by Amy Benson
I was fifteen and he was the golden boy, not the sparkling-eyed boy. The details here are only shorthand to our shared experience. Conjure your first real crush, a crush so arduous it was like having a job—with heavy lifting, office gossip, and endless negotiating of nonexistent signs (Was that a longer-than-usual look my way? Did he play that song on purpose?). I had had a crush on him since I was twelve, but it had grown acute in the last year. In high school, more than 350 miles away, I had been writing his initials, MIT, with a little mitten drawing in the top corner of every single notebook page. I’m sure I humiliated myself in other, less spectacular ways as well. I cried over him, of course, and I practiced my trumpet, shut in our little shower house behind the cabin, working myself into a romantic apex as I figured out how to play radio love songs, eyes streaming at the wobbly notes of love unreturned.
This is the boy who, on the Fourth of July, at the community center dance in the small town twenty miles down the road, asked me if I wanted to go to the car with him to get some gum. Big Red, to quicken the pulse.
I have always had trouble mastering lust for lust’s sake—but I’m not boasting. I consider this a weakness. For me, lust has almost always had to mean something, to be justified. My need to be special has often overwhelmed other, savvier needs—for example, the need to read people appropriately or to learn from experience. If the boy I “loved,” miracle of miracles, wanted me, some deep recognition must have passed between us, I reasoned. He must have spotted my elusive saving graces. Sometimes, I failed to realize, a boy just wants.
Later that night, my sister and someone else came out to drive us home. I sat in the back seat with the golden boy, pinned under the weight of his sleeping head. I was mortified to be the one people might talk about (What did they do back there? Not much, actually), but I was also proud. I had won something. I had been chosen, finally, as his special girl. And with him passed out on my shoulder, having kissed me and, rather lazily, I later realized, tried to feel me up, I was already the long-suffering girlfriend.
Since this story must seem familiar, you probably already know how it ends, but I’ll tell you anyway. Two days later we all convened again on the dock for our swimming ritual, me sneaking looks at him, half-guilty memories of his foreign skin close at hand. I wondered what was supposed to happen next. How did people “go together,” besides mingling spit in the back seats of cars? I could think of nothing to do with him beyond that night. After everyone else left, he asked me if he could give me a ride on his motorbike the quarter mile off the dock and around to the beginning of our family road.
Riding on the back of a motorcycle is clearly a prelude to sex—the full-body embrace, calves to cheek pressed against his back, his neck. No one doubts a man and a woman riding up to a restaurant together on a motorcycle are slamming roughly together morning and night. I’ve only been on a motorbike that once, but I knew even then it felt like the sex I hadn’t yet had. To hang on for that brief ride, my inner thighs coated his outer thighs, my hands, water-chilled, molded his abdomen. I was restrained, though. It wasn’t in me to disbelieve what everyone seemed to be saying: girls who give too much away give it all away, every bit of power they doubtfully had in the first place. A fucked girl, in other words, is fucked. So I rounded my shoulders and kept my breasts off his back. When I got off, I could still feel the press of him along my legs. Definitely sexier than the back seat of the car. Of course, this is when he dumps me.
Eyes on the gravel, usually placid hands suddenly agitated . . . There’s this girl I’ve been seeing on Drummond Island. I guess we’ve been sort of going out. So, I guess that’s it. Just so you know. And that was it.
He was just a boy, worth, perhaps, half a chapter. When my good friend happened to meet him years later, she couldn’t believe he was the boy to whom I gave years of my earliest, purest crush; we were so incompatible. I should have been grateful to him, though. Maybe he seems a bastard, using me for my warm mouth and the scent of hair spray rubbed off at my neck—but he could have gone on using me. He might have later put his hands under my sweater, guided my fist to his crotch, unclenched my fingers and rubbed them up and down; he might have kneaded the muscles of my neck until they gave and then pushed my face toward his open zipper. I might have reasoned to myself: Well . . . I’ve loved him for so long . . . And I could have continued to use him for a bewildering imitation of love. But he didn’t let that happen. He looked at my frozen face and told me, No. Thank the gods for him, really.
