by Teddy Wayne
Sara looked soberly into her coffee.
“I lied about not being a virgin,” I said. “I was insecure, and I think I overcompensated and did things with you, in bed, that I felt weird about after. I want to apologize.”
Sara tore off the sleeve of her cup and ran her fingers along the ribbed interior. “Listen, David. I didn’t mean what I said about you not feelings things. That just came out in the heat of the moment. The breakup caught me off guard, and on top of being painful, it was a real slap in the face. You weren’t always the easiest boyfriend. You could be remote, and there were times when it was hard to get through your defenses. That was okay, though—I figured it was worth the effort to get whatever was in there out. But I thought we were finally getting somewhere.”
“We were!” I cut in. “That’s what’s been driving me crazy. If only I’d shared more of myself. I feel like I missed out on something really meaningful with you. And I know I’ll regret that for a long time—thinking about what could have been, and the feeling that I threw it away.”
Her eyes rose to meet mine. “I’m new to the whole relationship business,” she said, “but the way I see it, there’s no point in beating yourself up for what you did or didn’t do in the past. Each experience teaches us something about ourselves, and you take what you learn to the next relationship, and you’re the better for it. I know it sounds corny, but I really do believe this.”
“I don’t want another relationship.”
She laughed. “Oh, David. I wouldn’t allow what happened between us to turn you off girls forever. It’s not like this was a thirty-year marriage that just collapsed. We’re in our first semester of college. This is supposed to happen.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said. “I’m not interested in a new relationship. I want to go back to the last one.”
Sara’s nostrils flared as she took a contemplative breath.
“I don’t know what to say,” she told me after a protracted silence. “I wasn’t expecting this, and it’s a lot to think about. I can’t give you a definitive answer right now, if that’s what you’re looking for. Maybe we can talk more after the break.”
“Of course. Of course.” I took the first, cautious sip of my piping-hot coffee. “Well, how’d your finals go?”
Her face softened in amusement. “Really? That’s your transition?”
“You know better than anyone that small talk has never been my forte,” I said.
She smiled. “Yeah, I forgot. Three classes down, one to go. I won’t bore you with the details. How are yours going?”
“Same here.” I’d skipped my economics exam and still hadn’t written the final papers for my other classes. “Anything else new?”
“Not much,” she said. “Oh—except Layla’s moving in.”
“With you?”
“Yeah, she’s taking Veronica’s place.”
I took a swig of coffee and let it scald the roof of my mouth.
“When did this happen?”
“Veronica just told me she was moving out two days ago,” Sara said. “Layla doesn’t like her roommate, either, so we asked the housing office if she could move in with me, and they approved it.”
“Is she moving into Layla’s room?”
“No. She was weirdly cagey when I asked where she was going. All I know is she hired someone to move her stuff tomorrow morning. Who does that in college?” She waited for a reaction. “I shouldn’t be so catty. She looked a little embarrassed when she told me.”
“So just one more night with her, huh?” I asked.
“Yeah, and she actually has to spend the night for once, since the movers are coming at seven in the morning. My room’s going to be a war zone for the next twenty-four hours: Layla’s flying home tomorrow and she’s in exams all day today, so she’s got to move tonight.” She checked the time on her phone. “That reminds me, I have to pick up a key for her at the housing office before it closes.”
“A key?”
“For the room.” She waved her hand in front of my face. “Earth to David. You there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, that’s great news. It’ll be nice to have a roommate who’s a good person.”
“I wouldn’t call Veronica a bad person. I feel sort of sorry for her. She seems a bit tormented.”
“I don’t know about tormented. I got the sense that she’s just not that nice.”
“The gentleman doth protest too much.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “You always got kind of antsy when she was around. I guess I wondered if you had a little crush.”
I made a face.
“A harmless crush,” she qualified. “I mean, what guy wouldn’t, from a distance?”
“So you’re helping Layla move tonight?”
“No—I feel awful about it, but I have my final evening session with my students to go over their college essays. Maybe I’ll be able to pitch in at the end when I get back.”
“Is anyone helping her?”
She shook her head. “And we’re supposed to get six inches of snow tonight.”
“I could lend a hand,” I said.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I’d be glad to. I don’t really have anything else to do.”
Someone called out “David!” Sara and I both turned our heads, but it was just the barista letting a customer know his drink was ready.
“Well, if you’re serious, that’s a very generous offer,” Sara said. “Layla always liked you.”
We got up to leave. Sara waved good-bye to the little girl next to us. She beamed back at her and held out the soggy remains of her cookie as a parting gift.
“That’s so nice of you,” Sara told her. “It looks delicious, but I have to save room for dinner.”
I met up with Layla that evening and, load by load, we transported her belongings from her dorm to Matthews, stacking her boxes in neat rows in Sara’s room and leaving an aisle for your own move in the morning. The whole process took about two hours, throughout which your window remained dark and no sounds issued from your room. As we returned to Layla’s dorm for the final trip, it started to snow. There were two boxes left, and I told her I could handle them on my own.
