The Lights Page 4

  “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.

  truth

  Later in October there was a film festival. Hogwarts was one of the sponsors, so we received free badges. This was a blow to Mark. He had adjusted without complaint to his status as a plus one. In fact, he had a real aptitude for it, bestowing the sense that suspending his own ambitions was a chivalric act. But filmmaking was supposed to be his world, and a certain luminary of the once-trendy Mumblecore movement who Mark particularly admired was premiering his new movie opening night. He didn’
t say how unfair this was, neither of us had to. I gently suggested that he could make a goal of getting a short film in next year’s competition. Wouldn’t it be more fun to be there with a film than just getting a free ticket?

  “Do you even want me there?” he said.

  “Baby, badges are like six hundred dollars.”

  “It must be nice getting presents for not having to work.”

  I rubbed his leg.

  The opening night film was at the same theater that held the revival series. There was a line wrapped around the building with a group of Hogwarts students toward the middle of it, including Jason and Harry. There was a feeling in my stomach that I decided was annoyance.

  For a couple of weeks I’d avoided Jason, and when I did encounter him socially gave him the cold shoulder. I hoped this confused and upset him. He had ruined our secret. I recruited allies to my cause. Being the product of an elite private school education, Shakespeare never invented a character better suited to the task. This Jason person, who I’ve barely noticed and it’s hard to imagine why I’m even talking about him, wouldn’t you agree he is abrasive and immature and the worst? Overall, I’ve been having the most wonderful time, though I have noticed an undercurrent of MALE PRIVILEGE, not to name any names (cough, cough, Jason White)… Getting people to side with you against a loud white idiot in a place like Hogwarts is approximately as difficult as leveling accusations of satanic consort in eighteenth-century Salem.

  At my approach Harry made a remark about the weather taking a turn for the Sapphic. Jason did not acknowledge me. This exacerbated my “annoyance.”

  After the screening there was a migration to the hotel bar, where a large crowd had gathered. Jason continued to ignore me, and I was now in a state of distraction. How immature was he! A few rounds later I found myself giving him a piece of my mind.

  “Are you PMS-ing or something?” I said.

  He looked at me like I was being the unreasonable one.

  I poked him. “Hi.”

  “So now that you want me to pay attention to you again I’m supposed to pay attention to you again?”

  “Um, obviously?”

  “I hear you’ve been saying messed-up stuff about me.”

  “Are you twelve?”

  “I don’t think you have to be twelve to object to someone saying messed-up stuff about you.”

  “I was only doing it so you’d know I was mad at you.”

  “Why the hell were you mad at me?”

  I did not know how to explain, let alone remotely desire to do so. It was good to see him.

  “It doesn’t matter now because I’m over it.”

  He considered this. Then he pointed at a decorative saddle and stirrups that was mounted to a post.

  “Do you bet me I won’t steal that?” he said.

  “You can’t steal it, there’s a million people here.”

  “What do you bet me I won’t steal it?”

  “I bet you nothing, because you’re not going to, and this is a pointless conversation.”

  “All right, bet me.”

  “I would bet you to not be the dumbest person alive but then I would lose.”

  Harry came over. I masked my impatience at the intrusion—not, I assured myself, that there was anything he was even intruding on.

  “I am going to count down from ten and then I am going to punch you in the face,” he said to Jason.

  “Ten,” he said, and punched Jason in the ribs. “You never know when Al-Qaeda will strike.”

  Jason pointed at the saddle. “Do you bet me I won’t steal that?”

  “You’re the world’s most miserable coward if you don’t,” said Harry.

  “Don’t call a native-born Texan a coward,” said Jason.

  “Sorry, I don’t speak coward,” said Harry.

  Jason threw back his drink, and looked around to make sure the bar staff was occupied, then walked over to the saddle and threw the post over his shoulder and ran out the doors with it.

  “That dumbass,” said Harry. “Now what’s he going to do with it?”

  The smell of his armpits was somehow more palpable in this crowd, as though even his odor was compelled to dominate the competition. But I was happy; I had the upper hand once more. Harry thought Jason had performed this towering idiocy on his account.

  But even if he did not know why, Harry intuited I had the advantage and gave me a considered look. “You know what your whole problem is, Oberlin?”

  “Yes, it is waging a full-scale assault on my nostrils as we speak,” I said.

  “Your problem is that you’re a seven who thinks she’s a four,” he said.

