by Pamela Erens
The way she dresses has changed in the months she’s been at school. The plunging angora sweaters don’t show up anymore, nor the cowboy boots. The look has been tamed. But she still likes her makeup, and there is still a deliberateness about her style that makes her stand out from Auburn’s sloppy-baggy or preppy norm. She still wears the three gold chains and the gold hoop earrings, and when I get closer I’ll see that there’s an addition now: a gold ring with ruby chips, worn on her fourth finger, the wedding one. She’s got on a pair of khaki-colored shorts and a boatneck top.
Since Seung was caught in her dorm my imaginary interludes with Aviva have become more leisurely. It’s as if, his status at school shaky, Seung no longer owns her so exclusively anymore. I’ve always been aware of the small details of Aviva’s physical presence: the slightly freckled forearms, the barely pointed chin, the particular splay of her fingers. But now, in my private theater, I hold on to those details longer. I slip her blouse off her shoulders and she doesn’t fade. I unbutton her from the neck to the belly and lay bare that purple bra again. I arrange her on my bed and sketch with my eyes her surprisingly ample hips. She reaches up for me and lets me come in. Her half-lidded eyes and the soft parting of her mouth reveal a pleasure I’ve never seen on the face of Lisa Flood. Sometimes Aviva doesn’t vanish even as I get more urgent and less kind.
I’ve told myself that if Seung is forced to leave Auburn, I might even have a real-world chance with Aviva. I don’t really believe this, but the notion allows the moments after I come to be filled with something that is nearly satisfaction rather than, as usual, a vague resentment and unease.
I aim the Frisbee at a spot past the library so David will have to go far to fetch it. “Sorry!” I call to him, shrugging, feigning puzzlement at my lousy aim. Then I walk toward the bench. I don’t know how I walk. I might look false and awkward; I might glide like Fred Fucking Astaire for all I know. I don’t remember. But then I’m there, looking down at her. She’s already got a book open and is seemingly absorbed in it. Leave Aviva alone for ninety seconds and she opens a book. Could I have been right that she was watching me so intently before? I believe I was right.
“What are you reading?” I ask. A very imaginative opener. Not to mention that I can read the book’s title perfectly clearly: Jane Eyre.
She raises the cover higher for me. “It’s so-so,” she says. “Lena’s always trying to get me to read the Brontës. Am I supposed to find Rochester sympathetic? He’s a jerk. The one I hate most is Wuthering Heights. It’s an embarrassment to anyone female.”
“No, tell me what you really think of it,” I say. “Don’t hold back.”
I get it out of her—a little smile. Thin, transient, but there.
I take that moment to sit down next to her, remaining alert to any rejectionist vibe. We’ve never spoken since that day at the boathouse. I don’t feel anything overtly hostile coming from her. Perhaps, after all, I didn’t shake her enough that day to make her hate me. Perhaps it already seems like a long time ago to her, as it does, somewhat, to me. She seems a little chilly, that’s all, sitting there holding her book impatiently, as if wondering how many seconds of politeness are required until she can go back to it.
“How’s your brother?” I ask. “The one who writes you all the time?”
She smiles more fulsomely now. It wasn’t what she expected to hear next, I guess. She tells me that Marshall is good, he’s going to summer school because he failed seventh-grade English and social studies, but he’s cheerful enough about it, and he knows the material . . . He mailed her a build-it-yourself radio kit for her birthday, and it made her burst out in laughter: When did he think she was going to find time to build it? And when had she ever shown any interest in electronics? But it kills her, really; he probably spent hours choosing it. Aviva sighs. Marshall. He shaved off all his hair over Christmas vacation, but it’s growing back.
I can’t imagine why she’s giving me so much detail. Maybe she just likes talking about her brother. Maybe all anyone wants to talk to her about these days is Seung, and she’s tired of that. She seems to lighten when she talks of her brother, lose her wariness. In my peripheral vision I sense David approaching, damn Frisbee in hand, fed up with waiting for me. It looks like he’s going to be stupid enough to ask what’s up, is the game still on. But he stops at a distance, watching us for a moment, then turns toward the library. Good man, David. Just so long as you give me back that Frisbee. It’s my best one, a Discraft Sky-Styler.
