The Appetites of Girls (23 page)

One morning before I left, I found Opal waiting for me on the common room sofa. She sometimes woke before breakfast to do stretches at the athletic center, but even for her this was an unusually early hour. Moments before I had heard her speaking in a hush to Ruth, who must have risen to use the hall bathroom. I had waited until their voices ceased before emerging from my room, hoping to avoid being seen leaving, to avoid, especially, Ruth’s longing stare.

“Do you have a minute?” Opal placed a hand on the empty seat cushion beside her.

“Okay.” I wondered what the two of them could possibly have been discussing. If they missed me.

“When I was fourteen,” she said, “just after we moved to Puerto Rico, Mother left me for three weeks with her boyfriend Paulo’s aunt, whom I’d met only once before at some birthday party. Mother and Paulo had tickets for a cruise down the Windward Islands. An adults-only cruise, so I could not be taken. She joked with me that she would come back if I was lucky. Twenty-one days I stayed in this woman’s house. She
spoke almost no English, and I sat on her rocking chair on her front veranda in the choking heat and wondered if Mother would ever return.” Opal pressed her thumbnail into the groove between her two front teeth. Her face was pale. I could see the rivulet of a vein below the white of her cheek.

“That must have been awful. I can’t begin to imagine how you felt.”

Opal nodded. It was long minutes before she was able to speak again. “When a woman gives up everything she is for a man, she’s playing with fire.” Opal leaned her left arm against her chest, her fingers curled as if she were digging up the right words to make me understand. “You know, when you allow your own life to be swallowed up—” She stopped, her eyes looking into mine. “You’re very sweet, Setsu, but you have to protect yourself. You have to protect who
you
are. No one else in this world will.”

When she had finished, I placed a hand on hers. “Thank you for sharing this,” I said. I smiled to let her know I understood what she implied. Still, my throat tightened with irritation. There was no reason to tell her she had wasted her time. But the comparison was preposterous. I was
not
Opal’s mother. And James certainly was not one of her mother’s sleazy boyfriends. Did the fact that I
loved
a man mean I was snuffing out some truer, stronger self? My situation was different in
every
way.

•   •   •

I
n the first months of that year, I had saved the colorful party flyers that arrived in my campus mailbox, sticking them with thumbtacks to the corkboard over my desk. But now, it seemed, James and I always had our own plans, and invitations became crumpled balls in my wastebasket. Two Wednesday afternoons, I even failed to show for my scheduled monthly meeting with Professor Yolen, my academic adviser, remembering only hours later, long after he’d left his office. James had surprised me on those occasions, finding me on my way out of Chaucer class. “Let’s take a drive.” He’d rattled his car keys. “The day is too nice to waste.”

“You are turning me into a delinquent!” I said. But the missed parties, the stammered apologies to Professor Yolen, seemed a small price to pay for my blissful time with James. How good he was to me, always showering me with compliments, even claiming to adore what he referred to as my delicate appetite. Fondling my nape, more than once he confided that the way I had eaten during our first dinner together had endeared me to him. “Just like a tiny fawn or a gentle dove,” he said, licking the tips of my fingers. “Sweet, sweet Setsu, you are perfection embodied.”

So when we shared lunches or dinners, I tried to measure the portions I placed on my plate—a single thin strip of filleted fish, two spoonfuls of rice, three small chunks of squash.

James sometimes joked that the full glass of wine he poured for me each meal seemed out of proportion to my modest helpings. “I’m going to get fat spending time with you,” he would tease, gesturing to the mounds of food remaining on the table, filling his dish with seconds, even thirds, as if the small quantities I took fueled his hunger.

And I was reminded then of how much older James seemed than most of the males in my classes or the nearby dorms. They were still boys in many ways, but James, at twenty-five, with his thick voice, his sure opinions, was unarguably a man, unafraid to ask for the things he liked. In one of his dresser drawers, he had placed a number of my belongings as well as several of the purchases he’d made for me. And as we grew to know each other better, he began to buy things exclusively meant for our time alone. A lace brassiere, a baby-blue garter belt. One night, after we had pushed aside our dinner dishes, our emptied glasses of wine, he took my hand, leading me down the hall to the cool of his darkened bedroom. “Would you?” He dangled the brassiere and a string of glass beads from his fingertips. “You’re so beautiful. Too, too beautiful to remain hidden.” He began to hum softly—Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose”—then lit my scented candle, which had made its way from the dining table to his bedroom windowsill. “Walk for me, Setsu,” he whispered. “God, you’re as lithe as a nymph. I love to watch you move.”

