by Julie Hilden
Yet somehow Ilan knows me. And he chooses me, chooses me alone, above all others.
A few weeks after we begin dating, Ilan drives me out to my mother and stepfather’s house in Connecticut for Thanksgiving dinner. He wears a jacket and tie. I play my CDs loudly and want the car trip never to end. We make each other laugh so hard he swerves.
Over drinks, my meticulous, beautiful mother snipes at me: ‘Maya, that sweater has a pull in it. Why aren’t you taking care of your clothes?’; ‘You know, having a boyfriend doesn’t mean you’re excused from studying.’
We aren’t there for an hour before Ilan makes an excuse – we are going to the grocery store – and rescues me.
The store’s that way,’ I instruct him once we’re in the car.
‘We’re not going there,’ he tells me. ‘Is there someplace we can be alone?’
There’s a field in back of the elementary school.’
When I was growing up, I used to lie by myself in that field often in the fall, beneath the leaves that lay thick on the grass as they do now – a submerged child who watched the sky. I imagined myself underwater, as if the leaves floated on a pond’s surface, and I floated just beneath.
Once we arrive, I try to kiss Ilan, but he shakes his head. ‘Come over here,’ he says.
We scuff leaves, walking, and he leads me to a thick, low-hanging tree branch. The northern edge of the field is lined with twisted trees that crane and reach. Of them all, this is the easiest to climb.
‘It’s the best tree,’ I tell him, and he nods.
I clamber up to sit on the branch and then I drop myself upside down, releasing first one hand and then the other, until I am hanging by my knees, the way I used to as a child here.
Your mother is something else,’ he says.
‘Wait until you meet my father.’ I hitch myself back up to a sitting position.
‘He’s just as bad?’
‘Only to me. You have to understand, they hate each other, and I was the child of their marriage. And they’re both perfectionists – it was why they divorced. They like the pretty families they have now. I think they wish I didn’t exist.’
‘It’s not normal, Maya.’
‘Normal or not, that’s the way it is. Is your family so normal? You never talk about them.’
‘There’s not much to say, it’s only my father now. My mother died when I was eight. It was pancreatic cancer – no warning, and she was gone in two months.’
Ilan climbs up to join me on the branch. He rearranges me so I am leaning against his chest. Settling back against him, I look out onto the eddies of yellow and orange leaves.
The month before she died was like a siege in our house – nurses, sometimes a doctor too. My father was set on her never going to the hospital, and he was sick too. Nothing the doctor could diagnose, I think he just wanted to die when she did. So it was like I had no parents. The nurses kept telling me what to do, and I kept ignoring them.
There was an IV for my mother, with painkillers. By the end, she was taking enormous doses. She’d tell me about her hallucinations. Dreams of falling or flying. I used to believe they were my dreams too. Once I was talking about one of them, this particularly great dream of flying over New York so you could see Central Park and all, and my father corrected me. He said it sternly, like, “That’s your mother’s dream.” Like, “Give that back to your mother.”
‘Before she got sick, we had this game. We’d tell each other a real dream and a made-up one. The other person had to guess which was which,’
He twists a lock of my hair around one of his fingers as he talks, tensing the curl.
‘After she got sick, I’d always sleep in her bed. If the nurse kicked me out, I’d sleep underneath, right on the marble. Anyway, one night I was reading to her, and I fell asleep. I woke up the next morning and her face was gray. No one expected it. She’d been feeling better – maybe a remission, the doctor said. No one thought it would be that night. The doctor apologized, he was embarrassed. We’d missed her death.’
He pauses. I understand that he does not want me to twist around to see his face. It is possible that as he talks, he is soundlessly crying, but if that is the case I will never know it. Throughout my time with Ilan, I never see him cry.
‘I’ve told that story so many times to shrinks, I don’t even feel it anymore,’ he says quietly. ‘It was such a powerful feeling, and now I’ve lost it. There was a talk we were going to have before she died, she said so. But the last thing she said to me was, “You need to wash your hair.”’
