What She Saw... (15 page)

6. Humphrey Fung

OR “The Anarchist Feminist”

NOT TWO WEEKS after she and Phoebe met—in Introduction to Biological Sciences 101, a prerequisite for graduation— Holly Flake drove her baby blue Dodge Dart over to Delta Nu Sigma in the middle of the night and helped load up the back with Phoebe's possessions (plastic milk crate after plastic milk crate of shoes and books, posters and towels, hangers and diuretics). Then she squired the lot of it back to her off-campus apartment, one half of a two-family house next to the Leafy Bean Café. Conveniently for Phoebe, Holly's roommate had moved out the month before. It didn't surprise Phoebe. As a general rule, Holly didn't get along with most other girls. She was too jealous (even though she was positively gorgeous). She was too possessive (even though she wasn't the slightest bit materialistic). Her mother had been a model. Her father was a well-regarded neurosurgeon. She had a learning-disabled, identical-twin sister inexplicably named Jim. She was exactly what Phoebe needed. Just as Phoebe was exactly what Holly needed. Indeed, the two girls compensated for each other's failures— Holly's failure at friendship, Phoebe's failure of experience. Not that Phoebe ever actually got up the nerve to admit to her new best friend that she was still a virgin. But there was never any doubt about which of the two was the bigger slut. In fact, Holly Flake was a self-identified slut.

Never mind the used condom she kept in the bottom of her book bag—“in memoriam for all the lost nights.” Holly Flake was convinced she'd invented a new sexual position—she called it “tantric doggie” and was only too happy to demonstrate on her stuffed pig, Wilbur, for anyone willing to watch. And when she was bored, which was all the time—daily life was never quite exciting enough for the Lake Charles, Louisiana–bred redhead—she'd make lists of her thirty-two ex-lays. (A math major, she had a natural affinity for numbers.) Sometimes she'd rank them by the size of their personal fortunes, sometimes by the size of what God gave them. Sometimes she'd alphabetize them by last name, sometimes by first. If she couldn't remember either—if, for example, she'd screwed them in the parking lot at a Grateful Dead show—she'd give them code names like Deadhead 1, Deadhead 2, and Deadhead 3. Whatever list she made, her differential equations T.A., Anton Abrams, wound up at the top of it. She said he was the heir to a big-name paper-towel fortune. She said he was worth ten million at least. She said it was as wide as a poster tube and as long as a ruler. She said she broke his heart, but Phoebe read through the lines that it was really just the opposite.

At least Holly had a list.

Phoebe wanted a list of her own, and she wanted Humphrey Fung at the top of it—she knew it the moment she saw him, across the porch at Gerald Stevens's Fuck Spring party, leaning back against the balustrade, a cigarette fastened between his lips. He was tall enough and slenderly built. And he was dressed in a tartan kilt fastened with a pewter pin, tube socks pulled up to the knee, and a black T-shirt that read, I DESPISE EVERYTHING YOU STAND FOR. And yet, even despite that outfit, he was easily the most beautiful boy at the party, and possibly in all of Hoover University. He had tawny skin and sculpted cheeks, permanently flared nostrils and impossibly long lashes. But he wasn't just beautiful, he was tough. He looked like nothing could touch him. That's probably why Phoebe wanted to. She was thinking some of Humphrey's audacity might rub off on her. She was desperate to lose her virginity. And she was testing the limits of her newly discovered powers of attraction. In the four-and-a-half months since Spitty had left town, she'd somehow managed to reinvent herself as the darling of the Eurotrash crowd, most of whom spoke scant English, which meant that all she had to do was stand there looking sulky and half starved. Except it got a little boring impersonating an actress in a Godard film.

Especially since she didn't speak French.

She dragged her new best friend into the corner for a second opinion.

“What do I think of Humphrey Fung?” squealed Holly Flake. “Aside from the fact that he's got the dumbest name on the planet, he's wearing a skirt, and he's a humorless poser?” She dragged Phoebe across the porch, stuck her head in Humphrey Fung's magnificent face. “I think he's perfect. Oh, hi, Humphrey! Do you know my new best friend?”

He looked up slowly from behind a mantle of silky black bangs. “What happened to the old one?”

“What happened to your pants?”

“What happened to your face?”

