What had struck Linda most about the article was its very accusing tone. Men liked women to have large breasts; it was highly suspect, if not downright bitchy, the way some women refused to provide them. Linda feels Kenneth looking at her. Mentally undressing her? Why, even as they speak, Dave and Kenneth are probably asking themselves why her breasts are so small. Because she is cold and nervous, Linda has been sitting with her arms crossed over her chest. Now she deliberately uncrosses them.
“When do the rest of you arrive?” she asks distantly.
Dave looks himself over. “I’m all here,” he says. “This is it.”
“No. Your other roommates. The brothers.”
There is a moment’s silence while Dave and Kenneth drink their coffee. Then they both speak at once. “We couldn’t afford the apartment just the two of us,” Kenneth says, while Dave is saying, “The Flying Zukini Brothers? You mean you haven’t met them yet? You are in for a treat.”
“They’re here already,” Kenneth adds. “God, are they here. They have presence, if you know what I mean. Even when they’re not here, they’re here.”
“Go home while you can,” advises Dave. “Go home to your small brown men.” His eyes are just visible over the tilted rim of his coffee cup.
Footsteps stamp at the doorway. There is a sound of keys. “Too late,” says Dave ominously as the door swings open. Two clean-cut men in T-shirts which show their muscled arms try to come through the door together. They catch, in charmingly masculine fashion, at the shoulders. They are nice-looking, but somehow Linda knows the quadruple wedding is off. No one would take the last name of Zukini anyway, not even if they hyphenated it.
“I got a car!” says the first of the brothers through the door. “I mean, I put the money down and it’s sitting in the basement. I drove it home!” He accelerates into a discussion of RPMs, variations in mileage, painless monthly payments. Man talk. Linda is bored.
“Linda, this is Fred,” says Dave. “The other one is Frank.”
“You want to go see the car?”
“I got a class.”
“Good thinking.”
Linda shifts from one foot to the other, feeling awkward and grateful for Fred’s noise, which makes it less obvious. She wants to say something intelligent before she pushes her way through the clot of men blocking the door, and the longer she puts it off the more awkward it becomes. She gives up on the intelligent part. “Thanks for the coffee,” she says to Dave. She narrowly misses Fred’s fist, which has swung good-naturedly past her ear and settled into Kenneth’s shoulder.
Kenneth covers the spot with his right hand. “Don’t do that again, Fred,” he says, his tone deceptively light. And then Linda is out in the hall and the door closes behind her.
• • •
WE HAVE REACHED the end of the Second Encounter. Let’s take a moment to reorient ourselves, and then perhaps you have questions I can answer. Yes? You. In the back.
The Chronicle? No, I believe it is a major newspaper with some particularly well-known columnists. Did you have another question?
Well, yes. I know it wasn’t painted by Rembrandt and you know it wasn’t painted by Rembrandt and in fifty years everyone will know it wasn’t painted by Rembrandt, but in 1969 it was a Rembrandt. There was another question, wasn’t there? Yes. You. Speak loudly, please.
Well, I’m not sure I want to answer this. We are experiencing these events as Linda does; to give you an objective assessment of Linda’s physical appearance would taint this perspective.
Let’s imagine a reality for a moment, an objective, factual you. How do others perceive you? How do you perceive others’ perceptions of this you? We are now at two removes from the objective reality; we have passed it through two potentially distorting filters — others’ perception of you and your perceptions of others — and yet for the purposes of relationships this is absolutely the closest to reality anyone can come. So this is where we will stay. Linda is small and thin; you experience this with Linda. She perceives herself as ordinary so you will share this perception. But I will point out that, although Linda imagines her appearance to be a liability, still she dresses in ways that support it. She cultivates the invisibility she feels so hampered by.
The point you raise is an interesting one with its own peculiarly female aspects. The entire issue, women’s perceptions of their own bodies, is strange and complex and one of you might consider it as a possible term paper topic. Let’s collect a little more data and then discuss it further. We’ll pick up the Third Encounter a bit early to give you a chance to see the women together first. And let me just give you this bit of insight to ground your thinking on this subject. There are four women involved in this next Encounter, four relatively intelligent women, and yet all four share the same basic belief that anyone who looks at them closely will not love them. They feel that their energies in a relationship must go primarily to the task of preventing the male from ever seeing them clearly.
Are we ready? All right.
• • •
DINNER IS OVER, and the women of apartment 203 are still sitting around the table. They are holding a special financial meeting. Item one: Someone has made two phone calls to Redwood City and is refusing to acknowledge them. This is of interest only to Linda; the phone is in Linda’s name. Item two: Was the Sara Lee cake which Julie consumed unassisted a cake bought with apartment funds or a personal cake?
Julie’s position is completely untenable. She argues first that it was her own private cake and second that she most certainly did not eat it alone. It is the most flagrant case Linda can imagine of someone trying to have her cake and eat it, too, and Linda says so. Julie is a closet eater and has developed a number of techniques for consuming more than anyone realizes. She will open the ice cream container from the bottom and shovel away unnoticed until someone else tries to serve herself and the ice cream collapses under the spoon.
Julie can seldom decide if she is dieting or not. This ambivalence forces her to rely on an ancient method of weight control. If, after polishing off a chocolate cake, it turns out she is on a diet after all, she throws it up. Of course this step, once taken, is irrevocable. Julie thinks that she is fat, although the whole time Linda has known her she never has been.
“Self-induced vomiting is hard on the stomach lining,” says Gretchen. Gretchen is as short as Linda, but more muscular and athletic. She is a feminist and says so. “This is what finally destroyed Roman culture.”
“Lead in the pipes,” contends Linda.
“What?”
“They used lead in their water pipes. Eventually they were all brain-damaged.”
“The process was accelerated by self-induced vomiting.”
Julie is not listening. She is holding her red hair in her fingers, isolating single strands and splitting the ends. Julie does this routinely, although she spends extra money on special shampoos for damaged hair. Gretchen bites her fingernails. Lauren, who is black and so beautiful that strange men approach her on the street and say, “Hey, foxy lady,” to her, pulls out her eyelashes when she is nervous and has done such a thorough job she now wears false eyelashes even to class. Linda bites her lips. She was told once as a child that her eyes were her best feature; she ceased to have any interest in the rest of her face. And then later she read in Chekhov that an unattractive woman is always being told she has beautiful eyes or beautiful hair. Linda’s most recent compliment is that she has nice teeth. It is hard to get excited about this.