I could sneak into her room and beg her not to tell Becca.
I could offer to read her fiction. To write her a letter of recommendation. I could offer her money, except that I did not have any money and also, that would offend her. I could talk to her like an adult, that’s what I could do, except the thing about these kids in college, all of them, they were treated with these kid gloves and not as the adults that they actually were also expected to be. My God, were these students coddled. Rachel could not even accept a constructive comment on a short story. She retreated as if she had been wounded. She stopped turning in work. I had not even told her that her writing was bad. I was just trying to make it better. That was my job.
Poor, wounded Rachel Klein, who grew up in this house, a house that was like a dream, and she took it all, everything, for granted. She had wanted a sexual experience with me. She had wanted it and she had made this abundantly clear to me. She had held my hand. We had walked slowly up the stairs together. There had been at least fifteen stairs on which she could have changed her mind.
She had unbuttoned the buttons of my shirt. There must have been eight buttons and she had been painstakingly slow, careful, deliberate. Nothing about our experience had been hasty or tacky or crude. It was erotic. It was tender. I remembered. It was not as if I had forgotten. It was not as if I did not think of her in Pakistan, after my grandmother died, wishing that she were there to comfort me. It was not as if I did not think about it almost every time that I saw her. Even now.
It had been mutually satisfying. That was all it was ever going to be.
Could we not be friends?
This, this was what it was to be an adult.
I could try to explain all of this to her. I could explain to her that we did not have fast-growing tumors inside our bodies. That we were lucky. I could explain to her that I had not been taking advantage of her and that I was not taking advantage of her mother, either. That I was not that kind of person.
I had never wanted to hurt Rachel. It had never occurred to me. It was just that she was young. She was young and impressionable, so of course she was going to get hurt. That was just part of life. That was part of being alive. We did not have to regret what we had done. It had been nice. Very nice.
But now, it was different. It was altogether different with Becca. With her mother. It was unexpected and wonderful. I could explain to Rachel that this was love. That I was in love with her mother. I understood that she would have difficulty processing this. She would think that she was perfect, with her perfect body, as if that was everything, all that mattered.
I heard Becca open the door, taking Princess out for a pee, and I decided I would try. I could try to talk to Rachel, quickly, and assess her state of mind. I hadn’t talked to her once that entire summer, not once, properly, one-on-one. Of course, I realized, that must have hurt her feelings. Why had I not thought of that before? I did not need to be afraid. I knocked on Rachel’s door.
“Come in,” she said, and I opened the door.
Rachel was naked. She was standing twisted in front of a full-length mirror. “Do I have a bruise?” she asked me. “On my ass? Can you see anything?”
I slammed the door shut.
I could see her still, on the other side of the door, not wearing any clothes. She did have a bruise, or what looked like the beginning of a bruise, a rather large one, the size of a baseball. The skin a strange yellow.
“Why did you say ‘Come in’?” I said.
“To fuck with you,” she said. “That’s why.”
“That wasn’t nice.”
“No,” Rachel said, from behind the closed door. “I suppose it wasn’t.”
I stood there.
I had a very real reason why I wanted to talk to Rachel. I wanted to assess the situation. It was bad. And yes, yes, she was going to ruin it for me if she had her way. I should pack my bags right now and get out while I was still unscathed. I could write to Iowa and see if I could still have the job. Why had I sent that e-mail already? I could write to Kristi and beg for forgiveness. She would love that, me begging her.
“Did you have something to say to me?” Rachel said.
“I did,” I said. “But I forgot.”
“You forgot.”
“Yes,” I said. “I forgot.”
I stood there on the other side of her door, still frozen. I would not go back into her room. I would not risk being alone with her ever again. I could hear the front door open and close. Becca was back with the dog.
“Good night, Rachel,” I said to the closed door.
* * *
—
There was an update from Myra Alice on Facebook about my dying friend. His hair had started falling out from the chemo and so he had shaved his head. Now he was bald. She had posted a picture. In no way did Sean look handsome bald. He looked like he had cancer.
A tumor, I wanted to tell Rachel. She could have a tumor. She had everything. She even had a story she could tell her little friends. I wanted to shake her.
There was a stream of positive comments from friends, saying how good Sean looked when obviously he looked awful. Shit, he looked like he was dying. We were the same age. I remembered watching him on the slopes at Vail. With a pair of skis on his feet, he was like a different person. Fast, sleek, confident. On campus, he was tentative and careful, unwilling to talk in class. I think it was not until after she had seen him ski that Myra Alice was able to view him as a romantic partner.
I bet he was not skiing now.
It was hard, looking at this picture of a skinny bald man, to remember what Sean looked like when he had hair. He had red hair. He was not a particularly masculine-looking guy. He was pasty and pale. Whereas I was swarthy and my hair was dark, but otherwise we had the same haircut. We were the same height. We dressed the same, signed up for the same classes. Myra Alice had joked once that we were twins, Kermit and Fozzie Bear. I had pretended for months after they had gotten together that we could still be friends. But I was not big enough a man to watch them together, happy in love.
