A Plea for Eros

roles, both conscious and unconscious. Sincerity is not at issue here; most of us play in earnest. Through the language of clothes and gesture and through talk itself, we imagine ourselves as the other person will see us, mirroring our own desire in them, and most of what we do is borrowed from a vocabulary of familiar images. This is not a territory of experience that is easy to dissect legally.
    Apparently, there is a new law in Minnesota against staring. It has been duly mocked in newspapers all over the world, but according to my sister, it came about because of the increase in the number of construction sites around Minneapolis, and women were weary of walking past them. Most women have experienced these painful, often humiliating excursions in front of an ogling, jeering crowd of men, and I don’t know of anyone who likes them. This event—the construction crew whooping and hooting at a passing woman—is a convention, a thing those guys do in a group and only in a group, to liven up the job, to declare their masculinity to the world
safely.
It’s the pseudo-sexual invitation. Not a single one of those men expects the woman to say, “Yes, I’m flattered. Take me, now.”
    But staring, even staring in this crude from, does not seem criminal to me. “Officer, he’s staring. Arrest him,” has a feeble ring to it. And I say this despite the fact that twice in my life I found myself the object of what would have to be described as aggressive staring. For several years, when I was in high school and then attending college in the same town, a young man I knew only slightly would appear out of nowhere and stare. He did not stare casually. He stared wholeheartedly and with such determination, he made me nervous and uncomfortable, as if he did it to satisfy some deep longing inside him. Without any warning, I would find him stationed outside the restaurant where I worked or outside the student union at my college, his eyes fixed on me. They were enormous pale eyes, ringed with black, that made him look as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. “I’ve been standing here since eight o’clock this morning,” he said to me once at three in the afternoon, “waiting for you.” One night after work he followed me through the streets. I panicked and began to run. He did not pursue me. The problem was that he acted in ways that struck me as unaccountable. He would make abrupt changes in his appearance—suddenly shaving his head, for example. He walked all the way to my parents’ house to deliver a gift, badly packed in a cardboard box. Filled with dread, I opened the box, only to find an ugly but innocent green vase. Not long before I received the vase, this young man’s twin brother had killed himself in a cafe in a nearby town. He had gone there for breakfast and then, after finishing his meal, took out a gun and blew his brains out. I am sure I associated the actions of the twin with the one who survived, am sure that the staring frightened me because I imagined potential violence lurking behind those eyes. The looks he gave me were beyond anything I had ever encountered, but I also honestly believe he meant me no harm. Perhaps in his own way he was in love. I don’t know. But the crux of the story is that I think I brought it on myself without meaning to. Once, when I was in high school, I hugged him.
    I worked at a place called the Youth Emergency Service, and the staring boy used to hang out there. I don’t know where he lived or how he managed. He didn’t go to school. He was sad that day, as he probably was most days, and we talked. I have no recollection of that conversation, but I know that in a fit of compassion I hugged him. I am convinced that the whole staring problem hinged on this hug, and to this day when I think of it I am mortified. Acts cannot be retrieved and, sometimes, they last. This is not a simple story. I often wonder if any story is, if you really look at it, but I carry his face around with me and when I think of him and the former me I feel sorry for both of us.
    The other staring man was a student of mine at Queens College. I taught freshman English there and an introductory literature class. My teaching was passionate, occasionally histrionic, but I was a young woman on a mission to educate, and sometimes I did. This student was clearly intelligent, although he had profound and jarring diction problems. His papers were written in a gnarled, convoluted style that was meant to be