Him Her Him AgainThe End of Him Page 3

  Oliver did not look surprised to see me standing at his door. He had no clothes on.

  “I was thinking about it,” I said, “and I decided that actually, I would like to go to bed.” I paused, then clarified, “With you.”

  “Splendid,” he said. I noticed that there was now a fire in the fireplace and then I noticed that on the furlike rug, there was another naked person.

  “Would you excuse us?” Oliver Qas said to William Bright Brunt, a third-year student who, when he wasn’t au naturel, gallivanted around posing as Lytton Strachey, though his beard was merely a loose interpretation of the original and though Strachey, in point of fact, had been a student of a different college. William patted Oliver on the shoulder, then withdrew to the bedroom, where I gather he’d been when I was in the living room the first time.

  There was that expectant look again. No two ways about it, I was going to have to take my clothes off, and the scrunched-up tartan blanket on the floor was going to be of no help. I did some calculation: it would take me longer to take off my top (three items) than my bottom (two items that could, if necessary, be removed as one), so starting with the former would minimize the amount of time I would be totally exposed. Then again, if I started with the bottom, there would be less for him to look at for a longer amount of time, and besides, I could sort of crouch.

  Now it is time, I think, to tell you, if you haven’t already guessed, that at age twenty-one, I had never done it. It was just one of those things, like real estate ads, that I wasn’t interested in until later in life.

  I may have been indifferent to strong, restless desire in my youth, but not to anxiety. As a teenager, I prepared for the inevitable by studying scenes from movies to determine which way the girl angled her head when she kissed the boy. What I discovered was that, pretty much always, the female, and, therefore, the male, too, tilted to the right. My theory is that it has something to do with the exigencies of cinematic lighting or the fact that most people are right-handed or maybe even the rotation of the earth.

  Here goes nothing, I thought, yanking my sweater above my head.

  “What about your boyfriend?” Oliver Qas said casually.

  “What boyfriend? I don’t have a boyfriend,” I said, trying to disentangle my barrette from my sweater while trying to preserve my dignity and also not let my midriff look bulgy. “Oh, right. Him,” I said, remembering that I did have a fake boyfriend. “We’re not technically going out anymore. The six-month pact was just a promise thing.”

  Under the pretext of helping me with my barrette, Oliver Qas stuck his tongue into my mouth.

  I stepped back. “I can’t. I just can’t. I really like you, but I never have, and you know, no offense, okay? It’s just that I’m a . . . you know.”

  Oliver looked unfazed. “You’re going to have to do it sooner or later and it might as well be with me,” he said, taking a bossy step in my direction.

  “You’re right,” I said, “but it’s just that I’m too tied to my boyfriend right now. Emotionally, I mean,” and then I tripped over the tartan blanket. I couldn’t help but notice that the plaid was based in white, which my mother told me a plaid never should be.

  We parted in good spirits. Lytton Strachey even wrote out directions to my dorm, which he handed to me, before chucking my chin.

  And now, Eugene was about to kiss me.

  This time, I was ready, and not just psychologically. The day after I had met Eugene, I made an appointment with Dr. Bevan, the doctor who, according to Libby, had killed Ludwig Wittgenstein by misdiagnosing his prostate cancer as malaise until it was too late. “Contraception is not called for, old girl,” Dr. Bevan told me. Dr. Bevan emphatically believed that the solution to all physical and mental problems of old girls was pregnancy. “It straightens everything out,” he said, on medical authority, I presume.

  There was, on the other hand, Dr. Dansie at the Family Planning Clinic, who was to diaphragms as the Avon Lady is to samples. She handed them out enthusiastically to one and all. “Take this with you everywhere,” Dr. Dansie said, referring to the practice diaphragm she had given me until she could provide a customized one. “Let’s say you’re going on a first date; take it along. Or you’re going to the beach with an old friend; take it along. Business trip with your boss? Take it along. Lunch with a favorite uncle? My point is that you simply never know which encounter will, ahem, count.”

