When You Swim At Night

Dion Farquhar

She'd been so unable to achieve what she wanted so deeply, or so she never tired of claiming, she reminded herself as she turned in sync with Joan Baez's voice singing "Farewell Angelina" to watch Kevin and Kit walk down separate aisles. No parents on their arms, solid presences, converging in the middle at the altar.

Nice brocade evening suit Kit was wearing, she had to admit, though still incredulous at Kevin's choice of a mate. Beautiful fabric, perfect fit. The flared waist of the skirt-jacket wrapped around her too-full hips like a fluted seashell cradling her pelvis. But such a bright white. The suit would have been perfect in a self-possessed non-hysterical color. And context was ignored too. The sharp white didn't work paired with Kevin's dreary, saggy-assed beige suit reluctantly produced from the back of some closet, clearly the result of an adamant, "I'll do it myself" attitude. Bottom-lining his refusal (or still worse, inability), to suit himself appropriately for the remnants of traditional form Kit had insisted upon and extracted.

A little passive-aggressive foot-dragging here, she gloated, as she turned her attention back to the strains of the Baez song marking the beginning of the ceremony. Kevin and Kit neared the front of the church, reflecting the white-beige color prism set up by their moving bodies. Bright white and washed-out beige juxtaposed like a magnificent Barnett Newman. Stations of the Cross. But there, the unprimed canvas rather than any paint applied to it was what made it stand out, an experienced, virgin canvas screaming self-possession from its fabric-raw beige. Kit's showing us she's got the body down, plumped out or not. She's claiming it in a last hurrah, so why doesn't he support her in that, she wondered. Is Kevin going to play virtual husband to her superwife? Why is he contradicting himself and trashing her in front of us to boot? I can't believe I ever wanted this guy? The nothing-but-coffee-grinds-in-his-fridge, purist starving writer, but a pop Calvino, she had to admit. His understanding the spin of stories had led her to overlook his metaphysical tics. Like his belief in "the feminine imagination." She thought of all the reasons she'd wanted him in the first place and couldn't forgive him for not wanting her. A shared passion for writing wasn't enough for him. And shouldn't have been, she thought now.

In the end though, there were things she just couldn't live with in a man. Kevin was oblivious to the deep structural divide between the straight and the stoned, as important as the raw and the cooked. Writing was his only drug, his only way to get there. He lacked commitment for anything else. Like Catholics not using birth control because they weren't planning to have sex, Kevincould only let being stoned overtake him, never seek it out. He had no carry over, no staying power. Meaning missing. A drug is really a drug, it's not nothing there. She liked drugs. How they let you connect with your half-thoughts, fleeting sensations. The forgotten ground between neutral and overdrive. Your head on cruise. Which was actually a kind of thinking hard.

And he didn't know how to get stoned on food either. The eighties passed him by. Living in Manhattan on the upper West Side, he might as well have been in Kansas. He ate take-out pizza and deli sandwiches nightly, although he lived in a neighborhood surrounded by Chinese, Thai, Indian, Mexican, and every other ethnic restaurant that offered take-out delivered to your door. Now, she thought, Kevin and Kit are a good match there. They eat like Puritans. Oversteamed broccoli and a pedestrian roast chicken. And that cole slaw. She'd steel herself for dinners at their place. There was no getting stoned on food there. The kind of place where you have to ask for the pepper because it's not on the table, and when it comes, it's in a shaker.

Thank god I'm not marrying him, she thought. Someone (of her generation and class) who doesn't know the difference between grinder pepper and shaker pepper is willfully ignorant. Kevin and Kit lived in Manhattan, a few blocks from Zabar's, a store with the best selection of kitchen equipment at the lowest prices. It probably had five kinds of pepper grinders to choose from. There was just no excuse. Deliberate stupidity, not wanting to know, was the one thing she couldn't stand. I detest indifference, fence-sitting of any kind, she realized. She was feeling better by the minute. Maybe this wedding won't be so bad, she told herself, they really are a good fit, dispassionate, neutral even, about the pepper.

