Louisa Meets Bear

by Lisa Gornick

  None of us have had more babies.

  1975

  Louisa Meets Bear

  We meet awash in a Princeton drizzle, the fountain turned off for the winter, the lights dripping yellow in the grayness, everything a stately concrete or gargoyle Gothic. You are with James, that sickly boy who with his dirty oversized sweaters fancies himself a typhoid poet. Always before when I’ve spotted you, you’ve been in a horde of muscular boys like yourself—boys who play on sports teams and are so loud about everything that they leave me sometimes intimidated by their mass and sheer beauty, their hair wet from showers and glossy as horse hide, and sometimes, I must admit, filled with disdain (the old brains-versus-brawn thing)—so that it surprises me to see you with James, whom I know only for his incomprehensible poems with their references to T. S. Eliot and the Greek dramatists, the footnotes often three or four times longer than the verse.

  What I will most remember about you this night is how you try to smell me through the dusky drizzle, your nostrils distended with the effort, and how I am certain you must be able to detect the scent of Professor Boyd plastered between my legs. Later, when I tell you about him, you grow angry. “Louisa, the guy’s a pervert,” you say, unable to grasp that Boyd, the nearsighted academic rising star whose op-ed pieces on geopolitics have twice appeared in the Times this past year, had been less spider than fly, and that I, interested both in the marijuana he offered and what would be my first experience with a married man, unzipped my own jeans.

  *

  It takes you two days to find me after that night. I know that you are looking. I don’t hide, but neither do I help. Instead, I frequent my usual reading spots—a green couch in the basement of the art library, a leather chair in the back room of the Eastern Studies collection. You find me in the leather chair. You lower yourself into its mate. Between us are my diet soda can and a bag of red licorice. “You don’t make it easy,” you say.

  I like that you don’t pretend to be looking for a book on Buddhism in Chinese history. I like that when I offer you my red licorice, you take a whole handful and then another while we talk, first about whatever we have in common, that being mostly James, the roommate assigned you your first year, he a doctor’s son from a gentleman’s farm in Virginia, you a plumber’s son from a Cincinnati row house.

  When you ask about me, where I sprang from is the way you put it, I tell you about my father. A “biomedical scientist” is how I describe him. You look slightly lost.

  “Genes. The chemical directions on how to build a person. Adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine.”

  I stop there because that’s about as much as I know about what my father does in his San Francisco laboratory. What I mostly know is the way the fog settles into the pocket where the hospital lies so that taking the bus with my father east to our sunny Mission District home is like changing seasons. “Microclimate,” my father calls it, cheek to window as he studies how the clouds catch on the ocean side of the telegraph tower. I could describe where my father’s office is in the corridor of laboratories, a skull-and-bones sign posted on the door, the acrid metallic smell that hovers over the beakers, counters, and various, always ticking, measurement dials. But I can’t explain what it is that my father researches, only that I think about it as unveiling the machinery in the magic, the molecules that make your eyes look like a deer’s and mine the pale green, you later tell me, of leaves yet unfurled.

  “Think about Dorothy pulling back the curtain on that old geezer who made the Emerald City,” I say when you inquire further. “It’s something like that.”

  What you tell me about your father, my old man you call him, which seems at first awful but then kind of wonderful, is about a shrapnel wound during World War II, a scar that cuts from under his armpit to close to his heart, and a time, fifteen years or so ago, before he found God and started going to mass every Sunday, when he drank too much. I ask if he resents it, your coming east to this fancy place, and you say mostly he thinks about it as a character flaw in you that you’d spend four years sucking up to rich people. It’s your brother-in-law, you say, who knows enough to really resent you, having gambled on an ice hockey career instead of college and then coming up empty-handed when his back gave out before he turned twenty-five.

  “And what made you the frog-prince?” I ask.

  “Celia Healding, whose old man was an alum and sent the recruiter my specs.”

  “Celia Healding?”

