Fraternity

by Benjamin Nugent

  When the music went Biggie Biggie Biggie, I took her by the elbow and we took the floor. We humped the air between us; we collaborated. When the two of us left early, hand in hand, stumbling down Greek Row to Delta Zeta Chi, she said, “I have to say, I’m surprised this is happening with you.”

  I asked her what she meant.

  “Just a wrong first impression.”

  The house was abandoned, all the brothers at TN’s post-otter party, hoping to show off their injuries to girls who had seen them be brave. Our feet creaked on the stairs as she followed me up. In my room I gave her the plug to hook her phone to my speakers and asked her to choose music. She filled the room with the yarn-shopness that Five had described, and I recited her poem from memory, with the lines I’d added, while she sat on my bed with her chin on her fist.

  “Consider it your poem, too,” she said, and I knew I was supposed to kiss her, and I did.

  I had never been to Silicon Valley, but that was where I went that night. Green grass in the shadow of silicon mountains, steel gray with chalk-white caps. Silicon wolves stalked the foothills, screen-eyed. I saw myself kneeling in that grass, doing for Nutella what God was doing for me. I made the sounds I thought Nutella would make.

  I put on a condom as the yarn-shop song started over. When we were about to start fucking, I asked her to recite the poem. She looked at me for a moment. Please, I said, and she recited. I recited with her, and it worked: When we fucked, Nutella was close, because we had drawn him into the room like we were two lungs. He was just out of reach, something sprayed in the air, like a poem.

  I only saw the blood when we were finished. I looked at her face for an answer. She sat and sucked air through her nose, wiped her face with the back of her hand.

  “Were you thinking about Nutella?” she asked.

  I said no in a too-deep voice.

  “You’re lying to me. Why did you want us to say the poem?” She started to cry. Her shoulders jumped in rhythm to her sobs. “It’s cool, but at least don’t lie to me.”

  Cry, I ordered myself. We would cry together. I pictured tide pools in my eyes. I pictured what the funeral would look like if my little sister died, her friends crying in their glasses and braces. But I’d tried to make myself cry many times, and always the same thing happened: my eyes knew I was trying to do it, and refused. I couldn’t make myself cry any better than Nutella and Five-Hour could make themselves Melanie’s lovers.

  I waited for a minute, listening, trying to join. Finally, I leaned over and put my lips under her eye, so that I could taste her. I wanted to tell her what I tasted: sour makeup and salt.

  “I’m sorry I lied to you,” I said. “I thought about Nutella but also you at the same time.” She took my hands and folded them across her ribs. And then something occurred to me.

  “You can’t write a poem about how I said that,” I said. “About anything to do with me and Nutella. Even though it was your first time, you can’t write a poem about it that you show to people.”

  I watched her blink in the dark.

  “I might not write a poem about it,” she said. “But I’m going to talk about it with my friends.”

  “You can’t,” I said. “You can’t tell them I thought about Nutella.”

  “Okay, I won’t,” she said, and I knew that she was now the one lying.

  I pulled away from her and sat up in bed. I could see what was going to happen to me like a film projected on my wall: My life was ruined. She would tell her friends, who would tell other girls, and Shmash or Five would find out from one girl or another. Shmash and Five would be too embarrassed to tell Nutella, but they wouldn’t be able to resist telling other brothers, and one night, very drunk, a brother would tell Nutella. And nothing would happen. No one would say anything to me. No one would want to take anything from me. But brotherhood would be taken, in the end. The ease with which my brothers spoke to me, the readiness with which they spilled their guts in times of humiliation—this would be withdrawn. My place among them in the consulting firm of the clock and talons.

  The atrium full of chamber music exploded, as if God had sung a note so high it shattered four stories of green windows.

  I sat there hating her. She must have hated me back, because she got out of bed and put on her clothes without speaking. She had left the house by the time the brothers returned from TN. I lay awake and listened to them bang around the kitchen. They chanted in unison, a single, iambic owl: uh-ooh uh-ooh. It sounded like beware, beware.

