What's Important Is Feeling: Stories

by Adam Wilson

  Elizabeth, almost twenty years my senior, was the product of previous boom times for heroin chic. She’d spent the better part of the nineties complementing the look with an actual needle stuck in her arm. After rehab, she’d managed to buckle down and finish her thesis, a sunless tract on AIDS and the American death drive. The published version had earned her a small following in certain academic circles. Now she carried herself with a jaded self-confidence that attracted men and women alike—but mostly men, and mostly gay—and that I did my best to emulate.

  During my four years of college I had developed what is sometimes called a girl-crush—though the term sounds too cutesy for what I felt—on Elizabeth. I’d taken her class on late capitalism (the syllabus was divided between Edward Said and Judith Butler) in the second semester of my freshman year. By semester’s end I had already copied her hairstyle (straightened black bangs), clothing style (gothic airline stewardess), and eating style (S.S.S.—soup, salad, sashimi), and was finding excuses to stop by her office on an almost daily basis.

  Elizabeth was new to Boston—she’d done her graduate work at Columbia—and seemed appreciative of both the company and worship. I saw her as the epitome of urbanity, and the embodiment of an academic idyll that otherwise existed only in past tense novels by nostalgic baby boomers. Elizabeth and I played out this campus fantasy, smoking imported Gauloises on the library steps and discussing all relevant isms. But mostly we talked about the men in our lives, whom we referred to as our dudefriends.

  “Dudefriend thinks it’s his life’s work to sperm up my eggs,” said Elizabeth, once. “If only we were lesbians.”

  “If only,” I said, unsure what she meant. Was the implication that we would be a lesbian couple, or just a couple of lesbians?

  “I mean, I’m not one of those overpopulation people, or worse, the oh-so-magnanimous doomers who don’t want to subject a future generation to blah blah blah. But what happens when my son is molested by his math teacher?”

  “Isn’t that a cross-that-bridge-when-you-get-there sort of thing?”

  “Oh, he’ll definitely get molested,” said Elizabeth. “The question is whether to uphold the traditions of our rape-shaming society by telling him his body has been traumatized, or refrain from comment and hope he remembers it fondly, some kind of passionate hug session from the man who taught him Boolean algebra.”

  “What kind of school are you imagining this is?”

  “School of hard knocks,” said Elizabeth.

  When she decided to sabbatical in Manhattan, it seemed natural that I tag along. I was, by then, two years out of college, with no life goal except the vague intention to move to New York as soon as I could afford it. Elizabeth was able to secure me an internship at an ad agency run by an old family friend, so long as I promised to maintain ironic distance from the industry’s consumerist credo, in much the same way that Elizabeth “ironically” bought dresses at Barneys.

  She led me to a small room behind the kitchen. The floor was stacked with books and printouts. There was no desk, just a coffee table, couch, and mounted plasma television, unplugged. A week-old Times was open on the table. The photo showed a bombed-out building in Beirut. A shirtless man lay injured in the rubble, trapped beneath fallen pipes. Another man tried to lift him out by the arm, but the injured man appeared limp and immobile, content where he was.

  “My office,” said Elizabeth. She cleared space so we could sit. We lit cigarettes. Elizabeth ashed on the couch.

  “My cousin’s,” she declared with a wave. “Or his for now at least. He bought it for eight, wants to sell it for ten. Old story. And I get to squat here until fall when the market’s meant to change. The art and furniture are rented, by the way. I did my best to dissuade him.”

  I’d heard of this cousin, an I-banker. Elizabeth liked to brag about the non-penetrative experiments they’d engaged in as adolescents in Pittsburgh. The Cousin was tall and handsome, and still felt guilty about these encounters, which he remembered as being only semi-consensual. Elizabeth remembered things differently—in her version, she was the aggressor—but she liked the power position his guilt placed her in. For years he’d been paying off Elizabeth’s Amex.

  Elizabeth caught me scanning the Times.

  “Hideous,” she said. “Just hideous. Women and children they’re killing. Innocents. It makes me sick. And the macho Republican Zionists like my cousin cheering them on.”

