The Other

  “What about your parents?”

  “I told them yes, I had this new boyfriend, who was very enamored of the telephone.”

  She sipped her Frappuccino. “Being hounded is flattering,” she admitted. “It’s obnoxious but flattering. Really, as much as I felt invaded by his phone calls, there was something great about my mother raising her eyebrows suggestively every time the phone rang. I ended every conversation with ‘I love you’ and ‘I miss you’—phony on my part, but I enjoyed the role. That’s the advantage of a phone romance: hang up and it disappears. You don’t have to deal with it. It’s back to baking pies and listening to Perry Como. Although I didn’t enjoy Christmas that year. There was this nagging feeling I had that something was askew in my life. I mean, John William never once wished me a Merry Christmas. Not even when he called me on Christmas morning. I’m sitting there in my bathrobe, a little urgent to get into the shower because we’re leaving for my uncle’s house in Elgin pretty soon, and John William is talking, for some reason, about gnosticism instead of wishing me a Merry Christmas. Gnosticism! What the hell? To me, it sounded like devil worship. I could have gone with a normal guy, I guess, but this is what I’d chosen—or, should I say, this is what happened to me. Personally, I think I went brain-numb that fall at Reed because I was fresh from Aurora. This guy, he couldn’t deliver a ‘Season’s Greetings.’ Everything—everything—was an ethical question, in his head. I mean, how paralyzing is that?” Cindy sighed.

  “John William and I did the one thing we were good at in January: we took walks. He ranted and raved while I checked out the scenery and, quite frankly, brooded kind of darkly about my situation, my conundrum. How am I going to extricate myself? was a question that made me ridiculously gloomy. If you’ve declared your undying love for a guy and then break up with him—blah. How do you keep from feeling just blah? And that’s just the selfish side of the equation—obviously, there’s the other person’s pain to worry about, too. The other person’s reaction. But I had to get out. I was on the verge of a panic attack. Here I am strolling the riverfront with John William, where I ought to be peaceful, and instead I’m sunk in dread, even while I’ve got my arm around his waist, even while we’re stopping to kiss. Like I said, he was a good kisser. It still felt great to just sort of tuck into his warmth on one of those cold January walks and drown out whatever he was talking about. I remember sitting on a bench with him at Johnson Creek Park and, being nineteen and romantic, thinking how we’d met slow-dancing to that syrupy James Taylor song, and how appropriate that seemed right then, when I needed to break up with him. Born in sadness,” said Cindy, “and ended in sadness, like all my other relationships until I met Bill, because Bill doesn’t need a mother. Bill’s the one guy I’ve met in my life who doesn’t seem to need a mother.”

  She reached into her handbag then for a slim pair of reading glasses tucked into a leather case. “Plus-threes,” she said. “Nonprescription. I use them for needlework and the TV Guide. Bill has about ten of these. They’re all over the house.” She slid them on and inspected her nails. “Garden dirt,” she said. “I was pulling weeds this morning. There’s something to be said for meditative gardening, for solo gardening—just you and your weeds. In fact, this morning, while I was weeding, I had a chance to get focused on what I was going to say. How much I was going to tell you.”

  “How much?”

  “Some things are really private,” said Cindy. “But now that we’re here, let me tell you what happened. Even though I can’t believe I’m doing it.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Talking about my sex life as raw material for a screenplay. You know what? Maybe I should skip this.”

  But she didn’t skip it. Instead, she reminded me that this boyfriend of hers, so manic about issues, so upset about the universe, so voracious in his reading, so frenetic in his walking style, seemed to lack normal sexual intensity. She had a number of theories—he was gay, nervous, preoccupied, had an ethical problem, or, most likely, he’d been emasculated by his gnosticism, within which he frowned on “depravity.” He sometimes talked about an Epiphanius, who’d castigated nudity, love feasts, and orgies—Epiphanius, John William droned on, who joined with Jerome to denounce Origen as a heretic; Origen who, in accordance with Matthew 19:12, castrated himself; who nevertheless seemed sound to John William in his espousal not only of reincarnation but of “apocatastasis, the salvation of everybody.” But what was John William talking about? Instead of trying to unbutton her pants? Sitting on a log in Reed’s wet canyon with its vista of a marsh full of rotting alders, he argued, aloud, with long-forgotten Carpocratians instead of making normal young-male advances. His kisses were pleasurable, but he wouldn’t move beyond them; he never made a search inside her clothing.