“Well, I'll let you two get to know each other. . . . Oh, Gerald!”

“Yo, Flake,” said a doughy-faced giant in a trench coat and matching bowler. “Have you ever seen
The Lawnmower Man
? I swear the fractal patterns in that movie are designed to induce a narcotic high.”

“Gerald, you'd probably get high watching
Bambi.
” Holly disappeared after the party host.

A few semiexcruciating moments of silence passed between Humphrey and Phoebe before she thought to ask him, “So how do you know Holly?”

“She donated powder for one of our demos,” he told her.

“Demolitions?”

“Demonstrations.”

Phoebe breathed an inaudible sigh of relief. It was one thing to deactivate from Delta Sigma; it was quite another to fall in love with a terrorist. “So what was the powder for?” she asked him.

“A few of us dressed up as ashen corpses,” he answered. “You know, black capes, Kabuki makeup. It was a right-to-smoke thing.”

“I'm sorry I missed it.”

“Yeah, it was a pretty serious scene out there. We were up against a pretty substantial counterrally—a bunch of vegan assholes complaining about secondhand smoke. They can eat my secondhand shit.” He took a final, furious drag on his cigarette before tossing the butt into the adjacent bushes. “Anyway, my slogan really put them to shame.”

“What slogan was that?”

“Keep your hands off our self-destructive impulses,” he said, exhaling in Phoebe's face.

“It's a good slogan,” she said, waving away the mushroom cloud.

“Yeah, it's almost a shame I gave up on anarchy. I was a genius at the signage.”

“So why'd you give it up?”

“I'm too rule-oriented a person.” He shrugged before withdrawing a hard pack of Parliaments from a zippered compartment down by the waist of his black leather motorcycle jacket.

“Would you mind if I had one of those?” Phoebe asked him.

Humphrey extended the pack in her direction. “I wouldn't have guessed you smoked.”

“Only at parties,” she lied.

In fact, she'd only smoked six cigarettes in her entire lifetime, and the first two had been just the week before—at a local bowling alley where she and Holly Flake and two filthyrich foreign students—one from Venezuela, one from Monaco— had passed a leisurely evening gawking at the tattooed forearms of Vietnam vets. Everyone else had been smoking Gauloises blondes. Phoebe hadn't been able to think of a good reason why she wasn't too. That's how she started. And now that she had, she wasn't interested in stopping. She liked the way smoking made her feel—as light and jumpy and vaguely nauseated as a buoy tossing in the high seas.

And she wanted to impress her own self-destructive impulses upon Humphrey Fung, who struck a match with one hand and pressed the resulting flame to the tip of her cigarette. But it didn't take, it wouldn't take. The flame crept closer and closer to his finger. She didn't understand what she was doing wrong. She regretted ever asking for a light. His scowl on temporary hold, Humphrey looked like he was about to crack up. “You have to inhale on it,” he told her finally before he ripped the thing out of her mouth, stuck it in his own, lit it, inhaled on it, handed it back to her.

“Thank you,” she whispered in defeat.

But she had it backward. She learned that soon after— that her incompetence made Humphrey feel useful. Just as her naïveté fueled his fantasies of having seen and done it all before the age of fifteen, albeit in a backwater college town in central Pennsylvania. A native of Hoover, Humphrey Fung was the son of Jack Fung, distinguished professor of parasitology, and Greta Fung, a yoga instructor at a nearby New Age retreat. He barely tolerated either parent. He found their back-to-nature values abhorrent. His idea of “alternative” had less to do with smiley faces than it did with alienated frowns.

Beyond the facial expressions, however, he had yet to identify a subculture that met the needs of his own anomie. He'd tried them all—Goth, punk, surf-punk, skinhead, sk8 (skate-boarding), D&D (Dungeons and Dragons), SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), and just plain “A,” as in Anarchy, his latest incarnation. None of them ever satisfied. All of them felt like costumes—costumes he slipped in and out of with the ease of a beauty-pageant contestant. Maybe his perpetual identity crisis had something to do with his being half Chinese and half Swedish. Maybe his beauty was to blame. Whatever the case, life had been too easy for Humphrey Fung.

In most ways, it still was.

“What do you say we get the fuck out of here?” he asked Phoebe with an insouciant lift of his cleft chin.