“How’d he look?” I ask Aviva, about her brother’s shearing.
“Terrible.”
“So why’d you do it, too?”
Her eyes widen. A moment passes, and I think she realizes I don’t mean it unkindly, that I’m actually pained by it, missing those heavy tresses. Tresses: a good, romantic, old-fashioned word.
“I don’t know,” she says. “It seemed to make sense at the time.”
“I wish you hadn’t.”
“I went home,” she says slowly, as if she really wants me to see the matter through her eyes, “and everything in my house seemed dingy and wrong, just out of place and worn out and . . . and spoiled. I can’t explain it.” She tells me that her parents split up back in the fall; her father closed her mother’s credit card and checking accounts and is already behind on his child support payments. He’s living with another woman, who makes strange comments about Jews. Aviva is worried he’s not going to come through with her Auburn tuition for next year. He claims that he will, no problem, but the letters arriving in Chicago from Auburn’s bursar’s office prove he hasn’t.
“Anya says not to worry, she’ll keep me here somehow. She says his new lady is old money, new vulgar. In that accent of hers.”
“Who’s Anya?”
“My mother. I call her Mom or Matka—that’s Czech—to her face, but when my brother and I talk about her behind her back we call her Anya. Because she’s just such an Anya.” She explains that her mother was born near Prague and got sent out of the country when she was nine, on one of the Kindertransports set up to rescue children from the Nazis. When the war was over, her parents, Aviva’s grandparents, were dead. Anya’s not as young as most mothers. She was thirty-four when Aviva was born. She teaches sociology at a college in the Chicago suburbs—“about images of women and women’s roles in society and that sort of thing.” As if all this explains something to me.
“You come from the same town as Seung, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I say. I wish Seung didn’t need to come back into the conversation.
“Do you know his family?”
I know who they are, I say. They live in a different part of town. I don’t say it’s where the smaller houses are, where you have more immigrants and blacks and even some crime. I mention that they’re not the kind of parents you saw all the time at school basketball games or the damn used-book fundraiser.
“His mother told him she wished for something very bad to happen to me.”
This startles me. “She said that?”
“Apparently. But in Korean. With some choice epithets. I think one of them meant ‘pale chicken.’”
I can’t help laughing. She laughs too, then it vanishes.
“Do you think Seung is going to be kicked out?” she asks. “Everybody tells me no, and I’m tired of being lied to. What are the odds, do you think?”
“When a kid goes before the committee?” I rub my hand on the iron arm of the bench. “Usually they get kicked out.”
She nods. She faces straight ahead, so that I see her in profile.
“What would you say if I told you I might be glad if Seung got kicked out?”
I take my time in responding. First, there’s a sharp thrill—is she hinting something to me? Something connected to the way she watched me while I played? Then I decide I’m out of my mind. She couldn’t be coming on to me. Probably what’s driving her is something less sneaky and more desperate—she simply needs to talk. Because I happen to be her
e. Because I’m listening. And somehow she knows it won’t go any further.
Slowly, I answer, “I wouldn’t say anything. Or I’d say you have your reasons.”
“Well, don’t worry,” she says, dropping her gaze to her knees. “I was just joking.” A pause. “I feel like I can tell you things. I don’t know why.” Then: “It’s probably a terrible idea.”
As though that were a cue, a window opens above us. It’s Sterne, his T-shirt sleeves rolled up over his ropy shoulders. “Hey, Bennett-Jones, take a hike,” he calls down.
Aviva’s head snaps up. “Tell Seung to chill out,” she shouts back to Sterne.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur, wishing she’d let me speak up for myself.
“Don’t be. He’s being ridiculous.”
“Are you moving your flabby ass or what?” asks Sterne. “You’re bothering the lady.”
