“Is it permanent?” I asked.
“No. She did it shallow, so it’ll fade in a few months.” She pulled up her pants. “I took some pictures,” she said. “So I could look back on it.” She pointed to the bulletin board, to which Polaroids of her cut buttock had been affixed. Her expression as she pointed had the minor, easy pride of a workman indicating a newly repaired phone or dishwasher.
Kenneth called two or three times a week, often late at night. Usually I let him talk into my answering machine while I stood in the hallway, listening. Sometimes I answered, and we would talk for an hour or more. He offered to find furniture and other stuff for me, for my household. “I could help you upgrade your apartment,” he said.
“There’s nothing wrong with my apartment.”
“Well, no, I’m not saying there is. I’d just like to make it better.” He paused, and I could feel him tensing, as if before a jump. “I’d like to make your life better.”
I rolled my eyes.
Our conversations were much like the one we’d had about the model who wanted to be a lawyer or an actress. They were amiable and opinionated, and sometimes he said things that irritated me, but the irritation didn’t stick: first I wanted to tell him what was wrong with him, then I felt foolish, then I accepted him, and then I lost interest. Under the awkwardness and the arrogance, I knew there was generosity and kindness and that he was trying to give it to me. Not because he wanted anything in return, but just to give it. Still, I couldn’t feel it. I tried. But I couldn’t.
I was walking on the street one afternoon when I saw Frederick again. I was with a colleague, a likable, loudmouthed creative writing teacher named Ginger. We were gossiping so avidly that I didn’t see Frederick until he was right before me. He was with a big man who had a hard, void face. Frederick’s face was also hard, but when he saw me, his eyes became startled and alert, almost fearful. I looked at him, and the expression in his eyes became shapelessly emotional while his face and body retracted and became harder. For a moment, his nonfeeling and his emotionality ran quickly parallel, and again he matched me. Then his eyes hardened too, and as he walked by me, he quite unmistakably sneered. “Hi, Susan.” His voice was soft and caressing, but he said my name like an insult. I was hurt and shocked beyond any sense.
“What was that?” said Ginger.
“This guy I had a one-night thing with.”
“Jesus, Susan, how old is he? He’s not a student, I hope.”
“God, no. I wouldn’t do that.”
Ginger looked over her shoulder. “He’s looking back this way,” she reported. “Guy looks like a fourteen-year-old skeezer.”
“Don’t,” I said. “I liked him.”
She was quiet, and I thought I could feel puzzled embarrassment in her silence. She put her hand on my back and rubbed me. “Sorry,” she said.
I didn’t answer, because I felt terrible. I experienced my tenderness for Frederick as a gross, gushing thing that had oppressed and offended him. It occurred to me that he had sneered precisely to make me feel that way. I hoped that wasn’t true. But even if it wasn’t, it seemed that I had been very stupid to see such complexity in what had happened between us. It seemed equally possible, though, that he was even more stupid not to see it.
Kenneth invited me to have dinner at his house with Phillip and his girlfriend Laura, a young blond woman with a small face full of timid hope. Kenneth’s wife, with whom he still shared the house, was away for a month, and he wanted to celebrate. We sat in the kitchen and drank wine while Kenneth prepared steaks and salads. The kitchen was gleaming and precise. Every bright knife, every cork and dish and bag, was meticulously and aesthetically arranged. Kenneth washed and dried the lettuce; his hands were white with cold from the water.
Phillip harangued us about President Clinton. He said he knew his presidency was a disaster when he tried to make the army accept homosexuals. Had he succeeded, Phillip went on, it would’ve been an unprecedented cultural cataclysm, a fact that no one but religious nuts would acknowledge.
“It’s not that I have anything against them,” he said. “I don’t care what they do. You see them in the Johns all the time—who cares?”
I hated his words, but his voice and face had a desperate, emotionally distended quality that made me involuntarily sympathetic. I did not think he believed what he was saying, yet he continued to expel words as if from a violently churning pot.
“But if homosexuals ever become truly accepted, just normal like everybody else, do you know what will happen? Heterosexual men and homosexual men will band together, and male power will be felt in this society like never before. Women will be knocked off their pedestal and ground underfoot. Then we’ll see sex for the horror it really is. There’ll be no romance, no—”
Laura frowned and picked up the cork from the wine bottle. Her pale hair fell forward and covered her face; she tucked it behind her small, very red ear. Kenneth concentrated on the lettuce.
“Phil,” I said carefully, “you aren’t making any sense.”
“Have you read Thomas Aquinas or Aristotle? Because you should have. Even though they’re dead white males.” His dignity rasped horribly. “Do you know the story of the warrior who had a cute little slave girl that he kept around for fun, and then there was the man he truly loved? And—”
“Spell it out,” I said. “What are you trying to say?”
“That all these stupid liberal women who think they have some kind of alliance with gay men don’t understand. Gay men aren’t interested in women. They care about men.” He looked at me as if he hated me, except that his eyes were focused inwardly.
“Yeah,” I said, “and lesbians are a lot more interested in women than in men. In fact, sometimes even straight women, frankly—”
“I’m interested in women,” said Kenneth brightly, “whether or not they let gay guys in the army.”
“Phil,” said Laura. She looked at him with all the focus and force she could put in her little face. She looked as if she was trying to remind him of something he had accidentally forgotten.
Abashedly, he dropped his eyes, coughed, and turned his chair so that he faced her, not me.
We moved into the dining room, to eat around a big table. We all helped to set the table and bring out the food, and those gestures of goodwill made us seem like friends. The thick, rare steaks were served on large, expensive plates. Laura said that her mother, who lived in Kansas, would be glad to hear that Laura had eaten a steak dinner, because she thought Laura and Phil ate too much pasta. Her voice included us all in its bright, gentle touch. The men looked at her almost gratefully, as if glad to be reminded of the special place where mother and food were. Phillip began talking about the scourge of political correctness and how it had made honest talk impossible in the academy.
I examined the decorations on the buffet next to the table. They included vases, little books upheld by bookends, several different kinds of matchboxes, and statuettes of animals and girls. They had the potential for the kind of luxuriant aesthetic spewage I enjoy, but they were positioned with a stifling judiciousness that ruined the effect. Amid the fuss, I noticed a small framed photograph of a very handsome young man. He had long hair and wild eyes and an open, imperiously yelling mouth. He looked as if he were riding a roiling, swift-moving current of joy and triumph and satiety, yelling out his pleasure as he rode.
“Kenneth,” I said, “is that your son?”
“No,” he said. “That’s me. Almost thirty years ago.”
Sherbet was served, with slices of mango. Kenneth put on a CD. As each song played, he told us about each musician who played it, his history, his technical strengths and weaknesses. Then he told us about each of the instruments. Then he discussed the sound quality of each cut on the CD as opposed to vinyl.