What She Saw... (21 page)

It was never entirely clear what they talked about.

Afterward he'd take her home, where he'd take her from behind as if he were doing her some kind of favor. And he wouldn't remember to kiss her first. And there was a part of her that didn't mind. There was a part of her that may even have liked it—liked the way Bruce Bledstone took what he wanted, and to hell with humanity! It was so stolid, so confident—so unlike herself. What she couldn't accept was that his eyes no longer lit up like Christmas lights at the sight of her. Maybe he'd seen her too many times. Maybe that was the problem—he already knew the contours of her naked thighs. There was no fancy new garter belt that could change that.

There was no fancy new position they hadn't already tried.

IT WAS THE second-degree rug burns with which she arrived back at Hoover one Monday after a certain weekend in New Haven—Bruce Bledstone was giving a paper at Yale on counter-hegemonic strategy—that inspired Phoebe to reexamine her commitment to depravity. Not that she wasn't proud of those suppurating wounds. They seemed like final proof of her liberation from suburbia. They seemed like tangible evidence of her victimization at the hands of Bruce Bledstone, as well. And she was sick of lying on his behalf. Which is maybe why she felt compelled to show off those battle scars to at least half the student body, as well as the campus health center nurses, who shook their heads disapprovingly and asked her if she didn't want “another kind of checkup,”
if you know what I mean.
(She knew exactly what they meant, but she wasn't interested in a gynecological cure.)

She was still thinking Bruce Bledstone would make it better. Still thinking it was his responsibility to do so. Still thirsting for the subjugation he alone seemed capable of delivering. Because as much of a mess as she made, it was never messy enough—it was always too clean. Which is why she called him up and demanded an explanation for the night in question—a night for which she claimed to have no memory, such was her state of intoxication. It was only partially true. She hadn't been that wasted.

Neither, apparently, had he. “You were crawling around on the floor like a little slut,” he seemed to recall. Then he laughed. As if it were all pretty funny. And maybe it was.

Maybe life was all a big joke, and the last to laugh was the first to lose.

Moreover, who was Phoebe Fine to object? Here she'd gone to great lengths to join the ranks of the sluts—as she understood it, a subset of self-realizing gender warriors not ashamed to take full advantage, economic or otherwise, of their prodigious sex drives. (She'd learned so much in Recontextualizing Madonna 316.) That said, in that particular moment in time, she would have preferred to have been crawling around her crib. She wanted her mommy, too. But she didn't have the kind of mommy who could bear to hear about such things. She had the kind of mommy who drowned out all her sorrows—and everyone else's, too—with the ordered legerdemain of Bach's
Gold-berg Variations.
And besides, Phoebe was getting a little old to be running home. She was almost twenty-one. That was the really terrible part.

Now that she was all grown up, all she wanted was to be a kid again.

AN UGLY PERIOD of Phoebe's life was to follow. She chewed her fingernails into bloody pulp. She showered infrequently, she cried incessantly, she smoked relentlessly. She wore the same outfit every day, her “fat outfit”: black palazzo pants and a men's extra-large brown cardigan. She couldn't keep down her breakfast (twelve tablespoons of brown sugar), never mind her lunch (a blueberry muffin). She played Brahms's
Tragic
Overture, op. 81 until she couldn't play it anymore. Then she started up with Air Supply's
Greatest Hits.
(“I'm All Out of Love” was the song that really hit her in the stomach.) And she lost the ability to concentrate on any academic topic that could not directly be connected to Bruce Bledstone. For example, she became a minor expert on Italian Marxism.

She was flunking French.

And she was calling the no-longer-visiting professor's city number at odd hours of the night. Not because she had anything to say. She only wanted to know he still existed—only needed to hear him say hello in that somehow-still-reassuring narcotic drawl of his. The familiarity of his voice would comfort her in the split second of its actuality. It was only after she'd hung up that she'd experience this vast, strangulating nothing-ness swirling around her. Then she'd feel like she had nothing to look forward to in life. She'd feel as old and jaded and washed-up as only a twenty-year-old can feel. Then she'd cry so hard her lovely, spacey new apartmentmate with the pink hair and the 1950s calico housedresses, Sabine Walinowski, would come knocking to see if she was okay and did she want any homemade miso soup? (She didn't, thank you.)

