Read Online Jericho by George Fetherling - Free Book Online Page B

as hard as you can to make other people like you by being socially artificial and unnecessarily cheerful. I stopped buying into this fallacy when I was a teenager. My school uniform was never actually uniform with everybody else’s. My shoes were scuffed, one knee sock was almost falling downwards from elastic fatigue, my tunic never hung right. The other girls looked alike, which is to say they looked more girlish, and they didn’t have hair like old straw. They all spoke exactly alike too. They zeroed in on my mastery of language as the evident symbol of all the ways in which I was set apart at a distance from them. Often I sought out silence as my response to these cruelties on their part. They couldn’t ignore me if they couldn’t see me, so I cleverly turned myself invisible. But this only made me even more conspicuous—the only invisible person in the crowd. What I’m describing is pretty much the pattern on which life has been lived by me. This is how it is.
    Which brings me to the matter of desire. I experience desire, you know, just like other people. Lesbian desire, my own at any rate, is like that of straight persons as I understandit from the culture they continually bombard me with. You meet someone, either without expecting to or in some venue intended for that purpose, and there is something about her that you find attractive that you have never seen or noticed in anyone else before or, conversely, something that reminds you, though usually not consciously, of a quality you have admired in others in the past. You are reluctant to approach for fear that experience will rear its ugly face and you will be rejected. You don’t know how to proceed. This is especially difficult when you’re dealing with people who have so-called “good personalities” (the term has no scientific validity whatsoever—it’s a mass-media concept). They simply go around being polite to people all the time, completely without any discrimination, hoping to ingratiate themselves, living a constant lie. Thus you never know what they’re really thinking behind their smokescreen of—would you call it affability? I call it hypocrisy.
    Beth was nice that first day when she came into the office, but I don’t mean that in a negative way. I didn’t get the impression she was being nice because she wanted my help, though of course that’s exactly what she wanted, or needed. Sure, she has the type of body I find attractive. She isn’t heavy but she has a broad back. Also, her legs looked a little stronger than most; I immediately guessed to myself that her calves were strong, possibly from growing up someplace where there are a lot of hills. But it was not merely her physicality that made me want to get to know her, important though this is. Helping people with my knowledge is how I have gradually come to respond to the world’s awfulness towards me that I constantly experience, and I sensed that she could use a wise friend. Possibly being a couple one day,weaning her off the self-limiting narrow-mindedness of exclusively straight experience, of course occurred to me the moment she appeared in my doorway like a golden retriever or some other type of dog with similar emanations of questioning vulnerability. After all, I’m talking here about desire, which though it must never be misshaped by abstract emotion is not totally a logical thing by any means—we all accept that. Or such was my thinking at the time. More recent events have caused me to reconsider some of my initial responses, which I always seem to do only in the middle of the night when I should be getting back to sleep.
    I can tell that she too is a victim of desire, though not towards me, but towards that devious phony she keeps talking about. I know just by looking that he is the type of individual with a police file that has his name on it. She, coming from a different sort of background, cannot recognize him for what he is. Such is my fear. When we meet I hear in her