Sarah Phillips

by Andrea Lee

  We thought we were awfully clever. Curry was a visual studies major who was planning—with the insouciance that returned so suddenly to male students after the end of the Vietnam draft—to spend a year after his graduation that June traveling and taking pictures in northern Brazil. I was concentrating in English and putting the finishing touches on a collection of angular-looking poems with a lot of asterisks in them. Like most of our friends, Curry and I both harbored ill-conceived ideals of leading lives that would almost geometrically contravene anything of which our parents would approve. We spent a lot of time talking about what it meant to come from the kind of earnest, prosperous black family in which civil rights and concern for the underprivileged are served up, so to speak, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “It made us naughty and perverse,” insisted Curry. When he was home on vacation, he liked to scandalize his father, veteran of a score of nonviolent desegregation campaigns, with long quotations from Marcuse and Che Guevara.

  The funny thing was that when I was with Curry, as daringly as we talked, I didn’t feel much like the anarchistic poet I hoped I might be. When I was with him, in fact, I experienced a sweet feeling of nostalgia, a faint but concentrated and lingering suggestion of dear past days in the small world of home and family.

  Encountering Curry at Harvard had reawakened a memory I hadn’t been aware of for many years: it was an image of a Sunday morning in autumn, during the time his family had visited our house in Philadelphia. Very early—before the grownups had come downstairs, and while Curry’s two little brothers were still asleep—Curry, Matthew, and I, all of us in pajamas, had been on our knees on the dining-room rug, reading the comics. The first sunlight was shining through reddish leaves and gauze curtains at the window, striking the polished legs of the furniture around us, and over everything lay the magical freshness and conspiratorial quiet of the awakening day. As I pored over the bright-colored funny paper, my brother made a rather labored joke (I thought) about the comics being full of “nuts”—“nut” being a derisive nickname the boys had bestowed on me. Curry looked at me and gave a cruel snicker; as he did so, a sunbeam struck his round cheek, and I saw for the first time, with the feeling of having learned a secret, that at the corner of his left eye he had a birthmark shaped like a long tear. It was faint, but it lay on his cheek with a formal precision, like the stylized tears clowns sometimes paint on their faces.

  I never mentioned the birthmark to him, not even when I met him again in college, but my eyes automatically sought it out as something reassuring, a familiar landmark, whenever I sat down to have lunch with him in the Winthrop House dining room. Sometimes we lingered so long that they turned out the lights on us; in the early dusk of fall and winter the dim, high-ceilinged room seemed like a cave. We usually sat at one of the side tables, two little figures dwarfed by the tall, many-paned windows, cracking jokes and guffawing as the kitchen help walked back and forth in the half-light. Occasionally the stout Irishwomen who served the meals would give us curious glances that we imagined were hostile—it was a year of accelerating race conflict in South Boston—and Curry responded by talking in an outrageous Georgia redneck accent that he’d learned at his fancy prep school.

  On Wednesdays Curry’s girlfriend Philippa would join us after her tutorial. Philippa was a blonde from New York, undeniably beautiful, but a little faded and monotone in coloring, a fine-arts major with feminist ideas that she expressed in an incongruous wispy, little girl’s voice. She and I professed warm friendship, but I made fun of her behind her back. “Phil’s like an aquatint of Gloria Steinem,” I once remarked to Curry, and he, disloyally, agreed.

  Curry and I used up a lot of energy making fun of each other’s lovers; each of us treated the other’s romantic escapades as if they were recurring bouts of insanity. Curry was especially cruel about a Chinese law student I went out with for a few weeks during my sophomore year. “Why don’t you go out with your own kind, dear?” he asked me one afternoon in a meddlesome, grandmotherly manner. “Your circle of men is like the United Nations.”

  “Look who’s talking,” I snapped back. “You’d better find a black girlfriend before you get yourself thrown out of that Frantz Fanon study group.”

  “You and I ought to get married,” said Curry, abstractedly twiddling his bony fingers. “Except with such a nice colored girl and a nice colored boy, it would be …”

  “A little too boring,” I finished for him.