  “In Cincinnati, if you’re Ohio All-State, the rich girls give you rides in their cars.”

  *

  When I call Corrine, my best friend from San Francisco who lives out by the beach with her two-year-old daughter, Lily, and her jazz drummer and cocaine addict boyfriend, Alfie, she says, “Bear, what kind of name is that?”

  “His real name is William. William Callahan. But his friends, I don’t even know if they’re really his friends, all these guys he knows, that’s what they call him.”

  “He sounds like a jock. An Irish jock.”

  “His mother’s parents came from Sicily. His father’s father was born in Ireland. The jock thing, that’s his meal ticket. How he got here. Like Alfie playing weddings.”

  “So where can he take you?” This is Corrine’s and my special question, the question we have asked each other about the boys and then men each of us have had in our lives since we began to realize that something about our necks and breasts did something to the rate of their heartbeats such that we could get them to do things for us. At first, when Corrine wore her blond hair so it touched her waist, her face the kind you’d see drawn in a children’s book in pale watercolors, me with dark hair and the air of something mysterious (Italian? Arabic? boys would ask), we had meant the question literally.

  “He has a car,” Corrine would say. “We drove to the top of Twin Peaks and just sat there, looking out at the lights.”

  “He has a motorcycle,” I’d say. “He’s going to take me to Point Reyes.”

  Later, “Where can he take you?” meant what can he show you. “He’s into acid,” I remember Corrine telling me about this skinny guy with a ponytail and a squinty way of looking at people. “He knows these guys who make it out of Menlo Park, but the way they do it, it’s not really drugs but more like a religious experience.” Or it might have been me saying, “He’s older. He had a girlfriend he lived with for a while. He reads poetry and talks about writers I never even heard of before.”

  About you, I pause. It’s hard to put into words for Corrine where you will take me. I imagine Corrine curled on her bed, the TV on without the sound, books piled on the crate at her side, Lily’s toys strewn like bread crumbs across the floor.

  “Don’t tell me it’s something stupid like sex,” Corrine says.

  “No, it’s not that. We haven’t got there yet. It’s something about purpose. It’s almost old-fashioned—kind of the way I imagine my father having made himself a scientist, determinedly moving himself from one world into another. You can feel it in him, like something chugging. We don’t have that. Your parents will always be richer than you. I’ll be lucky if I do half as well as my father. Does that make sense?”

  “Best I can make out, the guy’s a goddamned race car.”

  *

  You have a red VW that has no heat. You take me for Chinese food at a place outside of town. You drive with the window open and only a sweater, and I am too timid, too ashamed to tell you how cold I am, my toes clenched, my shoulders hunched so my arms can steal some of the warmth from my chest. I don’t tell you that I barely know how to drive, that watching you shift gears, drink a Coke, fiddle with the radio, and wind us through the back roads to the highway, all I can think of is I must be missing some gene you have—that whereas I have learned from my perpetually lost father to transpose spatial relations into words (“Let’s see,” he would say as we stood at a street corner ten blocks from our house, “I think we made a right here at this burrito place”), you move with an internal map of your body
through space, your limbs generating their own heat.

  At the restaurant, you cup my stiff hands between yours, and rub. “You have no blood,” you say. You keep my hands pocketed inside your own while you tell me about your afternoon drinking scotch with the Ivy Club members who are recruiting you.

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “Working-class boy comes to the country club,” you say, and even though I disapprove of the eating clubs, many of which don’t admit women and one of which, I was told, hung a blow-up of my photo from the freshman directory as one of the top ten coeds of the year (Screw them, Corrine said, only losers waste their time going through those books, but it had left me humiliated, like one of those dreams in which you realize you’re walking around without any pants), it tickles me to think of you breaking into the ranks of these pale and anemic third-and fourth-generation Princeton men with their land-grant Virginia and Connecticut families.

  “I made first string this year, that’s why,” you say. “They always take one football player. It’s affirmative action for jocks.”

