Three One Nine: Closed Door

 My lovely friend Miss Ginny in Montreal wrote me once upon a time with this story. I found it utterly delightful. She'd have been seventeen at the time, having just acquired her own first boyfriend, an Older Man of...I think...thirty-two. The story is so perfectly Ginny:

I only remember this.

At a friend's party, her stepfather hand-picked me, I suppose. "I always noticed you," he said. We left the teenaged voices and skateboards and gangly limbs by shutting the door on it all. And just-like-that it was quiet. It was so quiet, but we were only down the hallway. Only a wall separated us from all of that.

Oh yes-- one thing. My boyfriend was out there in that room. My first boyfriend, and an "older guy" himself, incidentally, but not in the way I was looking for I suppose. This was complicated by a boy (a "peer") who was also in attendance, who liked me for a couple of months. The boy and the boyfriend were in conflict. The boy was hurling all sorts of unsavory insults ("child molester", etc) at my boyfriend, but for a few moments I was away from all of that. Remember? We shut the door on that.

So what was different about my boyfriend, old enough as he was, and The Stepfather? When the boyfriend said I was pretty, I was surprised. "You're a doll, a real living doll." "Really?" I had never thought of myself in that way. I didn't see myself as a younger girl, but as an Equal, maybe. I didn't feel any delicious imbalance in power. I wasn't aware of my youth, maybe. However, with him I felt it. It was full in the air. There seemed to be a Game going on that I didn't understand.

I understood that somehow, I had something he wanted. I never thought of myself in those terms. So he shut the door on the party: "I want to show you some art books." I remember that some Game was going on, something that required rules, because I remember thinking about the way I'd sit. About the way I'd arrange myself. (Prostrate, by the way. Bare legs bent at the knees, calves criss-crossed) Our arms were very close. "I always noticed you. Slavic eyes." (A thrill-- all those afternoons coming home to my girlfriend's schoolbags flung on the floor, had he been watching me? I'd never noticed.)

And then the most delicious sense of touch, ever-- he trailed one finger down my profile. "I want to paint you. You should sit for me. You were meant to be painted nude." "I will, I will!" It was hard to understand him because of his accent. I made a bold move-- threw out the pretense: "Do you like Nabokov?" Yes, he did. Lolita was brought up. (When I had given a copy of Lolita to my boyfriend-- he hadn't read it, nor heard of it --he complained, "There's too much French!") He ran his finger over my bare knee and thigh. But we were taking too long...our absence would be noticed. Books gathered up. Hair smoothed, skirt straightened. I kissed him on the cheek and returned to the living room.

He had given me his card, and once I worked up enough courage to walk by the studio, but I couldn't go in. I think I saw him at the art supply store. There is such a sense of regret. I know my friend's mother eventually threw him out of the house. I wonder if he would still like me if he saw me now.

I still remember that finger on my profile and on my leg. I don't know if I've felt something like that since. Why didn't my boyfriend do something like that? Maybe I felt that I could outsmart him-- unlike the painter.

A lovely story. Just the kind of thing Miss Ginny would tell. I remember asking her about it on the phone one night and hearing her do this major sigh. She'd passed up the chance to be a muse, she said. She told me that she imagined posing nude for him, imagined feeling like one of the young would-be models in "Blow-Up". I do hope she finally saw "La Belle Noiseuse" sometime.

Levin posed nude in high school for a couple of people-- not posing for phone camera nudes, but formally posing to be sketched and painted. That made all the difference, she told me, that it was a formal thing. I of course am thinking right now of the young Liv Tyler in "Stealing Beauty", posing topless under a Tuscan olive tree. That's something I can use as a template for both Levin and Miss Ginny. Not that I can draw, mind you, let alone paint.

This makes me think, too, about a new memoir that's appeared in France-- Vanessa Springora's "Consent: A Memoir".  The book is about her affair at fourteen or fifteen with the much older writer Gabriel Matzneff, who was fifty. I haven't read the new English translation, but I probably will. Miss Ginny, Levin, and Liberty all liked older men, and Miss Ginny and Levin sought out Older Admirers who were literary or artistic...though of course Miss Ginny's high school experiences were mostly unrequited crushes and daydreams of European cities and literary parties. I seem to have known a great many girls in my life who were attracted to age-disparate relationships (none like Ms. Springora's, mind you) and who had stories to tell that were often romantic, usually complex, generally over-intellectualized, and sometimes very, very hot. 

There's always the question of what comes after, yes? There's very much the question of how the girl reacts, ten years later, when she's in her later twenties and runs across the man for whom she was a muse. There's awkwardness built in, but also the possibility of something not unlike friendship. A possibility--- and that's a relationship I'd like to put into a story. I'd like to think that the male character (my voice, of course-- how could it not be?) would have the intelligence never, ever to say anything that approximates "I taught you well" or "You turned out like I knew you would."  Those things would deny her own agency.  What could you say, though? I'm thinking about something Dr. Lecter says in an episode of "Hannibal": With all my knowledge and intuition, I could never entirely predict you. I can feed the caterpillar, I can whisper through the chrysalis, but what hatches follows its own nature and is beyond me. That's a brilliant quote, but it has to be said in a way that isn't creepy-- it has to be said in a way that makes it mean that she is something you may have helped along but didn't claim to create, that she's become herself in some brilliant way.

Does that make any sense?