by Pamela Erens
For now she takes a carrel and begins to read, keeping the pink book nestled unobtrusively in her lap.
The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness . . .
Yes! Aviva thinks. Yes! When she goes for a bathroom break she places the little book, and the one called Intimacy, under the more sober-sounding Psychoanalytic Approaches, turns all three volumes facedown, and shoves their spines against the back of the carrel where they won’t be readily seen. But Cort, working nearby, uses the opportunity to check out her reading, and reports back to Voss and me that Seung Jung’s chippie apparently does some research to amplify her bedroom skills. We enjoy this tale greatly for a couple of days—at least I pretend to—but aren’t bold enough to pass it on; it might get traced back to the source.
Aviva takes the books to Mrs. Conn-Frere, gazes into the distance as she’s checked out, and over the next two days she reads The Art of Loving as often as she can, taking notes in her rounded handwriting on loose-leaf paper. She reads only when alone in the room and is careful not to leave the notes on her desk where her roommate might see them. There are passages in the book on that terrifying term, frigidity. Is she, Aviva, frigid? A woman, writes Fromm, “opens the gates to her feminine center; in the act of receiving, she gives. If she is incapable of this act of giving, if she can only receive, she is frigid.” Does this apply to her? Is the reason why Seung can never enter her that she only wants to receive from him and not give? Why does the book not talk about the thing that has happened to Seung and her; why does no book ever talk about it? It is unique, unheard-of—that’s why.
Love is active, the book tells her. Love is giving. Love puts the other person’s needs above one’s own. The woman is receiving and the man is penetrating.
For several days Aviva feels hopeful: Fromm has told her what love must be and, with her student’s sense of purpose, she will follow the guidelines and emerge with success. She will love Seung properly and something will subtly soften in her without endangering her or making her afraid. Seung will sense that new softness, that womanliness; he will come in. Aviva attempts to think of Seung’s needs, which she can hardly even picture. He wants to please his parents, even if, behind their backs, he acts the scapegrace. Other than that, he seems simply to need to be with her—her, Aviva. She wills herself to love him for himself, not simply because he loves her so blindly—but what is “himself” besides this blind lover? She doesn’t, in fact, care about his schoolwork, the nitty-gritty of his home life, his childhood memories, his plans for the future. Or not very much.
The little book, inspiring at first, becomes a scold. She will never be able to live up to it, she doesn’t even understand it. “Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says: ‘I need you because I love you.’” How can one possibly sort this out? How can Aviva even imagine a love so ideal, so disinterested? She returns the book to the library, along with the others she took out that day, which she has not bothered to open, and as they fall down the slot in the front desk, she feels a great relief.
36
When our month of restrictions is finished, I’m not quite sure what to do with myself in the evenings. I feel slow, fat, and blinkered—a confused mole. The first night, I wander around campus, resisting my desire to go to Currie’s for a milkshake; besides, I don’t want to sit alone. Voss has been acting again as if restrictions was all my fault, and whither goes Voss goes Cort. So I’m on my own tonight, unless I want to hang out with David Yee in the library and talk about partial differential equations. I should make some new friends. Yeah, right. My time in this place is almost over; I’m just looking to ride out the final months and make a new start next year, somewhere far away. Somewhere out of the reach of my father, somewhere I will start to be whatever it is I think I’m capable of becoming.
I walk in the direction of the Dramat, not that anything is going on there tonight, but it soothes me just to be nearby. The spring production is The Playboy of the Western World, and I’ll be props master, but tryouts aren’t for another week. When I pass the Academy church, I hear singing coming from within. I keep walking, but the notes trail me and pull me back. The voices are very sweet, and maybe I want to be in a room filled with people rather than alone in a darkened theater. I make my way in, standing at the back, not yet committed to a seat and a stay.
