Mary Gaitskill - Because They Wanted To - Stories

Kenneth invited me to have dinner at his house with Phillip and his girlfriend Laura, a young blond woman with a small face full of timid hope. Kenneth’s wife, with whom he still shared the house, was away for a month, and he wanted to celebrate. We sat in the kitchen and drank wine while Kenneth prepared steaks and salads. The kitchen was gleaming and precise. Every bright knife, every cork and dish and bag, was meticulously and aesthetically arranged. Kenneth washed and dried the lettuce; his hands were white with cold from the water.

Phillip harangued us about President Clinton. He said he knew his presidency was a disaster when he tried to make the army accept homosexuals. Had he succeeded, Phillip went on, it would’ve been an unprecedented cultural cataclysm, a fact that no one but religious nuts would acknowledge.

“It’s not that I have anything against them,” he said. “I don’t care what they do. You see them in the Johns all the time—who cares?”

I hated his words, but his voice and face had a desperate, emotionally distended quality that made me involuntarily sympathetic. I did not think he believed what he was saying, yet he continued to expel words as if from a violently churning pot.

“But if homosexuals ever become truly accepted, just normal like everybody else, do you know what will happen? Heterosexual men and homosexual men will band together, and male power will be felt in this society like never before. Women will be knocked off their pedestal and ground underfoot. Then we’ll see sex for the horror it really is. There’ll be no romance, no—”

Laura frowned and picked up the cork from the wine bottle. Her pale hair fell forward and covered her face; she tucked it behind her small, very red ear. Kenneth concentrated on the lettuce.

“Phil,” I said carefully, “you aren’t making any sense.”

“Have you read Thomas Aquinas or Aristotle? Because you should have. Even though they’re dead white males.” His dignity rasped horribly. “Do you know the story of the warrior who had a cute little slave girl that he kept around for fun, and then there was the man he truly loved? And—”

“Spell it out,” I said. “What are you trying to say?”

“That all these stupid liberal women who think they have some kind of alliance with gay men don’t understand. Gay men aren’t interested in women. They care about men.” He looked at me as if he hated me, except that his eyes were focused inwardly.

“Yeah,” I said, “and lesbians are a lot more interested in women than in men. In fact, sometimes even straight women, frankly—”

“I’m interested in women,” said Kenneth brightly, “whether or not they let gay guys in the army.”

“Phil,” said Laura. She looked at him with all the focus and force she could put in her little face. She looked as if she was trying to remind him of something he had accidentally forgotten.

Abashedly, he dropped his eyes, coughed, and turned his chair so that he faced her, not me.

We moved into the dining room, to eat around a big table. We all helped to set the table and bring out the food, and those gestures of goodwill made us seem like friends. The thick, rare steaks were served on large, expensive plates. Laura said that her mother, who lived in Kansas, would be glad to hear that Laura had eaten a steak dinner, because she thought Laura and Phil ate too much pasta. Her voice included us all in its bright, gentle touch. The men looked at her almost gratefully, as if glad to be reminded of the special place where mother and food were. Phillip began talking about the scourge of political correctness and how it had made honest talk impossible in the academy.

I examined the decorations on the buffet next to the table. They included vases, little books upheld by bookends, several different kinds of matchboxes, and statuettes of animals and girls. They had the potential for the kind of luxuriant aesthetic spewage I enjoy, but they were positioned with a stifling judiciousness that ruined the effect. Amid the fuss, I noticed a small framed photograph of a very handsome young man. He had long hair and wild eyes and an open, imperiously yelling mouth. He looked as if he were riding a roiling, swift-moving current of joy and triumph and satiety, yelling out his pleasure as he rode.

“Kenneth,” I said, “is that your son?”

“No,” he said. “That’s me. Almost thirty years ago.”

Sherbet was served, with slices of mango. Kenneth put on a CD. As each song played, he told us about each musician who played it, his history, his technical strengths and weaknesses. Then he told us about each of the instruments. Then he discussed the sound quality of each cut on the CD as opposed to vinyl.

When we finished eating, he said, “So. Are you ready to look at some stuff?”

We followed him upstairs, past darkened rooms full of furniture and boxes heaped together. He took us to the spare bedroom, where he had been sleeping since the separation. There, he kept the small things: drawers filled with sunglasses, cupboards of slumbering hats, boxes of jewelry in grand knotted lumps—gold, silver, glass, and plastic—ashtrays, matchboxes, paperweights, and figurines that fussed and promenaded. There were bags of shoes, chests jammed with women’s underwear, a deep closet full of suits and dresses. In the corner, a small, hard bed stood assailed by the teeming stuff; I wondered how he could sleep in such an uproar.

We walked through the room with cordial exclamations of delight. Kenneth rummaged magisterially, concentrating on finding things that each of us might especially like: an Armani suit for Phillip, a velvet gown for Laura, gray suede shoes, cuff links, scarves, an amber necklace. He kept saying, “Here, this is perfect for you.” He handed me a pair of sunglasses with elegant, winged eyes, a fey spray of rhinestones on each wing, the occasional bare indentation where a stone had dropped poignant as the bad teeth of an aristocrat. “Take them,” he said.

Phillip went into the bathroom with the Armani suit and came out wearing it, pleased and resplendent as a child at his own birthday party. Laura took a purple silk blouse and a zebra-striped handbag. Somewhat guiltily, I pocketed the sunglasses and an enormous pale-blue glass ring.

“Here, Susan,” said Kenneth. He went into the closet and emerged with a big gold coat in his arms. He unfurled it and held it out to me; it was a ridiculous, beautiful coat. “When I met you, I pictured you wearing this,” he said.

I looked at the coat and felt the same shy, greedy pleasure I had seen in Phillip’s face, as if I were a kid receiving a treat simply for being myself. “Thank you,” I mumbled. I turned around and offered him my arms. He put the coat on me, and his hands briefly closed on my shoulders. I turned to thank him; his face was private and mundane, but his eyes were full of emotion that was shallow and deep at once. The mixed quality of it reminded me of the expression I had seen on Frederick’s face when he passed me on the street, even though it was not the same mix.

During the drive home I asked Phillip and Laura why they thought Kenneth was so dedicated to collecting stuff. “It seems kind of compulsive,” I said.

Laura snorted mildly. “Oh,” she said, “you think?”

Phillip spoke, his voice insistent, almost bullying, and at the same time absolutely defeated. “When Kenneth was at Harvard, he was a leader,” he said. “He was at the center of a charmed circle. He had parties that were legendary—to be invited, you had to be extraordinarily intelligent or beautiful. He went through girls like they were nothing. They used to come crying to me afterward, and I’d say to him, But she’s a lovely girl, don’t you want to give her a chance? And he’d laugh. He’d just laugh.” As he spoke, the insistence gradually drained from his voice, leaving only the defeat. His hands on the steering wheel looked helpless and somehow hurt.