The Cloud of Unknowing (8 page)

She sat at her writing desk and pulled the books out of her backpack. She opened
The Peloponnesian War
, then put it down again and picked up
Dionysius the Areopagite
instead. She'd taken an incomplete in that course too—Western Mystical Philosophy. She still had to write the term paper. The reading was denser, but there was a lot less of it. Lately she'd found that she could become immersed if she read closely and tried to follow the arguments. Maybe it was the effect of her new room: monkish and cell-like. There was a thrill of secret initiation that, had she been raised in a religion, she would have recognized.

She took an index card out of her desk and copied out a passage. “For if all the branches of knowledge belong to things that have being, then that which is beyond Being must also
be transcendent above all Knowledge.” She read it over and added, “Cf Cloud of Unknowing.” She'd made a pile of notes already, but she didn't know what to do with the ideas as a group. That was what she'd wanted to talk to Jim about tonight. He'd mentioned something to her the last time she'd talked to him, some theory that God is a sentence without meaning, or maybe a grammatical formula for making all the sentences of the world.

The first time Kitty saw Jim was on a sunny September afternoon just a few weeks after she'd arrived on campus. She was still enjoying a kind of automatic popularity with some of the older guys. She sat on the steps of the student union with someone she'd just met, a Chemistry major from New York City named Conrad. He was telling her about Renaissance Fair, a campus-wide “bacchanal” that marked the end of the school year in May. He used the word as though it were a neutral term, like “prom” or “social.” She was only half-listening, though. While he talked, her eyes followed someone walking across the lawn. He wore a red and black checked hunting cap and work pants and a matching jacket, like a TV repairman's uniform. He took long steps, swinging his arms almost comically. From where they sat, a hundred feet away, Kitty sensed a coiled energy.

Conrad noticed her looking. “That's Jim Frank,” he said. “He's a real wild man. Do you want to meet him?
Hey Jim
,” he called, “do you want to meet my friend Kitty?” Kitty got the impression he was showing off a little, pleased with himself for knowing this person well enough to make an introduction. The walker stopped and pivoted in their direction. “
No!
” he called back, flashing a wide grin. He continued on the path, disappearing into the campus radio station—which was in the
basement of Kitty's dorm block.

Half an hour later Kitty was sitting on the toilet in a bathroom stall on her dormitory floor when Jim Frank's face appeared between the door and the frame.

“Pleased to meet you, Kitty,” he said. He stuck his hand through the gap. His gray, unblinking eyes met hers directly, and she stared back until her pee stream stopped.

“I'll be right out,” she said.

She found him in the hallway, bouncing lightly in his black service oxfords. “I apologize,” he said. “About before, I mean. I don't like that guy. I didn't want to talk to him.”

“Conrad said you were a wild man.”

He nodded vigorously. “That's it, right there. That's why I don't like him.”

They went outside and fell naturally to walking. Jim clasped his hands behind his back. Kitty sensed that he was concentrating on matching her pace; that he would be walking faster if he were by himself. He was from the Bay Area. He'd dropped out a year earlier and he wasn't sure if he was going to stay in Portland. He told Kitty he was writing a novel, and that he found inspiration in California: the tiki torches at night, the smell of barbecue.

“Listen, Kitty,” he said, “can you do me a favor? I need something from the library.
The Thief's Journal
, Jean Genet. I don't have an ID anymore. I was going to ask my friend who works at the radio station, but he wasn't around.”

“I mean, I'd like to help, but—”

“I'll give you my driver's license as collateral. I only need it for a day.”

She brought the book out to him and he handed her his driver's license. He had a beard in the picture.

Kitty took Jim's license out and looked at it a few times that evening. When he met her on the library steps the next day
to give her the book, he didn't want it back. “It's expired anyhow,” he said. And that was the last she saw of Jim for several months.