  BASICS

  It was the pregame for Eighties Tuesday, and most of the Kappas had come over to Delta house. It was dark outside, and in the living room the light was dim and the air was full of perfume. Zach arrived late because he’d been upstairs, lying on his bed, talking with his mother on the phone about whether or not he should buy an electric toothbrush. He took the last available seat, next to Sharon. Their only two previous conversations had revolved around professional basketball. The couch they shared was low and white, and she played with a tuft of stuffing that protruded from a tear in one of its arms. The volume on the TV was set so low that smaller explosions were inaudible. He sipped pale beer from a plastic cup.

  She asked him if he liked the show. He shrugged. He didn’t like superheroes anymore, he said. He didn’t know what had changed. He’d been in love with superheroes when he was a child. He wasn’t gay anymore, he explained, but he had been gay when he was little, if he thought about it. It was something about the briefs that the men wore over their tights. They were a different color from the rest of their costumes, so they drew the eye. And their pectorals were so much like breasts that they’d seemed to him a race of hermaphrodites, though he hadn’t known the word. To be a superhero was to have parts from both sexes. That was how it had seemed.

  As he spoke she drank hard cider from a narrow can she’d brought with her from Kappa. She peeled off its label in strips. She laid the strips on the arm of the couch and pressed them into the fabric with her pointer finger. She said that she, too, had been a gay child. Her first loves had been older girls, the assistant teachers in second grade. She still remembered their names: Sandra, Maura, Pauline. She hadn’t regarded them as grown-ups, because they’d looked so much younger than her mother, and their hair had been so much longer. It was as if, when she was seven, girls her own age were human, and women were human, but older girls belonged to a higher species. They glowed. She had now reached the age at which little girls fell in love with her. She saw them look her up and down. When she had looked at older girls that way, as a child, what she’d wanted was to run away with them. In her fantasies, she said, one of them would take her by the hand and run with her through the lawns of her suburb. The two of them would help each other scale the fences and stone walls. Finally, when they reached a field, they would gather momentum, leap into the air, and fly, abandoning their families.

  As she said this her face took on a sleepy expression. He couldn’t tell to what degree they had discovered a special ability to be candid with each other and to what degree they were both already a bit drunk. Usually, at this point in a conversation with a girl, his throat constricted, his voice squeaked, he knocked things over with his elbow in the simple act of picking up a beer, and nothing he said sounded true. He asked her if she wanted to go up to the study room, where there was a large can of IPA from a Worcester-area microbrewery stowed on a shelf in a cardboard box that’d once contained a coffee maker. He explained that he kept it there so that his roommate wouldn’t drink it. It was much better than the beer down here. She nodded. They stood and snaked their way through the couches.

  In the study room upstairs, they sat on opposite sides of a desk, passing the tallboy. Retired oars hung from the wall, their shafts chewed by oarlocks, their blades painted purple and yellow. The overhead light flickered. The pregame was a faint noise beneath their feet.

  He asked her if she thought she would still find the assistant teachers attractive, if she met them today. She
said she didn’t feel that way about individual women very often anymore. It was more like, sometimes, she had the desire to be an evil man, a CEO in a pin-striped suit who slept with his secretaries. She blinked at the floor and drank, self-conscious. We can’t pause too long, he thought. He had to confess something immediately, to reciprocate her confession, or the exchange would grind to a halt.

  It was the same with him, he said, in that he didn’t desire particular men so much as think it would be cool to be an evil woman. He never dreamed of being a good woman, or a normal-looking woman, or a woman of average uprightness. He only realized that this was the case as he said it. He only dreamed of being a woman who was super fucked up and off-the-charts good-looking. He thought about long, dark hair piled on a pillow in a hotel room, mirrors with brass stuff on the frames. He could imagine fucking rich morons. He couldn’t imagine being a woman with a good man, a man who had loftier aims than making money, who lived according to principles. That sounded like a nightmare.

