Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  Ellen turned to me with interest.

  “I couldn’t,” I confessed. “It was just too disgusting.” Then I asked, instinctively, “Did Mr. Polhill … want that?”

  Ellen began to cry. I had never seen her cry before, and I hovered near her, on the verge of hugging her as I would hug Grace when she cried, but hesitant. Ellen wasn’t like Grace. “Did you do it?” I whispered.

  “I tried,” she said, “but after about three seconds, he—you know, he—”

  “No! No!”

  “In my mouth,” she sobbed.

  “Oh, my God!”

  “And then I threw up. All over him and on the bed.”

  I was quiet, stilled by my horror at the scene she’d conjured, and at the same time tickled by some creeping mirth that seemed lodged within it. My mouth, of its own accord, twitched into a smile, at which point Ellen’s crying swerved into laughter, outright hysterics, tears still dripping from her eyes. By now I was laughing, falling with Ellen into aching hilarity until I, too, burst into tears. “He must’ve died,” I sobbed.

  “He ran in the bathroom and locked the door,” she said, and then we doubled over, both (as it turned out) helplessly wetting our pants.

  Later, having showered and changed, stuffed our jeans and underwear in Ellen’s washing machine, we put three Old Styles in a bag and carried them to the cemetery, along with a pack of Kools. “Forget the men,” Ellen said. “They’re perverted.”

  “The good ones wouldn’t do it with us,” I agreed. “They just want to do it with their wives.”

  We sipped the dry, cold beers. It was so warm, we no longer needed our jackets. We were fresh and clean, yet from somewhere within us—below us, it almost seemed, down among the dead Swedes—came a weight that was palpable. The weight of our boredom, our impatience.

  “I have the answer,” Ellen said, but without any of the jollity that had accompanied our prior inspirations.

  “What?”

  “Moose.”

  Moose. Who within the month, she informed me, would return from the University of Michigan for summer vacation, three friends in tow. Who would party and water-ski with these friends for a couple of weeks, relubricating the vast machine of his social life before he commenced a summer job at his father’s factory. Whose friends would doubtless be the finest specimens the University of Michigan, or any university, had to offer. Not men, not boys. Experienced, but not perverted.

  And yet, for all the epic allure of Ellen’s brother and those within his hallowed ken, the very thought of another sexual undertaking exhausted me. I feared losing Ellen again after Moose’s return, as I had at Christmas.

  On his first Saturday home, we peeked down through the country club’s chain-link fence at the river directly below, where Moose and his friends—Marco, Amos, Todd—stuttered over the brownish water at intervals presaged by the roar of Moose’s motorboat. Even at this distance, the sight of Ellen’s brother was arresting: a taut, athletic-looking guy in neon-green swim trunks, the best water-skier of the four, by far. But he skied the least, preferring to egg on the others from the wheel of the boat.

  “Which do you want?” Ellen asked.

  “Including Moose?”

  She looked at me oddly, then shook her head in adamant refusal. “Marco,” I said, crestfallen.

  “I’ll take Todd,” Ellen said, which mystified me; he was the palest of the three, angular in a way that reminded me of my father.

  Moose’s destination that night was a party in one of the vast houses on National Avenue, just north of downtown; our plan was to show up there, do it somewhere in the house with our respective choices, and afterwards meet back at the country club beside the swimming pool.

  The party was disappointingly routine; Tom Petty straining some dad’s stereo, a throng of drunk, roaring guys older than our classmates, but otherwise identical. At last I observed Moose again at close range—in the kitchen, where he and another guy were scrimmaging with sponge mops for a can of Tender Vittles on the sticky linoleum. A towering presence was Moose, big shoulders flicking under his white T-shirt like keys on a player piano as he wrested the cat food from his opponent with some fancy mop work, forearms buttery with tan, his appearance a winning amalgam of beauty, thuggishness and faint embarrassment. And something else: an awareness on the part of Moose and everyone else, a crowd of admirers thronging the room for a glimpse of his folly, that he was special. Famous.

  At the sight of us—of Ellen—Moose abandoned the game. “Sis,” he said, discarding his mop and slinging an arm around her shoulders. Thus encompassed, Ellen looked childlike, serene—bland in a way I couldn’t have pictured. The crowd curled around her like a smile. I watched it all with jealous fascination.