We are silent for a moment. Then I ask him, ‘How was it with your father afterward?’
‘Okay. At least he made an effort. He got himself out of bed the day she died and made me an omelet. It wasn’t cooked all the way through but I ate it anyway. He missed my mother but we didn’t talk about it much. But I used to talk to her in my head. Sometimes I still do. I feel like I learn more about her every year.
‘Well, that’s my mother, that’s the story,’ he says abruptly. ‘Let’s go. Your parents are going to think we were in an accident.’
‘I don’t care what they think.’
He helps me down from the branch, carrying me in his arms for a moment. I cannot tell if he has been crying, but as usual his eyes are big and dark; they take in the world.
Ilan drives us back to the house. After an hour with him outside as a respite, for once I am not lonely there. I can act like a guest – drying my hands with my mother’s monogrammed towels, keeping my napkin in my lap and my elbows off the table, making sure to use the correct silverware. My life is elsewhere.
The next day, my mother calls me at school to say she believes Ilan’s a good influence, protective. But she doesn’t know that what he protects me from is her – her happiness with her other children, and her odd formality with me.
The party’s very dark and our cigarette ends, like fireflies, leave trails in the air. The off-campus apartment is lit only by candlelight and moonlight, with a balcony that people drift onto, and then drift back from. The darkened French doors that lead there reflect the many different candle flames inside, and their translucent curtains balloon when the wind catches them.
Everyone is drunk, dancing with abandon. I stand close to Ilan in a corner, and accidentally I touch my cigarette to his arm.
‘Sorry,’ I whisper.
‘Try it again.’ But I won’t, I hesitate.
‘You won’t hurt me,’ he assures me.
I touch him again. He doesn’t flinch.
Try it for longer.’ I hold the cigarette close to his skin and watch as it begins to blister.
‘Okay, stop’ – he says it a beat later than I expect. And I wait that beat, I wait for him to speak.
Then he does it to me, burns me a little. After an instant, I whimper at him, indignant, ‘Stop.’ Tears come to my eyes.
We begin to alternate. It is a game. ‘Ouch,’ I hiss, when it is my turn. And in a second, he stops. But when it is his turn, he can take the pain silently, and even smile at me as I burn him, as if to say, ‘What is this to me?’
He waits longer each time, so calm. I wonder what quality in him makes him able to wait. It seems a spiritual quality, like the ability to walk on coals – one I envy.
Soon a small circle of people forms around us, two men – one large and one small – and a woman. We mesmerize them. Glassy-eyed in the dark room, they watch me put the cigarette on Ilan’s skin, watch it blister. Showing off, he no longer tells me when to stop; he lets me decide when.
‘Do that again,’ the large man commands, but Ilan refuses.
Frustrated with Ilan, the men begin burning each other. Drunk, they drop cigarettes and laugh, fall against things and swear.
Their adoption of our game seems menacing: it was between us, about us. Ilan and I draw together and slip out onto the balcony, into the moonlight and the full, cool blast of night air.
Through the glass-paned door we can see the small man dr
op an ember on the woman’s skirt, the fabric scorching around the hole it leaves. It is hard to tell if he has done it intentionally, to bring her into the game. She screeches, and the large man, tall in a light blue jacket like a jazz musician’s, threatens the small man, who tells him to fuck off.
In an instant, the large man pushes the small one against the balcony door. Glass shatters all at once, falling in a quick, brutal hail. The party’s host shouts, They’re going to make me pay for that.’
The small man steps back from the door with one of his hands bloody – his thumb has a shard of glass in it. The woman pries out the splinter and rips off part of the hem of her ruined skirt to bind the thumb. But the moment the bleeding stops, the small man is at it again, smearing his bloody hand on the large man’s blue jacket, and she backs away from both of them in disgust.
‘Let’s go,’ Ilan whispers to me. He puts his arm around my shoulder and guides me safely out.