  Sharon sipped the ale, handed it back to him, and said, “We’re both evil.” She narrowed her eyes and slouched, like a crone, and pointed her finger at him. “You, too, are an evil one.” She said it in a crone’s hoarse voice. She made her finger tremble, to give the crone a parkinsonian ailment. “It’s true that you have kind of an evil face,” she continued, returning to her normal way of speaking, but doubling down on the crone’s posture, leaning even farther across the desk. “I don’t like it. I want to slap it.” She raised one hand as if to swat his cheek but she didn’t do it.

  They could hear the pregame draw to a close. People whooped with excitement at the prospect of marching through the cold to the Hangar and dancing on a floor with shifting patterns. In anticipation of Eighties Tuesday, someone had put on a song from the eighties. You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, the man sang, and the lyrics that followed were indecipherable. Zach knew that his brothers were lacing their brogues and sneakers. He knew that Sharon’s sisters were pulling on their heels. This was the last chance to go downstairs and join them. They sat and listened to the departure.

  He went to his room to find his roommate’s cigarettes. They smoked on the porch. They stood barefoot in the inch of snow on the grass, to see how long they could bear it. She said his cologne was so strong that standing next to him was a greater test of endurance than standing in the snow. She said it was like he was a dying Abercrombie store trying to attract customers with its smell. For the first time in his life, he genuinely wanted to dance with a person. He almost suggested they join the others at the Hangar for Eighties Tuesday, but he was worried that his dancing would depress and embarrass them.

  Instead he worked up his courage and told her she could slap him in the face if she did in fact want to. He blushed, surprised at how much this sounded like an offer to have sex. He felt like a cat that had turned around and raised its hindquarters in the air. She bit her lip, struggling with a decision.

  “Okay,” she finally said, with some ambivalence. “Yeah. I’ll slap you.”

  “Cool,” he said. They decided to go inside first, and stood facing each other in the living room, warming their feet on the carpet, drinking the last of the beer from the keg.

  “I’d feel more comfortable,” she said, “if we both hit each other. You can hit me in the stomach. It’s actually strong. I don’t know why.”

  It was; she took his hand and pressed his palm to her belly, to show him. She never did any sit-ups, she said, it had something to do with her genes. He agreed that he would hit her in the stomach, but he said that he thought she should hit him in the face first, since she was the one who had brought up the idea of hitting, by saying she wanted to slap him. She nodded and grazed his face with the tips of her fingers.

  “Sorry,” she said, “that was terrible.” He told her not to worry, that it was okay. They were both standing behind the white couch on which they’d sat earlier that evening. A small amount of her beer had spilled on the floor when she’d slapped him unsuccessfully. She really should have put down her beer first, she said. That was one of the reasons she’d slapped him so clumsily. Once she had placed the cup by her feet she assumed a stance that she said she’d learned on her high school volleyball team: feet planted shoulder-width apart, low center of gravity. And then she hit him in the stomach, which surprised him, though it wasn’t very hard. It was different from how it felt when he’d put on boxing gloves and sparred with other Deltas. He could feel the impact of her two front knuckles, each of them distinct and sharp.

  “Why can’t you hit me in the face,” he asked her, “if you don’t like my face?” He became conscious of his breathing. She had risen from her volleyball posture. She seemed to consider his question, her head tilted to one side. She looked out the window, at the snow that was being picked up by the wind, and back at him again, and nodded, as if to say, Yes, there’s a small amount of snow lifting off the ground. And then they were lurching across the room as a single inelegant creature, kissing, knocking over cans, spilling beer and cider. The fizz of the spilled drinks on the carpet was a dirty sound. His eyes were closed but he could hear a truck slicing through the slush in the street, splashing cold water as it passed. There was traffic on North Pleasant. Someone was leaning on a car horn. Massachusetts was covered in snowdrifts that were stained by exhaust around the edges. Was this what people meant by “dirty,” when they spoke of a mood that could descend on lovers, this feeling of being part and parcel of the world?

  They looked at each other, their arms wrapped around each other’s waists. They took the narrow back stairs that led to the third floor holding hands.

