“Do I just lie?” Five whispered. “Do I just act as if I fucked her, and if someone asks, say a gentleman never tells?”
I told him to tell the truth. To act like it was nothing to apologize for, because it wasn’t. He fist-bumped me, weakly at first, but again and again, until the bumps acquired force. It was not what I had said, I think, because my advice was unremarkable. It was only that he could see the respect on my face, the respect for his tears, and respect, above all, was what he needed.
“I’m done telling Oprah about not getting it up last night,” he called to the living room. “And he made pancakes.”
Five minutes later everyone was in the sunny kitchen, eating, brewing coffee, rinsing dirty plates, taking out the trash, crushing beer cans, talking about internships. Nutella squeezed fresh OJ wearing only his Red Sox boxers and baseball cap, and juice ran down his arms. Buck proposed a toast to Five for continuing the Delta Zeta Chi tradition of almost fucking God. Dust motes frolicked in the air as if emitted by our muscles, and the kitchen smelled like garbage, chocolate, sweat, and spring. I wondered if there would come a day when I would cry.
That night I had a dream I didn’t want to have. In a white hotel room, I said to Nutella, Why not? What’s the reason for us not to, you and I? What harm? I woke up spattered in cum and consoled myself as I washed my abs, hunched over the sink in the bathroom down the hall, with a different question: when ten sportsmen slept beneath a common roof, the smells of their sweat joined in a common cloud, who could escape unsportsmanlike dreams?
The following evening was Otter Night at Theta Nu. We walked to the TN house with flattened cardboard boxes under our arms. To otter, you needed a cardboard box and a wet carpeted staircase. The theme of ottering was, look how brothers will pour buckets of water on a carpeted staircase, sled the stairs face-first, and be injured.
We ottered once a year at Theta Nu, but this Otter Night was remarkable for the presence of God, who’d been invited by Nutella. As soon as she climbed the stairs with the flattened box in her hand, we gave it up. None of us had seen a girl otter. To otter was to engage in a dick-bashing test of will. (Jockstraps were expressly forbidden.) To otter with tits was beyond imagining.
She stood at the top of the stairs, eyes closed, back straight. We shouted, drank, whispered that a girl wouldn’t do it, filmed with our phones. She laid her box on the ground, looked at the ceiling above her, as if to consult a watchful parent. And then, to the ticking of a drum machine and the groans of a rapper and the groans of the rapper’s woman floating above the rapper and the machine, she dove.
Her eyes flinched open every step. It was all quiet the three, four seconds of actual otter, but for the damp thump-thumps, and a collective fraternal gasp. At the end, she reached for the bannister to slow herself, a good move, and her landing at the bottom did not look unbearable. She came to a halt with her upper body on the soaked floor, her legs sprawled on the soaked stairs, her face in carpet, the cardboard sled tucked like a lover beneath her pummeled breasts.
“Give me a beer,” she said, and I hugged Stacks, Nutella, and Shmash, and they hugged me back, and we all screamed God, God, God.
Throughout the night, God drank beer and touched guys’ arms. And a weird thing happened: the brothers declined to put the moves on her.
No one steered her to the dance floor and freaked her. No one hovered beside her and asked her questions about her classes, holding his beer at chest height like a mantis to display his biceps.
The brothers were scared. Attempting her, Nutella had blown his load. Attempting her, Five had limp-dicked. And she ottered like a warrior.
But to me she was a secret collaborator. We were both Nutella poets, the way people we read in core humanities were nature poets. I wasn’t scared of her at all.
When the music went “Biggie Biggie Biggie,” I took her by the elbow and we took the floor. We humped the air between us; we collaborated.
When the two of us left early, hand in hand, stumbling down Frat Row to Delta Zeta Chi, she said, “I have to say, I’m surprised this is happening with you.”
I asked her what she meant.
“Just a wrong first impression.”
