I wondered if at some point he had stopped simply living and had started concentrating on making the myth of Michael Morris.
“Maybe you’d like to do me sometime. My portrait. I could sit for you,” he said, turning into profile to tease me. He showed me the side that hid the mole on his eyelid.
I thought about having sex with him. He’d crush me. He’d call me little girl, and I’d get wet. He’d enclose my breast in his fist, owning it, grabbing it like some golden apple. He’d spread my legs wide and bury himself deep inside me. He’d want me to wrap my legs around his head, or stand on my hands. He’d want me on top, touching myself. He’d want drama. He’d want gymnastics. He wouldn’t ask if I minded if he smoked in bed. He’d sleep deeply and with his mouth open. In the morning, after he’d showered and taken care of his body’s needs, then he’d think about me. Good or bad? Maybe with his pen in hand, or his dick, or maybe not at all. Maybe he wouldn’t think of me at all. I’d be just one in a string of women all blurring together. Fur, and legs, and the occasional quick glass of juice or coffee, drunk over the kitchen sink as they exchanged terse pleasantries. Have you seen my necktie? Will you call me? Someone he’d remember until the next girl appeared, and even then my face would be hazy, my name and my body lost. I couldn’t stand that idea.
“You got a lover?” he asked me, running the length of his index finger back and forth across his lips.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. How many?”
“One,” I said. He smiled like he already knew what I was going to say. Still, I didn’t think that one should pose any obstacle to us getting to know each other. In fact, it might turn him on. I wasn’t sure. I could always deny it later. And I liked the way he said lover instead of boyfriend. It seemed to suggest that you might have a relationship with another person, male or female, simply for the sexual pleasure of it. No dinner in front of the TV, no talking about religion or your parents, just sex. Just great sex.
“Why isn’t he here with you tonight? Doesn’t he like my work? Or did you lose him after the reading?” He grinned at me.
“He’s sick,” I lied.
“Would you marry him?” he asked, letting the smoke slowly crawl out of his mouth.
“Maybe,” I lied.
“If you got pregnant you’d marry him, wouldn’t you? Even if you weren’t sure you loved him.”
“No, of course not.” I hated that I was blushing. Hated that he assumed I was the sort of woman who wouldn’t marry for love, but because of a social stigma. He was saying I was uptight, old-fashioned, a prude.
“You can tell me.” He leaned into the table. “You could have an abortion. Would you do that?” He lit another cigarette with the still-glowing tip of the last one, and stared at me as though he really expected me to answer him civilly.
“That is none of your business,” I snapped. I thought about Mary Beth at home in the dorm. I wondered what she would do right now. Would she laugh? Throw a drink in his face? Grab his dick? I did know she’d be surprised to see me here with Michael Morris. She probably wouldn’t believe it when I told her, if I told her. I knew she’d be amused. Even though I’d lied and told her I wasn’t going to the reading.
“Sorry,” he said, holding up his hands like he meant no harm. “I didn’t realize it was such a touchy subject. No big deal. I just thought we were having a conversation.”
“We were talking about love, not abortion.”
“Right, love,” he snorted, and took a long drag on his cigarette. “Liking the same foods, the same sex—that isn’t love.” He leaned across the table toward me. “What could you know about love? You are a child.” He made his voice soft and knowing. “I know you. As beautiful as you are, and as special. I know you.” His arms encircled the table, holding on to it, as if to say, This table here is
all that is between us and I have it in my arms. This little thing is all that divides us from being one.
“I’m sorry about you and your wife,” I said.
He stopped and looked solemn for an instant, then he said, “I did love her, the bitch. No one wants to believe that.” He laughed. “But that’s a closed chapter.”
“That’s horrible,” I said, expecting him to respond, but he didn’t. “How can you say that?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You want me to say it’s some way it isn’t.”
“You really hurt her. You did. How could you write all that stuff knowing it would cause her pain?” I asked him, half disgusted, half curious. I didn’t want to believe he set out to damage her. I wanted to believe he set out to damage her.
“I didn’t hurt her. She let it hurt her; that’s different,” he explained, and paused dramatically as though waiting for it to sink in, as though I should understand the difference, and if I didn’t, I needed to.
He looked odd sitting in the deep, high-backed white wicker chair. His eyes unblinking, his chest lurched forward and curled over the table, slightly hunched, like he was going to ask me for a favor and he didn’t want anyone to hear, or he was going to beg for something horrible, something he needed to save his life, and he didn’t want to have to ask. He made me feel that if I were a real woman I’d know what it was. I’d know, and because he was an artist I’d offer it.
He stood up halfway and pulled his chair around the table closer to my side.
“I can’t hear you with all the noise,” he said. “I can’t hear you,” he said, pressing his ear into my lips as I said, “I’ll speak louder.”
His eyes were half closed. His head rising up close to my shoulder. Almost resting there like some big, dangerous baby. He ordered two more drinks. I switched to Jack Daniel’s. He smiled as I took my first sip of it and flinched.
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