Karen Fowler - Black Glass

She hears a key turning in the door. “Kenneth,” says Dave, and Kenneth joins them in the kitchen, his face a little flushed from the cold air, his eyes dark and intense. Kenneth gives Linda the impression of being somehow concentrated, as if too much energy has been packed into too small a package.

“This is Linda,” Dave tells Kenneth.

“Hello, Linda,” Kenneth says. He starts moving the clean dishes out of the drainer and onto the shelves. “I love this place.” He gestures expansively with a plastic tumbler. “We were right to come here. I told you so.” He is sorting the silverware. “I’ve been over at Sproul, what — half an hour? And in that time I got hit with a Frisbee, someone tried to sign me into the Sexual Freedom League, I listened to this whole debate on the merits of burning New York City to the ground, and a girl came up out of nowhere and kissed me. This is a great place.”

“What was the pro side of burning New York?” asked Dave. “I’ve got relatives there.”

“No more blackouts.” Kenneth puts a coffee cup away, then takes it out again immediately. Linda sees her chance.

“Take mine,” she urges. “I haven’t touched it. Really.” She gives Dave an apologetic smile. “Sorry. I meant to tell you before you poured. I hate coffee.”

“It’s okay,” he says evenly. “I’ll never ask you over for coffee again.” He turns to Kenneth. “Tell Linda what happened last night.”

“Oh, God.” Kenneth takes Linda’s coffee and sips at it. He settles into the chair next to her, leaning back on two legs. Linda decides she is attracted to him as well. She looks away from him. “Last night,” he begins, “this guy came to our door looking for a friend of his named Jim Harper. I said we were new to the building, but I didn’t think there was a Jim Harper here.”

“I don’t know a Jim Harper,” Linda says. “In fact, you’re practically the only men. Except for—”

“So he says Jim Harper might be living under an alias and have we seen any little brown guys around. I say, ‘Is he a Negro?’ and he says, ‘No, he’s just a little brown guy.’”

“So,” Dave finishes, “Ken tells him we’ll set out some snares tonight and let him know in the morning if we’ve caught anything. Who are the other men in the building? Are they little and brown?”

“There’s only one. Dudley Petersen. And no. He’s middle-aged, middle-sized, medium coloring. We think he’s a CIA agent, because he’s so cunningly nondescript and he won’t tell us what he does.”

“You could live your whole life in Santa Barbara without anyone coming to your door looking for small, brown men,” Kenneth tells Linda. “I love this place.”

Linda does not respond. She is thinking about Dudley. Last summer he’d gone to Hawaii for two weeks — on vacation, he said, but she wasn’t born yesterday. She knows a Pacific Rim assignment when she sees one. He’d asked her to water his ferns. Apparently she’d been overzealous. She wouldn’t have thought it possible to overwater a fern. There’d been bad feelings on his return. But while she had access to his apartment she’d found a shelf of pornographic books. Quite by accident. She’d brought them downstairs and shared them with her roommates. Really funny stuff — they’d taken turns reading it aloud: “He had the largest hands Cybelle had ever seen.”… “‘No,’ she moaned. ‘No.’ Or was she saying ‘More. More?’”… “Her silken breasts swelled as he stroked them. She drew his head down until his mouth brushed the nipples.”

It all reminded her of an article the Chronicle had once run in the women’s section. An expert in female psychology (an obscure branch of the larger field) had argued that small-breasted women were using their bodies to repress and reject their femininity because they would rather be men. Under hypnosis, with the help of a trained professional, these women could come to accept themselves as women and their breasts would grow. This happy result had been documented in at least three cases.

What had struck Linda most about the article was its very accusing tone. Men liked women to have large breasts; it was highly suspect, if not downright bitchy, the way some women refused to provide them. Linda feels Kenneth looking at her. Mentally undressing her? Why, even as they speak, Dave and Kenneth are probably asking themselves why her breasts are so small. Because she is cold and nervous, Linda has been sitting with her arms crossed over her chest. Now she deliberately uncrosses them.

“When do the rest of you arrive?” she asks distantly.

Dave looks himself over. “I’m all here,” he says. “This is it.”

“No. Your other roommates. The brothers.”

There is a moment’s silence while Dave and Kenneth drink their coffee. Then they both speak at once. “We couldn’t afford the apartment just the two of us,” Kenneth says, while Dave is saying, “The Flying Zukini Brothers? You mean you haven’t met them yet? You are in for a treat.”

“They’re here already,” Kenneth adds. “God, are they here. They have presence, if you know what I mean. Even when they’re not here, they’re here.”

“Go home while you can,” advises Dave. “Go home to your small brown men.” His eyes are just visible over the tilted rim of his coffee cup.

Footsteps stamp at the doorway. There is a sound of keys. “Too late,” says Dave ominously as the door swings open. Two clean-cut men in T-shirts which show their muscled arms try to come through the door together. They catch, in charmingly masculine fashion, at the shoulders. They are nice-looking, but somehow Linda knows the quadruple wedding is off. No one would take the last name of Zukini anyway, not even if they hyphenated it.

“I got a car!” says the first of the brothers through the door. “I mean, I put the money down and it’s sitting in the basement. I drove it home!” He accelerates into a discussion of RPMs, variations in mileage, painless monthly payments. Man talk. Linda is bored.

“Linda, this is Fred,” says Dave. “The other one is Frank.”

“You want to go see the car?”

“I got a class.”

“Good thinking.”

Linda shifts from one foot to the other, feeling awkward and grateful for Fred’s noise, which makes it less obvious. She wants to say something intelligent before she pushes her way through the clot of men blocking the door, and the longer she puts it off the more awkward it becomes. She gives up on the intelligent part. “Thanks for the coffee,” she says to Dave. She narrowly misses Fred’s fist, which has swung good-naturedly past her ear and settled into Kenneth’s shoulder.

Kenneth covers the spot with his right hand. “Don’t do that again, Fred,” he says, his tone deceptively light. And then Linda is out in the hall and the door closes behind her.

• • •

WE HAVE REACHED the end of the Second Encounter. Let’s take a moment to reorient ourselves, and then perhaps you have questions I can answer. Yes? You. In the back.

The Chronicle ? No, I believe it is a major newspaper with some particularly well-known columnists. Did you have another question?

Well, yes. I know it wasn’t painted by Rembrandt and you know it wasn’t painted by Rembrandt and in fifty years everyone will know it wasn’t painted by Rembrandt, but in 1969 it was a Rembrandt. There was another question, wasn’t there? Yes. You. Speak loudly, please.

Well, I’m not sure I want to answer this. We are experiencing these events as Linda does; to give you an objective assessment of Linda’s physical appearance would taint this perspective.

Let’s imagine a reality for a moment, an objective, factual you. How do others perceive you? How do you perceive others’ perceptions of this you? We are now at two removes from the objective reality; we have passed it through two potentially distorting filters — others’ perception of you and your perceptions of others — and yet for the purposes of relationships this is absolutely the closest to reality anyone can come. So this is where we will stay. Linda is small and thin; you experience this with Linda. She perceives herself as ordinary so you will share this perception. But I will point out that, although Linda imagines her appearance to be a liability, still she dresses in ways that support it. She cultivates the invisibility she feels so hampered by.