You were taking down Philip Roth. Actually, you kicked off the seminar by going after Nabokov and that led you to mow Bellow before you pounced on Roth where you were even more clinically eviscerating. You talked about the poisonous patriarchal perspective and female character constructions as hypersexualized objectified narrative props. Portnoy’s, Pastoral, Sabbath’s, you blew through Roth like a supercell thunderstorm. Some of the guys sitting around the conference table stared into their laps while others gazed off into some neutral middle distance but not me, I couldn’t look away. I didn’t know enough to agree or disagree with what you were saying. I couldn’t say if your ideas were original or derivative or a heated mishmash of the two. And I didn’t care if I was doing the very thing you were railing against by noticing the flecks of gold in your gray-green eyes and the way your black hair refused to stay tucked in its purple plastic claw clip but spilled out defiantly across your shoulders.
After class I caught up to you as you made your way across the open quadrangle, hauling an overstuffed canvas bag lopsidedly slung over your shoulder, bulging at the sides with the outlines of book spines. It was the fall of 1998, already the end of September but Vermont’s blazing foliage colors—the ones promised on the cover of every college catalog—had been late-arriving and muted when they finally came. You were the TA grad student experiencing your first underperforming New England autumn; I was the undergrad senior experiencing my last.
Updike, I said.
What?
You forgot to include Updike.
You walked like you talked, never breaking stride, letting nothing and no one impede your forward progress. You’re right. I should have called out the entire male Western canon but that would have taken —you know—centuries.
I’ll clear my schedule.
You kept moving ahead until, at some point, probably against your better judgement, you slowed down just enough to look back and smile.
It was just the two of us on the third floor in the house on Lamont Avenue where you lived with an uncounted number of other grad students, in your eight by ten room with the sloped ceiling where a person could only stand fully upright when entering or leaving. You were pulling titles out of the stacked crates in your tiny closet—you had no room for clothing in there, just books—and holding them up like flash cards.
You need to read her.
You were talking about Andrea Dworkin but a few seconds later you would say the same thing about Katha Pollitt, Doris Lessing, Vivian Gornick, Bracha Ettinger, Shulamith Firestone, and a bunch of others—a roll call mostly unfamiliar to me and only interrupted by my stupidly asking you how to spell Shulamith.
We spent several afternoons lying on opposite ends of your mattress, passing books back and forth, mostly you passing and me receiving after you read aloud passages which were all variations on a theme along the lines of “I alone had to squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop” and “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies?”
You were also the most physically reactive reader I’d ever seen—wincing, sighing, gasping, flinching like you’d been punched, laughing until you had to gasp for air. You hung on the words of your intellectual north-stars while I clung to yours. And then one day in the middle of it all you dropped the book you were holding and told me that men like me gave you hope. I wanted to ask, Hope for what? but I was wise enough, just barely, to say nothing. That was the first night we slept together. In the morning we went for a run and that sort of became our thing whenever I stayed over, waking early, up before the sun and running to the edge of the darkened college town and back, you typically going way out ahead and having to run in place while I caught up and we briefly resumed running in tandem again until you gradually pulled away. Maybe it was the pounding on the pavement that caused stories about your life to shake loose but it was when we were in motion that I learned about your big-time professor mother—you said she taught kickass feminist theory at three different colleges—who insisted that her daughter not be shackled by the constraints of a bourgeois life so even if you wanted to do conventional things like fall in love or get a real job you would have to wait until your mother died, which had its own built-in redundancy because it would have killed her anyway. I’d never met anyone like you; I didn’t know people like you were even possible. One morning we were running side by side, step for step, and maybe it was the beautiful synchronicity that caused me to ask you as casually as I could, trying to make it sound as if it didn’t matter to me either way, like I was almost intending to be ironic, What are we anyway? My weakness was wanting to know how I fit into your life; my mistake was verbalizing it. You stopped and looked at me as though I’d blurted out something completely incomprehensible.
God, what is it with men and labels?
This time you raced ahead and didn’t wait for me.
You broke it off the next day, whatever it was. Right at the end of class, one where you seemed subdued and slightly unfocused—you called Pynchon a pyrotechnical masculinist, but your heart wasn’t in it—you slipped me a note on your usual hurried way out the door. It was a single typewritten sentence: “I was going to tell him we should stop seeing each other but then I realized he never saw me to begin with.” I looked for an attribution, a source, but there was none. I spent a couple of days trying to track down where it came from. I finally realized you were quoting yourself.
