more than “I dreamt of you last night.”
“I dreamt of you too,” he says. “You were beautiful.”
Over time I came to grasp the nature of my position among women. I came to see that despite what I knew to be the rarity of my bond with Rourke, my feelings of uniqueness were not unlike other women’s feelings of uniqueness. At bridal showers, at picnic tables, in dressing rooms and hair salons and kitchen gardens, I listened with compassion—if every woman has made herself available or has given herself over despite some better knowledge, isn’t that the same as faith, and aren’t women so faithful?
I began to pay attention when women talked; I learned to interpret the language of grief. Women who have suffered use talk as a way of addressing the baffling sea at their feet. They talk to make the abstract real. Like men who name flowers, viruses, and boulevards, women talk to stake ownership. They talk to reclaim the pride they feel they’ve lost.
In December of my sophomore year, after Mark and I had begun to see each other, Mark and Rob arranged for their friends from Jersey to come to an art show I was in. It was Rob and Lorraine, Chris and Lee, Joey and Anna, and Mark. Everything of mine was city rooftops. Chris and Lee bought a charcoal of Madison Avenue rooftops, and Mark bought an acrylic of a black bird sweeping over Murray Hill rooftops. Afterward we all walked through the snow to Patisserie Lanciani in the West Village for coffee and dessert. Halfway through pastries Lorraine ran out because of something Rob said; I didn’t hear what. It must have been bad, because the men looked down and shook their heads and Anna and Lee followed Lorraine, taking their coats to the bench in front of the café. Through the glass Lorraine’s hair fanned against the picture window like a corona of hooks and coils. It looked like a squid sucking up against the side of a tank.
“Fucking guy,” Chris said. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t know how you expect to keep a woman,” Mark said.
Rob said, “I don’t want a woman to keep, just one to fuck.”
“Yeah, well,” Mark replied, “any woman worth fucking is a woman worth keeping.”
“Yeah, well,” Rob said, copying Mark’s voice, “exactly my point.”
I figured I’d better leave. Lorraine and I weren’t exactly friends, but it wasn’t right to listen to the men discussing her. I joined the girls on the bench. It was cold but pleasant. West Fourth Street is beautiful in snow, with flesh-colored lamplight seeping through branches and everybody with dogs and packages, going slow. Lorraine was relieved that I’d come, though I couldn’t say precisely how that relief was communicated.
Lee was striving to boost Lorraine’s self-esteem, but Lorraine’s head was junked up with crazy information. By the pool at the Ross house one day when they visited us there, she saw an article in Cosmopolitan called “Keeping Your Man Satisfied—10 Tips to Great Sex.” Just as I thought, What a profitless bit of journalism—a damp cushion could satisfy a man, Lorraine tore out the article, folded it, and placed it in the back flap of her date book. I couldn’t help but wonder whether the woman who’s afraid that she isn’t satisfying her man is being satisfied herself. Is anyone giving him tips?
Lorraine kept blowing her nose and shaking her head, saying she lives in constant fear of Rob getting arrested or busted-up or “worse,” but when she asks him things, she’s told to mind her own business.
“Mind your own business?” Lee repeated indignantly.
Lee could become very indignant. She was not the average Jersey girl; she was going places. You could tell by the impeccable way she dressed.
“If only he would talk to me,” Lorraine sobbed, guilty suddenly to have impeached Rob’s character. “It’s just, he won’t even talk to me.”
“Don’t defend him!” Lee snapped. “His behavior is inexcusable.”
I thought it was okay for Lorraine to feel guilty. Life is complicated, and she and Rob were complicated, and it’s often difficult to render in language the dynamics of the heart.
After the café we walked around the Village in twos and threes, looking into the parlor windows of brownstones, saying how great it would be to live in this or that house. Just as we were about to turn the corner from Bleecker onto Eleventh, Lorraine stopped me.
“Thanks a lot for listening back there,” she said. “It helped me out. You know, us