When I went out to get my mail, I found that he had left a note on my mailbox. I sat on the front steps, smiling foolishly. Sunlight tingled on a tiny, dislocated rhinestone that someone had lost without noticing. The note was badly spelled and almost incoherent, and that, for some reason, endeared him to me. He had given me his phone number.
His voice was warmer and more direct than I remembered it. He said a man who had been at the party had called him that morning to ask how it was to spend the night with me. “And I told him it was none of his business,” he said. His words rang with resolute gallantry, but they bewildered me; they sounded completely artificial, yet I sensed that he wanted to believe himself gallant.
We planned to meet for a drink at seven o’clock. He said he had an appointment at ten, which gave us three hours together. Shyly, I said I was looking forward to seeing him. He said he felt the same way. Then he asked me if I felt “compromised.” I knew what he meant, but I pretended I didn’t; there was vibrant excitement in his voice, which I wanted to resist. “No,” I said. “Why would I feel compromised?” I paused. “Do you?”
Half an hour before the meeting, I opened my closet to dress and realized that I was frightened. In part I was afraid simply because I had not been on a date for over a year. But mostly I was afraid that the peculiar absence I had felt in this boy was a harbinger of some-thing worse than absence, something he himself was not fully aware of. But I didn’t want to be afraid. I especially didn’t want to be afraid of a kid. So I pushed my fear down under my thoughts. In sup-pressed fear, I chose a high-necked, calf-length dress that once belonged to my mother. It was a quietly beautiful dress, and wearing it usually made me feel both feminine and strong. As I put it on, however, my expectation of feeling good was just barely undermined by a feeling of shame so subtle I didn’t identify it for what it was. Before I could, I suppressed it as well.
The bar Frederick had chosen for our meeting was elegant and old, slightly rotted and faintly clandestine. It was furnished with little glass lamps hanging from the ceiling and small tables covered with long, seemly cloths. He was the only person seated there when I arrived. He stood and looked at me with the same stare of ersatz adoration that had made me notice him at the party. “You look like a movie star,” he said.
“And you look like a rock star,” I snapped. My sarcasm startled me; I hadn’t yet noticed how ashamed I felt, so I didn’t realize that his absurd compliment had touched my shame.
My tone seemed to startle him too, but he didn’t break stride. He helped me out of my jacket with a flourish. He bought me a pale-gold drink in a beveled glass. He took my hand and looked into my eyes and said, “I respect you.” He paused with excited relish and then continued. “I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because you’re older. But I respect you.”
I tried to understand the feeling beneath his words. It felt as if he were saying two different things with equal force. It felt almost as if he were straddling something. My unease became harder to ignore.
“When I first saw you from across the room I thought you were an extraordinary person,” he continued. “And now you look. . . well, you look. . .” He gestured at me in my mother’s dress. “Ummm . . .” The hint of a smirk played through his eyes.
I was suddenly shocked and humiliated, too much so to say anything. I couldn’t tell if he was being elaborately cruel or very foolish or both. The proportions of the room seemed all at once strange and precious; the little tables looked like cleverly arranged decorations with no relationship to function. “Frederick,” I said. My voice was wooden and small. “I’m nervous. I’m scared, actually.”
He furrowed his brow slightly. “Why?”
He seemed genuinely puzzled. I tried to think of how to explain it to him, but it was too complicated. “I don’t know,” I said unhappily.
“Here,” he said. He changed chairs so that he was sitting at my side instead of right before me. “That’ll make it easier,” he said gently. “I’m not, like, staring at you.”
“Thank you,” I said. His gentleness touched me. Maybe, I thought, my fear was a grotesque projection; I decided I mustn’t let the past completely distort my experience of the present. I relaxed, and my tender feeling for him woke and breathed again. The tables looked like tables at which one might simply sit. He raised one hand and, very tentatively, almost as if he were frightened, touched my cheek. He asked if I would like another drink. “No, thank you,” I said.
He began talking about a woman he’d had sex with some weeks before. He had never wanted to see her again, so he hadn’t called her, even though he’d said he would. She, on the other hand, had been harassing him with phone calls he never deigned to return, demanding to see him. Finally, that afternoon he’d visited her. He’d just come from her, in fact.
“I was arrogant and controlling and cocky with her,” he said. “Which just made her want to have sex with me all the more.” He sighed as if exasperated. “I was totally different with her than I am with you. I don’t respect her, and I’m not interested in her.” He paused and lightly gripped the edge of the table with both hands, his long fingers soft and tense, like the paws of a young cat. “I like myself better with you,” he declared.
I was not only ashamed for myself, I was also ashamed for him, so much so that I was virtually paralyzed by it—yet I still hadn’t noticed it.
“I used to have a lot of relationships like that,” I said heavily.
“Like what?”
“With men who didn’t respect me. And I can tell you, without even knowing her, that this woman doesn’t respect you either. That kind of shit goes both ways.”
He looked puzzled, then wary. He retracted one hand slightly along the edge of the table.
“At the time, I would’ve told you that I loved these men,” I said. “But really, I didn’t even like them.”
“So why were you with them if you didn’t like them?”
“Those situations are often erotic. And it’s complicated. I mean, why’d you go to this girl’s house if you were so uninterested in her?”
“Oh, it’s definitely erotic. But I don’t like it.” He looked vaguely into space. “I don’t like it,” he repeated. He hesitated. “I want to be a nice person,” he said. He looked at me, expectant, almost childish. He looked as though he wanted me to tell him that he was a nice person, and although I would’ve liked to, I found I couldn’t. Silently, I lowered my eyes. The pause was terrible.
The conversation was over and we both knew it, yet neither of us wanted to admit it. With a great effort we changed the subject and lurched into a discussion about books, horror movies, and the construction of Frederick’s web sites. When one of us stumbled, the other would clumsily lend a hand, so that we gamely, even chivalrously, pulled each other along. The peculiar thing was, I think we actually liked each other—not that it did us any good.
“I was thinking,” he said. “Maybe you could suggest some poets for me to read. I don’t know anything about poetry.”
“I don’t know you,” I said. My voice was clipped and hard. “I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what you might like.”
There was another silence. I felt a shift take place in him. If he had been straddling something before, he had now chosen a position. He looked at his watch; he said he had made plans to go meet another woman. “We have some time,” he said, “so I can walk you home.” He stood and swung his jacket around his shoulders. “With leisure and pleasure.” His voice was voluptuous and charmed by itself.