The Other (12 page)

“Wait,” said Cindy Saperstein. “I guess I should have gotten on a bus right then instead of pretending I was into it the same way he was, but the way it lays, you’re nineteen, you’re stoned, it’s four in the morning, you’ve been slumming all night and running around with this good-looking guy, and so I guess it was too late for both of us. I mean, for a half-second, as a game with myself, I bought into this Romeo-and-Juliet myth. I said yes, because about ten percent of me yearned toward this romantic fatalism that was so entertaining, so I said yes, I’d kill myself, but it was strictly an act—the other ninety percent was just this normal college girl who was hanging out and having fun.”

“An act.”

“I wasn’t going to kill myself, obviously.”

She reached back and again laid her hair on her shoulder. The more time you spend with someone in her middle years, the more you penetrate to her salad days—I couldn’t be certain, but was there some modicum of regret in the way she absentmindedly, and fleetingly, inspected her split ends? In that Madonna-like leftward, downward glance, so briefly ruminative about this moment from over thirty years before? So girlishly retiring and mutely sad? Cindy rolled a strand between her thumb and forefinger while I noted the long curve of her ear flange, and also the grace of her hand in repose. There were the bony protuberances and calluses of age and work. But have you seen, perhaps in a painting, a wool spinner drawing strands from a spindle gently, as if by calm sleight-of-hand? I was reminded of that—Cindy touched her hair in just such a light, artful way. At the same time, I was looking at the crown of her head. For some reason, up top she was salt-and-pepper instead of gray.

Cindy said, “I mean, I wasn’t even going to kill myself in
metaphor,
okay? And I should have told him that instead of saying I was Juliet.”

B
Y LATE
N
OVEMBER
, at Reed, Cindy had misgivings—she felt John William’s anguish over their Thanksgiving parting was incommensurate with the duration involved, a mere four days. When she embraced him again, back at school from Aurora, he gave her a puka-shell necklace with pink bead spacers. His other gift was a photocopied essay on Penthesilea, whom Achilles slew on the plain at Troy but fell in love with as she drew her final breath—John William had underlined passages Cindy didn’t think were special and had written indecipherable notes in the margins. One December night, they walked up Market Street to Washington Park and climbed wide steps to Portland’s formal rose gardens, sterile and bloomless in early-winter weather yet still brandishing, on this night, luminous thorns. There were stark canes mulched in the city’s sleeping glow, but John William was heedless of the invitation in such a scene, busy as he was delivering, for Cindy’s benefit, a lecture on the medieval troubadours of southern France. Enough already. She couldn’t make him notice the view of downtown lights through a lane between trees, or the way the mulch had hardened beneath crystalline frost so as to fracture, gently, underfoot. He didn’t see any of this, because in his brain fever, the real world didn’t exist.

He gave her, that December, in swift succession, a choker of quartz-and-amber flowers, a twisted leather bracelet, a sailor’s-knot bracelet, a pair of powder-blue butterfly-crystal drop earrings, and a sterling-silver toe ring, none of them wrapped or boxed but just handed over with terrible impatience and an eagerness that, each time she felt its acquisitive gravity, increased her unease about the charade she was engaged in. All these cobbled-together trinkets and street-market baubles, made by hippies or Taiwanese, weighed her down and made her feel collared—especially the choker, with its poorly shaped flowers, which strangled her when she turned her head.

Christmas approached, with what Cindy had begun to see—for the first time in her life, while removed from home, with her old sensibility swamped by her new education—as a forced gaiety and a mass hysteria about excess. “Well-decorated consumption,” as John William called it, “bearing every relation to the dark triumph of capital.” Some of her dorm-mates strung lights in their dorm rooms or displayed holiday kitsch. A lighter mood prevailed on campus even as the sun grew lesser; one evening she even heard Bing Crosby from a turntable down the hall, crooning “Here Comes Santa Claus” alongside the Andrews Sisters. Despite herself, Cindy felt a warm indulgence and domestic pleasure, a resurgence of her already receding Midwest, and joined the circle of rum-eggnog drinkers and holiday pot smokers sitting on parallel dorm-room beds and yogi-style on the parquet, who soon opted for another seasonally appropriate LP track, Cheech and Chong’s “Santa Claus and His Old Lady.” All a crack-up, but not for John William, who was jealous of her friendships and wanted to consume her, who denounced in a fell swoop every student on campus as infantile and dependent, with the college as parent surrogate and the institutional dorm beds in their lifeless cubicles a humiliation and a death to the spirit. When she asked him in a parry about his dorm room—which she’d never visited—he said that after one night there, listening to his freckled Bostonian roommate argue for the profundity of lyrics by the Eagles, watching him tack up a poster of Grand Funk in concert, seeing him sharpen two pencils in preparation for his first day of classes, noting how new his toiletries kit looked—split-grain leather, pop-topped, unstained—he’d opted out. He slept on couches in lounges, he told her. The campus, so poorly secured and inherently optimistic, set in its mild and friendly community and admitting into its fold only scholars to be trusted, had many furtive and unlocked corners, overheated all night by central boilers; he’d even gone underground, into the labyrinth of ducts there, and slept beneath the frosted greens and darkened buildings in mechanical bunkers. Showers? The question occasioned a diatribe on water usage. The cleaning of a human body required no more than two quarts of water every forty-eight hours if the bather was wise and responsible, whereas the cultural norm in the modern world was to send gallons down the drain daily for no sanctionable reason. In this case, said John William, there ought to be a law—as long as we were living in a society of laws instead of in a state of consensus—a law sharply limiting the high water usage Americans viewed as their birthright. And what was more wasteful than the metal trays, under heat lamps, in the school cafeteria, each with its baleful, glistening load of food-industry proteins and hybridized grains, some percentage of which was slated three times a day for the college disposal bins, a measure of excess always in reserve so as to slake all possible young appetites? An unconscionable food status quo, as unquestioned as air and paid for by tuition moneys, which obligated every student at Reed, said John William adamantly, to do something about such sickening extravagance—to do something about it as opposed to shopping at Kmart after classes for ironic Christmas elves.

