The Other by David Guterson
He was, she added, endlessly attentive, punctual to a fault, and an idealist, which she respected. He’d salvaged a broken mimeograph from a Dumpster and was repairing it, which to Cindy seemed novel—he had the idea of mass-producing political broadsides once this hand-cranked machine was in order. From the campus treasurer’s office, John William procured a copy of Reed’s financial report, and while she studied Plato at his side, he marked it up with a highlighter. In the cafeteria, he ate mostly raw vegetables. He had a peculiar sense of what constituted a date—for example, he asked her if she wanted to get up at 4 a.m. on a Saturday and walk until dusk, the idea being to follow the Willamette to its confluence with the Columbia. She agreed and got blisters. When it rained, they huddled in a railroad car inundated by blackberry creepers, and even though this felt dangerous and tawdry, she also felt enamored of the industrial sound of the storm beating on their rusted hideaway, and of the idea of what they were doing. She noted again that John William was conspicuously less horny than other boys she’d known, who surely would have pounced on her in such an opportune setting. No thrusting loins, no poking fingers. He had a lot of ideas, though, and despite his post-dance prologue of tormented silence, he now proved to be an insatiable promulgator, for his audience of one, of heartfelt positions. He had a way of animatedly twisting up the political with the metaphysical that made him impossible to follow, but Cindy didn’t care. She was his fond, confused listener. If Buddhism, existentialism, and anarchism went together, that was all right with Cindy. Instead of pinning her and clawing at her bra, like other boys, John William sat with his knees up and rambled effusively, saying that Pol Pot’s education in Paris subverted the ideal of a liberal-arts education, or questioning the New Deal. Other smart boys had liked her, but this boy’s brain was on fire. Plus, here in the Oregon country the midday light was soft and broad beyond the frame of their boxcar door, and there was wind riffling a field of high weeds and woody Scotch broom. An alluvial fertility could still be felt transpiring in the earth in the week before Halloween. The color of the sky was like a length of white chalk turned on its side and rubbed into asphalt. Sanded—that was how the world looked, worked slowly down to no rough edges. All of this wasn’t sweltering cornfields, and it wasn’t a plate of salty French fries at Big Larry’s Drive-In on the road between Aurora and Sugar Grove, where she used to go with a senior named Ted Lynch when she was a sophomore at East Aurora High School—Ted Lynch, who drove a two-tone Plymouth Duster 340 and played second-string free safety on the football team. Now she and John William walked the Willamette with their arms around each other, and when they came to the Columbia at Kelley Point, in the wet haze of this October afternoon, John William regaled her with stray information: Lewis and Clark had camped here; they’d also employed elk brains to soften hides while wintering at Fort Clatsop; in Montana, the Corps of Discovery had fallen so hungry some members ate their candles. No matter. She preferred his agitated brain—its speed, heat, and recall—to anything she’d come across so far in suitors, and his frenzied chivalry also had an appeal: when she observed offhandedly that it was cold, he splintered discarded apple-crates with his boots and built a fire on the riverbank, inducing high flames until she asked him to stop, whereupon John William desisted immediately, and with the obeisance of a knight. And so she came back to campus that evening happily disheveled, her hair smelling like smoke and rain, mud in her shoes, drawn tight and light-headed from not having eaten (he’d insisted that fasting would enhance the day, and she had to admit there was truth to that, even though, for most of the afternoon, she’d felt preoccupied with the idea of finding a tuna sandwich), and the coppery taste of his mouth in hers, because, by her dorm door, she’d slugged him once in the gut playfully, then pushed him against the foyer wall and, with her forearms against his chest, slid her tongue between his teeth while she had his lips parted. He didn’t flinch, but, as she said, “he had a hard time admitting to his body.” Afterward, he said that the day behind them already wounded him in memory. “You’re weird,” she answered, and slugged him again with the tomboyish coquetry she’d developed for use with her boyfriends in Aurora. This cool and different West Coast guy—it was time to write home to her friends about him, because he was such a trip.
