THEY WENT SWIMMING together and she swam better than he did. She watched his arms, his shoulders rising darkly from the green water. He turned and saw that she was watching. “Do you know my name?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said, although she couldn’t remember it. She knew she was supposed to know it, although she could also see that he didn’t expect her to. But she did feel that she knew who he was — his name was such a small part of that. “Does it start with a W?” she asked.
The sun was out. The surface of the water was a rough gold.
“What will you give me if I guess it?”
“What do you want?”
She looked past him. On the bank was a group of smiling women, her grandmother, her mother, and her stepmother, too, her sisters and stepsisters, all of them smiling at her. They waved. No one said, “Put your clothes on.” No one said, “Don’t go in too deep now, dear.” She was a good swimmer, and there was no reason to be afraid. She couldn’t think of a single thing she wanted. She flipped away, breaking the skin of the water with her legs.
She surfaced in a place where the lake held still to mirror the sky. When it settled, she looked down into it. She expected to see that she was beautiful, but she was not. A mirror only answers one question and it can’t lie. She had completely lost her looks. She wondered what she had gotten in return.
• • •
THERE WAS A MIRROR in the bedroom. It was dusty so her reflection was vague. But she was not beautiful. She wasn’t upset about this and she noticed the fact, a little wonderingly. It didn’t matter at all to her. Most people were taken in by appearances, but others weren’t. She was healthy; she was strong. If she could manage to be kind and patient and witty and brave, there would be men who loved her for it. There would be men who found it exciting.
He lay among the blankets, looking up at her. “Your eyes,” he said. “Your incredible eyes.”
His own face was in shadow, but there was no reason to be afraid. She removed her dress. It was red. She laid it over the back of a chair. “Move over.”
She had never been in bed with this man before, but she wanted to be. It was late and no one knew where she was. In fact, her mother had told her explicitly not to come here, but there was no reason to be afraid. “I’ll tell you what to do,” she said. “You must use your hand and your mouth. The other — it doesn’t work for me. And I want to be first. You’ll have to wait.”
“I’ll love waiting,” he said. He covered her breast with his mouth, his hand moved between her legs. He knew how to touch her already. He kissed her other breast.
“Like that,” she said. “Just like that.” Her body began to tighten in anticipation.
He kissed her mouth. He kissed her mouth.
• • •
HE KISSED HER MOUTH. It was not a hard kiss, but it opened her eyes. This was not the right face. She had never seen this man before and the look he gave her — she wasn’t sure she liked it. Why was he kissing her, when she was asleep and had never seen him before? What was he doing in her bedroom? She was so frightened, she stopped breathing for a moment. She closed her eyes and wished him away.
He was still there. And there was pain. Her finger dripped with blood and when she tried to sit up, she was weak and encumbered by a heavy dress, a heavy coil of her own hair, a corset, tight and pointed shoes.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” She was about to cry and she didn’t know this man to cry before him. Her tone was accusing. She pushed him and his face showed the surprise of this. He allowed himself to be pushed. If he hadn’t, she was not strong enough to force it.
He was probably a very nice man. He was giving her a concerned look. She could see that he was tired. His clothes were ripped; his own hands were scratched. He had just done something hard, maybe dangerous. So maybe that was why he hadn’t stopped to think how it might frighten her to wake up with a stranger kissing her as she lay on her back. Maybe that was why he hadn’t noticed how her finger was bleeding. Because he hadn’t, no matter how much she came to love him, there would always be a part of her afraid of him.
“I was having the most lovely dream,” she said. She was careful not to make her tone as angry as she felt.
THE VIEW FROM VENUS: A CASE STUDY
Linda knows, of course, that the gorgeous male waiting for her, holding the elevator door open with his left hand, cannot be moving into apartment 201. This is not the way life works. There are many possible explanations for the boxes stacked around his feet — he may be helping a friend move in, his girlfriend, perhaps. Someone equally blond and statuesque who will be Linda’s new next-door neighbor, and Gretchen will point out that she is a sister, after all, and force everyone to be nice to her. Their few male guests will feel sorry for her, oppressed as she is by all that beauty, and there will be endless discourse on the tragic life of Marilyn Monroe.
The door slides shut. Linda reaches for the second-floor button, but so does he, and they both withdraw their hands quickly before touching. He takes a slight step backward, communicating his willingness to let her punch in the destination. She does so; the outline of the button for the second floor shines slightly. It is just below eye level. She watches it closely so as not to look at him, and she can feel him not looking at her. They share the embarrassment of closely confined strangers. The elevator does not move.
Linda is upset because she is nervous. This nervousness is in direct proportion to how attractive she finds him. She is very nervous. She tells herself sharply to stop being so juvenile.
He reaches past her and re-presses the button. “It’s always like this,” Linda tells him. “When you’re in a hurry, take the stairs.”
He turns slowly and looks at her. “I’m Dave Stone,” he says. “Just moving in.”
“Linda Connors. Apartment Two-oh-three.” So he will be living here. He and his girlfriend will move in together; they will both be neighbors, but she will still be a sister, and no one will be allowed to rip off another woman’s man.
The elevator groans and shudders. It begins to lift. “I’m transferring up from Santa Barbara,” Dave says. “Have you ever been there? I know how this is going to sound, but you really do look familiar.”
“Nope.” The elevator jerks twice before stopping. Linda is expecting it and is braced against the side. Dave stumbles forward. “Maybe you’ve confused me with some movie star,” Linda suggests. “A common mistake.” She gives the door a slight push to open it. “My roommate Lauren says I have Jack Lemmon’s chin,” she adds, and leaves him struggling to unload his boxes before the elevator closes up and moves on.
Inside the apartment Linda gets herself a glass of milk. Her mood now is good. She has stood next to a man, a strange man, and she has talked with him. She actually spoke first instead of merely answering his questions. And she tells herself, though it is hard to ever be sure of these things, that nothing about the conversation would have told him this was difficult for her.
The truth is that men frighten Linda. The more a particular man appeals to her, the more frightening he becomes. Linda knows almost nothing about men, in spite of having had a father practically her whole life. She believes that men are fundamentally different from women, that they have mysterious needs and assess women according to bizarre standards on which she herself never measures very high. Some years back she read in “The Question Man,” a daily column in the San Francisco Chronicle, that men mentally undress women when they pass them on the street. Linda has never recovered from the shock of this.
One of Linda’s roommates, a red-haired woman named Julie, is curled up with a book. It is a paperback entitled The Arrangement. Julie likes books with explicit sex. Julie already knows she is destined to be some married man’s lover and has told Linda so. Linda reads Jane Austen. For fun.