At some deep level, she thought, returning her gaze to the couple at the front of the church, now turning to face friends and family, as she noted the way he tucked his head in down between his shoulder blades, his body is rejecting hers. She became aware of her measured breathing. I'm alone here. Out there for years without a keeper. Why single women are poor. They don't want to make it look too easy. Or more women might do it.

It was an hour before she was to meet and have her first and only "date" with Monroe, if that's what you call the time adults spend together when they are considering spending more time together that includes fucking. She watched Kevin's slightly too-long, dark brown straight hair brush against his shirt collar as he moved his head. It was just an inch too long to look good for a wedding, she observed, or six inches too short.

Don't go off the deep end. Less label envy, more contempt. There are two of everything here and I am alone. Again. But the only alternative was settling for bullshit or a full-time babysitting job. She had other things to do. Fascists worshipping at the shrines of their overblown reflections or wimps she'd have to coax along, fanning the tiny flame for both of them. You need to be clairvoyant to satisfy a man out of bed. And she wouldn't settle. Better alone. Look at this churchful of couples. Do they look like they've got the energy to spark anything in anyone, least of all in each other. No heat, just routine. Give me stark raving mad baglady burnout over slow sub-urban compost. She breathed gratefully, feeling her coursing pulses slow, finding the pace of some peace inside the rage.

Her friend Kevin, spoke first, turning to face their friends and families. Without glasses and beardless, he looked younger than his forty years, she thought, like a precocious little boy. She tried to settle in and get comfortable on the hard wooden pew, watching him shift his weight ever so slightly from one foot to the other. Looking straight out at the people in front of him, he began his would-be pagan rap. Sure of himself, yet making it all up as he went along, with no need of notes. "I'm moving through her," she heard him say behind his words. He went on, paying homage to his being nourished by those female juices that he swore he was gonna do his best to keep flowing for them both. What a crock. Such dishonesty. They're the sexless models. I just can't see them loosening up enough to fuck. He went on to anticipate objections, translating a little: "I'm not just the pussy-whipped, clean-shaven little boy you see up here in an alien suit and a tie that pinches my neck. O.K., I never got a handle on the dress code thing. But this is a victory narrative all the same. With her I am not me, I am identity liquified into warm flow and intensities terraced and scaled. I sing the body electric (she cringed) with Kit and that's why I'm up here, because of her. Let me spin it out for you."

OK, Kevin, she thought, good pretense, but no converts, watching him will his rap to soar out of the frame of the gothic arches, spread beyond the geometrics of the seating. Will it out of reach of the sore-loser man in hippy robes embroidered in primary colors standing between them, open prayerbook clasped to his chest like a folded flag, lips frozen into neutrality. Go for it, Kevin, do it for us. Take us with you up and out of here into that place you write of--joy and pleasure. If we can hear you out without cringing or trashing your experience, denying your happiness, this coming home and opening out you are saying this woman is for you, we also open to you, with you, and we get touched by that contagion too.

We are everywhere, began the subtext, the very reason he was her friend, her fellow writer, like viruses on the body politic. But smarter, faster, more pleasured and more humane than you cowardly pricks in charge of everything, making sure that no one ever has any fun, defending your own boredom-dealing privilege with the work-for-me-or-die imperative, teaching us to hate the colors of our own and each others' skins, taking our bodies away from us, draining our blood, and feeding us a diet of overcooked stones in the name of a civilization that deserves death row. Gospel made history. Forget the word made flesh. We should be so lucky. The trick is doing history without gospel. Medea an object lesson about the dangers of mixed marriage and independent women. Regret and revenge. She glanced at her purple suede backpack curled next to her on the dark oak bench.

Or, Anglo-Saxon curse. Romance forms, Teutonic foundations. "Why hast thou made thy mate eat fruit?" Made? Was Milton on Adam's side too? Or just his characters? she wondered. You fucking bad-rap prick. Don't saddle me with an opposition that doesn't even exist yet: consenting partners - violent coercion. Feh. I'm sharing this fruit, this knowing, with Adam because it's good. There is nothing better, more fun, than more forms, knowing them so that one might play better. A world beyond work. Before play, even. And he goes for it because he, like me, isn't a prick, but then we get killed. And I get blamed. Sin. Death. Work. Oh, puh-lease. If god had been sex, or art, or revolution, I would have been welcomed into heaven along with my mate and the snake. A veritable red carpet. A party. Graduate school at its best. Slithering subjects. That would have been worth writing down.

