Girl: But are you a man or a boy?

Jonathan Ames: Well….what’s the difference?

Girl: With a man, you feel like you’re being taken and you like it. And with a boy, you feel like they’re stealing something from you, and you don’t like it.

She was extremely pretty, with that air of innocence that can be devastating to young men and provocative to older ones.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

The second time my grandmother caught me vomiting, she didn’t wait in the hall; she sat on my bed paging through the copy of The Rise of Silas Lapham that she’d found on my nightstand. Her voice was raspy with morning as she said, “Close the door.” When I had, she said, “That was very foolish of me before, wasn’t it? Thinking you were trying to lose weight.”

I stood by the bureau and said nothing.

“We’ll go to Chicago, and we’ll have it taken case of. Next week, likely. I need to make a few calls. You can do as you see fit, but I’d advise against saying anything to your parents. I just can’t imagine what purpose it would serve.”

I felt an impulse then to express incomprehension, except that I did comprehend. At night, when I listened to “Lonesome Town,” I knew. She was right.

“Isn’t it - ” I hesitated. “Isn’t it illegal?”

“Certainly, and it happens all the time. You can’t legislate human nature.”

“You don’t think that I should have it?”

Quietly, she said, “I think it would kill you. If the circimstances were different, I would say, ‘Go live at a girls’ home in Minnesota, go to California.’ But you don’t have the strength. You’ll be strong again, but you’re not strong now.”

As she spoke, I could feel my lips curling out, the tears welling in my eyes, I whispered, “I’m sorry for disappointing you.”

“Come sit by me,” she said, and when I did, she rubbed my back, the palm of her hand sweeping over the white cotton of my nightgown. After a moment, she said, “We have to make mistakes. It’s how we learn compassion for others.” She paused. “You don’t need to tell me whose it is. That doesn’t matter.”

We can feel their eyes on us as we walk in our red dresses two by two across to the side opposite them.  We are being looked at, assessed, whispered about; we can feel it, like tiny ants running on our bare skins.

To be a man, watched by women.  It must be entirely strange.  To have them watching him all the time.  To have them wondering, What’s he going to do next?  To have them flinch when he moves, even if it’s a harmless enough move, to reach for an ashtray perhaps.  To have them sizing him up.  To have them thinking, He can’t do it, he won’t do, he’ll have to do, this last as if he were a garment, out of style or shoddy, which must nevertheless be put on because there’s nothing else available.

To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out, while he himself puts them on, like a sock over a foot, onto the stub of himself, his extra, sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug’s eye, which extrudes, expands, winces, and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again, bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf, into them, avid for vision.  To achieve vision in this way, this journey into a darkness that is composed of women, a woman, who can see in the darkness while he himself strains blindly forward.

She watches him from within.  We’re all watching him.  It’s the one thing we can really do, and it is not for nothing: if he were to falter, fail, or die, what would become of us?  No wonder he’s like a boot, hard on the outside, giving shape to a pulp of a tenderfoot.  That’s just a wish.  I’ve been watching him for some time and he’s given no evidence, of softness.

But watch out, Commander, I tell him in my head.  I’ve got my eye on you.  One false move and I’m dead.

Still, it must be hell, to be a man, like that.
It must be just fine.
It must be hell.
It must be very silent.

Love? said the Commander.

That’s better.  That’s something I know about.  We can talk about that.

Falling in love, I said.  Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another.  How could he have made such light of it?  Sneered even.  As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim.  It was, on the contrary, heavy going.  It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space.  Everyone knew that.

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him.  We were falling women.  We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely.  God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner.  The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total.  We were waiting, always, for the incarnation.  That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time.  That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain.  You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.

Or sometimes, even when you were still loving, still falling, you’d wake up in the middle of the night, when the moonlight was coming through the window onto his sleeping face, making the shadows in the sockets of his eyes darker and more cavernous than in daytime and you’d think, Who knows what they do, on their own or with other men?  Who knows what they do, on their own or with other men?  Who knows what they say or where they are likely to go?  Who can tell what they really are?  Under their daily-ness.

Likely you would think at those times: What if he doesn’t love me?

Or you’d remember stories you’d read, in the newspapers, about women who had been found–often women but sometimes they would be men, or children, that was the worst–in ditches or forests or refrigerators in abandoned rented rooms, with their clothes on or off, sexually abused or not; at any rate killed.  There were places you didn’t want to walk, precautions you took that had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtain, leaving on lights.  These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you.  And for the most part they did.  Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.

But all of that was pertinent only in the night, and had nothing to do with the man you loved, at least in daylight.  With that man you wanted it to work, to work out.  Working out was also something you did to keep your body in shape, for the man.  If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too.  Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with a bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise.  If you didn’t work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude.  Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.

If you don’t like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves.  And so we would change the man, for another one.  Change, we were sure, was for the better always.  We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

It’s strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the ever-expanding perimeters of our lives.  I was like that too, I did that too.  Like was not the first man for me, and he might not have been the last.  If he hadn’t been frozen in that way.  Stopped dead in time, in midair, among the trees back there, in the act of falling.

In former times they would send you a little package, of belongings: what he had with him when he died.  That’s what they would do, in wartime, my mother said.  How long were you supposed to mourn, and what did they say?  Make your life a tribute to the loved one.  And he was, the loved.  One.

Is, I say.  Is, is, only two letters, you stupid shit, can’t you manage to remember it, even a short word like that?

Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

It’s one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman…

And in the last analysis, nothing’s any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed and there he is; without that, you’re not a woman. You’re something with a French provincial office or a book of clippings.

But you’re not a woman.

Daphne: Oh, come on now, Dr. Crane. It’s not like men have never used sex to get what they want.”

Frasier: How can we possibly use sex to get what we want? Sex is what we want.