  I was too indignant to respond. I didn’t know if I was angrier that he was right that I saw myself as a four or that he had only called me a seven.

  Moments later Jason came back in and returned the saddle as unobtrusively as possible. He returned to us flushed and chagrined.

  “Coward,” said Harry.

  Later in the night the three of us wound up in the room of the filmmaker being celebrated, in the way of these things that you can’t remember exactly how it happened, but can often be attributed to the search for better drugs. There was some pot, but Harry was adamant that someone in this room was holding coke. I hoped not, because Harry was the second to last person I wanted to do coke with; coke is a drug that invites your least favorite person to the party and that person is you. I would still Hoover it if it was ever in front of me, though.

  “One of you Communist Hollywood cocksuckers is holding out!” Harry announced in frustration.

  No one came forward if this was the case, but it had the unintended effect of fascinating the filmmaker despite no shortage of parasites and toadies, in that feline way that we all feel a subtle pull to the one person in the room who is least interested in impressing us. They were not natural bedfellows: the filmmaker wore loose flannel shirts and an unflattering beard and was overall committed to the indie-film-dude sensibility which, in ordinary circumstances, prompted Harry to make wistful comments about reinstating the draft. He was also the higher status male, which alone could be expected to rouse Harry’s ire. But the filmmaker regarded him with such deferential curiosity that any instinctive aversion Harry may have felt was soon overridden by assuming his even more natural role as lecturer. I watched in astonishment as Mark’s hero listened credulously to Harry’s explanation of the failing of his work.

  “The point of narrative is to show the soul in conflict with itself,” said Harry. “This is the problem with cocksucking Hollywood.”

  The filmmaker interjected, politely observing that he worked outside the studio system.

  “I don’t care about your Hollywood Communist distinctions!” said Harry. “There are basic conflicts of the soul that fuel narrative. Courage, honor, betrayal, fighting the battle in a world of suffering and finding hope. This is life. Unemployed losers who talk like they have a dick in their mouth whose central conflict is deciding what silk screen T-shirt to wear today is not. You have a war going on inside you.”

  “I think I’m a pretty happy person,” said the filmmaker.

  “You have a war going on inside you!” said Harry. “And if you are telling stories with anything less than the moral conviction required to win this war, you are actively contributing to the empire’s decline.”

  The filmmaker absorbed this. “Oh man,” he said.

  I jumped in. “Is it possible for you to have a conversation about art without sounding like Mussolini?”

  Harry rolled his eyes toward the filmmaker for support. “This is why woman writers are like woman drivers,” he said. “Their emotions are driving the car.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  He rolled his eyes again.

  “Fuck you,” I said, this time with a quaver in my voice that universally means
you are losing ground.

  I glared at Jason. He was not the person I was mad at, but I was so mad someone would have to account for it, and Harry had the advantage just then.

  I could see that Jason was conflicted. He wanted to come to my defense but it would have meant publically challenging Harry and disrupting their pack equilibrium. I continued glaring at him. This is a moment I look back on with nostalgia. It was the first time I tested him.

  “Well, a lot of guys think they’re better drivers than they are,” said Jason.

  “What are you trying to say?” said Harry.

  “I’m just saying that most stuff you can say about women you can say the same thing about men, just with more ego.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you’re a Communist?”

  “You better not call a native-born Texan a Communist unless you’re prepared to reap the consequences.”

  “As long as the consequence isn’t that you sneeze on me so I become a Communist.”

  “Now you’ve done it.”

  Before long they were wrestling, red-faced and wheezing on the floor. It is a natural law that men who start out play-fighting will simply be fighting after thirty seconds and this was no exception. It was soon obvious that Jason was at a disadvantage. Harry was nearly a head shorter, but far stronger, and meaner, and he got Jason into a headlock from which he could not extricate himself with his thrashing knees and elbows.

  “Say it,” said Harry.

  But Jason would not yield. His breath was increasingly ragged as Harry tightened his arm around his windpipe, and Jason flailed more wildly, knocking over a standing lamp.

  “Who are these idiots?” said one girl.

  The filmmaker hit his joint with a troubled expression. “Do you think my characters lack moral conviction?” he asked me.

  I was focused on the display at my feet. Jason’s situation was more pathetic by the moment. It looked like he might pass out, but still he pried at Harry’s arm, limply, like a tired kitten.

  “Let go of him, you gorilla,” I said. But…the longer Jason held out, the happier I was.