by Lucy Ferriss
“You have done this,” she said a little dreamily, “with other girls. Have you not?”
“One other girl. I told you about her. Ashley, in high school. Oh, Afia, please.” He took her hand and wrapped it around his penis. She felt the pulse of his blood under the thin membrane. “Let go now,” he said after a few seconds. “I don’t want to come, not like this.”
“Come,” she said. “That’s the bad thing. Isn’t it?”
“No, Afia, no. Not a bad thing. Not when we love each other. Here.” He moved her hand away from his penis. Gently he pushed her back onto the mattress. “I love you, Afia,” he said. They said that in the movies. But this wasn’t the movies, this was Gus. “Let me,” he said.
He moved down her body. He slid her jeans off, her underpants. He studied her belly, her mound of Venus—the hair there was too dark, too thick, she never looked at it herself, but he studied the terrain with a look of wonder in his eyes. Then he dipped his head and pressed her thighs back firmly, as if opening a pair of heavy curtains, and he put his mouth there. There. She felt it on her in the dirty place, and his tongue that he played in her own mouth, it played down there, finding her, pulling her out. There. “Please,” she said, and she wanted to say that her legs mustn’t be apart, this was why women back home rode motorcycles sidesaddle, so nothing would get between them, nothing there. But he muttered something, she couldn’t hear, he came up for breath and then his mouth was back, deeper in the place. There. There. Rising, she felt herself rising. To meet him. “Please,” she said again. “Please. Please. Gus. Oh, please.” And her hand went to his head, his soft curls, holding him to her. There, and she felt herself turn inside out. She heard herself shout. Then she was weeping, she couldn’t say why, and he was on her, the whole length of him, and his hips moving, his penis like a hot iron bar rubbing against her wet patch of hair. “Don’t hurt me,” she managed to say.
“I won’t. I won’t hurt you. I’d never hurt you. Oh, Afia,” he said. Something sticky spilled onto her belly, but she was past caring. He stopped moving. He wrapped his arms around her. He buried his face in her neck.
Some time passed. She didn’t know—seconds, minutes, an hour? From above, the cold December air slipped through the open windows and lapped them. “Afia, M’Afia,” Gus finally said, and he gave a low chuckle.
That snapped her back. She pulled her arm out from underneath his back—it had gone to sleep a little, pinpricks below the elbow—and sat up. She felt the drying mess of his ejaculate in her pubic hair. His come. She recalled what she had done, unfolding to him like that, opening her shame, delighting in it. Shahid, she suddenly thought. Shahid lala. At the thought of her brother, of her brother’s knowing what she had just done, her body contracted. She curled up like a bean sprout. Her arms wrapped her shins; her head tucked into her chest. Blindly she reached for the blanket and pulled it over her body and head. She tried not to breathe. The air hurt. It kept her shame alive.
Weakly she heard Gus talking. She felt his hand pulling at the blanket. “Honey?” he was saying. “You okay? C’mon out of there, M’Afia. Knock, knock. Come on, don’t get weird on me. Honey?”
“I must go,” she said into the blanket. She didn’t know if he could hear her. She didn’t move. “I must go.” The blanket was becoming damp with her breath. Her damn breath. Oh, to disappear.
“Here. Here, look. I’m sorry, I thought you wanted to.”
Unmoving, she nodded. I did want to.
“Here, let’s make it better. Cover yourself with this. It’ll be okay. I didn’t come inside you, right? So it’s not like we did anything, really. Here.”
He managed to pull down the blanket so her head was out. She sneaked a look upward. He was still naked, blotchy pink, his hair disheveled the way it got when he’d played a squash match. He was holding out his bathrobe; she’d seen it hanging on a peg by the tiny bathroom built out from the far corner of the garage. It was terry cloth, navy and red plaid, frayed at the cuffs. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he managed to lift her torso as if she were an ill child. He maneuvered her arms into the sleeves. Her hair fell into her face, but she didn’t brush it back—she wished it would fall heavier, become a wall between her and the world.
