Louisa Meets Bear (5 page)

The summer after I graduated, my father remarried—a stylish (but I thought hardened) woman in her thirties who was an associate at his firm. A couple of months later, my brother followed suit, eloping with a Brazilian model whose parents opposed the marriage due to Jay not being a Catholic. My mother finished her degree and took a faculty position in the school of social work at Sacramento State.

After two years kicking around at odd jobs in various parts of the country—editing a trade publication for the Idaho Association of Plumbing Supplies Distributors, keeping the books for an ostrich-breeding farm outside of Austin, teaching English as a second language at a Korean community center in Spokane—I came back East to go to law school. I direct a program that runs halfway houses for women with chronic mental disabilities. We pride ourselves on finding them meaningful work and fostering in the houses a sense of family. As for what my alumni fund questionnaire calls my “personal life,” I live with a man who has an odd sleep disorder such that he sleeps during the day and stays awake all night. He supports himself on the interest from a trust fund and is working on a book on probability theory and games of chance. Our living room is stacked with DVDs of people playing roulette and blackjack.

Until Brianna was fifteen, I received a letter from her parents every Christmas. In their last letter, they told me that Brianna played on a travel soccer team, sang in her school choir, and loved to read. In the summer, they would go to Italy. They planned to show Brianna my letter around her birthday, and after that it would be up to her if she wanted to be in touch with me.

Although my brother and I both followed our father into the practice of law, my mother is fond of remarking how much my brother is my father's son—the implication being that I have in some way taken after her. It's not that I'm dismayed that she is, in fact, right (the area of law that I practice is essentially social work) but rather that I am troubled that this is so—troubled that those fourteen years the four of us lived together could have set the direction of either my brother's or my pursuits.

None of us have had more babies.

 

1975

 

Louisa Meets Bear

We meet awash in a Princeton drizzle, the fountain turned off for the winter, the lights dripping yellow in the grayness, everything a stately concrete or gargoyle Gothic. You are with James, that sickly boy who with his dirty oversized sweaters fancies himself a typhoid poet. Always before when I've spotted you, you've been in a horde of muscular boys like yourself—boys who play on sports teams and are so loud about everything that they leave me sometimes intimidated by their mass and sheer beauty, their hair wet from showers and glossy as horse hide, and sometimes, I must admit, filled with disdain (the old brains-versus-brawn thing)—so that it surprises me to see you with James, whom I know only for his incomprehensible poems with their references to T. S. Eliot and the Greek dramatists, the footnotes often three or four times longer than the verse.

What I will most remember about you this night is how you try to smell me through the dusky drizzle, your nostrils distended with the effort, and how I am certain you must be able to detect the scent of Professor Boyd plastered between my legs. Later, when I tell you about him, you grow angry. “Louisa, the guy's a pervert,” you say, unable to grasp that Boyd, the nearsighted academic rising star whose op-ed pieces on geopolitics have twice appeared in the
Times
this past year, had been less spider than fly, and that I, interested both in the marijuana he offered and what would be my first experience with a married man, unzipped my own jeans.

*   *   *

It takes you two days to find me after that night. I know that you are looking. I don't hide, but neither do I help. Instead, I frequent my usual reading spots—a green couch in the basement of the art library, a leather chair in the back room of the Eastern Studies collection. You find me in the leather chair. You lower yourself into its mate. Between us are my diet soda can and a bag of red licorice. “You don't make it easy,” you say.

I like that you don't pretend to be looking for a book on Buddhism in Chinese history. I like that when I offer you my red licorice, you take a whole handful and then another while we talk, first about whatever we have in common, that being mostly James, the roommate assigned you your first year, he a doctor's son from a gentleman's farm in Virginia, you a plumber's son from a Cincinnati row house.

When you ask about me, where I sprang from is the way you put it, I tell you about my father. A “biomedical scientist” is how I describe him. You look slightly lost.

“Genes. The chemical directions on how to build a person. Adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine.”

I stop there because that's about as much as I know about what my father does in his San Francisco laboratory. What I mostly know is the way the fog settles into the pocket where the hospital lies so that taking the bus with my father east to our sunny Mission District home is like changing seasons. “Microclimate,” my father calls it, cheek to window as he studies how the clouds catch on the ocean side of the telegraph tower. I could describe where my father's office is in the corridor of laboratories, a skull-and-bones sign posted on the door, the acrid metallic smell that hovers over the beakers, counters, and various, always ticking, measurement dials. But I can't explain what it is that my father researches, only that I think about it as unveiling the machinery in the magic, the molecules that make your eyes look like a deer's and mine the pale green, you later tell me, of leaves yet unfurled.

“Think about Dorothy pulling back the curtain on that old geezer who made the Emerald City,” I say when you inquire further. “It's something like that.”

What you tell me about your father,
my old man
you call him, which seems at first awful but then kind of wonderful, is about a shrapnel wound during World War II, a scar that cuts from under his armpit to close to his heart, and a time, fifteen years or so ago, before he found God and started going to mass every Sunday, when he drank too much. I ask if he resents it, your coming east to this fancy place, and you say mostly he thinks about it as a character flaw in you that you'd spend four years sucking up to rich people. It's your brother-in-law, you say, who knows enough to really resent you, having gambled on an ice hockey career instead of college and then coming up empty-handed when his back gave out before he turned twenty-five.

“And what made you the frog-prince?” I ask.

“Celia Healding, whose old man was an alum and sent the recruiter my specs.”

“Celia Healding?”

“In Cincinnati, if you're Ohio All-State, the rich girls give you rides in their cars.”

*   *   *

When I call Corrine, my best friend from San Francisco who lives out by the beach with her two-year-old daughter, Lily, and her jazz drummer and cocaine addict boyfriend, Alfie, she says, “Bear, what kind of name is that?”

