That week I didn’t run into Jason again, but the subsequent Saturday there was another film in the series and I went to the same bar beforehand. He was there. We both pretended this was a funny coincidence. He didn’t ask me if I’d read it. I didn’t tell him he was right: he would be seeing his name in lights. I was excited for him, the way it is always exciting to meet a person with a destiny. We talked about the Bechdel test. Jason was of the mind that this was the worst kind of condescending East Coast elitism.
“It’s a free market,” he said. “Basically the argument is that women in fly-over states should want more enlightened things.”
I pointed out that we had a culture to enjoy as a result of East Coast elitism.
“This is the Republic of Texas,” he said. “Kindly hang your colonialist horse shit at the door.”
I pointed out that he and Harry were two of the most elitist people I ever met; they were constantly self-referring as “the boss” or “the king” or equivalent inflating parlance that could only be interpreted as performance art except neither of them were kidding.
“Real people don’t go around calling themselves ‘the king,’” I said.
“You have this weird obsession with what real people do,” he said. “Put it this way. My favorite book as a kid was The Macmillan Book of Greek Gods and Heroes.”
I scoffed at the obviousness of this and respected him for ignoring it.
“My mom got it for me for Christmas in the first grade. It put me on the path. What I learned was the distinction between fiction and myth, and the distinction is that fiction is fiction. There are different planes of reality. The one we see is tedious and mundane and it’s where most people spend every day half awake, with an underlying terror over their own insignificance. But there is another mythic plane that overlaps with the sort of lame one where life is both a personal experience and a symbolic act and you are the completely unfuck-with-able hero whose every step and setback and victory has cosmic implications—and the only difference between these two realities is which story you tell yourself.”
“So do you buy you-flavored Kool-Aid in bulk?” I asked.
“And the most important thing you can do in this moment is admit you’re afraid you agree with every word I just said.”
It was unusual for him to make direct eye contact and more than a little disconcerting. By temperament, and because his ego didn’t need the help, I was compelled to take an adversarial stance against much of what came out of his mouth, while failing to bear in mind that even a person who talks too much can still be observant, that the way you withhold can be just as revealing as what they offer. I was surprised at how uncomfortable his look made me. The way he looked at you made you feel like you were the only thing in the world. I averted my eyes to my thumb worrying the sweat of my drink.
“I come from a place where being an inch taller than everyone else means they’ll be waiting outside your door to cut you down to size,” I said.
“Well you’re in Texas now,” he said.
“Possibly,” I said.
The next week we were in our now-customary spot immersed in our now-customary mode of conversation: impassioned, urgent, caroming from drink to drink and idea to idea, my elbow at that perpetual forty-five degrees. We were talking about our greatest fears. I was opening up to him. It’s possible I didn’t entirely mind being looked at like the only thing in the world.
Hers: DISTRACTION. The demon of her line, which consisted of a high incidence of addled brilliance and existential turbulence. This demon had come to plague her once in the form of the magazine, but there were any number of dumb, devious masks it might wear to get close enough to insert its proboscis and drain the best of you, the stuff that was supposed to go into the work. This was the perennial question of being a participant versus an observer. Was it possible to be both, meaningfully? Maybe for some, not for her. In her bones she knew her calling was to sit somewhere quiet and watch, like Buddha under the tree, while this seductive adversary did its worst. The things that happen to you before your real life starts, that usurp it. She had made an agreement with herself that if she was unmarried and unpublished by the time she was thirty, she would throw herself under a train.
“I have a suspicion you threaten to throw yourself under a train a lot more than the average person,” he said.
His: the middle. He had been born middle middle class with a vertebral quirk inclining him to the firmament. A child, inevitably, of a librarian and a used-car salesman in post-Reagan suburbia, he had been raised in an environment of tract housing, diet sodas, and syndicated sitcoms. But he shared with his home state a native tendency toward bigness, attracting him to the monomyth, and its purest expression: the motion picture. Hitchcock, Scorsese, Coppola, men who wrote their dreams in light. The mass-manufactured disposability of the middle class fueled, rather than extinguished, the urgency of his mystical inquisitiveness; he spent his adolescence sharpening his wit with college students at Austin coffee houses and his bookshelf consisting of the trifecta of great twentieth-century religious synthesizers—Jung, Eliade, Campbell—as well as an unembarrassed collection of New Age self-help books—The Intuitive Warrior, The Tools, The Way of the Shaman. Like Eliade he saw the New Age movement for all the stigma surrounding it as essentially positive: faith in the power of what can’t be seen or measured, an affectionate optimism about the endless perfectibility of our species. Like Jung he not-so-secretly believed every word of it. A necessity, because the alternative was believing in suburbia.