She raised her hand to her lips, feeling the curve of her smile, confirming her embodiment. I've been there, god, she thought, and I know that realm. And I'll be there again one day. With a real partner. Maybe even to stay.

The groom was warming up, threatening to break out into an aria, pure performance, up there on the altar. Funny word, groom, she thought. Doesn't a groom scrub shit off rich people's horses, deal with stables, clean them out. She watched and listened to Kevin's speech as if she were at an opera. Only without music. Thinking about the way the music in opera comments on the action in a way that's unavailable to the characters. Music the characters' desires.

Her glance passed over and through the wedding couple in front of her to the more elemental tableau depicted by the stained glass windows. A half-naked young, very pale muscular man being tortured. Blood, pain, sweat. The crown of thorns, whips, ropes. Roman soldiers with beards in tight pants with armored breastplates. Sleek knee-high leather boots. Other men in beards and flowing robes. Weeping women in cascading veils. Death by crucifixion. A man graphically tortured to death. For claiming to be who he is, the son of god. Now he is judge and savior. Baby Jesus and the Easter Bunny. A worldwide industry grown up around him.

Marry this to the eighteenth century. All over before then. By the sixteenth century, only children play. Then, the spirit of gravity gathers steam. In the evolution of play, adults get dropped out. But they get something else. First, came courts and queens. Handel chirping on the soundtrack. Forever and ever and ever. The King is dead. Long live the King. The x/y axis. Master-slave/revolution. Class/race/gender. She knew their power, their poison as well as their cure. His hand in her hair, firmly pulling her toward him. Her mouth around him, his tongue moving over her clit, fingers sliding inside her. She loved good energy, the back and forth looping circles of overlapping talk, the layering of touch, comings and goings, resting lightly before the rise of other pleasures, plateaus.

She came back from temporal limbo. Kevin was laying down the word, something about orality and sex in the church of his bride, her body his temple, the only one he's gonna worship in forever. He was getting into a pace, coming into his stride. He'd moved on. Groom at a gallop. Now declaring himself, his profound need for their fucking, the desire all bound up with need and fear that it continue to flow through him with her. That this fucking has been feeding him and he's hungry. So he's gonna treat her good. Try to hear her side, be able to meet her at least half way.

Pretty wonderful, she thought, letting herself be sucked in, to a point. But why wouldn't he play penguin cool to her white brocade suit that left him slumming in baggy beige instead of a shiny tux, a performative negation of his straight-on rap. She couldn't stop herself from thinking how much he looked like a hologram of himself, a 3-D plastic doll, rotating evenly and noiselessly up there on the altar.

But back to the rap that he was winding down now. What moved her was his declaration that he would fight to keep their juices flowing, keep them moving, that he'd do anything rather than let them dry up. He would stop at nothing to fuel their passion. She liked that commitment in a man. Thought it courageous of him to be able to say it straight, without the usual wink or elbow-in-the-ribs patriarchal imperative that ironized any expression of real feeling. Except that he hadn't had any--for me, she couldn't help recalling. No, he wanted Kit, not me. Why was she still smarting from his lack of interest?

She remembered her mother's hysteria around the entire domain of the sexual when she was a teenager, implying that men didn't marry girls who let them "go too far" with them. She smiled at the unintended wisdom of fifties strategic caveats about feminine caution. The truth was, men didn't marry their peers. For a woman to be a peer, she had to be better, smarter, faster--working with all sorts of handicaps. A light clicked on in her head. She pulled it together. They marry the aerobics instructor, the rehab nurse, the crazy they then can't leave, their students. Not me.