I saw a shrink for a time, I’m not ashamed to say. I was desperate once in my life, had to fight the urge to step into traffic, lean too far over the railing of a bridge over a New Jersey river. I pictured again and again pieces of my head spread on the wall behind the tiny futon that used to be my bed, a small, chill gun I didn’t own dropped to my lap. This is bad ethics: I shouldn’t let the people who will worry about me know this. What does it serve to speak about those urges that have nothing to do with making life more complex? Suicide is the ultimate simplification, the rest from difficulty and industry. And shouldn’t the project of our lives be complexity? Doesn’t this story locate moments that bloom or fester with dis-ease? As children, we learn the dimensions of the things around us in 2D. Then, in adolescence, we learn those things all over again, in 3D. We learn that, say, principles, rules, states of being, people, are reversible; that when you flip something inside out, you might forget what it was a moment before, it is now so unlike itself. Then, what we didn’t want to know, the reverse of all of our expectations, becomes tenacious memory.
Anyway, the doctor, my “lady,” as I called her, once asked me to remember experiences from my childhood in which I witnessed anger. Oddly, it wasn’t my father’s frequent, slow-burn pouting that came to mind. Nor my sister’s whipcord insults, her door slammed in my face. Nor was it, of course, my own icy retreats. It was the face of my usually gentle, kind, and padent mother twisted up, her cheeks and eyes flushing red. Her voice, when she finally got to me on the road (moments after the golden boy had sputtered away) and grabbed my upper arm until her fingers practically met through the skin, sounded at once strangled, heartbroken, and (did I imagine it?) triumphant.
I was not abused; most people weren’t. But I was—we all have been—marked by fallible people, since there is no other kind. And we do not learn democracy, if we learn it at all, from the way we process experience. For what stays with us, perhaps even defines us, are the anomalies, the irretrievable bad acts of good people (not the habitual misdeeds of troubled people). It is our own goodness that gives us the power to be terrible. I am in my therapist’s office learning to unmake the things that have made me, and I remember my mother’s rare anger first. The reverse gesture. The star falling out of the sky. It seems hardly fair that the best one of our family unit should be remembered for the moment she fell through herself, through the careful web of her own forbearance.
Imagine holding gauze to the skinless stomach and chest of a man, picking stones and glass, bugs and the wheel of a Matchbox car out of the flesh below where the skin should be. Imagine working an ER and seeing women open like carrion, having given their eyes and hearts and pancreases. Or the skulls of men made liquid, the features of their faces turned inside out. Motorcyclists all. My mother was a nurse, and what authority she was denied elsewhere she wielded freely for the sake of our health. She had told us many times, with eyes rolled up as if already seeing us without legs or scalp or teeth, never to ride a motorcycle. But I hadn’t thought “motorcycle” when I saw the empty space on the back of the golden boy’s meager dirt bike, and the dirt road had been empty as always.
From where our private road begins, it curves along the shore about thirty yards, shielded by high grasses and raspberry brambles and saplings. It is usually a cool, quiet place unfolding to a short sequence of Bensons’ cabins in various states of disrepair. For me, it has always held the promise of oasis, of the return home. But that day I had to walk back through images of my failure. I
had been used, and there was nothing special in me. My mother, though, having watched me get on the motorbike, was waiting to show me just how special I was to her.
They were right—he was right, she was right. But they were terrible, too, coming at me in brutal succession, with both betrayal and shame, and I cried in the shower until my eyes swelled nearly shut. He might have told a prettier lie; she might have slowed her drive to my arm once she’d seen my fallen face.
