by Mary Gordon
Walt would have listened to that story with a knowing sneer on his face, mocking the idea of heroism, of mixed blood, of the danger of death.
He'd say, “But it never happened. You only made it up.” He would know that I'd forgotten that. And that was what scared me: he knew.
He believed only in the visible. Like my parents, he was interested only in what was of use. One of my new friends loved to quote Baudelaire about the bourgeoisie: “Lovers of utensils, enemies of perfume.” I smiled dreamily every time he said this, which was often. I hoped that, when the time came, I would choose the scent of gardenia over a carrot peeler, but I wasn't sure. I knew what side my parents were on. That was Walt's side. He had read even more books than I had and made choices that were like the ones I knew I had to flee.
His reasons for them were unassailable: he hungered and thirsted after justice, but he insisted he was interested only in practical measures, things that would “work.” If he'd ever had heroic childish dreams, he would have denied them, and, anyway, at that time I would have been unable to believe that he'd experienced anything like me. Rather, it was important to me to believe that he had not. I said I was interested in beauty. But I knew that, when it came to it, you had to say the most important things were to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give shelter to the shelterless, stop the war. I marched and marched for all these things. But when the time came, what I hoped was that the revolutionaries wouldn't take over the Metropolitan Museum and that they'd give me time to draw. Walt said, “You have to keep your eye on what's important.” But I knew that whatever he said were the most important things to him— justice, a workers’ state— he would have given anything up for me. Knowing this, I was able to dismiss his analysis of my new values and my friends. I could leave him and go back to them and to the work which they convinced me was of greater importance than anything else in my life. Or should be. You have the gift, they said. I only half believed them.
I thought I was a painter then. I was working in a style that imitated the medieval. Bestiaries. Illuminated letters. For my friends’ birthdays, I would invent composite mythic animals that expressed the nature of the one to whom I gave the gift. Or I would ornately design their first initials, and within the letter I would place the friend's ideal city, containing all his or her pleasures. This required thorough studying of them, which was easy for me: I was studying them to learn from them. Their code, so easy for them, all the things they had seen and had, which were so far away from me I feared that when they came my way I wouldn't even recognize them. It was crucial that I attend closely to the details of their lives. Having done this I could easily render what I'd learned. So, for example, I would put in my friend Charlie's C a plump white cat, green grapes, a hint of Venice, and rowing the gondola a thickly muscled, barrel-chested boy. Daria had Paris, steaming bowls of cafe au lait, croissants, baguettes, a tiny Seurat, Belmondo and Seberg running in matching striped shirts. I was never sure whether my friends liked what I did because they admired the looks of it, or its technique, or because they so enjoyed having been so thoroughly attended to. Walt would watch me sometimes working on one of these drawings.
“Can I just sit and watch you draw?” he'd say. “I'm reading. I'll be quiet.”
I'd shrug my shoulders, as if to refuse him was too much trouble. But I knew he wasn't reading— he was watching me. His foot would jiggle with the surplus energy of his frustration. He would run his hands back and forth over his mouth. I knew exactly what was going on, and it excited me to make it happen. I would cross my legs so that my skirt rode up to my thighs. Sometimes, pretending absorption, I would sit with my legs outspread. I would lean over, not wearing a bra, so that if he peeked he'd be able to see my breasts. Then, when I caught him peeking, I'd pull at the neck of my shirt impatiently.
“What the hell do you think you're looking at?” I'd say.
“Nothing,” he'd say, abashed.
“Well, watch it.”
A few minutes later I would languorously scratch the inside of my calf or stretch my arms above my head and leave them there an extra second. He would struggle like a guilty child not to look. But he would never win.
Once, he asked me if I'd make him one of those letters for his birthday. He told me it was coming up soon.
“I doubt it,” I said.
“Why not? I'd really like one. I'd really like it.”
“I don't think of it as your thing.”
“You're wrong. You're wrong about me. I really want one.”
“I guess I just really don't know you well enough,” I said. “I have to know the person really well. I have to think a lot about them.”
“Couldn't you try?” he asked.
“I don't think so.”
Didn't he know that the more he seemed to want the drawing, the less likely I'd be to give it? How could he not know? He had to be able to see that what I liked was refusing him, and if he saw it why did he keep doing what he did? Didn't he see that the reason I made these elaborate gifts for my new friends was precisely because they would never yearn for them, might even leave them on their trays in the cafeteria or in their rooms at the end of term? They were so used to receiving gifts that one more (and from me) could never mean that much.
Nothing excited me so much in those days as refusing Walt. I was going to bed with a lot of boys, without much pleasure, because I felt I should. But every night after I came home from a date with Walt, when I was taking off my underwear, I had to face the evidence: I'd been turned on.
But I didn't think of going to bed with him until my friend Charlie said the words. I was mortified when I ran into Charlie while Walt and I were walking down the street. I barely said hello. “Well, I can understand why you wanted to keep that little dish to yourself,” he said. “Personally, I wouldn't let him out of my sight. I'll bet he's one of those tough, scrappy types that just goes on and on for hours.”