She liked what he'd said and started to feel abysmally alone again. Who cares if I don't really want him. It hurts to see them declare that they want each other. Nobody wants me. But even her inability to create the relationship she hungered for hadn't driven her to despair. To the edge, maybe, but not over it. Unlike some of her friends who believed in the inevitability of unhappiness, she dreamed her happiness daily. Her resilience fueled absence with deepening visionelaborated through live-wire webs of friendship. Fellow travelling border-crossers, she knew she'd be dead without them. But here I am at Kevin's wedding, not a friend in sight, she thought as her eye swept the group of strangers in the church.

No one was wanting to feed me and be fed by me. At one level she could hardly remember what sex was about. You have to get undressed to do it! She was incredulous. At the same time, she knew that for her, good sex counted as necessary for a good life. And she was so far from finding it. It had nothing to do with will. Or I'd have it. And she didn't. It just took one, she reassured herself, reining herself back from despair. Something she remembered she used to love to do. And would do again. Some day.

The words that Rich, a vicious and fiercely competitive acquaintance whom she'd met through Kevin, spat out in a snit, came back to her: You're too much for him. I introduce you to an eligible man and you blow it. You don't know how to make a man feel good. You've got to lay back, not argue so much, make him feel like he's got it all together. A man wants a woman to confirm what he's got, show him a little respect, not be on all the time, not matching him shot for shot, Rich had crooned at her, contempt lacing his rap.

She hated Rich's just-beneath-the-surface-hostility, his refusal to recognize the many respects in which they were on the same side--transgression, challenge. But why the desire to hurt? He'd done it several times, gone nuts with her. And in public social situations, since that was all they'd ever been in together. And they hardly knew each other. But his meanspiritedness had hurt her even though she knew he was in far worse shape than she. She had checked her desire to respond. You cruel faggoty prick, you're only capable of fucking crack-addict kids you pick up in Times Square hustler bars when you're paying for the sex. Go read your fucked up self-hating gender-twisted script with your chosen homeboys and see where it gets you. As for me, I'm doing the best I can.

She snapped back to the church at a pause in Kevin's speech, amazed at how Rich's "You're-not-femme-enough" rap coming from this transgender bad-faith uppity prick had stung her. Besides, he was right. But she was a little slow in registering that Rich was even more of a pig and more of a woman-hater than the straight men she fucked. An independent woman their red flag. After Kevin finished speaking, she could feel the audience suppressing its applause, translating it into a distinct rustle. She almost spontaneously shouted, All right, but caught herself just in time.

Now Kit was there turning toward Kevin and the congregation to say her rap. She was smiling but her hands clutched a small spiral pad from which she read. Unlike Kevin's pagan rhetoric that he was putting out there for all to join in celebrating, Kit spoke with difficulty--of the fence of her beliefs, of nature being god in all of us, of the healing power of love, and of her pagan-savior boy she's gonna mamma. He's her heartfelt project, sanitized as prayer, healing, god, and therefore OK. Kit-the-person was strangely absent during her speech despite the cast of characters: Kevin, nature, god, love.

She could see the minister warming a little to Kit's rap. After all, historically, women have been their allies more than men. Desperate fools trying to make religion work for them. But that was another story, she stopped herself. The minister's posture and body language relaxed, and he backed off from the tight-lipped demeanor he'd assumed during Kevin's assault. Kit waxed reverent about reconnecting with nature, droning on about their sharing a love of the outdoors, camping, hiking. Spare me the pastoral trip, she thought, remember Cain. An uptight farmer who did in a dumb shepherd. And all those rural tribal idiots on five continents killing each other in bucolic isolation. Spare me paens to the values "nature" teaches us.

She tuned out, her mind segued into imagining their sex. What did Kevin feel when they were in bed? Did they do everything? Kit was so sweet and boring compared to Kevin. Maybe they're the wicked ones in bed. No, can't be. Doesn't good sex entail imagination, risk, perversity? She thought of the tightly scripted, limited, patterned sex some men had insisted on with her. And in despair she'd complied. Oh, god, she thought, amazing how even sex can be used to shut one's partner out. Who was Kit now to him? What would she become? Was Kit wearing a garter belt underneath that white suit? she wondered, refocusing on the white and beige blurs in front of her.

