I'm Sorry You Feel That Way (16 page)

I kicked him away.

There was something wrong with that man.

At Ram’s Horn, he slid off his shoe and poked and prodded his foot around in my lap. I shoved him off me. “Stop it,” I hissed. “I’m not kidding.” My stomach was starting to churn. Was it in response to the gyro or was it concern that this—this—was my future? That Al would become as fussy as his old man and I would turn bitter like Karleen and together we’d live a life of silent meals and scorn? It infuriated me that he wouldn’t let me use his toothbrush.

“Mmmmmm,” Lucky said. “Mmmmmm.”

He chopped his spaghetti into bits then scooped them up on his fork. After he wiped his plate clean with a piece of bread, Lucky pressed his lips together and dabbed his napkin against the corners of his mouth in a deliberate and pompous way. Smiling at us, he announced, “My sufficiency has been suffonsified.”

Spoken in a haughty tone, that phrase means I’m full, I’m stuffed, I couldn’t eat another bite, and I’ve heard only one other person say it. Al says it after a dinner of pot roast and mashed potatoes, or tuna casserole with crushed-potato-chip topping, or a turkey and all the trimmings prepared in the month of June just to please him. “My sufficiency has been suffonsified,” Al says, and I also have started saying, “Any further indulgence would be super-sanctimonious.” It’s the language of this family.

Later that night, when my stomach knotted and cramped up on itself—it probably was the gyro—Al and I were alone on the sofa bed in his old bedroom. He gave me a Tums, he brought me a glass of milk, he rubbed my back.

“I was thinking,” he said. “We can always run over to Kmart and buy you a toothbrush. Why don’t we do that?”

That’s when I asked him what I’d been worrying about since we got here. I asked him was he going to turn into his father. He said probably. He said he probably already had.

I
t may just be me.

I worry that my friend Andrew Boyle is a pervert, even if he doesn’t hang fuzzy dice from the rearview mirror of a sleekly black Pontiac Trans Am. Andrew doesn’t own a Trans Am or a customized van all decked out with zebra-skin rug, water bed, and a sign that reads IF YOU SEE THIS VAN A-ROCKIN’, DON’T COME A-KNOCKIN’. He doesn’t linger in front of the Kwik Trip where the troubled high school girls—the pukers, the cutters, the partiers, the sluts—like to hang out smoking cigarettes and drinking Diet Cokes after school. He doesn’t unbutton his polyester shirt all the way down to his snakeskin belt. Andrew Boyle fusses over his appearance, he is always fashionably dressed, he purchases his clothes on eBay, designer brands so expensive I’ve never even heard of them. He doesn’t wear polyester shirts. Andrew Boyle wouldn’t be caught dead in polyester. Nor does he wear shiny shoes, like the ones the sleazy teacher at your school wore so he could stand close to a cheerleader and sneak peeks up her skirt in the reflection of his shoe. Though he lists
Lolita
as one of his favorite novels, Andrew does not leer at schoolyard nymphets nor does he say
Light of my life, fire of my loins
or
Hey, little girl, do you want some candy?
or
I’m gonna make a big star out of you
except, maybe, as a joke, something he might drunkenly say to a beautiful woman of appropriate age with the hope that she will model for him.

When I was first getting to know Andrew, I didn’t think I would like him, because he seemed arrogant and show-offy. And it would turn out that I was right: Andrew Boyle is arrogant and show-offy, but he is also witty and well-read, environmentally conscious and politically aware, a person with whom you can have a smart and interesting conversation about Raymond Carver’s short stories or Robert Altman’s films or the Canadian rock band Rush or Peter Singer’s argument against speciesism. When I like Andrew Boyle, I like him a lot. He can be easily amused, easily entertained; his laugh is nice to hear.

A vegetarian except during Thanksgiving Dinner, Andrew takes good care of himself. He doesn’t smoke cigarettes or marijuana, he doesn’t chew tobacco or gum or drink cheap domestic beer. He drinks Grenache Shiraz Mourvèdre, vintage 2001. I’ve never heard of it, but he says it tastes like PBJ without the bread or the peanut butter. He doesn’t mind when I call him a snob. He doesn’t take offense.

He doesn’t have a pierced ear or wear a gold medallion on a gold chain. He does have a gold watch that his parents gave him for a graduation present, an expensive gold watch from a fine watch-maker, but because gold jewelry is tacky, he doesn’t wear it. When he thinks about his parents giving him this gift of a watch that he’ll probably never wear, he feels guilty.