The house was abandoned, all the brothers at TN’s post-otter party, hoping to show off their injuries to girls who had seen them be brave. Our feet creaked on the stairs as she followed me up. In my room I gave her the plug to hook her phone to my speakers and asked her to choose music. She filled the room with the yarn-shopness that Five had described, and I recited her poem from memory, with the lines I’d added, while she sat on my bed with her chin on her fist.
“Consider it your poem too,” she said, and I knew I was supposed to kiss her, and I did.
I had never been to Silicon Valley, but that was where I went that night. Green grass in the shadow of silicon mountains, steel gray with chalk-white caps. Silicon wolves stalked the foothills, screen-eyed. I saw myself kneeling in that grass, doing for Nutella what God was doing for me. I made the sounds I thought Nutella would make.
I put on a condom as the yarn-shop song started over. When we were about to start fucking, I asked her to recite the poem. She looked at me for a moment. Please, I said, and she recited.
I recited with her, and it worked: when we fucked, Nutella was close, because like two lungs we had drawn him into the room. He was just out of reach, something sprayed in the air, like a poem.
I saw the blood only when we were finished. I looked at her face for an answer. She sat and sucked air through her nose, wiped her face with the back of her hand.
“Were you thinking about Nutella?” she asked.
I said no in a too-deep voice.
“You’re lying to me. Why did you want us to say the poem?” She started to cry. Her shoulders jumped in rhythm to her sobs. “It’s cool, but at least don’t lie to me.”
Cry, I ordered myself. We would cry together. I pictured tide pools in my eyes. I pictured what the funeral would look like if my little sister died, her friends crying in their glasses and braces. But I’d tried to make myself cry many times, and always the same thing happened: my eyes knew I was trying to do it, and refused. I couldn’t make myself cry any better than Nutella and Five-Hour could make themselves Melanie’s lovers.
I waited for a minute, listening, trying to join. Finally, I leaned over and put my lips under her eye, so that I could taste her. I wanted to tell her what I tasted: sour makeup and salt.
“I’m sorry I lied to you,” I said. “I thought about Nutella but also you at the same time.”
She took my hands and folded them across her ribs. And then something occurred to me.
“You can’t write a poem about how I said that,” I said. “About anything to do with me and Nutella. Even though it was your first time, you can’t write a poem about it that you show to people.”
I watched her blink in the dark.
“I might not write a poem about it,” she said. “But I’m going to talk about it with my friends.”
“You can’t,” I said. “You can’t tell them I thought about Nutella.”
“OK, I won’t,” she said, and I knew that she was now the one lying.
I pulled away from her and sat up in bed. I could see what was going to happen to me like a film projected on my wall: My life was ruined. She would tell her friends, who would tell other girls, and Shmash or Five would find out from one girl or another. Shmash and Five would be too embarrassed to tell Nutella, but they wouldn’t be able to resist telling other brothers, and one night, very drunk, a brother would tell Nutella. And nothing would happen. No one would say anything to me. No one would want to take anything from me. But brotherhood would be taken, in the end. The ease with which my brothers spoke to me, the readiness with which they spilled their guts in times of humiliation—this would be withdrawn. My place among them in the consulting firm of the clock and talons.
The arboretum full of chamber music exploded, as if God had sung a note so high it shat
tered four stories of green windows.
I sat there hating her. She must have hated me back, because she got out of bed, put on her clothes without speaking, and left the house by the time the brothers returned from TN. I lay awake and listened to them bang around the kitchen. They chanted in unison, a single, iambic owl: uh-ooh uh-ooh. It sounded like beware, beware.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Mastiff
FROM The New Yorker
EARLIER, ON THE TRAIL, they’d seen it. The massive dog. Tugging at its master’s leash, so that the young man’s calves bulged with muscle as he fought to hold the dog back. Grunting what sounded like “Damn, Rob-roy! Damn dog!” in a tone of exasperated affection.
Signs along the trail forbade dogs without leashes. At least this dog was on a leash.