When she finished reading her speech, Kit gently folded her steno pad, hugging it to her chest. She smiled at Kevin and the minister, both of whom smiled back at her. Finally, he got to do his bit: the vows and rings part, as she thought about her complicated friend Kevin, and her own mixed motivations, able to fully acknowledge the vein of morbidity in her interest in this wedding. She couldn't help admitting that he had interested her because he seemed initially to be scarce good material: a peer of sorts. When they continued to meet periodically to talk theory and literature during the past year, each lunch or dinner would be ritually begun with Kevin's status-report on his increasing involvement and connection with Kit. The first few times, she'd hold her breath for the desired confession of break-up and disaster, until eventually--a little slow--she decided she didn't want him anyway. What was this horrible scavenging she was reducing herself to anyway? That's another story, she sighed. Eventually, she managed to say she was happy for him and only wished she had comparable news to report.

After this ceremony, though, she knew that Kevin was in deep trouble and one day might unwittingly tap into his unacknowledged rage at Kit's not being able to keep up. He would unleash escalating emotional violence against Kit. Who lacked even a clue as to what was happening. So she would go hysterical and demanding, thereby provoking his even further withdrawal. The rising pitch of violence being the only way to stir himself up at all now. Looking at the two of them standing at the front of the church near the door to the hall, she shuddered slightly, recalling the lock-step dance of her parents, or even, more generationally current, of her own years cultivating variations of relationship hell.

There had been enough superficial differences between relationships to keep her from recognizing basic patterns such as passion fueled by unavailability. Then, when unhappiness and misery followed as she struggled to get them to do what they couldn't, she erased her own complicity by designing her very own victim niche. I picked these guys who couldn't do it, she thought. Yeah, but give yourself a break. They were also out there--ostensibly single, heterosexual, even claiming they wanted a committed relationship--to be picked. She was stymied by how intrapsychic forces intersected with market conditions.

This is crazy, she thought, snapping back to consider the couple who were publicly declaring their commitment to each other. Kevin and Kit are fundamentally incompatible. For example. Kevin hated cars. Living in Manhattan, he had no need of one, so he elevated indifference to the level of political principle. Kit, on the other hand, living at the end of a subway line in Brooklyn, stonewalled him on his car contempt and refused to give hers up, even though the apartment they just moved into was on the Upper West Side. She, on the other hand, took a third path. Never having had the choice, I get to remain agnostic on the car issue and make political capital out of it. Actually, it was handicapped parking that got her the most incensed. It's really couples' parking, she mused, because every car I've ever seen in a handicapped spot leaves someone inside on the passenger side. Sour grapes for the division of labor.

Finally, the minister was getting his few minutes to do the vows. Nothing unusual here. Kevin boomed out his "I do" and Kit squeaked out hers. Vow, rings, blessings. Thank god it's over, she thought, as she slung her backpack over one shoulder and stood up to walk out of the pew. She watched the guests making their way over to the receiving line Kevin and his bride-wife formed as they stood side by side in a corner of the church, guarding the entrance to the church hall.

She looked around at the sanitary surroundings of the church annex. Those long, brown metal folding tables were timeless, she thought. And the concrete floor and cinderblock walls. Such a contrast with the gold gilt pseudo=baroque painting and sculpture inside the church. She wondered, Which one was the stage set? Watching Monroe's lanky frame bend over to cruise the platters of whitebread tea sandwiches, she thought, this is the most interesting looking man in the room. Might as well say something. So without pausing too long as she glided past him, she said, "Check out the spanokopia. Beats the white bread." There was some quick double-take side-stepping that showed in strong body language that he had noticed and liked her comment. The next thing she knew they were standing alongside of each other in a group of people who were tentatively trying to talk about their alienation from the forms they'd just witnessed.

"What wedding seems to me to be about," a short, slight middle-aged man with small black and blue dinosaurs on his tie said, "judging from the past three I've been to, is that the woman wins some formal concessions from the man, his public declaration of love, commitment, etc."

The lanky one turned to her, shifting a tiny napkin and half a piece of spanokopia into his left hand. "Thanks for the tip. It's pretty good. My name's Monroe Herman," he said, extending his hand.

"Hi," she said, "Sue Hunter," shaking hands before turning back to the group to hear what a trim woman in her forties with a stylish very short haircut had to say.