  Your laugh sounds like an engine rumbling, and I understand why the Ivy boys are courting you: so that they, self-conscious and mannered like me, might imbibe something about you, about your uncomplicated maleness, about the way you stretch out on the couch with an arm crooked behind your neck when you watch TV and yell, “Go, baby, you got it!” at the players on the screen, the way you drive a car as though it were an extension of you, the way your outside and inside coincide. Rumor has it that there are entire departments of investment banks that are all Ivy men, and I know that for you, being admitted into their circle is more valuable than an inheritance. The advantages will go on and on.

  You bite into a spring roll. Still chewing, you lift my hand to under your nose and inhale. “God, you smell good,” you say.

  *

  It’s a Saturday night, a month later, and we’ve gone on my suggestion to see Last Year at Marienbad. You’re still on good behavior with me—we’ve not yet slept together—but I can feel your irritation at the pretentiousness of the audience, everyone jammed together on metal folding chairs, pretending they understand what the trancelike actions of the characters signify and the meaning of the mathematical game, which I recognize from my father as Nim, that they play.

  Walking back, we both know that we’re headed into bed. You’ve told me that James is visiting a girl in Philadelphia; I’ve not told you that I’m not a virgin, that Corrine and I have gathered an anthology of sexual adventures, often reported to each other with greater relish than we had in the acts themselves—she, being four years older than I, having more entries, but I, with Boyd, having held my own.

  Your room comes as a disappointment, not the room itself but that you have no aptitude for creating an environment. I think of Corrine’s and my theory: a man who does not appreciate color, who cannot arrange objects so they create balance in a room, will have no talent for sex.

  You motion me to sit on the edge of a bed dressed with a nappy blue blanket and brown plaid sheets while you pour wine into paper cups. You sit next to me. I make a show of sipping a few times. You take two gulps, put your empty cup on the floor, and lean over me, pushing my shoulders backward, your mouth covering mine. For a moment I am stunned by the size and weight of you, but soon there is so much commotion, your hands under my sweater, my hands on your belt, that I stop focusing on the mass of you.

  “Condom,” I whisper, thinking of my cousin Lizzy, pregnant her very first time, she told me, shaking her head in disbelief.

  You reach for the bedside stand, fumble with what sounds like the wrapper. Then you go soft. I panic. I am losing you. I can’t track what you are doing, only that you are trying and trying, rough waves crashing against me, and it is a relief when finally you roll onto your back.

  It’s dark but still you shield your eyes with your hands. “Jesus,” you say. “I feel like such a pussy.”

  I pull the sheet over me and move onto my side. Propped up on an elbow, I kiss and kiss the knuckles of your hands.

  “This has never happened to me before.”

  You turn your back to me.

  I run my fingers across your shoulder blades—big, beautiful angel’s wings. “Shhh,” I say, “shhh.”

  “All I’ve been able to think about for weeks is how much I want you. It was too much to actually have you here.”

  I wrap my arms around you and spoon myself behind you. I imagine you are my baby and I can hold you inside of me.

  “It was strange,” I say to Corrine the next day over the phone. “But I liked that he lost it. It made me feel that I mattered to him.”

  “You’re a weird one,” Corrine says. “What happened after that?”

  “He fell asleep. I dozed off after a while. Then in the morning we tried again.”

  “And?”

  “That decorating aptitude–sex talent theory—wrong, wrong, wrong.”

  *

  By spring, we are playing married. I am nineteen and you are twenty; we embrace the idea for that reason. You buy a double mattress for your room and we move the dorm bed into the hall. When summer arrives, we rent an apartment in New Brunswick and cart the double mattress up four flights of stairs. You get a job in a lipstick factory, a gig, you call it, that one of your coaches arranged. I tutor two little boys, one a whiner, the other a screamer, both dumb but rich. You buy us a hibachi. I learn how to grill eggplant brushed with olive oil.

  In August, we go to San Francisco even though at the last minute my father calls to say he is off to Argentina that week.

  “Something’s come up,” my father says mysteriously.

