|
How did you meet Laura? In my apartment. That doesn't seem real. She had stopped to pick up a mutual friend—and I conspired to have her stay. She groaned how she was starving, and touched her stomach— (hard to conceive then that someone so thin could obsess so ferociously about food). My one room flat quickened intimacies. I took the desk chair, Jenny the sofa, and Laura, as if to complete a triangle, perched on the edge of the only item I had not found on the street. (Which thank God I had had the foresight to throw a bedspread over before this stranger arrived!) "If you're starving I know a place on MacDougal." Laura was a good hour late for a "prior engagement"and soon Jenny would have to catch the "seven-something" back to her parents' house—(don't ask me why the hurry unless she...sensed?)—where she was holed-up while she pounded the unpromising, promiscuous streets searching for work. "But I'm sure you two will have...a wonderful dinner... and I'll see you...and you...soon..." We had to pass my apartment to get to Laura's—which was further west. She might as well come up given the way the evening had— Once full, she groaned of gone hungers, and no sooner reassumed her position on the bed than I proposed she spend the summer with me in Cuernavaca (where the plan to share a villa with some college friends in the social sciences who'd planned to study at The Institute with The Master— including D. and a married couple— had just fallen through). She didn't say a single expected thing. No "we only just met it's absurd"stuff; every disclaimer revolved around her "full-time job" from which "there was no way"she could take an unpaid leave. My willingness to survive as an office temp provoked her contempt. "How can you, who don't have a real job, understand?" This in the tone of Hannah Arendt to students who wanted shortcuts: "How can you, who haven't read [Schopenhaur], understand what [Nietzsche] is getting at?" Once it was clear the rent was taken care of (I had salted away the money for the Mexican venture) and the idea began to interest her— we had a roller-coaster week, warnings, provisos desires, complicities, misgivings. You must have come to an agreement. That's what it was. So no problem? One. I believed the terms would change. That you would prove an exception. That she didn't say the things she said. I couldn't prepare myself for the unexpected hurts. How she couldn't forgive me my friendship with someone she found as unglamorous as Jenny. Through whom you met? I guess you could say that. Why do we all imagine, when it comes to character, that what has befallen others will not necessarily befall us? That we will be spared. |
||||
|
|
||||
