That was the gist of it.
Did he make fun of me?
Oh no, Kathryn, he didnt. Certainly not. No he didnt do anything like that at all.
Well, you wouldnt tell me if he had. Anything else? Did he tell you anything else about us?
He said you two were broke in those days. You worked in a library part-time. He said that you gave names to the dogs, the ones at the Humane Society. You named the dogs one by one, he said. The way he described it, what you did sounded like a blessing.
He told you that? I dont remember naming anybody or anything. I believe that he may have imagined the entire episode. We did go to the Humane Society once. I do remember all those animals. The barking. But I think we just walked in and then walked out without anything like an event, any sort of story, happening there. We had both been at the Botanical Gardens and we heard the dogs making a ruckus nearby, and we went over to investigate. The rest is probably imaginary. Im certain he made it up.
I suppose he might have, I tell her.
This is all so weird, she says. Your calling me out of the blue and asking me about some encounter that Bradley and I had years ago. Arent those matters personal? I think maybe they should be. I realize that nothing stays hidden anymore but Id still like to keep a few domestic particulars private. Especially when it comes to my love life. Such as it is. I cant imagine why anybody else would be interested in who I love or how I loved them.
Oh, everyones interested in that. Besides, Id change your name. You could retain your privacy.
Thats not quite what Im getting at, she says. My marriage with him failed. So its not a matter of pride exactly. I switched partners, but doing that is very difficult and taxing in ways you dont anticipate. Especially when you do it the way I did. It changes your views of yourself and who you are. You said youre a writer. Have you ever read Schnitzlers La Ronde?
Yes, sure.
Then you remember what its about. Changing partners. You should reread it. I acted in it once when I was a sophomore. She waits for a moment, as if imagining it. I played a housemaid. There was a pantomime lovemaking scene on stage between me and the young gentleman. That was fun.
Well, maybe you have a story of your own, I suggest. About what happened to you.
I have lots of stories, she says. But theyre not the sort you give away, you know and I dont tell them to just anybody. What did you say your name was again?
I tell her.
I honestly dont remember ever meeting you. Ive never heard of you. Did we ever meet? And this is for a book youre writing, Charlie?
Sort of.
You arent going to post this whole deal on the Internet, are you?
No.
Thank God. Who are you anyway? Could you please explain that again, that who-you-are thing?
I try to spell out to her who I am. Its not easy, summarizing yourself on the telephone to a stranger. Before Im finished, she breaks in. All right. I think I get the idea, she says. Okay. Thats enough. You want a story? Ill give you one. But then you have to promise me not to bother me anymore. Are you writing this down?
Yes.
Oh. The thing is, youre appealing to my vanity. I suppose I always wanted to appear in someones book, and I guess this is my chance. I can be a literary entity. Up there with Mrs. Danvers and Huck Finn and imaginary people like that. But youll just have to understand that Ill only do this once. Then you cant call me again. Im going to check on you before I talk to you again to make sure that you really are who you say you are. A woman in my position has to be careful. To start with, I dont remember you from my Bradley days. You could be anybody.
Of course. Thats right. I could be anybody.
But if you check out, this is where Ill meet you. And she gives me the name of the coffee shop where Bradley is the manager, Jitters, and she also gives me a time.
When I get there, I am served by a woman whose name tag identifies her as Chloé. Kathryn orders a café latte, sizes me up, then begins to speak.
CHARLIE, ILL START with a generalization here that maybe only applies to me. Maybe. Please dont be too offended. I always found it a challenge to love men. At first I just thought I had to, that I had no choice. I thought that men in general Id really rather not say this were unlovable. But I mean, look at them. If youre a man you probably may not realize how they are. Amazing when any woman can stay married to one of them. Most of the ones Ive known are bossy, or passive and obsessive, the men I mean, and after the age of twenty-five or so they are by most standards not beautiful. If one of them happens to be easy on the eyes, he gets hired by the photogenic industry. Beauty is not part of the show they do, most of the ones Ive known. So you have to cross that off the list of accountables right away. And youre left with their behavior.
They sulk, men, so many of them. They bear grudges and they get violent almost as a hobby, the ones Ive known. Didnt you realize this? Ask around. As a gender theyre youre always scheming or at least they seem to be scheming because they never ever tell you whats on their minds. The sample Ive had. They just sit there day after day and they brood. After the brooding, then the firepower. Well, I know these are generalizations, but I dont care, because theyre my generalizations, so I dont have to prove them, which is exciting.
