HONESTY

As we leaned on the kitchen counter after the meal and drank wine, Steve sometimes turned his shoulder to me instead of backing off slightly and including me in the conversation—and I wondered if it was deliberate. When he made an appreciative comment about Claire “not being badly built,” she cupped her hands under her breasts and said, “Grow! Grow!”

Eventually we left—for a party in San Francisco. While the others went ahead to the car, I was feeling a vague desperation, wondering how to break the silence as Steve and I trailed behind. He was looking at me. I heard myself saying, “What can I say?”

“What can you say?”

“That I feel a little lost—that this world is different from mine—these people…” I stopped. “But I like them.”

Huskily, “Sure, you can’t help it.”

That was all he said. Finally with a heroic effort, I blurted out, “Steve, you don’t even meet me halfway.”

“I know.”

“Why?”

“Listen… I have something to tell you…but I don’t know how.”

I waited and continued watching him.

“I don’t know how…just a minute…let me think.” He put his hand to his eyebrow and rubbed it. He was visibly agitated.

I laughed and put my hand around his neck. “Don’t make it so hard.” Inside, though, I was quivering. We were almost to the car.

“Let me say it this way…” He stopped again. “If…I mean, when you’re living away from home…next fall…then maybe we can meet on equal terms. Do you know what I mean?” he asked right before we climbed into the back seat of the car. Things were so crowded with the six of us I had to sit on his lap.

“No, I don’t,” I finally said. And the only thing that crossed my mind was that maybe he imagined we couldn’t have a sexual relationship as long as I was under my mother’s roof. But if that was it, he would have to tell me in plainer terms.

“You don’t know what I mean?”

I shook my head, glad that my hair was now hiding my face, because I was genuinely bewildered—and a little angry.

“How else can I say it?” He seemed absorbed in the problem for a few moments, getting nowhere. Feeling frustrated, I surprised myself, asking suddenly, “Steve, how do you see me?”

I was even more surprised when he was ready to answer. I don’t know why that seemed so unusual except…except that most people can’t or won’t tell you. But he seemed to have been waiting to tell me. He’d mentioned to Norm that he was going to take me out, he admitted—and Norm had said, “But she’s so naïve!” And he’d answered, “But I like her.” That was when he kissed me. He watched me after that, but I didn’t look at him. He touched my cheeks and neck with his fingertips and finally my mouth. When I didn’t respond, he settled back against the seat.

With the radio blaring, Claire, in the front seat, shifted her shoulders in time to the music, her hands moving through complicated patterns. When a song came on that she liked, she would break off mid-sentence and look transfixed as she “danced.” When she reached for Baxter’s smoke ring, it occurred to me how theatrical she appeared. She was talking about all the “beautiful” people she knew, then Baxter’s health—how she had put him on a diet and bought him pills.

At the party it was so noisy that I suggested to Steve that we go out for a walk. Maybe because he was a little drunk, he finally began to open up, saying that he’d liked me from the beginning and that my hair was “a thing” with him—but it wasn’t just that I was a cute girl. “You know you’re cute, don’t you?” he asked. I nodded because it was the easiest thing to do. (I wasn’t about to bring up how self-conscious I was about having acne and my painstaking efforts to hide it with make-up.) He went on to say that he liked the talks we used to have in B-5 when I would come and see him—but I always rushed off from work now, since my mother picked me up. This astonished me because I’d imagined he wasn’t even listening. He told me he thought we were alike in some ways—that we both said what was on our minds.

I admitted then that I had gone through a period of disliking him. I’d decided he wasn’t for real—that he was just playing games. (I didn’t tell him that I’d also felt resentment that he’d flirt with me, then go off with another girl. Or that he was sometimes almost brutal in his insensitivity—he would comment on the attractiveness of the girls we passed as he walked me down the hall). But I did tell him, and this was true, that I finally decided that he just liked people and was being honest in his own way.

Still, he seemed stung by the fact that I’d ever considered him a phony. ­He wanted to be thought of as a person without pretense, he said, someone who was always truthful in what he said and did. He thought I was like that too.

Then he told me that he’d lived in Austria, where he’d been a ski-instructor—and that he’d had a lot of girls, but he always lost interest in them. It wasn’t anything they did—he didn’t know why. But they gave themselves to him, and eventually he got tired of them. It didn’t work if a girl gave him everything, he said. She should save something.

Then what was his objection to dating me while I was living at home? I wondered.

Over Christmas vacation, he’d been with a German girl that he’d lived with in Austria, he confessed. She was older than he was—thirty. And in the past they’d talked about marriage, but it wouldn’t have worked. She wanted to do everything with him, while sometimes he wanted to be free to, say, go out to play pool with the guys. With her, it had lasted longer than with the others, he said. But he wasn’t ready to get married.

And all that time, it seemed so strange to be there with him…to be so frank that it was exhausting—to talk about everything so calmly. Days later, that night would seem extraordinarily intimate to me, and I couldn’t help but feel that we were bound together by what we’d said to each other. When you share private things about yourself, it means something…a lot, doesn’t it? I even wondered whether later he would regret or be embarrassed about having opened up to me. I can’t believe he did that with every girl. But maybe I have to think that.

That was as much as I wrote at the time, but I remember that Steve apologized repeatedly for the way he’d treated me earlier in the evening, though I kept telling him it was all right. And I felt it was, once the walls between us had come down. At one point on the drive home, Claire asked something in French about a trip to the beach they were all planning for the next day, apparently assuming I didn’t speak French—so I told Steve I’d understood. He said he was glad because he wanted to take me. When I told him truthfully that I couldn’t go—I had too much studying to do—he said that he would take another girl, but it wouldn’t mean anything. All of which left me profoundly confused after our date.

I also never wrote about what happened in the wake of that evening. I’d been so absorbed in my conversation with Steve that I was hardly aware of how cold I got on our long walk. Two days later, I came down with a bug and missed a week of work and classes. Steve called once during this time to see how I was. Despite his double messages—and the red flags his history raised—I foolishly began to hope during my illness that there was a chance for us. But in subsequent weeks back in the lab, Steve acted as though there was nothing between us—as though that night had never happened—and continued to flirt with other girls. I was so crushed I threw up a wall that never came down again. Forever after that, I would wonder why he couldn’t have left well enough alone and never asked me out— because I was much more deeply hurt after our date than I had been before.

I remember talking to Steve only once after that. One afternoon many months later, he said he wanted to talk to me after work—and walked me over to Bancroft Ave., where my mother would pick me up. He was telling me about how his new girlfriend appreciated his honesty, saying that she only asked that he always be truthful with her.

“Honesty isn’t just about what you say,” I retorted hotly. “You hide everything you feel!” And as I turned to get into my mother’s car, I thought I saw the glisten of tears in his eyes.