by Pamela Erens
THE VIRGINS
THE VIRGINS
a novel
PAMELA ERENS
TIN HOUSE BOOKS / Portland, Oregon & Brooklyn, New York
Copyright © 2013 Pamela Erens
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York
Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth St., Berkeley, CA 94710, www.pgw.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Erens, Pamela.
The Virgins / Pamela Erens. — First U.S. edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-935639-63-3 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS3605.R46V57 2013
813’.6—dc23
First U.S. edition 2013
Interior design by Jakob Vala
www.tinhouse.com
Once again for JDR, AER, and HER
Contents
1979
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Acknowledgements
1979
1
We sit on the benches and watch the buses unload. Cort, Voss, and me.
We’re high school seniors, at long last, and it’s the privilege of seniors to take up these spots in front of the dormitories, checking out the new bodies and faces. Boys with big glasses and bangs in their eyes, girls with Farrah Fawcett hair. Last year’s girls have already been accounted for: too ugly or too studious or too strange, or already hitched up, or too gorgeous even to think about.
It’s long odds, we know: one girl here for every two boys. And the new kids don’t tend to come on these buses shuttling from the airport or South Station. Their anxious parents cling to the last hours of control and drive them, carry their things inside the neat brick buildings, fuss, complain about the drab, spartan rooms. If there’s a pretty girl among them, you can’t get close to her for the mother, the father, the scowling little brother who didn’t want to drive hundreds of miles to get here. We don’t care about the new boys, of course. We’ll get to know them later. Or not.
She turns her ankle as she comes down the bus steps—just a little wobble—laughs, and rights herself again. Her sandals are tapered and high. Only a tiny heel connects with the rubber-coated steps. She wears a silky purple dress, slit far up the side, and a white blazer. Her outfit is as strange in this place—this place of crew-neck sweaters and Docksiders—as a clown’s nose and paddle feet. Her eyes are heavily made up, blackened somehow, sleepy, deep. She waits on the pavement while the driver yanks up the storage doors at the side. She points and he pulls out two enormous matching suitcases, fabric-sided, bright yellow. His muscles bulge lifting them onto the pavement.
I jump up. Cort and Voss are still computing, trying to figure this girl out, but I don’t intend to wait. Voss makes a popping sound with his lips, to mock me and to offer his respectful surprise. After all, I supposedly already have a girlfriend.
“Do you need some help?” I ask her.
She smiles slowly, theatrically. Her teeth are very straight, very white. Orthodontia or maybe fluoride in the water. I wonder where she’s from. City, fancy suburb? It suddenly hits me. She’s one of those. I can see it in her dark eyes, the bump in her nose, her thick, dark, kinky hair.
“I’m in Hiram,” she says.
Let me re-create her journey.
She awakens in her big room at an hour when it is still dark, pushes open the curtains of her four-poster bed. Little princess. Across the hall, her brother is still sleeping. He’s four years younger than she is: twelve. She makes herself breakfast: a bagel with cream cheese, O.J., and a bowl of Cheerios; she’s always ravenous in the morning. She eats alone. Her mother, in her bathrobe, reads stacks of journals upstairs. Her father is shaving. He doesn’t like to eat in the morning. He brings her to the airport but they say nothing during the long drive through the flat gray streets of Chicago. She hopes that he’ll say he’ll miss her, that he’ll pretend this parting takes something out of him. She was the one who asked to go away, but in the car her belly acts up, she’s queasy. She thinks she may need to rush to the bathroom as soon as they get to O’Hare. She wishes she hadn’t eaten so much. If her father would act like he might miss her, is afraid for her, she could be a little less afraid for herself. She has practiced her walk, her talk, everything she needs to present herself. She is terrified of going somewhere new simply to end up invisible again.
One long heel sinks into the mud. The past days have brought late-summer rains to New Hampshire, and although the air is now dry, the grass between the parking areas and the dormitories is soft and mucky. This is a girl used to walking on city pavement, concrete. She laughs and pulls herself out. She is determined to make it seem as if everything that happens to her is something she meant to happen, or can gracefully control. She avoids the wetter grass but in a moment she sinks again. “Oh boy,” she says. Her dress is long, almost to her ankles. I put down her suitcases and hold out my hand; she takes it and I pull. Her freed shoe makes a sucking sound. When I go over the sound in my mind later, it strikes me as obscene. Her suitcases are heavy, heavy as I’ve since learned only a woman’s luggage can be. It’s only a little farther to her dorm. She tells me that she’s an upper—what other high schools call a junior—and we exchange names. Aviva Rossner. She repeats mine, Bruce Bennett-Jones, like she’s thinking it over, trying to decide if it’s a good one.
