The Undergraduates

by Steven Snell

“We’re standing by my car – we agreed that after we changed we’d meet up in the parking lot. Keep it easy sort of thing, and me assuming I’d take longer than him.”

  “I take that that’s a no?”

  “I sped dressed. He must have showered, flexed, waxed his chest, flexed, fucked about…”

  “I reckoned you would have had a hot shower to get the stink off.”

  “Fuck that! There was ZERO chance he was going to get me out of my leggings. I just wanted to get home, have an epic bath and drink away the nonsense.”

  “Amazing. Okay, continue.”

  “Right. So, he’s being kinda cocky – enjoying his steroid buzz or something and I swear I was giving off no vibe what-so-ever during our entire time together – and he said, check this: ‘I’ll take you for a drink’ – like a statement, not a question.”

  “HILARIOUS.”

  “NO. … I tried not to laugh. I patted his thick shoulder and said, ‘No, thank-you, I’m good.’ So he said, get this, ‘Dinner?’ and I actually laughed and said, ‘Thanks for the workout but I think we want different things’ and he got kinda angry-like and said, ‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’”

  “Wow, he actually used ‘fuck?’”

  “Yep! So I took a step back and said bye and got into my car and drove the fuck off shaking my head thinking fucking-wow, I’ve come to a low point in my dating life.”

  “Worst.date.ever.”

  “Wait!”

  “What? No?”

  “He started texting me!”

  “I love him!”

  “They start coming in, streaming in.”

  “Beautiful!”

  “I know! He wrote how he didn’t actually want to go for a drink but fucking would’ve been okay.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “Hello, psycho.”

  “Full-on stalker. … Of course I don’t reply to any of them. But they kept coming in. Shit like, You need to work out more; It doesn’t matter, I had someone else lined up; You’d be hotter if you didn’t have freckles; I read these while stopped at red lights and I’m laughing my ass off. I drove home and went out with some girlfriends and for the rest of the night we took the piss out of the guy – and myself.”

  “Good!”

  “The best part, the messages continued to roll in while I was out. We took screen-shots of them and posted them on FB.

  “HAHAHA!”

  “The messages finally stopped.”

  “Oh I’m all sad-faced now. I don’t want this story to be over.”

  “Just about!”

  “I can’t wait for the conclusion!”

  “When I arrive home … I have a couple of glasses of wine in me. I decided to lob a message back.”

  “OH.NO.”

  “I said something like, ‘It’s painfully obvious how tender your ego is and the saddest part is that you know it. No one truly likes you because there is no you. You are nothing.’ Then I deleted the message stream and blocked him.

  “HAHA!”

  “And that’s my worst date.”

  “And my favourite one.”

  “In recent memory, mind you. There ARE others.”

  She looks over her shoulder and gestures with her chin, “See that traffic accident of dates behind me? That’s why I’m okay with shift work. I’d rather work long hours and catch up on sleep and bathe during time off.”

  “Totally.”

  “Okay, your turn.”

  “I’m not sure if I can top yours.”

  “They’re Olympic, yes.”

  … “Okay, got one.”

  “Hit me.”

  “Okay, so that question, if you could sleep with anyone, who would it be?”

  “Yes.”

  “She said Darwin.”

  “What?!”

  “She said she wanted to fuck me like Darwin’s journey on the Beagle.”

  “Seriously???”

  “I couldn’t make this up.”

  “What does that even mean???”

  “I still don’t know.”

  “What else?”

  “I don’t totally recall. … She said something about how hot it made her picturing Darwin building his theory that would change the way life is understood or something. Sitting there penning a revolution while the ship he’s on is tossed in the sea while he fought off tropical infections.”

  “How is this real???”

  “I’d rather it wasn’t.”

  “I love that it is! … What did you say back?”

  “Man overboard!”

  Laura tilts back laughing out loud to the ceiling. When she regains composure she says, “Well, I’ll give her credit, she’s very innovative.”

  “Like the electric toothbrush.”

  “… Which she probably masturbated with.”

  “Oh my god! I love this girl!”

  “During sex she’d yell, natural selection is dead! Then she’d scream something about twisting her nipples.”

  “What the fuck???”

  “Okay, I made the yelling bit up, not the nipples part though.”

  “Amazing!”

  “Her nipples? Not bad,” I say with a coy smirk.

  Laura pushes me, “I don’t want to hear that!”

  “She was very militant. Not in her Darwinism. As in like how she gave orders.”

  “Tell me!”

  “Like grabbing me, ordering me to twist her nipples.”

  “No!?”

  “Even the direction.”

  “What???”

  “Like counter-clockwise.”

  “Fuck.off!”

  “I couldn’t make this up either. … I went with random figuring I had a 50/50 chance at the right direction, you know, odds better than Russian Roulette.”

  She laughs out loud again. “I hate picturing you having sex with another woman but I LOVE this woman!”

  “I guess during university we all get obsessed with theories.”

  Laura is still laughing between. She takes a sip of her drink between breaths and ask, “Why do you figure that?”

  “You don’t really learn about theories until university. You don’t really learn about explanatory models in high school. University is where you begin to really dig into things, begin to understand or appreciated how really fucking complex the world can be made to be. During one course or another you’re no doubt going to come across On the Origin of Species.”

