Louisa Meets Bear (6 page)

You reach for the bedside stand, fumble with what sounds like the wrapper. Then you go soft. I panic. I am losing you. I can't track what you are doing, only that you are trying and trying, rough waves crashing against me, and it is a relief when finally you roll onto your back.

It's dark but still you shield your eyes with your hands. “Jesus,” you say. “I feel like such a pussy.”

I pull the sheet over me and move onto my side. Propped up on an elbow, I kiss and kiss the knuckles of your hands.

“This has never happened to me before.”

You turn your back to me.

I run my fingers across your shoulder blades—big, beautiful angel's wings. “Shhh,” I say, “shhh.”

“All I've been able to think about for weeks is how much I want you. It was too much to actually have you here.”

I wrap my arms around you and spoon myself behind you. I imagine you are my baby and I can hold you inside of me.

“It was strange,” I say to Corrine the next day over the phone. “But I liked that he lost it. It made me feel that I mattered to him.”

“You're a weird one,” Corrine says. “What happened after that?”

“He fell asleep. I dozed off after a while. Then in the morning we tried again.”

“And?”

“That decorating aptitude–sex talent theory—wrong, wrong, wrong.”

*   *   *

By spring, we are playing married. I am nineteen and you are twenty; we embrace the idea for that reason. You buy a double mattress for your room and we move the dorm bed into the hall. When summer arrives, we rent an apartment in New Brunswick and cart the double mattress up four flights of stairs. You get a job in a lipstick factory, a gig, you call it, that one of your coaches arranged. I tutor two little boys, one a whiner, the other a screamer, both dumb but rich. You buy us a hibachi. I learn how to grill eggplant brushed with olive oil.

In August, we go to San Francisco even though at the last minute my father calls to say he is off to Argentina that week.

“Something's come up,” my father says mysteriously.

“What?”

“I have to help a friend with some matters in Buenos Aires.”

“A friend?”

“Well,” my father says, “a lady friend. Her mother just died, and she needs to wrap up her financial affairs. It's a big mess. I said I'd help her straighten it out.”

It seems useless to complain. I did a lot of that with my aunt, my mother's sister, when she first moved to Oakland and would take me or Corrine and me most Sundays to brunch. Enough that I now understand the complaints only confuse my father. Instead, I ask the lady friend's name. “Juanita. She's an urban anthropologist. She just published a book on the street children of Buenos Aires.”

We stay at my father's house. You are fascinated by your glimpses of him: the First Nations wood carvings he brought back from Alaska, the fossils from Mongolia, his study with floor-to-ceiling books and a library ladder. That there is no TV. Snooping around, I see women's clothing in my father's closet (bright silks, a size ten, bigger than I am) and a vial of an expensive eye cream on the medicine cabinet shelf.

Although my father has left the house unchanged since my mother's death, her presence has been blurred by the slow accretion of his clutter: papers piled on the dining room table, a beach chair stashed next to the sofa, cans stacked on the kitchen counter. Only their, his, bedroom feels the same—the sheer curtains, the rose-colored dhurrie, the white bedspread with the knotted bumps.

We sleep in my father's bed. It is a clear, cool night and the curtains billow in the breeze. My mother lingers near. I realize how little I've told you about her: only that I was nine when she died in a car accident, north of the city.

You rub your nose across the top of my arm. “What are you thinking?” you ask.

I hesitate, unsure if I want to open this door. “About my mother.”

“What about her?”

“Right then, when you asked, I was thinking about the day she died. Corrine was my after-school babysitter. She was thirteen.” I can see Corrine with her dirty-blond hair caught high in a ponytail. “My mother wanted to hire someone older but I begged for Corrine because she was so pretty and she talked to me about junior high and having boyfriends and the music she and her friends listened to.”

You nuzzle my shoulder.

“Corrine was showing me how to paint my toenails. Chinese-red. I remember the phone ringing and Corrine telling me to sit very still so I wouldn't ruin the polish.”

I study the hair on your chest, the way it fans out like a spray of water. Not until I was older, maybe thirteen myself and Corrine was no longer my babysitter, did she tell me that my father, weeping on the phone, had blurted out the news to her. “When she came back in, she took a cotton ball and wiped the red off my toes.”

