We Had No Rules

by Corinne Manning

  “I appreciated getting to review that text again. It had been a few years,” I offered.

  She nodded. She twisted something in her fingers, but it wasn’t a tissue. It was brown, soft. A piece of yarn? My phone rang. I bowed my head to her and leaned over to answer it. Taylor stood to leave, but I held my hand up to her. She stayed completely still in the position I had frozen her in. I couldn’t look at that, so I swivelled away.

  “Hello?” I said. Taylor was still bent. I covered the mouthpiece. “It’s my partner, please relax. No, I’m here. I’m with a student in conference.” I listened to Julia. Taylor began to play with her earring. “Strawberries sound good. If there isn’t enough arugula in the garden let me know.”

  I worried that I would have to say “I love you,” but I didn’t. We hung up without a goodbye, like business partners.

  “Sorry about that,” I said to Taylor. The brown thing was displayed on her knee. She smiled.

  “Sounds like a nice dinner.”

  “It’s our anniversary.”

  “Oh,” she said, sitting up a little more. “Congratulations.”

  “What are your thoughts on this essay?” I asked.

  She held up the brown thing. “I have a little gift for you,” she said. “I noticed how your pens are always all over the place in your bag, so I knitted you this thing. So you know where your pens are.”

  It was unevenly knitted, but I could see now how it would work. It had a little flap, secured by a button.

  “That is so clever,” I said. I reached for it and she hesitated before giving it to me. I could feel the tug of her end from my end. The yarn was so soft. I undid the button and put three pens inside. I held it up to her, like ta-dah! And she giggled, probably like she had as a baby. I kept the gift on my desk, underneath my fingers.

  “You know the part,” she said, “where the villagers are watching the two women have sex through the hole in the attic wall, apparently for hours, and one woman just can’t take it anymore and says, ‘Haven’t you had enough fouling around?’ or something?”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “In the article. I just found that so striking, and I keep thinking about it. We didn’t even touch on that in class, aside from the fact that it was bizarre. There’s something about voyeurism, the eye, that I find really haunting.” She looked at me for courage to go on, and I leaned forward in my chair, which I never do.

  She leaned forward a little, too. “I kind of just want to write a paper on the fact that there is documentation that the villagers watched for four hours. And if that woman hadn’t called out, maybe everyone would have kept watching. And there’s all these views of queer sex being ugly, but that document proves that, even then, it was—is—quite the opposite.” She ran her hand through her hair, and I saw that her cheeks were flushed.

  “Quite the opposite.” I repeated, knowing it was the wrong thing to do. I glanced at the clock and stood. She jumped to her feet.

  “Write it. I’ll work on it with you. You can do this for your final paper.”

  “Really? I know you don’t like people to change their topics so late in the semester.”

  “Don’t remind me of that.” I grabbed the knitted thing and dropped it in my bag.

  She stood still for a moment, and I paused and looked at her, my bag over my shoulder. Her face had a slight chubbiness to it—that puppy softness of youth—and I could see it all over her body. I imagined how it would start to redistribute, or disappear forever, over the next three years. I didn’t move to hold her, I didn’t quite feel compelled to, but I was curious about the availability of her spirit. If I held her in that office, would I feel it on the sides of her thighs, around her ribs? What is it like for someone with a spirit so available to hold someone like me? Am I a heavy, cold thing? Boris at least appeared to love me. The longing in Taylor’s eyes was so present. I looked away.

  “I have a bus to catch,” I said.

  I opened the door. I’d never seen anyone move so slowly.

  —

  I arrived home with my arms full of groceries. I felt lavish after my meeting with Taylor—or maybe guilty—so I bought cheeses and chocolate. I bought a smoked trout spread to have alongside our salads. Boris and Julia greeted me at the door. Boris whimpered, her back claws clattering as she jumped into the air. Midway, she remembered not to put her paws on me and tilted back down to the floor. The house was warm and sunny, fabric and leather strips strewn over the furniture, the sewing machine out on the coffee table.