  The last part irked her most. Two things Elizabeth hated were Zionism and machismo, though she’d flirted with the former on kibbutz after college (“Yitzhak Rabin and pharmaceutical-grade ecstasy, darling—those were different times”) and the latter was a trait she proudly manifested. I do not mean to suggest that Elizabeth’s sympathy for Lebanese civilians was insincere, but something about the word hideous—the same adjective she’d used to describe the apartment’s art—made me wonder if it wasn’t all theory for her, some kind of ideological chess match unrelated to actual suffering.

  “It’s terrible,” I said, and hesitated, resisting a defense of what I knew was indefensible. Israel was a sore subject between us. I’d been indoctrinated early, and there were feelings from my upbringing I had trouble abandoning. Members of my own family had been exiled from Europe, shipped to Palestine for refuge while their parents were murdered. Besides, the Arab treatment of women and homosexuals didn’t seem to mesh with the radical queer feminism we both espoused.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Horrible.” Which it was. Israel was behaving horribly with its showy display of firepower, raining bombs over Beirut as if it were a video game. I’d said so to my father when he’d defended the attacks, ranting at the dinner table about Hezbollah, spearing a chunklet of chicken on his fork and waving it for agonizing minutes while he continued to talk. “They want to destroy us,” he’d said, but it was he, with his hate-filled eyes and four-pronged flesh flag, who appeared bent on destruction. He and the young Israeli soldiers I’d seen photographed shirtless on the Internet, holding Uzis in perfect hip-hop posture.

  At home, it was easy to argue with my archaic, conservative parents, but out in the world I fought urges to defend their worldview, to fight my leftist friends who seemed to stick up for every minority group except the Jews. There was general agreement that assimilation had happened and anti-Semitism in America was a thing of the past, but I couldn’t shake the sense that this dismissal was its own anti-Semitism, or an excuse for it. Jews were the new Wasps: privileged, powerful, perfect targets for blame.

  I sniffed my armpit.

  “Take a shower, darling,” said Elizabeth. “The bathroom’s something to believe.”

  The fete was held so I might meet prospective suitors. I’d recently broken ties with my dudefriend, Clarke, who’d taken a prestigious gig gofering for the House’s only out-gay congressman. Suitors was the word Elizabeth used. Fete was also her word, though it was only a dinner party. The real fete was upstairs, at the Host’s apartment. His bass shook and rattled the glass table, making music with our tumblers.

  Elizabeth leaned into Mike, her on-off, surprisingly all-American dudefriend. The others disdained him and baited him, he of the strong jaw and aggressive heterosexuality. According to Elizabeth, Mike had once been a star PhD candidate in sociology at Yale, but a car accident had rendered him partially brain damaged. He occasionally showed flashes of past brilliance, blurting full-formed ideas after hours of silence, but most of the time Mike fumbled his words, failing to articulate what was there on the tip of his tongue, tantalizingly out of reach. He was also always drunk. Mike was a happy drunk and treated me with warmth. Elizabeth’s friends brought out the worst in him.

  “Stop, please,” Mike said, but Nikil kept on talking.

  “Michael,” said Nikil. “I am not, as it were, defending Melvin Gibson. I am simply pointing out that, if the situation were reversed—if Mr. Gibson had slurred against Arabs or homosexuals—then no one would be quite so up in arms.”

  Mike pressed tumbler
to forehead and let out a sigh. We’d been on the subject for most of the evening, but Nikil couldn’t let go. Mo leaned into Nikil and squeezed his partner’s elbow.

  “It’s no use,” said Mo, shaking his shiny, shaven head. “He’s never going to understand.” They spoke of Mike like he wasn’t there. It occurred to me that Mike, a protestant from Chicago, was the only member of the ethnic majority in our group.

  “Well, if you won’t defend him, then I will,” said Elizabeth. I thought she was talking about Mike. Elizabeth rose from her seat, raised her tumbler.

  “Mel Gibson had every right to say what he said,” said Elizabeth. “It’s about time someone did.”

  “Salut,” said Nikil, and they clinked drinks. Elizabeth wiggled her butt a little bit.

  “If the situation were reversed, then wouldn’t Mel Gibson be the Jewish one?” said Suitor #1, a brunette named Brian Feldstein whom I disliked immensely.

