The first time I saw Killian, he was nude. Pale, toned, illumined by an unflattering cone of yellow lighting, like Michelangelo’s David on display in a Walmart. I was in my first year of graduate school, attending something called a Naked Supper Club at the home of a forestry school student named Elsa, who hosted monthly dinners consisting entirely of foraged vegetables, roots, and fungi. Elsa had several housemates, most of them PhD candidates whose favorite hobby was threatening to drop out of their respective programs for a more stable life. There was a dreamy man named Ronald who studied the physics of music; his primary partner, Wendy, a public health student who hoped to force the city into legally recognizing throuples one day; a heroin-chic comp lit fuckboi named Rhys who was rumored to be a Kennedy cousin; and Killian Bane – not a graduate student but an actor.
I was there on my fourth date with an art historian named Viktor, who’d known Elsa since prep school.
“You have really great conversations at these,” Viktor had said, after recounting the housemates’ names and school affiliations, as we traipsed up the hill to East Rock. “Nudity levels the playing field, you know. And don’t worry, no one looks good naked.”
Viktor and I had fucked twice already, which made these ostensibly reassuring words seem cruel rather than comforting.
I spotted Killian as soon as Viktor and I arrived and shed our clothes in the foyer. I wish I could say that I noticed Killian’s eyes first, which were green, keen, and feline, or his shock of black hair. But obviously I noticed his dick, which was very small. The smallest I’d ever seen, actually. In coloring and features it was commonplace – pinkish, circumcised, mercifully flaccid. From there I registered his torso, shoulders, etc., which were muscled but not bulky, and hairless, like a Ken doll, or a swimmer.
Viktor smacked his head on the coat rack as he stood up from untying his sneakers. “Ow!”
Killian glanced over at Viktor’s Ow!, and right then I was reminded that I was naked, and he was naked, and everyone was naked, and all these people—these hipster white people who would normally have terrified me with their cultural confidence and manner of taking up space unthinkingly – were, beneath it, also just undignified hunks of flesh. The room seemed very cold and very bright and I was sure everyone would see lust starting to prickle on my skin. And not for Viktor.
Suddenly Killian was in front of us, smiling. At first I assumed he knew Viktor, but my date had already slunk off to kiss Elsa on both cheeks. I looked his way long enough to notice how his eyes swept her pixie, porcelain figure, and how he dropped his hands to his crotch. I was only too happy to turn to this new man, whose gaze was fixed on me. The green eyes were especially vivid up close.
A single gray stripe shot through his black hair, near his left temple. Like Indira Gandhi. Despotic. I noticed then that he seemed older than me, and older than the other grad students; later, I learned that he was thirty-three – a distant age.
“Great to see you,” Killian said, enthusiastically.
I had never been noticed so plainly before. The guys I liked, lanky Art Boys, were dark-haired with hooded eyes and slouchy postures and opinions on the French New Wave, and all of them— white, Black, brown, Asian, mixed – went for cream-skinned wraiths. Plathy types. Elsas. It embarrassed me, later, to think that it all came down to my desire to be recognised, even if the recognition was a lie. I am basically plain. I have shiny hair and unblemished skin, though aunties are bitchy about its darkness. But I have one of those forgettable faces, particularly for people unaccustomed to distinguishing between the nuances of brown features. So when someone looks – really looks – something happens to me. An admixture of surprise and gratitude is stirred up, indistinguishable from desire.
It took me a moment to realise what he’d said. “Have we, er, met?” I asked.
“Just say we have,” he whispered. “The Future Senator cornered me.” He jutted his elbow at someone I’d met at the grad school bar—another naked white man, a 2L at the law school who was being mentored by a confirmed war criminal in the Global Studies department, with whom he was co-writing a tome called Great Man Theory.
I didn’t blame Killian for fleeing the guy, but I was still befuddled by the way he’d made for me. “Sure, yeah. Great to see you. How, um, how have you been?” I pinched the skin at my wrist, unsure. I had never been a performer of any kind. I am actually a terrible liar; it was why I so unsuccessfully concealed my double life from my parents.
Excerpted with permission from Goddess Complex, Sanjena Sathian, HarperCollins India.
