The Virginity of Famous Men

by Christine Sneed

  “What would you do?”

  Penelope touched the edge of her plate, avoiding Alex’s eyes. “I would probably go talk to the guys who did it to me. I would tell them that they’re assholes and that I’ve told my friends to stay away from them. I don’t know if I’d tell my RA or the dean though. I’m not very brave. But that’s just me.”

  Her words summoned something complicated that it took Alex several seconds to sort out. But then there it was, as uncompromising as a brick wall: disappointment. She wanted Penelope to command her to go to the dean and set things in motion against Carlyle and his friend, but her new sister, older and more worldly, had not said this. As Alex sat looking down at her empty mug, chocolate syrup drying at the bottom, she felt a powerful wave of exhaustion. She needed to get back to campus and go to sleep, even if it would have to be on the floor. It had been stupid to insist that Penelope come down from New York a week early, to expect her to have all the right answers, to fold her into a sisterly embrace and march her off to the dean’s office, where Alex would tell the whole embarrassing story of that hazy night when something bad had happened, but well, maybe it hadn’t? Though she knew it had.

  How stupid, for the thousandth time in her life, she had been. Was being.

  “Alex,” said Penelope, her voice gentle. “If you think you should go to your RA, I’ll go with you. We can do it first thing in the morning.”

  “I don’t know what I think,” said Alex. “I feel like such an idiot.”

  “What happened isn’t your fault.”

  “It is my fault. I shouldn’t have drunk so much.” She could feel tears pricking her eyes hotly and looked down at her lap. Her hands were clenched, her knuckles and nails glowing whitely. She worried that she might throw up.

  “Not every girl who drinks too much ends up in a room with three rapists. You should be able to go to as many parties as you want and not worry that you’ll be taken advantage of.”

  “That’s not—” She hesitated. “I don’t know if that’s realistic.”

  Her sister looked at her, fatigue showing in her kind, pretty eyes. “Let’s go back to campus. We can talk more in the morning, okay?”

  As Alex pushed back her chair, the tears she’d been holding in for the last hour began flooding down her face, an enormous lump rising in her throat. Penelope put an arm around her and steered her toward the door, out into the street, where they stood in the cold night air as Alex sobbed and Penelope hugged and murmured to her, the voices of the bouncers down the block reaching them in short gruff bursts, cigarette smoke hanging in wisps before their hawkish faces. Alex felt emptied out, on the brink of something terrible and necessary. Her sister’s neck smelled like rose soap and cloves.

  It was almost four in the morning and there were no taxis. They turned and started back to campus, to Alex’s room, where her drunken roommate snored softly in the tensile dark. Penelope held her hand as they moved north toward the university’s front gates, neither of them speaking. There was no one else on the street, and they walked fast, eyes on the block ahead of them. Alex wished they were already inside her dorm, the door closed and locked behind them.

  CLEAR CONSCIENCE

  When Sasha, Michael’s sister-in-law, was offered a consulting job at a big teaching hospital that needed help setting up its new outpatient facility, she had to commit to spending half the week in Chicago. Her home was in Madison with Jim, Michael’s brother, and their twelve-year-old daughter, Quinn, who loved horses and shopping and had plans to become a hostage negotiator after college, if not before, something Michael and Jim found amusing, Sasha preposterous. After she accepted the job at the hospital, there had briefly been talk of her staying at Michael’s place three nights a week during the six months she would need to commute to and from Chicago. Ultimately, his offer was rebuffed: she rented her own apartment, one closer to the hospital than was his place, which was in a neighborhood several miles north of the medical campus.

  Whether Sasha or her employer was paying the rent on her small, opulent one-bedroom in a high-rise that overlooked Lake Michigan, Michael didn’t know, but he suspected that regardless of who paid the bills, it was his brother who had insisted that Sasha find her own lodgings. It was also possible that she wanted her own place, an eventuality that bothered Michael slightly more than his brother opposing their occasional cohabitation.