  I’m not sure why I told you this since I never even opened the vinyl case that night. How could I? Once things got going, to the extent they got going, it would have seemed, I felt, vexing to interrupt. Besides, I was concerned, above all, that Eugene not figure out that this was my first time and how much more blatant a clue is there than a practice diaphragm?

  When Eugene kissed me, he tilted his head to the right, though admittedly, I might have forced the position. I kissed him back. Twice. “Your kisses are so recondite, my peach,” Eugene said, “that they are almost notional.” Until that moment, I had believed I knew the definition of “notional.” I had looked it up many times before. Look it up again, I thought, trying not to let the word get in the way of my concentration. “You are to be commended for your artlessness,” Eugene said. That was the opposite effect I was going for, but a compliment’s a compliment, I thought. Or would that depend on what “notional” meant?

  “Beginner’s luck,” I said, because truth masquerading as a joke is always what I strive for. I needed a short break, so I pretended I had to scratch my nose. That wasn’t a long enough break, so I brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes, tucked in my blouse, adjusted my watchband, picked at my nail, plucked some lint off my sweater, got an eyelash out of my eye, cleared my throat, and coughed.

  I saw Eugene smile faintly, then put on a serious face. “Shall we, my precious abecedarian . . . proceed?” Eugene solemnly said and just as solemnly, I nodded. Talk about proceeding, my suitor had me on the bed before I knew which end was up. But then the proceeding stopped so that he could amorously fold each item of his clothes, taking special care with the trouser creases, and stack one piece on top of the other on the bedside chair, ending with his socks. He laid his watch on one sock and his eyeglasses on the other. I tried to ignore this preliminary activity, thinking that to take notice constituted prying, in the same way you’re not supposed to see what’s going on backstage before the show begins.

  Unfortunately, I was so intent on coming across as experienced I didn’t focus on the experience. I can tell you, though, that the mood was grave, as if we were in the operating room performing high-risk surgery. When Eugene said, in a hushed tone, “Have you a pillow to sustain my neck?” he might as well have said, “Nurse, scalpel.”

  Later, call it seventeen minutes, we were still under the covers, still undressed, but now we were discussing what it means for one to devote oneself to the Life of the Mind. By that time, I had turned into two people. Number One was lying next to Eugene, faking an interest in what he was saying. Number Two was somewhere else, looking at Number One in stunned disbelief that she had done what she had done, that she had pulled it off. Number Two gloated over Number One’s triumph, but worried that perhaps she had not pulled it off. What if Number One had made some mistakes, Number Two thought, and Eugene was too lofty-minded to have pointed them out? Number Two was the one I identified with.

  “As I have been noting in my journal—” Eugene stopped abruptly. “For the love of Zeus, deuce it!” he said, shooting out of bed. “How could I be so daft?” As Eugene put on his clothes, he explained that he had left his journal uncovered on his desk at the office and was worried that someone on the cleaning crew might read it. “I had been puzzling over a proof of the Schlendorff Conjecture for Irrational Numbers, and, keep your fingers crossed, seem to be on the verge of cracking it.” Eugene crossed his fingers. “My work is not yet ready to show the world,” he said, and he planted his finger on his lips, I guess to indicate not another peep about his equations.

  Eugene walked backward
down the hall, facing me. “Good night,” I said.

  “How can there be night, my orbital core, when you are not in the sky?” Eugene said, continuing to back slowly away from me.

  “Guess I’ll go to sleep now,” I said. What else could I say?

  “You sleep,” Eugene said. “And I’ll dream.” I thought he had put his hand on his heart, but it turned out he was reaching for a mint.

  Struggling to believe the heart-first, mint-as-afterthought theory, I said, “Good-bye, Gene.” I figured that conveyed affection without seeming cheeky.

  Eugene stopped in his tracks. I saw him sucking on the mint. “Perhaps Genie or Hugh or Yoo-hoo,” Eugene said, “but never Gene.”

  Many years later, when Eugene and I had come apart, I mentioned to him that he had been the first for me. Wouldn’t you think that that would elicit a tender, possibly even wistful response? “For what it’s worth,” he said, looking a little distracted, “you did a really crackerjack job.”