  “I hate your room,” she said, as she followed him in and shut the door. He said he hated his roommate’s fridge. She said she hated that it had no beer inside. He said that he hated his rug, as he rubbed his feet against it, and it was an ugly rug, its pattern alternating squares of black and gray. His roommate had ordered it from Lowe’s and they’d never had an honest conversation about it. It was like Goodnight Moon, the game of declaring their hatred for each object. He chose a playlist on his phone and connected his phone to his speakers. The music was unobtrusive, instrumental hip-hop, and now its very unobtrusiveness struck him as contemptible. “I hate this music,” he said.

  They climbed into his bed and undressed each other. She said that she hated men. Their hatred for all the things they’d mentioned was a kind of languor, a drug. He felt oddly inoculated against judgment, taking his clothes off in front of her. It was better to feel her hands on his skin and think, She hates my skin, than to think, Does she love my skin? It was better to feel her hands in his hair and think, She hates my hair, than to think, Does she love my hair? He could feel that he had become a better kisser than he usually was, because he wasn’t as nervous.

  They stopped talking while he fingered her. When she pulled his hand away, he took a condom from a drawer in his nightstand and put it on. She dragged him on top of her, and then they were having sex, slowly, wearing expressions of affected disdain. He was twenty-two years old, a senior in college, he’d had sex four times, and every time, he knew, he had been the worst lover in the world. He’d heard of men who lasted a minute spoken of as shitty in bed, but he couldn’t fathom how any man had been able to last thirty seconds. A minute was herculean. All four times, a combination of panic, gratitude, and reverence had overwhelmed him within ten or fifteen seconds, or five. But now everything was different. It astonished him, the power of this new way of doing things, of doing things in a spirit of fake hostility. When he’d approached sex in a spirit of love, he’d felt like a rabbit, and now he felt like a sloth, in a good way. It seemed like a realistic possibility that he could go on doing it for a long time. Look at us, he thought, a couple of stupid little ugly dirtbags. He felt that he was hovering over the bed, watching two people at their work. They were both making the sounds people made on television. Look at these two little assholes, he thought, hoping to maintain the mood that had
proven so helpful. It was incredible how slowly they were moving, how much time had passed, perhaps a minute already. This was what it was supposed to be like.

  I am not being guided by intelligence, he thought, I am being guided by instinct. That’s how it works if you know what you’re doing. He pinned her arm to the bed beside her hair, and then, when she made an encouraging sound in response, he propped himself up on one elbow and—it felt like just another sound he made—put a hand on her throat and applied a small amount of pressure with his fingers.

  Her face fell and went blank. This was the problem with the fake hostility, he saw: it was unclear how far it was supposed to go. Her face was still fallen after he took his hand off her neck, and he wondered if he should get off her and apologize. But it seemed wasteful to let everything go to hell. He thought, We’ll recover, we’ll find our way back to how it was before. He gazed into her eyes like a really nice person, as they continued to have sex. He made the face of a gentle lover, dropping his mouth open. And these contrivances turned out to be another mistake, because she shook her head and looked away. A moment later, she told him to stop. This happened at the same time he realized that he might be about to come, and the confluence of the two events was so disorienting that he froze, as if “stop” were a demand for the cessation of all movement, rather than a demand for withdrawal. He lay on top of her, limp, breathing hard, his head resting beside hers on the pillow, for more than five seconds, less than ten, neither of them speaking, or moving, and then he came. It felt like a clerical error, like clicking send when you meant to click save. He pulled out and looked at her, and she was averting her eyes and covering them with her hands.

  He sat beside her and tried to read her body language. She was lying on her side, turned away from him. He felt tenderness and regret. How was it possible he had hurt this person whom he was so intent on pleasing? And then the tenderness and regret were mingled with fear. What was it called, what had just happened? Was his hesitation in pulling out of her and getting off her when he knew he was about to come a form of aggression, for which he deserved punishment, or was it a brief stupor, a natural effect of having sex? She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the wall.