“Did you, you know . . . ?”
“What?”
“You know . . .” She hesitated again. She sounded lonely, left behind like that. “Did it feel good?”
“Mmmm,” you said, smug and inscrutable, adding to the distance between you. “It felt great. Totally far out. No . . . it was soulful. ...I can’t explain.”
It wasn’t really soulful, but you were already rewriting the experience. The real story, as you dimly recall it, twenty-five years later, was that it didn’t feel great at all, and it just went on and on. What you identified as pleasure started in the silence after the sex part was done and the winter afternoon was growing dark. You lay there, staring at the ceiling in dim light, and held a naked man for the first time in your life. For a little while, maybe fifteen minutes or so, you honestly felt that this was what it was like to be all grown up and happy. Then he rolled out of bed and put on his jeans and started looking for his car keys.
Lloyd left the bathroom and stopped outside your closed door. He cleared his throat.
“Aren’t you girls supposed to be studying?”
“We are.” Your tone ripe and condescending. “We’re doing our homework.”
Cass looked alarmed.
Lloyd hesitated. “Sounds like just a lot of chatter to me,” he said. “Finish up and go on home, Cass. It’s getting late.”
You listened as he descended the creaking stairs.
“Lady,” Elliot crooned, strumming at the strings of his guitar, “you keep askin’ why he likes you? How come?”
You knew not to ask questions like that. Still, he teased you:
“Wonder why he wants more if he just had some. . . .”
He told you all about San Francisco, about the brown hills of Berkeley, about the scene. There was no bullshit, he explained. That’s what was so great about it. None of the crappy materialism of middle-American capitalist culture. You looked around the bare room in the small house. There was very little materialism in evidence. He could use some new sheets for his bed. He slept under a military green sleeping bag with a nubbly flannel lining, printed with hunters and ducks. He could use a new frying pan.
You had an idea. There was some extra stuff at your parents’ house. They were going to give it away to the church fair anyway. You could bring it next time? It was such a good idea, and you were excited and proud to have thought of it, but to your surprise he smiled and shook his head. “No thanks,” he said. “I don’t need ‘stuff.’ ” And the way he said it made your heart sink, like there was a larger point you were missing completely.
He told you about his friends. One was an anarchist sandal maker. One built drums. Another walked through a plate-glass window while tripping on LSD.
“Was he okay?” you asked.
“He died.” He was staring up at the ceiling. “He thought he was going to Europe.”
You couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
“You know,” he prompted. “When he walked though the plate-glass window.”
You still didn’t get it.
He sighed and lit a cigarette. “Larry was tripping, and he wanted to go to Europe. So he walked through the window, as though the physical laws of gravity and, like, glass, didn’t apply to him anymore. Like he’d transcended all that. But he hadn’t. And he fell. And he died.”
Wow. You took the cigarette from his fingers and dragged, hoping that this was an adequate response. You worried about other girlfriends. Surely he must have had lovers, way more experienced than you, who would have known how to participate in a conversation like this. Had he ever been in love with them?
“‘Made for each other, made in Japan.’” He crooned the lyrics of Grace Slick’s song, grinning as he wound a strand of your long black hair around his finger. When he sang, sometimes it sounded like love, and you imagined it at night, under the glow-in-the-dark stars, where the air was thick with your dreaming. He would look deep into your eyes. “I love you,” he would say. “I love you, Yumi.” And you would sob and hug your diary, where you were writing it all down, doubled over with a heartache that was the closest thing you knew to a body’s pleasure. “Oh, Elliot,” you whispered under your father’s starry sky. “I love you, too.”
“Woman with a greasy heart,” he sang.
What was he talking about? Your heart did not feel greasy, but you wished it could be, if that would make the song be about you.
“Woman with a greasy heart, Au-to-ma-tic Man.”
You faced each other, naked and cross-legged on the mattress, and he reached out to trace your nipple. He moved his fingertip up the center of your rib cage, like a zipper to your mouth, and you sucked on it like a lollipop to make it wet.
“Mmmmm, Yummy,” he murmured, as he drew the finger back down your stomach and slipped it between your legs. “You’re so open. I love that about you. . . .”
And there it was. He’d finally said it. He loved you.
You threw your arms around his neck. “Oh, Elliot,” you breathed. “I love you, too!” Pressed your cheek against his, feeling the tickle of his mustache, the rasp of his unshaved skin, holding him for a long time. Then, slowly, you realized that something was wrong. That you were the only one doing any holding. That he was not holding at all. In fact, he was merely sitting there, his arms at his sides. You let go of him, sat back, hugged your legs to your chest. If you could have died, you would have done so, gladly.
“Oh, wow,” he said.
You had nothing more to add.
“Of course, I love you, too, Yummy,” he said. “It’s just that there are so many different levels of love, you know. . . .”
You didn’t know, but you were finding out.
“What a downer. I don’t want to hurt you, Yummy. Maybe we should just—”
“No!” you cried out, too loudly. “I knew that. That’s what I meant, too.” You pressed your chin into your naked kneecap. You were shivering, so you pulled his sleeping bag up around your shoulders. The metal zipper was ice cold and bit into the skin of your neck as you wrapped yourself tight in the grimy flannel with the hunters and the ducks. The bag was so old that the waterproofing was peeling off the surface fabric. You concentrated on scraping the flaking plastic with your fingernail. It came off like dead skin. He reached over and placed his hand on yours, to stop you fidgeting.
“Yummy?”
You snatched your hand away. “Don’t call me that.”
He was surprised. “Why not? It’s your name. . . .”
“My name is Yumi.”
“Yummi?”
“No. Not like gummy. Like you. And me.”
“You-me.”
“Say it quicker.”
“Yumi.”
“If you can’t pronounce it right, don’t say it at all.”
He laughed. “You’re fantastic. This is what’s so great about you. You’re very mature for your age.” He reached for your hands again. “Yumi, Yumi, Yumi. . . . Life can be complex, but you understand