by Ryan Ruby
A second glass was poured and with it came a second round of toasts:
“To Claire!” “To Zach!” “To Tori!” “To Owen!”
It was midafternoon and it seemed like it would be forever. For a long time, no one spoke. I lay back, resting in Claire’s lap, pleasantly drunk, and felt the champagne evaporating through the pores of my skin, as all the pink-gold bubbles I’d consumed returned to their homes in the sun. I heard: the sound of oars on the river, the flutter of birds, a breeze through the drooping willow leaves, the click of the wheel on Zach’s lighter, his indrawn breath. But these were only soft exceptions that drew my attention to the gauzy density of the surrounding silence. I opened my eyes. Claire was looking at the large white tuft above our heads.
“What do you see?” she asked us.
Tori craned back her neck to look at the cloud.
“I see a ship. With two masts. See? There’s the hull and there’s the keel and those are the billowing sails.”
“A corsair’s frigate prowling the Barbary Coast,” Zach embroidered. He languorously tapped my arm with the back of his hand. “What about you?”
The cloud was beginning to change shape. The billowing sails Tori had identified were merging together and what was once the keel had slowly broken away to form a cloudlet of its own. The result was a large, oval-shaped mass that flared out at the top and culminated in a nub. To me, it looked like a custodian helmet. The cloud was God’s bobby on the celestial beat, making its rounds, spying on us sinners here below.
When we reached Folly Bridge, it was the girls’ turn to take up the spruce poles and steer us back to the boathouse. Leaning back against the cushion, I looked over at the other punt. In private, Claire and I gave a good deal of thought to the question of Zach and Tori. Sometimes it felt as though we pondered their relationship more than our own, which merited as little study as a Year 6 maths worksheet. But perhaps that was only how it seemed to us, I thought, letting my fingers skim the surface of the water. Perhaps, late at night, in the other bedroom of the flat, similar conversations were being had, with Claire and me as their subject.
To have a relationship with Zach, I told Claire, you either had to be content to yield him the spotlight—or be capable of stealing the show. Tori fell into the latter category. She attracted him by never being overly impressed by him, I hypothesised, by never confusing his theatricality for reality, and knowing, without ever having to be told, which of his statements to take seriously, which to let pass without comment, and which to lovingly ridicule. In public at least, their affection expressed itself as skirmishes of wit and verbal jousting, a merry war very different from the earnest more-things-in-heaven-and-earth conversations that resulted when he and I were the principal characters on stage.
Not that they hadn’t any disagreements. Like Gregory Glass, Tori clearly did not share Zach’s nostalgia for putatively superior bygone eras, or his contempt for the compromises entailed in political action. She believed that not only was the better the enemy of the good, but that providing the good, defined as concrete improvements to people’s economic well-being, was the legitimate aim of a life’s work. (She hoped, in fact, to enter the civil service one day.) Unlike Gregory, though, she didn’t take Zach’s disagreement personally. She deflected his criticisms with insouciant humour rather than attempting to volley them back with ad hominem rhetoric. “Where’d she learn to do that?” I once wondered aloud. Claire told me I’d understand as soon as I met her parents, next to whom Tori was apparently solemnity personified.
Claire agreed with my general assessment, but naturally, as Tori’s friend, she took the view from over her shoulder. Therefore it was Zach’s thick skin that impressed her. “Before we met,” Claire told me, “Tori was seeing a DPhil student called Sam Finchley. Normally she wouldn’t go in for such a dour, reedy bloke,” but Sam was the first opportunity to present himself after her previous long-term relationship came to the conclusion of its protracted collapse. Sam, alas, was quick to wither under what he perceived to be Tori’s scorn. “I don’t think either of them,” Claire said, “could stand being in a relationship with a woman who was cleverer than they were.”
That things were not perfect between them, however, was only made apparent to me a few weeks later, by the slamming of a door.
