Indecent

by Corinne Sullivan

  “You make a guy work hard.” He was grinning; we’re joking around, his grin seemed to say. It’s okay to do this now because we’re past all the unpleasantness.

  I thought to reaffirm my illness, but decided instead to take his lead. “That’s me. Princess Imogen, unable to be wooed.”

  His smile became uncertain, as though I’d told a joke that he wasn’t sure was offensive or not.

  “It’s from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.”

  Raj shrugged. “Never read it.”

  “Me neither.”

  Raj dipped a chip into the salsa, most of the large scoopful falling onto the tablecloth before it reached his mouth. We both stared at the spill. He smiled sheepishly. “Want a drink?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Conversation was easier after drinks were delivered. We talked about our classes, our students, our sports teams (he was the assistant coach of the swim team, which had just begun practicing for the winter season). I asked him about running, and in a rush of unexpected affection, asked if he would be interested in running together once the weather warmed up. He said he would. Our entrées were delivered, and we liberally picked off each other’s plates. Had I been interested in him, I would have said the date was going well.

  “I have to ask you something,” he said. Our plates were nearly empty, and he’d just started his fourth drink.

  “Okay,” I said, biting my straw. I was just about to finish my third drink.

  “The other night, Wednesday night…” He shook his head. “You’re going to think I’m crazy.”

  “Try me.”

  “The other night in the dorms I heard this noise like … like a girl crying. It was coming from the stairwell. And I’ve never heard you cry, of course, but … for the craziest reason, I was sure it was you.”

  My teeth were still clenched down on my straw. My heart pounded, and I felt weak from the effort of keeping my face impassive.

  “So I guess what I’m asking is…” He shook his head again, laughing. “Was it you?”

  He wasn’t baiting me; he truly did not know, I could tell. For an impulsive second I thought I might tell him the truth; he could know that there was someone else and that I hadn’t turned down his dates to be malicious, that I wasn’t a bad person. And ever since Chapin’s reaction to the secret, I was desperate to find someone who might understand. But I knew Raj wasn’t that person; all he wanted was for me to tell him that it wasn’t me, that yes, he was crazy, and I was more than willing to do that.

  “Wednesday night, huh?” I screwed up my face, pretended to think hard. “Hmm, no crying in boys’ stairwells as far as I can remember.”

  He laughed, and I joined him. We had a great laugh at his expense. “I’m hearing things,” he said.

  “A ghost.”

  “The Perkins Hall ghost, Crying Christine.”

  “Bawling Belinda.”

  Raj paid the check, and we left. He took my hand on the walk back, and I let him because the night had been nice and I didn’t want to spoil things. He walked me back to the Hovel and kissed me at the door (which I let him do) but didn’t ask to come in (which was a relief). I went in through the back door and watched him walk towards Perkins. I waited ten minutes before following him.

  * * *

  I’d begun planning it at the beginning of the night. And with each drink, I became more and more certain that the plan was good. I would go to Kip’s room and tell him that it didn’t matter what we were, that I didn’t want him to be my boyfriend. I would tell him anything to make things like they used to be. It was a humiliation I’d never be able to articulate sober. It was only when my inhibitions were down and my basest desires most potent—to fuck, to feel—that it felt okay to act.

  I looked down the hall to make sure Raj’s door was shut before I crept up the stairs. It wasn’t until after I knocked that it occurred to me that it was earlier in the night than I usually went over and that he might not be there, or worse, that he could have someone else in there with him. But he answered, and he was alone. For once, he was surprised to see me.

  “Hey?” he said, a question.

  I kissed him. I pushed my tongue between his teeth and sucked his bottom lip, open-mouthed and greedy. For the first time in a long time, he didn’t taste like booze. It took me longer than it should have to realize he wasn’t kissing me back. I pulled away. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s just…” He closed his door behind us and ran a hand over his chin, already sprouting new scruff. “Like, two days ago you stormed out of here all in a huff and now you’re back like nothing happened.”