  “Yah, I think I remember that.”

  “… I don’t know, he’s just such a central figuring in having thrown life out of balance, maybe re-orienting it. That’s what university should do.”

  “I never really thought about it like that. I like that. It’s very true.”

  Our conversation continues. She tells stories and asks questions. Christmas plans, random holidays, more stories about work. I can’t stand X. X pisses me off. I wish X would quit. I like that she has rationale for every one of her opinions. She follows up each commentary with a why. I ask her if it was during her BFA where she became to form opinions or if she’s always been prone to that. At first she says she doesn’t know. Then she says it’s been many things. She says during her first degree she learned from textbooks and tutorials about lighting and theory, about texture and composition. She learned in studio how “it’s nearly impossible to remove oil-based paint from your stomach.”

  “Stomach?”

  “All the way down to my knees. And my crack! … Actually there might still be some there.”

  “Hilarious!”

  “Manet would be impressed.”

  “Is this an artist thing? Does every artist at one time in her career paint her body?”

  “Oh of course!”

  “What else did you learn?”

  “How to lose my virginity.”

  “Ha! That didn’t happen until university?”

  “I was waiting for Mr. Right.”

  “And how’d that work out for you?”<
br />
  “The first time we had sex was with his fingers.”

  “What?”

  “He was rapidly fingering me, finger banging me –”

  “I love that term!”

  “I’m bringing it back. … I remember thinking, is this how sex goes? And then he stopped suddenly and grabbed a condom from under his pillow and as he was tearing the little packet open he came on my leg.”

  “THAT.IS.AWESOME!”

  “The second time –”

  “He actually entered you?”

  “Oh yes! Five minutes later he got hard again. I put a condom on him and I got on top.”

  “See, success!”

  “If we were going to bang, I wanted to actually bang his penis.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “I got on and got him inside me. It was bloody uncomfortable but I figured I’d get used to it, this is how it works. I slowly rocked back and forth –”

  “And?”

  “And, yes, it was getting easier. He had this weird expression –”

  “Weird?”

  “Yep! But I continued. It did get easier. In fact, I couldn’t feel him at all.”

  “See, easy!”

  “Not really. See, he had cum apparently after a second or two and I was riding his limp penis.

  “HAHAHA!”

  “He eventually just slid out of me.”

  “That.is.amazing.”

  “I’m such a slut.”

  “Totally! … And second year? Any improvement?”

  “… Ah,” she smiles, “I had some fun.”

  “What else?”

  “I exhausted a boy with after-play. I’d play with his cock and get him to cum again, and then again, until he begged me to stop.”

  “Sounds torturous.”

  “Entertaining, really.”

  And she continues, adding details to what we’ve discussed before. She doesn’t look away, not to one person around us, never to the opening and closing door of the front door. We continue just talking, absorbing. She looks at me and says she wants to be spooned and how she loves cum and cuddling on her sofa and lying on her stomach while being mounted from behind. She tells me about administering IVs to addicts and how difficult it can be to find a veins and how many vaginas she must have seen since she started nursing school, about how too many – “So gross!” – too many male patients she’s seen who wax their pubic hair, about how odd breast implants look on a dead woman. She tells me about when she made the choice to take a break from being an artist to become a nurse. She tells me about how she realized she needed some stability in her life, how life was too chaotic and a good job would give her some structure. “I don’t miss painting right now, but maybe I will some day.”

  “You don’t miss expressing yourself creatively.”

  “Not at all. … Maybe one day.” She continues, one topic to the next, lab procedures to weekend activities to what she’s reading. I ask her what’s the last thing she painted.

  “… God,” she replies.

  “And what does that look like?”

  She says she found her god as a child holding a single scoop of vanilla ice cream driving with her dad home from a weekend on Georgian Bay.

  “I was licking the edges keeping the ice cream from running onto my hands. I was sitting on a towel because my green and purple bathing suit was still wet.”

  “You remember the colours?”

  “I have a thing about details. … My dad, he looked over to me and motioned with his head and said, ‘Look at the field of trees.’ The orange light was like a rope thrown down from heaven. My god it was gorgeous. … Growing up in a Catholic household I knew about God, you know, read the mandated passages, saw the pictures depicting him, but had not seen God, had not felt him. And then in my still damp bikini driving home with Dad, just a passenger on my way home from a weekend canoeing and swimming with Dad, I found God; I saw it.”

  “It?”

  “… Yah, God has no gender. … I remember later that week in Catholic school I lost it again. School was straight up Catholic. White shirt, pleated skirt, socks up to the knee and black low-heeled shoes. God was rigid and rigorous. Arrive at school, take attendance, go to chapel, know what sin is. Be Catholic. Crosses on the wall in every class, in every hallway. This is where I learned to pray the right way. What to say, how to say it. I adhered to it. My dad taught me something different. He said, ‘Think about something beautiful and imagine it in you. Don’t ask from it, talk to it. Tell that presence a story.’ So, sometimes on my bed, sometimes before it, sometimes on that beach in my bikini with my towel wrapped around me and goose bumps on my arms I talked in my mind about my days thinking that someone was listening. … It wasn’t until I was 17 though when I officially turned away from Catholic God.”

