by Susan Choi
He produced a racquet from the back of his closet. He even produced a towel. These dangled limply from his hands when he arrived at Sarah’s door. The actual distance from the club, across the boulevard, to Sarah’s door had been vastly greater than suggested by the many continuities. The walk—without the benefit of sidewalks or crossing signals, for their city wasn’t built for pedestrians—from the JCC parking lot to the southern gate of Sarah’s complex had taken close to twenty minutes, in the heat of the damned, along a median planted with scorched rhododendron but not any trees, during which several separate motorists had pulled over to ask if he needed assistance. In their city only the poorest of the poor, or fresh victims of crimes, ever walked. Once inside Sarah’s sprawling and mazelike complex, David reeled—it was enormous, a city of its own, without signs. Sarah and her mother had moved there when Sarah was twelve, their fifth move in four years but the first Sarah’s father had nothing to do with. Sarah and her mother only stopped getting lost in the maze of carports when they put a chalk X on the bleached wooden gate separating their assigned parking space from their back patio. July in their city: an average daytime temperature of ninety-seven degrees. From the sole clue David held, her apartment number, he could never have guessed that she lived on the far, western side from the club, near the opposite entrance. Sarah had given him directions from the western entrance which he’d disregarded, knowing he wouldn’t be coming that way. He had been too ashamed to explain this to her, his plan involving a ride to the club, too ashamed of not having a car of his own, though neither of them had a car of their own, being only fifteen and not legal to drive for a year. It didn’t cross his mind that she felt it as keenly, the utter dispossession of not being licensed to drive in that city of cars. It was part of the excruciating in-betweenness of no longer being children, yet lacking those powers enjoyed by adults. The “streets” within the complex weren’t real streets at all but a tirelessly branching metastasis of walkway, or driveway, the former distinguished by borders of dying impatiens, the latter by bordering spaces to park. It took David over an hour to find Sarah’s apartment. He might have walked two or three miles. David had imagined he would take her in his arms as he’d done on that day in the dark, but he only stood, glued to her threshold, with his sun-boiled blood spreading stains in his eyes. He thought he might vomit or faint. Then the shared air of their childhood touched him: that particular air of their city, mustily buried and cool, from its unending journey through air-conditioning ducts that the sun never reached. No matter if one lived in a mansion or a little brick box, that air smelled just the same. David stepped toward it blindly. “I need a shower,” he managed to say.
For his ruse he’d been forced to wear shorts, knee-high socks, infantile white sneakers, a sporty T-shirt. The outfit embarrassed Sarah. He looked alien to her, unhandsome, though this quibble peeped faintly at her from beneath the hard weight of her lust. The lust in its turn was eclipsed by another and unprecedented emotion, an onrush of sad tenderness, as if the man he would be, full of unguessed-at darkness and weakness, had for a brief instant shown through the boy. The boy pushed his way past her and locked himself in her bathroom. Her mother worked long days somewhere; mother and daughter shared the small, dowdy bathroom, so different from each of the four bathrooms in David’s own home. In this strange realm he showered with a smooth brick of Ivory soap, passing it between his legs, firmly lathering every square inch, meticulous and patient because truly frightened; he’d never had sex with a girl he loved. He’d had sex with two girls before this, both of whom now dissolved in his mind. His mind, slowly dilating as his blood temperature came off the dangerous boil. He’d made the shower water cool, almost cold. He stepped cautiously out of her bathroom, a towel circling his waist. She was waiting for him in her bed.
* * *
MR. KINGSLEY, THEIR teacher, lived with a man he called his husband; he twinkled at them provocatively when he said this. This was 1982, far from New York. None of them, except for Sarah, had ever known a man who might call another man his husband while twinkling provocatively. None of them had ever known a man who had lived many years in New York, who had been a member of the original Broadway cast of Cabaret, who referred to Joel Grey, when reminiscing on these times, as “Joel.” None of them, again except Sarah, had ever known a man on whose office wall might hang, among other fascinating and risqué memorabilia, a photograph of an exuberant and barely clad woman, heavily made up, flinging her arms wide and high, who somehow despite zero resemblance was strangely reminiscent of Mr. Kingsley himself, and who was rumored to be Mr. Kingsley, though no one believed it. Sarah’s first cousin, her mother’s sister’s son, was a “leather queen,” Sarah said calmly to platter-eyed classmates; this cousin lived in San Francisco, often wore women’s clothes to sing torch songs, and in general gave Sarah a key to Mr. Kingsley’s esoterica that her peers wholly lacked. This was how David had first noticed Sarah: her aura of knowledge. He sometimes saw her laughing with Mr. Kingsley, and their laughter seemed shared, on the same remote plane. David envied this, as did everyone else, and he wanted to annex that plane for himself.
