I keep
things. Occasionally, they aren’t even my things. For many years, a small,
duffel-like bag sat in the bottom of a closet in my apartment. The bag belonged
to a college friend of my husband’s. Here’s how it got there.
This college
friend, let’s call him J.C., visited us in New York soon after we got married,
back in the mid-’60s. He and my husband told stories, talked about people they
both knew; we drank a lot—this was before pot was a part of our life. My
husband had told me J.C. was a charismatic figure, always a crowd of girls around
him, always organizing parties.
I developed
a crush on J.C. He was lean, dirty blond hair, blue eyes, just my type. (I
should insert here that while I was newly married, we had only gotten married
because my parents found out we were living together and made a fuss. We were
relatively young, only 22, hadn’t dated much in high school or college, so we
had both agreed that sexual fidelity wasn’t anything we particularly cared
about. But neither of us had yet acted on this bohemian belief.) I flirted with
J.C. while we sat in the living room, drinking and talking. Late into the
night, my husband and I repaired to our bed alcove, while J.C. wrapped himself
in his sleeping bag on the floor of the living room.
One night
in bed, my husband asked, “What do you think of J.C.?”
“I have a
real crush on him,” I admitted.
My husband
said, “He told me he thinks you’re really hot. He wanted to know whether it was
okay if he slept with you.”
“What did
you say?”
“I said, it
was up to you.”
I wasn’t
sure how I felt about this. On the one hand, it was exciting that J.C. wanted
me as much as I wanted him. On the other hand, I didn’t like the idea that he’d
asked my husband for permission. I wasn’t a piece of property that J.C. could
borrow for a night of fun.
I waited to
see what would happen. Would J.C. make a move on me? What would I do if he did?
He spent another week sleeping on our floor, then returned to Kansas. He never
made a move. I was a little disappointed.
After he
was gone, my husband asked if anything had happened between us. I said, no. He said
he thought J.C. was more afraid of losing a place to stay for the night.
Some years
passed. My husband and I moved to a bigger apartment and had a baby. A few
months after the baby arrived, J.C. was in New York again, this time on his way
to Europe for a year. There was some woman he knew, they were going to meet up
in Venice—or something like that. He talked more than he had before, ideas more
than stories about people they knew, something about “extended life.” I was
less attracted than I had been.
This time
he brought marijuana. We sat in the living room, smoking, he at one end of the
couch, me with my babe in arms at the other. The dope infused a repulsion toward
J.C. so powerful I had to leave the room.
My husband
joined me in the baby’s room some minutes later. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“He’s
giving me a strong feeling of paranoia,” I said, and my words flowed into the
air in balloonish letters, like cartoon dialogue. I admired them until they
faded like the Cheshire Cat.
“Do you
want me to tell him to leave?”
“No, I’ll
just stay away from him.”
J.C. left
the next day, but returned a few weeks later. Something had gone wrong, the
woman wasn’t there. He was on his way back to Kansas. Could he leave this bag
with us? He’d pick it up some other time. My husband put it in the closet in
the baby’s room.
J.C. never
came back for the bag. Every few years, he’d call my husband on the phone, each
time talking more and more incessantly about his discoveries of life extension.
After a while my husband heard that J.C. was haunting his congressman’s office,
claiming either that others were stealing his ideas about life extension or the
congressman himself had stolen the ideas. Then we stopped hearing from him.
About 30
years after the bag was left with us, I opened it. There was nothing inside. It
was an awkward size, neither small enough for a carry-on, nor big enough for
more than a weekend. It had a stiff top, like an old-fashioned carpetbag. My
husband was happy to get rid of it.