  “I’m sorry about the mess,” Julia said. She fixed the bobby pin that kept back the wily piece of hair she was always tugging at, then took the bundle of groceries from my arms. I followed her into the kitchen.

  “I decided to start a new shoulder bag for you. You’ve officially been carrying that one for seven years, and I’m much better than I was then. Look.”

  I followed her to the counter, where the bag rested. She was using the leather we’d bought from a lesbian couple on our block who sold skins.

  “See that?” she pointed to a small pocket in the lining of the bag. “That’s for your pens. After I gave you the old bag, I was mortified because you’d come to class and I would watch you go searching for pens. They were all loose, and I just couldn’t believe I hadn’t considered that. I thought, My God, I’ll never be a theorist—I don’t need to see everything and how it works so clearly. Let me just be surprised.” She wrapped her arms around me and kissed me deeply. I tasted onions. I ran my fingers through her hair and brought my lips to her ear.

  “I thought you dropped out because of all the Foucault.” I felt a ripple through her body.

  “Foucault,” I said again.

  “Stop it.” She pinched my side.

  The table by the back window was set formally. She opened the wine and I realized I had seen her open probably hundreds of bottles of wine, and every time, I still stared in awe at her hands, the way the fingers made every action seem like a rare skill. This was the kind of thing I had tried not to notice when she was a student, but no matter how hard I tried, I could still see her hands moving, with that pen, moving.

  “Foucault was part of it, but it was also just too painful to see you use that bag while you still felt so unattainable. That seems so long ago. I don’t think I’ve felt that kind of awe about you for years. It’s nice how things shift.”

  I put Boris’s front paws up on the chair and rubbed down the sides of her body. I stared at the blood spots on her eye and kissed the top of her snout.

  “We’re coming up on seven years for Boris, too,” I said. “I think that’s when I knew we were really together,” she said. “That I wasn’t just this kid you passed notes with through campus mail. It blew my mind—I was living with you and we had a dog.”

  I took a sliver of trout and let Boris lick it off my finger.

  —

  I brought the knitted case back to school and left it in my desk. I did not take it with me to class. Taylor noticed my new bag, saw the pocket where my pens were kept. I didn’t make eye contact with her until I was settled. She did not send me an annotated bibliography or consult me about her project again. In fact, on the last day of the term, she didn’t hand anything in. She was the first to leave class, and I felt a flash of anger as she walked out the door. Nothing happened between us! I wanted to shout at her. The only thing I almost said out loud then—as I felt my head rush with rage—was Act like an adult.

  I was fuming when I got back to my office. I tossed the final papers on my desk and paced. What made her think that just because I was going to help her with a paper, because I appreciated her work, I would give up my life for her? How dare she be so petty as to not hand in that paper?

  I found myself at the computer. My fingers flew on the keys and I couldn’t stop. How dare you? I wrote. To act slighted when nothing happened. To think that anything would happen. I typed and typed. I noticed a red squiggly line underneath one of the words,
and then a green squiggly line under a sentence fragment, but I just kept going. I clicked save and then sped out of my office to get home in time to take Julia out to dinner.

  Later that evening, I stripped down to a T-shirt and sat with a beer to read through the email, only there was nothing in my Drafts folder.

  The beer swam thinly in my belly. I opened my Sent folder and there it was, delivered that afternoon when I thought I’d saved it. No subject, no salutation, no closing. The email was enraged and unhinged. I glanced at the first few lines and wanted to disintegrate.

  “M,” Julia called. “I’m on the phone with Max. Do we have plans Saturday?”

  I couldn’t answer. What was Saturday? How could I fix this?

  I went back to my inbox and there in bold was Taylor’s name. The damn RE:. My cursor hovered over it. I wanted a meteor to land right then, right over Silicon Valley, or wherever it was that the internet lived, and shut it down, make it gone for good.