At some angles, Andrew is very handsome; at others, he’s sort of funny-looking. Gawky. Geeky. He can look hip and cool and urbane or he can also look like what he is: a dorky high school valedictorian who spent many a Friday night playing Dungeons & Dragons and secretly wishes he still did.

His undergraduate degrees are in math and music. He has a Ph.D. in art history from a prestigious European university. Andrew can affect the world-weary, snobby, snotty, fashionably androgynous attitude of someone who’s spent some time hobnobbing in Europe. A friend of mine, upon first meeting him, was surprised to learn that Andrew was not gay. “Of course he is,” she said. “He’s completely gay. He’s totally gay,” and when I told her no, he’s just serious about the time he spent hobnobbing in Europe, she insisted, “That guy is so gay.”

Lots of people assume Andrew Boyle is gay—probably because of his meticulous posture and graceful gesturing, his lack of interest in organized sports, and the jaunty gray scarf he wears indoors wrapped around his neck so the ends dangle over his shoulders and down his chest in a casually studied way. But he’s not gay. Andrew Boyle is just the kind of guy who knows about girl stuff. What girls like. What it’s like to be a girl. Sometimes the thought occurs to me that he knows more about being a girl than I do, that I’ve been doing it all wrong. Why don’t I get my eyebrows plucked? Why do I still buy my clothes at JCPenney, and how can it be that I haven’t ever heard of Marc Jacobs? Why was I so flattered when Andrew Boyle told me he approved of my shoes, cork wedges that take me from barely five feet to five-feet-four?

“Those are great shoes,” he said. Then he told me he loved what I’d been doing with my hair. “It looks good. Your hair looks like a shampoo commercial.”

“Well, thank you, Andrew!” I said modestly. I was very flattered because usually I don’t think about my hair unless it’s to hate it. “I usually hate my hair!” I told Andrew Boyle. “It’s so thick, it’s hard to manage. It’s hard to find something to do with it.”

“You know what I like to do when a woman has thick hair?” Andrew asked.

“No. What? Tell me.”

He slid his hand under my mop of big, thick hair, he grabbed a hunk of it, he yanked, snapping my head back, exposing my neck. “Sexy,” he said.

I frowned, but I stayed calm. I took a deep breath, raised my eyebrows. “Well,” I said.

But I was furious. Because when Andrew Boyle pulled my hair like that, it hurt like hell. But I was determined not to let him know that. Because I wondered if that’s what he wanted. Because I think there’s no way it’s me: this guy is definitely a pervert.
I bet he’s seen that move in a thousand and one pornos
, I thought.
He is such a fucking pervert.
But what made me angriest is at the time I couldn’t think of what I could do back. What was some comparable physical action that’s equal parts pain and humiliation?

What I came up with, of course, is that someday I will kick Andrew Boyle in the nuts. Hard. When he is least expecting it.

 

 

 

 

 

Currently, Andrew is an assistant professor of art history at a midsized state university. According to RateMyProfessors .com, a website that asks college students to comment on their teachers, Dr. Boyle is demanding; a real tough grader; very helpful; boring even though he doesn’t think he is; an okay teacher; a great teacher; a total phony; an excellent teacher; hostile to Christianity; extremely open-minded; a guy who loves to hear himself talk; enthusiastic and laid-back; someone who wants everyone to be his pal; and a blowhard who thinks he’s better than everybody else.

Andrew Boyle is almost exactly two years older than me. Soon, he will turn thirty-eight. To celebrate his birthday, he’d like his friends to join him for a night on the town. He’d like to have some fun. In the meantime, he wanted to know if I was interested in going out for dinner and drinks with him one night this week. He seemed lonely, and I felt bad for him, but I had to say no. I had to remind him why I don’t go out on weeknights. “I’ve got that kid at home,” I told him. “I’ve got that husband.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “I forgot.” He sighed, loud and sad. “Everybody has a kid at home. Everyone has a family. Everyone except me.”