I was sitting at the kitchen table, book open, pencil in hand, trying to understand the difference between free and bound variables before my eleven o’clock logic lecture. With Zach and I no longer in the same tutorial, and Prelims looming for me in six weeks, Trinity Term had dispersed our group somewhat. Since our return from holiday, Claire had taken my place as our most diligent student. Always an early riser, she was already off at her tute, where she’d be presenting her analysis of a lesser-known work by the Gawain Poet. Tori had a free day. And Zach, who began the term by declaring that there was no point in going to lectures any more, was, I wrongly assumed, sleeping in.
My attention wandered. A serious discussion, I could hear, was taking place in the other room. The volume of their voices steadily increased from studied whisper to heated debate to shouting match. I put my pencil down, now fully intent on deciphering the indistinct words being spoken behind the door. Only their emotional register revealed itself clearly to me. Zach was cross. Tori, upset.
When the door opened suddenly I quickly lowered my eyes back to the book. This didn’t fool Zach, who remarked, “You know, when you’re listening in on someone’s private conversation, the best thing to do is look up, not down. Because a person naturally looks up when he hears a door open. The fact that you’re looking down at your book can only mean that you were eavesdropping, the very thing you were trying to hide by looking at your book. Sometimes I think I’ve taught you nothing.” And then, as he left the flat, he slammed the door behind him.
My first instinct was to run after him. But Tori must have heard him speaking to me, and it wouldn’t do for her to come into the kitchen needing someone to talk to and find herself alone in the flat, abandoned. I gently knocked on her bedroom door—that one Zach had cruelly left wide open. I stepped into her room, but before I could ask if everything was all right, she pointed a finger in the direction of the dining room and shrieked, “Out! Out! Out!”
I collected my books and ran out the door, following the path Zach would have likely taken back to college. I caught up with him on St. Giles’, just as he was entering a pub. Short of breath, I asked, “What the bloody hell was that about?”
“She wants to go to something called Commems with me,” he said petulantly.
I was relieved. As I ran to catch him, the thought crossed my mind their row had been caused by Zach’s confession, in a moment of guilt and weakness, of what we’d done in Berlin.
“It sounds like a ridiculous way to spend an evening,” he continued. “It costs nearly a hundred pounds a pop. It’s Carnival themed for crying out loud!”
“Brazilian?”
“Venetian.”
I looked at him with incomprehension. The Commemoration Ball was an Oxford tradition in which you drank and danced until sunrise dressed in white tie and wore, in this case I presume, commedia dell’arte masks. Ridiculous or not, it sounded like the very sort of evening on which Zach would normally be quite keen. As for the expense: I’d never known him to complain of it before. He’d been sponsoring my travel and my books and my drinks for several months now. What was another few hundred quid to go with Tori to a ball?
“You’re going to lecture then?” I asked.
“I’m going into this pub here and I’m going to drink until I’m in a better mood. Then I’ll see what I want to do about Tori.”
Later, after the two reconciled, Claire told me the other side of the story. Their row, as he said, was about Commems, but as so often happens, from such small beginnings it had quickly expanded into more emotionally volatile territory. And this Zach had completely left out of his account.
As I had, Tori found his reasons suspect. She pressed
him on them. The hidden cause was his imminent return back home at the end of the term. When Tori enquired into the future he envisioned for their relationship—would they remain together, do long distance, reunite in a year when both graduated?—he responded angrily. He hadn’t given it the least bit of thought. Thinking about the future, he’d argued, only ruined his ability to enjoy their relationship in the present. After all, they’d only been together three months. How was he supposed to plan for a year from now?
Zach returned that evening to the Bevington Road to apologise. He had a bouquet of clover and thistle he’d picked himself in Port Meadow in his extended hand and Chaplinesque penitence all over his face. Tori stood in the doorway with her arms crossed and declared, through a defiant frown she was having trouble maintaining, that she could not be appeased by such a mawkish gesture.
Then he produced the two tickets.
Claire thought that this was a concession that amounted to victory for Tori. The tickets were an expression—an implicit one, granted—of his desire to remain with her after he left for New York. I thought otherwise, but kept my opinion to myself. It seemed to me that Zach had slyly concealed his postponement of the subsequent question by returning Tori’s focus to the original point of contention. Looking back on it now, I can’t help but think he ultimately decided to buy the tickets because, already, he knew he would not be attending that ball.