Of course I couldn’t stop seeing you. Not only standing before me once a week in the airless, windowless seminar room, but coming up and down the library steps, rushing along the footpaths and alleyways and cut-throughs, even your silhouette glimpsed through the window of the English Department office where you liked to hang out when you had nowhere else to go. One day I saw you running around the athletic track and your hands were churning faster than your legs—as if you were explaining something to someone in your hyperkinetic way—and I could tell there was this intense back and forth dialogue going on, this great debate, and you seemed agitated, on the verge of tears as if you were losing the argument. But there was no one else in sight. You were running by yourself.
The next class there was someone new leading the seminar. A tall, sinewy guy with a shaved head who favored the fabulists—the Barths and Calvinos and the like—and never once mentioned Woolf or Atwood or even Philip Roth.
Then it was that freakishly warm early December day—Vermont bestows exactly one a year—with the whole world spread out on Memorial Commons. T-shirts and no shirts. Orange frisbees flying. Faculty dogs running wild. Silvered curlicues of pot smoke the only clouds in the sky. The whole scene was a mirage—it would snow two days later and we wouldn’t see green grass again until spring. There must have been hundreds of people in various poses and reposes on the great swath of lawn and you were there too, sitting in a tight circle of your fellow postgrads, ranks closed and hermetically sealed against the coarse undergrad hubbub, everyone leaning into whatever recondite discourse was taking place, probably debating structuralism versus deconstructionism, and then I saw you walk off and go sit alone, separating yourself from the conversation instead of stirring it, and at some point a woman from the circle came over and knelt next to you and put her arm around you while you covered your face with your hands. I started walking towards you and got halfway there before turning around.
Second semester started and you were nowhere to be found. After a week I went to the house on Lamont and the woman who answered the door—she had spiked orange hair and an Irish accent and seemed pissed that I woke her up—told me you had taken some sort of medical leave. She eyed me skeptically, like if I was really a friend of yours as I claimed wouldn’t I know that?
I didn’t see you again until the night before graduation, in the off-campus apartment I shared with three other guys. Except that night I was sharing it with about a hundred people, a traveling party that somehow ended up at our place. At some point I looked around and there you were. Or a faded facsimile of you. It was like someone had taken an eraser and wiped away your long hair and smudged your skin and rubbed out the shine in your eyes. I asked if you wanted to sit—stupid because it was standing room only and anyway all the furniture was either broken, taken apart or missing altogether. There was shit everywhere. Upturned boxes. Loose articles of clothing. Rows of trash bags. The music was loud. We snuck into the bathroom and closed the door because it was the only place to talk. In the harsh fluorescent light you looked even less like yourself. You said you just wanted to say you were sorry, that I’d met you at a precarious moment in your life and I deserved better. You weren’t intact. You were going through some stuff. I asked what kind of stuff and you shrugged. Stuff like not being able to get out of bed in the morning. Or concentrate on work. Or care about anything. You tried to make it sound like it was no big deal. But you were better now and threw out your arms to demonstrate your high spirits—ta da. Oh, and you’d won a Fulbright. You were going to spend the next academic year in the Czech Republic doing a research project on post-communist feminism. So there was that.
You stared at me, waiting, like now it was my turn.
I might give New York a try, I said. You know, the whole writer thing.
You just smiled.
For the next year and a half, I lived in a fourth-floor studio walkup on East 110th Street, working for a moving company during the day and trying to write at night. Once I realized you had to be back from Europe and re-starting your life, I fell into this running reverie of meeting you in one of those underside-of-Manhattan scenes—coming towards each other under the leaky cover of rickety sidewalk scaffolding, reaching for the same sweaty strap on the subway. It never happened of course but it kept me company wherever I went. Meanwhile I started and abandoned a raft of stories, all of them about you, some more rooted in fact than others, finally finishing and editing one to death before sending it off. Six months later it got accepted; one year later it came out. I hoped you’d somehow stumble upon it—accidentally or otherwise—or hear about it from one of our mutual acquaintances or have it shown to you by a colleague, maybe someone more than a colleague, who experienced a sharp jolt of recognition while reading it as in, hey, isn’t this character based on you? Isn’t he writing about your old life? And why is he making it sound like a love story? Why do men always do that?
Peter Gordon is a short story writer living in Massachusetts. His recent work appears in The Sun, Amsterdam Review, Post Road, The Dublin Review, and elsewhere. His fiction has received a Pushcart Prize and multiple recognitions in the Best American Short Stories series.