Kitty saw Conrad all the time. He always seemed to be hanging around the Student Union or the coffee shop next door. She liked his rapid way of speaking and his Converse high tops and his hair—long and kinky and black, like Jimmy Page. They hung out together all night at the first social of the year. Kitty was wearing an old dress of her mother's—burgundy rayon with a square neckline and short, puffed sleeves that made her look like a cigarette girl. They danced until their clothes clung to them, and then Conrad leaned in to be heard over the band, enclosing her in a curtain of kinky hair. “Let's go to the rhodo garden,” he said. His lips brushed her ear.

What?
She asked with her eyes.

“The rhododendron garden. Down the hill. I'll show you.”

She followed him down the steep campus driveway, across 28th Street, and into the quiet park. The path wound among bushes and over a little footbridge.
Something is about to happen now
, she thought as they sat down on the bank of the pond. She felt a pulsing in her throat and between her legs. Without hesitating, Conrad kissed her, forcing her down onto the grass. Thinking of duck shit, she pushed him away and pulled off her mother's rayon dress. He stood up and straddled her while he undressed, then knelt down and wriggled her underwear off. His face loomed close again, and then he was lying on her. She wrapped her legs around him and memorized the patch of sky over his shoulder, and the rhododendron branches framing it.

And then he was inside her and she was moving with him, her arms pinned on the spongy ground. All of him felt smooth and hard. She smelled his hair.
Prell
, she thought. He jerked
forward suddenly and gasped, and then they were lying side by side. He slid his hand over her shoulder, down into the dip of her waist, and up over her hip. She still throbbed everywhere, but it was over.

Later he told her he'd been tripping on acid.

The next day, Kitty went with a group of people to the coast in Conrad's car. They took LSD and sat on a beach of little black stones, smoothed by the ocean and hot in the sun. Kitty rolled around and dug her hands in the pebbles. She threw them in the air and felt them fall on her legs and stomach like fat, warm raindrops on the surface of a pond. She wandered down the shoreline and sat for a long time, watching the surf churn, until she noticed the tide coming in. She was unsure for a moment how fast it was moving. It suddenly came to her that she would be trapped in her isolated cove if she didn't get back to the others. The cliff behind her, she saw, was steep and greasy—too slick to climb. She began running and didn't stop until she reached Conrad and lay next to him on the pebbles.
I have a lover
, she told herself.

Conrad lived in a big group house up the hill from the campus. It was boxy and white, and they called it “The Westinghouse” because it looked like a dryer. The common rooms were decorated with trash-picked couches and shopping carts. A smell of ether drifted up from the basement, where Conrad made drugs that Kitty had never heard of: MDA, DMT, bromo-mescaline. She felt brave and tried everything. They went to the movies tripping, or to video arcades, or just wandered around the mall. Conrad smuggled sodium out of the lab at school, and they threw chunks into the Willamette. It exploded on the surface in yellows and oranges, like waterborne fireworks.

They went out late at night in search of food. Their favorite
place was a diner downtown where the waitresses had gingham uniforms. One waitress wore a stiff yellow wig and only had teeth on one side of her mouth. She recited the litany of pies on request:

“PeachappleDutchapplecherryblueberrypecanstrawberryrhubarbpumpkinbananacreamBostoncreamlemonmeringue.”

“What was that third one?” Conrad would ask, winking at Kitty across a table of half-eaten food.

It was Conrad who suggested she move into the Westinghouse when the room next to his opened up. The first night he stayed with her, and the next night he didn't. The night after that, he still wasn't home when she finally fell asleep. It bothered her, but she kept it to herself. After all, he had never said they were a couple. “It'll be convenient” was all he'd said. A few times she crept abjectly into his room without being invited. She craved him, but she always left him still craving.

Kitty turned her recriminations inward when she came home and found Conrad on the living room couch with someone on his lap—a girl named Holly, who'd hitchhiked up from Eugene in her bare feet. Later that night, after Kitty sneaked downstairs and confirmed that Holly was not sleeping on the couch, she lay awake in her room and imagined them on the other side of the wall: Conrad's hand moving over Holly's shoulder and into the dip of her waist, across her belly, between her legs.

