“Aren’t you Barbara?”
“Do I know you?”
“You should. I’m Diane.” Diane from another life, Diane from four years past! Diane of Diane and Tove! Diane of the worms! We sat down at a small table and in recounting her past years of addiction from one drug to another I saw the familiar expressions, the way her lips crinkled up her cheek when she talked.
“I knew you were here before I recognized you,” she said, “I felt your Barbara presence.” This was the most incredible chance encounter. We were in Mexico one hundred miles from where Tove now lived, and they hadn’t seen each other since our days in the Petaluma house together. She got on the bike behind me the next day and we drove through vast maguey fields and lush jungles under baroque cloud-filled skies to Tove’s. Although Diane could stay but a day it was a grand reunion. I told her that were I to live that early meeting over with the two of them, I would never have moved in on their life the way I did, that I would have been more sensitive to her feelings. She told me not to be sorry for the past. After all, it was.
In the house next to Tove’s lived Consuelo who wore a greystreaked wig and had a layer of blue paint circling her manufactured eyelashes. Twirling and dancing, she pranced first around Tove, then me. Wearing the tightest pants and a low-cut yellow sweater, Consuelo, the lovely next-door neighbor, was caught in a sex role as constricting as my own. She knew of no other way of being but sexual, of physically coming on to men and women.
One night I could take it no more and decided to put her manipulative techniques to a test by allowing them to work on me. I wanted to be seduced. It was easy. We were lying in a room in her house watching TV, a Mexican, Kung Fu Western. Her husband was behind us on a mattress and her children were on either side of him falling asleep. Tove was intent on trying to understand the program from the corner she occupied. My arm against Consuelo whenever I could rest it there, my bare feet brushing hers, my body heat feeling hers, I was allowing myself small rushes of warmth. When her husband left for his night job we began wrestling on the mattress. Equally matched, we held each other off with our strong arms. She was a student of karate and I knew a little, too, so we matched eyes and yelled grunts until we dropped on the mattress sweating in the hot evening humidity. Tove left to go home and get some sleep while Consuelo and I waited for the late night news. I lay closely beside her. We translated the news back and forth and looked at her husband’s collection of Playboy. She obviously thought the nude pictures of women would turn me on. She took off her yellow sweater and her bra to show me her breasts, which she said she didn’t like because the brown circles were too big for her standard of beauty. I laughed at her, then again when she said her stomach was too pouchy from carrying babies. But I didn’t laugh when she tossed her head remembering the pain of childbirth and the nasty doctor who told her to shut up and forget that it hurt. And I wasn’t laughing either when I couldn’t suppress the desire of being close to this woman and began to wet kiss her arm. Then she giggled. I wiped the nervous lashing of her eyelids closed and tried to brush away the anxiety that made her brow quiver. I put my leg over hers on the bed. As enticing as she had been, she couldn’t come through and be in the least way tender to me. She pushed my face away with the palm of her hand. She kicked at me and laughed. She was as nervous as a housebound cat. She did try to rub me, to pet me, but her hand strokes were more from compulsion than feeling. I tried to explain that the act itself didn’t mean anything without feeling. That her strokes were nothing but flyswatter swipes. She turned to me in seriousness.
“Forgive me Barbara, but I cannot serve you with making love.”
“That’s quite all right, Consuelo. I understand.”
“You are not angry with me?”
“No, how could I be angry with you? You can only do what you feel, but I wanted to match your seduction with my own.”
“Seduction?”
“Yes, the way you flirt and entice.”
“But I act that way with everyone.”
“That’s the point.”
We hugged goodnight and promised to see each other the next day. I felt good that there was a probability the game-playing had moved to a more real level of encounter.
But I saw myself in Bill and in Consuelo. Duplicates of myself. How could I revert to that old and wearisome game of sexual seduction? It was a form of conquest. How could I be proud of capturing someone like a butterfly in a net? There was something else I wanted. Someone to like me for myself. Not for my ability to seduce, playact, or perform. Not for whatever talent I might have. Not for any display I might make, but for the simple and complex, the personality that I am. It was a simple desire; it seemed more clear than the masks of confusion I covered it with. I always wanted this simplicity but thwarted it through role-playing, through the diversionary tactics of seduction, through those power plays no one could genuinely respond to. No one could come through loving me. I was too well-concealed. For years I had blocked the possibility of getting what I wanted: to be liked and loved for myself.
I PHONED DUSTY, WHO I HAD BEEN SLEEPING WITH before leaving for Mexico. She had three other lovers at the time, but I was certain I was special. The international operator connected us. I heard a sleepy hello at the far end of a wire that miraculously allowed some form of communication.
“Will you accept the charges?”
“Yes.”
“But I can’t come to join you in Guadalajara right now; I am in the middle of another story for my book the press decided to publish and I can’t afford a disruption. Besides, it’s too expensive.”
“I’m glad they’ve decided to print your work, and I know your writing is most important to you.” My heart sunk to my toes and worked directly through the tile floor of the telephone booth into the Mexican soil below.
“How’s your love life?” I asked stiltedly. There was a long pause.
“It’s OK. I’d like to include you in it.”
“I thought I was included.” The roots were stretching out for strangleholds, finding rat tunnels with nothing in them. “Well, Dusty, best of luck. I’ll see you when I get back.” I wanted off the phone. For a while I didn’t want to see the light of day, but I knew I should reach out to somebody. The fountains of spray congealed through my visor; the long way to Lopez Mateos was shortened by my grief. At intersections a few long tears would choke out and find their way to my crawling heart. At last I arrived at the suburban home of my friend. Pulling my dark visor down over my face I hoped for a few more minutes of the hidden, almost savored grief, grief that told me, “Barbara, you are feeling,” but the warm, pale face of Tove met me at the door. In her arms I sobbed out the remnants of hurt that fell like leaves at our feet in a summer half spent.
“I think you’re a fine person when you are yourself Barbara, and I think others see it.”
“Then why am I alone when I want to be sharing my life?”
“A year ago I would have said you were doing things to prevent anyone from wanting to be close to you, but now I think you have a much better chance of finding someone to share your life with. Maybe you should look for a friend. I know how important a lover is to you but it seems that’s not working out now.”
A friend, I thought, how does one find a friend, go about making a friend? I know so well what a sex relationship requires, but a friend? I have no idea. Sex has been such a large part of my life for the last years, but I really could do without it now, for a while, I thought.
Tove was sensitive and tremendously aware of what was going on in her environment. I was there within her range of seeing, then I was the recipient of her understanding, which was profound. I brought her some coffee the next morning. We lay on the bed curled up against each other loosely, dozing. I was so comfortable with her. We could touch, stroke, kiss without eroticism. I could shit in front of her without embarrassment. I could do anything openly with this one who knew me so well. After the coffee an intense look crossed her face, a face a little older with lines that were not there