She walks ahead of me instead of following, perhaps intending me to watch her small ass shifting under the white jacket. The wind lifts the hem of her dress, pastes it against her long bare leg. The Academy flag whips around above us and clings to the flagpole in the same way. The smell of ripened apples floods the air. We’re on the pavement, finally; she click-clacks to the heavy door and opens it for me. Strong arms on such a slender girl. Someone’s playing piano in the common room, a ragtime tune. Aviva starts up the stairs, expecting me to bring the bags. It’s strictly against the rules for a boy to go up to the residential floors. I go up.
Inside the dorm, t
he light is dim. The walls are cream-colored and dingy, the floors ocher. She counts out the door numbers until she finds hers: 21. I put the suitcases by the dresser, the same plain wooden dresser that sits in my room and in every student room on campus. Her suitcases contain—we’ll all see in the days to come—V-necked angora sweaters, slim skirts, socks with little pom-poms at the heels, teeny cutoff shorts, cowboy boots, lots of gold jewelry, many pouches of makeup.
There’s a mirror above the dresser. I catch a view of myself: sweaty forehead, damp curls. Aviva’s roommate is not here yet. The closet yawns open, wire hangers empty.
“Thank you so much,” she says.
I give the front door a push. It hits dully against the frame, doesn’t shut. Aviva has plenty of time to do something: slip into the hallway, order me to go away. She regards me with a patient smile. I am going to slow down the action now, relating this; I want to see it all again very clearly. Like a play being blocked—my stock-in-trade. And so: I push again and the door grinding shut is the loudest and most final sound I have ever heard. Aviva steps back to lean against it and let me approach. She’s a small girl and moving close to her I feel, for once, that I have some size. The waxy collar of her jacket prickles the hair on my forearms. Her neck is damp and slippery, and her mouth, as I kiss it, tastes like cigarettes and chocolate. I picture her smoking rapidly, furtively, in the little bathroom on the plane. Her hair smells a little rancid. The perfume she put on this morning has moldered with sweat and travel and now gives off an odor of decayed pear.
“Don’t open your mouth so wide,” she says.
My feet are sweating in my sneakers. My crotch itches. My scalp itches. She drops her hand and I see that her fingernails are painted a pearly pink.
She tilts her head against the door and laughs. Her thick curls swarm. I could bite her exposed neck. I do not want to get caught, sent home. I see my father’s hand raised up to hit me and know I’m about to step off a great ledge. In a panic I reach for the doorknob, startling Aviva. I open the door carefully, listen to the stairs and hallways. “It’s all right,” she says, although how can she know this? But she happens to be correct. There’s the oddest emptiness and silence as if these moments and this place were set aside just for us amid the busyness of moving-in day at the Academy. Aviva gives the door a bump with her ass to shut it again, but I insert myself into the opening and slide past her, fleeing down the stairs and out into Hiram’s yard.
Cort and Voss are no longer sitting on the bench in front of Weld. A lone bicycle is chained to its arm.
Later I see Voss in the common room reading a New Gods comic book. “How was the chick?” he asks. I shrug. Big nose, I say. Too much makeup. Not my type.
2
It’s late September, early October. Let’s say October, that first week, the peak of foliage season. I see Aviva Rossner and Seung Jung meeting during that time, amid the flaming yellows and deep reds. Seung was a kid I knew from my New Jersey hometown; we’d been in middle school together. I don’t really know when the two of them met, or how. One day she was simply there, Aviva, on the couch in our common room, sitting on his legs. He lay back, his head on the arm of the couch. She sat astride him, one leg dangling off the couch, the other bent beneath her. Her legs were bare; she had come from the gym. She wore gray gym shorts and a hooded sweatshirt that said AUBURN ACADEMY. His eyes were closed, he was smiling.
They meet in music theory. Let’s say that. Aviva is always trying to broaden herself, to try things for which she has no aptitude: music theory, volunteering in the nursing home, drugs. She was afraid during her childhood and tried nothing, and now she wants to discover she is not really a coward. She sits in the big music room with the sheet-music stands pushed to the sides, listening to old Barnet Fretts with his muttonchops, his Down East accent. Sing B flat, he says. She cannot imagine B flat. How can one conjure it up from all the other tones? She sees the words B flat as if a typewriter were striking out the letters one by one. She tells herself that if she simply concentrates on those letters, the note that comes out of her mouth will be correct; her mind will find a way to arrange this. She sings her note. Old Fretts frowns.
Seung has the seat next to hers. The chairs are welded to scalloped desktops. He puts his hand on her arm. He is olive-colored, muscular, wearing a white Lacoste shirt with the required blazer and tie. A senior. “You have a nice voice,” he says. It’s true. She can’t sing the right note but her voice is sweet. Seung’s composition book is filled with tiny black notes like teardrops, inked carefully in his miniature, exact handwriting. When he tells her his name, she says it’s perfect for this room, this hour: Seung, pronounced like the past tense of sing.
After class they walk together toward his dorm. It is on the way to her own. He knows who she is; he’s watched her walk near him, past him, toward the library, up the stairs of the Assembly Building. Everyone knows who she is: she’s that girl with the long, kinky hair and pale skin, the dark eye makeup, the V-neck sweaters that tease you into thinking you will catch a glimpse of her breasts. She wears high-heeled boots and gold hoop earrings. Another day, she might be costumed in the clothes that everyone else wears, turtlenecks and Fair Isle sweaters, but no one is fooled; she still doesn’t look like anyone else.