The time had come for medical intervention.

At least according to her shrink, Nancy Patchogue, it had.

She put Phoebe on these little yellow pills designed to abate her desire to binge on Mint Milano cookies when she felt sad or anxious—as if there were never any resolution, just this ringing in her ears, just this chorus behind her eyes, just this terrible hunger gnawing away at her insides, begging to be quieted with something, anything, mineral or vegetable, food or sex, fish or fowl, anodyne or cyanide, it didn't really matter in the end. In the beginning, Nancy Patchogue told Phoebe, she might get head rushes when she climbed stairs. And she'd almost certainly wake up with a dry mouth, feeling groggy and listless. And it was best if she avoided alcohol.

Even better if she avoided Bruce Bledstone.

It was the opinion of Nancy Patchogue that Bruce Bledstone was the “punishing father” Phoebe never had, her “real father” being a mild-mannered, nearly egoless fellow who preferred
Masterpiece Theatre
and gardening to contact sports and cigars. Oh, she wasn't entirely wrong about Leonard Fine, Nancy Patchogue wasn't—he
was
mild mannered. Phoebe never bought the rest of her doctor's proto-Freudian palaver, preferring to believe that the difference between Bruce Bledstone and guys her own age she might otherwise have dated was that guys her own age had zits, were really insecure, only talked about themselves, and had nothing to teach her. Whereas Bruce Bledstone was a
fucking genius
.

However, she'd come to understand that he “affected her adversely.” That was Nancy Patchogue's phrase. And, so, with her doctor's encouragement, she called him up and told him she was “still in love with him,” which was why she couldn't see him anymore.

He said, “The two sentiments don't seem to fit together.”

He said, “I was never able to express deeper feelings for you, but you've permanently eroticized the topography of my bedroom.”

Then he said, “Only time will tell what I've lost. To be perfectly honest, you've always been seventy-five percent phantasmagoric.”

But he didn't sound all that upset to hear that Phoebe was leaving him. If anything, he sounded as if he were reading off a TelePrompTer. Is it any wonder she called him back not two weeks later to say she wanted to see him, needed to see him, and it couldn't wait? (Without him, she was just Phoebe Fine with the Fat Face—that's what she kept trying to explain to Nancy Patchogue, but Nancy Patchogue didn't seem to understand; Nancy Patchogue had a fat face herself.)

“Are you sure that's what you want?” he asked her.

“I'm sure,” she reassured him. Because she thought she was. She didn't see any other way around it—around her vanity. Bruce Bledstone still made her feel beautiful. He made her feel sophisticated, too. He made her feel as if she were living out some case study from one of those self-help books she'd see women twice her age leafing through in bookstores around town.

“Well, it's always nice to see you,” is what he always said.

The desperation lays continued on a sporadic basis.

BUT THERE WERE marked improvements in other areas of Phoebe's life. Thanks to those little yellow pills, she wasn't throwing up half as many times a day as she had been. And she'd settled on a new major—German studies. She even had a weekend affair with a budding Hegelian from Massapequa— followed by another one with a Brazilian drama major who seduced her with his well-honed directorial techniques. (“Relax,” he kept saying. His hands started on her shoulder blades and moved south.) And she had a new best friend, Audrey Cone, who encouraged her to channel her excess energies into perfecting her body. That's how Audrey channeled hers. She and Phoebe went to aerobics every day at five. They were religious about eye cream. They ate fat-free muffins for lunch and fruit salad for dinner.

They turned twenty-one three days apart.