  It was late January. Her inability to break up with him had gotten critical. There seemed no way to do it. The rain in Portland had reached what she hoped was a wintry crescendo, true downpours driven on a south wind that overwhelmed the storm drains and the campus buildings’ quaint copper downspouts. The sky hovered not far overhead, dense and in motion, as if churned by this malicious Jehovah John William talked about. She didn’t like it, but she and John William kept perambulating like lovers and striding intently through canvassing expeditions, since she was now a foot soldier in his “Restructure Reed” campaign, which entailed just the two of them. They would be walking through a neighborhood, and he would point out how the roots of the elms had reared up the pavements as if insisting on their rights, and Cindy would fight the urge to push him up against a telephone pole and reach into his underwear. Then, one day, it occurred to her: sex might be the way out.

  The following Saturday was propitiously sunny; the sky cleared for her spicy if lugubrious plan. Their idea—her idea—was to take a blanket and go into Oaks Park to look for butterflies awakened briefly by this unseasonable warmth. She lied. She said her biology professor had mentioned a bloom of California tortoiseshells that might show up on a sudden sunny day in winter. So they went, she and John William, with the thin blanket from her dorm-room bed in the day-hiker’s backpack she’d gotten from her parents for Christmas, and with a box of Chilean cherries from a roadside market. In a stand of cottonwoods above the river, they spread out the blanket and ate their fruit. The spot was lonely. Winter sunlight penetrated the forest whitely and lit the lichens spackling the trees. Cindy wore a ribbed sweater, a black moleskin skirt, and a utility jacket—all Goodwill finds—with mid-calf woolen socks, tan patrol boots, and—a final touch—her Patty Hearst beret. Her pink legs had purposely not been stuffed into winter hose for this occasion; she sat on them spitting cherry pits by folding her tongue around them and, with her lips shaped like a small O, blowing. Then she brought out rolling papers and a film can of dope.

  For a while, they passed cherries between their mouths and smoked. He didn’t entirely lose himself in it, but she did feel that he’d been slowed enough to enjoy what they were doing. Cindy licked a fruity excrescence from the corners of his lips until, in his bravest moment yet, he tried to reciprocate, lapping at her face with a hint of vulgarity, although primarily politely, as if cleaning up a child’s mess. She felt hopeful until John William stopped their lingual lovefest to keep the empty cherry bag from blowing away on a gust of wind. Freshly determined, she stuck a second joint between his lips and lit it. (“The original date-rape drug,” she said at Starbucks.) Miraculously, a few butterflies made their appearance; one fell into the coarse nap of their blanket, where they inspected it, Cindy on her hands and knees. In short, she was doing everything in her power to direct her own porn film. All the elements were in place for outdoor sex. A blonde coed on a blanket in the forest rearing up in feigned innocence to note a butterfly, her throat stained by cherry juice, her ears red and labial, her shiny hair cascading, her beret a little militant, and her patrol boots untied. And beside her the handsome but clueless young buck, in need of initiation.

  They stood. She worked on him to
kiss more lewdly. At first he seemed repulsed, but she held his tongue against the floor of his mouth in an intimation of dominance, and his reaction was to seize her by the shoulders more forcefully, which she thought was promising, which she thought intimated a quelled sadism and contained the spark of a truly libidinous response. Cindy pressed herself to him from knees to sternum. This time, he didn’t pull away. She threw off her beret and opened her jacket. (“So embarrassing, but I knew my good features.”) The pull-chain zipper on her ribbed sweater caught sunlight. She locked her hands in the small of his back so as to gain purchase should he attempt a retreat. All freshly erotic to her—a boy who smelled good and wanted to get away must be snared by all possible wiles, and the use of those wiles, in league with the spur of her anticipated betrayal, propelled her enjoyment.

