Louisa Meets Bear by Lisa Gornick Read Free Book Online

remember Corrine telling me about this skinny guy with a ponytail and a squinty way of looking at people. “He knows these guys who make it out of Menlo Park, but the way they do it, it’s not really drugs but more like a religious experience.” Or it might have been me saying, “He’s older. He had a girlfriend he lived with for a while. He reads poetry and talks about writers I never even heard of before.”
    About you, I pause. It’s hard to put into words for Corrine where you will take me. I imagine Corrine curled on her bed, the TV on without the sound, books piled on the crate at her side, Lily’s toys strewn like bread crumbs across the floor.
    â€œDon’t tell me it’s something stupid like sex,” Corrine says.
    â€œNo, it’s not that. We haven’t got there yet. It’s something about purpose. It’s almost old-fashioned—kind of the way I imagine my father having made himself a scientist, determinedly moving himself from one world into another. You can feel it in him, like something chugging. We don’t have that. Your parents will always be richer than you. I’ll be lucky if I do half as well as my father. Does that make sense?”
    â€œBest I can make out, the guy’s a goddamned race car.”
    *   *   *
    You have a red VW that has no heat. You take me for Chinese food at a place outside of town. You drive with the window open and only a sweater, and I am too timid, too ashamed to tell you how cold I am, my toes clenched, my shoulders hunched so my arms can steal some of the warmth from my chest. I don’t tell you that I barely know how to drive, that watching you shift gears, drink a Coke, fiddle with the radio, and wind us through the back roads to the highway, all I can think of is I must be missing some gene you have—that whereas I have learned from my perpetually lost father to transpose spatial relations into words (“Let’s see,” he would say as we stood at a street corner ten blocks from our house, “I think we made a right here at this burrito place”), you move with an internal map of your body through space, your limbs generating their own heat.
    At the restaurant, you cup my stiff hands between yours, and rub. “You have no blood,” you say. You keep my hands pocketed inside your own while you tell me about your afternoon drinking scotch with the Ivy Club members who are recruiting you.
    I raise my eyebrows.
    â€œWorking-class boy comes to the country club,” you say, and even though I disapprove of the eating clubs, many of which don’t admit women and one of which, I was told, hung a blow-up of my photo from the freshman directory as one of the top ten coeds of the year (Screw them, Corrine said, only losers waste their time going through those books, but it had left me humiliated, like one of those dreams in which you realize you’re walking around without any pants), it tickles me to think of you breaking into the ranks of these pale and anemic third- and fourth-generation Princeton men with their land-grant Virginia and Connecticut families.
    â€œI made first string this year, that’s why,” you say. “They always take one football player. It’s affirmative action for jocks.”
    Your laugh sounds like an engine rumbling, and I understand why the Ivy boys are courting you: so that they, self-conscious and mannered like me, might imbibe something about you, about your uncomplicated maleness, about the way you stretch out on the couch with an arm crooked behind your neck when you watch TV and yell, “Go, baby, you got it!” at the players on the screen, the way you drive a car as though it were an extension of you, the way your outside and inside coincide. Rumor has it that there are entire departments of investment banks that are all Ivy men, and I know that for you, being admitted into their circle is more valuable than an