I thought of my mother. When I was little, her worst insult was “mediocre.” Her favorite insult was “cunt,” but there was always a hint of admiration when she used it. When she called somebody “mediocre” it was like a ray that reduced another person to absolute nothingness. One day I asked her what it meant.
“When something is as far from being great as it is from being terrible,” she said.
I realized I was telling him this, that I had inadvertently started talking about my mother with him. His face showed that he knew we’d entered precarious territory. His instincts, even then, directed him to be sensitive to my moods. I wanted to change the subject. Fate obliged. Abruptly he grew visibly tense: something had caught his eye and he averted his look, angling his body away from whatever he had seen.
“What?” I said.
“Group of suits by the piano,” he said.
I looked over at a table of lawyer types, including one overweight young woman.
“Is she looking this way?” said Jason.
“What, did you bang her?” I asked, surprised. I expected a greater level of shallowness from him, and frankly would have been a little disappointed for this mystique to be dispelled.
He crinkled his nose. “What, no. Is she giving me the evil eye?”
“She hasn’t seen you.”
He slouched into his stool. “Tell me if she does. No, don’t. I can’t even deal with the evil eye, it makes me so uncomfortable you wouldn’t believe it.”
“You rogue,” I said. “What did you do?”
“I briefly dated her friend. Her friend is much hotter, obviously. It became necessary to extricate myself from the situation, and it didn’t go over well.”
“What, did you Houdini?”
He shook his head in a jerky, Asp-y way. “Not clean. For one thing, it leaves the door open for when you’re feeling lonely or another girl has shot you down or whatever to drunk-text her. And for another thing, it’s unchivalrous. I told her I was engaged.”
I looked at him skeptically.
“In this scenario, I’m the clear villain. She’s not wondering if there’s something wrong with her or confirming the general agitas women of a certain age can feel toward dating because this was an outlier of shittiness.”
“You know it’s way shittier to break it off with someone without giving them an honest explanation.”
He defended himself. “So in this scenario she’s working at a respectable law firm and doing pretty well, but is bored herself talking about work. One time after an all-nighter she goes into this Debbie Downer spiral thinking about how many hours of the last two days she’s spent in the same ten-by-twelve-foot box, which she then starts extrapolating over the next forty years of her life. By the end of this conversation I want to slit my wrists with a butter knife. But it’s a good income and she’s got however much in student loans and this timetable for when she wants a house and kids and blah blah blah, all of these notions she has convinced herself are more important than being free. And it would have been unchivalrous to tell her we wouldn’t be seeing each other anymore because everything she’s doing is wrong.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said. “If you’re in a situation you can’t see the way out of, you need to rise above it.”
(So pleased with my own success with this transcendent function, I was blithely forgetting my doubt and fatalism the previous fall, Mark physically preventing me from deleting my Hogwarts application at the last minute.)
“Maybe you saying something about it would have given her the perspective she needed to do something,” I said. “Maybe not and it would have haunted her forever like a drip in the next room. It’s not for you to decide, and lying is never good juju, my friend.”
It was unclear where my stance on this subject came from. I had been with the same person for seven years and the two boyfriends before that had gradually fizzled when we went to prep school and college, respectively. I’d never broken up with anyone in my life and could only attribute my sudden conviction to how pleasurable it was to disagree with Jason on anything because he was so obnoxious.
“Hold the phone!” I said. “What do you mean ‘women of a certain age’?”
“She was twenty-eight.”
I didn’t know what offended me more: that this constituted “a certain age” or that he had dated someone older than I was. It was not impossible, of course, he was tall and objectively handsome, and in a distinguished graduate program. But it short-circuited my brain that an actual woman could take him seriously.
“You are probably the lamest person I’ve met in my whole life,” I said. “And I studied abroad.”
He didn’t respond. A sort of rictus had overtaken his face and there was a trapped animal look in his eyes. I glanced back and saw that the woman by the piano had now seen him and was giving him the evil eye. Jason was not exaggerating how much this got to him, and I was to discover the formation of this anxious shell was his default response to things he found upsetting, a list which included but was not limited to: sustained eye contact, crowds, loud noises, or any kind of sensory overstimulation without the heavy use of intoxicants, having to use a ballpoint pen because his Pilot Precise had run out of ink, intense emotional exchanges when he wasn’t in the mood, quotidian social exchanges when he wasn’t in the mood, being touched anywhere near his Adam’s apple, being late for movies (trailers emphatically part of the movie experience), and, perhaps most of all, any attempt to penetrate Fort Jason, which is what I came to call this retreat within himself.
I hit him. “Oh my God, vomit! She probably thinks I’m your fiancée!”
This was when I first learned how unamused he was by disruptions of Fort Jason, and also, in this moment of true vulnerability, how fun it was to torture him.
