Respond to but don’t trust. What I mean is that Artemisia seemed to know herself. Seemed because Artemisia was less master of her fate, captain of her soul, than she was a clever gardener. Sequestered in a domestic plot, she worked with the tools at her disposal. Trapped, yes, but in a hedge maze of her own careful design. How else to interpret her insistence that she had never wanted control? That she had, in her relationships with men, only ever wanted to be a child? How else to interpret her insisting all this to someone she barely knew, to someone who was still a child herself? Though sometimes I think in fact she did know herself. Sometimes I think one of the things she was trying to tell me was that she was unhappy in her marriage.
Artemisia was, at the time of our conversation, no older than forty-four. In other words, she was young and yet, because of my age, she seemed to me old, even quote-unquote wise, and therefore untouchable, metaphorically but also literally, and so even as I was coveting her sleeveless shifts, coveting the stern knot into which she’d tied her long hair, streaked with gray, the few frizzed locks that had escaped the grip of her elastic, it did not then occur to me that I might also be coveting the body beneath and below. Now I know that I am never more covetous than when someone tells me a story, a secret, the sharing of a confidence stoking in me the hunger for intimacy of a more proximate kind. I’m trying to say that Artemisia’s mouth was moving. That if I had been capable, in that moment, of true honesty, I would have said that what I most wanted to do was stop it with my own. I’m trying also to say that this desire need not be, was not in this case, sexual. Not in the way that the term is commonly understood. Artemisia had, in telling me her story, given me something of herself. My desire to kiss her was a desire to thank her, was a desire to give her something of myself, was a desire to become her, the imagined gesture equal parts grateful, generous, acquisitive.
Artemisia lit one more cigarette and smoked it down. She drank the last of her glass of wine. The bottle she’d brought to the table was empty. Well, she said, I should go to bed. Good night. She stood and then bent, placed one hand on my shoulder as if about to confide something further to me, something of so delicate a nature it would need to be whispered, her mouth moving against the skin of my ear. Perhaps I imagined, in the next moment, her head bowing as if to meet mine, the dip of her torso. Because then she merely pursed her lips and gave my shoulder a squeeze and, gathering her cigarettes, her glass, the empty bottle, reentered the suite’s living room and went, I assume, to her bedroom, the bedroom she shared with Pablo. I say shoulder but in fact she placed her hand in the curve where shoulder becomes neck. Let it, though perhaps this too I imagined, linger. I did not see her again that night.
Ann Arbor, 2002
“There’s this girl I know.” She took a drag of her cigarette, exhaled. We were in her apartment, large but the space poorly apportioned, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and then a kitchen jutting off a wide central hallway that served also as the living room, its floor hardwood, dark and scuffed; earlier that night I’d ripped a hole in my stockings, snagged the soft fabric on a splinter. I was sitting on the floor. We were graduate students in the Midwest and our stipends had rented us more space than we knew what to do with. John had been at the party but he had left and it was only women now, four of us: me (female pain in Jacobean revenge tragedies); the apartment’s tenant (American literature since 1981); Laura (the Bloomsbury group, with a focus on Virginia Woolf); and a blonde with heavy eyelids, those eyelids now closed because she was, her head resting against the wall, asleep (female narratives of the Civil War). Because Laura and the tenant were on chairs and I was on the floor and the other woman on the floor was asleep, I felt myself an acolyte or a novice, felt Laura and the tenant to be my teachers. Mostly the tenant. I craned my neck. The tenant was speaking.
“This girl I know. Knew. We went to undergrad together. We weren’t close, but I’d see her around. Not at parties, but in class, or she’d host—she called them soirées: cheese and crackers and flaky puff pastries stuffed with meat—and I’d be invited. We had coffee, lunch, a handful of times. Nice girl. Mousy, shy. Had braces her freshman and sophomore years. Pretty. But unpolished. Hair always back in a ponytail. Overalls. Actual overalls. Like the nerdy girl before the makeover, the makeover that is destined to be, that is a priori successful, because the girl, of course, she was always hot, she was just”—she waved the hand holding the cigarette—“wearing weird glasses or whatever.” She stubbed the cigarette out. “Anyway, her junior year, this was after the braces came off, she started dating this guy. She was—” The tenant stood and walked into the kitchen to refill her drink. Behind me was a coffee table littered with discarded cups, plastic, most of them, a handful filled with cigarette ash, lipstick-smeared butts. The tenant was standing now, leaning against one edge of the arched threshold that divided the kitchen from the hallway–living room. “She was,” the tenant said, “a virgin. I don’t know how I knew this—I don’t think she told me—but I’m sure I knew it and I’m sure it was true. We were part of the same larger circle. All of us English majors.” She smiled. “One semester a whole bunch of us took Chaucer and we would spend our weekends getting drunk and memorizing bits of The Canterbury Tales. We had a game going where the thing was to sneak the word queynte into conversations with anyone who hadn’t done their pre–eighteen hundreds pre-reqs.” She shrugged. “I guess you’ll just have to trust me when I say I’m sure, when I say it was known. Not that we gossiped about it. We were twenty, twenty-one, and I mean we memorized Chaucer for fun, it wasn’t so unusual. Just, it was known.” The tenant lit another cigarette. Laura and I were still sitting. Laura was worrying a cuticle on a finger of her left hand with the thumb of her right, as was her habit when she was no longer and could not foresee when she would again be the center of attention. The blonde made a small noise somewhere between a sneeze and a snore and rolled her head so that it drooped now over her left rather than her right shoulder. “But anyway this guy. He was—we wouldn’t have known to call him a predator then. A sexual predator. Even now, saying the words, I feel kind of”—she shrugged again—“kind of stupid. But he was a grad student and my first year he dated a freshman and then later she dropped out and my second year he dated another freshman and she went on medical leave and in between there were”—she waved the hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette—“rumors. That he could be a little—rough. That he didn’t care if the girl wasn’t into it. That the pretty girls in his section got the best grades. I remember hearing once that he had a wife stashed away somewhere, but that one I never— Anyway. The point is, my third year, our junior year, this girl, she starts dating this grad student. And the fact that he was dating a junior, this actually seemed like an improvement. She was twenty-one and he was thirty-one, maybe thirty-two, and we, I feel bad about this now, we joked that maybe this was exactly what she needed, like he was the hot guy in the movie about the pretty nerd, how she wouldn’t be a virgin much longer. I want to say—I want to offer as exculpatory evidence, our fear. I want to say that our jokes were born of our relief that he’d picked her and not one of us, and I do think that was part of it, but also—she was so prissy, she didn’t drink, didn’t go to parties, turned all her papers in on time. I think we resented her for being—apparently, of course, not like we knew—untouched by college, unmarred. By this point, this was several semesters post-Chaucer, we’d all humiliated ourselves in one way or another, gotten too drunk and vomited in the bushes or yelled at an ex in the backyard of a frat house or woken up in someone’s bed and not been able to remember how we got there—but this girl; this girl, she hadn’t—not once. We resented her for it. And then also why hadn’t he picked us, that was the other side of it, weren’t we good enough, pretty enough, smart enough. By what criteria had we been judged, in which ways had we been found wanting.