“Stand back,” she finally managed to say. He stepped away from the bed and she rose. But once she’d knotted the belt around her waist, she didn’t know what else to do. The delicious feeling that had started when he put his mouth between her legs still crept up through the center of her body, like a heavy perfume. The intoxicating taste of shame.
“Whoa,” he said as she started to sway. He got his arms around her shoulders. Gently he steered her to the bathroom. His face looked so worried. She wanted him not to worry, what had happened was not his fault, but she couldn’t put the words together in English. That her legs would carry her across the industrial carpet of the floor astonished her. Blurry still, without her glasses, the fish glimmered under the light of the aquarium. Rufus Wainwright wasn’t singing any more. Keeping one hand on her back, Gus reached into the rickety shower stall and turned on the spray. “You just need to wash off, Afia,” he said. “Just wash me away, then you’ll be okay. We love each other, okay, honey? Let me kiss you. Just once. Here.”
Steam began to rise. He lifted her chin with his fingers and put his lips on hers. It was different this time, the touch like a benediction. Still she could not meet his eyes.
He untied the robe. “Go on,” he said softly, slipping it from her shoulders and steering her into the stall. The water was warm and pounded her back. She stood with her hands over her breasts. Between her legs, she felt urine release. At the same time her eyes released and she began to sob. The water poured down, the tears poured. Then she felt something warm and a little rough against her shoulder blades. She turned. He was in the stall with her, Gus. Naked too, and wet, he soaped up the washcloth. He ran it over her back. Then he turned her, opened the cross of her arms so the water spilled over her front. Turned her again; knelt on the white floor of the shower. With studious care, he washed her pubic hair, her thighs. When she would not part her legs he reached around and washed between them from the back. Standing again, he lifted up first one of her arms, then the other, and soaped the delicate skin underneath, the little nests of hair that she didn’t shave, and turned her again so the water would rinse off the soap. Then, quickly, he soaped and rinsed himself. When he was done, still under the steaming spray, he wrapped his arms around her, his big bearish arms. When he let her go, the water washed her again, washed away his touch. “You see?” he said, and the huskiness in his voice was gone; he sounded like a boy, a very young and hopeful boy. “It’s going to be fine.”
He stepped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around himself, and left her in the bathroom. After a little while, she shut off the water. The tiny room was white with steam. She groped her way out of the stall to a second clean towel that he’d left for her on the rack. She dried herself everywhere and twisted her hair up in the towel. She brushed her teeth with a finger and Gus’s paste. Before she put the robe back on she touched herself, just at the top of her pubic mound. It felt softer there, like the skin of ripe fruit. When she stepped out into the room, Gus handed her back her glasses, and she slipped them on. And it all looked as it had before. This was her home in America, this was her safe place. Shahid did not know she was here; no one knew or could know. Nothing that happened here could hurt her.
Gus was standing apart from her, by Voltaire’s cage. The iguana was stretching his neck up, sniffing for food. Gus’s arms hung down, the palms turned toward her, waiting. Her lips parted by themselves into a smile, the pleasure making its way all the way up now and into her face. “I’m hungry,” she said.
“We’ve got ice cream,” he said.
They sat together at the rickety table, the light outside gone now, only the yellow light from the bathroom streaming across the floor. Their knees k
ept knocking against each other. Afia felt famished. She couldn’t stop eating.
CHAPTER SIX
Lissy managed all her job requirements superbly except the Ask. The Ask was the moment when you faced a potential donor, an alumnus or parent you’d been schmoozing for an hour or a month, and you put the question: How much would they give? She asked questions all the time: hard questions, peculiar questions, questions whose answers she didn’t want to hear. But the Ask wasn’t about asking. It was about favors. Big favors, money favors. The Ask was really a Beg.
The week after fall semester wrapped up, she was getting ready to leave three-year-old Chloe with a sitter and haul her patient, plucky husband down to New York to be at her side while she accomplished the Ask. The capital campaign was due to wrap up by spring. For Lissy, its outcome meant either going forward with or shutting down plans for a true fitness center at Enright. The dinner, at the Yale Club, was meant to be the final push. All the university officers were attending, plus a hand-selected group of seniors, Shahid Satar among them.
