The Virgins

by Pamela Erens

  Asking around, I find a ride with a day student I hardly know. When he and David and I get to Charlie’s place around 9:00 PM, the party is in full swing. There’s a half moon low in the sky and it’s very dark outside the farmhouse proper. People wander with bottles in their hands, beer or whiskey, searching out private spots to talk, drink, screw. In the basement of the big house, near shelves holding a few onions and potatoes, there is a Ping-Pong table and an enormous freezer and refrigerator. The fridge holds beer and the freezer vodka, along with huge hunks of meat wrapped in white paper. Scattered across a stainless-steel table are open bags of chips and pretzels.

  I play Ping-Pong for a while with David and then go out to get some air. There are hayfields behind the house, an empty structure that someone claims is an old chicken coop, and, farther away, an archery range with targets pinned to bales. I’m wondering if Aviva is here tonight. After Seung’s body was found, she left Auburn for a couple of days; a cousin or aunt from Connecticut drove up to collect her. When she came back we all studied her, looking for something—we weren’t sure what. She had some dark knowledge inside of her, something vast and slumbering that might shoot quills at us if we got too close. From the outside, though, Aviva appeared more or less the same as always, or at least the same as she’d come to look over the course of the year: thin, pale, a little less bold in her carriage. But it was hard to get a handle on her. Seung’s crowd closed around her, protecting her, hiding her from curious eyes.

  They are with her now. I’ve circled back to the farmhouse and see her walking in my direction, flanked by Sterne and Giddings and some of their Weld hangers-on. There’s something loose but careful in her walk that makes me think she might be drunk. That would be interesting—a drunk Aviva. I’m not going to be able to get close to her, though, so I bushwhack into the fields until I come across a group spread out on blankets, drinking and nodding to a boom box blaring the Allman Brothers. It isn’t my kind of music, but it’s loud, loud enough that I can get swamped by the noise, lose track of the outside world for a while. I lie down on my back and close my eyes. Someone puts a beer in my hand.

  Time goes by. It must be about an hour, because I remember the Allman Brothers finishing and then both sides of Aqualung being played. I’m liking this little pocket of existence, where people come and go every so often, unspoken to, unmolested. I’m inclined never to leave. But some instinct makes me open my eyes just in time to see David Yee pass by in the company of some girl, looks like a lower maybe, a tiny little thing who will be sorry later when she figures out what a dork she’s attached herself to. Well, well, David, I think. Somebody in the pile of bodies finally speaks, commenting slurringly that “they” are setting off firecrackers at the archery range, and when I listen I can hear the sharp spattering sound. I get up, take a swig of Heineken, and leave the bottle with someone else.

  I haven’t gotten far when I see Aviva on the stoop of the chicken house. She’s with Cort, of all people. I don’t think the two of them have ever spoken in their lives. I wonder where Seung’s crowd went. They wouldn’t have left her; she must have separated herself from them. She’s got her eyes closed and Cort’s arm is draped around her. For chrissakes, Cort, I think. You’re a faggot! Aviva is wearing a long skirt and an oversized oxford that in the light of the bulb fixed above the stoop seems to be either white or pale blue. It was Seung’s shirt, maybe. I am sure it was Seung’s. I go cold looking at it. It is as if Aviva has draped Seung’s dead body around her shoulders. Does no one else notice this? Does it make no one else recoil?

  Cort greets me drunkenly. Aviva raises her head from his shoulder and blinks at me indifferently. Though this doesn’t amount to much of an invitation, I crouch down opposite them. It’s a humid but bug-free night.

  “Aviva’s going to Europe,” Cort tells me.

  “Oh.”

  “With Lena,” Aviva adds unexpectedly. Her eyes close again. “Two months, Eurail Pass, everything. My father told me about the tickets this morning.”

  “That must be nice,” I say, “to have a father who gives you tickets to Europe.”

  “I was supposed to find a job this summer. And see a shrink. But Lena’s aunt called my mother and my mother called my father. It’ll be cheaper than an actual shrink—I’m sure that’s what convinced my dad.”

  “Come on, you don’t know that,” I say.

  “Traveling will be good for you,” Cort tells her soothingly. I wonder when he developed such a confident sense of Aviva’s psychological needs. I despise the sound of her name in his mouth. Aviva. I believe he has no right.