It’s the choral choir. They have a surprisingly good turn-out; perhaps there are others besides me who feel at loose ends on this chilly, interseason evening. I see Aviva in the pews—my eye always finds her instantly in a crowd—and next to her are Lena Joannou and Kelly Finch. They are gazing up at the stage, all attention, and I see that their friend Carlyle Johns is one of the singers. The bright lights on the pulpit are distorting, but something about Carlyle’s face looks wrong, as if she fell down and bruised herself. My eyes slide to the other faces, boys and girls, all lit up, mouths open, static yet shifting like the faces I imagined I would put in my production of The Seventh Seal. They are wholly fixed on their task and move in perfect unison. So preoccupied am I with watching that for a while I don’t even hear any sound, I’m aware only of these sculptural faces. Then the voices return, with a purity that surprises and unbalances me, and something shifts painfully around my heart. It’s only the girls singing now, and their voices are so high and sweet; if I were at all religious I would think they were lifting me up somewhere closer to . . . what? Something radiant and uncorrupted. After a few moments the male voices come in again, enriching the range, rumbling but still pure, and I have to sit, my legs won’t hold me. I push my way into a spot in a back pew, receiving a look of annoyance from a girl I don’t know, and once I’m there I’m so shaken I can’t look at the pulpit anymore. I drop my head and close my eyes. The music keeps coming and I know I’ve made a mistake; I don’t want to hear this beauty, which won’t stop but pushes at me relentlessly. It’s too much; it threatens to hurt me. I’m tempted to cover my ears but manage to sit on my hands to keep them still, squeeze my eyes tighter, and bear it. I should have known not to come into a room where everyone is leaning in as one, everyone is feeling as one. I’m not meant for such places. I ball my fists. It will be over soon, I keep telling myself. I try not to hear the beautiful music. Soon it will be over.
37
Seung’s parents are in Boston for a research conference Mr. Jung is attending, and Seung takes the bus from Auburn to meet them at their hotel. He has something to tell them. He isn’t asking for permission. He’s already paid the deposit for two nights at the beach cabin on Nantucket; the money is his own, saved from his lifeguarding job. He’s decided—naturally he doesn’t say this—that he and Aviva need to go away somewhere, far from the ducking and hiding at school and the parental shadows at home, in order to succeed in their physical union. In a new, bare place he’ll be able to give Aviva what she seems so to need; he will be virile and whole. For a while, the two of them were able to be happy deferring the inevitable but lately he can tell she is thinking about it again, wondering, growing agitated. And he? He doesn’t know what he feels, what he wants. But there’s a vibe in the air, and it makes him jittery. Aviva is slipping from him, he senses it; or is he making things up? Sometimes when they are together her attention seems far away; there is something she is pondering that makes him as envious and frightened as he would be of another lover.
Two nights and three days in Wauwinet, Seung tells his parents, and then he’ll come straight home for the rest of the April holiday.
His mother says very well, then, if he is such a man, if he makes the decisions around here, then she and his father will stop paying for his Auburn education. He can come home and get a job and go to public school. She says that he thinks he is a man but he is just a little—she uses the Korean word for shit. Seung’s father says nothing, which makes Seung know there is a chance everything will be all right. He watches the chopping motions of his mother’s hands as she appeals to hi
s father in Korean. She grabs her purse and leaves the hotel room. Then Mr. Jung pours two glasses of whiskey from a bottle in the minibar and says that he does not approve of this little Jewish girl, he thinks her spoiled, lacking in propriety and good sense. She will be bad for Seung in the end. But he can see, he says, that Seung has the fire in his belly for her, and there is nothing to be done about that. He will have to let the fire burn itself out.
“Just don’t do anything idiotic. You know what I am saying. And do not think, for a moment, of marrying her. You are way too young and it would be a great mistake.”
Seung grabs his father by the shoulders, almost hugging him, and his father embraces him. They are both over-whelmed by this gesture, and they stand for a long moment before parting.