“Jesus,” says Aviva. She turns away from the window and yanks open her book. She looks tired and a little cowed, and I don’t want to cause any more trouble for her. It’s time for me to go. I swallow the sting of once again being silenced by Sterne. I feel that if I give it back to him the way he deserves, I’ll lose Aviva’s respect. So I’ll take the high road and all that. Look like the better man. Fuck. I get a sudden craving for something sweet. I think I’ll head into town.
“Take care,” I say to Aviva—a phrase that until now I’ve heard only from a grown-up’s mouth. I touch her arm. Sterne fades and all I’m aware of is that I’ve sat here for ten or fifteen minutes, talking to her, hearing what she had to say. My head is light; I’m beginning to fly. I don’t care if Aviva dislikes me, or is using me. Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t. I don’t think she knows herself. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. She’s telling me things. She’s telling me things even Seung doesn’t know.
53
Those last weeks of school the sun doesn’t set until eight, eight fifteen in the evening. You can walk late in the woods or along the river. The smell of lilac and wisteria follows one to classes. The town is in bloom: baskets of impatiens on the porches, azaleas in the yards. Until the very last minute, it’s hard to take our final tests and papers seriously. We’re seniors. We have our spots in our colleges, our summer plans. We are just waiting to be gone. For the next part of our lives to begin.
David Yee closes our door and gestures me over to his bureau. He opens his underwear drawer and fishes out a flat, tear-shaped bottle of Courvoisier XO. I whistle.
“We worked really hard all year,” he says.
“You devil dog.”
He smiles, nervous, pleased with himself.
“You little charlatan. You pretend good boy.”
He holds on to his flickering smile.
It’s really good stuff that he has, aged thirty years or something like that. I don’t ask where he’s gotten it. It is the kind of booze your parents might give you when they’ve decided it’s time to treat you like a man. I look forward to drinking it. We make a plan to meet at a spot along the creek and walk somewhere we won’t be seen. David is so anxious about the whole thing, this first foray into delinquency, that he insists we go there separately rather than together. Fine, I say. I tell him I’ll bring what I have—the usual, 151. We’ll be aristocratic and ceremonial with the cognac and make sure we get plastered with the 151. As a goof I put on the hideous class ring my father ordered for me at the start of school, saying that once I graduated (he reserved his certainty in regard to this outcome), he would have it engraved with my initials and the year.
It’s two weeks until the end of the term. Seung’s bags are packed. His trunk is at the dock behind the gym and will be sent by freight to his home. He’ll be in Jordan by tomorrow afternoon. His brother is coming down from Ithaca and will meet him at Jordan Station. “To be a buffer against the duffers, man,” he says. Number One Son. He’s not so bad.
Sterne and Giddings take Seung out for a farewell dinner. They go to the Chinese place on the state road, a forty-five-minute walk, and Seung doesn’t let anyone order alcohol. “Do me a favor,” he says. He wants them in the library, he says, by six thirty. They had better do well on their final exams; there have been enough fuckups already. The restaurant has paper lanterns and a plastic Santa Claus atop a bricked-up fireplace. The paper menus are stained with food. The boys toast the absent Detweiler with raised glasses of Orange Crush.
“May he return.”
“May he not return. May he have a better fate.”
“May he regain his sanity. May he be valedictorian of his two-bit high school and hike the Lake Superior Trail and sleep with many plump Midwestern babes.”
They’re drunk. Even though it’s only Orange Crush they’re drinking, they are woozy, sentimental, uncoordinated. Seung makes them both promise to look after Aviva. Make sure she’s all right, that she doesn’t need for anything. Giddings sweeps his arm to make a point and a glass goes spinning off the table. The waitress kneels to gather up the shards, telling them it’s no problem, no problem.
Out on the strip again, Giddings gives Seung his going-away present: two tabs of excellent acid he’s been saving since his last trip home. “One for you, one for Aviva.” There’s more where that came from. Giddings had planned a graduation gift for them all.