TRANSCENDENT VICES.—If Darwin is correct, what ultimately distinguishes human beings from other organisms is not reason, language, religion, or tool-making, but chastity, sodomy, castration, and suicide.
Rivington Street has gone from deserted to dense in the hour since we disappeared into the bar. Now we must navigate the cracked and crowded pavement back to her flat, a task Vera entrusts entirely to me. She leans her head on my shoulder and threads her arms through mine. Make a left at the corner, she says. I extend my hand to her waist and pull her hip to me. I lean my cheek on the crown of her black hair, and we take the unsteady steps together, with our four feet, back to her flat. We wade through a queue at a cashpoint. Step around a guitarist sitting on his amplifier, looking at his watch, waiting for the rest of the band to come. Walk past a couple obliviously snogging against a wall, on which a stencil of a large rat holding a paint roller has been spray-painted. Vera’s steps echo irregularly on the pavement, sounding clearly above the loud music spilling out of the bars. Above the loud rows being conducted on the fire escapes above our heads. Above the car horns and the police sirens. Stanton, she says. Make a right.
At the door, she gives me her handbag to search for the keys. This makes me uncomfortable, but I do it anyway. A memory: Mum slapping the back of my five-year-old hand, saying, Never go through a woman’s handbag, prying a sweet from my grasp. A rule I’ve adhered to unquestioningly, almost superstitiously, ever since. My fingers graze a paper notebook. A purse. Tubes of lipstick. A compact. Tampons. Loose change. The sharp edge of a jewel case. A CD player. A string of headphones. Then, finally, the metal ring with the keys on it.
Silver square key for the outside. Diamond-shaped bronze key for upstairs, Vera tells me, her eyes half-closed.
The lights in the flat are off. I make to turn to the sofa, wordlessly volunteering to sleep there. In case things have changed since last night. In case last night was an aberration. But she catches me by the tips of my fingers and leads me to the bedroom. Feebly, I begin to protest, I’m not sure this is a good—but she covers my mouth with her own.
We struggle to get out of our clothes. Ripping and pulling as much as we unbutton and unzip. I step out of my trousers and peel my socks off with my toes. Rather than yielding to my attempt to lay her on the bed, she holds me at arm’s length, palm open on my bare chest. She turns round and crawls across the bed on her hands and knees. Where the bed meets the wall, she places her cheek to the sheets, intertwining her hands at the base of her neck. Like a schoolgirl taking cover during an air raid. Offering herself to me impersonally. Almost with resignation. The way Nadya offered herself to Zach. Not how I imagined it. But is it ever how you imagined it? I try to enter her, but she stops me, saying, Not there. Please. Don’t ask me to explain. There’s some lube in the dresser drawer. Yes. Now, slowly. Slowly.
I rest my chest on her back and clutch her breasts to stabilise myself as she begins to move her hips. Slick with sweat, my hands slip down her chest, my fingers meshed into the cogs of her ribcage. She grabs me by the scruff of the neck. Digs her nails in. Pushes herself against my pelvis. She breathes in sharply through her teeth, the sound a child makes when she skins her knee. A sharp cry ejects itself from her throat. Hard to say whether these sounds are indications of pleasure or of pain. Whether they mean I should keep going or I should stop. She whispers unintelligibly into the sheets. As though she were praying into them. When she lets go of my neck, I straighten, holding on to her by the hips. The groove of her lower back is glistening with sweat. Hers. Mine. She is using me, I think, using me as an instrument of her suffering. Besides the afflicted cries and the mad whispering all I hear is the sound of the necklace, clicking like clockwork against her chest.
You know, she starts to say, when we are lying on our backs, catching our breath. You haven’t…
I suddenly feel quite sober. Judging from the way her words slip from the corner of her mouth, I think I may be the only one. The portentousness of the pause that follows is unnerving. I slink out of bed to find the packet of cigarettes in my pocket. Some confession is coming, of that I’m sure. Words I’ve longed to hear. Words I’m afraid to hear. To prepare myself for them, I curl into the windowsill, letting the smoke from my lips plume into the humid night air.