38
One day Giddings returns to his room after lunch to find Detweiler still in bed. He is sitting on the mattress with his legs crossed as if he is planning to meditate. Pillows are propped between his back and the wall. He wears flannel pajama bottoms and a once-white T-shirt with holes in it. His head swings slowly toward the door as Giddings enters.
“You cut classes, man?” Giddings asks.
Detweiler smiles, that sweet, slow smile they all know him for.
“No,” he says. “It’s just that I can’t leave the room.”
“Say what?” Giddings replaces his morning books in the bookshelf and selects his afternoon ones.
Detweiler doesn’t answer, just smiles.
“No shit, you really haven’t been out?” But Giddings can see he hasn’t been.
“I know it’s only a short distance between this bed and that door,” says Detweiler. “And now the door is even open. So I should be able to do it. I should be able to stand up and put my clothes on and walk in that direction. Even if I didn’t take my books and didn’t brush my teeth, it would still be a good thing. But from here it looks very, very far. The door just looks far.”
Giddings thinks Detweiler has been toking, a stupid thing to do right here in the room. “You stand up with me,” he says. “I’ll help you get dressed, and we’ll walk together to the door.”
“No,” says Detweiler. “No. I have to do it myself and I just haven’t been able to. I’m sure it will work itself out eventually.”
At three o’clock, Giddings comes back to check on Detweiler, this time with Seung. Detweiler hasn’t moved from the bed, but now he is crying quietly. “I don’t think I’m crazy,” he says. “I know I’m me. I’m Jeremy Lawrence Detweiler. My mother is Susan and my father is Anthony. And that’s you, Giddings and you, Jung. I was supposed to be at calculus for first period and I’ve got cross-country in half an hour. I know that there shouldn’t be any problem standing up and walking across the room.”
It takes four of them to carry Detweiler down the two flights of stairs and into the ambulance that pulls onto the lawn outside Weld early that evening: Seung, Giddings, Sterne, and Mr. Glass. Before calling Mr. Glass the three boys make sure there aren’t any drugs in Detweiler’s system. “Not even coffee,” Detweiler insists. Later Dr. Van Neelan comes over from the infirmary with Ms. Merton, one of the psychology counselors. Detweiler’s parents in Michigan are contacted and agree to have him moved to Peter Bent Brigham in Boston.
There is a stretcher waiting behind the ambulance but when Detweiler sees it he panics and tries to twist free, demanding to be put down. He can sit just fine in the vehicle, he begs, there’s no need. They confer with their eyes, then set Detweiler on his two long legs, whereupon he climbs into the back of the ambulance very calmly. They see him reach for his seat belt. They’ve managed to get him into a pair of jeans and a pullover. “It was just that thing of getting out the door,” he reassures them.
“Don’t worry,” he continues, as the ambulance driver restarts the engine. “I’m not totally all right, but I’m not crazy. I’m pretty sure I’m not. I mean, I don’t believe I’m Jesus Christ or anything.”
39
The college envelopes arrive in the mailboxes, fat and thin. I never did fill out my application for Dartmouth. I had plenty of money in a fund from when my Aunt Marcie died, and when my father blew his gasket, as he surely would, I’d just tell him, in essence, screw you. I didn’t even think he’d hit me. Both he and I were getting a little old for that sort of thing.
Once the word goes around, kids are mobbing the PO, pushing to get to their boxes. I retrieve three skinny envelopes and one thick, solid one. It’s from Bard, which is my first choice. As soon as I’ve muscled my way back out of the room and reread, with pleasure, my letter of acceptance, my mind turns to Lisa. She will certainly have gotten into either Yale or Brown, most likely both. A few weeks more of school, and then I won’t be seeing her again. I feel doubly lightened.
Seung is accepted at Colgate and at Rutgers, his safety school. That evening, he phones home. There is a silence on the other end. Mr. Jung had hoped for Harvard.
“Dad,” Seung says. “I’m a reasonably intelligent kid who tries hard. I’m not Harvard material. You know that by now.”