The first few times he had requested this, I shook my head, shivering slightly in my state of half-undress. But James seemed impatient with my reticence. “Don’t be so modest, kitten.” The flame from the candle made elongated shadows of my limbs on the walls as I paced James’s floor. “Dance, will you?” James would lower himself into a corner armchair, then lean forward on his elbows. And I would hesitate, trembling now from nerves as well as cold. But even in the near darkness I could see such desire in James’s parted lips, could hear it in the quiet grinding of his teeth, and slowly, slowly I began to sway my hips, wanting, willing to do things for him I had never done before. This was part of what it meant to have a man, I told myself.

Still, there were times when we lay together, bodies entwined in that most intimate way James had shown me, I felt I was no more than a child beside him. Pulling the sheets to my shoulders in sudden bashfulness, I would whisper these fears into the faint patchouli scent of his chest.

“Oh, no, no, Setsu.” The things I complained of, he said, were the very things he most loved about me—the girlish dimple in my left cheek, the hips I managed to keep so slender, my tiny waist and thighs and breasts. And he would slide the sheet down, down, little by little revealing what I had shyly covered, then embrace the narrowest part of me where my stomach caved.

One evening after James had held me in this way, he jumped from bed suddenly and pulled a pad and pencil from the canvas knapsack on his floor. “Oh, that’s so perfect. Don’t stir. Don’t move an inch.” And with a towel loosely wrapping his middle, he began to sketch me. My whole body flushed, and instinctively I drew my arms across my chest.

“Please, please, Setsu. You trust me, don’t you? I haven’t done this in years,” he said, lifting his pencil slightly from the page. “But, God, you are so gorgeous. Like a rare and fragile flower.” And as he gazed at me, I saw, to my surprise, that his eyes were shiny with tears. So I agreed: for him, I would swallow my discomfort. I would even tie the band of lace
around my neck that he had brought to me. He worked almost without ceasing for what must have been close to an hour, pausing only once to find the classical music station he liked on the radio. “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” was playing, and James inhaled slowly, eyelids fluttering as if breathing in the splendor of the music. “Do you know this piece?”

I nodded wordlessly. Yes, I knew it, so well I could sing every note, so well my left hand recalled every fingering. I almost spoke this aloud, but for some reason it felt the wrong time, the wrong thing to say.

When James was finished, he drew me close to him. And I stroked his back and shoulders, the tops of his thighs in the manner he liked best, wishing to make him happy.

“Never before,” I murmured, “has anyone made me feel so beautiful or so loved.”

•   •   •

J
ames had several friends who lived in Boston—teachers, artists, writers—acquaintances he’d made during the two years between college and graduate school, when he lived in Cambridge, working on the campaign of a Democratic state congressman and waiting tables. Coincidentally, two of them—Dominic and his girlfriend, Fiona—had known Francesca some years before in the New York art scene. And Fran had met Nicholas one summer at a resort in Saint-Tropez. One of them had suggested a collective evening out. “I can’t wait for my friends to meet you,” James announced one February afternoon as he reached for my face with his palms. “I keep telling them how wonderful you are. So they think you sound too good to be true. I can hardly wait to prove them wrong.”

“I will be on my best behavior!” I had laughed at his compliment, but in truth, the thought of being introduced to James’s friends made my stomach jumpy. I had heard Francesca’s stories about her old crowd in New York, and I was sure I could never fit in. I wished, too, James had not praised me so highly, worried I would be a disappointment.

“So what are Dominic and Fiona like?” I asked Francesca some days before we were to meet them. Francesca was sprawled on our couch, thumbing through some French magazine. We had just returned from the Brown bookstore together, Fran in need of a text for her philosophy class, I to replace two notebooks I had somehow mislaid in my trips between James’s place and mine.