  Feldstein was attractive enough, with clean teeth, hazel eyes, and the kind of the cock-clipping skinny jeans that were just coming into style. What annoyed me was his closeness to Elizabeth. He’d graduated a year ahead of me, and was, by all accounts, her first and truest protégé, a whip-smart artist of the sneer and bon mot, in whose shadow I stayed. Besides, I thought he was an asshole. In class he’d always cut down my comments, and at parties he alternated between ignoring me and acting overly familiar, draping an arm over my shoulder and calling me “kid.” I considered Feldstein my nemesis. Not that I’d say so to Elizabeth. There was an erotic element to his idolatry that Elizabeth enjoyed and that I couldn’t quite provide. I sensed he saw me as some kind of consolation prize. I solaced myself by imaging Feldstein masturbating in the dark, cradling his pathetic penis, resigned to the fact that he would never fuck either of us.

  “We mustn’t speak in hypotheticals,” said Nikil, who always spoke in hypotheticals. He himself had been a protégé, along with Elizabeth, of the great Said. “We must approach the reality of the situation, which is this: the Israelites invaded Palestine, brought about apartheid, and enjoy the careless killing of Muslim women and children. To phrase it any other way would be to euphemize, anesthetize, soften the blow. We cannot share sympathy with this murderous regime. We cannot let tribal allegiances get in the way of reason.”

  Elizabeth listened intently, still standing, prepped for another salut. I wanted to point out that Palestine and Lebanon were two entirely different countries. Mike refilled his scotch and drank it down in a long gulp without grimacing. Tonight was more of the same—the things he put up with for Elizabeth’s love. Or “love,” as she often reminded us, fingers raised in fangish air quotes. Feldstein placed a hand on my knee. Mo looked at Nikil and said, “Lighten up,” and Nikil’s face broke into a boyish grin, and soon everyone was laughing.

  “Sorry,” said Nikil. “I’m so used to trying to fire up my students that it carries over into dinner party zealotry. Jesus, this is good scotch.”

  Suitor #2 lit a joint and passed it to Nikil. When their fingers touched, #2—another old friend of Elizabeth’s from grad school—leaned into Nikil and noogied his head.

  “The picture of ethnic harmony,” said Elizabeth. “If only you two were the leaders of nations.”

  The evening went as planned. After ten minutes of #2’s valiant but futile cunnilingus, he stroked my hair and said he understood. He’d seen my face; he knew it wasn’t easy to leave the tribe. “Nikil knows he’s a hypocrite. He would be stoned to death in Pakistan. The best thing that ever happened to him was being sent to that boy’s school in London.”

  The word lover is ridiculous—perhaps even redonkulous—and it speaks to my state of generational denial that I referred to #2 as my lover, and refused to acknowledge that redonkulous was a word. That fall, when I was sharing a place in Greenpoint with Jenny and the Piñata Artist, I used the word redonkulous to describe, among other things: piñata art, Elizabeth, the Prince Street apartment, and Mr. #2 himself.

  My lover was exactly twice my age, and from Omaha, but he lived like a British bachelor, surviving on Heinz beans, bodega tomatoes, and Earl Grey tea. He owned neither mop nor broom, and was constantly reshaping his redonkulous goatee.

  The situation wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but Elizabeth seemed so happy about the match, and I liked the way he knew what I was going to say before I said it, and that he read poetry as well as theory, and his furry gut, which I found refreshing after years of envying Clarke’s smooth six-pack. Elizabeth said it was always a good idea to date someone uglier than yourself, though she’d broken her own rule with the objectively hot Mike.

  #2 had a poorly self-assembled Ikea bed frame, so we spent most nights that week on an air mattress at Elizabeth’s—the Cousin had rented decorative furniture to display to potential buyers, but not beds. We shared a spare room the Host used for stashing his children when they’d visited from L.A. The rooms had not been repainted, and ours bore a safari mural on all four walls. Giraffes, monkeys, and lions watched over as we screwed and talked and slept.

  The sex had improved considerably since Elizabeth and I had bought matching vibrators. I could get off in mere minutes if I used it while he entered from behind. For her part, Elizabeth said Mike refused to incorporate the object out of masculine insecurity. She said it like she was impressed.