  A year and a few months before Sasha was hired for the Chicago job, Michael went through an unpleasant divorce, his ex-wife, Tess, adding extra enmity to the proceedings by writing, under a pen name, acerbic blog posts about her view of the divorce and its causes. The pen name was a mockery of anonymity—all of their friends and family knew of the blog, which made scathing fun of Michael’s perceived shortcomings and infuriating habits. The one scrap of good fortune in his marriage’s demise was that there had been no children to argue over along with everything else.

  After Sasha settled into the routine of her three nights and twenty-seven weekly hours of work for the hospital, Michael met her for dinner on Wednesday evenings. This was usually the third night of the three she spent in his city, and often an air of subdued festivity permeated their meetings. Sasha claimed not to read Michael’s ex-wife’s blog, where he was referred to alternately as the Tightwad and the Crocodile, and sometimes, more inexplicably, the Mole. In addition to serving as the focus of his ex-wife’s virulent frustration over the scale of her accomplishments so far, he was the supposedly spoiled younger brother to Jim, who was five years his senior. Jim was also four years older than Sasha, and Michael liked that he and Sasha had grown up listening to the same music and seeing the same movie matinees, whereas his brother, with his half-decade handicap, was sometimes teased for being an old man when they were all together—how could he not remember who Pauly Shore was? Or Blind Melon and Mazzy Star? That Jim could recall dialogue verbatim from Casablanca and Apocalypse Now and all three of The Godfather movies, that he favored the classics over the junkily ephemeral, that he was wittier and more cultured than Michael and his entire graduating high school class combined (as Jim, slightly drunk on strong eggnog, had once claimed during a fractious family Christmas party)—these qualities were thrilling to Sasha when she met Jim, but now not so much.

  “I shouldn’t talk about him when he’s not here to defend himself,” she said, looking down at the second fish taco on her plate, deciding, Michael assumed, if she should eat it. If she didn’t, he would ask her for it. Jim would have started eating it without permission, but he was her husband, and also always ravenous, in part because he claimed to be too busy to eat lunch, or else decided to make do with an apple and handfuls of raw, unsalted almonds at his desk while the other attorneys in his office went down the street for sandwiches and fattening, overdressed salads: full of sodium and bad calories, he said, with a disapproving shake of his head. (“Nutrition density is hardly given the time of day in this country,” he also said. “Lentils! We should all eat lentils at least every other day.”) He ran forty miles a week, more when he was training for a marathon. Michael was fit too, though not as disciplined or, as he had said to some of his friends, as obsessive; he exercised only a couple of days each week, with weights at the gym and halfhearted five-mile bouts on the treadmill. “The dread-mill,” his brother liked to say with a frown. Jim ran outside, rain or snow or sweltering sun.

  “You know I won’t tell him,” said Michael, feeling a little uneasy despite his desire to hear Sasha say critical things about his older brother, disclosures that always interested him.

  She met his gaze, her dark eyes clear and unblinking. “I know. But I don’t want you to feel like you have to put up with me. I can go to a shrink.” She laughed softly. “I do go to a shrink.”

  This was new, somewhat startling information. Michael glanced again at her leftover taco, unable to look at her for a few seconds.

  “That’s a good idea,” he said.

  She laughed again. “I suppose so, yes.”

  “Does Jim
see one too?”

  She shook her head. “No. You can just guess what he says. Running is his therapy.”

  “I went with Tess to a marriage counselor for a few months. It was like getting kicked in the ass for an hour straight.”

  Sasha made a face. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “On the way home, Tess kept the kicks coming.” He paused. “Sorry. I’m the one who shouldn’t be bothering you with this stuff.”

  She smiled. “Not at all, Mike. Don’t worry.”