Memory is the murderer of fact; good memory is genocide. In my mind this went on for weeks or months, our secret nonassignations—the hope I would pretend I didn’t have to find him at the bar waiting and the pleasure when I would, the ranging conversations about what we considered to be crucially, redemptively true, at the theater buying sodas I had no interest in to accidentally graze his arm on the armrest…but innocently, the whole thing so funnily innocent that there was no reason to inform Mark, the whole thing so easily misread. In reality it only happened another one or two more times before Harry had to come in and wreck things for everyone.
Resentment speaking. Guarding the throne of self-deception is a Cerberus whose heads are self-centeredness, pride, and self-pity.
The truth: I’m using Harry as a scapegoat for my own lies.
The truth: he is still an ASSHOLE.
It was another after-class outing, our cohort congregated at adjoining picnic tables. Harry sat on one end holding court on something or other, likely making the other males feel inadequate by comparison. When Harry was out, there tended to be a gender segregation in the seating arrangement. Nevertheless, I was attracted to the men’s table. For one thing, despite my feminist leanings, I have never possessed an innate talent for the sort of conversation required by groups of females—consisting in the main of approvingly smiling and laughing in a high register at things I find so boring I want to individually pull out all the follicles on my face—but mostly because I had a secret, and when you have a secret there is an unfailing attraction to people who are in some way connected to it.
My presence put Harry in fine fettle. There is a kind of man that can only believe that the proximity of a woman is a result of his own magnetism. This put me in good fettle. I had a secret and he didn’t know it. The advantage was mine.
He adjusted his performance for my presence. That is to say, whatever he was talking about, doing so louder. I had the advantage and was game. I don’t specifically recall what he was talking about, but I provided him with the voice of feminine opposition that put the wind in his sails. Let’s say he was rating the relative military prowess of various Indian tribes.
HARRY: The Navajo were good skirmishers, but lacked the focus to become a great warrior nation. Unlike the Sioux, as Colonel Custer could attest. Custer was a prick. Although, Sitting Bull himself could only sleep on his back because he had a wife on either side who hated the other one and wouldn’t let him turn the other way, so it just goes to show you.
LEDA: Goes to show you what?
HARRY: But really what we are doing is lubing up before we start talking about the Comanches.
LEDA: Do you ever get tired of the subject of people killing people?
HARRY: People killing people has another name, and that is history, which last time I checked, never hurt anyone to be a student of. So the question as a novelist is whether or not as a man you can write a character tougher than yourself.
LEDA: Who exactly is this question relevant to besides you?
HARRY: It’s the central crisis of the male novelist. All fiction is about the test of moral courage, and this ultimately expresses itself in men as physical courage. That’s why half the novels worth reading, probably more than half, are novels about war.
LEDA: What you’re saying is actually insane. Not insane in the colloquial sense, but like running around in a Napoleon hat and diapers insane.
HARRY: Of course a man can write truthfully about a character of equal or lesser physical courage, but is it possible for him to of write a stronger man without having an ashamed feeling in his stomach that he’s lying?
LEDA: Fortunately, woman writers don’t have to sit around worrying about something this dumb.
HARRY: I don’t know what the equivalent would be for women. Maybe whether or not you can write a character more sensitive than yourself.
LEDA: Oh for the love of God.
HARRY: Those French fries are going right to your ass, by the way.
There were pitchers of beer on the table, but I went inside for something harder. Axioms like “beer before liquor” were the mark of an amateur to me. When I returned Harry pulled me onto his lap.
“You know what I like about you, Oberlin?” he said. His nose was red and his eyes were bleary and filled with that entitlement of proximity. “You’re the kind of ‘feminist’ who doesn’t actually have any chick friends.”
Austin nights were still warm enough in the fall for there to be a film of sweat on your clothes and the smell of his armpits was strong.
“Wow, does your body actually produce that odor or do you roll around on a dead gorilla before you go out?” I said.
He flexed his biceps, looking pleased.
“Does it make you jealous your boyfriend is taller than you?” I said.
“Aw, the man cub,” he said.
Something behind the blear in his eyes became hard and focused as he smiled.
“I just love resting my head on his shoulder at the movies,” he said.
I shoved myself off him. Other people were looking over but I was only dimly aware in the tunnel vision of my anger. They had talked about it. Of course they had. What I had believed was to be an understanding, our secret, he had no incentive whatever to hold up. I WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE A SECRET. He had ruined it, of course he had ruined it. He was just a kid, a twenty-two-year-old kid with this horrible gland of a friend who he had probably told everything to, and I was a silly LITTLE GIRL making an idiot of herself, and God knows what snickering, adolescent conversations they had had about me. I felt dizzy. But through my occluded drunk and angry vision I was still aware of the smirk on Harry’s face, winning. I vowed never to talk to Jason White again.