Sol Stein - Other people

Bill Acton, I regret to report, is the son of an old friend of my father's from Yale. We met under the worst of circumstances, my parents were throwing a between-Christmas-and-New-Year's party at the house and it's their idea of conviviality to have young people — that's what they call us, young people — invited also, so it's a familylike party. Only what happens is that the parents congregate together getting sloshed and the young people, if they can stand each other, smoke dope in an upstairs room. What struck me about Bill was his shyness. The other fellows who were about my age were all coming on the same way they used to in college, jocks-with-cocks looking for an opening, and Bill just sat there. I don't like wallflowers, female or male, but I happened to ask Bill something and his answer was a quote from Auden. I mean he didn't say it pretentiously, just as if it was the right answer. I guess I was also flattered by the fact that he assumed I'd know, that I wasn't just an opening for his oil rig, I was a person with a brain.

Well, we talked a lot that evening, and when the adults were ready to go home, Bill didn't offer to take me somewhere for a drink, meaning something else of course, he shook hands . Sure there's something terribly square and old-fashioned about that, and I guess all I thought at the time was that Bill was not boring and he's the kind of guy you could bring home if you had to (can you imagine my bringing the Frenchman from the U.N. home? My father'd have had a heart attack!). So when he was leaving I said call me. That's all.

Well, of course he called my home and Mom told him I don't live at home and gave him my phone number, and we got together for the movies, we went on a picnic believe it or not, I found out he liked rock and classical just like me, and then one Saturday we had dinner at Adam's Apple, which I sometimes go to to get away from the U.N. crowd at lunch, and we had no particular plans for afterwards, so we walked downtown and then West, and before you know it, we're in pornsville, and when he realized it, I swear he blushed. The theater right in front of us was playing Behind the Green Door . He asked me did I know what kind of a film it was, and I said yes, Betsy Thorne described it scene by scene to me. The box office was manned by a Puerto-Rican-looking woman. We were about five feet from her, and she was looking Bill right in the eyeball when he said to me, "Let's not."

I could hear the woman whisper "Chicken shit."

Bill walked closer to her cage and said, "What did you say?"

"Nothing," said the woman.

I took Bill by the arm and said, "Let's go." We walked quite a while before he talked. He said he'd seen a couple of films like that some time ago and really didn't care for them, they made sex seem mechanical and impersonal.

"But did you find them exciting?" I asked.

"Sure," he said. "It gets you going and stops you at the same time because it's so crude. Did you ever get a tan from a sunlamp?"

I hadn't.

"Well, I have," Bill said, "and it's not the same as getting it from the sun. It feels artificial. That's what I'm talking about."

I knew all about his ambivalence because I was churning over some of my own. A fellow couldn't be nicer than Bill. Bill was reliable. A friend. A nonthreatening friend. I asked him did he ever lose his temper, and he said he tried to control his temper. I told him about my insomnia, and he looked at me as if I were reporting on outer space. He always slept. It's not that I'm afraid of perfect people. I'm leery of my reaction to them.

Eventually we wound our way back to Bill's car. When we got to my place, I invited him up for a drink, and for a moment I thought he was going to beg off, but I said, "There's a parking place right in front. A New Yorker can't turn down an empty parking place, can he?"

Upstairs he hung his jacket up on a chair. I put a record on and brought out a half-gallon jug of Gallo's Hearty Burgundy and a couple of glasses. Bill did the pouring as if it were his role.

I tried to get him to talk about himself, and finally he told me about his year-long leading-to-marriage kind of thing that broke up. She sounded like a very nice person, a perfect match. She took up with someone Bill described as mean. Isn't that the way the ball bounces?

I asked him if he'd ever smoked dope. He nodded. I wanted to say Good for you . So I went to my stash and brought us a joint. Neither of us was a cigarette smoker, and we had a lot of trouble inhaling. It was a bit comical. He seemed happy that I was sharing the embarrassment as well as the joint. It relaxed him, I could tell, and I felt he was making something erotic out of passing the joint from his lips to my lips, back and forth. Suddenly he excused himself and went to the John. When he came back his breath smelled of toothpaste. I knew Bill was the kind of person who would never use someone else's toothbrush. What did he use, his finger?

When I offered a second joint, Bill volunteered to reimburse me for it and I told him not to be silly.

"It's funny," he said, not looking at me, "before the wine and dope I was wondering what a person like you saw in a person like me, but now I'm feeling pretty good about myself," and he tried to put his arms around me.

"No," I said.

He took his arms back immediately.

"I like you," I said. "But not that way."

He looked so crestfallen I wanted to take his face in my hands and kiss it, but anything physical at that point could have been misinterpreted.

I didn't pass the joint back. "Not if you're driving soon," I said.

"I better go," said good Bill.

"Yes. I enjoyed your company."

"Thanks for the wine. And the…" He pointed to the joint I was still holding. Then he fled.

I felt like a shit. What would have been so awful if I had gone to bed with him? The Frenchman didn't misinterpret it, a fuck was a fuck. But Bill would have, wouldn't he?

The following afternoon, lying on Dr. Koch's couch, I described the evening with Bill in minute detail. I am listening to myself tell it as if I'm a Christian martyr. I felt I was inches away from grasping something about myself. Dr. Koch interrupted my silence to say, "What are you thinking?" and I said I was reciting the evening with Bill to make Koch jealous.

I could hear the clock ticking in Koch's study.

For a long time he said nothing. Finally, I heard a deep sigh.

"Do you feel guilty about what you said?"

I didn't answer.

"You did nothing terrible," he said.

I come here for insight, not for absolution . I didn't want to talk.

"What are you thinking?" he insisted.

"Nothing," I lied. "Nothing, nothing, nothing."

Before Marta died, for almost all of the thirty-four years of our marriage, every Saturday morning when weather permitted, we would go out shopping together. In the early years it was often just window shopping, discussing with high seriousness which of two armchairs we would buy for my den, knowing we would never decide between the two and have to look for a third because there was not enough money to buy something as frivolous as a comfortable place for me to sit. But when I had paid off my debts from medical school and from the early years of transposing myself to this country, we used whatever was left after food and rent not to save — how could we save for the future when we had so much to make up for the past? — but to spend with a vengeance against the forces that had denied us!

When we go on a shopping spree not for what we need but for what we want, we find we still have the reckless joy of children somewhere inside bursting out. I remember the day Marta and I splurged — we felt like kings — buying our first wall-to-wall carpeting for the living room and hallway to replace the second-hand rugs, threadbare from the feet of our only son, Kurt, and his friends, and our friends, and our own feet, and from the feet of patients without count, coming and going.