Page 307 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 295

“I’m not a virgin.”
“How does it feel to be a fetish?”
“What’s a fetish?
She went ha ha ha. Her mouth went ha ha ha. Her hair went ha
ha ha. “You reveal yourself in your writing,” she said. “You must be
careful ha ha ha.”
“Why? Writers are, like, strippers, revealing themselves ha ha
ha.” I said it, but her mouth and hair made me say it, revealed me
saying, Hemingway was, and was not, The Old Man and the Sea.
“True.” She pretended to weigh her words, trebling wine on her
tongue. “Unless a writer comes out and says, I mean, really makes
the personal explicit, ‘this is me’ or ‘what happened to me,’ well, the
reader can hardly know what is an autobiographical act, or what is
manufactured.”
“Fiction.”
“Your essay exposed you ha ha ha as an ex-seminarian.”
“A former seminarian. I’m a former seminarian.”
“What’s the diff?”
“An ex-seminarian is one who didn’t get over it.”
“Humph! Jesuit! I hope you didn’t mind my grilling you in the
Student Union.”
“No.”
“How did you find it? I’m curious.”
“The grilling?”
“The seminary. I think you were there a very long time. How
over it are you?”
Her apartment was one of those semi-furnished flats fitted out
with odds and ends. The orange couch, where she enthroned herself,
sitting with her feet up, her knees folded under her, all in black, was
the center of the room. Piles of cushions scattered in small archipela-
goes across the floor. She said furniture was bourgeois, and marriage,
and religion, and how did I like sitting cross-legged as a beatnik in
a beanbag chair?
Behind her, in blue, greens and yellows, a print on textured card-
board, of a painting, “by Carrington,” she said, a portrait, head and
shoulders, of a florid young man, “you notice, but, of course, you
think you look like that, romantic, a lover, painted by a woman,” a

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