But it was less a proposition than a declaration. He was already zipping his jacket and walking down the front steps. He must have known the answer would be yes, and it was. She threw her arms around Humphrey's narrow waist while he revved the motor of his vintage Norton. The accordion pleats of his kilt billowed out on either side of him as they pulled away from the curb.

It wasn't clear if he was wearing anything underneath. “SO HOW COME I've never seen you before?” he wanted to know over a cheeseburger deluxe at the twenty-four-hour greasy spoon.

Phoebe took a deep breath. With his black Doc Marten tie-ups with yellow overstitching, Humphrey was bound to be a harsh critic of the Greek system. (College was easy that way. You could tell everything about a person's politics based on his or her footwear.) But then, she couldn't lie about everything— or could she? “I was in jail—I mean a sorority,” she said, trying to make the best of the truth.

It must not have been good enough. Humphrey made a face as if he'd just tasted something rotten. “You were in a sorority?”

“Until three weeks ago,” she confessed. “That's when Holly kidnapped me. Now I'm living at her place.”

“Well, congratulations on getting out alive. Aside from rendering heterosexuality compulsory, sororities promote a nefarious kind of intragender rivalry—all under the deceptively magnanimous guise of fraternity and philanthropy.”

For a moment or two Phoebe was speechless. She'd never heard a guy speak this way. It was so uncool it was cool. It was Spitty Clark's worst nightmare. In light of her recent deactivation from Delta Nu Sigma, it only made Humphrey Fung that much more attractive to her. (The crowning blow had been Homecoming Weekend, during which time Phoebe had found herself upside down in a miniskirt being carried out of Chi Zeta Phi by an irate bouncer who'd taken umbrage at her lack of a hand stamp.)

“It sounds like you know a lot about sororities,” she offered.

“I recently became a women's studies major,” he told her by way of explanation.

“A women's studies major? You're joking.”

“I only joke when it's funny, and there's nothing funny about gender discrimination.”

“Maybe not. But I didn't know you were even allowed to be a male women's studies major.”

Humphrey shrugged. “It hasn't been easy. A lot of the women in the program don't take me seriously. They think my politics are a front. They think I'm a total poser just 'cause I'm good-looking.”

Phoebe didn't let on that Holly had used the exact word. “I don't dismiss you as a poser,” she sought to reassure her prospective devirginizer. “I mean, I wouldn't even know who you were posing as.”

“Well, thanks,” he said.

“People don't take me seriously either,” she added. “Then again, I'm not sure if I want people to take me seriously. I mean, to be perfectly honest, I don't take myself very seriously.”

“You should,” said Humphrey.

“Why?”

“Otherwise, people will step all over you. And besides, for too many years women have been treated as entertainment, objects, decoration, wall hangings, toys, tools, playthings . . .”

Humphrey's talk excited her. She liked the idea of aligning herself with a male feminist—if only because she couldn't imagine going to a tailgate with one. But the idea of being a play-thing aroused her even more. She wasn't ready to grow up and become a player, never mind a woman. She was just getting used to being an object of desire—just starting to enjoy it.

And wasn't that what she was to Humphrey Fung—an object of his desire? It certainly seemed like it on the way out of the greasy spoon. It was on the sidewalk out front that he first asked to kiss her. She didn't say yes, she didn't say no. She thought her closed eyes and parted lips would speak for themselves.

But Humphrey wasn't the kind of guy who felt entitled to presume. He said, “For too many years men have read women's silences in a self-interested way. So I'll ask you again. Do you want me to kiss you before I drive you home? Or do you want me simply to drive you home?”

“You can kiss me,” she told him.

At which point he felt entitled to lean her up against a telephone pole and press his lips into her lips, his hands gripping her butt, his kilt brushing her thigh. But the moment was short-lived, thanks to a carful of drunken Tau Upsilon Gamma brothers who throttled by to the tune of “Dyke it up!” and “Leave it to Beaver!” They must have thought Humphrey was a girl. Phoebe quailed in embarrassment. She was the only one. “Sexist homophobes!” Humphrey screamed back at them at the top of his lungs. Then he turned back to Phoebe with a selfsatisfied grin on his face—he seemed to thrive on conflict—and asked her, “Would you like me to drive you home? Or would you like me to drive you back to my bivouac and tent down for the night?”