Andrew would like to have a kid at home someday. He’d like to have a wife—he’s never had a wife—but right now he doesn’t have a girlfriend or even prospects for a girlfriend. He doesn’t have a dog or a cat or a houseplant or a house. He lives in a duplex. He says he doesn’t have a reason to live. One night last March, Andrew Boyle sat at my kitchen table where he ate five garlic-stuffed olives and drank half a Summit pale ale, then told me he’d been entertaining thoughts of jumping off a bridge. “Pretty much every day,” he said. Six months later, he’s saying the same thing. In fact, just the day before yesterday he told me he doesn’t know why he goes on living. “I have nothing to live for,” he said.

What Andrew Boyle does have is a camera. He takes pictures with it, pictures of landscapes sometimes, but more often, when he can find willing models, he takes pictures of women, especially young women of appropriate age (which means they’re at least eighteen) who also happen to be beautiful (which means they’re thin and bosomy or, as my father would say, “built like a brick shithouse”). These women must also be interested in participating in what Andrew calls art photos (which means they disrobe). Andrew Boyle is always in search of beautiful young women willing to pose naked for him.

In his experience, high-end hair salons are a good source of such young beautiful women. “Hairstylists tend to care about their appearance,” he says. “They’re interested in beauty. They keep themselves up.” Hairstylists, according to Andrew, are frequently vain, a quality he very much approves of, because an appeal to a woman’s vanity is often what finally convinces her to model for him. Because you look good, I imagine him saying, you’re hot, you’re sexy, and well, you know, you’re not always going to look like this.

Andrew has also noticed that waitresses at bars in college towns are frequently young and beautiful. One Friday night, I went out for dinner with Andrew, and afterward he suggested we have a drink at The Wooden Nickel, a bar that’s well known as a meat market for college kids, the place where after they get good and drunk on Jägermeister and Red Bull, Screaming Orgasms, and six-dollar pitchers of Long Island Iced Teas, they hook up and have sex. Andrew said he knew a waitress there, a girl named Robyn, who was working that night. “I want to invite Robyn to my upcoming birthday festivities,” he said. “I also want to ask her if she’ll model for me.”

Robyn had blond pigtails, blue eyes, dimples, and long legs in knee-high socks. She was wearing shorts. She was wearing high-heeled boots. Her eyebrows were plucked to perfection, her nose was pierced, her ears were double-pierced. She was cute as a pixie, and she knew Andrew by name and drink.

“Hi, Andrew,” she said. “Do you want a Summit?”

Andrew said, “Robyn, some friends and I will be celebrating my thirty-eighth birthday next week, and you are invited to join the festivities. My birthday is on a Wednesday night, but most people can’t party with me in the middle of the week. So we are going to have the festivities on the weekend. Are you free on Friday night?”

Robyn said she thought she had to work on Friday night.

“Are you free on Saturday night?”

Robyn said she wasn’t sure, but she thought she might have to work on Saturday night.

“Let me know,” Andrew said.

Robyn told him she would let him know, then she glanced at me. We smiled at each other, tight-lipped smiles, and I understood that this girl might be cute as a pixie but she wasn’t stupid, and I knew Robyn the Waitress at The Wooden Nickel would be posing for Andrew on the twelfth of never, and it’s not just me. It’s him. Other girls feel it, too. Andrew Boyle is most definitely a pervert.

 

 

 

 

 

On several occasions Andrew has sat at my kitchen table, opened up his leather satchel, and pulled out a leather-covered portfolio containing his art photos, pictures he took of a beautiful naked woman of appropriate age. Before seeing these pictures, I made fun of Andrew. I said oh yes,
art photos.
I said do you drive a Trans Am? Do you wear shiny shoes? Where is your gold medallion? Are you a pervert? No, really, are you?

However, after seeing the pictures, I had to agree that they were neither dirty nor pornographic. The pictures are beautiful. The woman in the pictures is always beautiful, her body the body of youth, her skin smooth skin, her body a firm but curvy body, nothing is fatty, nothing is drooping.

The woman in the pictures may change, but what remains constant is that she is always someone Andrew had fucked or was fucking or wanted to fuck, and that’s something that, for me, keeps them from being art photos, the work of an artist. That’s something that, no matter how beautiful they are, turns them into booby pictures that Andrew took and pulled out of a leather satchel as we sat at my kitchen table—pictures that, for reasons I haven’t yet figured out, Andrew showed to me but not to my husband, who wandered into the kitchen to fix a ham sandwich while Andrew and I flipped through his leather-covered portfolio—and I tried to think of things to say that weren’t “How on earth did you ever talk this girl into doing this?”