The Girls From Corona Del Mar by Rufi Thorpe Page A

remarkable and encyclopedic knowledge of Husserl, another a tortured African American painter (quite talented) who found his very interest and indeed love for me, a white girl, to be yet another form of his debasement and mental colonization by the white man. In short, Franklin was just not my type.
    And then one day, Franklin asked me out.
    “Remember the day I asked you out?” he often asks me, even now, years later.
    “Yes,” I say.
    “I was so nervous.”
    “You didn’t show it,” I say.
    And he didn’t. He came into my office, casually leaning against the door frame. It was about eight at night, and he had been monitoring me, I suppose, and must have known that I had taken no dinner break.
    “You are going to have dinner with me,” he announced.
    “I am?”
    “I really hope so,” he said, his brow lifted, his smile wide.
    And so he, feigning nonchalance, as though none of this were planned, escorted me out of the building and around the corner to a not-inexpensive Italian place that had candles on the tables and where I ordered the farfalle and asparagus with gorgonzola cream sauce, and where he ordered a steak, and where we drank a bottle of wine.
    Our rapport was not immediate. In fact, there were several points during dinner when I zoned out completely and returned to the conversation with no idea of what he was saying. He was speaking, of course,about cuneiform, which should have been interesting to me, but Franklin was so good, so orderly, and so polite that it was difficult to tell at first that he was brilliant. But he was.
    After dinner, we returned to campus. “I’ve got to stop by my office,” Franklin said, and, unthinkingly, I waited with him while he unlocked his door. Inside, all was lit by candles. There was a bundle of lilies on the desk.
    “For you,” he said, handing them to me without any kind of fanfare.
    “For me?”
    He nodded eagerly. On the floor there was a blanket spread out, another bottle of wine, a plate set with cheeses and crackers, a box of chocolates. Some kind of chamber music was playing softly, what I later identified as a concerto by Fauré. I was so surprised by all this that I didn’t know what to do but laugh, not derisively, but nervously, girlishly, hiding my face in the lilies. I had never had anyone make such a gesture before. Not in my whole life. Not even when I went to prom.
    “Will you … stay and chat?” he asked.
    And so I began to take Franklin seriously as a suitor. And as time went on, I would take him more and more seriously, as a suitor, as a scholar, as a man.
    When we began working together on the Inanna project, I worried we would wreck things by spending too much time together, but we seemed unable to disappoint each other. How often had I sat across a table from some man or other and realized, in the elision of the moment, that they were about to disappoint me terribly?
    I remember once finding several Polaroids of a naked woman in my mother’s nightstand. I had no idea who the woman was; she was a stranger, someone I had never seen before, yet she was clearly posed on my mother’s bed—I recognized the tiny rosebuds of the bedspread. The first two were of the woman alone, and then there was another one of she and my mother, both naked, and artfully kissing each other, in thewatched, passionless way familiar to firmly heterosexual women participating in polite threesomes. The photographer, I guessed, had been my stepfather, Paddy. I must have been around eleven when I found these photos, and I remember, not feelings of shock or scandal, but a sickening recognition of something I had known all along, this awareness of my parents’ base dirtiness. I slid the photos quietly back in the drawer, imagining my mother and Paddy pathetically showing these three washed-out Polaroids to one another after the “kids” were put to bed: my two wild little brothers and me, sleeping in a heap on our air mattress. This feeling of resigned