There's an image that often comes to mind of my mother. It's from a photo album that's mostly filled with green-tinted pictures of me as a baby. A chubby bundle held high by various adults. Near the back of the album, though, there's a photograph of my mother from the year before I was born. She's crouched by a tree, her eyes raised toward the camera, an expression of full deliberateness on her still-childish face. Her hair is cut in a pageboy, swingy and shiny, her skirt encircling her in the crouch. In the look she gives the camera and my father, who says he took the picture, she is both coy and bold, as though saying to my father,
I know you want me and I know you want me to act like your sweet girl.
When Corrine and I would flip through the album, she would always pause to stare at that picture of my mother with her appearance of innocence and boldness all at once. “What a tease,” I once said, afraid that if I didn't say it, Corrine would.

*   *   *

Later that week, I take you to visit Corrine. On the bus out to the beach, I try to prepare you. I tell you that Corrine lives in varying intensities of chaos, that she thinks of herself as a painter, sees the world as a tableau in Matisse primary colors, but that aside from the butterflies she painted on Lily's bedroom walls, she rarely actually finishes anything, her apartment littered with canvases in different stages of completion.

Sitting on pillows in Corrine's living room, you surprise me by your obvious disapproval, your pointed silence. Corrine grows nervous, talking more and more. She offers us cocaine. You refuse and then walk out of the room while I partake. Corrine whispers to me, “That Bear of yours, he sure is overbearing.” I giggle nervously.

Afterward, we fight. “The chick lives like a slob,” you say. “I feel sorry for the kid.”

“She's a wonderful mother.” My voice sounds tight and closed even to my own ears. “Lily is happy and healthy and open with everyone. Her teacher says she's one of the most empathic children she's ever known.”

“Reports who? Corrine?”

That night, you sleep turned away from me. In the morning, I have this idea of homemade English muffins. Not until the ingredients are mixed do I realize that they take an hour to rise. Anxiety I cannot explain creeps in.

The muffins are still rising when you come into the kitchen with a towel wrapped around your middle. Your hair sticks up and you haven't brushed your teeth. You reach for a box of cereal and head to the refrigerator for milk. “I'm making English muffins,” I announce.

You pull your hand back from the refrigerator door in an exaggerated gesture and sit down at the table. I pour you a cup of coffee the way you like it, black and sweet, and give you the newspaper. I hull strawberries and scrape the seeds from a cantaloupe.

Ten minutes pass before you shoot me a look.

“A few more minutes,” I say. “Then I can put them in the oven.”

You roll the paper into a tube and slam the table. Coffee sloshes onto the floor. “Jesus Christ, can't I just have a bowl of cereal? Or do I have to stand on ceremony for this production of yours?”

I start to cry. You get a sponge and wipe up the floor. You lean against the counter with your arms folded across your chest and your chin jutted forward. You seem to be inspecting me: skinny arms and legs poking out of a nightshirt. You shake your head back and forth and glare. “Don't you know how to fight?” you say.

In the fall, we move back onto campus. We both take singles, though mostly we sleep in your room, where you have installed the double bed. I learn to fight back. Sometimes after an argument, you poke me in the ribs and grin. “Good job,” you say. “A real contender.”

*   *   *

When I tell you about Andrew, that I met him on an expedition to New York to visit Juanita, east for her book tour and by then my father's live-in lover, that I had not wanted a man to get up from his café chair to come talk with me, you look at me with disdain. “You fool,” you say. “You arrogant little fool. Do you think you're so astounding that men can't control themselves with you? You invite it. You fucking invite it.”

Once you say it, I know you are right: there had been something open, available, in the way I held my head while I waited for Juanita, in the way I carefully folded my magazine, crossed my legs, sipped my cappuccino, lit cigarettes. I had watched myself as though I were blown up on a movie screen, twenty times life-sized, lifting my eyelids ever so slightly to glance around the room, careful not to reveal my unfamiliarity with the scene before me, my uncertainty as to how to find my way back to Port Authority should Juanita not arrive—which she did not during the hour before I left with Andrew.

