Aporia

Pale blue morning light threatened them; the room seemed even colder to her than it had been during the deep hours of the night, that dark expanse that begins when bars close and parties stop, during which one is either asleep or intoxicated, seeking sex or having it, or more probably approximating it in some ghastly, ineffectual way. The endlessness of non-coital congress, which left her restless enough that only profound exhaustion could extinguish her resurgent urges, made her —a  virginal adolescent in her first year of college— a somnabusexual, a half-dreaming, half-groping, strangely aimless liminalist.

Next to her —trying to act as though their nearness was incidental— he was close to shivering, but was aware that whatever was perpetuating their interaction was too fragile to endanger by seeking a jacket or blanket, or even admitting to being cold, thereby giving them an excuse to finally go to their rooms and sleep. He assumed that it was a lapse in her self-awareness that propelled their increasingly nonsensical conversation along: she had forgotten her beauty, or rather the station her beauty conferred, or had perhaps mistaken him for someone else —an easy thing to do given how radically he misrepresented himself in a desperate effort to be what she wanted. This aberration, this unnatural connection between someone elect and someone repellant, could not be jeopardized by any interruption.

So it was that in addition to being cold, he badly had to urinate, and also to fart, but couldn’t bring himself to stand from the laminate-wood and airplane-seat-upholstery sofa now illuminated by dawn’s awful light. The bathroom was too near, he anxiously calculated; he had little hope of peeing without farting, and no hope of farting without being heard, and therefore no hope of relieving the embarrassing pangs of pain which, once every few minutes, gave a sudden urgency to his wandering words.

He was distracted by these things, and by scores of other problems with his body, its processes, its protuberances, its posture, its position, its persnickety insistence on the primacy of its needs. His insecurity was interwoven with his vanity; his  self-loathing was self-involvement; he devoted more thought to the problems of his posture than to the girl sitting next to him, and when he did think of her it was primarily to consider how repelled she would be by his knees, which he considered misshapen, or by the sharpness of his teeth, or by the stray hairs he missed during his bi-weekly shave, or by some other ordinary foible he considered a titanic defect, like a pigeon ashamed at being small for an eagle.

She was aware of his intermittent focus, and it irritated her. She had chosen him; she had stayed awake through the night with him, ruining herself for the next day —which was now arriving— and he remained indecisive. Just a year ago she’d have assumed he was unsure of her appeal, but experience had taught that men found her attractive, though without persuading her that she was. She could tell he was unsure only of himself, and while she liked a certain mild hesitancy, this was something else, something grating.

Watching him, she realized that she found the cowardice of a sensitive man driven by lust he cannot acknowledge a particularly repulsive thing to behold. With grand pronouncements and treacly sentiments and dark humor he was trying to mask the urges he was too fine, too sophisticated to accept in himself. She imagined him in countless such suspensions: perched as near to some unfortunate woman as possible without giving away -to her, to himself- the darker drift to catch in his unending speeches. He was a satyr pretending to be a seraph, not realizing that she wasn’t a sexless high school poet, interested in angelic boys who talked of politics and music.

He could sense her withdrawal but could imagine only two causes: insufficient ardor in his praise of her charms, about which he assumed she was as insecure as he was of his, or insufficient self-abasement; perhaps he simply wasn’t being honest enough with her, perhaps she found him inaccessible because she imagined he didn’t need her.

Who but a youth hopes to arouse someone’s interest by appealing to their pity? But as the day broke into the dormitory common room, he felt there was no other option: in his weakness he was following an asymptotic approach to her, getting nearer and nearer but demanding from her ever clearer signs, and finally he said, hoping to force the issue:

“I can’t believe you’d be interested in someone like me.” He expected her to assure him that of course she was interested, how couldn’t she be, he was so cultured, and how caring and attentive he was, she’d never met anyone like him, he wasn’t like other guys, and so on. He expected this because he believed it, because underneath his corrosive insecurity he felt that he was a wonderful, kind, interesting, arrestingly funny, inimitable man, obviously the best sort any woman could wind up with were they not so inexplicably (and, in his frank view, stupidly) attracted to idiots and brutes. But even he was unaware of the throbbing egotism which lurked beneath his timidity.

“Don’t say that,” she said, quickly and angrily.

“What? Why not?” He had not considered that his genuine, but calculated, but genuine, but calculated appeal might lead to anger.

“Because it annoys me. I find fishing like that annoying. I can’t like anyone who doesn’t like themselves. If you do not think you’re worthwhile, why should I? In spite of you? And why say it? What do you want? Do you want to feel better about yourself? Is that why we stayed up all night, talking? So I could say nice things about you?”

She had never spoken so honestly in such a moment before; it was a liberation, an escape, a joy; she felt as though she had finally reached, after hours of elision, some final reality, a space beneath all the posing and preening, and she even felt happy with him for being there with her; she waited to see if he felt it, too.

But he was aggrieved, wounded; he couldn’t parse her words; his gambit -which he was dimly coming to understand was a gambit, a tactic- had failed, and here he sat, truly hurt and suddenly very sincerely unable to believe this girl was interested in him. He could not remember now whether it had ever seemed possible.

Quickly —and the speed was as much proof of his endless mendacity as the decision itself— he changed course; he knew that he lusted for her, felt in love with her, with her complexities and her difficulties, and, of course, her body, her long toes and her enormous eyes, and he felt sure that if only she understood the ambiguity of his insecurity she’d not find it so irritating; she’d see it for what it was: the characteristic hallmark of a highly intelligent, deeply creative thinker. That understanding could come later; he couldn’t drive her away now.

So he lied, or thought he lied: “No, I don’t need your words. I don’t say that I find your interest incredible because I’m in any way unlikeable, but because generally people aren’t capable of seeing in me what I think is best; and not because it’s obscured by flaws or defects or whatever, but because people are too stupid, too shallow, too crass, too conventional. I’m happy that you aren’t.”

He pronounced the final words with such forceful arrogance that he could scarcely believe she didn’t slap him, but she didn’t; instead, she seemed to soften and move slightly closer —though she was only shifting her weight— bringing her face now within a range he could reach with only a moderately humiliating degree of spinal readjustment. They kissed, and immediately his thoughts turned to his performance: was it the substance of what he said that had softened her, or had the anger he felt given him a forcefulness she found attractive? Why were women attracted to that sort of aggression, he wondered, kissing her badly, absent-mindedly, in the warm sunlight of the morning.

For her part, she was well-aware that his short speech was the act of a wounded boy, but she didn’t care; at last the night was over, at last the mooning and waiting was at an end, and her gambit had worked: she could be honest and demand honesty, and she’d get either it or a compliant performance, which was hardly distasteful.

That morning, restlessly half-sleeping and occasionally aping the sex they’d yet to have, they thought of their dormitory courtship, and into their young minds all the wrong lessons settled.