Love and Shame and Love Read online

  “I’m not sure there needs to be any more.”

  “He’s this supposedly important philosopher.” She waved a tuffle of rice squeezed between two chopsticks before his eyes. “It was Karl Popper who brought scientific rigor to the so-called soft sciences. You have something on your chin. Some sauce. Karl Popper said, for example, that astrology was bunk and sociology was even bunkier.” She licked her finger and reached across the table to his chin. She touched his chin with her licked finger. She touched his chin with her—

  “How did he feel about Scientology?” Popper asked.

  “Quick,” Kat said. “Name the lovechild of Karl Popper and L. Ron Hubbard.”

  He shrugged.

  “Cher?”

  She honked a brief laugh. “Nice. Not that I’ve ever read Karl Popper. Nobody reads him anymore. I guess he served his purpose. To bring scientific rigor to whatever whatever whatever. Seems kind of obvious to me. Systems need proof. Okay, next.”

  She pressed her chopsticks to her lower lip and watched him watch her. Popper took this in about his relation. A kinsman rendered irrelevant, these days unknown even to his own family.

  “And Kierkegaard?”

  “Oh, Kierkegaard’s just romantic. That’s a different deal altogether. Abraham was prepared to kill Isaac because he loved him and he loved God. And God didn’t make him do the deed because He loved Abraham. In Kierkegaard, everybody loves everybody. I’ll take Kant. If we’re estranged from ourselves, how can we not be estranged from other people, much less love them? Kant says that what we don’t know—or wait, maybe that’s the existentialists—”

  Popper gripped the side of the table. The entire lunch he hadn’t once used his chopsticks. Sitting there half listening, watching her eat, her fingers brilliantly, acrobatically, tonging those thin little wooden sticks while he shoveled food into his mouth with a common fork like a hayseed. Possible to switch to chopsticks now, this late in the game?

  He opted to stop eating altogether.

  “Something wrong?”

  “No!”

  She stood up and stretched, fluttering her arms toward the ceiling. “You’re done? I think I’m done.” He watched her go up to the front and pay the bill for both of them. On the sidewalk outside, the sun white and bulbous, she said, “Did you notice nobody working there was Chinese? A Chinese restaurant should have at least one Chinese person—What are you up to now?”

  What am I up to now?

  It was the autumn of Mike Dukakis. What could possibly go right? In a month, Popper would cast his first vote in a presidential election. And on the other side of campus, the bells in the tall clock tower ring, the bells ring…

  ON THE RUG

  Kat refused to live in the dorms. What am I, a lab rat? She smelled of lip gloss and sweat. Amazing, and also deeply disturbing, how fast two near-strangers can go from Chinese food to a wrestlingish tussle on a worn-out rug in an attic room amid the trees. Her walls were practically all window. No furniture, only the bed they weren’t using. Skin that seemed as far away an hour ago as, say, the Yukon Territories is now right here beneath his shocked fingers, his entire body (led by his still blue-jeaned pelvis) in a state of ecstatic flux, now spastically, aimlessly, freakishly thrusting, a twitch, and aw no no, shit, shit, shit—

  To distract, to buy time, to cover up, to ward off the unwardoffable, he clutches her and he tells this stuff about the Yukon Territories, trying to remain calm, casual. “Isn’t it amazing how a clothed person is another country? For instance, earlier today, to me, you were—your body, I mean—was the Yukon, Canada’s northernmost—”

  “Are you a little repressed or something?”

  She reached inside his boxers. His heart banged deep in the well of his ear.

  “Oh, I get it.” One goose-honk, two goose-honks.

  “Just give me a little time.”

  “You know what you need to do?”

  “Just a little time—”

  “Grip yourself. You know, when you’re still stiff. You want to cut off the blood flow, like a tourniquet. Plus, you’ll probably enjoy—”

  “Please stop talking.”

  “It’s called shunting.”

  “I’m begging.”

  “I’m only trying to impart some friendly advice.”