Back in Ilan’s dormitory room, we curl together to sleep – but for once I cannot drift off in his arms. I intensely need a cigarette but I’ve run out.
I don’t wake him, don’t want to admit my need. He always takes my last cigarette, believing I am not addicted the way he is. And that’s what I let him believe – that I can wait.
It’s not true, not now at least. Though it’s the middle of the night, I go out by myself to the convenience store, nonchalantly shoving the pack into my pocket after I pay, so even the clerk won’t know the extent of my desire.
Outside Ilan’s door I smoke quickly, almost desperately. Then I go back in, brush my teeth with his toothbrush, and slip back into bed.
The next day, we hear the fight got out of control. One guy’s arm was broken; the woman was badly burned. And the day after that, we receive phone calls from the college, telling us there will be a disciplinary hearing. Official letters soon arrive. It turns out the woman is claiming the fight was our fault.
Ilan’s father gets a lawyer to represent us both. He is portly and officious, unhappy to be here. Ilan and I are told we have the right to separate, private hearings, but instead we ask to attend each other’s – which are scheduled on the same day. I don’t tell my parents what is happening.
On the appointed day, we sit in a huge, echoey lecture hall in uncomfortable wooden chairs whose arms hold podlike half desks. Facing us, on an elevated podium, is a panel of three old, sober faces and two eager young ones, those of fellow students.
Ilan stands; he is to speak first. ‘I hope we aren’t going to get burned,’ he remarks, and smiles.
No one smiles back. Even I don’t dare. The lawyer glares at him, and he flinches.
‘Sit down, Mr Resnick, until you can take this seriously,’ the head of the panel, an elderly woman, intones. ‘Ms Sumner, why don’t we move on to you.’
I rise to stand before the panel.
‘Why do you think you did it, Maya?’ the woman asks.
I sense that she wants to let me off, since I’m only a girl, after all. And I know what I should say, what the lawyer has coached us to say: we are very sorry for any harm we caused, and we learned from the experience never to do this again. But I find I can’t say it. What Ilan and I learned was different – more interesting, more dangerous – and I don’t believe we caused any harm. I don’t want to lie.
‘I don’t think it’s any of your business,’ I tell her, surprised at how hostile I sound. ‘We didn’t hurt anyone. Why don’t you blame the guy who started the fight?’
‘He’ll have a hearing too. This is yours. Is there anything you want to say? Any explanation you’d like us to consider, maybe an apology you’d like to offer?’
‘No.’ I shrug and, without permission, I sit down.
The lawyer gives me a frustrated, furious look and leans over to whisper instructions to Ilan. But Ilan, when he is called upon, follows my lead and refuses to speak.
We are two stubborn children, nineteen and twenty. In the end, we are expelled. It is hard to blame the school, for we have been so uncooperative. Even so, the letters we receive say we can reapply in a year or two – as long as we get the counseling we need to prepare ourselves for the ‘adult situation’ of college.
We know we won’t return. Scoffing at the letters, Ilan burns them, setting them alight in a small metal dish. It takes a long time, but we watch them disappear into ash.
It occurs to me, when I learn we will be leaving, that there have been some real violations of which, ironically, the college never learned.
Though I try not to admit it to myself, I have started to write Ilan’s papers for him sometimes. The writing comes easily to me, and only with difficulty to him, so gradually I move from commenting on his papers, to editing them, to simply writing them myself for him to submit.
The evolution is quick, and we never talk about it; it simply happens. One night he leaves to have dinner with friends, and when he returns I have finished his work for him. He only smiles and says, ‘Good, now we have the rest of the night to ourselves.’
We still discuss the papers as if it were he, and not I, who had written them. I even overhear him boast, to his father, of the good grades he’s begun to receive. I don’t mind: I am happy that there is one way in which I can save him, since I feel he has saved me in so many ways.
And I already accept that we will never be like other people – will never live like other people. It is not that I believe the rules don’t apply to us, it is that I believe we will have another way of living, one that lies somewhere outside normal life. And so I wonder whether leaving college, for others our age a catastrophe, may in the end be for us a strange triumph, a mark of how far we have departed.
