by Ryan Ruby
In college we were given another chance to separate, to differentiate, maybe it was our last chance, our last chance to learn how to be apart, so that when we finally came to be apart, the pressure wouldn’t destroy us, because, as I said, things that cannot bend under small pressures invariably break under great ones. But we didn’t take it. The pendulum between distance and proximity, between tension and relief, between shame and desire, between absence and presence was already swinging and could not be stopped. The college assigned us to different dorm rooms, as a matter of school policy, there were no coed dorm rooms, even for siblings, Zach was assigned to a single in a dorm across campus from mine, where I had a double, with a roommate. This was our chance, our chance at separation, to keep our separate rooms, but now that our parents couldn’t watch over us, Zach reasoned, there was no reason for us to be separate, no reason that things shouldn’t return to the way they were when we were children, before we had to separate, to differentiate, to be apart. Zach persuaded my roommate to switch rooms with him. That wasn’t difficult actually: by chance he had landed one of the most coveted room assignments in college, and when the RA discovered our violation of school policy, we paid him not to report it. No doubt it doubly pleased Zach that he had to break the rules to get what we wanted. At first we lived chastely as a monk and a nun, we went everywhere together, but we never pushed the border further than we already had, that was my wish, it was my idea to place some kind of border between us, so that we could survive the torture of our impossible love. Zach didn’t object, at least not explicitly, he didn’t pressure me any further, and the border between us stayed firm for two years, stayed firm until a few days before Zach went off to Oxford, went off on the advice of Dr. Stein and the insistence of our parents, went off with extreme ambivalence and anxiety on both of our parts, as I was telling you, when we cut each other for the first time and, in so doing, weakened the border we would totally erase as soon as he came back home for winter break.
When he came back home for winter break, after months of not seeing each other, in which our only contact was through language, through letters, through our invented code, I picked him up at the airport. To say I was happy to see him would be an understatement. I was ecstatic to see him, positively ecstatic, I threw my arms around his neck when he came through the doors of the terminal. Everyone there must have thought we were boyfriend and girlfriend. But at that moment I hardly cared, I thought, So what! Let them! and kissed him on the lips. New Year’s Eve, the night that contained the moment, the moment that said to me, You Are This, he stayed here, with me. Katie was in Los Angeles, visiting her family for the holidays, we had the apartment to ourselves that night, the night that contained the moment that whispered to me, This you will be forever. That night it seemed like this apartment was the whole world, even though we could hear sounds from the street, people getting drunk, playing music, lighting firecrackers, celebrating, it was as if the world outside these walls didn’t actually exist. We stayed inside, dressed in our finest clothes, I put on the pearls, the pearls I only wore on special occasions, because I sensed, without knowing, unfortunately, how right I would be, that this was a special occasion, and besides, they went perfectly with the dress he picked out for me. I picked out a suit for him, that suit, the one you’re wearing now. He opened a bottle of champagne, I put on some music, we drank and danced, in the living room, like two people dancing at the center of the center of the world. We drank and talked, told each other about the months we had passed alone, expanded on what we had recounted in our letters, he had even written about you, he told me that he had noticed you, and though he’d never spoken to you, he sensed you were the only person at the college that he might be able to have a real conversation with, the only person he might be able to open up to. Then, when he was opening the second bottle of champagne, he asked me to see the scar, to see how it had healed. Instead of rolling up the sleeve, what was I thinking, I was probably thinking that I didn’t want to tear or crease the fabric of the dress in my drunken state, instead of rolling up the sleeve, I unzipped it from the back and took it off, letting it fall to the floor, stepping out of it and hanging it over a chair, not thinking or probably not caring how provocative that would have looked, to be dressed in only the pearls and my underwear and the scar on my arm. Holding my arm, like you did, he rubbed his thumb over the scar, like you did, and asked me, almost offhandedly, as if it were a perfectly normal thing to ask, as if he was just wondering aloud, When I cut you it excited me and Was it the same for you? It was, as you know, I’ve confessed that to you already, it was the same for me, but in that moment it felt less like a confession of a secret shame than a confirmation of our connection, which had not diminished during the time we had spent apart from one another, a confirmation