In 1982, none of them, except Sarah, had ever known a gay person. And equally, in 1982, none of them viewed Mr. Kingsley’s gayness as anything but another aspect of his wholesale superiority to all other adults in their world. Mr. Kingsley was impossibly witty and sometimes impossibly cutting; the prospect of talking with him was terrifying and galvanizing; one longed to live up to his brilliance and equally feared that it couldn’t be done. Of course Mr. Kingsley was gay. They lacked the word for it, but intuition supplied the frisson: Mr. Kingsley was not just gay but an iconoclast, the first such they’d ever encountered. This was what they longed to be themselves, little though they could put it in words. They were all children who had previously failed to fit in, or had failed, to the point of acute misery, to feel satisfied, and they had seized on creative impulse in the hope of salvation.
Strange, appropriate disruptions and traumas foretold summer’s end. Hurricane Clem crawled toward them from the Caribbean, turning his wheel on the nightly newscast. Sarah’s mother took her week’s vacation, and sat home regarding Sarah with weary suspicion and making her put masking-tape X’s on the windows and fill up the spare water jugs. Sarah only got away by claiming she needed to use the library, on the campus of the college very near David’s house. She and David got themselves dropped off far apart from each other and both mistakenly far from the library, and even once they had found each other, felt somehow misused. They walked in the dizzying heat, end to end of the summer-struck campus, hopelessly looking for somewhere to be, too hot and upset to link hands. Periodically, a grounds worker in a golf cart piled with tarps and sandbags would drive past and throw them a look. There were no college students on campus. The whole campus including the library was closed. Crossing an ocean of parking-lot asphalt they came upon the football stadium, like a ruin of Rome standing silent and bleached in the heat. They squeezed through a bent scissor gate. Behind a snack bar, at the base of a popcorn machine, on a pair of flattened boxes that smelled of stale grease, Sarah let David fuck her, her mouth crushed in his ear, her legs looping his waist, her hands struggling to hold his sweat-slippery back. His rhythmically agonized exhalations scorched the side of her neck when he came. For the first time she didn’t, and felt an aloneness. They hunched away from each other to get dressed again. David didn’t brush off the bits of junk stuck to her legs, or make some comment that let Sarah feel it was all right to laugh. David, fighting with the laces of his sneakers, wished he hadn’t come without her. He wished he hadn’t felt her so rigid beneath him on a bed of cardboard. It had been very different from the times in her apartment when they’d had all her bed and her carpeted floor and the hallway and even the living room couch and armchair across which to spread their desire, when they sometimes would surface as if from a dream, and laugh to find themselves in a new room, and he’d touched every inch of her skin with his lips,
and pushed his tongue in her cunt, and seized hold of her hands when she bucked and cried out, both of them startled and thrilled by her pleasure.
After dressing, they walked off the campus, having wound up so close to its edge, and found they were at the same plaza where Sarah’s French bakery was. In a store Sarah liked, David watched her try on jewelry, weird handcrafted stuff made with unpolished rocks. When Sarah’s mother’s Toyota appeared outside the shop window, Sarah rushed away without letting him kiss her in front of the clerk. David stayed longer, and left with a ribbon-tied box.