She emerged from the bathroom in the one cocktail dress she owned, an off-red silk thing with a halter neck. “Wow,” Ethan said. “You sure clean up nice.”
“Speak for yourself,” she said, appraising him. He looked great in a tux, she thought. More filled out, less gawky. He was a psychologist, and she sometimes imagined him in his overstuffed armchair, a jangle of legs and arms like a resting marionette, listening to people’s problems.
He held her by the hips, his brown eyes behind their Buddy Holly glasses appraising her shape. She’d combed mousse into her wheat-colored hair and spiked it. “Maybe we should stay over,” he said. “Brunch at the Doral.”
Kissing him quickly, she turned back to the mirror and fitted the diamond earrings he’d given her last Christmas into her lobes. They had almost frightened her at first—not just because diamonds were extravagant, but because the square-cut gems, set in pale gold prongs, came from a man who knew her better than she did herself. “I told Kaitlin we’d be back by one,” she said.
“So invite her to sleep over. Easier for her, and more cash.”
“You’ve forgotten one thing,” she said.
Ethan frowned, then rolled his eyes. “We’re giving the star athlete a lift.”
“I’m sorry, honey. But you said you didn’t mind, and—”
“I don’t.” He stepped closer. His hands came around her midriff and cupped her breasts lightly. “But let’s take a weekend sometime.”
“In the city?”
“City, or up at the camp.”
“I thought your sisters wanted to sell the camp.”
“They do. I don’t. Maybe in the spring.”
“I’d love that,” she said. She reached her arms back and they kissed. “When I’m out from the squash season,” she said, “I’m yours.”
Funny, she thought as she finished dressing, how they called Ethan’s family place, in the Adirondacks, a camp. A camp, for her, had been a patch of ground in the Ozarks, not a piney cottage with vaulted ceilings and a new dishwasher.
Kaitlin, the sitter, played on the women’s squash team, and Chloe loved her. “Buenos tardes!” she sang out when Kaitlin strode into the living room.
“What you got there, Peanut?” Kaitlin asked.
“Dora puzzle,” Chloe said. Chloe was crazy about Dora the Explorer. She’d begged to have her hair cut like Dora’s, though with Chloe’s curls the Dutch-boy bob didn’t bear any resemblance.
“Tacos ready to go,” Lissy said, “and she needs a bath.”
“Yum yum,” said Chloe without looking up. “Dora loves tacos.”
Lissy lifted her from the floor for a hug. She loved the smell of the back of her neck. “Be good to Kaitlin.”
“Don’t go, Mommy.” Chloe was pressing Lissy’s lips together to make a fish face. “I’ll be scared.”
“Is Dora scared?”
“No, not of anything.”
“Just think of her then. Te amo.”
“Te amo mucho, mucho!”
They drove by the university to pick up Shahid. He, too, cleaned up nicely. In a dark suit and crisp blue tie, his wavy hair combed back from his high forehead, he looked like a young symphony conductor. He had small, boyish ears, usually in need of a Q-tip. Lissy had been watchful of him since the afternoon, two weeks ago, when he had glimpsed his sister on the Smith website and dashed from her office. But his answers regarding Afia had been tersely polite. She had held off from bringing the photo up with Gus, whose hand was surely the one clutching Afia’s in that image. Now she let Ethan draw Shahid out. He was good at this. When Lissy first met him, they were taking the same PATH train, she trekking from the Lower East Side to Rutgers University and he heading for the state penitentiary to talk to men convicted of violent crimes. That had been his dissertation subject, male violence and its prospects for remediation. Among other things, he knew how to charm young men. Now he was asking Shahid about his travels in the States. Had he spent much time in New York?
“Only for the squash championships, sir,” Shahid said from the backseat.
“But you’re trying for an MBA at Harvard—”
“Inshallah. If they admit me, sir.”
“Then you might move here, one day. Wall Street and all.”