  * * *

  But before that, before many years later, there was the day after my first night with Eugene. As you might have figured out by now, I’m a big blabbermouth. I told, well, pretty much all my friends about Eugene. Here is what they thought of him.

  Libby: “He must have been the one I saw preening in the hall outside your room. Do you have the word ‘twit’ in America?”

  Obax: “He sounds dreamy. When can you two double-date with Etienne and me?”

  Etienne: “Philosophy, it is I am not agreeable with. To find out meaning of the life is for some bourgeois. It is unmeaning.”

  Anna: “He’s a philosopher? Does that mean he’s good at life or bad at life?”

  Nora: “It doesn’t matter what I think of him. Or what you think of him. Boyfriends have short shelf lives.”

  Paul: “He got you in the sack by using a word you never heard of?! I have to try that one.”

  George: “Why don’t broads ever go for English blokes?”

  Evie: “As long as he’s not from here, you’re fine. Englishmen’s teeth are rank.”

  Norma: “Eugene Obello? Isn’t an obello the mark they put in ancient manuscripts to indicate a spurious passage?”

  Bronson: “I’m fairly certain an obello was the name of the machete they use in the Philippines.”

  Not the unanimous endorsement I’d been hoping for.

  Nevertheless. Eugene and I started to see each other on a regular basis. It was now typical for me to bicycle over to his place after dinner three or four nights a week, have a glass of wine with him, then proceed to his bedroom until it was time for him to go to sleep. Eugene was strict about racking up seven and a half hours and my presence appeared to interfere with his goal. The one full night I did spend with him gave me insight into what it would be like to share a bed with the Gestapo. Every move I made, however infinitesimal, was subject to interrogation.

  Even so, to me, we were dating. I have come to believe, however, that Eugene had a different point of view.

  “I don’t get it,” Libby said one night. It was about one in the morning and we were in her room, engrossed in spirited discourse about ourselves. Also, we were putting nail polish on our toes. I had just returned from Eugene’s.

  “Surely you don’t mean to suggest you fancy him?” Libby said, kicking around her feet so the polish would dry faster. Do you hate it as much as I do when the English begin a sentence with the phrase “Surely you don’t mean to suggest”? Because, of course, that is exactly what you were going to suggest.

  “For one thing,” I said, “he’s really smart.” I held up a bottle of something. “Is this varnish?”

  “You Americans,” Libby said, “you’re all so bloody impressed with a sham Brit accent.” She handed me a nail wand. “Use this. It’s more expensive.”

  “Did you know that some people pronounce ‘hegemony’ with a hard g?” I said, deciding to illustrate Eugene’s brainpower with an example. “Eugene told me that.”

  “By the way, everyone we know is smart,” Libby said.

  “But everyone doesn’t say he likes this part of my face,” I said, pointing to the part of my face that was below my cheekbone toward my nose.

  “We’ll see,” Libby said. “And Eugene is wrong about ‘hegemony.’ And that color has too much color.”

  “Why do you have to ruin everything with facts?” I said.

  By the time Libby and I were putting the ridge filler on our nails, Eugene, I figured, was in his fourth hour of sleep. “Define ‘deviant,’ ” I said to Libby, who had just used that word to describe my relationship with Eugene.

  “Don’t you think that two people who regularly take their clothes off in front of each other at night,” Libby said, “should also do stuff together during the day, for instance, talk?”

  “Don’t you think you’re being awfully conventional?” I said, and then, with as much wisdom and weariness as I could affect, I added: “That’s not the way things are in the modern world, Libby.” Needless to say, how would I know? But who was this Libby to call me weird? She was seeing a guy who had informed her that if they were to make a serious commitment to each other and if she had to have her arm amputated afterward, he would leave her. He wanted her to be aware of that in advance, he said, so she couldn’t turn around and blame him later and say he was a bad guy.