My hands hovered over the keyboard, wondering what it was that I could possibly write. My head was all over the place. I was thinking about Rachel, naked, her breasts, that bruise on her backside. I wrote a comment and deleted it.
I started another comment, and again, I didn’t post it. There was nothing I could say that could change the situation. Nothing I could say that would make him feel better. There was nothing to say that would make me feel better. What could I do? Nothing. I could get on a plane and visit him and that wouldn’t make him feel better. That would just be awkward. Where would I stay? A hotel in D.C. would cost a fortune. I could not stay with them. It was not like when we were in college.
Hopefully, Myra Alice was taking good care of him. He would be loved and cared for until the end. I wanted that for Sean. I had been dumped by my fiancée. He had gotten married. He had been married for ten years already, and I had been the reluctant best man. I had always, only been jealous. The truth was, I had thought that I was in love with her. She was the first girl I had slept with at college, but by the next day, I already knew the score. I would watch her hook up with Sean and then fall in love and I would pretend that I did not care. At a certain point, I stopped caring.
But I also never told him, about me and Myra Alice. She didn’t, either.
Die, tumor, die.
I thought the words, but I didn’t believe them. He had an inoperable tumor. My old friend, the one who had gotten the girl, he was fucked, pure and simple. It was as if the dice had been rolled and he got terminal cancer. This time, I was the lucky one. Our friendship had been over a long time ago.
It felt unfair that I was burdened with this now. I sat on my bed, staring at my phone. I was trapped in this stupid room, the least realized room of the house, wanting desperately to be with Becca, un
able to go to her. This was her house. Rachel was a smoking gun. I had to wait. I had to wait. Follow Becca’s lead.
The phone vibrated in my hand. I was so nervous that I dropped it, and the screen cracked. Of course it did. It was a text from Kristi. Fucking Kristi Taylor. I wanted it to be Becca. I was afraid to read Kristi’s text. But I had nothing better to do and I was trapped and so I read it.
It said everything I already knew.
You are a fucking moron.
* * *
—
And those were the words that I told myself, over and over, as I struggled to fall asleep. I hoped against hope for a knock on the door, a knock that did not come. I wanted it to be Becca, of course, Becca wanting me as much as I wanted her. I wanted her to choose me as I had chosen her.
It was three in the morning.
I was lying in bed, but I wasn’t any closer to sleep. My phone vibrated again. I had no self-control. I would not wait until the morning. I grabbed for my phone, saw the cracked screen. I had a warranty but I was sure it had expired.
My message. It was not a text but an e-mail. Probably just a political e-mail, another Democrat asking for money, or maybe PEN asking me to stand up for oppressed voices in literature, some stupid shit like that that had slipped into my important mail. Or it could be real, a real e-mail. Something good. My mother might have written me. She might finally be done being mad with me. It was time. Becca was not mad at Rachel, after all. She would forgive her anything. She was threatening to end our relationship to keep her daughter. My mother would forgive me. Or Kristi might have written again, compelled to tell me off one more time and needing her full keyboard to express her vitriol.
I reached for my phone, illuminating the screen, knowing that the chance of sleep would be even more remote.
The e-mail was from my new editor.
I had sent her the pages of my novel before dinner. Becca had been monosyllabic with worry and I’d thought, Why not? Why not take this chance? Because I wasn’t dying. I did not have cancer. I had everything ahead of me.
I read my editor’s e-mail quickly, and then I read it again.
The pages I’d sent were wonderful, WONDERFUL, more than she could have hoped for, so different from my previous book. Fresh and to the point and entertaining, and she was SO EXCITED.
“Fuck,” I said, my hands clenched into fists. “Fuck, yeah.”
Khloe
The first time I texted Rachel Klein to tell her that I would go to the beach with her in Connecticut, I didn’t mean it. I was just texting shit, the way people do. And then, it was the actual weekend and I didn’t have any plans. Jane had literally shut the door in my face. So I would go to the beach in Connecticut. Fuck it. Maybe I would see Zahid Azzam and I would fuck with him. So hard. I would tell him that his editor was busy counting his shoes, opening his underwear drawer.
I woke up early, packed a bag, took the subway to Grand Central, looked at the board, figured out the train I would have to catch, bought my tickets, bought a coffee and a croissant. I bought a straw hat. It was like a fucking mall down there. I texted Rachel and told her I was on my way. And if she couldn’t meet me, if she had made other plans, whatever. I would be in Connecticut. I would find a beach. I had never been to Connecticut before.
But Rachel was there at the station, waiting for me.
“I didn’t think you would come,” she said. “You surprised me.” She smiled. She seemed happy to see me. This was the first proper vacation day I had taken all summer.
“I love your hat,” she said.
* * *
—
But the beach was nothing much. Disappointing.
It was small. There weren’t real waves. The sand was sort of gray and muddy. There was a playground next to the parking lot and there was a mother there with a little girl and a baby and she looked sad and tired.
“This is really it?” I asked Rachel. “This is all there is?”