She tries not to glance into the plate-glass windows of the art gallery as they pass. She finds it almost impossible to resist checking herself to make sure that she is sufficiently vivid, not fading away. She half expects, each time she looks, to see nothing there.
“What other classes are you taking?” Seung asks.
She wonders if she heard or only imagined a stutter on the word taking. Seung has short, thick legs, slightly bowed, a long, broad torso, and broad shoulders. His straight black hair, parted in the middle, completely covers his ears, grows past his chin. His face is a square. He gives an impression of intense physical strength, and Aviva soon learns that he swims butterfly on the varsity team. She has to look up to speak to him, though he is not especially tall. Tall maybe for an Asian kid. She is always having to look up. She compensates by standing back from other people, a little farther away than is natural. If you saw a photograph of her you would think she looked fragile—bony arms, narrow shoulders—but in person, something tough and irreducible overshadows that impression.
Seung is a proctor in his dorm, a position defined in the Auburn Rule Book, he tells Aviva, as a liaison between the student body and the faculty on matters of student welfare and discipline. “I try,” he says, winking. He plays keyboard for a school band and loves jazz and a good old down and dirty rock-and-roll tune. The Southern groups are the best: Little Feat, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers. They make you want to get up off your butt and dance.
“Are you from the South?” she asks. He doesn’t seem it.
“New Jersey. Joisey. You’re from the Midwest. Or Buffalo.”
“Someone told you!” It does not surprise her that people should be talking about her.
“No. But you sound like those people you talk to when you order something from a catalog. They’re all in Wisconsin or Chicago.”
“What do you know about ordering from catalogs?”
“I got my mother a Lands’ End sweater for her birthday. Korean mothers love Lands’ End.”
She tells him, almost proudly, that she has no talents whatsoever. She plays a little piano, badly. She can hit a tennis ball. She can’t draw or paint. She likes to read, novels and psychology especially. She points to the library, the one built by the famous architect, with its brick piers and warm wood and many windows flooded with light. “I love that building,” she says.
“I’ve seen you there,” he tells her.
“Probably,” she agrees. She often sits on the second floor in one of the big square armchairs, looking over the great lawn with its changing colors. She stays late. She doesn’t like to be in her room; she and her roommate don’t get along. Her roommate won’t lend out shirts or sweaters and doesn’t approve of smok
ing. Every night the roommate carefully folds and hangs the clothes she has worn that day. She goes to bed early and wakes up early.
Aviva shifts her books to one side to make sure Seung gets a glimpse of her breasts, her waist. Already she has gathered that there’s something resigned and self-doubting in his nature, something that makes it hard for him to think: me. If they part now, she will lose him.
“Are you taking anyone to the dance this Saturday?” she asks.
He expels a short, tight laugh. He’s not. He rarely goes to the dances. He walks out to the woods with Detweiler and Sterne, his closest friends, occasionally with others from Weld, too. They smoke reefer or drop acid and listen to some goodness: Jean-Luc Ponty, Traffic, the Köln concert, with Keith Jarrett kicking the piano’s footboard and moaning.
“Why don’t you ask me?” she says.
3
I’m convinced that she made the first move, not the other way around. She’d had a few entanglements already; word had it that she came on strong. Then, after a week or two, she’d get tired of the guy, or maybe he’d decide it wasn’t wholly an advantage to be linked to the new talked-about girl on campus. Anyway, my version fits with what I knew of Seung. Even back in middle school, when we pushed him up against the lockers and called him Chinky and Chinaboy, there were girls who liked him, and they liked him more as his shoulders broadened and his muscles hardened and he became one of the school’s better athletes. But he never reached out for what he could get. Likewise at Auburn. He had his group of buddies, smart stoners and good-time guys mostly, but you rarely saw him with a girl. As if he didn’t believe any of this female attention ran deep. He was waiting for someone to insist—to master him.
4
I’m inventing Seung, too, of course. It’s the least I can do for him.
5
Four thirty, the grass darkening, the sky pressing near. Seung, Detweiler, and Sterne walk past the gym and the playing fields, which are emptying now, out to the track. The three friends look nothing alike. Detweiler is tall and skinny, with lank blond hair past his shoulders and granny glasses. His thoughts are always somewhere separate, tender; he smiles to himself without knowing it. No one likes to interrupt his reveries, which somehow gentle every gathering. Sterne is a different kind of thin: muscular, sinewy. He is a tennis player, shorter than Detweiler. His hair is dark, his cheeks hollowed. His family has loads of money and a ski cabin in Vermont. Next to these two, Seung looks like a weight lifter, a wrestler, a squat tree. They forget he is Asian, that his face stands out from theirs. He never forgets.