"It's clear that marriage, as opposed to living together, mainstreams your relationship. Sometimes, when people age, they have less energy for the small fights."

"Is that bad?" a woman in an attractive floral print dress shot back. "I mean, aren't they often a waste of time?"

Her eyes tried to maintain focus but her head was racing in high gear. Uncritical participation in bourgeois couple formation, and its symbolic older sister, legal marriage, is almost universally practiced by straights, that is--radicals as well as the general population.

Marriage triangulates the private couple into key economic and political institutions. Legitimizes children, inheritance, property transfers, insurance coverage. The idea of community witness, while ostensibly celebratory of couple formation, functions as nuclear policing. The tyranny of community. And gender is not incidental either. Almost always, the trump card is held by the man. Remember, there's radically differential education, job training, income--in addition to emotional makeup. The one thing he has withheld. It's women who seek, demand, and need marriage. It's women, endless flow, soft, wet, and infinitely malleable, who would nail down the law, the absent father, the endless flux of authoritarian simulations--which cannot be secured because it's everywhere. So female insecurity and piety have made home a prison. Male desertion is framed as break-out. To create its own underworld of resistance too. The number of deadbeat dads has never been larger.

If the couple is kept going by feelings of dependence and need, on the one hand, and guilt and feared ostracization, on the other, then why stay with a partner when it's over, when it's turned into mutual acrimony and contempt with both people playing out their intrapsychic S/M scripts.

"So why do you think they did it?" Monroe's voice pierced her rant, at the same time he leaned toward her with an outstretched platter of assorted cheese cubes with toothpicks clustered together in a shotglass.

"The usual symbolic reasons, I guess. Commitment, family. Who knows?" The tie, short haircut, and floral dress all nodded agreement. "How do you know Kevin and Kit?" she interjected, taking a more concrete tack, letting her glance fall on Monroe.

"Actually, I just met Kit once before. I'm one of Kevin's writer friends. I'm a contributing editor on Third Leg Review,..." "Oh, Third Leg, good journal. I've seen it around."

"We published Kevin. Do you know his Superman series? Well, Third Leg took a chance and published one of his first. A story about an armchair type whose life is run by revisions of Superman comics. You know, fifties fantasies brought up to date, grunged and urbanized. When he sold the collection to that little press, it took off. And we know some of the same people on the journal, it turns out. What about you?"

"Well, it's a similar story. I'm a contributing editor on Washington Square,..."

"Really. Well, well," he beamed at her, unable to conceal a twitch of envy. "It's a great spot to be in, don't you think? Contributing editor, I mean." "Absolutely, not too much work, you help out a little. I write reviews for each issue and bring some people in. We published Kevin's Selectric mushroom cloud poems. I met Kevin at a benefit reading we had a couple of years back. The sex-and- violence gay-boy Rich Benders, who's in that prestigious Dutton series..."

"Yeah, I know that one. Great covers and they spend a lot on promotion, but you've got to be gay."

"Yeah. Rich introduced us during the break. He was match-making. I was busy elsewhere and so was Kevin. Anyway, we're friends, but I can't fathom his taste in women...I mean, his choice of a wife."

"Do you want to get out of here? Go for coffee. There are some cafes nearby," Monroe said, smile in his eyes.

Feeling his interest, she allowed hers to flow. Looking back at him with a pleased smile, she said, "I think it's respectable to leave soon. Do you know anyone else here?"

"I think that Kevin is friends with the people from New Jersey who publish Parrot Quarterly. The short guy all in black who's trying to pick up the woman on his left. He's the editor, Sheldon Rose."

"Kevin circulates a lot, doesn't he?"

"Yeah, and so does his work."

They said their goodbyes to Kevin and Kit, smiled and nodded to some of the people they'd been talking with, and took off, out of the dark church annex and into the warm spring day. Feeling the warm air, she took off her black linen jacket and hooked it over one strap of her backpack and began to roll her long-sleeve blouse up to the elbow. I wonder what this one's up for? she mused with a smile spreading across her face. Wouldn't it be nice...