  “Cort will be taking math this summer,” I inform her. “University of Maryland only agreed to take him provisionally. No hittee grade level, no gettee in.”

  “Right, Bennett-Jones. I’ll be haunted all my life by the shame.” He lifts a flat bottle to his mouth, takes a swig, passes it to Aviva. She hesitates, then puts her narrow, fragile-looking fingers around it.

  “Cort.” All three of us look up. No one heard Voss approach, and now he looms above us. His shirt is unbuttoned to midchest; he’s sweating exhibitionistically. His feet are planted like a man expecting a fight.

  Cort disentangles himself from Aviva and struggles upright. “Hey, man.”

  “Billy Lavery is shooting a Winchester rifle out there. I want to check it out.”

  “He has a gun?” Aviva asks. She stands, too, batting a leaf out of her hair.

  “Bradley’s folks have a whole room full of guns and rifles and even some Civil War shit, but it’s fricking triple-locked. This one, though, Charlie found in the basement.”

  “It’s dark,” Aviva says. Her hands are on her hips. She seems less drunk now.

  “Billy’s got a lantern. Cort.”

  “Coming, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Someone could get hurt,” insists Aviva.

  “No one’s going to get hurt,” says Voss. “Billy isn’t stupid.”

  “Don’t be such a thickheaded dick,” says Cort. “Think of what Aviva’s been through, man.”

  Voss looks briefly at his sneakers. “Billy’s had only, like, two beers,” he says. “And Charlie isn’t going to let anyone else shoot.”

  He strides off in the direction of the archery range. Cort hurries to join him.

  “Idiots,” comments Aviva.

  She looks around, as if distressed to find herself all alone, as if I am not still crouched there a few feet from her. The bulb light makes the buttons of her shirt gleam, and I try again to figure out what color it is. I’m regretting giving away that beer I had.

  “I wish I hadn’t come,” Aviva says.

  She turns and walks after Cort and Voss. I scramble up to follow.

  She must hear my steps, but she doesn’t speed up or tell me to go away. In a moment I’ve caught up. She doesn’t acknowledge my presence.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. I’m out of breath, from nerves. “I’m sorry about Seung.” Just now, I am sorry. I’m sorry about everything. I want things to be better for her. I want her to stop looking so depleted and vulnerable.

  “All right,” she says. “Thanks.”

  She increases her pace; apparently, she’s done with the conversation. But a few moments later, she stops short and makes an impatient gesture. “What do you want?” she asks.

  “It must be terrible,” I say. I mean nothing in particular by this. I just need to say sentences to her. They form themselves without my thought or involvement. I need her to acknowledge me.

  Her lips are closed, contemptuous. “It’s not terrible,” she says. “It’s not anything. It’s nothing, nothing.”

  I can’t truly hear her. I keep talking. “Of course I can’t really know what it’s like when someone you care about dies. I can’t really know what . . .”

  “I don’t feel anything,” she interrupts. “Do you get that? Does anybody get that? I’m cold. I’m cold all the way through. There’s something missing in me, just like I always thought.”


  “It’s not true,” I say.

  I don’t see it coming. Her hand strikes me across the face. She looks surprised. She clutches the hand with the other one and shuts her eyes. “What the fuck do you know?” she says.

  “Okay, okay,” I say. I feel, with alarm, that tears are rising to my eyes. I beg them to stay away. The skin around my left eye prickles.

  “Okay,” I repeat. I believe that I’m backing away from her; I even see myself turning toward the farmhouse, moving back toward the big porch and the lights. But clearly I don’t do this, because I find I am on my knees, my arms around her legs, my head against her belly, weeping. Her belly is flat, a little bony, but very soft too. Her hand comes down and rests on my head.

  “Please,” I say. “Please.”

  I reach up and undo the bottom button of her long shirt—Seung’s shirt. Then the next button. I want to put my cheek against her and tangle in the warm metal of her necklaces and feel the warmed skin beneath. Then I realize it’s not her I need to be naked but me. I turn my shaking hands to myself. I pull off my shirt and kneel there with my short, fleshy chest, my ugliness exposed.