Phoebe was in no mood to celebrate. She told as much to Roberta and Leonard. But they didn't listen, they never listened. It was always the same thing. They yelled, “Surprise!” when she walked in the back door. And they made her eat chocolate cake even though she told them she wasn't eating dessert anymore. And they gave her presents she didn't want— Wilkie Collins novels she'd never read, Telemann CDs she'd never listen to. And she had to say, “Thank you,” and “I really love it.” Even though she
really hated it
—would have been happier with a check for twenty bucks. But at least they'd remembered the date. It was more than she could say for Bruce Bledstone. Not that the oversight particularly surprised her. She was past the point of imagining that he cared. She figured he was probably busy anyway—busy pondering the collapse of the Soviet Union, declared officially defunct with the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev, the very same day.

IT WAS A mild winter as Hoover winters went.

The spring was short and rainy and torpid—even as it reminded Phoebe of an earlier spring, when the stillness in the air gave way to a certain restlessness that for one fleeting moment seemed to have found its match. But that time was now over. That time now seemed like a distant memory. Phoebe wasn't even the same girl. She was wiser now. She was somehow less sure of herself.

Now she understood the value of fear in love.

Graduation day came and went.

Then it was summer, though not in any ordinary sense, what with school being out forever, and Phoebe having not the faintest idea what to do next. She didn't even have a place to live. It was pretty scary, and she was trying not to cry. (She'd made that mistake the night before.) And she was leaning against a parking meter outside Bruce Bledstone's Upper West Side sublet. (He and Evelyn had separated. “Trial Deterritorialization” was the phrase he'd used only half in jest. Not that it mattered now. It was too late in the day for Phoebe to imagine she'd been a causative factor.) And she was getting ready to say good-bye after another pointless night, another sporadic lay, when he turned and looked at her from behind a pair of expensive-looking sunglasses that made eye contact all but impossible, and said, “Do me a favor—don't come around here next time you're in a bad mood, with the burden of your problems, expecting to be entertained, to the complete disregard of my life and plans.”

And his anger so shocked her that she forgot about her tears. “How can you tell me I'm a burden?” she sputtered. “I thought you were my friend!”

“We were never friends,” he demurred. “I mean, we're different from friends.”

Then he leaned over and planted a kiss on her cheek as if she were some distant relative to whom he felt obliged to pay his respects—that or some casual acquaintance he might or might not see again, it didn't really matter either way. Then he walked away and she watched him go. She watched his hulking form loping up the street until he was the size of a dot. Then he started to blend in with the others dots. Then he was gone, and she was alone with her thoughts. And she was thinking: Bruce Bledstone was right about one thing at least: he never was her friend, never would be. And the realization left her strangely relieved. It was easier hating him than loving him.

If only she could have held on to her anger!

But she couldn't. She couldn't bear to imagine herself a mere detail of a pattern. Which is how she imagined herself when, a month or two later, she learned through a mutual acquaintance that she hadn't been Bruce Bledstone's first sleep-over student, and she wasn't his last, either.

WHICH WAS MAYBE why, one, two, not quite three years past those first tremulous barrette unsnappings, when she and Bruce Bledstone were living barely twenty blocks from each other, she was still, occasionally, quixotically, calling him from downtown barrooms at half past midnight. She wouldn't be drunk, but she wouldn't be sober either. She'd be riding that middle wave of inebriation where the
poverty of everyday life
seems at the very least irrelevant, in many ways comic, and at rare moments charmed. “I want to see you,” she'd shout-whisper into the receiver in her best sex-toy voice—two parts pure bravura, one part little girl lost in the mall.

Because, even with her competitive-tennis days long over, she hated the idea that she'd lost. Because in the distant reaches of her convoluted brain, she was still thinking she could make him love her. Because, thanks to Bruce Bledstone, now she knew the difference between the “putting out system,” as in a preindustrial system of production marked by pride in individual achievement and encapsulated by the weavers of Silesia, and the regular old twentieth-century version of “putting out,” as in “for a good time, call . . .” And because, at that particular moment, her life was so distinctly unglamorous—her main connection to New York City being the Class Act Temporary Employment Agency—that even the most degraded of lays had come to seem like compensation. Not to mention the fact that her campaign to rid herself of the final vestiges of her sheltered upbringing was as yet unfulfilled—i.e., in so many ways, alienation was its own reward.