Holly did not leave the next day, as had been her plan. She stayed for weeks. Kitty's pride dictated that she be nonchalant. She, Holly, and Conrad went together to Sodium Beach, and to the diner with the gingham-wearing waitresses. She let Holly pull her hair into a French braid and walked around campus with her and was bitterly relieved when she moved on.

One day, Kitty woke feeling sick and decided to skip her morning lecture. It was afternoon when she got up again, and she was hungry and lightheaded, so she took some Spaghetti-Os
off Conrad's shelf and ate them out of the can. A sudden thirst for orange juice came over her. She put a coat on over her flannel nightgown and walked to the Thriftway, where the bright lights and the muzak hit her like a wave. Before she felt it coming, she'd vomited Spaghetti-Os all over the waxed linoleum tiles.

When Conrad found her in bed later that afternoon, she told him about the Spaghetti-Os, and throwing up at Thriftway. “Feel my forehead,” she said. “Am I hot?”

“No,” he said, climbing in next to her. He reached under her quilt for a breast.

“Ow.”

“That hurts?”

“Yeah. Ow, don't touch them.”

“Hmm. You didn't miss your period, did you?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I don't really keep track.” She considered for a moment. “I don't remember having one last month.”

“Well, there you go,” he said. “C'mon. You can't get any more pregnant.” He pulled her nightgown up. “Don't worry—I won't touch your tits.”

It was the last time she had sex with Conrad. She woke the next day and found she couldn't stand him anymore. She didn't tell him when she confirmed her condition. She didn't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing something so consequential had come of their adventures.

Kitty skipped the last lecture of the semester and took a bus to the clinic. A small group of protesters lined the sidewalk outside, but they didn't look at her or even pick up their signs as she walked past them. Inside, she changed into a gown and accepted a Valium from the nurse. She worried that it wouldn't work, that somehow all the DMT and LSD and MDA she'd taken in the last few months would neutralize it, but after a
few minutes a drowsy feeling came over her. The rest she met calmly: the donut of fluorescent light, the stirrups, the doctor with the port wine birthmark on his cheek, the sucking sound of his machine and the cramping pain. She tried to think about what was happening but she couldn't hold it in her mind.

She told her roommates they would have to get someone else, that she wasn't coming back after winter break, and packed up her trunk and her suitcase and a cardboard box of books. She didn't even own the mattress she'd been sleeping on. After paying for the abortion and losing her security deposit, she was lucky to find something she could afford: the basement room in the house on the cul-de-sac, with its Astroturf and bad lighting and its damp chill that reminded her every day of hard-won self-sufficiency.

After the break and the three weeks of torpor and Jack Benny reruns, Kitty came back to Portland ready to start again. She stayed away from the Student Union and anywhere else she was likely to run into Conrad, and went to work on her incompletes. She was downtown, browsing the table of Reed course books at Powell's, when she saw Jim Frank for the second time. He seemed genuinely pleased to see her.

“You didn't end up going to California?” she asked.

“No, not yet,” he said. “I think I will, though, sometime soon, but I just got a job at the 7-Eleven on 28th Street. I'm living on Hawthorne, in my own, my very own apartment. Listen, I'm going to Singles Going Steady now.”

Singles Going Steady turned out to be a record store across the street. Inside, they paused for a moment. “You know, you look like a Shangri-La,” Jim said. “That is, you look like one of girls in the Shangri-Las. I'll show you.”

She followed him to the Oldies section and stood by while
he flipped through a bin, frowning. He pulled a record. On the cover, three girls posed in matching outfits.

“Mary Weiss—the lead singer.” He pointed to the one in the middle. “It's your hair, the way you have it parted. That and those kind of pants.”