* * *
REMEMBER THE IMPOSSIBLE eventfulness of time, transformation and emotion packed like gunpowder into the barrel. Remember the dilation and diffusion, the years within days. Theirs were endless; lives flowered and died between waking and noon. Hurricane Clem made landfall, and turned the boulevard David had crossed at midsummer into a raging brown river that sucked cars from the curbs and turned trees upside down. The first day of school was delayed for a week, confirming their suspicion that a lifetime, not a summer, had passed. They couldn’t possibly still be fifteen. They took the natural ambition, at that age, to shock the peer group with a summer metamorphosis to greater extremes, being actors. Chantal returned to school with an Afro. Norbert tried, with uncertain success, to conceal himself under a beard. The most passionate female friendships had somehow expired. Sarah did not know why, as she came back through the doors to the Black Box, her whole body grew rigid when Joelle Cruz came shrieking her way. The previous spring she had practically lived with Joelle. Joelle had an older sister, Martine, at the school, and Sarah had spent fewer nights at home than with Joelle, in the back seat of Martine’s grimy car, as they drove around in quest of liquor, or drugs, or a bouncer who’d fall for their cheap fake IDs. Joelle had introduced Sarah to coke, Rocky Horror, and wearing ballet flats with jeans; now her very flesh repulsed Sarah. It was too damp and pink. Sarah could smell Joelle’s pits. Sarah felt that she did nothing different; she only was different. She didn’t blow Joelle off. She didn’t speak coldly to her. But no; she had changed. She was not Joelle’s friend anymore. It felt so ordained, so engrained in the utterly new circumstances of sophomore year she was sure Joelle knew it as well, even willed it, perhaps, an overt act to which Sarah only responded.
But Joelle’s irrelevance was irrelevant to Sarah, even as Joelle stood there talking to her. Everything was irrelevant to Sarah apart from David. She imagined his acknowledgment flashing toward her like a mirror. She and David had traveled so far ahead, just the two of them; they’d disappeared past a horizon, discarding their school selves behind. If they kept the shucked skins it was just for the sake of disguise. For Sarah it went without saying that their summer would be their secret, like a Mount Olympus (had she known what this was at the time) where they whispered together like gods. She had not even thought to explain this to David. She assumed that he already knew.
David burst into the Black Box not as a winking mirror but a spotlight, bearing down bright and hot, and swinging his arms in a slightly hitched way. He was hiding something he exposed by his very attempt to conceal it, flanked by a dozen of their classmates who clung to his charisma like lint. Sarah found herself holding a tiny gift box with a bow while they all stared at her.
Colin crowed, “David’s gonna get down on one knee!”
“Look at you, red as a beet!” Angie laughed.
“Open it, Sarah,” begged Pammie.
Sarah shoved the box back in his hand. “I can open it later.”
“Open it now,” David urged. Perhaps Colin and Angie and Norbert and Pammie and everyone else of whom Sarah was so grotesquely aware were invisible to him and he could not even hear what they said. That glimpse, of herself alone at the heart of his gaze, only lasted an instant. His indifference to their audience struck her as a dare or a test. She didn’t see as a counterindication to this angry idea of hers his hot blush as deep as her own; if her face was as red as a beet, his was red as a burn, he’d come out in lurid blotches that overlapped with his boy’s patchy stubble to make a mess of his face.
“I’ll open it later,” she said as Mr. Kingsley came in, waving his arms around his head to indicate that while it was glorious to be reunited, would they please shut their traps and get into their seats.
David wound up two rows behind Sarah; she didn’t have to look to know exactly where he was. Facing forward she burned with her sense of a wrong. By her or to her? Her head would not turn, she would not look his way no matter how hard he willed her to do it. Adrenaline was roaring through them both, its warning urgent and obscure. Just minutes before, David had been striding through the big double doors, in fact bouncing, in fact funny-walking from lightness of heart because he was finally stepping onstage in the role of her boyfriend. Sarah his girlfriend. David viewed these roles as sacred; they were the two roles he most cared about. Who gave a shit about Hamlet? He’d been afraid the little box was too small, that she’d be disappointed by a box that could fit in the palm of her hand. But when she opened it, the silver chain would unfurl, the blue stone would lie in the hollow he loved at the base of her neck. Something like his own radiance would pour from her—not the fright, or disgust, he had seen. Or the shame? Of him, obviously.