that Zach knew what I had been thinking, what I had been feeling, as he always had, and I felt close to him, closer than I ever had to him, as I asked him if he wanted to do it again. He didn’t answer, he went into the kitchen and took the knife from the drawer, there’s no way to say this without simply saying it, he cut me again, put a red line right beneath the white line where the other cut had healed, then he handed me the knife and started to unbutton his shirt. We could have stopped there, that was the moment to stop, that was the moment I could have said, No, this has gone too far, just as you could have said, but didn’t say, This has gone too far. It was the last moment I could have said that, although the last moment one can say something or do something is always at least a moment too late, the last moment is really something we can only see in retrospect, when we try to trace things back to their origins, when we try to answer the question, When. At that moment, that too-late moment, I was watching him speechlessly, hypnotized by the taste of the champagne and the sight of blood, hypnotized and, yes, aroused, I was watching him lift my arm by the fingers, it felt like it was floating of its own free will, he lifted it to his lips, ran his mouth over the cut, licked the blood off my arm. Then I did the same to him, cut him and licked the blood off his arm, realizing at that moment that the way his blood tasted was exactly the way my blood would taste, warm, slightly metallic. I thought, This is wrong, and I remember being excited by that too, by the wrongness of it. I remember thinking, for a moment, before things went too far, before we were kissing each other, before I lay on my back and unhooked my bra and felt his mouth on my breasts, as I held him there, my fingers threaded through the back of his hair, his lips pressed to my heart, I remember thinking, There is no one in the world but Zach and me. I lifted my hips so he could undress me, so that I could be naked with him, so he could be inside me, connected as no two people have ever been connected before. But in the next moment, the moment after the moment it was too late, I learned something awful, something horrifying, something which, from that moment on, I have wished I could unlearn. I learned that time never stops, and that the moment after the moment it seems to stop, the moment after the ecstatic moment, the moment after the moment where time itself seems fulfilled and completed, is free fall. Zach came quickly, the moment of our connection, of him being inside me, was only that, a moment, a moment that said to me, What you are is a Monster. While he was shaking, Zach reached out, as if to stabilize himself, as if he needed to prevent himself from free fall, he grabbed the closest thing at hand, the pearls. The necklace snapped. Then I did. I heard the pearls rolling on the floor, and as I heard them rolling on the floor, I remembered what my mother, our mother, told me when she gave them to me: One day you’ll pass these pearls on to your daughter. My throat began to burn with acid, I felt sick, outside became real again, terrifyingly real, real with a vengeance, I could hear the sound of the fireworks outside, but instead of watching them from the rooftop, as we had planned, we spent the first moments of the New Year, naked, on our hands and knees, suddenly very cold, collecting the pearls from the floor, from under the couch, picking them out of the rug as if they were head lice. I was shrieking, in a panic, cupping the lost pearls in my hands, counting them up, t
here were thirty I knew, thirty in total, I knew because I played with them obsessively when I wore them, touched them all, counted them. We managed to find all of them but one, which I now know is the one he put in the letter to you, somehow he managed to hide it from me, put it in his pocket and took it halfway around the world with him, only to send it back to me, to send it back to its point of origin, back to the beginning, a beginning that was really the beginning of an ending, his ending, through you, the person he thought would end with him, but you did not end, because time does not end, it does not stop, even when we try to end it, even when we try to put a stop to it. I was screaming, screaming at him about the missing pearl, We must find it, What will Mommy think, What will I tell Mommy. Screaming about the pearl, It’s lost, It’s lost, when both of us knew I was screaming about the other thing, about what we had just done, we hadn’t used a condom, of course we hadn’t, when you’re going to fuck your sister, when you’re going to commit incest, what’s the point right, why even bother with something like that, who takes precautions when they throw caution to the wind. As I was screaming, It’s lost, It’s lost, as I was looking for the missing pearl, freezing cold, naked, on my hands and knees, the blood drying on my arm, the cut beginning to sting, I became certain, totally convinced that Zach had gotten me pregnant, that already cells were dividing inside me, cells that were at once too close to me and too far from me, cells that would divide and differentiate until they became the daughter to whom I’d promised my mother to pass on these pearls, all thirty of these awful pearls.
