for Renata, with fond memories
I watch her from across the crowded commons area, a speck of an Asian girl, chain-smoking long, slender black cigarettes. A feather dangles from one ear and she wears her jet-black hair tied in a pair of braids on either side of her head. Two dyed red streaks, the hue of Chinese lacquer, radiate from the parted centerline of her hair. Smoke plumes from her pinched nostrils like steaming volcanic vents, the cloud obscuring a sad, down-turned mouth that seems to have swallowed a scream.
She pretends to read the giant volume lying open on the table beside the squat, white espresso cup heaped with crushed cigarettes butts, but her restless eyes give her away.
When she stands I perceive a delicate Frankenstein's monster: a mature, weathered face joined to an adolescent body that could have belonged to a different creature. A pair of ample breasts sprout from the prepubescent frame, hanging free beneath a white satin blouse unbuttoned to a bony sternum peeking out from a wide depression of cleavage. Dark nipples strain walleyed against the sheer fabric like peaks collapsing in opposite directions.
Her skirt limply drapes her thighs as she walks away with no hint of ass or hips or wiggle. Fragile legs make me think of a new-born colt trying to walk. It seems a miracle they support her even as she balances gracefully on stiletto heels.
She leaves behind a single sheet of notebook paper. I jump up from my perch, grab it and chase her down, thrusting it at her when she stops and turns, her eyes fixing me with a challenge. I hold out the paper she has obscured with scribbled black doodles of brambles converging to a tangled web of thorns. She thanks me and slips it into her bag.
I stall, asking what she's reading. I know I sound like an idiot, but she stays and we stand and talk. She studies psychology, she says, and is already professional, a therapist with a practice. She takes advanced classes from her psychotherapist, a psychiatrist with a reputation for his synthesis of Freud, Jung and Wilhelm Reich. She focuses on Reich.
I invite her to coffee but she brushes me off. Afterward, her image haunts me as I go through the motions of teaching my afternoon classes.
Something must have stuck with her as well, because when I return to my office I find a voice message with her number. I return the call and her disembodied voice surprises me. Breathy, like she's been running, it's deeper and throatier than I remember. I ask how she found me. She says she tracked me down through the Aerospace Engineering Department, so I ask how she knew I was on the faculty and she says I told her, but I know that's false. I don't press the issue.
We meet at a small coffee house near campus in the student ghetto, an artsy place I would never visit on my own. She talks endlessly about herself, which is fine with me.
Of Japanese descent and in her mid thirties, she divorced her way out of a childless marriage. She won't talk about her ex.
Speaking in hushed tones as if telling secrets, her husky voice metered out with little inflection, I can see she controls her pace with a conscious effort against some mania hovering in the background, as if she is about to explode into a torrent of words all crammed together.
She tells me she harbors a deep-seated distrust of men, that she's cynical about all sexual relationships and has no preference for either men or women, considering them interchangeable. She uses people, she says, without guilt or concern for the consequences of her actions. It's simply that men are easier to exploit.
All the time we talk she smokes her black cigarettes, often lighting a fresh one with the ember of the one already lit.
Feeling guilty for not contributing something, I begin to explain my own work with satellites and navigation. She cuts me off, telling me not to discuss mechanistic universal principles with her. They are lies. She knows about Kepler's laws and gravitation and considers it all rubbish, explaining nothing. Everything is spirit, she says, held together by the glue of spirit, the whole world spirit and alive and all the so-called truths of science and engineering are no more than pernicious falsehoods perpetrated by stupid, misguided white men.
After that I don't bring up anything about myself or my work. I don't enjoy discussing it anyway. Only boring people find that stuff interesting.
She fixes me with a curious expression and her sad mouth straightens just a little to make peace with a smile. Her eyes dart away, watching not so much out of curiosity as terror. I understand that everything in her world harbors animus, that kindness exists in nature only as a trick on the gullible.
She invites me to dinner at a nearby Japanese restaurant. It's a cuisine I have never tried and she patiently guides my beginning efforts with chopsticks, but I drop as much as I get to my mouth. She informs that it is not polite to bite a roll in two. You must always eat it in a single bite.
Her autobiographical monodrama continues with wild tales of promiscuity. They begin before high school and intensify in college, orgies and threesomes and foursomes, numerous lovers and sexual escapades with strangers. She delivers the outrageous stories in a deadpan style, not once indicating a hint of pleasure.
After dinner we walk to her apartment where she devotes most of the night to a lecture on the theories of Wilhelm Reich, explaining bions and orgone energy, orgastic potency, physical and psychiatric orgone therapy, biopathy and social irrationalism, character armor and genital character and neurotic character and a bunch of other nonsense that would have driven me to rage with anyone else.
Besides Japanese food, her favorite, Clarice introduces me to other cuisines I know only marginally, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Indian. She eats no meat, only fish and shellfish, tofu, and vegetables, and convinces me to do the same. Eating meat, she contends, makes people stink.
She takes me to galleries I didn't know existed. We attend staged performance art, incomprehensible spectacles laced with pent-up sex spewed at the audience in unexpected fury. Our evenings end at bars crowded with creatures in spiked, wildly colored or inky black hair, white faces, black lips, tattooed and pierced, smoking organic cigarettes and drinking Sazerac cocktails and absinthe, deliberating art and literature and films and sex and listening to sequences of monotonous electronic bleats.
For several months we are always together without so much as kissing, though eventually we begin to touch, hold hands, hug.
I don't miss sex. With the exception of youthful undergraduate forays, mostly unsuccessful, into the demimonde of liberal arts seeking, aggressive women willing to seduce me, I have spent the bulk of my life a celibate. There was a girlfriend in graduate school, a fellow candidate for the Doctorate of Engineering, mortified of sex. The last I'd heard, she lived alone and devoted herself to writing obscure papers and teaching.
I don't understand what Clarice sees in me. Compared to her, my life drags along in tedium.
We sit on her balcony late at night. She lights a joint and demands we smoke it together. I tried pot in the past but never cared for it; the disorientation left me immobilized and afraid. I prefer the steadiness of reality clearly distinguished from my interior thoughts, but with Clarice I find I welcome the permeability of the boundary between inner and outer.
Beside me on the sofa, wearing her feather in one ear and a shark's tooth in the other, she leans back and brings her bare feet to my lap, rubbing my groin with their soles. I watch her feet twist and bend as though endowed with extra joints, moving with the expertise of someone who has perfected a technique over years of practice. I lean in to kiss her but she averts her face and tells me to be still. She sits up and strokes my member through my pants, then frees it and sheathes it with a condom, never touching it with her bare hands. Leaning into my lap, she sucks until I reach orgasm.