  There’s the report of a gun going off, then cheers. I rise and take Aviva’s hand and lead her into the hayfield. We lie down on the ground, breaking the stalks under us, and kiss. Her mouth is warm and tastes of rum. She does not make a sound but I feel her breathing slow and thicken, and, just as I’ve imagined so many times, she raises her arms around me. Her mouth is a tunnel I can get lost in. I reach down and feel the whole length of her—her own intimate shape, plane and slope, curve and bone. She’s shivering. I spread my shirt on top of her, on top of the man’s shirt she’s already wearing. I unbuckle myself, pull off my jeans and underpants. She sits up, clutching my shirt, waiting. Her skirt is pushed up above satiny-looking panties. I don’t know if I can bear it anymore. My cock is going to split out of its skin, break open like a fruit. For a moment the old violence comes up in me and I feel as if I could maul her in my desperation to have her to myself. But I hold back, I hold back. She lets me lower myself onto her and stroke her; I can feel her chest and belly soften underneath me and yet she keeps her legs rigid. I stop. I ask her if I should go on.

  —Yes.

  She sounds far away. I kiss her again, and again she feels warm and receptive, but then she turns her mouth away as if to say, Get on with it. I nudge her apart as best I can and she squirms to accommodate me. I push in slightly; she’s wet but tight. Then with pent-up impatience I push again, harder, and she cries out sharply.

  I fall back on my knees, apologizing. She lifts her head, tries to smile. “It’s okay,” she says. I know it’s all going wrong but I can’t stop now, my greed and joy send me on. I push in again, more gently this time. She is quiet now, very still. I feel as if I am moving in a horrific emptiness. I thrust in once more, and she makes a little ah!—of pleasure or discomfort I can’t tell—and then, all at once, all happiness and will drain from me and I pull out, panting, my cock throbbing in painful protest.

  Aviva sits up, her eyes wide. “No,” she says. “Don’t stop.”

  I crawl away from her, let the hay close behind me. And there, with my back to her, I tug and yank at myself until—it doesn’t take long—I spill. I wipe myself off, cry quickly and quietly, rub my eyes with my forearm. Everything is humid, sticky, soiled.

  When I come back to our spot, she’s fled. My shirt and jeans and underpants lie here and there on the ground. I gather them up and my hands find something else: a ring, at least it feels so in the darkness, smooth and bumpy. I pull my clothes on slowly, slip my find into my pocket, spit to get the taste of something out of my mouth. I walk dizzily toward the farmhouse, stopping once to piss in the weeds, and, after grabbing a fresh beer from the cooler, seek out a dark spot against the back wall outside, where few people see me or speak to me for the rest of the evening. At some point I fall asleep, and I don’t wake until someone shakes me by the shoulders. It’s the day student, who has been decent enough not to leave without me and is prepared to drop me and David at the Greyhound station in Portsmouth as promised. David is wearing a shit-eating grin. He must have gotten somewhere with that lower girl.

  In the light of the bus station, as we wait for the first of the day’s buses to Boston, I examine Aviva’s ring, gold with little ruby chips, narrower at the bottom than at the setting, as delicate as she is. I lost a ring to Seung and from Aviva I gained one. I slip it back into my pocket.

  Many hours later, in my parents’ home, disheveled, still hungover, I step into the shower to rid myself of the crud and grime of the previous evening, and I see the dried blood on my penis. It takes me a minute to realize that’s what it is. Aviva was starting her period, is what I think at first. Could that be right? Maybe that’s why she was so ambivalent, so tense. Still, I can’t help feeling that it’s the blood of a wounding, an assault. I can’t make sense of it all—this thing I wanted so much to do, waited to do, then fled from again. What is its meaning to me now? When I was inside of her I thought of Seung stretched out on his back at the Bog, his head in the dirt, that weed smile on his lips, still alive, breathing, blood pumping throughout his veins and valves. “The shape of a pull toy,” he’d said of a THC molecule. I’d thought of that, pressing into Aviva, moving in and out, until, looking at her face, so stricken and impoverished, I couldn’t go on.

  And now, as the hot water courses over me, I make a different set of connections. I remember Aviva’s startled cry, so like Lisa Flood’s the first time I entered her. I think of Seung at the Bog saying that he’d failed, that he’d had to cheat on Aviva, that he wasn’t a man, and these things mix together with other, less formed thoughts, and all at once I know: my God, Aviva, the great Auburn slut, had been a virgin.