  “What happened?”

  She crosses her legs and says, “I had a dream I was making out with Jeff, Jesus’ brother.”

  “Oh god!”

  “I know, I know! I can’t believe this is a true story but I swear!”

  “Oh, I have no doubt.”

  “Jeff, not God’s immaculate conception; he’s not even immortal.”

  I shake my head laughing.

  “Jeff and those too big shoes to fill.”

  “Sandals,” I add.

  “And beardless too!”

  “Shaving would have sucked before God let man invent the four blade razor.”

  “Ha! … And the best part – I was so hot in my dream. Not hot as in turned on, hot as in Jerusalem in the summer hot!”

  “I think I might want to bathe by the time I hear the end of this dream.”

  “You have no idea! See, I think the dream was this: my anti-repenting, my psyche trying to reclaim all of my sins and remove my childhood guilt of being told what I was guilty of.”

  “I like that.”

  “I remember when I started to actually read the Bible instead of being given preselected texts and passages to memorize. I read it from cover to cover, Old and New. And at night, in bed, on the weekend at the beach wrapped in a sweater, day after day. It was exhausting! But I remember this, this was the key moment: If what I was reading was true, that if people actually bought into this, then we’d just be automatons, robots literally dictated by a higher order. And since the most religious adherents appear to be the least religious in their hate for nonbelievers, well, what else can I say? Does that make sense?”

  “I think so.”

  “So I found other things to worship,” she says with a smile tucking her hair back behind her ear again.

  I lift my coffee, pause and ask her to reveal two things to me that I don’t know about her. A moment of silence, just music and background chatter. She looks at me, at her hot chocolate, back to me.

  “I haven’t slept with anyone since we did.”

  She looks away.

  She smiles then looks emotionless and plays with her mug, spinning it slowly on her thigh. I look at her hands then her eyes, then just beyond her shoulder. I think about who she is to me, who we are to each other, her life in mine, mine in hers. I look at her. Can we be on stage together or is it best if we’re audience members to each other’s shows awaiting intermission or curtain closing? If something changed, would we need to define ourselves as something? What do we call each other? What does she actually want? She returns my gaze. I smile. She smiles. I lift my mug to my lips and rest it there, speaking over the rim.

  “We laugh a lot.”

  “We do.”

  “We smile even more.”

  “Yah.”

  Her green eyes.

  Her mouth.

  I speak or she speaks or we fill the air between us in silent communication. Without intent or sometimes sense. Two days ago I was underneath Karen. Karen who seems no more found than me. But safe. Or lost. I don’t want to show her my lost. Anything of emotional complexity she avoids because it’s not who she is or it’s not what she wants to be. It’s not me.

  I
look at Laura. Look at her. Thinking. Talking. She starts talking about the third time we slept together. She says it was the first time she touched herself in front of someone else. She says how she felt safe. She says she was finally becoming comfortable in her nudity. She says she still held back from fully letting go. She says how much she enjoyed touching my body. She says how must she enjoyed touching her body. She touched her body and laughed and giggled. She says how easy it was swaying above me. She says, “Would you like to watch me sway now?”

  We stand, exit the Christmas spectrum of lights. We’re down the street, another street, into her building, the elevator up to the seventh floor, into her apartment. She pushes me down on the area rug and takes off our clothes and says, “Tonight I want you to finish on my feet, then you have to hold me.”

  Sleeping with Laura is like being shot at or driving off a cliff. I may survive both but the thought of either scares the fuck out of me – but the ejaculation before impact is better than God himself pulling an orgasm out of you.

  26.

  I’m driving north, out of the city. Just driving. Driving and the road and trees and streams of headlights across my eyes at 60 km/h and the images are a stampede of nuclear waste spilled off the back of a 1973 Ford pick-up truck with rusted paint and bullet hole body work. The medication I stopped taking comes with a warning not to operate machinery at time of ingestion. Take the pills before going to bed. But this induced nightmares … ants crawling over my stitched mouth and no sound sleep, just tossing and rolling and hoping. I’ve been in Goya’s etching Esto es Peor. My left arm had been chopped off. A tree branch was lodged into my chest pushing out through my thoracic spine. A soldier to my left was standing forcing the face of a dejected woman into his groin. My right foot still in my boot was up in a leafless tree. But I could not wake from it. My eyes opened to the dark ceiling but my body frozen stuck to my sweaty cotton bedding. My clammy body sweating, staining my sheets a darker colour of egg shell white. My jaw locked and eyes watering and stop forcing it, Shawn.

  Stop forcing.

  Feel.

  A breeze.

  A gentle warm spring wind. Wind in the trees.

  A summer storm.

  A cumulonimbus cloud.

  An anvil cloud sawed off by the jet stream. Hell and fury and another continental catastrophe. Birds ripped from sandy shores and cars slammed into roofs and bodies drowning from a river breaching its banks and medevac helicopters dropping out of the sky and crashing slamming and rotor blades soaring ripping through bodies in the dark dark night.