“Sorry,” he heard himself say. “I didn’t mean to be too…” He knew that this was an unsatisfactory description of what he’d done, but he was afraid that he would use the wrong words if he tried again to describe it. He reached out and stroked her hair, until she jerked away. She said nothing, only searched under the blanket and sheets for her clothes. He stopped talking and sat naked in bed, watching, as she extracted her underwear and socks from the bedding and started to dress.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She turned to him and shrugged. She threw up her hands and shook her head. She didn’t know if she was okay or not, she seemed to be saying, or at least she didn’t know the degree to which she didn’t feel okay. Neither of us understands what just happened, he thought. Neither of us understands the nature or seriousness of what I’ve done wrong. It seemed to him that there was a moment of accord, in which they each registered the other’s confusion. And then she left.
* * *
As soon as he heard Sharon leave the house, he called his mother. He tried her cell and then her landline. She picked up on the fourth ring and asked him if he was okay. He could tell from the sound of her voice that he’d woken her up. He could see her standing in her bedroom in the house in Agawam, bare-legged in a T-shirt. She had put on her glasses, he guessed, and now she was looking out the window at the snow caked on the neighbors’ solar panels, the black driveways with sharp corners.
“I think I might have sexually assaulted someone,” he said. “I don’t know.”
She told him that he didn’t need to stop crying but that he did need to speak clearly and slowly, so that she could understand what he was saying. “Don’t be shy,” she said. “You need to tell me exactly what happened. Don’t leave anything out.”
He told her.
“Wait,” she said, “go back. How long was it between when she said to stop and when you ejaculated in the condom, inside her?”
He tried to remember the precise length of time, counting one-Mississippi two-Mississippi in his head as he replayed the moment. He sniffed back mucus and tasted it on his tongue. “Like maybe six seconds,” he said. “Maybe seven. But I’m not sure.”
“And then you pulled out?”
“Yeah. She looked upset.”
His mother laughed with relief. “From how you were talking about it,” she said, “I’d have thought it was two minutes.”
He waited for her to go on.
“Look,” she said. “You may have to go to some kind of counseling. But you’re not going to get expelled. If the university expelled all the guys who did what you did, they would lose a lot of money. If the cops charged all the guys who did what you did with a crime, a lot of people would have to go to jail.”
He toppled backward onto the bed and stared at the ceiling. Everything looked beautiful and new now that she’d told him he was safe. The snow sparkled in the porch light. Despite the weather, a car drove by with its windows down and its stereo on, playing dance music.
“You need to be more careful,” his mother said. She made a pained sound. “Did she seem like she was going to be okay?”
He touched the sheets where Sharon had lain naked less than ten minutes earlier. He skimmed his hand back and forth across them, still holding the phone to his ear. “Should I go to Kappa and apologize?”
There was a long silence. His palpitations came and went. He heard her fill a glass with water at the kitchen sink. Or maybe she was filling a kettle for tea.
“Well,” she said, “of course you should be nice to her, but let’s give everyone a chance to calm down. If you tell her you’re sorry, in an emotional way, like something really serious happened, she might decide that something really serious happened. Everyone’s tired and worked up. Let’s talk tomorrow, before you think about saying anything.” She spoke to him of the riskiness of all intercourse, of the possibility of unwanted pregnancy, of catching diseases. She reminded him of the importance of listening carefully to girls and paying close attention to their signals. These were things she’d told him many times, and he found it soothing to hear them again, like a storybook from childhood.
“I’m sorry,” he said intermittently, as she spoke to him.
“You don’t need to apologize to me,” she said, but he continued to do so, whenever there was a pause in the conversation. After a while, his breathing slowed and he almost felt capable of sleep.
* * *
But he didn’t sleep after he got off the phone. He went downstairs to clean up the mess he’d made with Sharon. The floor of the living room was littered with bottles and cans that they’d knocked off the arms of chairs and couches. He’d never cleaned a floor before, so he didn’t know whether to use the broom or the mop, or, if he was supposed to use them both, which came first. The carpet had absorbed most of the spilled beer, so he went with the broom. Only one of the bottles had actually shattered. He tried to sweep the shards into a little pile, but some of them were lodged in the fabric.
He was on his knees, picking out the glass with his hands, when the front door swung open. Four Deltas had come home early from the Hangar, led by Five-Hour, who was singing the song that had been playing toward the end of the pregame: “I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar / That much is true.”
He didn’t want to talk to Five-Hour, so he looked away and returned to his task.
“What are you doing?” Five-Hour asked. “Why are you cleaning at night?”
He dropped the last of the shards into his cupped palm and went to the kitchen to throw the mess in the trash.
“Did something happen?” Five-Hour asked, following him.
He could see the others settling on the floor by the TV in the living room and resuming a PS4 game they’d paused in the afternoon. He heard the clatter of hooves and remembered there’d been talk of a cavalry engagement. There was an exchange of fire, repeater carbines in a valley or ravine, and then there were the cries of shot horses. How many guys our age, he wondered, have sat together at night, during a war, and listened to the sound of horses dying?