“Don’t be silly,” I said when she insisted on helping. “You have an early flight tomorrow. Stay here. I’ve got this.”
“You sure?”
“Of course.” I picked up the boxes, creating a small tower that blocked my face. “Oh, whoops—I forgot the key. Duh.”
My hands full, she dropped the room key in the pocket of my parka and held the door for me. “Back soon,” I said.
I hauled the boxes over to Sara’s room. On the way back I detached my room key from my key chain and replaced it with Layla’s. “Here you go,” I said, handing her my own key.
“Thank you so much, David,” she said, marveling at the bareness of her room. “I don’t know how I would’ve done this alone. You really are a nice guy.”
“Not at all,” I said.
Sara would be getting home soon. I dashed back through the Yard to Matthews, nearly slipping on the snow-slick pavement, and let myself into room 505 with Layla’s key. I pressed my ear against your door and heard nothing. The light was still off. I was confident you were out, though it was remotely possible you had come in during Layla’s move and gone to sleep early. Holding my breath, I cracked the door open.
Orange lamplight from the Yard pooled in, glazing a dozen or so boxes haphazardly scattered about the room. Your bed was empty.
The closet was cleared out. I reached into the interior pocket of my parka and removed my phone, your essay, and the bathrobe belt. I took off the parka, along with my jeans and shoes, and put them on the top shelf. Then I stepped inside and shut the door.
<
br /> I sat cross-legged on the floor, knees resting against the walls, and reread your essay by the light of my phone.
All that time I thought I’d just been watching you, and it turned out you’d been keeping close tabs on me, too. It was almost flattering.
But there were omissions: no mention of the elbow contact during lecture, of crying in my arms on the stairs, of flirting with me outside Sara’s room. Certainly nothing about the picture frame. You were as dishonest in your “study” as you’d been with me all along. Your icebreaker descriptor should have been inveritas.
I touched your bathrobe belt. You had no idea that I’d taken it or what I’d done with it—countless times. Add that to Part 3 of your essay.
Around nine o’clock I heard something. I darkened my phone and sat perfectly still. The door swung closed in the other room. I waited for the sound of your door opening. A minute passed—it must have been Sara. Moments later my phone silently lit up with a text from her:
I stopped by your room to thank you for helping Layla but you weren’t home. There’s a pizza study break in the basement. Thinking of going if you want to join.
I switched my phone off; I needed to stay alert. To pass the time, I balled up your belt in my hand and squeezed it, relaxed my fingers, let it spill out, and rolled it up to compress it again. Eventually I heard the muted purr of Sara’s white-noise machine. Through two sets of doors it sounded like the comforting whoosh of a distant highway.
I periodically turned my phone back on to see the time. The final check was at 1:43 a.m. Shortly after this I heard footsteps and a creak. A subtle air current rattled the closet door. The space between the floor and the door filled with light. A clomp and a thump, what sounded like coins dropping, a cross between a grunt and a sigh, then the light turned off and it was quiet again. No bathroom routine tonight.
You were tipsy if not intoxicated. In a few minutes you’d be out cold. I waited that long, plus a little more, twisting the belt and knotting it this time so it retained the shape of a ball. Then I rotated the knob slowly and fully—so as not to make a clicking sound—and nudged the closet door ajar.
You’d neglected to pull down the shades; the light from outside illuminated the rhythmic rise and fall of the white comforter, its contours forming a snowcapped, undulating mountain range. You weren’t snoring, but you took husky breaths, the stertorous sleep of the inebriated.
I skied soundlessly across the floor in my socks, slaloming around your boots, peacoat, and jeans, until I arrived at your bed. Your black sweater statically clung to the side of the comforter. A bottle of pills was uncapped on your bedside table; the Ambien you needed so desperately to fall asleep. You lay on your back, hair feathered across the pillow as if floating underwater, lips parted, face slack.
I left the knotted belt on your bedside table.
Reaching over your body, I lifted the top of the comforter, careful not to create a breeze as I peeled its downy bulk off the length of you. The sheet was twisted at the foot of the bed.
A gossamer T-shirt hugged your torso. Your legs were bare, but you wore underpants.
An abrupt breath was chased by a spluttery snore. I waited for you to settle before proceeding. Pinching either side of the elastic waistband, I coaxed the underpants down, past the barrier of your backside and the mattress, across your thighs, over the hillocks of your knees, along your shins, and off your ankles.
Your winter-pale body stretched out before me like a patient etherized upon a table. It would be wonderful if David shared his observations more in class with his peers, who would surely benefit. A delicate band of crenellations snaked around your hips. A trim delta of hair over your mons pubis.
Despite your half nakedness, I wasn’t aroused. I took off my boxers and fondled myself, but remained inert. Foiled by my own pathetic phallus.
Yet when I looked up at the tender hollow below your throat where the sloping clavicles nearly met, a cove for a locket, I felt a tingling. I held a hand over your neck, so close that I could feel the heat of your skin. My quiescent penis rose phoenixlike; where there had been a noodle was now a saber. (Is my prose too stilted for you, my sentence constructions overwrought, my vocabulary baroque, my register phallogocentric?)