  With girls of any color, Curry was popular. He was the most successful kind of flirt, the kind who really knows about women’s clothes, and who can look attentive through long monologues about emotions. He was also a wonderful photographer, and that was another way he attracted girls: he took arty portrait shots that became quite the thing in some circles at Harvard. In his pictures pretty girls perched in fey poses in the branches of trees in Radcliffe Yard or, in trailing Indian dresses, lounged against tombstones in Christ Church cemetery. Sometimes he photographed them nude, with contemplative expressions on their faces as they crouched inside cardboard boxes or huddled among heaps of crumpled newspaper. He was so successful at all this that he had already published several pictures—notably “Monica with Onionskin”—in photography magazines, and his telephone line (much to the envy of his suitemates, and to the studied indifference of Philippa) was murmurous with female voices.

  Curry had been asking for a long time to do a portrait of me, but I just laughed at him. “You’re the last person I’d let take my picture,” I told him. “You know too much.”

  I enjoyed his pictures, however, and I liked to sit and discuss with him the faces and figures of the girls he photographed. (He talked about girls in an abstruse intellectual manner that broke down sometimes into a fraternity-style appraisal of measurements.) And I liked to visit him in the darkroom at Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, where his curly head and intent, spoiled-boy’s face glowed through the red darkness, and in the intimate smell of chemicals we watched the developing pictures rise out of the paper.

  One afternoon in mid-April of my sophomore year, Curry and I were sitting around in the living room of his suite, waiting for Philippa to arrive so that we could all go down for an early dinner. (It was roast-beef-and-ice-cream night at Winthrop House.) Half an hour before, we’d had a beer with Curry’s suitemate Grant, a burned-out surfer from a rich family that seemed to own half of Honolulu. (I often thought that the three suitemates, Grant, Curry, and Ted—a shy black work-study student from the Mississippi Delta—formed an interesting social continuum.) Talking to suntanned Grant, who found it hard to put three sentences together without using the words “bummer” or “dynamite weed,” had depressed me; after he left to sleep in the library, I sat dispiritedly on the sagging twin bed that served as a couch, looking at a contact sheet of pictures Curry had taken of Philippa during a weekend on Nantucket.

  “She looks fantastic here,” I said to Curry, who was sitting cross-legged in a big red leather chair that had yellowish stuffing showing through a dozen tears and slashes. “Ten times more alive than in real life. How did you do it?”

  “That’s an incredibly nasty thing to say, but I know what you mean. Sometimes she works better for me on film.”

  He had been splicing together one of his obscure blues tapes—it was typical of Curry to be pedantic about music, and meticulous in the upkeep of his elaborate stereo system—but suddenly, in one agile movement, he laid down the tape and swung his skinny legs to the floor. “Come on, Sarah, let me take your picture. Right now. You haven’t been thinking about it, so you’ll be natural.”

  “But Phil’s coming for dinner.”

  “That won’t make any difference. She’s cool. She watches me shoot all the time. Come on, there’s enough light. I’ll set up the tripod.”

  “Do you want me to take off my clothes?”

  For less than a second—one of the infinitesimal fragments of time that determine how a remark is given or received—Curry hesitated. Then he said, in his normal rela
xed, teasing voice: “Well, I think that’s the best thing you can do. We can roll you up in Grant’s tapa cloth, or have you climbing the bookcases, or something. We might get some fantastic shots.”

  I went into Curry’s bedroom and pushed the door three-quarters closed. It seemed stupid to be modest about the act of undressing when I was willing to prance around naked in front of a camera; I was surprised to find, however, that I was deeply unwilling to have Curry see me in the graceless process of disrobing: legs stuck in my jeans and underwear, head lost in my sweater. When I had pulled off my clothes, I tossed them onto Curry’s bed, a big double mattress he and Philippa had bought from the Salvation Army. It lay on the floor, almost filling the tiny room, covered with rumpled sheets and bearing on one pillow an ashtray full of dried-out apple cores. Over the desk and the crammed bookshelf beside the bed were taped photographs and contact sheets, as well as three posters that showed Curry’s eccentric range of interests: a black and red notice for a Caribbean Marxist rally, a poster from a psychedelic minimalist exhibition that depicted what looked like a radioactive pea, and an enlarged reproduction of a Burne-Jones angel.

