He opened the car door for me with a jaunty gesture, and there we were, close together in a small, sealed place. He said he hoped I liked French food. I said I did. He drove down the streets with what seemed abnormal care. There was vacuous delicacy between us.
“Does the situation still seem strange to you?” he asked.
“Yes, but it’s okay. It’s less strange than meeting somebody through a newspaper ad. It seems all dates get funny after some point in your thirties. It’s probably unprecedented and maybe even unseemly, all these middle-aged people with problems out on dates.”
“Do you have problems?” he asked.
“Oh, none at all.”
In silence, we recovered from my attempt at levity.
“I don’t care if it’s strange,” he said. “It’s just a nice thing for me to be on a date at all.”
His words gave off a high, sterling tingle. I felt they should’ve touched me, but they didn’t. Still, I noticed them, tingling.
The restaurant was a plain rectangular room muffled in white. The many people seated in it ate with great energy. A woman’s sharp nose and tense posture, combined with a glimpse of someone else’s long, nimble fingers, gave me an impression of cutting fineness. The waiter who seated us smiled as if he was glad to see Kenneth arrive with a date, and his warmth was startling in the midst of the arranged enjoyment. We studied our menus and selected our food. That out of the way, Kenneth folded his hands and leaned slightly forward with dense shoulders. “You wanted to know about me,” he said, “so let me tell you some things.”
He had gone to Harvard, where he had studied literature. He had been a founding member of SDS. He had started a rock band and, with the band, had moved to San Francisco, where he helped preside over “acid tests,” or public LSD festivals, about which I had read a book and seen a TV special. He had played music and handed tourists paper cups of Kool-Aid with LSD in it, which, to his amazement, they drank.
His voice when he told these stories was oddly perfunctory, as though he were answering a job description. I thought of his phone voice: complexity crushed into a ball. I realized that across from me sat an unknown person, full of thoughts and feelings I had never had. But it seemed that to get to them, I would have to pry them out of their balled shapes. I wondered if I felt the same to him; maybe everybody over the age of thirty balled up without realizing it.
As he talked, I imagined him standing around the Marina with his guitar, handing Kool-Aid to happy, receptive tourists. When I was fifteen, a stranger had given me a tab of acid, but I’d at least known what it was. We were alone in a room together. He sat next to me, watching my pupils dilate. His body seemed both insensible and grossly live, filled with the ignorant majesty of his breath. “If I wasn’t such a nice guy,” he said, “you could really be getting screwed.” I tried to figure out what he meant by that. Eyeless homunculi suddenly spilled out of his nose and sat on his upper lip. The radio sang “I feel free.”
The waiter brought wine to our table. Kenneth tasted it and made a small frown of approval. The waiter filled our glasses.
In 1971 Kenneth married the girlfriend of a Yippie celebrity. He went to medical school at her urging. They traveled all over the world together and had children. They were still friendly with the Yippie celebrity, who was now a public relations consultant for environmentally responsible businesses. The food arrived.
We traded information and opinions as we ate. Kenneth ate with fine, tight manners. He ate as if he expected his food to be exquisite, and as if he was almost irritated to find his expectation duly met. He said he’d read my poems and thought they were good. He wondered why I didn’t write more. He described a story he had read recently and admired. It was about a man who wanted everything he did, even the smallest gestures, to be perfect. If they weren’t, he’d repeat them until they were, which meant that the author had devoted a lot of space to descriptions of such acts as the man repeatedly taking his comb out of his pocket and putting it back.
“I hate that kind of thing,” I said. “It’s an art school concept.”
“I suppose it is,” said Kenneth. “But I thought it an elegant description of compulsion.”
“Compulsion isn’t elegant,” I said. “It’s ugly as hell.”
This seemed to startle him. “Well, yes, it’s an, um, illness, I guess.” He sat poised over his plate, his utensils suspended in a slight, cute angle of ineptitude, like a pretty girl with one foot turned in. “But the story is also describing a wish for perfection that I share to some extent.” He smiled. “In a compulsive kind of way.”
“Well,” I said, “it is after all possible to be elegant and ugly at the same time.”
“I thought you’d understand.” He paused. “You know, that dress you wore at the party was a real knockout. I was hoping you’d wear something like that tonight.”
When I got home I felt agitated and vacant at the same time. I changed into my thermal pajamas and lay on the floor, eating a candy bar and lulling myself with a television fashion special that was mostly models walking back and forth while music played and high-speed graphics flared and dissolved. I went to sleep at three, and immediately had a nightmare. I was in a room full of strangers with muffled, half-frowning faces that I couldn’t quite see. I couldn’t hear most of what was said to me, nor could I make myself heard. The room was close and hot, and it was difficult to breathe. I walked around, trying to find an exit, until I realized that there was none. When I woke, I had to turn on the light and sit up, my hand on my rushing chest.
When I woke in the morning, I lay in bed for a long moment, feeling the agitation of the night, now faint and slow, with lots of empty space between pulses. I got up and made myself a mug of tea with a tablespoon of honey in it. I sat in the living room in a pool of live, swarming sunlight, drinking my tea. I thought that maybe I would write a poem about my dream. In the poem, Erin would be my companion in the dark room, a blind companion whom I could not fully see or hear but could feel in bursts of secret radiance.
Kenneth called a week after our date. He called at ten thirty at night. I ensconced myself in bed and we talked about our day. I described a class discussion of a long prose poem about a girl with “peanut-butter-colored hair” who gets gang-banged in a public pool by a band of boobs. The author of the poem, a likable young fellow, wondered guiltily whether it was wrong of him to portray the banged girl as a shallow fool. A subdiscussion had ensued about whether the character was in fact a shallow fool, just because, prior to the pool incident, she’d prattled about doing it with a local musician who later became famous. I told them it was mean-spirited and ill-advised to make a harsh judgment based on so little information, in life or in poetry—mainly because, if I were a teenage girl, I’d prattle about it too, and I wasn’t a fool, now, was I?
Kenneth, for his part, had just come from a trying dinner with his two teenage sons and one of their ridiculous friends, a dour young man with unattractive tattoos on his head, who’d gone on about how certain of his tattoos meant something sacred and private to him and then pulled up his shirt to reveal them. Kenneth thought it was stupid, but he had secretly enjoyed the fellow’s posturings, as well as those of his eldest son, John.
“John’s such a handsome kid,” said Kenneth. “He’s charming and he plays the guitar and girls just fight over him.” He sighed worriedly. “Poor Tom, on the other hand, just doesn’t have any of that. He’s smart and everything, but he’s never even had a real girlfriend, except for one back in high school, and she jumped off a fifteen-story building.”