He sat on the bed and began to roll a joint. I crouched down by the bookshelf and pretended to be absorbed in studying his CDs. I was nearly trembling, and yet some other part of me felt calm, intent on memorizing everything, squirreling away each detail to feast on later.
“Rose.” He had finished rolling his joint. “What are you doing over there?”
I turned to him and curtsied. “Just looking at your music.”
He held up his joint. “You want?”
There really was nowhere else to sit but the bed. As I approached I must have flinched, for he chuckled, a lower sound in his throat; or maybe he was just amused at how far from him I sat. He had to lean over to pass me the joint.
All the time Lacie had been with us, I’d been finding excuses to touch him: letting my hand linger on his arm, or our shoulders bounce when we walked home. He had done the same: with the pressure of Lacie keeping us apart, we had leaned toward each other. But now she was gone; now we were shy. On the bed, our knees faced out, two sets of headlights shining in different directions.
Carefully I snuck a glance at him. He was staring at the wall. Probably he was thinking about Lacie. We both spent so much time thinking about her; we were both caught on her hook, squirming, trying to win her attention. I knocked my leg against his. “Hey.”
He didn’t pull away; no, he leaned into me. Then he took my hand, and unfolded my fingers, and it was strange, the delicate way he put the roach down on the book; it was strange, the way he said, “Rose.” He never called me by my name. He never kissed me; that really was the strangest part of it all.
Soft, delicate lips. He flicked his tongue over my teeth. His hand stroked my hair. For a moment I couldn’t breathe, or move; then I threw myself at him, and cupped his head in my hand fiercely, sucking on his lips.
For a while we stalled out at kissing. But eventually, my shirt came off, his shirt came off, and I was on top of him and squirming around. I felt nothing beyond a kind of ruthless mechanical focus. I just wanted it done. There was this thing in his pocket, as if he had forgotten to take out his pen, but no matter how frantically I rubbed at it, he wouldn’t take off his pants. Finally I said in a weirdly businesslike tone, “I was thinking we could have sex.”
“Oh, do you want to have sex?” he asked brightly.
We were both trying not to break the dream of what we were doing, but when we were ready to start, when he had rolled the condom over his dick (I could barely look at it, I couldn’t even think the word “dick”), when he had said, “Are you sure this is okay?” and after he had pushed inside me, so that I thought I would split, so that I thought This can’t be right, this can’t be what people are so hyped about, I began to laugh—I mean it was so absurd, so unwieldy, so ridiculous to put that there, and when he met my face, his eyes were at first worried, and then he was laughing too, we were both giggling, I mean, it was ludicrous, what we were doing, it was obscene. His bare ass moved above me.
Afterward tears welled in me. My eye sockets burned. I wasn’t sad, or happy: there was just a tightness in my body, or a tightness in me. It was like he had turned me inside out for sport. Softly he patted the side of my face, and then his breathing—just as Lacie had said it did—got soft and even and regular. Keeping him with me was as futile as pinning a wave to the shore. Out, and out, and out he flowed, while I lay beside him, seething.
While he slept I stared at the ceiling. The tiles had five rows of five holes each: twenty-five. Across the ceiling, there were seven, eight, nine tiles…my cheeks were wet and cool with tears. Down there were six, seven…I tried to look without moving my neck. Maybe eight tiles. Which made…seventy-two times twenty-five…I carried the one…eighteen hundred holes above us.
When he woke something had shifted between us. The room was darker. I could feel him roll out from me, like the tide. He ran his hand along my back, but there was something disinterested in it. His touch was impersonal again.
“God,” he muttered. “What time is it?”
I wriggled away. Found my underwear and pulled it up. Sticky damp. “No idea,” I told him, and the coldness in my voice surprised us both. I, too, had gone away.
He sat up, put his feet on the floor, and squinted at his pager. “It’s weird Lacie hasn’t paged me.”
The air snagged on her name. Quickly I pulled on my old training bra. Thrashed into my giant Belle & Sebastian T-shirt.