  “What was it I wanted? I thought that if I did something coarse he might be appalled enough to drop me, although I just plain wanted him, too. Admittedly a confused strategy, but, then, I was dealing with a confused person, a guy who, I hate to say this, was a prig, which is a term I use with hesitation, because I don’t want to denigrate his moralism, I really don’t—I didn’t sit down with you to do that. But you know what? I also wanted passion. He’d sort of driven me nuts for three or four months with his tender kisses followed by nothing. I’d done two things that morning,” said Cindy. “Number one, I’d put on a clean and soapy-smelling floral-embossed bra; and, number two, I’d doused my cleavage with some Chanel No 5 I’d gotten in a free-sample mister. Anyway, I hooked his finger in my zipper ring and sort of worked up onto my tiptoes until the zipper went down and the point of his finger was where I’d spritzed the Chanel. And finally John William had his hands on my boobs. After all that time we’d gone together, he was finally doing what a normal guy would have done in ten seconds.”

  Cindy shook the last ice in her Frappuccino. “Every girl knows that the way to really own a guy—here I go with something really humiliating—is to get on your knees in front of him. I’m not going to be explicit about this, and I feel ridiculous talking about it, but you know what I mean. You know what I’m getting at. Guys have all kinds of terms for it. ‘Play the clarinet’ or ‘go French the hard way’ or whatever you guys say between yourselves in the locker room. I was going to, you know, gam, as the English put it, except I assumed he’d wake up from the spell I had him under in time to stop me. So this is very strange. I was at that moment men put so much stock in: about to unbuckle his belt and—I’m not going to flesh this out because it’s totally embarrassing. I’ll just say—you know what?—it didn’t work. If you catch my drift. And skipping the mechanics of whatever you want to call it. Because he let me go ahead. That’s right, buried inside of him was a guy like any other guy who wanted to be worked on in the way I keep talking around. I hate details, but I did have his jeans and his underwear down, and, no matter the guy, there’s something really pathetic and vulnerable about that, the legs with the underwear wrapped around them—like I said, I hate details; the light of day is painful. How am I going to say this? The whole aura of what we’d been doing with the cherries and my sweater zipper and so on just evaporated; that’s the easy way to describe it. I mean, suddenly it was winter in Portland in some clammy, dirty woods, and I couldn’t make it happen for him no matter my efforts. I tried, but it was sad and futile. He was so uptight. He had his head turned to one side and his eyes squeezed shut, like I was about to light a firecracker in his face or something, or shoot him with a pistol. He was holding his breath. It was like he was in pain. It just didn’t happen for him, and after a while I gave up. And this is typical—I felt terrible about myself. Can you believe that? I thought it was my fault instead of a problem he had—unbelievable. But here’s the weird part,” said Cindy. “He wasn’t embarrassed. I’ve seen other guys go through this; they’re so humiliated they don’t know what to do next, how to handle it; they’re freaking out. But not John William. John William proposed to me. He proposed when other guys would be endlessly apologizing. He got down on one knee and made this solemn speech, that he was ready to ‘throw it all over,’ whatever that meant, in the name of love, that we would ‘from this day forward,’ et cetera, whatever, the reunification of the duad or something—it was that type of elocution, like he was reading a proclamation just before the tooting of a herald’s little trumpet. He said we should drop out of Reed and find a place where we could build a cabin and grow vegetables and procreate; have I gone on long enough sarcastically about him for you to get the picture? I told him, ‘Look, you’re stoned right now, and things just got sort of weird between us,’ and that’s when he freaked out.”

