Unteachable

by Leah Raeder

  We stopped to listen to a guy busking with an acoustic guitar and a voice like liquid velvet. His skin shone russet-brown in the sun. He sang without seeming to care whether anyone listened, his eyes half-closed, his smile private and inward. I felt like a voyeur watching, but couldn’t look away. That’s how I wanted to be. Creating something beautiful without caring who noticed. Doing it for myself, for sheer joy.

  When the guy started singing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” I nearly lost it. I pulled out a bill without looking at it and dropped it into his guitar case. His smile flickered at me for a moment, then receded back into itself.

  I walked away, trying to swallow the tightness in my throat.

  “What was that about?” Evan said when he caught up.

  I shook my head. How do you explain that everything is too beautiful for words?

  If Wesley had been here, he would’ve filmed the moment, captured it. Raising the camera was his first impulse; mine was to feel, to let the world crash against my skin.

  What if I was wrong about what I wanted to do with my life? What if I really just wanted to live, and hadn’t truly come alive until I met Evan?

  I stood in the middle of downtown St. Louis, staring at sun-beaten concrete.

  “Maise.”

  I raised my face.

  He didn’t say anything else. We stood there as people streamed around us, like we had in the hallway at school. My brain simmered with wine and summer heat. I felt lost.

  Evan did something he couldn’t have done back home. He wrapped his arms around me, pressing my face against his.

  When we returned to the car I felt lighter, unburdened. We drove up to the Tivoli Theatre, an old-time movie house with a huge neon sign and a legit marquee. Stepping inside took us straight back to the Golden Age: velvet ropes and red carpet, classic Hollywood posters. The auditorium looked like a ball room with chandeliers dripping from vaulted ceilings, rows of plush seats, even a curtain over the screen. I stared at everything, starry-eyed. Evan watched me.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  He smiled. “Tell me about it.”

  Remember the rollercoaster?

  I zoned out during the film, which was a lot of vague, dreamy dialogue anyway. I was thinking about how far I’d come in five weeks, and how far I would go until I reached an ending of some kind, and Evan’s hand, warm and solid, holding mine.

  I was quiet in the car on the way to meet The Friend.

  “He’s sort of a douche,” Evan said apologetically. “You won’t miss anything.”

  Because they were going to meet in a club, where I couldn’t go, because I was eighteen. Because I was pretending to be an adult in his world full of actual adults.

  He left me with his car. “Two hours, I promise. Not a minute more.”

  Quick kiss. His hand on the side of my face. An earnest look into my eyes.

  Then it was just me and the stuffed pony, alone in the city.

  “You need a name,” I said.

  A hundred names leapt out from the streets of St. Louis.

  “Louis,” I said.

  My creativity was legendary.

  Louis and I drove around aimlessly for a while. Twilight came on faster here within the forest of steel and glass, neon signs popping out, streetlights making cigarette burns in the darkness. The city smelled like hot asphalt and the weedy tang of the Mississippi. There was something melancholy and restless in me, magnified by seeing people together, laughing, holding hands, free with each other. I ditched the car in a parking garage, leaving Louis perched atop the wheel. I wasn’t far from the river.

  I walked past the Old Courthouse, the great dome lit up and the molding looking like a wedding cake, with the Arch shining behind it. The closer I got, the higher it seemed to rise into the sky. The city thrummed around me, a live passionate thing full of hearts and hands and desires, and all of it seemed to concentrate here in a collective defiance of gravity. I took a photo from a nearby park: a silver bend in the night sky, the trail of something that had tried to escape the earth but not quite made it.

  Okay, so I was being morose.

  I sat on a bench in the park. A dad and his little girl walked by, the daughter gripping a handful of black-eyed Susans. She grinned at me shyly as if I’d seen a secret. Her dad smiled, too, but his smile dipped to the bare legs I crossed before he looked away.

  For the first time in ages, I didn’t feel good about that. I felt confused. I was eighteen, out in a big city doing whatever the fuck I wanted with an older man, but I was too young to go with him to a club, or to have my own real place, real job, real life. Wesleypedia told me once that human brains don’t fully develop until age twenty-five. Seven more years until I was a full person.