The woman stared at the animal, not twelve feet away, wheezing and panting. Its head was larger than hers, with a pronounced black muzzle, bulging glassy eyes. Its jaws were powerful and slack; its large, long tongue, as rosy-pink as a sexual organ, dripped slobber. The dog was pale-brindle-furred, with a deep chest, strong shoulders and legs, a taut tail. It must have weighed at least two hundred pounds. Its breathing was damply audible, unsettling.
The dog’s straggly-bearded young master, in beige hoodie, khaki cargo shorts, and hiking boots, gripped the leather leash with both hands, squinting at the woman and at the man behind her with an expression that seemed apologetic or defensive; or maybe, the woman thought, the young man was laughing at them, ordinary hikers without a monster-dog to pull and strain at their arms.
The woman thought, That isn’t a dog. It’s a human being on its hands and knees! Such surreal thoughts bombarded the woman’s brain, waking and sleeping. As long as no one else knew about them, she paid them little heed.
Fortunately, the dog and its owner were taking another trail into Wildcat Canyon. The dog lunged forward eagerly, sniffing at the ground, the young man following with muttered curses. The woman and her male companion continued on the main trail, which was three miles uphill, into the sun, to Wildcat Peak.
The man, sensing the woman’s unease at the sight of the dog, made some joke, which the woman couldn’t quite hear and did not acknowledge. They were walking single file, the woman in the lead. She waited for the man to touch her shoulder, as another man might have done, to reassure her, but she knew that he would not, and he did not. Instead, the man said, in a tone of slight reproof, that the dog was an English mastiff—“Beautiful dog.”
Much of what the man said to the woman, she understood, was in rebuke of her narrow judgment, her timorous ways. Sometimes the man was amused by these qualities. At other times, she saw in his face an expression of startled disapproval, veiled contempt.
The woman said, over her shoulder, with a wild little laugh, “Yes! Beautiful.”
The hike had been the man’s suggestion. Or rather, in his oblique way, which was perhaps a strategy of shyness, he’d simply told her that he was going hiking this weekend and asked if she wanted to join him. He had not risked being rejected; he’d made it clear that he would be going, regardless.
The woman had been introduced to the man seven weeks earlier, at a dinner party at a mutual friend’s home in the Berkeley Hills. The friend, closer to the man than to the woman, had said to the man, “You’ll like Mariella. You’ll like her face,” and to the woman, “Simon’s an extraordinary person, but it may not be evident immediately. Give him time.”
The woman and the man had gone on several walks together already. But a hike of such ambition seemed, to the woman, something quite different.
She’d said, “Yes! I’d love that.”
It was late afternoon. They had been hiking for several hours and were now making their way single file down the mountain. The woman was descending first, then the man. The man, the more experienced hiker, wanted to watch over the woman, whom he didn’t trust not to hurt herself. She’d surprised him by wearing lightweight running shoes on the trail and not, as he was wearing, hiking boots.
She hadn’t thought to bring water, either. He carried a twenty-ounce plastic bottle of water for them both.
The man was a little annoyed by the woman. Yet he was drawn to her. He hoped to like her more than he did—he hoped to adore her. He had been very lonely for too long and had come to bitterly resent the solitude of his life.
It had been an unnaturally balmy day for late March. At midday, the temperature was perhaps sixty-eight degrees. But now, as the sun sank like a broken bloody egg, darkness and cold began to rise from the earth. The day before, the man had suggested to the woman that she bring a light canvas jacket in her backpack; he knew how quickly the mountain trail could turn cold in the late afternoon, but she had worn just a sweater, jeans, and a sun visor. (The woman’s eyes were sensitive to sunlight, even with sunglasses. She hated how easily they watered, tears running down her cheeks like an admission of weakness.) And she’d confounded the man by not bringing a backpack at all, with the excuse that she hated feeling “burdened.” In the gathering chill, the woman was shivering.