“Without you it won’t be much of a celebration,” Sterne comments.
“Sure it will,” Seung tells him. “You guys have made it. You got through.”
They clutch him to themselves, clap him on the back. Next year they’ll be in college; he’ll be in high school again.
Seung returns alone to the dormitory after the others peel off for the library. His feet hurt. Aviva said she’d meet him in front of Hiram at six thirty. They’ll go for a walk or sit in the common room. No one cares anymore what they do. No one watches. The campus is busy, students bent over their books for finals. Interest in the two of them is waning. Their story is wrapped up, it’s over. They were caught, they didn’t get away with it after all. Their mystery has been leached out of them.
Aviva holds a large book against her chest. Seung can’t see what it is; her arms are crossed in front. Without exchanging any words, they begin to walk. They pass the edge of campus and walk along a residential street. There’s a child swinging in the mellow evening light. When they are a few blocks from campus Aviva leans against a lamppost. She’s still holding the book to her chest.
“Seung, once you’re home . . .”
He waits. He knows. He is going to be subjected to her truth, those things she cannot refrain from saying because they happen to be so.
“It’s destroying me . . .” he hears. “The humiliation . . . lying there . . . I’m dead inside . . . you’ve made me dead . . . I can’t feel anything anymore . . .” There are no tears, not even a look of sadness. Her mouth is a hard, grim thing.
It is the truth. He can see that. He is destroying her. She’s lost weight; she has become all elbows and neck. Her cropped and brushy hair is growing out again, badly. She is slumped and drawn, like someone recovering from the flu. He’s murdered her beauty. No, it isn’t that. That is still there. What, then? Her vitality. Her pride. Her love, if that ever existed.
“I don’t want you to call me. I don’t want you to write me . . .”
His hands ball into fists; he grits his teeth. Sweat springs out on his temples. He’s shaking, and then he begins to cry. Aviva thinks that it is crying, anyway. There are tears on Seung’s cheeks but he makes no sounds other than a choked sort of growling. His lips are closed, tight.
“Y-y-ou . . .” he finally forces out. “Y-y-you . . .”
She doesn’t know if he is cursing her or begging her. Perhaps he is going to strike her. If he does, she’ll hit him back. He begins to gasp and pound his head with his fist. Something shifts in Aviva and she feels that his actions have crossed the line into theater; he is trying to shame her into fear and pity.
“Oh, Christ, Seung, I won’t let you . . . you’re not going to do this . . .” She runs from
him, back through the streets, all the way to her dormitory. She checks in with Señora Ivarra, drops her heavy book on the floor and gets in bed, clothed, curled up tight. As she ran she imagined him behind her, chasing her; there had been violence in his eyes.
Seung lowers himself onto someone’s front steps and sits for a long time until his breathing loosens and slows. He always knew this day would come, knew he would lose her, that he wasn’t born to possess the things he wants. Not a creature like him, a Korean boy, a Number Two Son. Life put this girl in his way so he could envision pleasure, taste it, and watch it run away.
When he feels capable of it, he makes his way back to Weld, jittery and spent, and knocks on Mr. Glass’s door.
“I’m in for the night,” he tells the teacher.
Mr. Glass looks at the boy’s raw eyes and damp skin. The dorm is almost empty. It’s Seung’s last night at Auburn.
“Seung. Would you like to come in?”
“No, thank you.”
“I didn’t want this outcome,” Mr. Glass tells him, not shutting the door, not letting him leave yet. The boy wears that mask the Asian kids often do, the one that says, “I will not speak. Do not ask.” But that unhealthiness about the skin and eyes betrays him. What a waste, Mr. Glass thinks. A talented kid, but one who liked to push his luck, always sure the cat had more lives. Still, so close to graduation, the committee could have bent for once, could have given him probation. But the old-timers wouldn’t have it. The Auburn disciplinary system is out of date, inflexible, in need of reform. Mr. Glass has always taken that position.