  What the hell am I? I thought. Too old to be a real teenager, too young to drink. Old enough to die in a war, fuck grown men, and be completely confused about what I was doing with my life.

  You’re right, Evan, I thought. No one knows us here. I don’t even know myself.

  I thought about the man with the guitar. A nobody on a street corner, but better than a million somebodies on TV. He didn’t care—he did it for love. Love was what made it good and beautiful and ephemeral. And I thought about the man I was waiting for, the way my eyes had been gradually opening, sincerity replacing sarcasm, the way I felt I was constantly waking up and yet slipping deeper into a beautiful dream.

  And it hit me—what my semester project was going to be about.

  #

  By the time Evan called, the night was heavy and complete. He asked where I was and said he’d meet me. I was nervous about seeing him again, because something inside me had changed. An acknowledgment of things forming and fitting together into definite shapes. I thought it would show on my face.

  He got out of a cab and my heart pulsed in my throat.

  “How did it go?” I said.

  His hair looked messier now. His collar was open wider, his skin gleaming with a fine rime of sweat. He put his hands on my shoulders, his fingers flexing. “It’s a deal. Two hundred a month and it’s ours every weekend.”

  So we’re doing this, I thought. We’re going to move our affair across state lines. Was it legal in Missouri? Did it matter? We could be ourselves here the way we couldn’t in Illinois. No worries about who would see us, recognize us. I felt my heart echoing through my whole body. Jesus, I am actually going to do this with him.

  I let my breath out. “That’s way cheaper than Lolita motels.”

  He laughed. “I don’t care what it costs. I care that you get to be yourself. That we don’t have to hide.”

  He was slightly drunk. I felt a twinge of—something—at the fact that he was drunk and I wasn’t, but I let it go, because my giddiness was greater. This man didn’t just want to fuck me. We were making plans for some kind of actual, lunatic life together.

  You were so wrong, Wesley.

  “Let’s go look at this ridiculous thing,” I said, taking Evan’s hand. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  The Arch was freakishly huge. Each leg was as large as a house, plated in sheets of stainless steel the length of cars. Looking up gave me instant vertigo. You had to admire this kind of pointless audacity, planting something so bold and stunning and utterly useless right in the navel of America. It was supposed to be a monument to going west, growing the country, Lewis and Clark and Manifest Destiny, but all I saw was a big gorgeous fuck-you to the universe. The steel was inscribed with graffiti from the ground to well over my head.

  “Typical,” I said. “Someone makes something saying ‘I was here,’ then a million people put their own ‘I was here’ on it. We’re so vain.”

  Evan eyed me wryly. “You’re so cynical.”

  “Not true.”

  “Prove it.”

  I took his face in my hands and pulled it down to me. Looked at him the way he’d looked at me earlier, my hands full of fire and my skin a veil of flame. Then I kissed him. There was alcohol on his b
reath and smoke and cologne on his clothes and I didn’t care. He put his arms around me, pressing me against the steel. My eyes closed but I felt that knocked-over sense of vertigo again. My heart curved up into the sky just like the absurd beautiful thing behind us. I turned my face away, laughing, breathless.

  “Did I prove it?”

  He turned my face back to his and kissed me again, fiercely.

  His hands slid to the small of my back. He pulled me into him. I kissed him like his lips were water and I could not get enough of it. We were part of this place, the blood thrashing inside the steel heart of this city, the crimson in its stone veins. We were the cells burning like stars. People like us. Passion like ours.

  I didn’t even realize there were other people around until I laid my head back against the metal. Two men strolled past, middle-aged, hand in hand, and one smiled at us. And I knew then that no one saw anything wrong. They only saw two people who were crazy about each other.

  I could get used to this.

  I asked a woman to take a picture of us beneath the Arch. I looked at the camera, but Evan looked at me.

  “Two hours until we’re home,” I said as we walked out of the park, arm in arm.