“That will depend on my family.”
“Who are all in Pakistan?” Ethan glanced back at Shahid through the rearview. He was working his way, Lissy could tell, to the subject that had been vexing her. “Except your sister?”
“Afia is at Smith, yes.”
“That must be nice for you. To have her nearby.”
Shahid’s face paused midway between a smile and a grimace. “It has rewards and challenges, sir.”
“You must feel very protective of her.”
“She is a good girl,” Shahid said quickly. Ethan glanced at Lissy. “She is very smart. Much smarter than I.”
“They usually are,” Ethan said. They were passing Co-op City, the lights of Manhattan before them. “But you sound worried, Shahid.”
“My family has called us home. I don’t know why. And . . . well, Coach knows.”
Lissy turned. “I don’t know, Shahid,” she said. “Other than that you saw a picture of Afia. Are you afraid you won’t come back here, after your visit?” There, she had said it, the thing she herself feared. That one day Shahid would return to Pakistan and disappear, his talent buried, her years of working with him wasted.
“I am afraid she may not,” Shahid said.
A long pause fell. They took the Third Avenue Bridge and spilled onto the streets of Manhattan. “Because of this picture,” Ethan said at last.
“Because I failed to . . . because I failed, sir. And she wishes to be a doctor. And my country needs doctors.”
When they’d pulled up in front of the Yale Club, its awning stretched over the sidewalk, Ethan twisted around. “Shahid, let me ask you something. Are you upset that someone might’ve touched your sister? Or that it’s out there where people can see it?”
“I don’t see a difference, sir.”
In the overheated foyer, Lissy surrendered her coat and stamped her feet, in their stupid strappy heels. She shooed Shahid upstairs, to the Tap Room. When Ethan appeared from parking the car, she took his arm. “What difference,” she asked, “did you want him to see?”
“The one between guilt and shame.” He gave his coat to the attendant. “Would it be sinful for Afia to have a boyfriend, or just shameful if people knew about it?”
“Does it matter?”
“To him? It makes the difference he won’t admit to.”
“Well, thank you for bringing it up.” Lissy wrapped her arm around his weedy waist, stiff in the tux. “You got farther with him than I have.”
Upstairs, thin-haired men and frosted women were grabbin
g tumblers and flutes while launching into tales of Australia, Sweden, London of course, and at least one business destination in South America. Enright was a fallback college for Yale hopefuls, but somehow it still produced more than its quota of the one percent.
“You are one helluvan elegant A.D.,” said Don Shears, detaching himself from a pair of trustees. Enright’s president was a short man, with a shiny bald head that narrowed toward the top and arms that seemed long for his torso. He shook Ethan’s hand. “Dr. Springer,” he said. “Thank you for bringing your lovely wife. You’re both at table two, with the jocks.”
“Got it,” said Lissy. Her stomach lurched. The Ask, she thought.
Don moved away toward table one, where Charles Horton, board chair for the past decade, was already seated. Beak-nosed and narrow-jawed, Horton leaned one way and the other, his shock of white hair dipping first toward an oil executive’s pretty wife, then toward a leathery and squint-eyed widow. Lissy avoided him. At the last of these events, he’d introduced her as Madame Athletic Director, the Directresse of Sports, and he’d directed most of his conversation with her to her cleavage.
At table two she found her seat across from Ethan’s, between a beefy donor whose name tag read Jeff Stubnick ’95 and a willowy woman, Mona Smith-Gibbons, who said her father had won awards in pole vaulting. Their eyes widened at the news that she was the athletic director.
“I hear you’re after a fitness center,” said Jeff Stubnick, when he’d gotten over the notion of a coach in a cocktail dress. “Whatever happened to the gym?”
“The weight room,” said the donor next to him—square-jawed, horn-rimmed glasses, probably varsity lacrosse in his day.
“Everybody’s got them now,” said Mona Smith-Gibbons, who kept lifting her wineglass and looking hopefully for the server. “Our condo building, for instance. Six A.M., and you can’t get a treadmill.”