Surprise—when you expect one thing and get another. The moment in which someone makes you see the richness of his or her potential, or reveals the way the world resists our imagined narratives. Churches would have us believe that faith is terribly difficult. It is not. We are built for belief, for blocking out contradiction, for the all-or-nothing, for trusting in only one aspect of a person or experience at a time. To resist the easy slide into death we must learn complexity, but it is difficult to remember—at all times—that everything is always also its opposite. Every romance has a bundle of tawdry motives; every act of love has a flesh-parting pinch. To remember the inside-out days and find them good takes everything we have. But it gives us even more. I am pathetic I am brave. You are narrow you are fervent. My mother is angry she is generous, grieved, doing the best she can.
Part II, Reprised
If It Were to Happen, It Might Happen Like This
Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.
—TIM O’BRIEN
The Perfect Day
I imagine I have the perfect partner. She would be female; she would eat foods I hadn’t yet heard of and know how to wear eye shadow. She would think I was clever or cute only when I wasn’t trying to be, and she would teach me how to forgive. She would be lightly experienced in the ways of girls.
I lie next to her, this girlfriend of mine, the planes of her face portentous and moving. I hold her breast. It is such a soft bird—trembly but not at all scared to be held. Her stomach is talc. I watch my polished nails string bright spots through her hair, five small explosions in a field of brown. Have I really made her mouth curve so happily? I worship this woman as a man would—carefully, as if she were a delicate object; and I love her as a woman would—teasing out every strand of her she would wish to keep inside.
Mostly, I would want our courtship to be a happy movie montage of frenetic love—our days together as one long children’s party with uncalled-for laughter, small cups of sweet, empty food, surprise gifts for everyone, the prettiest shoes, pink glasses with curlicue straws filled with vodka and something red, and music by which we run ourselves breathless. It is the happiest honor to make her laugh; I would play the clown for her for the rest of my life.
Our nights should be a cabaret—boys in boas and lipstick, girls in wigs and blush. Party frocks all around. So many glittering go-go boots, so many penciled-in moles. My wig is lilac and sprinkled with stars, and everyone gets the joke. I sway across the stage with rolling eyes and a finger to my dimple. Ha Ha Ha. Lovely drag queen, am I not? Her smile tells me that I am not, but I am the next best thing. In her pink and tasseled dress she is not even sure with whom she is flirting. She just twirls, flirt falling from her where it will. But the boys and girls and the boys and boys and the girls and girls here are more likely to swap lipsticks than kisses. The only reason for a clock is to tell when we have stayed up past four. And this is the best part of the night: lipstick trailing, hair askew, feet hurting too far from the ground, boys’ chins darkening, girls shining through their powder. Through a drift of sequins, fans, tassels, dance cards, and curls from wigs of every color, we find each other. She sits on my lap, runs her finger down my nose, says, What good jokes we have played, not How everyone shone! How I want to take off your stockings and see you in the tenderness of your thighs.
I tremble with every button she touches. She says love makes her fingers clumsy. I say I am shocked by the audacity of getting what I want. Yet even now, stripped to the essential strands of bone and vessel and nerve, even now I close my eyes to sleep and there is the sparkling-eyed boy—one dream subsuming another. A fantasy superior in every way simmers next to me in a sweet-smelling cloud, yet when my teenage love—so far away, so small and unfulfilled—appears to me, standing in the lake we have in common, crinkling his sparkly eyes and offering his hand, I take it and wade farther and farther under water, where he has no wife, where there are no intervening years. He says in perfect dream-speak, There was no one to love but you. My heart would not have understood itself any other way. I crush his fingers in my hand. He says, I want to swim away with you, but you have to choose now or else I will kick and begone, always gone. I ask for more time, taking water into my lungs. He shakes his head, paddles his feet. He is drifting away, and I wake up, reaching out for him. I miss him as I would miss my own tongue.