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s been a while since I caught up with them.” She tossed the magazine on the floor, but she hadn’t looked at me, and I knew she sensed my nervousness and was annoyed.

Francesca made arrangements for dinner at a small Chinese restaurant in downtown Boston—Hunan Palace, a place James knew as well. “It’s a little clichéd, I guess,” she laughed from the backseat of the car on the way there, the three of us having agreed to make the trip together in James’s Volkswagen.

“Yes, clichéd, but the food’s not bad.” James glanced at me in the seat beside him.

I smiled with a carelessness I did not feel and smoothed my skirt across my knees. I tried not to think about the evening section meeting for my biology class I was missing because James had wanted to leave early, taking the most scenic route into the city.

“You are stunning,” he whispered, tracing a finger across my cheek. I was wearing an outfit he had helped me select, a white cardigan sweater with small heart-shaped buttons, a short flannel skirt, matching gray stockings. Beside me, folded, lay my ivory winter coat and a wool scarf threaded with the same color of turquoise as the bracelet he had bought me.

We joined James’s friends in the back room of the darkened restaurant, beyond a screen of wooden beads that swayed and clicked as we parted them. They were quibbling over an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts of a contemporary French painter whom Nicholas, Dominic, and Fiona admired but whom Greta, Nicholas’s date, deplored. “Have you seen it?” they asked Francesca and me as we took our seats.

Francesca hadn’t but was familiar with the artist’s work. “His early
pieces do little for me.” She combed a strand of hair away from her forehead. “But his recent work is really original.”

Since they seemed to be waiting for my response, too, I said only, “I guess I don’t have the chance to come into Boston as much as I’d like.”

Like James and Francesca, the others at the table had traveled much of Europe, even Africa and Asia. They read books in German and Italian, attended gallery openings.

“
My São Luis
is playing in Providence now.” Francesca leaned across the round table, addressing all of us. “You know, the Brazilian film? Setsu”—she turned to me—“make James take you if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s sublime.”

“Oh”—Greta nodded—“and the cinematography is reminiscent of
Sonia’s
Song
.” She squinted slightly as she peered at me, as if concentrating to be certain I understood.

I nodded in a manner I hoped was vague enough to cover my ignorance as I crossed and recrossed my legs beneath the table. As I listened to them argue about political refugee poets, emerging fiction writers, a controversial sculpture of Christ, I marveled that Francesca, only a month older than I, was so informed, so sure of her opinions. Like Fiona, in her long-fringed tapestry shawl, and Greta, in a suede vest, Francesca had dressed boldly, wearing high-heeled leather boots, enormous hoop earrings, and a red wraparound dress with a plunging neckline. When she leaned forward, her deep cleft of cleavage showed, yet she seemed to feel no more exposed than the rest of us, only, somehow, more assured, more substantial.

Our waiter set down the many platters we had ordered, and I watched Francesca pile her plate with crispy wontons, a heap of stir-fried rice, a bulging pancake of mu shu pork. And before I had finished the few items on my plate, she was spooning seconds. As we emptied our glasses of plum wine, the conversation grew louder, the voices more rapid. I tried to think of intelligent comments to add, but always the subject seemed to switch before I could contribute. Conscious of my silence, the blandness
of my wit, my careful clothes, my meager appetite, I stared at the napkin folded in my lap and picked at its frayed edge, knowing I had added about as much interest to the evening as the wooden coatrack wedged in the corner beside our table.

At the end of the evening, Francesca chose to remain behind rather than riding back to Brown with James and me. She had made plans to meet another friend at Emmaline’s, a club in the neighborhood, and would take a late bus home. I half wished James had agreed to stay when she’d invited us along. I turned to watch her dash around the corner, the cape she’d slipped over her dress sailing behind her like some great wing.

During the return drive, with words sloppy from wine, I spilled out my insecurities to James. “Do you think I could ever be more like them? I wish I were. More like Francesca.”

“What do you mean?” James wanted to know.

“She is so self-assured, so strong. Greta and Fiona, too. The way they talk and laugh, even the way they eat—”