  “Do you do this with everybody?”

  “Give this sort of advice?”

  “This. After a lunch date. Come back to your place and—”

  “Are you a monumental prick? Metaphorically speaking since as far as I can tell—”

  Kat rolled over and pushed the hair out of her eyes and began sliding downrug. Describe the attic room with windows on three sides, her on that frayed rug, his ecstasy, his shock, his humiliation, his what? The dappled afternoon light. The tall oaks lurking outside like voyeurs. Her chin edging down his chest. Describe it. Her chin—Why not just say happy? For once? Why not say joy, as derived from the thirteenth-century word originally connoting rejoice?

  “Cool apartment,” Popper connoted.

  She tongued his knee. “Don’t talk.”

  “Where have you been my entire life?”

  She paused, looked up. “You believe in that?”

  ON, WISCONSIN…

  Fourteen degrees with the wind chill, October, Michigan versus Wisconsin. Eighty thousand drunk fanatics bellowing for blood, nothing whatsoever at stake, Wisconsin’s 1–7; the only team they’ve beat is Northwestern.

  How to even begin to describe this ocean of complete idiots?

  Popper and Kat scrunched, huddled, blanketed. Popper making a point of holding Stendhal up in front of his face.

  “Watch the game,” Kat says.

  “The Charterhouse of Parma has more excitement in its pinkie than anything in this entire stadium. Fabrizio sleeping is more interesting. The public’s tax dollars go to support this sort of quotidian stupidity. Do you have an idea how much Bo Schembechler gets paid?”

  “Have more Jim Beam.”

  “It’s like a Nazi rally. Hitler entering liberated Vienna and the crowd goes wild for the Führer—Anyway, you’re for Wisconsin—”

  “Fuck yeah, Badgers!”

  And their voices lost in the loud, more white breath than words.

  “Don’t you need a hat?” Popper says. “Your ears are going to splinter off.”

  Kat raises the bottle to her lips and swigs, hands it to him.

  “Drink the hooch, Popper.”

  There’s a certain kind of cold that merges people in the same way that two metal objects freeze together. You can’t pry them apart until you inject heat. He thinks about how long it will take them to warm up in that tree-house room. How his feet, even in the morning, will still be cold. He thinks of her hungover breathing, her mouth open, her eyes half-open. He takes another view of his brethren. Humanity encapsulated in this great oval of inanity, and yet he could love these people, every million one of them, he could—

  “And please don’t use the word quotidian in ordinary conversation.”

  Kat hiccups whiskey and he thinks this, thinks—

  On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin! Plunge right through that line…

  GNATS

  A May evening and the sun squats motionless above these stately roofs. Two women sit in front of their little house, one on the humble stoop; the other on a chair on the lawn. They are reading. Both books are thick. (Textbooks? After all, we are blocks from the university.) And yet the two women read gently, almost lazily. There is no doom in the Midwest tonight. Only rows and rows of words. Small hands turn pages without haste. One of the women on the lawn has red hair; the other has on some sort of bonnet. The City of Trees is at peace. The gnats roam down the sidewalk in waves.

  There’s more, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, is there more?”

  “You hate it.”

  “I like it.”

  “What do you mean by more?”

  “Isn’t something supposed to happ
en? Is it a poem?”

  “You think something has to happen?”

  “Is that so terrible?”

  “Requiring something to happen is tantamount to literary tyranny. Think of all the people who nothing ever happens to. How could we ever do them justice on the page if we’re always giving their lives some kind of arbitrary action? Some people just read in the yard while sitting in a chair.”

  “Their entire life?”

  “Yes.”