She is still asleep, mouth parted as if mid-warning. I have always woken before the people around me into the blank space of morning. This is a dangerous hour. Our minds are not yet beholden to one another. I can think anything until she wakes. I think I might have laughed too loudly last night, danced like a fool, hoped for too much. I think: the shinier the joy, the thicker the tarnish. I am disappointed that I can still have thoughts like these, and I think there must be something I need yet. Must he take away my gold foil gift-when-everyone-else-has-forgotten; must she become one among others? May I not have an alpha and an omega? This is not his fault, but someone needs to be blamed for mornings withering before they start.
A Week at the Edge of the Woods
A Fictional Triptych of Adultery
I was raised to believe if you think a thing, you are as guilty as if you’ve done it.
I’ve been thinking: if I tempted him enough, he just might touch me. I don’t believe he really would, but the thing about knowing someone since he was young is you think you can reach all of those vulnerable spots he has since learned to cover over. I’d lie to him and tell him, If I could do it all over again, everything would be different. I’d say he deserves the happiness only we could bring each other. That he has been giving and giving of himself, being good when other men would have been bad, for so long, he has earned this indiscretion. But this tactic doesn’t need a special knowledge; it would work on many people, quick to believe themselves noble victims. We want to see in ourselves a special forbearance of a special burden. There is no room in this fantasy for evidence that feeling good doesn’t require others to feel bad.
Earlier this summer, while visiting the sparkling-eyed boy and his wife with my father, they mentioned that she had taken their baby to visit her parents for a week earlier that summer. He had been alone for a week. I slowly turn his time “alone” into “lonely.” I imagine we have done something with our bodies and I imagine that it needed to be done.
…
I imagine it begins up north, of course, midsummer in his house by the edge of the woods. And this is how my fiction of our affair goes:
I convince myself before I park my car behind the barn, out of sight of the road, that I will just pop in and say hi, that this is our chance to catch up, listen with sympathy to each other’s complaints. I laugh too much—I do this when I’m nervous. He talks animatedly in his frayed voice, perhaps testing the corners of his brain for his potential for adultery. I tell him a story, haltingly, about how I have these dreams about him—no, no (blush), not those kinds of dreams. Nice dreams, in which we walk together through the forest. We catch each other’s eyes the moment we both are thinking: we did not plan this. We stand and walk to the stairs, and he stops on the landing, turns, and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear, a maternal gesture, as if to say, simultaneously, Take comfort and Be ready. Then he turns again, his feet rising before me with each step in clean white tube socks.
…
The intimate talk of lovers we balance on each other’s limbs, fragile as real English teacups. He is slow to lean into me. But one cannot step back in
such moments. We have a template for most things: rising action, climax, denouement. For all stories we know well, there is no retreat—war, crop, conception, drug, affair. It is written: we must press closer before we part.
…
He stands at the window, looking out at the purple-dark woods. In order to breathe into the moment peaceably, there are many things we must edit from our consciousness—drawers full of her clothes, the scent of apple room spray, the widening fissures of betrayal. Is he regretting what we have already done this first night? Is he listening to the sift of wind through the cedar and poplar? One could drift on that, buoyed by coyote and insect. Our room is dark, and so his form is thrown into relief (what a beautiful phrase, “thrown into relief,” “catapulted into succor”) by the light of the stars. His naked back is turned to me, his arm resting above his head against the sill. It looks as though he is being filled through his raised arm with molten body pooling and pressing at the edges of his long, work-formed shell. See? His lower half—legs and buttocks—have cooled already to a stark white; his upper half is still thick with churning liquid glowing brown under the surface. I understand, suddenly, the painter in love with his model, taking something, imparting something with his glance. Touch seems weak in comparison.
…
Here, in this bedroom, we do not fit into any representations of time: calendar, clock, television shows that switch on the hour or half hour, sundials, wheels of light and dark. But then time itself is only a quaint effort to make sense of living, as we, with our creased brows and careless sheets, are an effort to understand the nature of love. Love is, for the moment, an animal between us, breathing poorly as if from a wound.