When I got in bed that night I thought of Erin erotically, but my thoughts quickly became inarticulate. I pictured her staring at me like a frightened animal. I imagined a deep, perpetual moan that racked her body but did not come out of her mouth. I pictured the organs in her abdomen dry as old roots, parched for lack of some fundamental nurture that she had never received and was trying futilely to find.
The next night we had dinner together. She pulled my chair out for me, as she always did. Her gestures and expressions were piquant and feisty, but for me they were occluded by the way I had imagined her the previous night. What I saw in front of me and what I had imagined both seemed real, yet one seemed to have nothing to do with the other. I was appalled to realize that I didn’t want to see her again.
Still, I invited her into my apartment. We sat on my living room rug, and I brought us dishes of tapioca pudding that I had made. There was subtle discomfort between us; I wondered if she had seen the change in me or if there had also been a change in her. She tried to kiss me, and I said I wasn’t sure I wanted to have sex. She said okay. We ate our desserts and talked. I said I didn’t think I wanted to stay in San Francisco. I said I thought my apartment was beautiful but that it seemed to me like a way station.
“There are so many doors and hallways in this place,” I said. “It makes it seem like a crossroads.”
“Is that how you think of me?” asked Erin.
Her question startled me. I said no, and took her hand and kissed her, but I wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth. She kissed me back as though she knew this. Kissing, we toppled onto the floor. The moan I had sensed in her was nearly palpable, but I knew she didn’t feel it. My kiss became an escalating slur of useless feeling. I kissed her to locate her, but it was no good; she was all in fragments. I took her wrist. “Don’t slap me,” I said. “I don’t want that.” She disengaged her wrist and pulled up my skirt. I knew I should not let this happen. She pulled my panty hose and underwear down. Inwardly, I rushed forward, trying to engage her, to find one tiny place we could wiggle around in together. She flew by me in an electrical storm. She had discovered that I didn’t want her, but she was ignoring her discovery. Without knowing why, I ignored it too. I rifled my memories of her, all her different faces; none of them stayed with me. She handled me roughly. Tomorrow, I thought, I would tell her I didn’t want to be intimate anymore. I closed my eyes. She was doing something strange. I opened my eyes.
She slapped my crotch with a handful of tapioca.
Jerkily, I sat up and stared. “Erin,” I said, “what are you doing?”
“Sorry,” she said. “It just felt right.” She giggled nervously and contracted herself. Her open hand sat in her lap, wet with beads of tapioca.
Absurd tears came to my eyes. I felt almost as if someone had thrown a pie in my face, but that wasn’t why the tears had come. “What a gross, inconsiderate thing to do.” But that wasn’t right, either.
“Oh, Susan, come on.”
She reached for me, and I pulled away. My stingy tears went dry. Erin shrugged and self-consciously ate some tapioca off her hand. Then she rubbed her nose with the back of it.
“I’ll get some paper towels,” she said. “I’ll clean the carpet.”
“I’ll be right back,” I said. “I’m going to take a shower.”
When I returned, Erin was seated on the couch, her limbs held tight into her body. Even in the dark, I could see she wore the starved face I’d seen in the Polaroids the swinging heterosexuals had taken of her.
“Do you want me to go?” she said.
“I don’t know.” I knelt and put my hand on her foot. “I think so.”
“I’ll go if you want. But I don’t want you to think I’m a jerk. I didn’t do that to be a jerk.”
“I know, Erin,” I said.
“You know, you seem so vulnerable,” she said. “You say you want to be real. But you don’t. Not really.”
I took my hand off her foot and turned my head away. The silence held varied beats and long, slow pulses.
When she left, she held my face in her hand and kissed me. “I probably won’t call you for a while,” she said. “But you can call me, if you need to process.”
After she was gone, I lay on the floor until I noticed that my old cat was eating leftover tapioca from a dish. I got up to put the dishes away, and then got in bed. I had a puzzling sensation of triumph at finding myself alone, a sensation that took me happily into sleep.
But I woke in two hours, sweating and throwing off the blankets. I wondered if Erin had thrown the tapioca at me because she had been angry. Or perhaps what had felt like anger was just the random overspill of a ceaseless internal spasm. I imagined the terrible moan inside her, like an endless, coughing dry sob. I imagined it so acutely that I was transfigured by it. The pain of it was so ugly it was almost revolting, and yet there was something desperately vital about it. I tried to think what “it” was. My kitten woke and touched me with her small muzzle. She allowed me to stroke her; even in her slumberous state, her small body was quick and fierce with life. She felt her life all the way down to the bottom. Everybody wants it, I thought. Erin has it, but she can’t bear it. Again, I saw her low internal organs, parched but tough and fiercely alive, holding on.
Stuff
An acquaintance of mine, a philosophy professor at a neighboring university, had finally succeeded in selling one of the many screen-plays he had bitterly toiled over and was giving a big party to celebrate. Friends of his, a married screenwriting couple, gave me a ride to the party. The woman was a thin, excitable person who appeared to be keeping a strict inner watch on an invisible set of perfectly balanced objects, lest any of them fall over or even fractionally shift position. The man seemed to inhabit a benevolent, functional daze. It apparently disturbed the woman that I was single. “You can’t just stay at home,” she said, gripping the seat back as she torqued herself around to face me. “You’ve got to go to classes and lectures and meditation groups, places where there might be single men.”
“I’m really not interested in that kind of thing,” I said. “I’m more of a drinker.”
She released the seat back and adjusted herself face-forward. Rather testily, we discussed the current cinema.
The party took place in a spacious studio in Palo Alto. Splendid vases of celebratory flowers stood on short white pillars shaped like building blocks. Almost immediately upon entering, I became engaged in a conversation about antidepressants, which I inadvertently started by casually remarking that I thought a certain administrator at Berkeley was so cranked up on Prozac that he didn’t know what he was doing.
“Prozac doesn’t crank you up,” said a classics professor. “Prozac makes you like you should be.”
Her voice was plaintive but resolute. She told me that if it weren’t for Prozac, she wouldn’t be alive. I told her that sometimes I felt so unhappy that it was hard to live, but that I preferred to sit through it.
“It’s like being your own mom sitting beside you on the bed when you’re sick,” I said.
The woman who had given me a ride poked her head around the corner. “Is one or both of your parents depressed?” she asked.
“I don’t know if they’re depressed, but they’re certainly miserable.”
“Then it’s genetic and you should take Prozac.”
I excused myself and sought out the host. I don’t really like him, at least not in the usual sense. In our first conversation, he had asked me why I’d never been married and then told me that he had been married four times, even though he never wanted to get married. He had done it, he said, only because “they wanted it so badly.”