  Evan gave me an unreadable glance. He didn’t say anything.

  We kissed again in the garage, and when he leaned me against the driver’s window and pressed his thigh between my legs, I gave serious consideration to another first: sex in a parking garage. I was wet and he knew it, and he was grinding his leg between mine and making me insane and sullen and miserable with want. My wiser self won out. We were doing things right. No need to risk everything now, on the cusp of…getting away with it.

  Still there. That kernel of wrongness. That thing I didn’t entirely want to lose, because the nasty little Lolita in me liked it.

  “I’ll drive,” I breathed against his ear.

  We were quiet on the way back. A tense, moody quiet at first, almost hating each other for not consummating this awful desire. Then the miles smoothed it away, and the starlight and tail lights soothed us. Evan had his eyes on me most of the ride. After a while he ran fingertips over my ear, my jaw, my collarbone. Not distractingly. Just enough to draw a pleasant shiver. To keep me awake.

  It was late when I finally pulled into town. Before I could head for my house, he gave me directions to his.

  My heart sped up. It didn’t make sense to go there first. How would I get home?

  Answer: I wasn’t going home.

  “Tomorrow’s a school day,” I said, staring at the windshield. “I have a class with you.”

  His hand circled the back of my neck. “I need you tonight.”

  Has there ever been a more effective line in the history of pickup lines than “I need you?”

  My teacher lived in a second-floor apartment in a staple-shaped group of buildings surrounding a parking lot, as if it were some kind of gemstone, something to gaze upon admiringly. There were other cars in the lot, other eyes in the windows. We walked inside without touching, but his stare was palpable. I followed him upstairs. My mind checked off every mistake I’d made since the beginning: kissing him in school, Wesley seeing the call from E, Britt handing Evan my phone as he took me home, and now this. Were we sabotaging it? Were we trying to heighten the danger to eke out some pathetic erotic thrill? Did we want someone to know, to stop us?

  In retrospect, you know all the answers. You know the shadowy throes of your heart.

  In the moment, you’re a teenage girl walking into your teacher’s apartment and your heart is beating like hummingbird wings, a wild red blur in your chest.

  He opened the door.

  When I stepped inside my whole body tingled, as if I’d passed through an enchanted gate. The lights in the parking lot filled the rooms with a soft sepia wash. Smell of new paper and fresh laundry. Everything looked simple and clean and sedate. No messy effusion of emotion, no clash of warring desires like in my whirlwind-wrecked room, that spiral galaxy of torn-out magazine pages and printed quotes from the internet and the random debris of my childhood, swirling around an explosive center. This place was fully formed, solid. I was a trespasser here. A girl spy in the land of adults. The crescent moon winked through balcony doors and I crept toward it, and there they were, those carnival lights he’d watched, thinking of other people’s happiness, of me.

  Wish you were here, I thought. And now I am.

  Hands around my waist.

  His body against mine, warm and hard. I turned my head to one side and his face grazed my cheek. The tickle of his stubble sent a charge through me, my nerves lighting up like neon. We kissed the corners of each other’s mouths, his hands slipping under my shirt, running over my belly, the arch of my ribs. When he reached my breasts his fingers became possessive, rough. His body was rigid and unyielding behind me, his hands almost tearing at my flesh—it felt like he wanted to take me apart. That meanness I thought we’d left in St. Louis returned with a vengeance. I dragged my hand up the inside of his leg, grabbing his dick through his jeans, and he took my earlobe between his teeth, painfully. I felt the shock in every extremity, my toes, my nipples, my fingertips. I dug my nails into his thigh.

  We made our way to the bedroom in fits and starts, stopping to tear clothes from each other. Even when I was naked he seemed to want more, wanted to strip me to the bone. He kissed me so hard it left my lips raw, the inside of my mouth bruised, and I couldn’t get enough. I wanted it rougher, harder. Everything that had stewed in me all day came boiling to the surface. He was driving me back toward his bed when I grasped his face, making him look at me.