  “What?”

  “I have to help a friend with some matters in Buenos Aires.”

  “A friend?”

  “Well,” my father says, “a lady friend. Her mother just died, and she needs to wrap up her financial affairs. It’s a big mess. I said I’d help her straighten it out.”

  It seems useless to complain. I did a lot of that with my aunt, my mother’s sister, when she first moved to Oakland and would take me or Corrine and me most Sundays to brunch. Enough that I now understand the complaints only confuse my father. Instead, I ask the lady friend’s name. “Juanita. She’s an urban anthropologist. She just published a book on the street children of Buenos Aires.”

  We stay at my father’s house. You are fascinated by your glimpses of him: the First Nations wood carvings he brought back from Alaska, the fossils from Mongolia, his study with floor-to-ceiling books and a library ladder. That there is no TV. Snooping around, I see women’s clothing in my father’s closet (bright silks, a size ten, bigger than I am) and a vial of an expensive eye cream on the medicine cabinet shelf.

  Although my father has left the house unchanged since my mother’s death, her presence has been blurred by the slow accretion of his clutter: papers piled on the dining room table, a beach chair stashed next to the sofa, cans stacked on the kitchen counter. Only their, his, bedroom feels the same—the sheer curtains, the rose-colored dhurrie, the white bedspread with the knotted bumps.

  We sleep in my father’s bed. It is a clear, cool night and the curtains billow in the breeze. My mother lingers near. I realize how little I’ve told you about her: only that I was nine when she died in a car accident, north of the city.

  You rub your nose across the top of my arm. “What are you thinking?” you ask.

  I hesitate, unsure if I want to open this door. “About my mother.”

  “What about her?”

  “Right then, when you asked, I was thinking about the day she died. Corrine was my after-school babysitter. She was thirteen.” I can see Corrine with her dirty-blond hair caught high in a ponytail. “My mother wanted to hire someone older but I begged for Corrine because she was so pretty and she talked to me about junior high and having boyfriends and the music she and her friends listened to.”

  You nuzzle my shoulder.

  “Corrine was showing me how to paint my
toenails. Chinese-red. I remember the phone ringing and Corrine telling me to sit very still so I wouldn’t ruin the polish.”

  I study the hair on your chest, the way it fans out like a spray of water. Not until I was older, maybe thirteen myself and Corrine was no longer my babysitter, did she tell me that my father, weeping on the phone, had blurted out the news to her. “When she came back in, she took a cotton ball and wiped the red off my toes.”

  There’s an image that often comes to mind of my mother. It’s from a photo album that’s mostly filled with green-tinted pictures of me as a baby. A chubby bundle held high by various adults. Near the back of the album, though, there’s a photograph of my mother from the year before I was born. She’s crouched by a tree, her eyes raised toward the camera, an expression of full deliberateness on her still-childish face. Her hair is cut in a pageboy, swingy and shiny, her skirt encircling her in the crouch. In the look she gives the camera and my father, who says he took the picture, she is both coy and bold, as though saying to my father, I know you want me and I know you want me to act like your sweet girl. When Corrine and I would flip through the album, she would always pause to stare at that picture of my mother with her appearance of innocence and boldness all at once. “What a tease,” I once said, afraid that if I didn’t say it, Corrine would.

  *

  Later that week, I take you to visit Corrine. On the bus out to the beach, I try to prepare you. I tell you that Corrine lives in varying intensities of chaos, that she thinks of herself as a painter, sees the world as a tableau in Matisse primary colors, but that aside from the butterflies she painted on Lily’s bedroom walls, she rarely actually finishes anything, her apartment littered with canvases in different stages of completion.

  Sitting on pillows in Corrine’s living room, you surprise me by your obvious disapproval, your pointed silence. Corrine grows nervous, talking more and more. She offers us cocaine. You refuse and then walk out of the room while I partake. Corrine whispers to me, “That Bear of yours, he sure is overbearing.” I giggle nervously.