  “If you’ve looked at her blog, you already know that we saw a therapist.” He hadn’t visited her blog in a couple of weeks. He knew that he should never, under any circumstances, read it, but some nights, angry or embittered by the memory of an old argument or petty humiliation, he did look, and then he lay awake for hours feeling furious and half awed by his ex-wife’s vindictiveness. “Doesn’t she have other people to hate?” his friend Jon, who had been his best man, once asked. “Like Donald Trump? What about Pol Pot?”

  “I haven’t looked at her blog,” said Sasha.

  “Thank you.”

  She regarded him steadily. “I didn’t like her. You know that.”

  “I was glad that you still managed to be nice to her though.”

  “I guess I was? But I didn’t have to see her as often as you did.”

  Michael laughed. “That’s true.”

  The bartender had turned up the restaurant’s stereo system, loud enough that everyone had to raise their voices to be heard across the narrow tables with their faltering tea lights. It was a few days before Halloween, and the song playing was “Thriller,” which Michael still remembered the words to; as a boy, he thought it was a mark of distinction that he shared a first name with the song’s flamboyant performer. “Quinn just saw this video for the first time,” said Sasha. “She loved it. She’s going to be a zombie this year.”

  “I keep seeing previews for zombie movies. I’m not really a fan but they seem to be everywhere now.”

  “I’m not a fan either,” said Sasha. “Jim told her that she’d make a very convincing zombie. He thought he was being funny. Quinn was offended, but she’s twelve and everything her father and I say now offends her.”

  “At least she didn’t want to be a stripper or a sexy witch.”

  “She has a friend who’s allegedly going as a porn star.”

  “I bet her parents are proud,” he said dryly.

  “His parents.” She smiled again, seeing Michael’s surprise deepen. “Yes, I know. He’s using fur from an old teddy bear for chest hair and a potato for—” She pursed her lips. “To quote Quinn, ‘for his thing.’ Do you think she knows the word ‘dildo’ yet?”

  “She talks to you about this stuff?”

  Sasha shook her head. “She talks to her friends about it. I eavesdrop when she’s in the living room and I’m in the kitchen. She doesn’t realize how loud she’s talking most of the time.” She pointed at her taco. “Want it?”

  “Thank you,” he said, lifting it off her plate with his fork. As he cut into it, her phone rang and she pulled it out of her handbag and sighed.

  “Jim,” she mouthed.

  He looked down at the taco, the strings of lettuce and sour cream oozing from its corners as he cut another piece. The speakers howled and a woman at a nearby table released a loud, answering cackle. Her friends guffawed. The woman cackled again, louder. Sasha stuffed a finger in her ear, a useless attempt, Michael was sure, to mute the drunken uproar. “I’m at dinner,” she yelled into the phone. “I can’t hear you very well, Jim. Can I call you back in a little while?”

  Then, “I’m with your brother.” After this, she said good-bye and gave Michael a sheepish look. “He said that I forgot to pay the water bill. He was annoyed, as you can imagine.”

  “Did the city shut it off?”

  “No, no, of course not. You get at least two warnings. That was only the first. He was just mad that I’d forgotten.”

  “I’m surprised he hasn’t had you set it up for auto-pay.”

  She laughed. “He doesn’t want our banking information in their system. He’s a little paranoid sometimes.”

  “Tess was like that too.”

  “I think I’d like one more margarita. It’s been a hard week.”

  She ordered a large lemon-lime with salt, larger than the other two she’d already had. Thirty minutes later, she was drunk, her eyes pink and heavy-lidded, her movements abrupt and unmeasured. Michael looked at her anxiously from across the table. He would have to drive her back to her lakeside high-rise and see her upstairs, where he would also have to make sure that she locked the door behind him after, as he imagined it, he left her sprawled across the couch or clinging to the granite countertop in the kitchen. He could remember seeing Sasha this drunk only once before—at his and Tess’s wedding, where Jim stayed sober and gave him unnerving, sardonic looks much of the evening, as if he could foresee the results of Michael’s marital gamble. Quinn was there too, six years old and sugar-stoked from several kiddie cocktails, her pink headband askew, her cheeks also glowing pink.