I spend the time I would have spent preparing for spring exams with Ilan’s hands in my hair, cupping my skull, as I move above him; as he teaches me my own pleasure by degrees. You were my education, Ilan – the one I preferred.
I walk through libraries of cramming students, heads bent over their desks, mumbling formulas they have memorized. As my roommates study, I pack my belongings in cardboard boxes, unsure where I’ll send them. I am more excited than afraid.
Our plans for the future are settled quickly, almost instantly. Ilan’s father offers us summer internships at the magazine where he works, in the city, and we move into a beautiful triangular loft he owns in Tribeca.
On the second story of a warehouse building, the loft is accessible only by a small, private factory elevator. It has five sets of huge floor-to-ceiling windows that face the street, so in the daytime it is filled with sunlight. The windows are made of thick double-paned glass, so that they block out virtually all outside noise. Heavy locks – including one that can be opened and closed only from the inside – will keep us safe there.
Ilan and I sleep in the broad bedroom at the triangle’s base. A smaller bedroom at its apex becomes a writing room we share. Eventually, it seems to me, that room will be perfect for a child.
I am amazed and intimidated by the life Ilan and his father have given me. I know that on my own I would be temping, not writing – and I would barely be able to make enough money to live anywhere in the city, let alone here.
I am relieved to be able to tell my parents about my new job and apartment at the same time I break the news to them, belatedly, of my expulsion. My mother mutters, but she does not yell – and she stops hounding me to return to school, after a while. She knows Ilan’s family is prominent, and that is probably why she drops the subject.
Ilan’s father’s magazine is small but growing, a sort of younger brother to GQ and Vanity Fair. Ilan mentioned earlier that his father worked there, but now I learn he owns the magazine as well.
I start my job the week after Mr Resnick offers it to me. My only qualification is that Ilan chose me; now his father chooses me too.
The magazine’s building is located in west Chelsea, only a few subway stops away from our apartment. Ilan and I share a tiny office there, our desks facing. It is as if we are one person, almo
st never seen apart. I am one of only a handful of female staff writers, and the men stay far away from me, probably because I date the boss’s son.
The job is surprisingly easy – Ilan’s father feeds us stories, and I find that simply saying the magazine’s name over the phone makes people who would never speak to me reveal their secrets. I am entranced. I understand then, at nineteen, that I will never do anything else but write, for as long as people let me.
My expulsion begins to seem like a mere shortcut, a clever side road into the life I would have longed for anyway.
After work, Ilan and I spend most of our time alone together in the loft. We have sex almost every night there, and eventually we begin to experiment.
Often Ilan ties me up and I twist below him with my wrists together, pinioned on the cold bed frame. He has carefully untangled the braid of the belt that encircled the waist of his silk robe, and now he likes to use its three strands of silk to tie me up. They are soft but they pull tight; often I have no room to slip my hands out, and I am helpless.
Once, I tie him up instead. He gives me two arms with which to start, letting me tie them to the bed frame. Then I tie his legs apart too.
‘Untie me,’ he commands.
‘Why?’
‘It doesn’t turn me on when it’s me.’
‘I’ll go down on you,’ I offer.
‘I still won’t like it. Untie me.’
I want to watch him in that position longer, the position where everything powerful about him falls away. But I begin to untie him instead.
As the first arm is freed, Ilan relaxes. When the second is freed, he sits up and begins to untie his legs himself, pushing me away when I try to help him. When he is done, he springs up from the bed and throws the cords onto the floor.
Afterward it is me he ties up. If he is particularly rough with me that night, I understand why. He knots the ties hard, without any room to slip my wrists out. I will not have his privilege, that of changing my mind.
Ilan tells me he wants to do everything with me: everything in life, everything sexually. Even as it makes me happy to hear it, I wonder what that will mean, and soon I find out.