“HE TOOK ME to Seattle on the Union Pacific in a boxcar. I remember waiting under the Forty-second Street bridge and making our jump when they changed engine crews. You have to understand, I’d grown up getting excited about cotton candy at the county fair and rolling my dolls up and down the street in a baby carriage, so hopping a train out here on the West Coast and doing reefer, hanging out with this intense, strange guy…Talk about sudden—I went from being Daddy’s little girl to dodging bulls and riding a freight north, all in about fifteen minutes—well, okay, with an interlude of Schlitz and back-seat car sex in between.” She laughed. “Cold,” she said. “It’s freezing in a boxcar. We finally hopped off around midnight on a Friday. I remember being really impressed by the shopwindows in Seattle—like at Jay Jacobs, where there was a Roman fleece robe in shocking pink for sale, and thinking how nice it would be to flounce around in one of those while drinking—I don’t know—Taittinger? John William wanted to put a rock through that window. Oh yeah, we went into a Steve’s Broiler on Fourth Avenue. I doubt it’s there anymore. Are there still places in Seattle where people smoke? I noticed something,” said Cindy. “When he was stoned he was definitely more amorous and sensual. It would be so unlike him to volunteer a kiss, but when he got a little weed in him, that changed. So we were sitting in this Steve’s, stuffing food into each other’s mouths and kissing in between. And talking about school. Or he was talking about school. Whatever he was reading. I don’t know. He’d go from Francis Bacon to Euripides in half a sentence. Then he’d kiss me. Then we’d eat some more. It was incredibly sexy. And it was so romantic. I felt like I was dating Byron. I was really a sucker for the Romantic poets when I was nineteen. Later, we hung out at the Greyhound station. You know, like in Simon and Garfunkel—I’ve got my head in his lap, and he’s reading a paperback with his hair in his eyes and with this sexy stubble on his jawline. I remember. This is the kind of thing you remember. I had my nose sort of up against his belly, which smelled like, I don’t know, you’ll have to supply your own simile—it smelled like a guy, is all I can say. I admit it, I was sort of in love. But—we were just sitting around in the Greyhound station, and he says to me, ‘What do you think of Romeo and Juliet?’ What? Was this a Shakespeare question? I think I made a joke like ‘Too much doo-wop,’ and then hummed a few bars of…” She hummed the refrain from “Just Like Romeo and Juliet,” by the Reflections. “John William said, ‘No—I mean killing yourself.’ He’s like ‘Could you do that? Because I’m looking for somebody who can do that.’
“Wait,” said Cindy Saperstein. “I guess I should have gotten on a bus right then instead of pretending I was into it the same way he was, but the way it lays, you’re nineteen, you’re stoned, it’s four in the morning, you’ve been slumming all night and running around with this good-looking guy, and so I guess it was too late for both of us. I mean, for a half-second, as a game with myself, I bought into this Romeo-and-Juliet myth. I said yes, because about ten percent of me yearned toward this romantic fatalism that was so entertaining, so I said yes, I’d kill myself, but it was strictly an act—the other ninety percent was just this normal college girl who was hanging out and having fun.”
“An act.”
“I wasn’t going to kill myself, obviously.”
She reached back and again laid her hair on her shoulder. The more time you spend with someone in her middle years, the more you penetrate to her salad days—I couldn’t be certain, but was there some modicum of regret in the way she absentmindedly, and fleetingly, inspected her split ends? In that Madonna-like leftward, downward glance, so briefly ruminative about this moment from over thirty years before? So girlishly retiring and mutely sad? Cindy rolled a strand between her thumb and forefing
Cindy said, “I mean, I wasn’t even going to kill myself in metaphor, okay? And I should have told him that instead of saying I was Juliet.”