  Tess and he had started dating in college during the last several weeks before graduation and dated on and off for five years before marrying—the marriage happening only because Tess had pushed for it. When Michael proposed, he had silently reasoned that if it didn’t work out, they could get a divorce. After all, what would be the big deal? Millions of people had married and divorced and more or less survived both ordeals. Since his own divorce, however, he’d grown cynical: about his naive and carefree former self, about the changeability of other people, about long-term commitment in general, sexual or otherwise—several of his old friends also having grown inattentive to their friendship, rarely bothering to return his occasional emails or phone calls. They had disappeared into parenthood, into exhausting jobs that required frequent air travel and overtime and onerous social commitments of their own, but one or two did apologize (often in an aggrieved tone that made him feel worse) when he did catch them on the phone.

  Since the July night when Tess had demanded that he get out out out! and had thrown his keys from their second-story bedroom window into the dense rosebushes on the west side of the money-pit colonial they’d bought four years earlier, he had gone on dates with two women. One he’d met online, and when they went on their first and only date, she’d brought along a friend. She informed him in a voice devoid of irony that the friend was there as a safeguard against boredom. The other woman he went out with was the cousin of a co-worker; she was cute and fit and had a good sense of humor, but after they had sex on the second date, she confessed that she was probably going back to her ex-boyfriend. As she smoothed her black pantyhose over her calves and pointed her toes coquettishly into the carpet, she gave him an appraising look and said, “But that was really fun. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble finding someone to take my place.” He felt disoriented and bereft, watching mutely from the door of his new apartment building as she drove her little blue VW down the street and away from his rumpled bed for good. He retreated inside and made himself feel worse by eating an entire bar of dark chocolate with bacon and calling Tess to demand that she return his deluxe-edition Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit games immediately or she would soon be hearing from his lawyer.

  A week later, her blog went live, and he became infamous among their small galaxy of friends and family members as the contemptible ex who snored and growled in his sleep and “snapped his jaws like a crocodile,” which she thought especially disgusting because he had bad breath. He often left the door open when he used the bathroom (a lie) and had insisted during their courtship, always, even on her birthday! that they go dutch (another lie).

  That Sasha claimed never to have read the blog was generous of her, but Michael didn’t believe it. She had once suggested that he counter with his own blog about Tess’s failings, something he considered but then dismissed because it would seem a feeble rejoinder, as if he were yelling at a sch
oolyard bully, “I know you are, but what am I?”

  With his arm around her shoulders, Sasha sagged against him while they waited outside the restaurant for the valet to reappear with Michael’s car. He wondered for a second if she would get sick before he got her home, and if she did, whether she would remember it later and feel embarrassed and not want to see him when she was in Chicago the following week. He had looked forward to their weekly dinners in the same way he used to anticipate a snow day or a Christmas package, one sent by his grandparents from Tucson in a brown-paper-wrapped box, and he knew this Sasha-related suspense to be a problem, or a soon-to-be-serious problem. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to have sex with his brother’s wife, though he did. Yet, this was hardly an original impulse, he felt sure. Sasha was attractive and smart, and among other things he liked about her, she often spoke with thrilling and knowledgeable fury about people, dead or alive, who she detested. She also loved Peter Gabriel’s Us more than So, which was true of no one he knew other than himself. What probably endeared her to him the most, however, was that she asked him questions no one else asked: If suddenly you could buy anything you wanted, anything at all, what would it be? If you were the last man on earth, whom would you want to be the last woman?

  On the drive back to her apartment, he glanced over at her twice and both times she was staring at him, a half-smile on her lips. The third time he looked in her direction, her face had collapsed into a suppressed sob.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked worriedly. “Should I pull over?” They were on Lake Shore Drive, hemmed inside a herd of speeding cars, and he could see that it would be difficult to safely pull over. It was drizzling too, the blades scraping the glass with a plaintive moan.