I knew what I’d been expecting. I’d been expecting Fire Island. The Hamptons. I’d been expecting a big long stretch of sandy beach, tons of people, beautiful people, beach umbrellas, breaking waves. I’d been expecting a few other people, at least. This, according to Rachel, was the Sound. It was not the actual ocean. This was the only public beach in town, she informed me. She had not told me this before. Apparently there were nicer beaches, located in people’s backyards. Rachel, however, did not have her own private beach. There was a lifeguard stand and two teenagers, a guy and a girl wearing red bathing suits, looking out onto the empty water. Jesus fuck.
“I thought there would be more people than this,” Rachel said.
She kept talking: “I went swimming here last week, with this guy and his little sister, who goes to my day camp. He held me under the water. For a long time. I could have drowned and no one would have known.”
I did not know what she wanted me to make of that. It still seemed odd that she had invited me out here in the first place. We barely knew each other, had nothing to talk about.
“Except for the guy and his little sister,” I said.
“Eventually my mother would have missed me,” Rachel said.
“Your father, too,” I remarked.
Rachel agreed.
“I wouldn’t hang out with guys who try to drown me,” I said, because I felt like something was required. I was older and therefore wiser. Why had she invited me? Why had I come?
“He’s in California now.”
I was relieved. Story over. I was definitely not the right person to share your sexual abuse story with. I had made a choice, though I would also argue it was not a choice, but I was with women. I did not date men who systematically tried to shove their dicks down my throat. I had spared myself that particular kind of abuse. But then I thought about that door, closing in my face. Right now, that didn’t seem that much better. It felt to me that as human beings we were fucked all around.
The beach, at least, was starting to grow on me. It was quiet. The air smelled like salt. The sun was strong. There were a couple of seagulls. Rachel was fine. It was nice enough here. I had to lower my expectations.
“There is a good place nearby to collect shells,” Rachel told me. “We can go there next if you want if you don’t like it here.”
“I don’t want to collect shells,” I said.
“Okay,” she said.
“Let’s swim,” I said.
There was a faraway look in Rachel’s eyes, like she didn’t actually care if I had a good day or a bad day, which was annoying. We waded out into the water. The sand felt good under my feet. I walked out until it was too deep to stand and then I swam out deep into the warm, calm water. As a rule, I never swam out this far. I was usually worried about drowning, but not here, there were no waves, and I was enjoying the sensation of my arm slicing through the surface of the water like a knife, and then, out of nowhere, a motorboat flew past me, and all of a sudden, the placid water was filled with choppy waves, and I was swallowing water. I went beneath the surface and came back up. I wanted to put my feet on the bottom but the water was too deep. Fuck. Motherfucking fuck. I just had to stay calm. Not panic. I thought about Rachel’s story, the asshole who held her under. I could die out here. Today could be the day that I die. I had swum out too far. It was like I had entered a highway of sorts, there were more boats coming, and I had become a deer in the headlights. This was insane. I was not going to drown, not here, in Connecticut.
“Fuck you,” I called out to the motorboat, already long gone. I looked back at the beach, the teenage lifeguards still in their tall chair, still talking to each other, oblivious. What the fuck?
I kept on treading water, waiting for the waves to go away before I started to swim back, and then I saw her, Rachel Klein. For a moment, it seemed like a coincidence.
“Are you okay?” she called out. “I
saw that boat. I was scared. Wow, you swam out far. I can’t believe how far you swam. Are you okay? Are you tired? The lifeguards aren’t even paying attention.”
Rachel Klein was swimming out to me, doing a crawl but keeping her head out of the water, talking as she swam. She would have noticed if I’d drowned. It was a small comfort.
* * *
—
Rachel took me to lunch, leading us to a small restaurant, more like a deli, down the street. She bought us turkey sandwiches and lemonades. I offered her money. She shrugged. “They know me here. It goes on our tab.”
A tab. I had never heard of a restaurant that kept a tab. “So you mean, your father pays?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, seriously considering the question. “I suppose he did before he left my mother. So he probably still does. I hadn’t thought about it. It seems unfair now that he is gone. My mother comes here all the time.”
“But you don’t pay?” I said.
“No,” Rachel said. “I suppose not. Not in the immediate sense, at least.”
We sat at an outdoor picnic table on a deck that looked out onto the small street. Main Street. Just down the road was the small beach where we’d just been swimming. So this was Connecticut. It felt small. It felt weird. I felt like I’d stepped into an old J.Crew catalog. I watched the cars drive by. A BMW SUV. A Mercedes. A Mini Cooper, a Prius. A Porsche. An old silver Jaguar, my kind of car. I felt sandy and hot. I was tired. Irritable. Hungover. Somehow it was only one o’clock in the afternoon. The sun was relentless. There wasn’t even an umbrella over this picnic table. It was a horrible place to have lunch, but I didn’t say this to Rachel. This seemed to be what she liked to do. What happened now? I would take the train back to Brooklyn and drink more beer? Drink and drink until I passed out and then went back to work on Monday? Fuck.
“It’s hot here,” Rachel said. “Do you want to come to my house? We have a swimming pool.”
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