Afterwards, because there is always an afterwards, we were in the bathroom, I was leaning over the toilet, he was holding my hair, he was whispering to me, trying to comfort me, as if comfort were possible, as if he felt no shame whatsoever in what we had just done, perhaps he didn’t feel any, perhaps he never did, perhaps that’s another difference between us, one I couldn’t ignore, one that couldn’t be erased. For me, the pendulum had swung back again, shame had once again gotten the upper hand over anxiety and my fear of being without him, shame was the dull, acrid taste in my mouth, the taste of alcohol and blood and vomit, shame was the cold sweat on my forehead, a nausea that began that night and has been with me ever since. Zach fell asleep that morning just before the sun began to rise, he was able to fall asleep, I couldn’t believe it, I watched his face while he slept and, for the first time in my life, I found it ugly, he had an awful, placid look on his face, as if he were pleased with himself, as if he were somehow peaceful and happy, he didn’t seem to feel my suffering, and, for that, in that moment, I hated him, I wanted to kill him. Later that day, the first of the year, around noon, when I couldn’t stand to watch him sleep any longer, I woke him up, I slapped him across the face and threw him out, I wouldn’t listen to him tell me to Please, Vera, calm down, I wouldn’t listen to him attempt to explain why I was upset. I shrieked, Get out, Out, I never want to see you again, I never want to speak to you again, because in his face all I could see was my shame, the impossibility our lives had become after we had done what we had done, I screamed at him until he left, and, as if it were a curse, a curse I’ve inadvertently brought down on my own head, he left, and the words came true, I never saw him again, I never spoke to him again. Two weeks later, I went to the drugstore and got a pregnancy test and, thank God, what I saw there was a minus sign. Mommy didn’t say anything to me when I brought the pearls to her to have them repaired, she didn’t notice there was a pearl missing, when she returned them to me, and told me to be more careful next time, I felt as if I’d committed a crime and no one had noticed, that there would be no consequences, that no one would ever find out, that somehow Zach and I had gotten away with it, we’d been given a chance to start over, I told myself, not knowing that our chance to start over had long since passed us by. I called him on the phone to tell him this, but he didn’t pick up. I left voicemails. I wrote him emails, apologizing for what I had said to him, trying to explain myself to him, trying to say that it was good for us to be apart, that we needed, now more than ever, to try to see other people, but he never responded. I began to miss him, desperately, but I wanted to force myself not to miss him. After he left, I fucked a new guy every week, I didn’t care how ugly, or stupid, or uncultured, or dirty, or dangerous they were, the uglier and dumber and more uncultured and dirtier and more dangerous the better, I thought, I needed to defile myself, to be totally abject, so Zach would never want me again, so I could free myself from his love by being absolutely unlovable. There were dozens of them, dozens of these awful men, whose names I never learned, or have forgotten, and were anyway unimportant to me, because they were indistinguishable from each other, these men were just the sick minds attached to the hard cocks I was trying to punish myself with, to me they were pawns, just pawns, disposable pieces in a game they would never find out about, a game they could never begin to understand. I fucked anyone who propositioned me or flirted with me or offered me drugs or money in bars to come to the bathroom with them, or to come home with them, or come to their hotel room with them. I had one rule, only one rule, no sex, these men could tie me up or hit me or cum on my face or fuck me in the ass or take naked photos of me or lick my shoes while I told them what slime they were or watch me go down on their wives or their girlfriends while they jerked themselves off, but I never again wanted someone to be where Zach had been. You don’t need to tell me how utterly stupid this was, how self-defeating it was, I recognized it myself. It was as if I were preserving part of myself for him, as if I were turning my cunt into some kind of shrine to the moment we had together, the moment that we were more closely connected than any two people have ever been connected, the moment that told me I was a monster, that he was a monster. I wanted to make him hate me, I wanted him to know that I was unworthy of his love, and so I wrote him a letter describing what I had done, what I had been doing, how degraded I was, I knew if I put it in a letter, written in our secret code, he would be forced to read it, he couldn’t just delete it and pretend it was never sent. I gave this letter to Daddy, this disgusting record of what my life had become, I had my own father pass it on to him, that’s how desperate I was, how unclearly I was thinking, and Daddy gave it to Zach when the two of them met in Berlin. The scars are enough, I wrote him. We’ll be connected to each other forever, but it is time, time to live our own lives, as separate people. It’s time to fall in love with other people. What I have done to myself these past months is for my own good, for our own good. Otherwise, we’ll never be happy. Otherwise, we’ll scar each other forever.