  Later, across a patio drenched in buggy light, Ellen and I tossed ourselves at Moose’s friends with an abandon verging on carelessness. Moose cast acid looks in my direction, but as the party ground on, he lost track of us. Eventually Marco and I crept up a narrow flight of stairs to a third-floor guest room that reeked of mothballs. He peeled the clothes from my body and was just lowering himself on top of me like a crane setting an old car onto a pile of old cars when I recoiled. “No,” I said. “Stop, wait!” stricken with the memory of Mr. Lafant. It was too soon, I didn’t know this guy; I’d forgotten what I was supposed to do with him, and why. Marco, bewildered by this seizure of modesty after my slatternly behavior downstairs, went to take a piss.

  I fled the room and bolted from the house, sprinting north along the river toward the country club, already revived by the thought of seeing Ellen and swapping our tales of woe, like always. Except, I thought, still running, what if hers was not a tale of woe? What if finally, after so long, she and Todd had found what we were looking for? The thought sickened me.

  The club’s iron gate was locked, a variable we hadn’t foreseen. I stood outside, wondering whether to scale it. Finally I shimmied over the fence and dropped to the ground inside the club, intensely quiet under the bright moon and torn clouds. The warm golf course grass bounced under my feet. I ran down the concrete steps to the pool, whose turquoise bottom caught the light of the moon, and I saw something move in the water and it was Ellen. I felt such a shock of happiness that I called out her name and she hushed me, laughing, and I saw her clothes by the pool and flung off my own and dove into the wet, heavy silence. I felt the water move as Ellen swam past, her long hair fluttering over my skin. We burst into the air, giggling.

  “So, what happened?” I asked softly.

  “With what?”

  I stared at her. “Todd!”

  “Oh, he couldn’t,” Ellen said, with an indifference that overjoyed me. “Too drunk.”

  But we were grinning. There was no sense of failure; only this giddiness, as if we’d broken free—finally, somehow—from an onerous fate. We swam to the shallow end and looked at the sky. The air and water felt identical in temperature, two different versions of the same substance. It was strange and good to be naked in the pool where normally you had to wear a bathing cap. Clouds floated past the moon, milky, mysterious, and I heard a boat on the river below and thought, I’m happy. This is happiness—why was I looking for anything else? Ellen floated on her back, water pooling around her breasts, and no one had ever looked more beautiful to me. I reached for her. It was as if she had known I would, as if she’d reached for me, too. We stood in the water and kissed. Every sensation of desire I had ever known now amassed within me and fought, demanding release. I touched her underwater. She felt both familiar and strange—someone else, but like me. Ellen flinched and shut her eyes. For once, I had some idea of what to do. She clung to me tightly, then collapsed, trembling, her arms around my neck. When she laughed, I heard chattering teeth. We moved to the pool steps and sat, our bodies underwater, just our heads and necks above, and I took her hand and put it on me. She was tentative, afraid, but I kept my hand on hers until my heart snapped and my head hit the concrete behind me. We lay there, my head pounding, a lump
forming on my scalp that would hurt for a week, and when the water made us shiver we got out of the pool and dried ourselves off with our clothes and spread them on the grass and lay on top of them and began again, more slowly now. Still, the intensity was punishing—we’re killing each other, I thought. We’re killing something. Afterward, we lay half-asleep, and finally Ellen said, “We could teach these assholes a thing or two,” and we laughed and got dressed and walked back to Ellen’s house, talking thoughtlessly, as if nothing had changed. We were best friends.

  We slept naked in Ellen’s single bed, pressed together with her hair everywhere, and again I had that sense, as when I’d first touched her, that she was less a separate person than a variant of myself—that together, we made one thing. I woke at dawn and had an impulse to leave, with it all still so nice. This was odd because it was Saturday, and normally we would have made Swedish pancakes and watched cartoons, probably spent the whole day together. But I left Ellen sleeping there and walked home in the May sunlight, and only as I approached my own house, the flat, unassuming yellow house bleached almost white by the bare morning sun, did what had happened with Ellen begin to seem pretty strange. I almost couldn’t believe it. But when I remembered the feeling of it, the physical feeling, I felt that warmth in my stomach and all I wanted was to see her again, to have that again. Am I a lesbian? I wondered, incredulous. No other girl had ever attracted me.

