"RIvalry"

I only messaged Susan to find out what happened to Stan. It had been twenty years since we knew each other in college.

Susan had been Stan’s girlfriend. She had married Stan after college. I had never married.

How I hated her! In college, she was not pretty, but her voice smacked of confidence. She stood barely five feet tall and sauntered with the laziness of a cat. Her face wore a permanent grin. Stan was so smitten, she led him around by the nose. There’s no accounting for taste in men when you’re nineteen.

Susan and I had not been friends in college—we merely chatted now and then— so I was surprised when she answered my message with a phone call. She said she was still married to Stan. The funny thing was, Susan remembered nothing of college.

I wanted desperately to talk about those days because they were a time of great upheaval for me. I had lost my virginity and practiced promiscuity while looking for a boyfriend, a fallen soldier, carrying the banner of women’s lib. More about that later.

Let me tell you about Stan. He was an intellectual, an introvert, and a chain smoker. I was intellectual, reserved, and fascinated by his chain-smoking. After we were introduced in the campus dining room, he placed a lit cigarette between his lips, inhaled deeply, and threw back his head, until he was looking at the ceiling. His jaw fell, then rose. Out of his mouth, a perfect oblong of white popped. It drifted into space, getting larger and less oblong, until it finally disappeared. Then another shot up. Then a third. He brought his head down, staring with cool brown eyes into my hazel ones. “Do you like philosophy?” he asked in a voice deep and clear as a radio announcer's.

There’s no accounting for taste in men when you’re eighteen. What did I know of life? Men? Myself? A month later, I kissed Stan in the middle of the football field, walking back to campus at night, after drinking with our crowd at a local bar. Susan and he had broken up. I was a virgin. Within a month’s time, when things began to heat up—I really liked Stan, and I think he got a kick out of me—Susan told Stan that she was pregnant. Back to Susan he sped.

If I wanted, I could tell her what she probably didn’t know. A year after our first kiss, I lost my virginity to Stan on a whim. I was sick and tired of being a goody-too-shoes. It was the seventies, and Erica Jong was teaching women to have sex for the pleasure of it. According to Jong, you didn’t even have to ask his name.

Susan said she had blocked those years from her memory. I said that certainly she must remember the pot-and-beer parties that took place inside Stan’s suite. Three nights a week, people spilled out the suite bedrooms into the center room with the desks, and from there, into the lounge. In the bathroom, a keg sat askew, as if tipsy, in a bathtub full of ice.

Inside Stan’s suite, the music was deafening, a fact to which people sitting on beds, leaning against walls, or just standing around seemed oblivious. The room reeked of marijuana and beer. It was hot beyond comfort. Spilt beer seeped into shoes. Joints passed around until whittled down to a quarter inch, burning someone’s fingers. Susan said she dimly recalled the parties.

The next time we spoke, I reminisced about a birthday party she had not attended, held for Stan during his junior year. Stan and she had been on the outs. I told her Stan had dressed up for the occasion in a suit that someone had lent him. I said that I thought he looked particularly handsome, although the suit was too large, so that, in actuality, he looked clownish. Such was my attraction that he might as well have been Robert Redford.

She said no, she didn’t remember, and I told her that was too bad. It had been a great party, and I had particularly enjoyed talking to Stan. I mentioned that we had been alone together after the party, as we found ourselves walking across the football field, just the two of us (I was conflating actual events). I put the suspicion in her mind that the evening had not ended there.

I didn’t tell her what had actually happened: The night of Stan’s birthday party, Stan and I went to his suite together afterward. When I had finally lost my virginity, Stan’s sheet was stained with blood. I wanted a eulogy. Otherwise, it would be a milestone uncelebrated.

Instead, Stan left the bed, and I watched him take a wooden plank from behind the dresser. He put the plank down at the closet door to look for a record. The on-off switch clicked on his stereo. He picked up the plank, moved to the center of the room, and waited as the needle scraped the grooves. He moved the plank into position. The music blasted. He had turned the volume way up.

Then he began to lip synch, in perfect synchronicity to the lyrics. He threw back his head, then his body. I thought his legs would give way if he leaned back an inch more. He pitched forward, bringing his knee to his chest, his eyes tight as fists, his lips closed shut, as if concealing great pain. He arched his body back. The drums crashed, guitar notes pierced the air with shrill brilliance, and the organ droned loud enough to reach an amphitheater’s back row. As he opened and closed his mouth joyfully, he jerked his body left and right as rock stars do, and with each turn, his penis slapped the thigh opposite.

Then he spun around completely, a naked, long-legged blur holding something made of wood, performing with maniacal fervor. I wanted to say, “Come back to bed,” but he didn’t seem interested. Under other circumstances, I might have found it entertaining. He was in his own world. In my world, I knew I could grab my clothes, sneak by him, leave, and he wouldn’t even notice. I tried not to think about it. The song would end eventually.

When he had died twenty times and there was a not a man left to fight (he had been lip-synching a battle scene), he bowed deeply, and like an opera singer at the performance’s end, he threw out his arms to the side in exaltation, breathing heavily. I smiled to hide my discomfort. He strolled over to the stereo and turned it off. Then he put the plank down, and avoiding my gaze, began picking clothes off the floor. I watched him in silence. He acted as if I weren’t there.

The next time Susan and I spoke, I talked about how eagerly I had let go of my virginity, given the aggressiveness of the men I knew then (I was not yet taking responsibility for my actions). It would have been natural for her to ask me with whom I lost it. She did not.

But I could hear the suspicion in her voice, which no longer rang with certainty. She was wondering.

The last time we spoke, I called her. Previously, it had been she who called me. This time her voice told me I had become the enemy. There would be no future calls.

During this last call, I mentioned that, later on, during my twenties, I had bumped into Stan on a job I took as a temp secretary doing word processing (a very popular job for writers after computers started being widely used in offices). He had invited me to lunch. I told her nothing about the lunch. She didn’t ask.

What I didn’t tell her was that he had made a pass. I turned him down. He was a cheater, and as they say, “Once a cheater, always a cheater.” Besides, why would I want such an insensitive person, who treated women so carelessly—not only girls he picked up, like myself—but the one who became his wife?

I left her to surmise everything that had happened. It was my personal mode of revenge.