  Kat took another look, holding the paper above her head and mouthing the words as she read. They were in her attic, in her house of windows. Popper watched them both in the multiple reflections, two people on a bed, in the light, one lying on her back reading a single typed piece of paper, the other sitting up and watching the one read. If she could read his mind at this moment, which she could have done if she wasn’t reading his story, she would have said, Popper, you watching yourself watching me isn’t watching me, it’s watching you. I’m only incidental to the process, the reader as ornament. The real star is you—

  “I got an idea,” Kat said. “What about if before these two started reading, they ate some shrooms? That way nothing would have to happen, but they’d think something did. Let them hallucinate a little. This is how all the people you were talking about get through their lives. They do a little drugs, they dream, or they watch TV or go snowmobiling—which is awesome, by the way, snowmobiling is the greatest thing ever invented and don’t let any pansy tell you—or they—”

  “What do you think of the gnats?”

  “The gnats I like.”

  “Kat?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you.”

  “You what?”

  THE KITCHEN CHAIR

  Her room had three kitchen chairs and no kitchen table. They were arranged around the idea of a table. She said, Who needs a table when you’ve got three chairs? She sat on one of them with her feet on a second, being his model.

  For this portrait, he don’t need no easel. Give this man a pen and paper and he’ll create fission with words—

  Christ, if he had even a modicum of talent, he should at least be able to describe her face.

  “Hurry up, Popper, I’ve got class. We’re doing Hegel today. I am who I am not because I am ‘I’ at the moment, but because of who ‘I’ will become, which is unknown. Thus, I am my future self—who knows who this is?—and yet at the same time, that self exists. It’s only time that’s in the way. And since time itself is nothing, meaning from the point of view of our perception of it, not in the Newtonian sense, then we’re our future selves right now. We just don’t know who the hell we are. Isn’t that awesome?”

  “Turn your head a little?”

  “I’m unknowable. Why even bother? Don’t write about my double chin.”

  “You don’t have one.”

  “Good. Or my weird tooth.”

  “What weird tooth?”

  “Excellent. You make a fine painter in prose.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “What?”

  “I came by around eleven.”

  “You want to know where I was?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “You’re talking like I have to tell you.”

  “Stop moving your eyes, your face keeps changing.”

  “I’m late to class.”

  “You’re right, I have no right, no right at all to monitor—”

  “I slept in the antiapartheid shanty.”

  “In the middle of the Diag? With who?”

  “With other people who think apartheid is a scourge on the face of the earth—Hugh, Paul, and some girl named Polly.”

  “You think I don’t think apartheid’s a scourge on the face of the earth?”

  “I really don’t know what you think about apartheid.”

  “I think apartheid is very bad. Does this mean you have to sleep with Hugh and Polly?”

  “Listen, Popper, I got to get to class.”

  For a long time after she left, he stared at her empty chair. Torn vinyl. Light blue. Little rubber feet on all four legs. A sad little chair empty of her body. Maybe it’s only in absence that we can get at it? Someone is gone, either to class—or clear out of your life—then fragments of a face emerge in a cold, still kitchen like a haunt. Joyce says absence is the highest form of presence. A small-boned face, high cheekbones, hidden ears only the tops of which poked out from her brown yellow hair, a chipped front tooth (a day camp accident involving a picnic table), slight upcurving nose, red from allergies. Roaming coffee eyes—

  She won’t come together. Her face with her hair falling all over it.

  IN THE DIAG

  Age-old problem: if she chose him, there has got to be something wrong with her. So he followed her. Every Tuesday afternoon for a month, he’d wait for her after her class in Angell Hall and trail behind as she wandered around campus. It made sense at the time. How could he penetrate her secret realms if he himself was always hanging around?

  The way people walk when they are with someone could not be more different from the way we walk alone. Alone, she was more timid than he’d expected, less charging around. With him she walked fast, sometimes stomped, laughed often, commented on everything and everybody. Now, those red boots I’m liking. And yet alone she seemed to blend in on the sidewalk. Suddenly shy, she looked at her feet when she walked.

