My Unsentimental Education

named Bob Barr came back and asked James for a private confab. When James returned, he said Bob Barr wanted weed to take to a party, and James gave him some, free. “This new batch is good. I’d like to get the word out,” he said, sounding like my dad trying to increase foot traffic at the auto parts store. Then: “Bob just gave you a compliment.” Bob Barr was a short guy who once took first place in a contest for chugging beer. James said, “Bob said that when you first came in wearing your modern coat. . . .” I’d worn it because the temperature was in the forties. My expression must have changed. James proceeded carefully now, as if he’d read a book about how to encourage your girlfriend to make the most of her looks. “Bob said you always look good, but he didn’t know how good until you got rid of the old lady clothes.”
I thought about how to answer. “Like I dress for Bob Barr,” I said.
James laughed. “But I like the new coat. And your sexy boots.”
I didn’t want to look like a beauty queen contestant, or a Bob Barr fantasy either. And I was on a budget—trying to seem as if I preferred carefully mingled cast-offs, the mishmash effect. But I didn’t own a full-view mirror and got just blurred or fleeting glimpses. Now James had dropped a hint. I was feeling demoted when he showed me an ornately inked butterfly on a scrap of paper thin as insect wings. “Pretty,” he said. “It’s blotter.”
I thought of the blotter my mother had put on her desk to keep pens from scratching the wood. James waited for me to react. I didn’t know yet that love seesaws forever between regard for the other and wariness for the self (self-protection). I thought James and I would one day get to reciprocal poise, and I didn’t want to lose face first. “LSD,” he said. I rolled my eyes: “I know that.” I didn’t. But I didn’t want to seem like Farm-Paula. James grew up in a real city, Milwaukee. He said, “So you’ve tripped then. In Spooner?” This seemed unlikely. I lied again and said, “Colorado.” Mentioning my time in Colorado with an ex-boyfriend older than James gave me back my edge. James looked hurt as he pulled the butterfly into quarters. “Ink amount determines potency,” he added. I didn’t say no, because No is complicated. Besides, I thought, I had an easy day tomorrow, lunch shift at the Crosstown Café, then my appointment with Dr. Darden Stoat.
But having lied made the tripping harder, because later—when I looked out the window and saw short people trekking down a street daubed in yellow, yellow pools of light, the people carrying fishing poles, and I thought would they really, in March?—I couldn’t ask James if he saw them too. If he didn’t, if we weren’t supposed to share the seeing, he’d know I was a first-timer. I’d have to retract my lie, and retractions are hard, harder still if you’re tripping. I put my thoughts into formation. I gave my thoughts orders. James burst into laughter. “Look. Trolls who fish.” But enough about later. Carpe diem. First, he made us sandwiches and said, “Of course, it takes an hour to get off.”
I nodded, grim. How long would “off” be?
James said, “I don’t know how coming down has been for you in the past, but I try to sleep. Coming down is as bad as getting off is good.” An algebra of pleasure and penance, I thought. Pleasure’s first spate passed through. Vines on my ultratropical skirt twisted in a way that seemed right for this room with wet air, aquatic décor, the cumulative effect of a bubbling aquarium with bright fish darting, guitars like Neptune’s forks, and the lush tangle in the window, a houseplant called a dragon tree or corn plant. I held a cup of Red Zinger tea, and the last swallow was a pool surrounded by fronds stirring—a landscape in a cup, miniature and antic, like a snowstorm in a globe, except it was summer here—and James took it to the kitchen sink. We went upstairs and had sex, only amplified. Hours passed. “We’ve peaked,” he said. Sensation crackled like heat-lightning.
He slept. I redirected bad thoughts, released good ones, but I got angry thinking that James liked me more in new clothes and didn’t know how grueling the LSD had been, was. These thoughts jammed, proliferated, so I put on my clothes and modern coat and went home, the black sky getting thinner, letting in light. At home, I flipped through newspapers one of my roommates had left in a stack by the door. I found a story about the First Annual Tattoo Convention, with a dozen black-and-white photos, the finalists for the Most Beautifully Tattooed Man and Most Beautifully Tattooed Woman Contests.
I got scissors, cut out these photos, and taped them on the bathroom wall that I’d sometimes surmised needed a poster, pictures, something, and, using bits of newsprint, cut geometric figures to counter the photos. It made an interesting effect, this bathroom with its claw-foot tub, ancient sink, commode with tall tank and chain, ceiling covered by pressed tin, and now the wall with inky-paisley men and women framed by triangle and boomerang shapes. The sky outside was blue now, and I remembered my ordinary life—the Swedish professor who’d like this bathroom, I thought, just as he’d liked the doodling in my notebooks better than paintings I’d completed for class, and he’d asked me to major in art. The sun, all the way up, shone through a grimy window onto the wall, and I saw how crazy I’d been. I ripped it all down, took a bath and hurried to the Crosstown Café.
My mother had brought my bicycle in the car trunk when she’d visited. I rode it to work over slushy streets, thinking exertion would sweat out the last of the