The trail had looped upward through pine woods to a spectacular view at the peak, where the man had given the woman some water to drink. Though she said she wasn’t thirsty, he insisted. There’s a danger of dehydration when you’ve been exerting yourself, he said. He spoke sternly, as if he were a parent she could not reasonably oppose. He spoke with the confidence of one who is rarely challenged. At times, the woman quite liked his air of authority; other times, she resented it. The man seemed always to be regarding her with a bemused look, like a scientist confronted with a curious specimen. She didn’t want to think—yet she thought, compulsively—that he was comparing her with other women he’d known, and finding her lacking.
Then the man took photographs with his new camera, while the woman gazed out at the view. Along the horizon was a rim of luminous blue—the Pacific Ocean, miles away. In the near distance were small lakes, streams. The hills were strangely sculpted, like those bald slopes in the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton.
Absorbed in his photography, the man seemed to forget about the woman. How self-contained he could be, how maddening! The woman had never been so at repose in her self. For nearly an hour he lingered, taking photographs. During this time, other hikers came and went. The woman spoke briefly with these hikers, while the man appeared oblivious of them. It wasn’t his habit, he’d told her, to strike up conversations with “random” people. “Why not?” she’d asked. And he’d said, with a look that suggested that her question was virtually incomprehensible, “Why not? Because I’ll never see them again.”
With her provocative little laugh, the woman had said, “But that’s the best reason for talking to strangers—you’ll never see them again.”
At least the bearded young man with the English mastiff hadn’t climbed to the top of Wildcat Peak, though other hikers with dogs had made their way there. A succession of dogs, in fact, of all sizes and breeds, fortunately most of them well behaved and disinclined to bark, several of them trailing their masters, older dogs, looking chastised, winded.
“Nice dog! What’s his name?” the woman would ask. Or “What breed is he?”
She understood that the man had taken note of her fear of the mastiff at the start of the hike. How she’d tensed at the sight of the ugly wheezing beast. It had to be the largest dog she’d ever seen, as big as a St. Bernard but totally lacking that dog’s benign shaggy aura. And so at the peak the woman made a point of engaging dog owners in conversations, in a bright, airy, friendly way. She even petted the gentler dogs.
As a child of nine or ten, she’d been attacked by a German shepherd. She’d done nothing to provoke the attack and could only remember screaming and trying to run as the dog barked furiously at her and snapped at her bare legs. Only the intervention of adults had saved her.
The woman hadn’t told the man much about her past. Not yet. And possibly wouldn’t. Her principle was Never reveal your weakness. Especially to
strangers: this was essential. Technically, the woman and the man were “lovers,” but they were not yet intimate. You might say—the woman might have said—that they were still fundamentally strangers to each other.
They’d been together in the woman’s house, upstairs in her bed, but they hadn’t yet spent an entire night together. The man felt self-conscious in the woman’s house, and the woman hadn’t been able to fall asleep beside him; the physical fact of him was so distracting. Naked and horizontal, the man seemed much larger than he did clothed and vertical. He breathed loudly, wetly, through his open mouth, and though he woke affably when she nudged him, the woman hadn’t wanted to keep waking him. In truth, the woman had never been very comfortable with a man at close quarters, unless she’d been drinking. But this man scarcely drank. And the woman no longer lost herself in drink; that life was behind her.
The woman liked to tell her friends that she wanted not to get married but to be married. She wanted a relationship that seemed mature, if not old and settled, from the start. Newness and rawness did not appeal to her.
“Excuse me? When do you think we might head back?” She spoke to the man hesitantly, not wanting to break his concentration. In their relationship, she had not yet displayed any impatience; she had not yet raised her voice.
At last the man put his camera, a heavy, complicated instrument, into his backpack, along with the water bottle, which contained just two or three inches of water now—“We might need this later.” His movements were measured and deliberate, as if he were alone, and the woman felt a sudden stab of dislike for him, anger that he could take such care with trivial matters and yet did not seem to love her.
The Best American Short Stories 2014 Page 32