BY LATE NOVEMBER, at Reed, Cindy had misgivings—she felt John William’s anguish over their Thanksgiving parting was incommensurate with the duration involved, a mere four days. When she embraced him again, back at school from Aurora, he gave her a puka-shell necklace with pink bead spacers. His other gift was a photocopied essay on Penthesilea, whom Achilles slew on the plain at Troy but fell in love with as she drew her final breath—John William had underlined passages Cindy didn’t think were special and had written indecipherable notes in the margins. One December night, they walked up Market Street to Washington Park and climbed wide steps to Portland’s formal rose gardens, sterile and bloomless in early-winter weather yet still brandishing, on this night, luminous thorns. There were stark canes mulched in the city’s sleeping glow, but John William was heedless of the invitation in such a scene, busy as he was delivering, for Cindy’s benefit, a lecture on the medieval troubadours of southern France. Enough already. She couldn’t make him notice the view of downtown lights through a lane between trees, or the way the mulch had hardened beneath crystalline frost so as to fracture, gently, underfoot. He didn’t see any of this, because in his brain fever, the real world didn’t exist.
He gave her, that December, in swift succession, a choker of quartz-and-amber flowers, a twisted leather bracelet, a sailor’s-knot bracelet, a pair of powder-blue butterfly-crystal drop earrings, and a sterling-silver toe ring, none of them wrapped or boxed but just handed over with terrible impatience and an eagerness that, each time she felt its acquisitive gravity, increased her unease about the charade she was engaged in. All these cobbled-together trinkets and street-market baubles, made by hippies or Taiwanese, weighed her down and made her feel collared—especially the choker, with its poorly shaped flowers, which strangled her when she turned her head.
Christmas approached, with what Cindy had begun to see—for the first time in her life, while removed from home, with her old sensibility swamped by her new education—as a forced gaiety and a mass hysteria about excess. “Well-decorated consumption,” as John William called it, “bearing every relation to the dark triumph of capital.” Some of her dorm-mates strung lights in their dorm rooms or displayed holiday kitsch. A lighter mood prevailed on campus even as the sun grew lesser; one evening she even heard Bing Crosby from a turntable down the hall, crooning “Here Comes Santa Claus” alongside the Andrews Sisters. Despite herself, Cindy felt a warm indulgence and domestic pleasure, a resurgence of her already receding Midwest, and joined the circle of rum-eggnog drinkers and holiday pot smokers sitting on parallel dorm-room beds and yogi-style on the parquet, who soon opted for another seasonally appropriate LP track, Cheech and Chong’s “Santa Claus and His Old Lady.” All a crack-up, but not for John William, who was jealous of her friendships and wanted to consume her, who denounced in a fell swoop every student on campus as infantile and dependent, with the college as parent surrogate and the institutional dorm beds in their lifeless cubicles a humiliation and a death to the spirit. When she asked him in a parry about his dorm room—which she’d never visited—he said that after one night there, listening to his freckled Bostonian roommate argue for the profundity of lyrics by the Eagles, watching him tack up a poster of Grand Funk in concert, seeing him sharpen two pencils in preparation for his first day of classes, noting how new his toiletries kit looked—split-grain leather, pop-topped, unstained—he’d opted out. He slept on couches in lounges, he told her. The campus, so poorly secured and inherently optimistic, set in its mild and friendly community and admitting into its fold only scholars to be trusted, had many furtive and unlocked corners, overheated all night by central boilers; he’d even gone underground, into the labyrinth of ducts there, and slept beneath the frosted greens and darkened buildings in mechanical bunkers. Showers? The question occasioned a diatribe on water usage. The cleaning of a human body required no more than two quarts of water every forty-eight hours if the bather was wise and responsible, whereas the cultural norm in the modern world was to send gallons down the drain daily for no sanctionable reason. In this case, said John William, there ought to be a law—as long as we were living in a society of laws instead of in a state of consensus—a law sharply limiting the high water usage Americans viewed as their birthright. And what was more wasteful than the metal trays, under heat lamps, in the school cafeteria, each with its baleful, glistening load of food-industry proteins and hybridized grains, some percentage of which was slated three times a day for the college disposal bins, a measure of excess always in reserve so as to slake all possible young appetites? An unconscionable food status quo, as unquestioned as air and paid for by tuition moneys, which obligated every student at Reed, said John William adamantly, to do something about such sickening extravagance—to do something about it as opposed to shopping at Kmart after classes for ironic Christmas elves.