I will say that the one feature I like about men is that they can usually figure out how small appliances work. Theyre good at fixing this and that. But that competence doesnt lead to passion, just to gainful employment. Of course Im only using the case studies here of the men I have happened to know in my brief lifetime. But a sample is a sample and what Im describing to you is what I have observed.
They get to you in the small ways. They have their little bag of tricks. You take Bradley. In high school he sat behind me or next to me in English and biology. He was above average whenever he studied, which wasnt that often because Bradley wasnt and isnt particularly studious. While everybody else was taking notes or being rowdy, Bradley was drawing sketches in his notebooks. Of me. Day in and day out he did pencil drawings of me in detail on paper. Even if his eyes were too large or too direct, he was a good-looking boy in those days when he remembered to comb his hair and to shave, and you should have seen the sketches he did of me. A few of them were confiscated by the teachers. Whenever they managed to steal a peek at what he was doing, the other girls were agog that he loved me so much. Everyone thought we were terrible sweethearts. Jesus. I never knew what I had done to attract his attention. In his hands a picture of a woman could often be more beautiful or arresting than the woman herself. It was hurtful, how beautiful he made me. I thought: thats me? I was just Kathryn before but in his sketches of me I was a miracle. I was extraordinary. I just couldnt get over what he did to me.
Do you understand what Im saying? He confused me in the way that a lot of women get confused. He had a system going with these sketches so that if he happened to be distorting my beauty by making me more attractive than I actually was, I never had the brains or the wit to notice it. These pictures pretended to be mere records of my looks, standing or sitting or gazing downward in thought, but they undermined me. If somebody makes you beautiful or says youre pretty and then repeats it insistently, you become his victim. He wasnt always detailed about my eyes but I didnt notice that at the time. That was my mistake. I should have noticed. Remember Picassos trouble with Gertrude Steins eyes in that portrait he did of her? Rembrandts portrait of himself in old age I saw it in London is as terrific as it is because of what he knew about his own eyes. Go look. Bradley didnt know anything about my eyes and therefore avoided them. Theyre not really in the pictures.
But because these Bradley-drawn pictures were celebrating me I fell in love with the pictures and then in a standard move I fell in love with the guy himself as the creator of the images in which a beautified version of me appeared. He drew one very elaborate sketch of me riding a horse that just about took the breath out of me. I was both beautiful and muscled, like the horse. A naked woman on a horse, two animals. I thought: if he can see me this way, then what else would I ever need?
But because these Bradley-drawn pictures were celebrating me I fell in love with the pictures and then in a standard move I fell in love with the guy himself as the creator of the images in which a beautified version of me appeared. He drew one very elaborate sketch of me riding a horse that just about took the breath out of me. I was both beautiful and muscled, like the horse. A naked woman on a horse, two animals. I thought: if he can see me this way, then what else would I ever need?
Well, much else is necessary, believe me. He only loved his love for me and the pictures he was drawing. He loved those two. He loved the feeling he was having. I was a mere accessory to the feeling.
Loving him was extremely tricky because he was inaccessible in a sort of wacky way. Like so many of these twenty-something guys he was a perpetual traveler in outer space. What are you guys looking for out there? Trysts with aliens? I dont get it. Never have. He was one of those men who could talk articulately about anything food or movies or music or current events but you could discern in the middle of his conversation that he had commenced to brood about something else that was not making its way into the mix. Right at the table hed disappear on you and you couldnt get him back. When he made love to me, he had this absentminded sex mannerism going on that eventually drove me crazy. And I dont mean how, with sex, personality has to give way to your desire. Thats why its so hard to talk when youre engaged physically.
Silent physical passion would have been just fine. But I felt insulted after a while: he made love the way you would drive a car to work. Autopilot stuff. Short-little-span-of-attention stuff. What I mean is that he was hardly in the same room with me when we were in bed together. He didnt notice enough how I was reacting. It was boorish. He hummed while he was doing it, as if he were changing a light bulb. If he could concentrate on me in the pictures, then why couldnt he concentrate on me in person when I was naked for him between the sheets? It made no sense. I assumed that this elemental problem with his absentminded love would improve, would go away, would dissolve.