  “Who am I to you?” I said, my voice hoarse. “Maise, or your student?”

  The animal single-mindedness lifted for a moment. His chest heaved, but his eyes were clear and colorless in the moonlight. “Both,” he whispered.

  I felt chills.

  “Then fuck me, Mr. Wilke.”

  He turned me around to face his bed. My heart hammered. I knew what to do. Got on my knees, palms splayed across the sheet. My hair fell around my face. The sheet wrinkled in my hands, moonlight scrawling over it in wet white ridges. I felt totally vulnerable and terrified and perfectly calm all at once. Noises behind me, a drawer sliding, something crinkling, then his weight and heat were pressing me down into the bed. He clutched my hips. I felt his stomach tighten against my back, his abs furrowing, and even though I knew it was coming I gasped when he thrust inside me, my hold on myself unraveling, my hands and feet instantly going numb. He held me tightly in place and fucked me slowly and it felt like I was coming apart from the inside. My fingers curled in the sheet. His stubble rubbed against my shoulder blade, his breath hot on my skin. As soon as it evaporated that spot turned cool until he breathed again. We’d been doing this to each other for weeks, but this was the first time we acknowledged that there was an element of wrongness in it. That we liked the wrongness. I finally understood what he meant when he said wish you were here—he wanted to do this to me, take me into his home as his student and fuck me on my hands and knees. Possess me completely. His hands moved to my breasts and he pulled me against him and fucked me deeper and it almost hurt. So intense, too intense to feel directly, just a sensation of being full to my core, of my body wrapping itself with crazy anaconda strength around him, taking him in as deeply as I could until I thought I was going to scream, cry, cease to exist. At some point I became aware that I was saying, “Fuck me, Mr. Wilke, God, fuck me, fuck me,” in a high pleading voice, an edge of my old accent bleeding through, and that the sharpness on my shoulder was his teeth. I couldn’t come and I didn’t want to. I just wanted to be dominated. So I called him by his teacher’s name and let my tense numb body slap against his and when he groaned and slowed down I said, “Please don’t stop, please,” and he didn’t, and he didn’t hold back, every muscle coiling, giving all of himself to me.

  There’s a very strange clarity when you get close but don’t come. Your whole body feels like an exposed nerve
, everything painful and grating but also miraculously clear. You don’t have that sadness, the post-coital tristesse. The world is hard-edged and bright.

  Evan held me, one arm around my hips, the other at my neck. His chest rose and fell against my back. Neither of us moved for a while. We knew what we were going to have to face when we looked at each other.

  Our bodies separated. I sat on the bed, crossing my legs self-consciously. He sat beside me. We both faced the wall. The refrigerator buzzed in the kitchen. A man shouted unintelligibly outside.

  “I’m sorry,” Evan said.

  “For not making me come, or for being my teacher?”

  He was silent a long moment. “Both.”

  “Don’t be.”

  He looked at me. I kept looking straight ahead.

  “I’ve felt like this since the beginning,” I said. We spoke in whispers, for some reason. Maybe truths weren’t as harsh that way. “I wanted you because you were older. I don’t feel anything for boys my age. And when I found out you were my teacher, something clicked in me. It felt wrong in the best possible way. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes.”

  Now I looked at him. “You like me because I’m young.”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “A big part.”

  “Yes,” he said, and I smiled a little.

  “Good,” I said. “I like that you’re kind of fucked up, because I’m kind of fucked up.” I uncrossed my legs, slipping one behind his. Ran my toes up the light hair on his calf. “I’ve been obsessed with you since that first night. Not just with you, but the way you make me feel.”

  “How do I make you feel?”

  Alive. Real. Valuable. Whole.

  “Like myself,” I said. “More than I’ve ever been.”

  He touched my cheek lightly. “Who are you?”

  “Your student.”

  He shook his head. “No. You’re the one teaching me.”

  My smile became full and genuine. I wrapped my arms around him, and we lay back on the bed together, quiet and calm, moonlight draping over our bare skin in a luminous sheet.