Read Online In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe - Free Book Online

enough sense to know that what I was experiencing so forcefully was a fundamentally trivial physical impulse. And that’s what makes the whole situation so bewildering and impenetrable. Why would one night with a boy I didn’t even particularly like seem worth ruining a serious and irreplaceable friendship for?
    I suppose, in accordance with the general and damaging abstraction of those years, I was fulfilling some misplaced idea of myself. I was finally someone who took things lightly. I thought a lot about “lightness” then. Even though I wasn’t someone who took things lightly at all, I liked, that year, to think of myself as someone who did—all of which raises another question in my mind. Was at least part of the whole miserable escapade the fault of the Milan Kundera book everyone was reading,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
? That sublime adolescent ode to emotional carelessness, that ubiquitous paperback expounding an obscure eastern European profundity in moral lapses? The more I think about it, the more I think it’s fair to apportion a tiny bit of the blame to Mr. Kundera. (Here Stella would raise her eyebrows. “A book forced you to do it? How
literary
of you, how
well read
you must be.…”)
    I suppose, also, in some corner of my fevered and cowardly brain I must have thought we would get away with it. I must have thought we would sleep together once and get it out of our systems. It turned out, however, that the boy believed in “honesty,” an approach I would not have chosen on my own. He called Stella at the soonest possible second and told her. It was not hard toimagine the frantic look in Stella’s eyes when he told her. Stella looked frantic when she had to pour cornflakes in a bowl. I hated him for telling her. I couldn’t bear the idea of her knowing. Strangely enough, I felt protective of her, as if I could somehow protect her from the threat of myself.
    I don’t think I grasped right away the magnitude of what I had done. It felt like waking up in the middle of a René Magritte painting and finding tiny men with bowler hats suddenly falling from the sky. It didn’t make sense, even to me, and I was startled, in a way, to find that it was real. To have the boy in my house the next morning, wanting coffee, and to have his soft blue-and-green flannel shirt spread out on my floor, was for some reason extremely startling. Cause and effect were sufficiently severed in my mind that I had not apprehended the enormity of the betrayal. In the light of day, it seemed a little unfair that I couldn’t take it back.
    I don’t remember if the boy called Stella from my house, or if he waited a few hours and called her from a phone booth in the train station. I do remember him reveling in his abject abasement. I couldn’t believe how much he reveled. He was, among other things, a religious nut. But back to Stella. It’s funny how even now my mind wanders back to him. This man I did not even delude myself into thinking that I cared about. This man I did not even
like
.
    Stella, needless to say, was furious, mostly at me. I’ve noticed, in these cases, one is always furious at the person of the same sex, and one always finds the person of the other sex contemptible yet oddly blameless. To further complicate things, Stella and I were supposed to be roommates in the fall. This made everything infinitelyworse: undoing our roommate arrangements proved to be more arduous than one would think. We had to disentangle ourselves officially in the eyes of the bureaucracy, and on paper: it was like getting a divorce.
    Before I go any further, maybe I should say something about self-destructiveness in those years. That warm July night, there was the pleasure of destruction, of Zippo lighters torching straw huts, of razing something truly good and valuable to the ground; there was the sense, however subliminal, of disemboweling a friendship. I remember filleting fish that I caught with my father on the docks, and