You haven’t said anything about the lines on my arm. And don’t tell me you didn’t notice them. I felt you running your hands over them last night.
Yes. I noticed them. Zach had them as well. On the same place. But on his other arm.
Did he tell you how they got there?
I shake my head. Is this something I really must know? Something I’m ready to know? Is it time for that?
I inhale deeply. Tell me.
Last summer, before Zach left for Oxford, was a terrible time for us both, she begins. And for me in particular. It’s difficult to explain, but Zach and I are one person, not two. Very few people know what this is like. Even if they can understand it intellectually, they can’t imagine what it feels like. You see, before this year, we’d only ever really been apart once before. One summer. When we were thirteen. Me in the city, Zach up at a summer camp near our aunt and uncle in New Hampshire. We wrote each other letters all summer, pages and pages in this secret code we invented, pages and pages about how unhappy we were to be apart. I told him to come home. And the only way he’d be allowed to come home, he figured, was to get kicked out for misbehaving. Mommy and Daddy began getting calls from the counselors about how Zach wouldn’t participate in any of the activities. Including meals. Then, a few days later, they called to say that he’d punched another camper in the face while he was sleeping. That was the final straw. They were forced to send him home. Now, the thought that we’d be separated for a whole year caused us a great deal of anxiety. There were times when Zach said he didn’t want to go, but Mommy and Daddy insisted. We weren’t going to be able to go through our whole lives attached at the hip, after all. Dr. Stein thought it was a good idea too. Still, my anxiety started to get out of control. So she prescribed me medication for it. For Zach too. But he never took it. On principle. We’ve both been diagnosed with depersonalization disorders. Maybe this was a misdiagnosis, or maybe the dosage was too low, but for me, the medication never seemed to work. Have you ever had a dissociative episode? It’s crippling. You feel like your mind is detached from your body. You feel like your thoughts have suddenly acquired bodies of their own, faces of their own, hands of their own. And they’ve all got these thought-hammers and thought-files and want nothing more to do than to break out of your skull. In a state like that—and it seems to last
forever—it’s impossible to summon up the will to do anything at all. The secret to overcoming this, Zach believed, was not medication, it was to remind your thoughts that they were only thoughts. And the only way to do that was through pain. Actual, physical pain. So when an attack would come on, he’d go to the freezer and get an ice cube and hold it until it melted and his hand went numb. We tried that every day for weeks, until we got used to it. We stopped feeling the pain and the ice no longer achieved its purpose. So we had to try… other things. The night before his departure, I was in the kitchen at our parents’ house. My hands were wet and cold from the ice. I took one of the knives from the drawer and rolled up my sleeve, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, to cut myself. I brought the knife to Zach and asked him to do it for me. He didn’t say anything, he didn’t ask me what the hell I was doing, he understood immediately. Without a word, he took the blade and swiftly ran it across my arm. There was no blood at first. Just a white line. A slit. We watched as it opened, hypnotized. It felt like it was breathing. Like the gill of a fish. Then the blood started oozing out, thick and dark as oil. It barely hurt at first, it only stung a little, but the stinging was enough to bring me back to reality. You won’t believe this, but getting cut was almost… pleasurable. I’d forgotten to bring a towel with me to clean up. Zach took off his shirt and wrapped it around the cut. Then he handed me the knife and said—no, whispered: Now me. Do it to me. I remember giving him a confused look. He wasn’t feeling any anxiety at that moment. It was something else. A desire to share in my experience. To be marked by me, as he had marked me. He hadn’t protested when I asked him, he hadn’t judged me, so I felt guilty at the thought of refusing him. I took the knife. And ran the blade across his arm.
She stops for a long moment and says nothing more, reflecting, I imagine, on the enormity of her confession, which she must have made for the first time. But she looks relieved to have spoken. Will I ever feel such relief? Her moist, bloodshot eyes move back and forth. Begging me to comment. To say something. To say perhaps—You’re off your head the both of you. Or else to say—I understand, I completely understand.