  “I’m sorry.” My voice sounded meek, a little girl’s apology.

  “It’s not something to be sorry about. I’m just … confused.” He was looking at me with that familiar unnerving intensity.

  “I am, too.”

  He sat on his bed and sighed, looking down at his bare feet. “This whole thing is just kind of fucked up, you know?”

  “I know.” I sat down next to him. I knew he meant fucked up as in complicated, but still I couldn’t help but think it was other kinds of fucked up, too. A fucked-upness I’d spent most of my time in the last few months expelling from my mind. “I know, but I don’t want to stop.” I paused, hesitating. “I like you.”

  “I like you, too.”

  He said this as though it was obvious, but still the words sent up a spark somewhere deep inside me. “Congratulations,” I said suddenly.

  “What?”

  I had meant to say it warmly, genuinely, but it sounded everything but. “For the contest, I mean. The oratorical contest you won.”

  “Oh, that. Thanks.” His eyes drifted to the dresser where, I noticed, a new trophy sat. He flicked his eyes away while I continued to stare. “What was it about?” I asked the trophy. “Your speech.”

  “I don’t know. It was dumb.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Jesus.” He bristled. “It was about my grandfather, okay?”

  I was strangely disappointed by his answer. It was as though he’d told me his college essay was about scoring the winning goal in soccer or a Habitat for Humanity trip to Guatemala. “That sounds nice,” I said. I didn’t say, You didn’t tell me about the contest. I didn’t say, What else have you not told me? I was tired of pushing. He didn’t want to talk, and I didn’t want to ask him to anymore.

  I got up off the bed and knelt before him. I unbelted his pants and tugged them down to his ankles. He watched me solemnly, holding his breath. Slowly, I took him in my mouth and didn’t stop until he groaned and rolled his eyes back into his head and came, hot and carelessly, down the front of my dress. “—sweetheart,” he muttered appreciatively, stroking my hair.

  * * *

  I knew he was there the moment I opened the stairwell door; I could hear him breathing. But still I went down the stairs, and at the bottom, Raj stood from where he’d been sitting on the bottom step and we stared at one another.

  “I heard your heels when you came in,” he said finally. “An hour ago.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t need a mirror to know that my hair was tangled, that my eye makeup smudged, that the front of my dress was crusty with Kip’s cum.

  Raj shook his head slowly, disgusted. “I knew it. I fucking knew it.”

  “Knew what?”

  He stared at me angrily. “Are you going to try and deny something here?”

  I opened my mouth, closed it again. It was exactly what it looked like.

  “Right.” He turned to leave.

  “Are you going to tell?” The question sprang from my mouth without warning, an impulse, a plea.

  He didn’t turn around. “I don’t know, Imogene,” he said. I stared after him, even after the door clicked shut, even after his footsteps faded down the hall, even after his bedroom door shut behind him.

  FIFTEEN

  The next day, before I’d even brushed my teeth, I knocked on Chapin’s door. “Enter,” she called. I peeked around the
door uncertainly, and I found her stretched out on her bed in a pair of simple white briefs and a tank top. I stared at the nearly nonexistent curve of her ass a moment too long, not expecting to see so much of her.

  She sat up. “Yes?”

  “Oh.” I still lingered in the doorframe. “Did you want to, um…” I mimed wrapping something around my body, as though it had slipped her mind that she’d greeted me undressed.

  “Am I making you uncomfortable, Imogene?” She grinned.

  “No! No, I just wanted to make sure—”

  “I’m fine if you are.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” I entered the room and shut the door behind me, somehow feeling as though I was the one exposed. I stood by her bureau.

  Chapin patted the foot of her bed. “Come here! I won’t bite.” She loved my discomfort. I knew better than to argue and joined her on the bed. “Now.” She folded her feet into her lap and stuck her chin in her hands, assuming a campy telling-secrets-at-a-sleepover pose. “What’s up?”

