The Last Romantics(49)
Before The Last Romantic, dating had always seemed like a purpose-driven exercise—date men, sleep with men, to find one man—but now it became process-driven. There was no one man, I realized, waiting at the end of this rainbow. The project itself served as both pot of gold and rainbow. I applied all the five-cent homilies I’d ever heard about the journey and the destination and not investing in the outcome into this, my sex life. And it was so interesting! What was more interesting than personal foibles and predilections related to sex? Because related to sex meant related to self and self-esteem and esteem of others. How a person behaved on a one-night stand spoke volumes. After I warmed up to the basic project mechanics (flirtation, initiation, fulfillment), I liked to shake it up. I would play a woman searching for commitment, or one heartsick from a bad breakup, or (once) a prostitute, or (twice) a virgin. Dabbling in the emotional specifics varied my partners’ responses and, most interestingly, changed my own physical outcome in ways that always surprised me.
Of course, the sheer number of encounters required that I look beyond the men themselves, their personalities specifically. They became for me a sequence of responses, physical, emotional, behavioral. Perhaps I should have taken anthropology in college as well as women’s studies, because the project seemed a melding of the two. Gendered in its consciousness and goals. But those who read the blog didn’t really care about the theoretical underpinnings, what I believed about gender expectations and sexual politics, the traps of marriage and motherhood, the need for women to claim their own personal freedom and expression, sexual and otherwise. Young women read my blog about sex because my experiences matched their own and my words provided confirmation that they—the furiously typing, horny, sexy female they—were not alone.
On the night of Joe’s engagement party, I had been writing the blog for ten months. I had 5,188 followers, averaged fifty to seventy-five comments per post, and was on the way to becoming the unlikely sexual guru to a certain group of single, primarily heterosexual young women with Internet access and complicated love lives.
Since the blog began, I had slept with seventy-six men.
*
“Hello? Hello out there?” said Kyle Morgan. He rapped a microphone. A small platform stage had been installed against the wall facing the windows, and Kyle now stood upon it, looking down at his party guests with the amused expression of a calm and indulgent host. Kyle had a louche authority about him. As vice president of Morgan Capital under his aging father, he was the de facto man in charge, the one who enforced the rules, but also the one who most frequently broke them.
“Children. Children, please,” Kyle said over the din. “It’s circle time now, so let’s listen up.”
All heads turned toward the stage. An expectant silence fell.
“Good, now you’ll all get a nice treat after class,” Kyle said, and grinned. “I first wanted to thank you all for being here tonight to celebrate Joe and Sandrine.” A few whoops, a smattering of applause. “I think I speak for many of Joe’s friends when I say thank you especially to Sandrine for taking Joe Skinner off the market so the rest of us have a chance.” Laughter, more hoots. “And I’m sure Sandrine’s friends would say the same. You’re a vision tonight, darling, really.” In the crowd Sandrine tipped her blond head.
I’d always liked Kyle more than many of Joe’s other college friends. Maybe it was his own brand of camp, heterosexual but not entirely. Maybe he was in love with Joe, or with one of the other fraternity brothers, or with all of them. Before Alden he’d gone to Dayton Academy, an all-boys boarding school where he was captain of the tennis team and voted Most Likely to Be Arrested for Tax Fraud. His lifestyle was paid for by his father’s bank, but Kyle wore his privilege lightly and enjoyed spreading it around. I’d gotten concert tickets from him, invitations to benefits and parties that Kyle couldn’t attend, a job interview (but not the job) at a liberal think tank. Because I was Joe’s little sister, Kyle folded me into the loose web of his concern and generosity, and it was a nice, warm place to be. For Joe, after so many years, it must have felt like home.
Kyle talked in a sweet, meandering way about his and Joe’s time together at Alden College, those years of magic and dreams, he called them, and the camaraderie of the fraternity, the enduring love these men had for one another.
“We never saw a finer bongmaster,” Kyle said. “Am I right, Joey? Am I right? We had some crazy ones.”
Joe raised his arm and yelled “Kyyyyy-le!” in a loud, gravelly voice. He broke the name into two distinct sounds—Ky-ULL—and repeated it again and again in a kind of chant. Kyle laughed and raised his arm in return, and soon all the other fraternity brothers—thirty at least—in the room followed. As the sound persisted, it warped and changed and became not a man’s name but something else. Something animal and of the moment. A sound distorted by the element in which it was issued.
Gradually the arms lowered, the chant died down. But Joe continued. Alone, he chanted at the same volume, the same rhythm: “Ky-ULL, Ky-ULL.” From where I stood, I could not see Joe; I only heard his voice.
Kyle looked uneasily out at the crowd. “Sandrine,” he said into the microphone, “are you out there? I think your man may need a glass of water.” He laughed nervously, and then Ace stepped to the stage and began to introduce the next speaker, his voice loud enough that it drowned out Joe. And then Joe’s voice abruptly stopped and the next speech began, this one from a friend of Sandrine’s.