  56

  So I was her first then? But I felt no triumph as the days and the weeks passed, rather that my crime against Aviva had doubled, and so had my responsibility toward her. I recognized myself now as someone filled with ugly and perhaps uncontrollable impulses. Who knew what I might do next? I might break a window and leap past the debris to steal stereo equipment or diamonds. I might attack someone, unprovoked, in the street. I was drinking a lot, and in truth that made me too stupid and uncoordinated to do anyone much harm. But it did not prevent certain images from appearing before me over and over: Seung’s body sunk at the bottom of the Bog, drifting and bloated; a ring—Gnaritas et Patientia—manacling one swollen finger. I thought of confessing to the Dean of Students or the police, and could not convince myself to do it. It’s not that I believed I could be charged with Seung’s death—it would fall short of that—but in the eyes of the world the distinction would be technical. I knew what I knew: Aviva and I together had snuffed Seung out. I had no courage. Evenings, in bed, I put my face to my knees and rocked fast, using the motion to keep my mind blank.

  57

  David Yee and I weren’t the only ones from Charlie Bradley’s party at the Greyhound station that early morning, waiting for the sun to rise and for the buses that would take us toward our homes. There were others, too, as rumpled and night-stained as we were. Among them was Aviva. Did she come in before me or afterward? I never saw her enter. I was sitting with my head hanging somewhere between my chest and my feet. David, entirely sober and his polo shirt somehow still crisp and clean, was reading the previous Sunday’s New York Times. I was thirsty and headed toward the bathroom in the hope that the sink worked and I could get a few swallows of water. I saw a shape from the corner of my eye, well across the room, but I knew it as if it were the shape of a mother or a sister. For a moment I was terrified; in my mixed-up consciousness, I had the idea that I’d killed Aviva the night before and yet here she was, back from the dead to accuse me. Adrenaline spun me from my path to the bathroom back toward my seat. After resettling myself gingerly I stole another look, thinking that Aviva might have vanished by now, might have been merely a hangover-induced apparition. But there she was. I touched the ring in my poc
ket and turned it and turned it. I spoke silently to myself until I once more believed that the girl sitting on the opposite side of the room by the broken snack dispenser was an ordinary girl, an ordinary living girl whom I had tried to love in the grass last night until I’d seen that I could not reach her and did not deserve to reach her. David read the paper and occasionally looked up at me for an excessively long moment, clearly wanting to be asked about his evening.

  Something squawked over the loudspeaker, an unintelligible crackle. I checked my watch: it was still too early for the bus I would ride, with one transfer, all the way to New York City. I felt rather than saw Aviva rise, and as she passed I took her inventory: brown peasant skirt, oversized oxford—I finally could plainly see its color as pale blue—chunky brown clogs. No earrings, only two necklaces—why? A knapsack, apparently holding very little, for it drooped limply off one shoulder. She did not turn to look at me, and although I’d in no way expected that she would, the feeling of absence as she passed was like a dark wind. I snatched at her scent: stale booze, sleep, some remnant of the clean outdoors. I stood and stumbled after her, calling to her to wait. She turned, and her eyes frightened me: they were empty, without expectation or irritation. They seemed almost blind. I opened my fist, saw her register the little ruby ring lying in my hand. A spark fired briefly into those eyes. She reached out and took the ring, her cold fingertips brushing the lifelines on my palm. I longed to close my hand upon hers, just for a moment, by way of apology, by way of explaining that I would always love her, but I resisted, and I can say now that nothing in my life since has ever been as difficult as that self-control.

  “Thank you,” she said hoarsely. Her eyes did not meet mine again.

  Through the smeared glass door of the bus depot I watched Aviva cross onto the asphalt lane where her bus idled, juddering erratically. I saw her small form rise one step and then two into the dark interior. She would never come back to Auburn. I don’t know if she had already made that decision as I sat there, noting her exchange with the driver—she said something, and then he said something. People brought it up from time to time over that next year, as they made their college visits from Auburn—remember Aviva Rossner, she didn’t return. Aviva nodded at the driver and turned toward the long tunnel of seats and then she disappeared behind the tinted glass.