  That whole week, ever since the All Hallows’ Eve Ball, Chapin had felt like a real friend, the closest I’d come to a friend since my old roommate Darby Li in college. She walked with me to and from meals. She invited me to go skiing with her during winter break. One morning, when I came down the stairs for breakfast, she even said I looked pretty. And it felt like more than her seeing Kip and Betsy Kenyon together at the Ball and finally hearing the entirety of my sordid affair, her kindness born of pity. As difficult as it would have been to believe a few months before, it seemed that Chapin simply liked me.

  “Something happened.” I fiddled with the quilt at the end of her bed, anything I could do not to look her in the face. “Raj knows.”

  In TV shows, the minimal explanation always leads to mutual understanding; in reality, my life didn’t mean nearly as much to other people as it did to me. Chapin frowned. “Knows…?”

  “He knows I’ve been hooking up with a student. That I am hooking up with a student.” I’d never said the words out loud before; I didn’t like the way they sounded. It was like admitting to a roommate that you masturbated under your sheets after she fell asleep, or to your parents that you used to pee in the pool. Acts that didn’t seem so bad in your mind but once made public—once you invited others to express disapproval or disgust—became deviant, forever tainting you.

  She looked unsurprised by the fact that Kip and I were still sleeping together. “What are you going to do?”

  I looked at her, helpless. I’d wanted a plan, reassurance, comfort. I don’t know why I kept expecting these things from others. “I don’t know.”

  “I know what you can do.” Chapin looked at me meaningfully.

  For once, the minimal explanation was enough. “I know.”

  “Then why don’t you stop?”

  I wanted so badly for her to understand. I wanted to say, I can’t because I’m in love with him. I can’t because I truly believe that after he graduates, we can be together. I can’t because I want him to take me out on his boat someday and introduce me to his parents and love me in the way that I know he’s capable. But I didn’t say any of that. “I’m going to stop,” I told her. “Really, I am. I promise.”

  She considered me for a moment and then asked, “Why do you do that to your face?”

  I immediately put my hand to my chin, to the raw patch of skin I’d struggled to cover with makeup that I knew she was eyeing.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean that to sound asshole-ish. I just meant, why do you pick at your skin like that when you know it’s going to make it worse?”

  I tried to deflect the subject, as I always did. “I spent four years with a therapist while she tried to figure that out.”

  “But why do you think you do it?”

  I contemplated the question for the first time in years. Finally, I said, “I think I do it because I think I can make it better. Only I can’t, of course. Then I keep picking, trying to fix my mistake, and it never heals and only gets worse and worse.” I lowered my hand from my chin, suddenly conscious that it was still there. “It’s disgusting, I know.”

  Chapin nodded. “I understand, and that makes sense. But that doesn’t mean you should keep doing it.”

  “I know,” I said, knowing I didn’t really mean it. “I know.”

  * * *

  The next week was the loneliest I’d ever been at Vandenberg. I was so convinced Raj had told the girls that he’d caught me—or at least that I had done something wrong—that I avoided them altogether. I didn’t have the energy to win them over. I didn’t have the energy to deal with anger or judgment. I didn’t want to see any of them—especially Raj—because what I most feared was not the loss of their companionship, but to be told by them that I was in the wrong. They wouldn’t understand—no one would understand!—and so that is who I spent my time with: no one. Even Chapin, my confidante, had become someone to avoid. Ever since I’d visited her in her room, she’d hissed constant reminders in my ear (“Have you ended it?”) and filled my phone with increasingly frenzied text messages (Do it! Do it!!!). Instead, I listened to “For Luna” over five hundred times. Betsy Kenyon’s profile page became the most visited website on my browser history. I ignored my mom’s phone calls because, after a few days of this, I became accustomed to the silence. Letting someone else in would destroy that. Hearing a familiar voice would only remind me how alone I was.

  I didn’t hear from Kip. I alternated between certainty that his name would appear on my phone any minute and doubt that I would ever hear from him again.