He sat with Five-Hour in the kitchen and told him what he’d done. He told him about the talk he’d had with his mother. “I see,” Five-Hour said.
He asked Five-Hour if he should try to talk to Sharon. Five-Hour dug in his backpack and took out a box of red licorice.
“If you think about it,” said Five-Hour, chewing on a lump, “you don’t want to roll up to her and start talking if she’s not initiating it. That might make it worse.”
He shook his head, though he didn’t know why he was objecting to Five-Hour’s advice. And then he said something he hadn’t known to be true until he said it, which was that he couldn’t help but feel everything had gone wrong precisely because he and Sharon had hit it off. The thing that had happened had happened not because they didn’t care about each other, or didn’t like each other, but because they did care about each other and did like each other. That was why things had moved so fast and the whole thing had spun out of control. It was like how a sports car with an amazing engine was more likely to crash into a wall than was a minivan with a shitty engine. “Fuck it,” he said, “I’ll just message her,” and picked up his phone. There was a closed Greek Facebook group to which everyone in Delta and Kappa belonged, so she was probably in his Messenger contacts.
He’d barely touched the screen when Five-Hour slapped the phone out of his hand. It hit the floor some distance from the table where they sat, its rubber case causing it to bounce slightly on the linoleum.
“My brother,” said Five-Hour, “you raped her, a little bit.” He threw up his hands. “In the eyes of the school, for however many seconds, that’s what you did.” They’d all been taught the affirmative-consent policy in first-year orientation, he pointed out. Even now, he said, she might be talking to her friends in Kappa, trying to decide what to do. Would people believe her—that would be her problem, if she wanted to start a J-Board. All she needed was a DM from him saying So
rry, I fucked up tonight, and problem solved. “Turn off the phone,” said Five-Hour. “Go to sleep, and don’t turn it on again until it’s morning. Don’t confess.”
* * *
He woke hungover, his roommate snoring in the bed kitty-corner to his own. Pink sunlight had crept onto the snowy eaves of the house across the street. He put on jeans and a hoodie, went downstairs, and drank two glasses of water. To treat his headache with fresh air, he put on his coat and sneakers and went outside.
The snow was ankle-high and smooth, save for two sets of footprints created by bare feet. They ran down the slope of the yard, one slightly smaller than the other, and stopped at the arbitrary spot where he and Sharon had smoked his roommate’s cigarettes and hopped up and down, shifting their weight from one foot to the other to keep their toes from going numb.
He walked downtown, past the other fraternities, to buy a coffee at the convenience store. The day was mild enough for a little of the snow to melt. Water pattered from tree branches onto the roofs of SUVs parked in driveways, and onto an empty beer can that lay crushed beside a bush.
At the corner of Fearing and North Pleasant, children were waiting for the school bus. There were three boys and two girls, the oldest maybe twelve, the youngest seven or eight. All of them wore down jackets with their hoods thrown back, their heads exposed. They had the disconsolate look of people barred from using phones. They muttered to themselves, stomped the ice, packed snowballs only to drop them on the ground. That little girl, he thought, is in love with the older girl. The older girl is thinking about what it would be like to be an evil man summoning his administrative assistant into his office after hours. The older boy is wondering what it would be like if he and the older girl were hermaphrodites in tights, who slept in a secluded mansion with others of their kind. The children were not having those thoughts—he couldn’t know what they were thinking—but it was possible, even likely, that the thoughts they were having were equally unmentionable. The world was more interesting now that he and another person had been free with each other.
In the convenience store, he poured two thimblefuls of nondairy creamer into his coffee. There was White Chocolate and Irish Crème, and today he went with Irish Crème. The creamer was revolting, but he wanted it, too. Was that what he had been like for her, last night, before things went wrong? That is, had she found him disgusting but also compelling? That was how it had seemed. It had been a new feeling, being liked and disliked in that way.
He took out his phone and opened the closed Facebook group. He wasn’t one of Sharon’s friends, so the pictures of her he could see were mostly shots of her whole pledge class as it advanced through the years. There was one photo of her with two other Kappas, sitting on a couch in the Kappa living room, stoned, pointing to their pink eyes. A bowl of guacamole was bathed in the blue light of the TV.
In addition to the coffee, he bought a spiral-bound notebook, a box of envelopes, and a pack of cigarettes. A bell jingled as the door slammed behind him and he came out into the cold. He sipped the coffee as he walked, spilling it down his coat. The sunlight was no longer pink. The buildings on either side of North Pleasant—a motel, a sports bar, a chain Italian restaurant—had ceased to be pretty and become their usual daylight selves. He watched a pair of joggers, a middle-aged couple with metal cleats strapped to the soles of their sneakers. Each of their footfalls splattered slush across the pavement. He wondered what Sharon thought of him, and whether she herself knew what she thought of him, as he descended the stairs to the mailroom on the edge of campus. He still didn’t know if he deserved to be punished, or, if he did, how severe the punishment should be.
In the mailroom there was a small counter with a pen on a chain. He took an envelope out of the box he’d bought at the convenience store and tore a page from the notebook.