  “M?” Julia called again.

  I couldn’t wait for the meteor to fall. I double-clicked.

  At first I was going to write that I was sorry because no one had ever sent me an email so mean. I think you should know that it hurt my feelings so much that it made me cry. I’ve been feeling confused about what it means to be a theorist. It seems like a theorist’s brain, after reading so much but not actually DOING anything, would just self-destruct one day, which maybe is what yours just did?

  I was going to apologize, but now I’m not going to. What you said to me was inappropriate and should be reported because you did lead me on. No one else got comments on their papers the way that I did. No one else got an uninvited email from you. I know how to read this and you’re just as bad as those fiction authors you talked about who claim they are not accountable for what their work does because they are just making art, when the fact is that you were fulfilling the role of seducer and I was fulfilling the role of seduced.

  Maybe I’m not a theorist after all. I’m too used to feeling things.

  I’m not going to tell anyone about this email, but I do want you to give me an Incomplete and sign me into an independent study with Professor Leon. He and I both think we could count it for the credits your class would have filled.

  If you didn’t want the pen holder, you should have said it wasn’t your style and no thank you.

  Taylor Fisher

  “Is this a joke?” Julia was standing behind me, her cellphone clutched to the base of her throat.

  “A misunderstanding,” I said.

  I shouldn’t have been so cavalier in that moment with her, but since I hadn’t heard her come up behind me, I figured she’d only had enough time to infer that a student was upset about a grade or a deadline, the way students often are.

  I stood up slowly and looked at her. She hung up the phone. Her fists were clenched. Is it fair to say that in seven years I had never seen Julia’s fists clench? And that fact struck me as odd, even as her hands struck me as beautiful. She pushed a fist into my chest. Lightly. I could tell she wanted to push harder.

  “She gave you a pen holder?”

  “I never used it. This isn’t like it was with us.”

  She wasn’t breathing and her eyes looked angry. I didn’t know that her eyes could look that way, and I wanted them to look at me softly, but I knew, staring into them, that I would never feel that from her again. That was the first thing that made me cry.

  “I used your bag when you gave it to me back then. I didn’t use her case. I only wrote to her once about a paper. She acted like something more had happened and her entitlement made me mad.”

  I couldn’t stop weeping—a hysterical cry, terrible whinnying sounds on my inhale. Julia was calm. Then I saw her breath heave in, and that made me feel better, but she returned to her stony self.

  “Back then, I knew you had a reputation, but I thought I was the only one—”

  “You were. You are. I promise.”

  “How many students?”

  “None. This isn’t even a thing that happened.”

  “It was such a risk to be with you,” she said. She rubbed at her eye, and I moved to hold her, but she put her hand up, the way I’d done when I asked Taylor to wait for me to finish my phone call. I would have stayed frozen like that forever if it would have made a difference.

  “Write her an apology, and then please go, please leave. I don’t think I can be in the house with you right now.”

  —

  Every time I came back to the house to get more things, I hoped Julia would change her mind, but each time she seemed more withdrawn, as if she had never seen anything worth anything in me. She called me a sex addict, said she’d read about it for a few hours on the internet and thought I should get help.

  “It’s your relationship with power,” she said.

  There was one box of books left and this time we arranged it so she wouldn’t be home. When I turned the key, which I was instructed to leave on the kitchen table, I heard Boris whimpering, her claws on the door. I let her put her paws on me, knelt down, and hugged her. I moved her front legs over my shoulders. I felt a swell of affection for Julia. This was not something that she had to do.

  My box was by the door, with a note on top of it. At what point would her handwriting no longer be the most intimate, most familiar thing to me?

  Take Boris for this month. We’ll figure out next month.

  —J

  Next to the box were Boris’s belongings: her bowl, her leash, her bed. I jumped up with the most joy I’d felt in years. Boris spun around in circles, her nails clicking like fireworks.