Charlie's talking to me in that way made me feel that he considered me more like him than like Walt. In on something that Walt wasn't. At that point, I decided it was safe to go to bed with him.
He'd never even hinted that we go to bed. I think he felt he didn't have the right to. We went out to movies and to dinner at a cheap Greek restaurant, and I always let him pay. When I went out with other boys, I always paid for myself, on the liberated understanding that if they paid for me it was because they were buying something, and since I was probably going to have sex with them anyway, I didn't want it to seem as if they'd bought me for the price of a movie or a meal. But I felt I didn't have to have that scruple with Walt since I wasn't going to go to bed with him. He was everything I was trying to get away from, and a large part of the point of going to bed with boys was to prove I'd got away from home. And it seemed to me he was lucky to be going out with me. I was giving him hints that could be helpful for his future escape. If he didn't seem to want to take them now, well, that was not my fault.
After Charlie had put the idea of going to bed with Walt into my head, I knew it would be very easy. I'd just have to ask him. The signs of his wanting me were pathetically visible: his jiggling right foot, his hand wiped over his mouth, his touching me whenever it seemed possible. The important thing would be to do it but to let him know that it wasn't important. Which was exactly what I said when I suggested sex. “Look,” I told him, “our not fucking makes it seem like such a big deal. I know you're dying for it. I'm sort of into it. You're like the only guy I know that I'm not fucking. That's not gay, I mean.”
He tried to seem casual, but he couldn't wait. When he took me in his arms, he was trembling. I couldn't help it; the pureness of his desire, its immaturity, its rawness, created ardor in me. I was in love with my own power to make someone want me. And he did want me, want me rather than wanting it, whatever it was: sex, my sex, the experience, the ability to recount it afterward. At that time, we were supposed to pretend it was an it we wanted. Girls like me had grown up listening to South Pacific in our bedrooms, but i
n a twinkling of an eye we were supposed to give that up for “I'm into fucking tonight if you're into it.”
My experience of sex was mostly an extended pretense. I had to pretend to want sex without wanting attention. The reality was usually exactly the opposite. I had sex because it was the best way of getting attention from the boys I thought worthwhile. But when Walt's sweaty, trembling hands ran over my body, I realized that for the first time I really wanted sex. I wanted sex and he wanted me.
He would never have said he loved me or used any of the language of romance. All that was a bourgeois trick to sell unnecessary products to the workers. It was blinding dust flung into their eyes by cynical tyrants to keep them from the vision of revolution. He may have thought he had his eyes on revolution, but I was the only thing in his sight. He never wanted not to be looking at me. When he got his first glimpse of me, coming up a stairway or entering a room, he always looked delighted, as if his good fortune in seeing me was more than he could bear. I was always moved by that look, but I would never greet him pleasantly. I always pretended that I hadn't seen him at first, that I was looking for something else and he'd just happened to come into my line of vision.
He always kept his eyes closed when he touched me. I always watched him, and I always let him do all the work. I would never touch him voluntarily. He would have to take my hand and move it as if it were asleep, as if I'd fallen asleep from boredom. He'd hold my hand and place it on his body, then he would move underneath it. He was fair and freckled, and his penis seemed wrinkled and unfresh to me, like the white of a fried egg cooked in a too-hot fat. Finally, in a kind of stoic despair at my lack of response, he would let go of my hand, enter me, and satisfy himself. Before he satisfied himself, though, he would work hard at satisfying me. And he did. But I was never grateful to him, as I was to the boys who took only their own pleasure and then hurried out the door. After he separated himself from my body, he would lie next to me and hold my hand. We would be on our backs, looking at the ceiling as if we were shipwrecked, as if we were waiting quietly for help to come.
After a few months of sleeping with Walt, it became clear to me that it hadn't become a topic of conversation among my new friends. They hadn't even noticed. I was beginning to find my own behavior to Walt insupportable; all his wanting was exhausting me, making me feel inadequate and cruel. And I was cruel to him all the time; I couldn't stand any longer how easy he made it for me to be cruel. I told him we shouldn't see each other over the summer so that we could think things over, just cool off.
He came to my house on the Fourth of July. “A friend of yours is on the phone,” my father said. I hadn't let my friends know I was staying in Queens for the summer, working for Con Edison in the billing department. When they'd asked what my plans were, I'd said vaguely, “Traveling, I guess.” So I heard my father with an alarm, an alarm that turned to irritation when I heard that it was Walt.
“I'm in your neighborhood,” he said. “I'm on your corner.”
He tried to make it sound casual, as if it weren't an hour subway ride from his house to mine.
I said absolutely nothing because I couldn't think of what to say.
“Can I come over?” he asked. “I'm at the candy store on your corner.”
“Well, if you're here, you have to come, don't you?” I said in the cruel voice I always used.
In ten seconds he was at the door. He was unshaven, his eyes were red, and his breath smelled as if he hadn't eaten or slept in days. He had a harmonica in his back pocket, and he kept whipping it out and playing snatches of melodies, then wiping his mouth with a handkerchief and putting the harmonica away. He didn't say anything. He kept walking around the kitchen table, around and around it like a dog trying to find a comfortable place to rest. My mother stood by the kitchen sink offering him various things to eat and drink which he refused. Finally she just stood in front of the refrigerator wringing her hands.