  I waited until that night to call her. Moose answered the phone (coldly, having surely been informed of my antics with Marco) and handed it to Ellen. I heard a guardedness in her voice that instantly provoked an equal guardedness in me, and our conversation had a weird, stilted feeling that was completely unlike us. It never went away. After that, seeing Ellen was like seeing one of the guys I’d done it with; she made me self-conscious, aware of the passing moments and the need to fill them with something. In the pauses I would wonder, Is she thinking about it? Does she want to do it again? But I didn’t, anymore, because now Ellen seemed no different from a boy.

  It was a horrible summer; I had no other friends. I saw Ellen only once, at the movies. “Wait,” I gasped, yanking Grace into the shadows as Moose and his entourage spiraled from the theater into the carpeted lobby. The guys were sparring, tousling, and Moose leaned down and hoisted Ellen over his shoulder—so easily, as if she were a cat, and her clogs fell off but Moose wouldn’t let her down, he ran with her through the glass doors and into the parking lot, where I heard the swells of her laughter. Someone collected the clogs and brought them to her. I watched, incredulous. To be coddled, protected that way—what must it feel like? To be at the absolute center, adored by the boy whom everyone loved, without trying. What could compete with it?

  That fall, I saw Ellen walking home from school ahead of me. She was alone, sadness closing back around her now that Moose was gone. I forced myself into a trot and caught up. “I feel so weird around you now,” I said.

  “Me, too,” she said.

  “We have to forget about that. We have to go back to how it was before.”

  “We have to!” she agreed.

  Then silence. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and we pushed terse, empty comments back and forth as I counted the minutes to my house. When finally it came into sight, I pretended my mother was waiting for me and ran ahead, leaving Ellen by herself.

  I had thought it would be hard to make new friends, but it turned out that Ellen and I were neutralized by our disunion to the same degree that we’d been empowered by our accord. Eventually we settled down with boyfriends and went to proms and even signed each other’s yearbooks—Good luck with everything!—and except in the most abstract sense, I forgot about that night.

  I did pay one last visit to Ellen’s house. This time with Moose, who graduated from Michigan and returned to Rockford to work for his father. I picked him up my senior year at a state championship hockey game, where he was watching teenage boys scramble over the ice. By then Moose’s aura of fame had shrunk; even the youngest siblings of the kids who had revered him were gone, and East High, where once he’d reigned, no longer knew of his existence. He was still living at home, and I followed him up the dark familiar stairs, past the master bedroom where his invalid mother spent her days, past Ellen’s empty room (she was a year older than I, and had already left for college) to his own attic lair: faded sports posters loosening from the walls, dusty trophies lining shelves. There was a seriousness about Moose that I hadn’t remembered. As we sank onto his bed, I noticed a series of ropes and pulleys connected to a box attached to the ceiling. I asked what they were. “Nothing,” he told me. “Some old stuff I outgrew.”

  When it was over he faded into a doze. I stared at him, the bulky shoulders, the slightly purplish cast of his eyelids; this locus of so many years of cumulative envy and mystery, idolatry and myth, now prone, snoring lightly into a pillow.

  His eyes opened. “What?” he said, groggy.

  “You,” I said.

  He looked puzzled, and raised himself onto an elbow.

  “Just … Moose,” I said, shaking my head. “Moose. Moose Metcalf. I can’t believe it.”

  He grinned, uneasy. He knew exactly what I meant. Wind filled the bedroom from his tiny window.

  “Actually, my name is Edmund,” he said.

  I was not a nostalgic person. I didn’t save Christmas cards, rarely took pictures, felt mostly indifferent to the snapshots people sent me. Until the accident, I had always thought my memory was bad, but in fact I’d thrown the past away, a ream of discarded events—so that I could move, unencumbered, into the future. Now, as I made my limping way among the tall bare trees toward Ellen Metcalf’s house, it was not with the intention of losing myself in misty-eyed recollections of my old friend, but to see the house now. To learn what it, and if possible she, had become.

  The Metcalf manse was a rambling Tudor style that has always been popular among the midwestern rich. The lawn still impressed me, wide and lush despite the scorching summer that had just passed. On the grass were sundry child-oriented items: a bat, a large plastic gun, a smallish fluorescent orange bike. What age child they denoted I had no idea. I touched my face, stuccoed with Mary Cunningham’s thick, flower-scented pancake. I was still badly bruised; rather than fading, it seemed, my bruises simply changed color, like fireworks whose finale won’t arrive. I felt darkly conspicuous; a dour visitor, a drug-ravaged starlet incognito.

  The area behind the house had been re-landscaped; flower beds shaped like lima beans blossomed with wine-colored begonias. I stood on the flagstone patio and listened to the silence. I went to the screen door that led to the kitchen—the door Ellen and I had always used—and gently tapped. I rang the bell. When it was clear that no one was home, I opened the door and went in.

  The difference shocked me; I remembered the kitchen as a dark room with greenish walls and high windows that made you feel you were straining to see the sky from the bottom of a well. Now the windows were wide and lower down, and the room had been opened up, cracked wide so you saw light and sky and green lawn spotted with piles of raked leaves. Very California, I thought, tapping my heels against the pizza-colored floor tiles, with an impressive array of beaten copper pots dangling above the stove.

  And if someone comes home? I asked myself, ascending the front stairs after a glance at the living room, where modern art had commandeered the walls. But I wasn’t afraid. I felt shielded—protected, somehow, by my dark glasses and mask of makeup, the silk headscarf tucked into the top of my trenchcoat to hide the bruises on my neck. This isn’t me, I thought, rounding the stairs and emerging into the upstairs hallway, whose crisp walls and luminous floors effaced all traces of its former dreariness. How could I be caught, when I didn’t look like anyone? As a model, of course, I’d carried my face like a sign, holding it out a foot or so in front of me—not out of pride or vanity, God knew; those had been stamped out long ago, or at any rate, disjoined from my physical appearance. No, out of sheer practicality: here�
��s what I am. Calling card, handshake, précis, call it what you like; it was what I had to offer to the world where I had spent my life.

  I was heading for the master bedroom, a room I’d glimpsed only when Ellen would go in or out, a shadowy peek, a gust of scented air, her mother’s hushed, plaintive voice. Now the door was open. I went in. The room was immense and spare, bars of sunset angling through wood blinds that looked custom-made. There were big ficus trees and a modern-looking bed with long delicate posts. The walls were yellow-white. In a plush adjacent dressing room I smelled one of the Chanels, but my damaged nose could not distinguish which. Long mirrors, walls covered with framed photographs. I went closer to look—I wasn’t yet allowed to wear my contacts—curious about the family who lived here now. Instantly I recognized Ellen, aged by many years but still beautiful, the bones even stronger in her face. She was standing on a beach with a man at her side, her husband, presumably, who looked ten years older and had the tanned skin and white teeth of a German.

  Ellen Metcalf. I was in Ellen Metcalf’s dressing room.

  Straining to focus my bleary eyes, I studied other pictures: Ellen lounging with her husband in some foreign clime; the squashed face of a newborn; some youthful photos of Ellen’s parents done in the manner of Hollywood stills; a montage of two children, the older a girl who—poor thing—looked nothing like her mother. I wondered if she’d been adopted. Ellen and this daughter in matching bathing suits, lying beside the country club pool. As I surveyed the whirling narrative of Ellen’s life, I began, for the first time, to feel anxiety at the thought of her coming home and finding me there. It wasn’t my trespassing that concerned me; more a basic sense that I couldn’t be seen this way.

  I decided to go. But no sooner had I left Ellen’s dressing room than I heard footsteps in the hallway outside the bedroom door. Appalled, I yanked my sunglasses over my monster-red eyes, shot back into the dressing room and hunched in a closet, gently coaxing the door shut behind me. I hid there, panting in a darkness full of filmy dresses scented with more of that mysterious Chanel, until it occurred to me that the humiliation of being caught inside a closet would surely exceed that of merely standing in a dressing room, and I flung open the closet door just as a girl of about thirteen, with earphones on her head, wandered in from the bedroom.