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She told that I might think of my background and my unfamiliarity with academic discourses as weaknesses, but that I should, instead, think of them as the greatest tools I had to do innovative, personal, and meaningful work. She told me to trust my perspective, and it was the greatest gift she could have given me. That summer, I worked sixty-hour weeks when I could get them, doing demo at construction sites and working every night at the bar, saving up against the coming academic year when my fellowship would mean that I had to teach classes at Penn to get tuition remission and a stipend, and wouldn’t be able to work as much.
My second year was better. Much better. I started speaking more in class and made a few friends. I didn’t see them much, since I was still working nights at the bar, but I felt more comfortable there. My third year, I finished course work and began studying for my Masters exams, which meant deciding what I would specialize in and what kind of project I wanted to undertake for my dissertation, which would get me my PhD. I was swamped all the time, trying to read everything that might help me with my work.
Then, that spring, I met Richard. He wasn’t the kind of person I’d ever been around before, and, while I can see it for what it was now, at the time it felt like a compliment that he was interested in me. He asked me questions about my research and seemed interested in some of the theorists I was writing about. He always said, “Thank god you have the good sense to write about something real instead of all that fiction.” It was a compliment to me but a dig at studying English in the first place. And, as Ginger later pointed out, it wasn’t really a compliment to me.
The thing about Richard was that he didn’t take any effort. He was never uncertain or insecure. He never asked me where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do. He’d say something like, “Italian okay?” And when I said sure, he’d say, “I know you’re going to love this place,” but never asked me later if he was right. He made it clear, after that first embarrassing date, that he’d pay when we went out. It made me really uncomfortable, but he also made it clear that if I didn’t go where he wanted to go, he’d go without me. And he was never rude about it. On the contrary, he was always exceedingly gracious, explaining things logically and making it seem like it was strange that I cared, since money was no big deal. Of course it isn’t, if you have it.
And he’d make light of it when he paid, joke around about how he liked that he could be the first one to take me for sushi or to a Korean steak house, even as he laughed at the faces I made as I tried raw eel for the first time. Then we’d go back to his apartment and he’d tell me exactly how he wanted me to fuck him. He liked it hard and fast and clean, and he’d come with me behind him, catching his own release in his hand so it wouldn’t get on the sheets. Something about the fact that he wanted me to fuck him made it feel less like I was a charity case or a kept toy. Ginger said that was a fucked-up way to think about it, but it made a difference. I’m not exactly sure why.
I never spent the night; Richard was always at the lab by 8:30 a.m. because he said any later than that and the best equipment was taken. He never came to my apartment, which he referred to as “the crack house,” even though he’d never been in my neighborhood, just heard things on the subway and read things in the online police blotter, which he checked religiously, as he did the weather. He was one of those people who truly believed that forewarned was forearmed—he taught me that proverb, along with “he who pays the piper calls the tune,” which he trotted out in response to my embarrassment when he sent his food back twice at a restaurant on a busy Saturday evening.
I saw Richard maybe twice a week, and honestly, I didn’t think about it that much. If I wasn’t at the library, I was at the bar, and if I had any found time I was hanging out with Ginger at the shop, reading behind the counter with the comforting buzz of tattoo machines inking the words into my memory. Ginger hated Richard. She only met him twice. It’s not that I was trying to keep them apart… exactly. More that I didn’t even think of them as existing in the same universe, much less as able to interact.
