Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

The next time he saw Patty was at a Foreigner concert in Minneapolis; he saw her holding hands with Pete Kopiekin.

Well, now she could probably be on a talk show about date rape. It was a confusing thing. She may have wanted to kiss him or to give Jack Spannos a blow job, but she probably didn’t want maple syrup poured on her. Really though, if you were going to get blind drunk and let everybody fuck you, you had to expect some nasty stuff. On the talk shows they always said it was low self-esteem that made them do it. His eyes rested on Lorraine’s hands; she was wadding the empty nut package and stuffing it in her empty plastic cup.

“Hey,” he said, “what did you mean when you said you kept trying to fit in and you couldn’t? When you were in Thorold?”

“Oh you know.” She seemed impatient. “Acting the part of the pretty, sexy girl.”

“When in fact you were not a pretty, sexy girl?”

She started to smile, then gestured dismissively. “It was complicated.”

It was seductive, the way she drew him in and then shut him out. She picked up her magazine again. Her slight arm movement released a tiny cloud of sweat and deodorant which evaporated as soon as he inhaled it. He breathed in deeply, hoping to smell her again. Sunlight pressed in with viral intensity and exaggerated the lovely contours of her face, the fine lines, the stray cosmetic flecks, the marvelous profusion of her pores. He thought of the stories he’d read in sex magazines about strangers on airplanes having sex in the bathroom or masturbating each other under blankets.

The stewardess made a sweep with a gaping white garbage bag and cleared their trays of bottles and cups.

She put down the magazine. “You’ve probably had the same experience yourself,” she said. Her face was curiously determined, as if it were very important that she make herself understood.

“I mean doing stuff for other people’s expectations or just to feel you have a social identity because you’re so convinced who you are isn’t right.”

“You mean low self-esteem?”

“Well, yeah, but more than that.” He sensed her inner tension and felt an empathic twitch.

“It’s just that you get so many projections onto yourself of who and what you’re supposed to be that if you don’t have a strong support system it’s hard to process it.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know what you mean. I’ve had that experience. I don’t know how you can’t have it when you’re young. There’s so much crap in the world.” He felt embarrassed, but he kept talking, wanting to tell her something about himself, to return her candor. “I’ve done lots of things I wish I hadn’t done, I’ve made mistakes. But you can’t let it rule your life.”

She smiled again, with her mouth only. “Once, a few years ago, my father asked me what I believed to be the worst mistakes in my life. This is how he thinks, this is his favorite kind of question. Anyway, it was really hard to say because I don’t know from this vantage point what would’ve happened if I’d done otherwise in most situations. Finally, I came up with two things, my relationship with this guy named Jerry and the time I turned down an offer to work with this really awful band that became famous. He was totally bewildered. He was expecting me to say ‘dropping out of college.’”

“You didn’t make a mistake dropping out of college.” The vehemence in his voice almost made him blush; then nameless urgency swelled forth and quelled embarrassment. “That wasn’t a mistake,” he repeated.

“Well, yeah, I know.”

“Excuse me.” The silent business shark to their left rose in majestic self-containment and moved awkwardly past their knees, looking at John with pointed irony as he did so. Fuck you, thought John.

“And about that relationship,” he went on. “That wasn’t your loss. It was his.” He had meant these words to sound light and playfully gallant, but they had the awful intensity of a maudlin personal confession. He reached out to gently pat her hand to reassure her that he wasn’t a nut, but instead he grabbed it and held it. “If you want to talk about mistakes — shit, I raped somebody. Somebody I liked.”

Their gaze met in a conflagration of reaction. She was so close he could smell her sweating, but at the speed of light she was falling away, deep into herself where he couldn’t follow. She was struggling to free her hand.

“No,” he said, “it wasn’t a real rape, it was what you were talking about, it was complicated.”

She wrenched free her hand and held it protectively close to her chest. “Don’t touch me again.” She turned tautly forward. He imagined her heart beating in alarm. His body felt so stiff he could barely feel his own heart. Furiously, he wondered if the people around them had heard any of this. Staring ahead of him he hissed, “Do you think I was dying to hear about your alcoholism? You were the one who started this crazy conversation.”

He felt her consider this. “It’s not the same thing,” she hissed back.

“You don’t understand,” he said ineptly.

She was silent. He thought he dimly felt her body relax, emitting some possibility of forgiveness. But he couldn’t tell. He closed his eyes. He thought of Patty’s splayed body, her half-conscious kiss. He thought of his wife, her compact scrappy body, her tough-looking flat nose and chipped nail polish, her smile, her smell, her embrace which was both soft and fierce. He imagined the hotel room he would sleep in tonight, its stifling grid of rectangles, oblongs and windows that wouldn’t open. He dozed.

The pilot woke him with a command to fasten his seat belt. He sat up and blinked. Nothing had changed. The girl at his side was sitting slightly hunched with her hands resolutely clasped.

“God, I’ll be glad when we’re on the ground,” he said.

She sniffed in reply.

They descended, ears popping. They landed with a flurry of baggage-grabbing. He stood, bumped his head and tried to get into the aisle to escape, but it was too crowded. He sat back down.

“Excuse me.” She butted her way past him and into the aisle. He watched a round vulnerable piece of her head move between the obstruction of shoulders and arms. She glanced backward, possibly to see if he was going to try to follow her. The sideways movement of her hazel iris prickled him. They burst from the plane and scattered, people picking up speed as they bore down on their destination. He caught up with her as they entered the terminal. “I’m sorry,” he said to the back of her head. She moved farther away, into memory and beyond.

JAMAICA KINCAID was born in St. John’s, Antigua, in 1949. Her mother, a homemaker, removed her from school to help support the family when her third and last brother was born because her stepfather, a carpenter, was ill and could not provide for them. Kincaid was sent to Scarsdale, New York, to work as an au pair. While there, she enrolled in evening classes at a community college, and later she attended Franconia College in New Hampshire on a full scholarship. However, she dropped out after a year and returned to New York, where she began writing, eventually becoming a staff writer for The New Yorker. She wrote for several magazines, and her stories appeared in The Paris Review and The New Yorker .

Kincaid often writes about colonialism as well as gender and sexuality. Many of her novels are loosely autobiographical, although she once said, “Everything I say is true, and everything I say is not true. You couldn’t admit any of it to a court of law. It would not be good evidence.”

The author of At the Bottom of the River, a collection of short stories, and the novels Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, Mr. Potter , and See Now Then , Kincaid has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and the Prix Femina Étranger and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont.