by Jill Malone
“A deconstructive evolution?”
“Oh tease if you want. I took care of you—since you were little—it never occurred to me that I might love him. I loved you. That was enough while you were here.”
“It seems so obvious now. I’m pleased; don’t think I’m not pleased. It’s just the shock of finding so much happiness here. I feel like I walked into someone else’s life.”
“But you allow we deserve it?”
“Of course you deserve it, Therese, both of you. Jesus Christ, am I a heartless bitch that you ask me that?”
“I’m asking your mother’s daughter.”
I felt crushed suddenly in the kitchen with the woman who had raised me, endured my sullenness, my temper and the bouts of silence I’d inherited from my father; that she would ask such a question for such a reason felt like betrayal. Anger growled from the pit of my belly and my fists clenched. Who was my mother’s daughter that such a question could exist between Therese and me?
“Fuck this, Therese.”
“I’m asking your mother’s daughter.”
“She answered already.”
“You answered.”
“We’re the same person.”
“No.”
“We’re the same fucking person, Therese.”
“No.”
“I am my mother’s daughter.”
“You’re more than that, Jane. I asked you if we deserved to be happy.”
“Yes, and I said Of course.”
“You said Of course your father and I did. Don’t you deserve it, too?”
My face felt hot. I was so angry that my jaw ached where I clenched it. A taste in my mouth of gingersnaps, I saw myself waxing my board on the floor as Therese’s bare legs moved around my periphery. I hadn’t thought she meant me. I wanted to touch her face, ease the intensity of her black eyes, the strain between us that had arched instantaneously like the hackles on a dog’s back.
“I didn’t think about it.”
“I’m asking your mother’s daughter.”
“Therese.”
I whispered her name like a prayer. The dirt road kicked up in front, and we wound around the corner, the back wheels sliding. Driving so fast, our hair roping out the windows, I watched the retaining wall pull closer to us. Closer and closer the wall loomed, like God, and then his voice thundering metal.
“You survived, Jane. You weren’t in the car with her. You survived her, and you deserve to be happy.”
I didn’t say anything. I wished I hadn’t come. I couldn’t stop my mother from dying each time like a new wound, her body pinned in the car, a malformed insect. Dust spilling through the window and mixing on the seat with the blood. I left the house and went to the orchards, sought out the mango grove, watched the myna birds hopping from branch to branch as if to test the resolve of each tree.
“I’ve been asked to tell you supper is ready.”
Grey had sneaked up behind me without disturbing the birds.
“You lost the coin toss?”
“Is it as bad as that?”
He crouched in the dirt next to me, the smell of salt on his skin, his hair still wet at the nape of his neck. Somehow, Grey seemed to belong to the orchard, his body perfectly at ease among the trees, and the blue block of sky. I felt more alien for his familiarity.
“No,” I answered at last. “The house is so different. It’s like I don’t belong here anymore.”
“It’s called visiting, Janie. You don’t have to stay.”
“Did Dad surf with you?”
“Your fucking dad was ripping it up. Jesus, so that’s where you get all your speed. Em and I were tearing after him—not a prayer of catching up, man. There were eight people in the water. Can you believe that shit? Eight people! I’m moving out here.”
“Yeah, it’s paradise. No movie theaters, no museums, no library, one UPS drop, no shopping—”
“If I could live here, I’d do it in a moment: this orchard is a world completely removed. You don’t need anything here, just tending the trees and surfing.”
“Maybe that’s what my folks thought too.”
He waited as if I might go on. I felt his eyes moving over me, scanning for my exact meaning. He reached over and pinched my belly.
“We’ve got to eat, kid. You can’t afford to skip any meals.”
“Fuck off.”
“Or we could just hang here and make out.”
I stood and looked down at him, crouched in the dirt like a peasant. His teeth were startling against the practiced tan of his face, and he grinned up at me with flinted eyes. God damned Hippie Gap Model.
“I’m afraid of nuns.”
“Me too,” he said.
He held my hand as we walked toward the house. From the trees bulbul birds swooped and wailed.
Grey kept us laughing all through dinner, recounting his misadventures skating uninvited in the pools of the ultra-rich in Hawaii Kai during the early eighties.
“We wanted to be the Z-boys of Dogtown—these renegade characters from California—but we were just a bunch of skinny surf punks running around with fat boards we could barely maneuver, these nasty burns on our legs from repeated falls.”
“Keep in mind,” Emily said, “that this is the eighties and Ryan wanted long hair like everybody else.”
“Right, but instead of getting longer my hair just kind of fro-ed out like John McEnroe.”
“Oh god, that’s horrible.”
“Think Gene Wilder in the early years, but curls instead of frizz.”
“So this one cop is chasing us from this anonymous house one day and he’s yelling at me: Young lady, you get over here right now.”
“No!”
“I thought I’d never live it down, yeah, Em? People were repeating that to me in the halls at school for months.”
When she spooned seconds onto my plate, Therese leaned over me and rubbed my back. A truce. We’d called a silent truce. Dad and Therese offered to drive Grey to the airport when we finished dessert.
“You two can stay behind,” Therese had said, squeezing my arm. She looked over at Emily and added, “To clean up.”
The kitchen still smelled sweet from the bul-go-gi marinade. Halfway through the dishes—my head light with whiskey—I grabbed Emily and kissed her mouth. Wresting a plate from her hand, I pushed her against the counter and went on kissing her, my wet hands in her hair, all my grief pooling inside our mouths.
“Stop,” she said.
I yanked her shirt up and clutched her breast, a groan inside me deep as a lioness’.
“Honey,” she said, her voice a warning: “Stop.”
I dropped to my knees, and pulled at her shorts as though I didn’t understand the concept of button fly. She squirmed sideways pushing my arms away.
“Stop it. Stop.”
I dropped onto my back and covered my face in my hands. Was there no comfort anywhere?
“What? Jesus, what?”
“Is that why I’m here? To fuck you when the house is empty?”
“Oh god, please. I can’t handle another scene today.”
“I’d hate to inconvenience you.”
“Jesus.”
“I know we’re being discreet about seeing each other. We both wanted that, but this is ridiculous. Ryan is going to find out sooner or later, and your parents know you’re a lesbian.”
“They aren’t my parents.”
“You know what I mean. Are we just having sex? Is that all we’re doing?”
“We’re not even doing that.”
“Fuck you, Jane.”
“Wait,” I sat up and grabbed at her calf. “Wait.”
She stopped at the foot of the staircase, refusing to look at me. I stretched my arm up to her.
“Please.”
She kicked the bottom step and slapped my hand away.
“You have to give a little, honey. You have to have some confidence in me.”
“I’ll tell them if it’ll make y
ou happy.”
“They already know—and no, I didn’t say anything. This morning, Therese told me to move my bags into your room. She apologized for separating us.”
Don’t you deserve it, too? she’d asked me, her face strained with worry. I allow we deserve it. Even I.
“My mother died when I was fifteen. We don’t talk about it. We’ve never talked about it. Coming home has been really complicated for me. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Anxiety, like a spent candle, extinguished from the room. She sat me on the counter in front of her and cradled into me, murmuring something unintelligible, something lost. Outside in the dark, the trees must have shimmered under the moonlight, their boughs grappling ever higher.
XIV.
Paul’s face blistered whenever he spoke in class, though he looked right at me to give his answers as if determined to see the thing through properly. Not one of my students ever called me Jane, nor did they use my surname. Instead, most of them simply caught my attention by other means, then began talking, although a few would call Miss! if I happened to be looking down at my transparency and had not noticed the insistent wave of one of their hands. But Paul, a thin, pale young man with long dark eyelashes, and a sculpted effeminate face, always addressed me as Professor. He was the closest I ever came to having a crush on one of my students, except admiration took the place of any erotic notion: I felt a maternal pride in his quick able mind; pleased each time I graded his test to find he’d scored perfectly again; listening specifically for his voice whenever we ran declensions as if he were my gifted soprano.
“Professor,” his hand raised above his forehead as if in salute, he blushed when I met his gaze. “I’ve been wondering—I’m not sure it’s appropriate for me to question—but I’ve been wondering about the translation exercises.”
Here he paused, glancing around the table at his nearest peers as though seeking their support to continue. I waited, curious.
“Well, it’s just that more than half of these translations include some form of rape. And I’ve … well, it bothers me.”
He looked around the table again, then up at me, with a worried expression as if he’d been disrespectful. The rest of the students had turned from Paul and were now watching me closely, apparently sharing Paul’s anxiety about an impending reprimand. I admired Paul; I was almost sorry to tell him that we have to live with our stories.
“It bothers me as well,” I said. “To use primary source material is preferable whenever possible, and these myths are more interesting than financial records, but you’re right to be bothered. Elements of these myths, the violence and the punishments, are often both shocking and distasteful to our modern sensibilities. It speaks to our evolution as human beings that this is true. The Latin gods, thieved from the Greeks, were frequently vindictive, selfish, amoral creatures who preyed upon the populace—sometimes at random.”
I scanned the class, then met Paul’s rapt gaze again: “But we study these Latin myths and poems because they give us insight into an age of great progress. Certainly they seem antiquated to us in the final years of the twentieth century, but the Romans made determined advances for their time period, not only roads and aqueducts, government and law, but in art and literature.”
“You’re suggesting that I’m taking these myths out of context?” he asked calmly.
“I’m suggesting that in studying language we are also studying a people, a society, a culture and it is foreign from ours in many fundamental and important ways. Should we censor myths that offend us? Remove any reference to incest, rape, torture, or murder? Should we study only the enlightened periods of history? And who would decide which periods are enlightened? I don’t mean to make light of your question, Paul, it’s a complex and provocative question.”
He shook his head slowly: “You haven’t made light of my question, Professor. I suppose I have taken them out of context. They’re myths, after all.”
Returning to the office after my last class, I found Delvo sitting at my desk in the dark.
“How now, Mercutio?” I greeted her.
“My dear Elliot,” she said as if someone were choking her.
“What’s happened?”
“I haven’t any idea. I’m supposed to be at the hospital right now, waiting in a cold impersonal stock room while my sister releases her first child. But I haven’t the nerve; I really haven’t. I hate hospitals, Elliot. Those squeaky floors and the pajama outfits on patients and staff alike, the intercom system, the rooms full of saws and needles.”
I leaned backwards against the closed door, the knob digging into my spine, and swallowed the burst of laughter that gripped at my chest and throat. Hardly visible at my desk, her profile thickened as though she’d been sketched in chalk, and her voice rasped urgently on about the unyielding cold of stethoscopes, white masks, stretched latex gloves. I’d imagined some horrible tragedy, rather than an ingrained phobia.
“Delvo, it’s only a building, an institution very much like this one.”
“I am not trapped in a building with gurneys and a morgue here.”
I smiled in spite of myself, hoping she couldn’t see my face clearly.
“Shall I go with you?”
“Oh no, no, I’ve quite made up my mind: I cannot go. I’ll see the child when they trundle it home. Babies all look like blind mice at first anyway. No doubt there will be pictures. My brother-in-law commemorates everything.”
Now I laughed heartily, masking the knock on the door behind me, so that the door opened into my back, knocking me forward into the dim room.
“Professor,” said Paul. “I’m sorry.”
“No worries, Paul.”
He stood awkwardly in the doorway, clasping his bag in his hand as if it were a floatation device and he in grave danger of drowning. I switched on the overhead light. Delvo went on mumbling from behind my desk.
“What can I do for you?”