  From outside the window came the sleepy mumbling of a pigeon that had somehow managed to land there despite the anti-pigeon spikes on the outer sill. I could see part of a brick wall, and a few bits of ivy flapping in the breeze. The suite was overheated as usual, and it felt good to be out of my clothes. I looked down at my body, which I knew was pretty, and felt a frisky excitement in being able to show it off to Curry. It was strange, I thought, that we had never seen each other naked before: at that time the groups of friends we both went around with found constant excuses to have chaste, tingly nude encounters, all organized in the name of a specious artistic freedom.

  When I came out of the bedroom, I called mockingly, “Get ready for the thrill of your life!”

  Curry had been adjusting the height of the tripod. When he looked up, there was another of those minute, crucial pauses. Then he said, in a dry voice, “How perfect you are.”

  In a minute we managed to adopt the intimate, jocular tone we normally used with each other, and the picture-taking session went forward at a smart pace. Curry urged me to do things with my hands or chin, or to “approach and react to the couch,” in a pretentious, slightly British accent he had clearly picked up from watching David Hemmings in Blow-Up. The poses we tried were amusing or acrobatic rather than erotic: neither of us quite knew what to do with my naked body. When Philippa finally came in, pushing her long hair out of her face, smiling with her usual air of thin-blooded pleasure at seeing me, and looking unsurprised to find me crouching bare as a newt on top of the couch, I was glad enough to go back into the untidy bedroom and put my clothes on.

  A couple of days later, in the Carpenter Center darkroom, Curry developed the rolls of film he had shot of me, and I came along to see the results. The pictures were all horrible. After my first shriek I was able to observe, objectively, that while the body of the girl in the photographs looked relaxed and normal, her face was subtly distorted and her neck strained, as if an invisible halter were dragging her backward.

  “You were pretty nervous,” said Curry, clipping one enlargement up on a drying rack.

  I looked at him, and he looked at me. We were very close together, closer than when our knees bumped occasionally under the dining tables at Winthrop House. In the red light his gold-rimmed glasses gleamed rosily, and his green plaid shirt looked black. The open neck of the shirt showed the tender-looking skin that stretched over his knobby collarbones, and for the first time since I had known him, with what was less a conscious thought than an impulse of my flesh, I was curious about how it would feel to touch his throat, his chest. At the same time I wondered briefly and coldly why Curry and I had never become lovers. The answer was fairly clear, as we stared at each other with eyes almost alike enough to be those of siblings, into faces that for each of us symbolized the unbearably familiar things of life.

  Curry began to laugh and waved a handful of negatives under my nose. “I’ll sell ’em to you,” he said. “Let me have five thousand in unmarked bills, or prints go straight to your parents.” As he spoke, he was stuffing negatives, contact sheets, and two dry prints he had enlarged earlier into a manila envelope. “Here,” he said, handing it to me.

  “I don’t want these.”

  “Take them anyway.” He had stopped laughing and spoke in a sharper voice than he had ever used with me before; and, unaccountably, I felt tears start to my eyes. I took the envelope quickly, looking away from him.

  We talked studiously about movies as we came out of the darkroom and walked up the gray driveway of Carpenter Center, and slowly I began to feel a lot better—relieved, as if an obscure crisis had passed. Across Kirkland Street the Memorial Church bell was ringing six o’clock. It had been a beautiful day, warmer than usual for April in Boston, and a yellow-green haze of budding trees hung over Harvard Yard. Kids were lounging on the steps of the libraries to catch the last of the waning sun, and Frisbee players shouted and leaped on the grass around the freshmen houses. In a single sunny afternoon the miracle had occurred that always galvanizes college campuses: summer, the shining irresponsible season that lies beyond the barrier of term papers and exams, had come into view.