John William, Cindy told me, had a policy of no Christmas gifts, but she didn’t and gave him one, wrapped in pages of The Oregonian with big felt-penned hearts penetrated by Cupid’s arrows drawn over text—George Harrison’s Hindu-inflected triple-album set, All Things Must Pass. They were out on one of the campus commons, on a bench beneath a bare Oregon myrtle, a few hours before she was catching an O’Hare-bound plane. Cindy watched John William scrutinize, with what looked like perplexity, the album’s moody black-and-white cover—the enigmatic Harrison, in tall rubber boots, slumped on a stool and surrounded by garden gnomes. “I can’t accept this,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It’s a Christmas gift.”
“Big deal.”
“Don’t say that.”
This common phrase of his, “Don’t say that,” was condescending and censorious, producing in Cindy a moment’s frustration, but she decided she would say “I’m sorry” to her boyfriend in the most genuine tone she could rouse. It was a mid-December afternoon, and the word was carried away from her lips as vapor. “But,” she added, “couldn’t you just think of it as something else?”
“That’s dishonest.”
“It’s recycled. It’s from a used-record shop.”
“I still don’t want it.”
He rode the bus with her to the airport. He shouldered her bag; he escorted her to her gate. They sat together, John William with his arms around her, so that she felt penned in. Outside, beyond the tall windows, against the planes at the jetways and on the tarmac expanse, sleet fell at a windblown angle, and Cindy missed home. In the winter wind from off the plains, her skin would demand emollient, but, on the other hand, a person could actually dress for mid-American weather; here, no matter what you did, you felt clammy from the inside. She pointed this out to John William, who shrugged and pulled her closer. Worse, he replied, was this antiseptic terminal, devoid of weather altogether; artificial environments, he added, were designed to induce malaise. Immediately Cindy regretted having spoken about the weather, but what was more banal—what ought to be safer—than meteorology? And what subject didn’t instigate, in this boyfriend of hers, so muscular and earnest, so angry at the world, a rant or complaint? On he went against their backdrop of slanting sleet outside and a benign seventy degrees inside, explaining to her that the point of obliterating the natural world was to deaden the senses; once the senses were deadened, a human being became an automaton; at Reed, as elsewhere, the experiments in the Psychology Department were funded by corporations; if Pavlov’s dogs could be made to sali
He stood in line with her. As they approached the boarding ramp, in the restless pack of holiday travelers with their carry-on bags and airplane books, John William asked her not to go. At the last moment, abruptly, he kissed her with a flagrant and overwhelming suction—the kind of public farewell kiss that evokes in its observers a jealous wish for equal passion in their own lives, even as it amuses and embarrasses them. This sort of thing can’t last is the common reaction: these young lovers will either part or mature into something less dramatic. But what does a watcher know? Cindy, decamped at last with All Things Must Pass in her arms, queued for boarding in the jetway, felt mainly relief that John William was behind her. Relief and the prospect of a Midwestern Christmas, as opposed to the sorrow of a sojourning lover. So the parting a watcher might predict at the touch of their lips was already present, although she’d thrown herself into that lovers’ adieu like the fair young Capulet herself.
At home, she took the hayride down Candy Cane Lane and the wagon ride through the Sinnissippi Forest that were Houghton family traditions. Cinched into an apron, flour on her T-shirt, she made apple-cider donuts and watched the black-and-white television her mother kept on the kitchen counter. For gifts, she went shopping at West Aurora Plaza. She drank Pabst with high-school friends and got modestly inebriated, enough to make her talkative about her West Coast boyfriend. There was an evening of hash and of vermouth something-or-others with a friend home from Bowling Green. But here was the problem: about three times a day, John William called, urgent, pining, and distraught John William, calling to underscore and emphatically reiterate the depth of his feelings, cross-examine her about her activities during the hours since he last rang, and deplore Christmas. “On with the performance,” said Cindy. “But now my motivation was different—not to make him happy, but to get him off the phone—or both, if possible, because he was calling ad nauseam. And there was this serious disconnect between the sound of his voice and me in my old bedroom, where I used to lay around at Christmastime with the radio on and a Whitman Sampler box. Sort of ironic—me eating caramels with my legs crossed and my head on fluffy pillows while he’s talking about saving the world.”