"It's good to be out of there," Monroe said, turning to her with another grin that registered pleasure, "what a great day." He also took his jacket off and slung it over his shoulder, letting it hang on his thumb and sway with his gait as he walked.

"Yeah," she said, "I like spring."

So now what? she wondered, looking over at him. Who is this guy? Do I want him? Does he want me? Forever or for a fuck? At least for a fuck, she thought, you've got to start somewhere. Monroe's pace was energetic, she noted, as they walked along the pleasant commercial main street of the Brooklyn neighborhood to which several of her friends had moved for more space than you could get in Manhattan and a magnificent park designed by Olmstead, the same guy who designed Central Park. When she visited her best friends in Park Slope on a weekend, she'd sometimes spend the night, bringing her running shoes for a morning run in the spectacular park.

"I like the Slope," he began, evidently feeling the need to justify his living in Brooklyn, "I've got a beautiful one-bedroom that would be double the rent in Manhattan."

"Yeah, I know," she heard herself say, "I have friends here. It's a great neighborhood. What street are you on?"

"Prospect Place," he said.

Near the subway, she thought, easy in, easy out.

They had stopped in front of a cafe with an outdoor sitting area, a few pitiful potted plants demarcating its borders. They hastily read the menu perched outside on a wobbly stand. Omelettes, pasta, sandwiches, deserts. "This looks fine," she said. He nodded and they walked in the door and through the restaurant to reach its outside tables.

After pushing her fork around the last bit of congealed raspberry tart, and draining the last drop of latte from her cup, her interest in Monroe was sated. She was eager to get away, get on the subway, stop at the Union Square Farmer's Market on her way home and get back to her Saturday. At eight, she was meeting a close friend for dinner in their favorite downtown Japanese restaurant with the scrumptious appetizers and totally fresh sushi. Then they'd go back to her house and talk and drink herbal tea and smoke grass. Maybe she'd bake her friend's favorite cookies that she adored too--those labor intensive Florentines. Oh, god, how did it get to be three o'clock, she thought, by the

time I get home, there will be only a few hours left before I meet Nicole. She wanted to lie on her couch and read, maybe even write a little. Savor her phenomenological gumbo.

During a pause in their conversation, she asked their waitress for the check. Although she was torn, she knew she couldn't begin dating Monroe. She had learned a great deal about him in a relatively short time. He was smart, and his heart was in the right place. But what an emotional mess. He subverted his ambitions at every turn, and she wasn't interested in another rehab case. At forty, he was still perennially broke, having chosen to support himself with marginal adjunct jobs in order to free up his time to write. But took no responsibility for the downsides that accompanied this choice, conflating the difference between "poor" and "broke."

He's bad news. Not lover material, she sighed, watching him slowly count out singles from his wallet to pay his share of the bill, a mere five dollars, as if he were parting with five hundred. She had quickly produced a twenty, and watched him construct her as the bourgeois. I'm not playing Lady Rich Bitch to this little boy broke, she thought, no matter how good he fucks. And I'd sure love to fuck him, but the price is too high.

What else had she learned? He was overidentified with the prisoners to whom he taught writing at Riker's Island, and who were putting out a literary magazine with his help. It was clear that he idealized their incarceration, saw them as pure victims, and was expiating his own white-male WASP guilt by overidentifying. A good observer, he had absorbed some urban black speech tics, and was quite riveting in his ability to break out into a kind of rap song. With no self-consciousness of what his self-aggrandizing casual anecdotes revealed about his own pathology that he mistook for radical politics, he told of provoking the prison administration. Silly things that got overblown by petty authoritarian bureaucratic hacks like using the prisoner's bathroom after class, a forbidden territorial transgression. This incident got him temporarily suspended from the teaching staff, provoked a demonstration inside, and made him even more of a star than before. He doesn't have a clue, she thought, he's bitter and sees himself as an oppressed victim.