He wrote quickly. He said that he knew he’d done something wrong, and broken the rules, that he was sorry and hoped to improve the situation in some way. He signed his name and wrote his number beneath his signature. He dropped the note and cigarettes into the envelope, and hesitated. I can still throw it out, he thought. I can still change my mind.
It was desire, even more than shame, that made him lick the envelope, seal it, write her full name on the front, and hand it to the man behind the desk. He was afraid. But he wanted to talk to her again, and this was the only way to make it happen.
FAN FICTION
I lived in the basement of a split-level built on a hill. The carpet was pine green. There was no kitchen. I kept ready-made sandwiches from Trader Joe’s in a brown minifridge, and the outline of a sandwich was embossed in burnt sauce on the microwave’s plate.
I liked to go running in the empty park, where big crows watched from the trees as I passed. The dust was golden orange. It worked its way into the treads of my sneakers and from my sneakers into the carpet, so that when the sun shone through the basement windows, the green material sparkled here and there with desert hues.
Exercise was important to me. My brothers in Delta had often said, Nutella’s fairest of us all, and I’d pretended not to be affected by their flattery. Now, when an audition had gone badly, or my agent had been slow to return one of my e-mails, I would put on music, take off my clothes, and look at myself in the mirror. At least I’d made my body. It wouldn’t last forever. That was why I had to be here now, while I was young. This was the window. My body had brought me Carla, or, to be more exact, I don’t think the two of us would have lasted an hour without it. I wouldn’t have been able to act normal around her if I hadn’t had a superpower of my own, however minor.
I never asked her for help with my career. When she wondered aloud if she should cast me in her next film, I said no, she had to follow her vision. We avoided bars where I couldn’t afford to buy my own drinks. I paid for half of everything, except for twice, when we went to resorts she wanted to try, in Montana and Big Sur, and on my birthday, and every once in a while, when she wanted to sit at a table on a deck overlooking the ocean, and for me to be there with her.
At midprice restaurants, waitresses told Carla how much they’d loved her film. At expensive restaurants, the hostess would tell the manager she was there, and the manager would bring free appetizers. One manager, a plump bald man in a suit, laid out three bowls of lemon mousse and three spoons. He called for wine and three glasses. “It’s been such a fucking night,” he said to Carla as he sat down. We’d never met him before.
One afternoon, the weather was black snow, ash from a fire in the Inland Empire. Pedestrians on Echo Park Avenue turned up their palms to catch the flakes. It didn’t happen where Carla lived, closer to the sea. “I’m jealous of your neighborhood,” she said, when I told her about it.
One evening when I was taking a shower at Carla’s house, she knocked on the bathroom door. When she drew back the curtain, the sound of the water changed.
“Show me your asshole,” she said. I turned, bent my knees, drew apart my buttocks, and let them fall back in place. She giggled for a long time and said, “That is just so wonderful.” I stayed longer in the shower than I had to, after it happened, while she sat on the toilet and read aloud from a novel I’d never heard of, a passage she hoped would move me. “You’re a good boy,” she said, as she shut the book. “I bet you never gave your mama any trouble.” There was something about the water and the humiliation, heat on heat. It became a ritual. Whenever I took a shower, Carla would creep in on cat feet, draw back the curtain, and shout at me to show it. It never got old. I don’t know why it made me so happy.
Our first three months were an extended fling. There was no talk of love. Whenever I try to describe how it became serious, the result is a series of clichés, so I’m going to let Carla take over. I’m going to imagine what the film would be like if she were to write and direct a film about what happened.
Caleb Newton, seven years ago a fraternity president, now a struggling actor, is on his knees in a weight room, doing military presses with chrome
dumbbells that clank when he knocks them together above his head. His phone vibrates on the mat.
Behind the gym, in a cramped parking lot with cracks in the asphalt, and weeds in the cracks, their leaves wilted in the heat, he leans over the hood of a hatchback, his shirt stained with sweat, his cell phone to his ear, and listens to loud breathing on the other end of the line. Just tell me, he says. Why are you—
An eight-story office building in Century City, just off Wilshire Boulevard. It’s early. There are scattered strips of purple cloud in a pink sky. A teal 1975 Lincoln, its white roof raised, descends a ramp into an underground garage.
Caleb at the stainless-steel steering wheel, guiding the wide car into a parking spot, his clothing casual and plain: jeans, a white T-shirt. Beside him in the passenger seat: Carla Dakopoulos, a film director, only two years his senior, but sought-after and acclaimed. She wears sweatpants, a hoodie, and a baseball cap.
We should put it on your card, she says. I’ll pay you back. He kills the engine. No, he says, I’ll—
A two-shot, from the back seat. We see the dashboard, and two heads of hair. No, she says, I’ll reimburse you. But we should use your card. People get—I’m not going to tell them my name. It’s better if the receptionists and the nurses don’t know who—I’m not an actor so it probably won’t happen, it’s a thing that mostly happens to actors, but I still—they can threaten to sell the receipt or whatever to a tabloid. But—
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