I stood there, fisting the bathrobe belt, summoning my resolve.
And then it was happening: I was mounting the mattress, my knees were straddling your parallel legs, I was burrowing my fingers into the crevice between your thighs, gently separating them.
“Who—” you said groggily, your eyelids fluttering.
No sense in delicacy now. I pushed your legs akimbo and maneuvered my knees between them.
“David!” you rasped, your palms meekly protesting my gravity.
“Veronica.”
The first time I’d ever said your name aloud; I thought of it constantly but it seemed too sacred to speak.
You screamed. When I tried to plug your mouth with the silk ball, you bit me. On the second scream I got it inside. I pinned down your arms as you wriggled and gagged.
How unjust the world is that some people can buy, on consumerist impulse, silk bathrobe belts with their initials on them and some people can buy them only without initials and some people can’t buy them at all.
You continued thrashing to no avail, my arms becoming someone else’s more muscular arms, my legs doubling in size, my body lengthening and massing as you shrank in direct proportion under me. But this is how you wanted me to act all along, isn’t it.
Before I could penetrate you, I heard a second set of female vocals.
The door was open and Sara was clawing my back. One of your knees squirmed free in the turmoil and uppercut me between my legs. I toppled to the side of the bed like a timbered tree, whimpering and clutching myself, quickly reduced to a flaccid state. A mushroom cloud of pain swelled through my gut.
When I looked up, I was the only one in the room. I instinctively put on my jeans and sneakers and hobbled out to Sara’s bedroom, pausing by the door to the hallway. Alarmed voices.
I collected my thoughts, reminded myself of the original plan. Fleeing was for the cowardly and deceitful. For the weak. You were the one who’d fled. The heroic manifested their own destinies and accepted their undeserved punishments without complaint.
I staggered back through the narrow passage lined by Layla’s boxes and returned to your room. En route to the bed I picked your black sweater off the floor and slipped it on. Pulling the comforter up, I waited for the authorities. The bed was warm and smelled of you.
DAVID FEDERMAN
Drowned in the odour
of Veronica
I was rousted from the bed and manacled. “You have the right to remain silent,” an officer barked, uoy evah eht thgir ot niamer tnelis. I ignored the rest and was paraded out through the hall and downstairs past Matthews residents peeping from the safety of their rooms.
A few police cars idled in the Yard, where a small crowd of spectators had assembled. It was still snowing. They shivered in pajamas and coats, their sleep interrupted during finals: perfect little Harvard students, I was once like all of them.
“Oh, my God,” said a girl who lived two rooms down (Cecily Trimmer, Houston, Texas). The cops bowed my head and pushed me into the backseat of a car. “He’s right on my hall.”
The cinematic montage of my future unspooled before me. The media would pounce. The front page of the Crimson would report daily updates on my case, gathering quotes from Steven. (“ ‘I guess he was a little strange—he never really wanted to hang out,’ observed the alleged assailant’s roommate, Steven G. Zenger.”) National coverage would follow with sensationalistic psychological profiles. Old acquaintances would come forth; I knew him, they’d say, seemed harmless, pretty quiet, I think he once said my name backward or something. There would be round-the-clock cable news updates, vociferous op-eds about sexual
assault in college, and agenda-serving think pieces holding me up as a metaphor for a panoply of societal disorders. A British tabloid would give me the libelous sobriquet “the Harvard Rapist”; the Parisian press would speculate about a ménage à trois gone wrong. The frozen, lopsided smile from my Freshman Register photo would fuel their fascination. The white male with whom everyone would become obsessed.
I would listen, deadpan, as the foreman read the jury’s decision in my televised trial for attempted rape. A verdict of guilty for the Harvard Rapist, David Alan Federman. Famous David.
None of that happened.
The burden of proof was on you, and aside from your police report and the eyewitness account of a jilted ex-girlfriend, the only damning evidence was a paper you’d written (not approved by your professor, it turned out, who disavowed the topic and research protocol as academically unethical) that showed you’d manipulated me. I had planned to employ the belt, my parents’ colleague would argue, for sadomasochistic purposes during consensual sex, and you had reacted hysterically once we began. My clothes were in the closet to separate them from your belongings ready to be moved. We had been seen at final clubs together on multiple occasions looking friendly with each other if not intimate; the only time I had shown up anywhere unexpected was in New York City, at a public venue, a mere coincidence. And if Sara testified, he would question why, if I’d supposedly been aggressive in bed, she had sent me a text saying she was thinking of me.
The Harvard connection would make it a high-profile trial, and your name—plus those of your prominent parents—would inevitably leak out. My lawyer also suggested that, should we go to court, allegations about your cocaine use and an affair with a married graduate student would be forthcoming.
The district attorney, afraid of losing the case, convinced your publicity-wary parents that it would be best for everyone if I were allowed to plead guilty to a lesser offense, assault and battery, sentencing to be held five years later, with the understanding that as long as I didn’t harass you in any way, physically or verbally, then my case would be dismissed, all pertaining material would be sealed, I wouldn’t have to register as a sex offender, and—