“I came out here to tell you something,” he said, pacing around the table. “You, I mean,” he said looking at me. “You two can stay and listen to it, you're her parents, I mean. I don't have anything to say that you can't hear.”
I was terrified that he was going to tell them we'd had sex. I believed that my parents could deal with my being a college student, traveling in an orbit that would take me from them, once and for all, only if they could convince themselves that I was still a virgin.
“I mean, you're her parents, you're the people in the world that care the most about her. Even if she doesn't understand that, I understand it.”
My parents thanked him for saying that. This gave him the signal to address his remarks only to them.
“This is why I'm here: because I figured something out. You know, I always thought she was better than I was. She treated me like she was better than me, and I believed her. I mean, she's so beautiful, and she knows everything, and everybody likes her. And she's a great artist. I mean, she's a really great artist. In a hundred years everyone will know her name. Everyone. So I always believed she was better than me. But now I know she isn't. Now I know I'm just as good as she is. lust as good. I always was and always will be. lust as good.”
He sat down at the table, and he put his head in his hands. He began to weep. He wept in a way that told us he had forgotten we were there, as if he were in the room by himself. My parents and I looked at one another. None of us knew what to do. We just let him sit there, weeping, his whole body shaking with sobs. None of us went near him, or said anything to him, offered him anything: a handkerchief, a drink, a phone call, an embrace. Finally, my father stood up. He put his thumbs in his belt loops and walked over to the chair where Walt was sitting. He put his hand on Walt's shoulder. “I'm going to take you home now, son,” he said.
Walt pulled himself together. He took his handkerchief out and blew his nose. He began playing his harmonica, some song like “Home on the Range.” My father backed the car out of the driveway to the front of the house. My mother shook Walt's hand at the door. I don't remember what I did.
That was twenty-five years ago, and I hadn't seen him since then. He'd dropped out of school. I didn't know where he went, and since I didn't know anyone who knew him, I thought there was no way of my finding out. There might have been ways for me to find out about him— I could have called his parents’ home— but I'd had no inclination to try.
I looked at him standing at the other side of the counter. He hadn't changed in twenty-five years. He was still boyish, amateurish in his body, as he had been then. I remembered what his body looked like without clothes, that it had been inside mine, had taken pleasure from my body and given pleasure to me. I remembered that I had not been kind to him. Not once.
I understood that if he'd come to the store to hurt me, it would have been, somehow, his right. I showed him into the office. I closed the door. I told the young man working in the front of the store that we were not to be disturbed.
Looking more closely, I could see that his hair had thinned, and it made the bones of his skull seem a feature as expressive as eyes or lips. I kept trying to decide if I liked his looks, if other people would consider him attractive, if his looks would appeal more to women or to men. But I couldn't bear to rest my eyes on him too long. He looked so unhappy; most people try to hide their unhappiness as if it were a wound that should be bandaged, covered up. Walt looked at me, freely exposing his unhappiness as if he thought it was something I had a right, or a duty, perhaps, to see.
“I know you're married,” he said. “You said so once on television. Who'd you marry?”
“A man.”
“What man?”
“A lawyer. We live near Battery Park. I like the view.”
“Does your husband like your food?”
“Everyone asks me that. He's usually on a diet.”
I looked down at the papers spread on the table. I shuffled them to indicate that I didn't have much time.
“That's nice that you live near the water. You alwa
ys liked the water. You always wanted a view.”
He mentioned the names of all my friends, and he sounded pleased when I said I still saw some of them.
“Keep that up,” he said. “It's important to keep up old friendships.”
I said I thought it was.
“Do you think I should get married?” he asked. “I never can get married. I would like to.”
“Anyone can get married,” I said. “It's the easiest thing in the world.”
“I wanted to marry you,” he said. “But I don't anymore.”
“That's good,” I said.
“You never wanted to marry me. Not for one minute.”
He looked at me with great fixity, as if he were daring me to say yes or no. Then I began to feel again what I had always felt when I was with him. It was anger, anger that I could never feel only one thing with him, that it was always two, and always at the same time, and always exactly the opposite of each other. I knew perfectly well that he was right, that I hadn't ever wanted to marry him, but at the same time, I seemed to have some fleeting sense that I'd thought it would be comfortable to marry someone who could understand my parents so that I wouldn't have to tell funny stories about them, savage tales that would make them comprehensible. I could tell him that, that part of it. He would be happy, and I always partially wanted to make him happy. Then I remembered that he would always ask the kind of question that no one with good manners would ask and then not listen for the answer. While I was worrying about what to say, his attention had wandered to something else. So I just waited, looking down at the papers on my desk.
“I bet your parents are really glad about the way things turned out with you,” he said. “That you have a good business, secure and everything.”
“My parents are both dead,” I said, hoping the words were brutal enough to banish their image, which I didn't want right then.
“Well, they'd really be impressed with this food if they were alive. That's some terrific food you have out there,” he said, turning his back toward me, staring at the closed door.