  I shifted my knapsack on my shoulders and reflected that summer meant commencement for Curry, who would then take off on his peculiar pilgrimage to eat feijoada among the Bahians, or whatever he intended to do. For me the summer meant the beginning of a time without my friend. This was something I thought of unhappily, but without tremendous perturbation, because I had the feeling that no matter what happened, I would always be running into Curry—that our particular bond of fascination and repulsion would bounce us together to resume, again and again, a dialogue that would always seem familiar, but never dull.

  We walked through the Yard and paused at one of the gateways, where a friend of mine, a tall Jamaican kid named Hunter, was passing out leaflets praising revolutionary activity in the Third World. Across the street nine Hare Krishnas, looking uncharacteristically buoyant and chipper in the bright spring evening, were hopping and chanting in front of the Harvard Coop. Curry had to go: Philippa was taking him to see Yojimbo, and I had to camp out in the library to finish an overdue paper on Yeats. When I had said goodbye and started walking up toward the Radcliffe dorms, I heard footsteps behind me and turned around to find Curry, out of breath from the run.

  “Hey, please don’t throw away those pictures!” he said, taking off his glasses, which had gotten fogged up with perspiration, and raking his fingers through his dark curls, which were standing up even more wildly than usual. With his glasses off, his little tear-shaped birthmark was clearly visible, and the sight of it was enough to dissolve any trace of the strange irritation and grief I had felt in the darkroom. “At least hang on to the negatives,” he went on. “Maybe I can try to shoot you again. I’d like to have something to work with.”

  I promised him I would keep everything—but, in fact, at the first trash can I came to, on Garden Street, I had a change of heart and tossed in the manila envelope, negatives and all. When we were hanging out together in the next few weeks, I was afraid, once or twice, that he might try to get the pictures back from me, but he never mentioned them again.

  That summer, after Curry had graduated and I had come home to Philadelphia for two months, my mother, with the indiscreet eagerness that sometimes overwhelms even tactful parents, asked if there was “anything romantic” between Curry and me.

  “Not a chance,” I said.

  “There are chances for all kinds of things,” she said coyly.

  “Not for that.” At that point I didn’t feel sure of much in my life, but for once I felt I had said something that was absolutely true.

  Fine Points

  One great thing about Margaret was that she wore exactly the same size clothing that I did, an excellent quality in a roommate; she had, however, completely different ta
ste, with an inclination toward plunging necklines, crimson tights, and minidresses in big, bold Scandinavian prints. My own wardrobe ran to jeans and black turtlenecks, odd little somber-colored tunics that I felt made me look like a wood nymph, and short pleated skirts that seemed to me to convey a sexy jeune fille air worthy of Claudine at school. “You literary types are always trying to look understated,” Margaret would say whenever she saw me dressed for seminar, for an Advocate meeting, or for a date. She was a chemistry major from Wellesley, Massachusetts, an avid lacrosse player with a terrific figure and a pair of unabashed blue eyes that revealed a forceful, stubborn nature—Margaret could keep an argument going for days. She adored fresh air and loathed reticence and ambiguity, and she had little patience with a roommate who, languid from lack of exercise, spent weeks reworking a fourword line of poetry.

  “It’s a question of fine points,” I would retort loftily, though I had only a vague idea of what that might mean.

  Margaret and I got along well for young women with such different souls. We spent a lot of time together in our cramped dormitory suite, squabbling comfortably over clothes and discussing romance—the one subject on which we were, to some extent, in agreement. The suite was on the fourth floor of Currier House; it consisted of two tiny rooms, a bathroom we’d decorated for a giggle with pinups of the bustiest Playboy Playmates we could find, and a kitchenette filled with moldy oranges stolen from the cafeteria. Our windows faced east, toward the corner of Garden and Linnaean streets—a lovely view, really, with the Observatory woods, the flat-bottomed, whale-shaped clouds that came sailing down from Maine, and the tall, somber Cambridge houses back of the trees.