  She’d spoken for an hour and forty-five minutes with no hint of sorrow, but now that changed. This woman with three children and a twenty-four-year marriage was remembering being nineteen in the woods near Oaks Park with burgeoning pain. Her voice trembled while she told me how John William reacted to this answer of hers—“Look, you’re stoned right now, and things just got sort of weird between us”—this casual and pragmatic answer that was not an immediate yes. “There was the longest silence. I guess I’d made the wrong reply. I hadn’t passed the test; the slipper didn’t fit. He couldn’t process that. He just stayed there on one knee staring at me, and finally he said my name, Cynthia—‘Cynthia’ instead of ‘Cindy.’ He said it twice while a couple of really huge tears rolled romantically down his face.” Cindy tried to laugh. “He wasn’t urging me toward anything,” she said, “and there was no inflection of a question in the way he said my name; instead, I felt damned, judged, condemned, blamed—to go back to Juliet, what’s in a name when it’s said twice that way by a lover who feels metaphysically rejected? You know what? John William was serious. He was asking me to spend my life with him, and to this day I’m certain he meant it. But here’s me: I told him, look, I like you a lot, but I’m not going to leave school and go live in the mountains. Well—bam. He got up and made tracks. The rapid exit as the solution to everything. And there’s some symmetry to that. It was the same thing that happened after our first kiss. Retreat.”

  Cindy rotated in her chair to take in more of Starbucks—as if checking to see whether she was indeed free to speak—and then said, in a whisper, leaning toward me across her empty Frappuccino cup, “I actually really liked him. I even still think about him, the boy I knew at Reed who smelled so good and loved me like an idiot. And I’m not putting Bill down by saying that, you know. But it was just…a different kind of thing. One of those very rich moments in your life. Where do those golden rainbows end? Why is this song so sad? One of those kind of moments.”

  I LET HER RECOVER: I said I had to use the bathroom. There was a poster in there of a man in a bowler and spats riding an old-fashioned bicycle with a looming front wheel along the Champs-Elysées while fair but faceless mademoiselles under parasols promenaded in the background. There was another of Monet as a shriveled old dwarf with a silver beard seated contemplatively on a wicker bench in his garden at Giverny. I passed a little time contemplating the shadow on Monet’s face and admiring the climbing roses. Both posters were clichéd. They would achieve the status of kitsch among a future generation—assuming there is a future generation. In the Starbucks bathroom, I doubted there would be. I suppose I was in John William’s frame of mind right then—everything seemed proof of something wrong with the world as it was currently configured. Yes, the paper towels were an 80-percent post-consumer-waste product, but what about the other 20 percent? Could humanity sustain that? When a question of this sort travels with you to the bathroom, life’s unpleasant. You aren’t going about with the necessary blinders on; your mind sees, in every scene and object, some harbinger of retribution and apocalypse. There’s then some logic in seeking a breast to rest on, just as there’s logic in abjuring social action. Why put yourself in the way? Why struggle against Jehovah? Embracing impermanence, the soul finds something that feels like rest, or at least a sustainable modicum of acceptance. Then the solitary searche
r, like a climbing rose, is domesticated, and wants only a corner of the garden in which to thrive while twining, sunnily, with a complementing blossom.

  She seemed better. She seemed composed. There was some denouement to share—that John William spoke to her only one more time, to demand the return of all the street-fair baubles and bangles he’d presented her with that fall (“I’m leaving no part of myself with you, Cynthia”); that she returned them; that he rigorously disdained her subsequently; that in February he was in the student paper for chaining himself to the radiator in the school president’s office while brandishing a petition; that she saw him more than once, with a nascent beard, standing under the branches of a plane tree in a campus courtyard, calling for the shutdown of the college, and distributing broadsides. That she disavowed, or at least diminished, her past intimacy with him when the subject was broached by friends (“We went out a few times, but the guy was too intense”); that she came on him once watching wood ducks in the canyon and assayed a rapprochement (“I love watching wood ducks”); that in March she overheard someone in the cafeteria say that “the barefoot speechifier” had departed campus—and that all this happened while she also took up skiing, led craft activities for disadvantaged children, experimented with acid, and worked at the Hauser Library. “John William basically went downhill very quickly. Everyone saw it—Reed’s a small place. Privately, I felt criminal about it, but isn’t that kind of self-inflating? To think that by spurning him I pushed him down a hole? In my saner and more lucid moments, I knew I had nothing to do with his strangeness—it was there before me and it was still there after me. If not me, someone else; if not someone else, then something else.”