John William, Cindy told me, had a policy of no Christmas gifts, but she didn’t and gave him one, wrapped in pages of
The Oregonian
with big felt-penned hearts penetrated by Cupid’s arrows drawn over text—George Harrison’s Hindu-inflected triple-album set,
All Things Must Pass.
They were out on one of the campus commons, on a bench beneath a bare Oregon myrtle, a few hours before she was catching an O’Hare-bound plane. Cindy watched John William scrutinize, with what looked like perplexity, the album’s moody black-and-white cover—the enigmatic Harrison, in tall rubber boots, slumped on a stool and surrounded by garden gnomes. “I can’t accept this,” he said.

“Why not?”

“It’s a Christmas gift.”

“Big deal.”

“Don’t say that.”

This common phrase of his, “Don’t say that,” was condescending and censorious, producing in Cindy a moment’s frustration, but she decided she would say “I’m sorry” to her boyfriend in the most genuine tone she could rouse. It was a mid-December afternoon, and the word was carried away from her lips as vapor. “But,” she added, “couldn’t you just think of it as something else?”

“That’s dishonest.”

“It’s recycled. It’s from a used-record shop.”

“I still don’t want it.”

He rode the bus with her to the airport. He shouldered her bag; he escorted her to her gate. They sat together, John William with his arms around her, so that she felt penned in. Outside, beyond the tall windows, against the planes at the jetways and on the tarmac expanse, sleet fell at a windblown angle, and Cindy missed home. In the winter wind from off the plains, her skin would demand emollient, but, on the other hand, a person could actually dress for mid-American weather; here, no matter what you did, you felt clammy from the inside. She pointed this out to John William, who shrugged and pulled her closer. Worse, he replied, was this antiseptic terminal, devoid of weather altogether; artificial environments, he added, were designed to induce malaise. Immediately Cindy regretted having spoken about the weather, but what was more banal—what ought to be safer—than meteorology? And what subject didn’t instigate, in this boyfriend of hers, so muscular and earnest, so angry at the world, a rant or complaint? On he went against their backdrop of slanting sleet outside and a benign seventy degrees inside, explaining to her that the point of obliterating the natural world was to deaden the senses; once the senses were deadened, a human being became an automaton; at Reed, as elsewhere, the experiments in the Psychology Department were funded by corporations; if Pavlov’s dogs could be made to salivate at the ringing of a bell, it followed that human beings could be made to buy what they didn’t need. “And meanwhile we’re just sitting here,” he said, as if that was the final word.

He stood in line with her. As they approached the boarding ramp, in the restless pack of holiday travelers with their carry-on bags and airplane books, John William asked her not to go. At the last moment, abruptly, he kissed her with a flagrant and overwhelming suction—the kind of public farewell kiss that evokes in its observers a jealous wish for equal passion in their own lives, even as it amuses and embarrasses them.
This sort of thing can’t last
is the common reaction: these young lovers will either part or mature into something less dramatic. But what does a watcher know? Cindy, decamped at last with
All Things Must Pass
in her arms, queued for boarding in the jetway, felt mainly relief that John William was behind her. Relief and the prospect of a Midwestern Christmas, as opposed to the sorrow of a sojourning lover. So the parting a watcher might predict at the touch of their lips was already present, although she’d thrown herself into that lovers’ adieu like the fair young Capulet herself.

At home, she took the hayride down Candy Cane Lane and the wagon ride through the Sinnissippi Forest that were Houghton family traditions. Cinched into an apron, flour on her T-shirt, she made apple-cider donuts and watched the black-and-white television her mother kept on the kitchen counter. For gifts, she went shopping at West Aurora Plaza. She drank Pabst with high-school friends and got modestly inebriated, enough to make her talkative about her West Coast boyfriend. There was an evening of hash and of vermouth something-or-others with a friend home from Bowling Green. But here was the problem: about three times a day, John William called, urgent, pining, and distraught John William, calling to underscore and emphatically reiterate the depth of his feelings, cross-examine her about her activities during the hours since he last rang, and deplore Christmas. “On with the performance,” said Cindy. “But now my motivation was different—not to make him happy, but to get him off the phone—or both, if possible, because he was calling ad nauseam. And there was this serious disconnect between the sound of his voice and me in my old bedroom, where I used to lay around at Christmastime with the radio on and a Whitman Sampler box. Sort of ironic—me eating caramels with my legs crossed and my head on fluffy pillows while he’s talking about saving the world.”

“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.”