David struggled to jam the box back out of sight. He needed to get it to his locker, destroy it, the indigestible lump that it made in the front of his jeans was a joke. To David, love meant declaration. Wasn’t that the whole point? To Sarah, love meant a shared secret. Wasn’t that the whole point? Sarah felt David’s eyes on her all through the class and kept perfectly still, held them there with her mind. Years later, in a future in which she enters theatres only as part of the audience, Sarah will see a play in which an actor asks, “Can’t there be a silent language?” and be surprised when her eyes fill with tears. Two rows in front of David, aching with the effort of keeping perfectly still so his gaze, like a moth, won’t take flight from the back of her neck, Sarah doesn’t yet know the words for this language that doesn’t have words. She won’t understand what it means, when David stops speaking this language to her.
* * *
“EGO RECONSTRUCTION,” SAID Mr. Kingsley, “requires a foundation. My darling Sophomores: one year older and wiser than when we first met. What might that foundation be?”
They wanted so badly to please him. But the question of how never had a clear answer. Say the right thing? (But what could that be?) Say a deliberately wrong but funny thing? Ask another question in response to his question, as he often did when responding to theirs?
Pammie raised her hand, eager and hopeful. “Modesty?”
He laughed at her in disbelief. “Modesty! Explain why you think so, and please don’t be modest. Please flaunt your thought process, Pammie, so maybe I can fathom what it is.”
Pammie’s plump face, beneath gold barrettes, flushed to the roots of her hair. But she had an odd stubbornness, a capacity to dig in her heels and argue. She was a Christian, a disposition unremarkable outside the walls of their school but within it unsupported, even mocked, and in the previous year she’d grown used to defending herself. “People who have too much Ego are stuck-up,” she said. “Being modest is the opposite of being conceited.”
“Let me make one thing clear: we can never have ‘too much’ Ego—so long as we’re in control of it.”
Control of the Self: each of them feared they lacked this. Sarah, for example. Earlier that year she had asked her mother to file paperwork to get Sarah a hardship permit, a driver’s license for people as young as fourteen who needed it to support their family financially, which Sarah had argued she did, offending her mother completely. In their subsequent fight, Sarah put a kitchen chair through the sliding glass door to their back patio, the repair of which cost her the whole summer’s worth of her bakery wages. “And you think you could drive,” Sarah’s mother had said.
David, for example. That day Sarah gave back the box, he had crushed it using only one hand, in th
e process cutting open his palm. When she later tried to ask, “Can I open it now?” he’d replied, “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.” Whether these examples proved self-control or its lack remained unclear to him.
“The foundation we require for Ego Reconstruction is Ego Deconstruction,” Mr. Kingsley concluded. They’d all heard about it last year, from the then-Sophomores and now-Juniors, who had constantly harped on this mystery while refusing to share even the slightest detail. “You’ll get there when you get there.” “You’re still Freshmen! Don’t try to climb a ladder in midair.” “The last time I checked, you couldn’t cross a bridge by starting in the middle.” The then-Sophomores and now-Juniors were a strikingly effusive, tight-knit class who seemed to possess some special aura the now-Sophomores lacked that wasn’t just the advantage of age. The then-Sophomores and now-Juniors were more photogenic, individually and together. In a school with no athletic program, they gave the impression of a cheerleading corps. Their clothing was coordinated, their teeth square and white. They had coupled early and lastingly, the exception of one couple, Brett and Kayley—whose saga of rupture, grief, and joyful reconciliation over the course of a few weeks the previous year had been consumed school-wide with the avidity usually reserved for soap operas—being the sort that proved the rule. The few then-Sophomores still single were exclusively affiliated, as Third Wheels or Best Friends. There were no loners, like Manuel, or irredeemable losers, like Norbert. There was no one like Sarah, whose fearful secret it was that during the Brett-Kayley hiatus, she had spent a night with Brett at his father’s condo, during which he’d talked about Kayley, and cried, and at one point interrupted his kissing of Sarah to throw all his bedcovers out the window. After he and Kayley made up Brett had grabbed Sarah’s wrist in the dusk of a Showcase rehearsal and warned her, “Don’t tell anyone,” and she’d been so afraid of the stain she might make on his image she hadn’t even told David.