  In the mornings I would head to my internship, dressed in clothes from Elizabeth’s closet, plus a pair of heels from Barneys that she’d bought me on the Amex and that raised me to an appropriate height for a SoHo intern.

  The work was tedious and brainless—light administrative stuff and the maintenance of a couple Excel spreadsheets—but I was happy there, bitching with the other interns about the idiocy of our bosses and of print advertising in general. None of us planned to stay past summer. Print was dead, digital was here, and these old-fashioned agencies would be razed to make way for startups that better appreciated our web-heavy résumés.

  I went along with this talk, though I was privately a print nostalgic, fantasizing about using the gig as a gateway to glossy magazines. Anything seemed possible. The others were from Reno, Gainesville, and Iowa City, and I came to understand that the SoHo aliens I’d initially found threatening were only posers like me, that in fact all of real New York was itself a simulacrum of the somehow realer New York of our Hollywood-assisted imaginations.

  Happy hour was upon us. Jenny said, “Ugh, I hate my arms,” code meaning either “Compliment my arms” or “Criticize a part of your own body in solidarity.” She was a fellow intern, an FIT grad from Seattle with an upturned Irish nose, prominent American breasts, straight blond hair, and impeccable fashion sense. Jenny complained ad infinitum but registered these complaints in the knowingly jocular tone of one who understands the relative triviality of her issues. I could tell she thought I took myself too seriously.

  “My neck makes me look like a bird,” I said, and waited for someone to disagree. No one disagreed. We sipped vodka tonics, vodka-tinis, and marga-Tito’s, which were like margaritas, but with Tito’s brand vodka instead of tequila, plus a splash of Red Bull.

  “Your guy’s in the news again,” said Jenny.

  “What guy?” I imagined #2 on the front page of the Post, led away in handcuffs by campus security. A girl points an accusatory finger. She’s wrapped in a blanket and looks like a less birdlike me.

  “The talk-show host. Dude’s been getting crunk since the breakup. Plowing through B-listers. He’s supposedly throwing these parties every night. It’s super sad. You gotta get your skinny ass up there.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, and checked my cell. I was supposed to meet Elizabeth, Mike, and #2 for dinner in twenty minutes.

  “Can’t you ditch?” said Jenny.

  “Elizabeth would kill me. She had to pull strings to get the reservation.”

  “Or at least meet up later? Party tonight at Aaron’s. Maybe find a boy your own age, sucka.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Maybe next time.” I pounde
d my Tito’s and left a twenty on the table.

  The line at the restaurant spilled onto the street. Mike stood apart from us, smoking, giving off a moody vibe.

  “What’s his deal?” I asked Elizabeth.

  “Probably his period,” she said.

  #2 let out a giggle, but I felt bad for Mike. He and Elizabeth got along in private, but she treated him terribly around other people. My favorite night so far was Sunday, when the three of us had watched a movie on Elizabeth’s laptop. The film was plotless and opaque. Instead of paying attention I’d focused on Mike, whose body lay beside mine, Elizabeth’s head in his lap. Mike’s fingers curled around her bony biceps, closing so thumb met fingertips. I could tell that Mike too had lost interest in the film—only Elizabeth followed the action on-screen—but he wasn’t bored. He looked perfectly peaceful stroking her hair with one hand and her arm with the other, the weight of their bodies sagging the air mattress, making my side rise up like a small, cresting wave.

  At dinner, when the plates had been cleared, Elizabeth made an announcement.

  “I’ve decided to write a screenplay,” she said. “Get out of academia once and for all.”

  “Get out of academia?” said #2. “That’s devil talk, lady. Blasphemy. Universities are the last safe places for ideas in this capitalist oligarchy.”

  Universities were also the last safe places for #2. They accommodated his perpetual adolescence—the drinking and fanciful facial hair and impressing girls like me—and he took offense at Elizabeth’s insinuation that his kingdom was a ghetto. That Elizabeth had tenure made it more annoying. #2 adjuncted at Baruch and City College, mostly freshman comp. He blamed his failure to rise on the fact that Jews weren’t the beneficiaries of affirmative action. This was a good thing for society, he made a point of pointing out, but bad luck for him as an individual.