  Loneliness, I’ve found, is like drowning: it doesn’t matter how stupid you look—how much you flail around or scream for help—because all that matters right then is getting through it. One afternoon at the grocery store I bought a bottle of wine—too-sweet pink Moscato—and I downed it in my bedroom in one sitting; that wasn’t something I would have ever done before. The deviance of drinking alone made me almost giddy until my stomach protested and I ended up with my head in the toilet bowl. Another day, after class, I took the train into the city by myself, thinking I might walk around, enjoy some anonymity, disappear for a while, and the moment I arrived I regretted my decision and caught the next train back to Scarsdale. I sat at my window and watched touch football games in the quad. I listened to my roommates laugh and talk in the kitchen and reminded myself they weren’t laughing and talking about me.

  One night, the night I drank the wine, I even texted Zeke Maloney from college. He didn’t answer, and I was upset, but really, what could he have offered me? What could anyone who wasn’t Kip offer me? Kip was—inexplicably, unappeasably—all that I wanted. Letting go would be too easy. Letting go was, at the same time, an impossibility.

  Around the middle of the week I sent an email to Clarence, asking if he wanted to get coffee and talk. There wasn’t anything romantic in my intentions, of course; I wanted company, and I figured he could use some, too. I could edit his papers. I could be his advisor, the big sister I was yearning to be, let him open up to me about his stresses and insecurities. I didn’t let myself acknowledge the real reason, the ulterior motive: I wanted to feel competent. I wanted to have something to offer. I was embarrassingly excited when he accepted.

  We agreed to meet at the coffee shop on campus Thursday afternoon. He grinned when he saw me and looked nervously at the few tables of boys around us as he took the chair across from me—I felt sure it was his first time meeting up with anyone there. I grinned back; I wasn’t used to feeling self-congratulatory, but I did. This is as much for him as it is for me, I thought.

  Over the course of an hour, a shared scone, and two hot chocolates (neither of us were coffee drinkers, which made my offer of the coffee shop for a meeting place seem ridiculous), Clarence became less player-in-the-drama-I’d-made-of-Vandenberg and more person—only child, Vermonter, oboe prodigy. He told me about the best friend he’d ever had, Lucian Warren, who’d been claimed by leukemia three summers ago. He told me about his dream o
f working for the refugee services division. He told me about his suspicion that Christopher Jordan, whose dorm room neighbored his in Slone House, was a marijuana user. By the end of our hot chocolates, I felt sure that I loved him—a familial love, a love I thought I’d forgotten how to feel. A love without complications.

  “You know you can always ask me if you need anything,” I told him. “That I’m here if you need me.”

  “I know,” he said, while his face revealed his surprise at the offer. He looked at me, then put the lip of his empty cup to his mouth, pretending to drink. I knew he felt the lopsided nature of our sharing but understood as well as I did that he wasn’t to be my confidant. I was the big sister; it was my job to collect his secrets and hold them safe, his to offer them and pretend I didn’t have any secrets of my own.

  I didn’t want Clarence to know my secrets. I liked myself in his eyes: sage, straightforward, beyond reproach or blame.

  * * *

  Dale asked me to stay after class on Friday, and I almost thought to leave anyway, to pretend to have not heard him or forgotten. By then the idea of Dale’s dirty, empty apartment disgusted me; as lonely as I was, a relationship with Dale was never something I fantasized about, never a source of excitement or arousal. Men scared me, I realized—their desires and experiences were too foreign to me. I could never gratify one and would never—at least any time soon, it seemed to me—understand one.

  “Imogene.” He was unusually somber as he waved me over to his desk. I sat in the chair across from him, wishing the last student out had left the door open.

  “Hi,” I said; it came out shrill.

  “Hi.” His voice fell flat, a deflated ball thudding on the pavement. “Imogene, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  I willed myself to relax, to appear comfortable. I made my eyes wide as though he had never touched my thigh or said he couldn’t talk to a girl who looked like me.

  “You’re being transferred to another teacher next semester.”