“His real name is William. William Callahan. But his friends, I don't even know if they're really his friends, all these guys he knows, that's what they call him.”

“He sounds like a jock. An Irish jock.”

“His mother's parents came from Sicily. His father's father was born in Ireland. The jock thing, that's his meal ticket. How he got here. Like Alfie playing weddings.”

“So where can he take you?” This is Corrine's and my special question, the question we have asked each other about the boys and then men each of us have had in our lives since we began to realize that something about our necks and breasts did something to the rate of their heartbeats such that we could get them to do things for us. At first, when Corrine wore her blond hair so it touched her waist, her face the kind you'd see drawn in a children's book in pale watercolors, me with dark hair and the air of something mysterious (Italian? Arabic? boys would ask), we had meant the question literally.

“He has a car,” Corrine would say. “We drove to the top of Twin Peaks and just sat there, looking out at the lights.”

“He has a motorcycle,” I'd say. “He's going to take me to Point Reyes.”

Later, “Where can he take you?” meant what can he show you. “He's into acid,” I remember Corrine telling me about this skinny guy with a ponytail and a squinty way of looking at people. “He knows these guys who make it out of Menlo Park, but the way they do it, it's not really drugs but more like a religious experience.” Or it might have been me saying, “He's older. He had a girlfriend he lived with for a while. He reads poetry and talks about writers I never even heard of before.”

About you, I pause. It's hard to put into words for Corrine where you will take me. I imagine Corrine curled on her bed, the TV on without the sound, books piled on the crate at her side, Lily's toys strewn like bread crumbs across the floor.

“Don't tell me it's something stupid like sex,” Corrine says.

“No, it's not that. We haven't got there yet. It's something about purpose. It's almost old-fashioned—kind of the way I imagine my father having made himself a scientist, determinedly moving himself from one world into another. You can feel it in him, like something chugging. We don't have that. Your parents will always be richer than you. I'll be lucky if I do half as well as my father. Does that make sense?”

“Best I can make out, the guy's a goddamned race car.”

*   *   *

You have a red VW that has no heat. You take me for Chinese food at a place outside of town. You drive with the window open and only a sweater, and I am too timid, too ashamed to tell you how cold I am, my toes clenched, my shoulders hunched so my arms can steal some of the warmth from my chest. I don't tell you that I barely know how to drive, that watching you shift gears, drink a Coke, fiddle with the radio, and wind us through the back roads to the highway, all I can think of is I must be missing some gene you have—that whereas I have learned from my perpetually lost father to transpose spatial relations into words (“Let's see,” he would say as we stood at a street corner ten blocks from our house, “I think we made a right here at this burrito place”), you move with an internal map of your body through space, your limbs generating their own heat.

At the restaurant, you cup my stiff hands between yours, and rub. “You have no blood,” you say. You keep my hands pocketed inside your own while you tell me about your afternoon drinking scotch with the Ivy Club members who are recruiting you.

I raise my eyebrows.

“Working-class boy comes to the country club,” you say, and even though I disapprove of the eating clubs, many of which don't admit women and one of which, I was told, hung a blow-up of my photo from the freshman directory as one of the top ten coeds of the year (Screw them, Corrine said, only losers waste their time going through those books, but it had left me humiliated, like one of those dreams in which you realize you're walking around without any pants), it tickles me to think of you breaking into the ranks of these pale and anemic third- and fourth-generation Princeton men with their land-grant Virginia and Connecticut families.

“I made first string this year, that's why,” you say. “They always take one football player. It's affirmative action for jocks.”

Your laugh sounds like an engine rumbling, and I understand why the Ivy boys are courting you: so that they, self-conscious and mannered like me, might imbibe something about you, about your uncomplicated maleness, about the way you stretch out on the couch with an arm crooked behind your neck when you watch TV and yell, “Go, baby, you got it!” at the players on the screen, the way you drive a car as though it were an extension of you, the way your outside and inside coincide. Rumor has it that there are entire departments of investment banks that are all Ivy men, and I know that for you, being admitted into their circle is more valuable than an inheritance. The advantages will go on and on.

You bite into a spring roll. Still chewing, you lift my hand to under your nose and inhale. “God, you smell good,” you say.

*   *   *

It's a Saturday night, a month later, and we've gone on my suggestion to see
Last Year at Marienbad.
You're still on good behavior with me—we've not yet slept together—but I can feel your irritation at the pretentiousness of the audience, everyone jammed together on metal folding chairs, pretending they understand what the trancelike actions of the characters signify and the meaning of the mathematical game, which I recognize from my father as Nim, that they play.

Walking back, we both know that we're headed into bed. You've told me that James is visiting a girl in Philadelphia; I've not told you that I'm not a virgin, that Corrine and I have gathered an anthology of sexual adventures, often reported to each other with greater relish than we had in the acts themselves—she, being four years older than I, having more entries, but I, with Boyd, having held my own.

Your room comes as a disappointment, not the room itself but that you have no aptitude for creating an environment. I think of Corrine's and my theory: a man who does not appreciate color, who cannot arrange objects so they create balance in a room, will have no talent for sex.

You motion me to sit on the edge of a bed dressed with a nappy blue blanket and brown plaid sheets while you pour wine into paper cups. You sit next to me. I make a show of sipping a few times. You take two gulps, put your empty cup on the floor, and lean over me, pushing my shoulders backward, your mouth covering mine. For a moment I am stunned by the size and weight of you, but soon there is so much commotion, your hands under my sweater, my hands on your belt, that I stop focusing on the mass of you.

“Condom,” I whisper, thinking of my cousin Lizzy, pregnant her very first time, she told me, shaking her head in disbelief.