He cast Delvo an anxious look, then said: “I’ve been thinking about what you said, Professor, and I think I understand. It’s like Huckleberry Finn. At the time it was shocking—revolutionary—to think that a black man was human with complex emotions and value. And Mark Twain wrote his argument from the perspective of an uneducated, mistreated Southern white boy, as if to say, ‘If this kid can get it, then anyone can.’ Now, of course, when you read Huckleberry Finn, you cringe through most of Huck’s racist observations, but that’s because the book’s out of context today.”
He stopped, face flushed, voice trembling and I grinned at him.
“That’s exactly right, Paul. Your example is much more precise than my explanation to the class this afternoon. I’ll borrow it, if you don’t mind, for the next time the subject arises.”
Despite his shyness, he beamed at me. “I don’t think the subject will come up again. No one else seemed bothered.”
“Most of them, I suspect, were just as troubled. Not everyone is brave enough to express concern to a roomful of his peers.”
Still beaming, he backed out the door, stammered he’d see me in class the next afternoon, then hurried down the corridor with his bag swinging dangerously at his side.
Delvo appraised me from my desk.
“He was worried about rape in the myths.”
“Ah,” she said. “I tell them, just wait until we get to the histories.”
“No doubt they find that comforting. Come on, Delvo, I’ll buy you a drink. Can’t have you camped out all night at my desk.”
“Excellent,” she said, climbing slowly to her feet. “Excellent. But I warn you, Elliot, any discussion of babies or hospitals is strictly prohibited.”
Without any inclination to broach taboo subjects, I locked the door to the office, and we followed, like a delayed echo, Paul’s footsteps down the corridor and into the night.
XV.
Sometimes I imagined myself the mistress’s mistress, housed in the servants’ quarters behind the mansion, the murmur of rain in the thick stalks o
f the banyan trees, awaiting a visitation from my lady. I never once slept with Emily in her own room. The rules for the affair were strict, implicit—we never shared them with each other—and integral to the survival of our relationship both as friends and as whatever we had morphed into.
Rule 1: No one knows. (Amendment to Rule 1: Or anyway, as few people as possible and certainly not the guy you surf with.)
Naturally, this is one of those rules that you hope, rather than expect to keep. A woman having an affair smells different, her body more resolutely sexual, more confident—a bolder laugh, a more relaxed gaze—a kinetic pulse between her lover and herself. Though some of these attributes may be interpreted as simple happiness, in the company of your lover the body confesses every secret. Ryan Grey, then, as our closest mutual friend, was our greatest liability.
Late one night in February, I hogged the couch at Grey’s place, where we were watching The Philadelphia Story, my legs cast across his lap, feet tamping his forearm whenever he stopped massaging whichever foot I’d pressed into his palm. Begrudgingly, he jabbed his thumbs into my footpad and arch while his fingers slid along the top of my foot. When he chose, his dexterous fingers gave a powerful soul-transforming massage, but you had to catch him in that moment between distraction and absorption to suck up every ounce of pleasure.
Concentrating on the movie—he was laughing at all the jokes, which made me love him all the more—he neglected my feet until I began to prod more insistently. Finally, after indiscriminate kicking failed, I paused the movie.
“Play the movie.”
“What?”
“Play the fucking movie.”
“Sorry, I didn’t catch that. What was it you said you wanted?”
“Give me the remote,” he said.
Since he already had my feet in his hands, it was fruitless to resist.
“Fuck that, bitch,” I said. “Come and get it.”
Spinning me onto my belly, he pounced on my back to prevent me from scrambling off the couch. Before I could stuff the remote down my shirt, he’d already pried it from my hands and was rewinding the film, one knee still etched into my back; I pulled the hair on his leg and pinched any skin I could touch. The couch was supple leather and it seemed possible I might inhale half of the cushion before he released me. Finally the whirr and click of the rewind stopped, and he set the remote on the table. The weight of his not inconsiderable body concentrated between my shoulders, I had decided to give.