Dak-ho Jung begs to differ. He points out various bad decisions Seung has made—taking advanced drawing instead of physics II his upper year, messing around with his school band instead of keeping up his classical music studies—but his heart isn’t really in it. “Harvard is the best,” he says at last. “Auburn is the best, and you should go from there to the college that is the best.”
“C-Colgate is a good school.”
“It’s the girl,” his father says, and now he sounds more sincere. “You waste all of your time on that girl. You’re infected, it’s like typhus with you. She’s made you frivolous. You think only about pleasure.”
“It’s not true,” says Seung grimly. If only his father knew.
40
A blue hand has been spread over the sky; the sun throws warm patches on the walks. We can smell it, the coming of spring. The trees are barely budded, and the air is still very cold. But the turning has arrived, it’s unmistakable.
Sterne says it’s time for the Spring Jubilee. No one has ever heard of the Spring Jubilee. It’s never been celebrated before. That doesn’t matter. They all agree to behave as if it is an ancient Auburn tradition, passed down by the sons of clergymen to the sons of industrialists to the sons of the intellectual meritocracy. They, the boys of Weld, are the latest in a long line of votaries paying homage to the Lady Spring.
They are full of busyness all at once, roused from their winter apathy. Sterne reminds them that the signal ritual of the Spring Jubilee is the making and drinking of mint juleps. He produces a pint bottle of bourbon from the winter boot collection. Giddings is dispatched on his bicycle for sugar and shaved ice and mint. He returns to report that the grocer has explained that mint is not in season until June.
“Of course it’s not,” says Sterne. “Did you get the Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Sterne.”
“In the Spring Jubilee, Wrigley’s Spearmint is always used as a substitute for fresh mint, due to mint not yet being in season.”
Giddings takes off again. In the meantime, the Grateful Dead lands on the stereo: “Shakedown Street,” “Good Lovin’.”
Urban Engelsted, a kid they sometimes hang out with, brings out his shot glass collection, and Seung lines up the little glasses on the windowsill. In the room now are Seung, Sterne, Giddings, Engelsted, and Engelsted’s buddy Mark Dasgupta. They are all aware of a space that would have been occupied, quietly and inwardly, by Detweiler. Every couple of months, there’s some casualty, someone you know who is expelled or fails out or cracks up. This winter it was Detweiler. Spend long enough at this school and you can do a roll call of disappearances, tally the little score marks on your heart. Sterne puts a stick of gum in the bottom of each glass and adds two spoonfuls of sugar. With the long end of the spoon he mashes the gum and sugar together. “We call this bruising the mint,” he says. “The technique was developed back on my old Kentucky plantation
, before it was destroyed by carpetbaggers. Do not remove the wad of chewing gum; it is considered impolite. But do not swallow it.”
The sound of clinking glasses, cold hands high-fiving. Young men are sprawled in chairs, their knees spread. Someone—Giddings?—has found a lei left over from a vacation, a theater production, who knows what. He drapes it over Sterne’s chest. The Grateful Dead segues into Jackson Browne. They toss back the shots and refill their glasses, not bothering about the sugar or the gum. A bolt of late-afternoon sun enters the room, illuminates Sterne where he sits like the May King. Giddings has stuck an unbudded magnolia branch in Sterne’s hair. All five boys daydream, lost in secrets it is all right not to share.
Seung is the first to leap up at the knock on the door. Sterne has the glasses collected in an instant, shoved into a pillowcase. He’s noiseless and fast. Giddings nudges two empty pint bottles under the couch with his heel.
It’s Mr. Glass. The music is a little loud, he says. His eyes move around the room, landing on one boy after another, on the bookcases, the desks, the window sill.
“Oh,” says Seung, “sorry about that. We thought we were being quiet.”
Mr. Glass laces his fingers together, allows the silence to lengthen.
“Would you like to come in, sir?” Seung asks.