  To Popper, these revelations were thrilling: I’m dead, it’s like I’m watching my own nonexistence. With me, Kat strong, vivacious, brave. Without me, timorous. Popper would duck behind bushes and construction equipment and watch her sit against the same tree in the Diag (a tree he had no idea she had any relationship with, a tree they’d walked by together dozens of times and she’d never said, Here, this tree means something to me, let’s sit here) and pull out a book. He thought it must be Emerson. She’d been carrying him around for weeks now. She’d read a sentence, then put the book down and think about it. It may have been: Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. She’d gnaw on her lower lip, throw a stone at a drunken squirrel. (People said they’d done atomic experiments on Ann Arbor squirrels in the fifties, which explained the fact that they walked on their hind legs and gibbered at people all day long in fourteen different languages.) From her tree, she’d watch life go by on the crisscrossing diagonal sidewalks.

  After a while she’d begin picking out a single person to follow with her eyes. A girl on crutches, a white-haired woman with clunky shoes, an angry tomato-faced professor, a fraternity pledge in a coat and tie, carrying an old tire slung over his shoulder. She’d follow each of them out of her line of sight as if they were heading out to sea never to be heard of again. Her eyes pinched into a sorrow he’d never seen on her face before. She even mourned the dork with the car tire.

  It took spying on her a few times to understand that she wasn’t watching for herself—meaning the lack of herself in other people. He came to see she had nothing to do with this at all. It was only about the people she watched until they were gone, how they could just disappear like that. Because people just vanish. Around a corner, into a crowd, down the street, across town. Isn’t this a kind of death? To watch someone out of sight? Sure, some of them she might run across again, but most—even in a dinky city like this—she would never lay eyes on again.

  ARBORETUM POSTCOITAL

  Bedraggled blanket Wednesday in wettened spring, missing class, Kat and Popper spent, drained, languid, pants pulled back up; Kat on her back, bridged across Popper’s thighs, stares at the trees; he’s reading, the sunlight polka-dot through a stand of ash—a place deep in the Arboretum known as School Girl’s Glen. Earlier, Kat said, I’ll show you a schoolgirl, Glen—

  POPPER: Listen to this.

  KAT: You never look at trees.

  POPPER: It’s Faulkner. From The Wild Palms. It’s about a couple. Faulkner’s one Chicago book. Part of it’s
even set in Wisconsin. Then this couple, they flee to Utah, where they almost freeze to death. It’s a strange book, very passionate.

  KAT: These are white ash trees, you can tell by the waxless leaves. Or maybe they’re box elders. Read the Wisconsin part.

  POPPER (clears his throat): They say love dies between two people. That’s wrong. It doesn’t die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you are not good enough, worthy enough. It doesn’t die; you’re the one that dies. It’s like the ocean; if you’re not good, if you begin to make a bad smell in it, it just spews you up somewhere to die. You die anyway, but I had rather drown in the ocean than be urped up onto a strip of dead beach—Damn. Urped not burped, now that’s fucking writing.

  KAT: What the hell’s he yattering about? This isn’t very Wisconsinesque.

  POPPER: Her, it’s a her talking. It’s Charlotte. She’s talking to Harry, the guy she’s run off with. She left her husband, Rat, because he was too respectable. There’s nothing Charlotte detests on the planet more than respectability. She’s an artist. Not a very good one, but this only makes her more passionate about art. In the book, she makes figurines and she sells them to Marshall Field’s. Harry’s a doctor, or almost a doctor. He’s poor and he’s never been in love before, which is part of the reason she’s run off with him. To, among other places, Wisconsin. To prove to him that love actually exists. I’m not reading this for class. Also, Charlotte left her two daughters with Rat. They don’t really figure in the story. Forget family, kids. Charlotte’s basically saying that in love it’s all or nothing. You half-ass it and you’re doomed—that’s when the bad smell—

  KAT: The husband’s name is Rat?

  POPPER: Apparently it means student, like a freshman, according to the helpful note at the back of the book.

  KAT: Read the urped part again.

  POPPER: You die anyway, but I had rather drown in the ocean than be urped up onto a strip of dead beach and be drifted away by the sun into a little foul—