  In the car, we settled in next to each other. Boris rested her head on my lap. I don’t know if either of us could feel my spirit—I’m not certain theorists have one—but I felt soft and available. I felt free, knowing that, in the end, Julia and I, at least in this one thing, acted in opposition to how we were set up to act. This is a theorist’s happy ending.

  the boy on the periphery of

  the world

  I’m totally one of those boys who snaps pictures of himself with his boyfriend’s dog as if he were my dog, even though the chances of that ever being true are slim, since Brian won’t move in with me. Brian has a boxer named Geraldine, and sometimes when Brian’s in class I like to take her for a walk. People say things like “What a sweet girl” or “Your dog is awesome,” and I always feel so proud. Sometimes, I’ll show off by giving Geraldine commands.

  “Wait,” I’ll say at street corners. She waits and I can tell that, inside, she is just raring to go, but I’ll hold off a little longer, her body almost trembling with desire, until I say, “Okay!” And she just goes, and I’ll glance at the approving nod of another nearby pedestrian. On these walks, people look at me and think, There’s a typical blond Carolina boy with a well-trained dog. Maybe they think, He has a girlfriend and he’s thinking of proposing.

  I’ve already proposed to Brian. He said no.

  I thought that was the end of our relationship, and I knelt on the floor of his dorm room and cried. I had just moved into the apartments off-campus the night before and I was already struck by our life differences. The dorm’s smell and unyielding faux-wood furniture depressed me. We are in different life stages, I thought to myself. But then Brian mussed my hair and knelt down beside me.

  “James, I just don’t want to get married now. Let’s wait until after next summer. We’ll live together. See how things go.”

  In many ways this was a relief. It occurred to me afterwards that I would have felt embarrassed to tell my family, because they wouldn’t exactly be excited. Even if they acted excited, there would be part of them that was disappointed. They would think, This is for real. It’s like all these years I’ve had my family at a curb, and I’ve been saying, Wait, wait, wait, and they would finally realize that I’m not going to say, Okay.

  It’s been two summers since I proposed to Brian and we aren’t living together. Last semester, he decided to get a
place of his own, and he brought Geraldine with him.

  “My uncle tells me that we have our whole lives to live together,” he said. “And that we should enjoy some time living on our own.” I watched him scratch up and down the sides of Geraldine’s greasy neck. “This summer, for sure,” he said.

  —

  I walk Geraldine back to my apartment, where Brian is supposed to meet me. We’re going to a benefit with his uncle, who is also gay. He lives in New York and gives money to a Southern AIDS alliance, and he bought us all tickets. He told us this was a nice chance to get to meet a lot of old queens. When Brian mentioned that I hadn’t met any old queens before, his uncle couldn’t believe it. I feel totally disconnected from the older generation and, honestly, a little afraid of them.

  My uncle died when I was seven and he already seemed so old, though I don’t think he’d even turned thirty. When my mom and I visited him in the hospital—which turned out to be the last time I saw him alive—there were clusters of men standing inside his room and milling around outside. There was a kind of damp sound to their voices. It wasn’t exactly like they had been crying but like they were soggy. If you left the cushions on the chairs outside and then it rained—these men seemed like those cushions. I remember thinking their skin seemed sort of spongy. It wasn’t because they were sick, though very possibly some of them were. My uncle’s skin was jaundiced and dry. I imagined squeezing the arms of one of the men over my uncle, wringing out whatever moisture was there and giving it to him. I thought saving him and ending my mother’s pain might be as simple as that.

  We walked into the room and a few of the men kept talking, except for one heavy, moustached, non-damp–looking guy. My mom held on to my hand tightly as she kissed this man, who had a smile that made me feel really warm and safe. He extended his hand to me, and when I shook it, I felt her hold me tighter. Maybe she already knew then. Maybe she was afraid that if she let me go, I’d float away with the other men as they tided out of the room.