  Despite what Libby said, Eugene and I did see each other during the day, albeit only on rare occasions. Once I attended a lecture he delivered, “The Fallacy of Fallacies Is a Fallacy.” Another time, we met for coffee at the university library. We had a big laugh that day, I recall, about a very old man we saw, we’re talking a million years old, who, when told by the librarian that the periodical he’d requested from the stacks would require three to six months to locate, leaned his elbow on the table and said he’d wait. It doesn’t seem funny now and, come to think of it, probably wasn’t funny then, but what can you do when love is first in flower?

  Hold on. It just came to me: something else happened that day at the library. A fragile-looking girl, about my age, fainted by the bicycle rack as we were unlocking our bicycles. I think you would have been as impressed as I was to see how adroitly and gently Eugene helped her up. When she seemed to falter, I watched Eugene offer her his arm. It almost brought tears to my eyes. My hero, I thought, though I guess you could say, strictly speaking, he was her hero. Eugene walked the girl home.

  “Good-bye, Genie,” I said.

  “Ta-ta, my duchess,” Eugene said.

  * * *

  I bet you are as down on Eugene as Libby was. I bet you are thinking: This guy better at least be one hell of a looker. I already told you I don’t describe people. I’m against description. I will tell you, if you insist, that Eugene had the wire-rimmed glasses and hollow cheeks of a young Bolshevik during the Russian Revolution, the organized hair of a boy having his school picture taken, and the lankiness of a tennis player—but honestly, none of that matters. I will tell you something that possibly does matter, something you might remember: Eugene’s eyes were run-of-the-mill, but what he did with them was not. He had a gaze that made the object of his attention feel, not just beloved, but absolutely worthy of that love. Of course, he wasn’t looking at you, so maybe you don’t care.

  I sense I haven’t convinced you yet. You know what I think it really was? He was a narcissist. I love narcissists—even more than they love themselves. You don’t have to buoy them up. They are their own razzle-dazzle show and you are the blessed, favored with a front-row seat.

  Here’s an example. It is not long after I’d met Eugene. He and I are drinking champagne on top of Castle Hill, which, to be topographically truthful, should be called Castle Bump. We are a-flush in celebration because an exalted academic journal has just accepted Eugene’s paper on . . . let me see if I can get this straight . . . how the thirty-seventh digit of pi is the key to understanding not just pi but much more, maybe even everything. (Please don’t ask me to go into more technical detail about pi tha
n this.)

  “Here’s hoping that your paper will forever change the way pi is thought of!” I say.

  “It will, my juju, it will,” he says with pronounced conviction and I believe him. Eugene kisses me—a lot of his body touches a lot of my body—and the next thing I know, he is lecturing me about Isaac Newton and gravity. Just think, I thought: Not far from the dirt mound on which I am having my most titillating moment to date, Sir Isaac Newton, it seems, had formulated his famous law explaining the mutual attraction of objects. I attached a meaning to Newton’s discovery, particularly to his universal gravitational constant, that I don’t think Newton had intended.

  “And that is why,” Eugene says, lifting his glass, “he is the greatest scientist of all time.” We drink to Isaac Newton or to Eugene or to both, and as we do, the sun sets. Eugene blocks my view.

  But that isn’t it entirely. It wasn’t only Eugene’s narcissism that made me fall for him. Name one other guy who ever told me I looked like a French actress?

  Afterward I bicycled home on cloud nine. I could hear “Oh, What a Night” blasting from King’s Cave, a dance club in the cellar of my college, and I took it personally.

  Later that same night, I think it was, Etienne, the boyfriend of my neighbor Obax, stopped by Libby’s room, where I had been propounding to her my theory that Stephen Hawking was faking it. “Could it be possible for you to give me the loan of your racket of tennis?” Etienne said.

  I can’t resist telling you now how much I detested Etienne. He and Obax were polar studies majors. His area was ice thickness; Obax didn’t have an area. She thought Etienne was cute and he was—in a Peugeot bicycle kind of way. You’d think that I, of all people, would have been sympathetic to someone enthralled with a guy who nobody considered enthrall-worthy. You’d think, but you’d be wrong.