She also read his put-downs of intellectuals and graduate school as more a lack of self-knowledge and insecurity about his own unresolved ambivalent relationship to the university, to the Ph.D. program he dropped out of years ago. With an anti-intellectual New Age inflection, Monroe railed on about how academics were out of touch with their bodies, how they traded living flesh for dry knowledge. Oh, god, she thought, not that rap. Everyone who had any brains and politics who'd gone through that ringer knew that the hoops were punitive and bullshit, much of the training pretentious beyond imagining, the jargon unconscionable, and the self-congratulatory pomposity of the professors unbearable. Yet if you wanted the credential they held out, you had to jump through their hoops, and do it to their satisfaction. It was just another complicated power relation, and the graduate student was in the subordinate position.

Yet Monroe described his experience of graduate school as if he'd been taken prisoner by torturers. His victim narrative failed to provoke her empathy, but instead completed her assessment of him as definitely not date material. He had also managed to interweave the class theme into everything. Graduate students were a "privileged" lot. Everything was "handed to" them. This attribute seemed to automatically discredit all intellectual work associated with the university. She listened to him, nodding where appropriate. This guy's incredible, she reflected, eyes locked in his. He actually believes this rap.

A year ago, she'd have done it. Gone ahead and fucked him, dated him, believed he was up for more than a fuck or two, and had a one-way but nevertheless full-fledged affair of the "swept away" variety. When not narcissistically self-involved, he could occasionally seem quite present and emotionally generous. He already was using stock lines like: "I feel I met you thirty years ago when I was a kid and now we're here together again."

She was back five years with Russ, one in a long line of master verbal manipulators, the pseudo-therapeutics. Back then, she hadn't learned the difference between intent and act. Repeating the fate of her ancestors. Just like 'ol dad. Or Gothic ghosts returning from the grave. So she hung on every word. One promise after the next. Declarations of intent that had held her in thrall. The power of words. Unable to grasp the conditional nature of his undelivered promises, protestations of evolving commitment. He would buy the fish; he wanted to be a full partner. There would be plenty of time to meet her friends. They would take a vacation together soon. He'd make dinner at his house, (and did; dinner was a tuna sandwich, and he didn't have any seltzer in the house, a month into knowing it was the only thing she drank). He would get over his sexual shyness. What was her hurry.

"I've really enjoyed talking to you," Monroe said, touching her forearm playfully. "Do you want to exchange numbers? Maybe we could get together."

Here goes, she thought, drawing in her breath.

"I'm really too busy," she said, "but I appreciate your asking. I also don't think it would be a good idea, given how my life is going."

"I was thinking," he persisted, "Next week, I could meet you at the NYU pool when it closes, and we could go to a cafe. You said you swim at night."

What does he know about me or my life, she thought, he's so self-involved, and he's been telling me, screaming at me, thinly disguised, that he's non-monogamous, a free spirit. Well, he can just freely toddle on--without me. Funny, that's what stuck, the swimming.

They got up and walked out of the restaurant together. "Bye," she said, "Take care." "Bye," he said, a look of consternation crossing his face, as she turned away from him to walk down the block.

On her walk to the subway, she savored the mid-afternoon light, happy to be going home. She looked in the shop windows, deciding whether to go in to a boutique with a SALE sign, enjoying the busy commercial street. She looked forward to riding the D train because it came out of the ground to cross the East River on the Manhattan Bridge. She reached into her backpack and plucked out her headset, turning it on. Handel's Jephtha.

She appreciated the cooler temperature of the subway station with its familiar mechanical smells of track and tunnel. It feels like the weekend, she mused, looking around at the other people on the subway platform. Thinking of how much she liked the frisson of Saturday night, even if she didn't buy into the "date night" part of it. People have been cut a little slack. Two days off from the jobs they hate. They're more relaxed. It even affects my workaholic rhythms.

As the train came out of the tunnel and sunlight poured into the car, she glanced up from the novel on her lap. Looking north over the oncoming silver skyline shimmering in the afternoon sun, she felt a bit of its energy and majesty. Pleased with herself, she watched the mid-afternoon light play on the buildings.

I like to swim at night, she thought, a smile crossing her face.

She sang along with the soundtrack:

Not cheerful day nor spring so gay
Such mighty blessings brings
As peace on her triumphant wings.

© 1996, The Blue Penny Quarterly. All rights reserved.