The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [3]
She laughed aloud, an unreal brittle sound that surprised her. “You son of a bitch,” she said, “I was going to leave you, you bastard. Why couldn’t you wait?”
But it evened out, she realized. He had done the leaving and could bear the guilt; she had been left and could feel worthless and rejected. There would be enough bad vibes to go around.
There generally were.
She had always been distant from people. Even as a girl in Dayton, she had lived very much alone in her own world. She was not autistic, and her withdrawal was recognized less by others than by herself. But she had known very early, so early that it seemed to her she had always known, that other people were able to be a part of one another in a way that she was not. An only child herself, her companions in childhood and after were almost invariably only children. With girls, she was most comfortable in relationships that furnished companionship without intimacy, friendship without the sharing of confidences. With boys and later men, her relationships similarly stayed on or near the surface. What intimacy existed was staged, an illusion created by mutual role playing.
When she was seventeen years old, she began dating a boy named Carl Spangenthal. He was nineteen, a second-year business major at the University of Dayton. He was very tall and very thin, with a narrow, rabbity nose and two high spots of color on his pale cheeks. She did not find him attractive, nor did she like him much,
But for some reason or another it never occurred to her to decline a date with him.
“You know what I like about you?” he would say. And then he would praise one or another negative virtue. “Your hands don’t perspire the way so many girls’ do. One thing I can’t take is clammy fingers.” Or he would praise her complexion by assuring her that acne really put him off. “I mean even a couple of pimples, say two or three pimples on a girl’s chin, and that’s it for me.” It seemed to her that his development of their relationship consisted of forever finding new ways in which she failed to turn his stomach.
One night, giddy and taut-nerved after an evening of petting, she became quietly hysterical in her bedroom at the thought of suddenly breaking out in everything that nauseated Carl. She envisioned herself turning in the course of an evening’s near lovemaking into a creature blossoming with pimples and gleaming with chill sweat, her eyes grown suddenly small and close together (“Just can’t take little beady pig eyes”), her breath foul, her whole body magically transformed into a compendium of everything that he deplored. Then he would turn on the lights and gag and run shrieking from the car, never to be seen again. She couldn’t get the image out of her head, collapsing on her bed in silent spasms of giggling.
However her vision changed her feelings for him, it in no way altered their relationship. He went on taking her out, and presumably would go on doing so until he hit on a flaw and found it in her. And she went on dating him. Few other boys asked her out. She was a high school senior, boys in her classes dated younger girls, and the boys she had dated in earlier years had mostly gone away to college. After she had been going with Carl for two months she turned down all other invitations automatically.
He was able to thrill her, and he was the first boy to manage this. In the limited petting she had done previously she had never been remotely excited. She had been neither fast nor slow, permitting this and prohibiting that intuitively, guessing