And, if I am honest, I noticed him before he noticed me, recognized in him even though I did not then recognize it in myself that he was posing: a pack of European cigarettes on the table, a copy of
Le Monde
spread out before him, a leather bomber jacket across the back of his chair. I'd seen both that he was posing and that it was an interesting pose, one that Corrine and I might dissect over a long telephone conversation and a string of cigarettes, and now I can see that I must have arched my neck in a way that would have invited a tiger to bite.

Later that night, after Andrew had taken me uptown for Japanese food and then downtown for Brazilian jazz, I called Corrine.

“Did I wake you?”

“No. Lily's been driving me crazy, climbing in and out of my bed. I just got her to sleep.”

“I met someone.”

“Shoot, girl.”

“He's a law student, here in New York, but he grew up in Berkeley. He looks like a California boy, tall and blond, but there's an edge to him. He seems to be always on the road. He spent a year after college running some kind of weavers' collective in Guatemala, though it sounded like there was money in it for him too. This summer he's off to South America. He carries a beeper in his pocket.”

When it comes to men, Corrine is a mistress of distinctions. She can talk about men with the same level of refinement that her mother can discuss upholstery. About Andrew, she asked what his hands and shoulders were like and what kind of car he drove. Does he listen? What does he read? What does his father do for a living? She wanted to know if I let him kiss me and what kind of kisser he was.

“Long and thin, broad, an Alfa. How he listens, that's hard to say.” I paused to think it over. “I'd say he listens for the gist of things, and he gets that quickly, but he's not too interested in the details. I don't know what his father does, but his mother is a hotshot feminist professor at Berkeley, though maybe there's some kind of family money because he has that rich-kid way about him. The kiss—he didn't ask if he could kiss me, he just did it, but he did it so fast, a brush of the lips and with this air that of course he could kiss me, that it was as though it was nothing.”

“Did he pay for your meal? Did he talk about girlfriends?”

“He paid. American Express. No talk about other women, but I'm sure they exist.”

“I'll sleep on it,” Corrine said. “It's the beeper that's got me. Sounds like a guy with a taste for dirty business.”

I was still in bed when Corrine called the next morning. In the background, I could hear Lily asking for cereal and the canned laughter from a children's show. I looked at my clock. It was 11:00, 8:00 a.m. Corrine's time. All I wanted was to get on a plane and sit in Corrine's kitchen, drink coffee, and wait for the fog to break so we could ride over the Golden Gate to the beach, Lily singing in the back seat, a raft sticking out of the trunk.

“You're in big trouble,” Corrine said. “He found his way into my dreams. I could see his bomber jacket and there was an Alfa too.”

“Why trouble?” I was thinking of you and how long it had been since I had slept alone and how you must be wondering why I didn't come last night to your room.

“You got yourself a heartbreaker. One of those too-dangerous-to-resist guys.”

Everything felt stale. My hair smelled of cigarettes. There was dirt under my nails.

“Listen, Louisa, I'm not saying don't go for it, just know what you're doing.”

Corrine and I rarely call each other by our first names. It made me sit up and listen. “I'm just going to forget it, a one-night misguided adventure.”

Lily was laughing at something.

“Bets are you're already sunk.”

*   *   *

After you tell me that I am a fool, an arrogant little fool, you punch a wall. We are in bed, in my dorm room, and little pieces of plaster fly onto the sheets. For a moment I think you might punch me too, and even though I know it would break my jaw, I wish that you would, that it would be you hurting me and me being comforted by you instead of you yanking on your jeans, grabbing your keys, and slamming the door.

You are down the stairs before I start to cry. You pretend not to hear me calling, “Bear, Bear,” through the open window until it is clear that people walking by are stopping to look up and I have to duck behind the curtain. In that moment, all I want is to take it back, my words that have, you tell me, wiped out all of your happiness in me, in my smell, in my touch, in our talks, in your certainty as you hike from gym to classroom to club that I am yours and the world is right. I want to take it all back, to say it's nothing, truly, nothing. Nothing has happened, just a guy I met in a café, nothing will change, but I know that by evening I will board the train to the city, even more the fool than you know.