“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said truthfully.
“Well, you’re at the age where you’d better start thinking about it.”
Everything about my dad was repelling and embarrassing me that year. His Mission Control eyewear, his petrochemically slicked hair, his wide gunslinger’s stance. He reminded me of a beaver, all uncorrected overbite and senseless industry. Building another dam why? Gnawing tree trunks why? Paddling around with a big grin why, exactly?
“Sex is a great blessing,” he said in his teaching voice. “But what you see in a porno magazine is human misery and degradation. I don’t know where you got the magazine, but simply by owning it you’ve materially participated in the degradation of a fellow human being. Imagine how you’d feel if this were Cynthia, or Ellen—”
“OK, I get it.”
“Do you really? Do you understand that these women are somebody’s sisters? Somebody’s daughters?”
I had a sense of moral injury, of being mistaken for a worse person than I was, because I had not, in fact, materially participated in anyone’s degradation. To the contrary, by stealing the magazine, I’d financially punished the bookstore for its bulk purchase of secondhand porn; I was, if anything, a virtuous recycler, and any private uses to which I then put the stolen Oui were my own business and amounted, arguably, to further punishment of the exploiters, since my reliance on stolen goods obviated any cash purchase of freshly exploitational matter, not to mention saving virgin forests from being clear-cut and pulped.
A few days later, I stole more magazines. I liked Oui because the girls in it seemed realer — also more European, hence more cultured, intelligent, and soulful — than the ones in Playboy. I imagined deep conversations with them, I imagined them attracted to how compassionately I listened to them, but there was no denying that my interest in them died at the instant of orgasm. I felt as if I was up against a structural unfairness; as if simply being male, excitable by pictures through no choice of my own, placed me ineluctably in the wrong. I meant no harm and yet I harmed.
It got worse. With college looming, I made a bloodless but nonetheless exciting pact to exchange virginities with my senior-prom date, Mary Ellen Stahlstrom, whose romantic sights were set on someone unattainable, and so it happened that, on the last possible weekend of the summer, in an Estes Park cabin belonging to the parents of a mutual friend, at the crucial moment of entry, I accidentally delivered a sharp masculine poke to the very most sensitive and off-limits part of Mary Ellen. She gave a full-throated shriek, recoiling and kicking me away. My attempts to comfort her and apologize only fed her hysteria. She wailed, she thrashed, she hyperventilated, she kept babbling a phrase that I finally deciphered, to my immense relief, as a wish to be taken home to Denver right away.
Mary Ellen’s anally violated shriek was ringing in my ears when I matriculated at Penn. My father had suggested that I choose a smaller college, but Penn had offered me a scholarship and my mother had seduced me with talk of the wealthy, powerful people I would meet at an Ivy League school. In my first three years at Penn, I made not one wealthy friend, but my intimations of male guilt were given a firm theoretical foundation. From lectures both in and out of classrooms, beginning with an orientation-week sex talk delivered by a female senior in bib overalls, I learned that I was even more inescapably implicated in the patriarchy than I’d realized. The upshot was that, in any intimate relationship with a woman, my motives were a priori suspect.
Not that intimate relationships turned out to be a problem. Apparently, only to girls less than five feet tall did I not look heinously young. One of them, a fellow staffer on the DP during my second year, started giving me significant looks, tilting her head to one side, and finally passed me a note in which she alluded to the “danger” of getting “badly hurt” by me. I obliged her by making out with her in the middle of the Green one night, partly out of guilt for not being more interested in having sex with her — for being such an objectifying male that I couldn’t see past her shortness — and partly with the vile male motive of finally having sex with someone, but I was unable to oblige her with the avowals that she then, with tilted head, solicited, and so I ended up guiltily hurting her with nothing to show for it. She went so far as to quit the paper.
I took refuge in beer, the pool tables in Houston Hall, and the DP. As working journalists in a student body doing frivolous student things, my friends and I achieved levels of self-importance that I wouldn’t encounter again until I met people from the New York Times. We had nougat cores of innocence, of course, but we’d all bragged about our high-school sexual exploits and it never occurred to me that, since I had lied, my friends might also have lied. The one person who saw through me was Lucy Hill. She’d been a scholarship student at Choate Rosemary Hall and had waitressed for two years before starting at Penn. She had a boyfriend who was nearly thirty, a self-taught hippie carpenter who looked a lot like D. H. Lawrence, her favorite writer. Lucy’s friendly clinical interest in me was more explicit and forgiving than my sister Cynthia’s. When I confessed to her what I’d done to Mary Ellen Stahlstrom, she laughed and said that Mary Ellen had shrieked because I was giving her the kind of intercourse she couldn’t admit she wanted. Lucy was now intent on finding me somebody with whom to fuck like bunnies. I didn’t love the sound of fuck like bunnies, and I vaguely resented the condescension implicit in Lucy’s project, but I had no one else to talk to about sex, and so I kept going to her off-campus house for weak coffee and mushy Moosewood Cookbook desserts.
Neither Anabel nor I knew it when she left my office, after pronouncing her judgment on my character, but I was exactly the guy she wanted. Outside my window, the sun had gone down in its sudden October way, and I sat in the twilight and suffered shame. I was prepared to believe I was a jerk, and yet it rankled to have been called one by an older and very attractive (and rich, can’t forget rich, it was there from the beginning) woman who’d made a special trip across the Schuylkill to denounce me. I didn’t know what to do. Calling Lucy would simply invite further reproach. I couldn’t get you’re a jerk out of my head. The mental picture of Anabel’s nude body in butcher paper also gave me no rest.
Stopping only briefly at the dining hall to eat two chicken cutlets and a slice of cake, I returned to my dorm room and dialed Anabel’s number, which I’d copied onto the palm of my hand. I counted ten rings on her phone before I hung up. When Oswald came back after dinner, he found me sitting in the dark.
“Mr. Tom, he brooding,” he said. “Something has ‘got his goat.’ Something is ‘stuck in his craw.’” He referenced, not for the first time, a Get Smart episode about an East Asian evildoer named the Claw: “Not ‘the Craw’! The CRAW!”
I wanted to tell Oswald that he’d fucked up and exposed me to humiliation, but he was in such high spirits, so completely unaware of having fucked up, that I couldn’t bring myself to ruin his evening. Instead, I vented my hatred of the author of the article.
“He’s very like a little sharp-toothed mink,” Oswald concurred. “If there were any justice in the universe, he wouldn’t write such clean copy.”
“The blind quotes about Laird were really mean. I’m wondering if we should print some sort of apology.”