“I should go find her.”
“Why? I’m sure she’s fine.”
He sighed. “I should go.”
I crossed my arms. “What, you want to make sure she’s not cheating on you?”
He shook his head. Pulled up his boxers. Stabbed by a thousand imaginary knives, I still yearned for his body as it disappeared beneath his clothes. His smooth, round thighs, the softness of his belly, those curling black hairs…
“That was my first time,” I said loudly. “Did you know that? You didn’t even ask. You just took my virginity. I hope you appreciate that.”
He puffed out his cheeks. Looked at me beseechingly. Oh. He thought I’d be easy. He thought I’d be chill.
“You’re a hypocrite,” I announced.
He finished lacing up his shoes. “So are you going to give me a ride, or what?”
* * *
—
So it came to be that an hour after I had lost my virginity to the boy I had loved for over five years we were back in my mom’s minivan trawling the empty streets for Lacie.
A fire began in me. Leo, languid in the passenger seat, was slumped and satiated, ready to be returned to Lacie. I had been had. It felt unbearable, this rage; it would consume me unless I gave it some out.
The stop sign came out of nowhere. I slammed the brakes, and we both jerked forward, then back. He looked at me, amazed. “This is stupid,” I told him.
“What’s stupid? Going to find my girlfriend?”
“She’s not your girlfriend.”
He gave me a little scoff of disbelief. “Yeah, she’s my girlfriend. When are you going to finally accept that?”
I had made a fatal miscalculation. I had pushed too hard, overplayed my hand, and thus the only thing to do was to double down on the strategy proven ineffective. “When you stop having a crush on me.”
When he didn’t answer right away, I plunged off a thousand-foot cliff into a sea of fangy monsters who tore at my flesh with tiny pointed teeth. “You like me,” I said. “You’re always flirting with me. Always.”
“You seduced me.” He sounded petulant.
“What?” I shrieked, and the car jerked dangerously. “I seduced you? You seduced me.” It was like learning pronouns in Spanish, hysterically.
“Oh, come on. You’ve wanted to fuck me since, like, Peter Pan. Everyone knows it.”
A white sheet of rage dropped over my mind. An incredible tightness came over my skin, and my head burned, and the knives were still stabbing, the sea monsters were still feeding. Blue-hot electricity zapped up my cells. Everything in me radiant with pain. I was screaming but my mouth was closed. I was breathing but no oxygen was getting in. And then we came upon Yale Avenue.
Yale: a wide curve left, a sharp jag right, the long graceful fishhook that connected Swarthmore and Wallingford. Carved from rock, it was a joy to take fast, but tricky, especially if you were a new driver, and angry, and distracted.
“What am I supposed to do? Just because you have a crush on me doesn’t mean I owe you anything.”
The fog coming off the pavement grew thick at the bend, and his laugh distorted horribly in my ears. “You know that everyone knows, right? You’re, like, completely obvious. You stare at me all the time.”
Again and again the cops would ask me: Are you sure there wasn’t another car? A deer? There are deer in the woods right there. Maybe in the corner of your eye? But the truth is that I turned t
he wheel. I had to stop the words coming out of his mouth.
* * *
—
There was a moment when I thought, I’m going to crash, and then I was crashing, juddering along the granite face of the rock, jut, jut, jut, and the pop! of the passenger-side airbag, and the horrible scrape of metal against rock, and then nothing. Silence. Leo lay bloodied up against me, a hot, heavy weight.
“Leo. Leo.” He didn’t move. He was punishing me. “Leo.”
When I finally understood that he wouldn’t answer, I opened my door and ran.
After dropping my bag on the table in the front hall, beside Lacie’s piles of mail—she never seemed to go through it—and last week’s paper—why she bothered to subscribe I could not understand—I stood dumbly in the dark, letting Cat spine against my shins. My head was paper-stuffed, my limbs noodly. I was strung-out, half-mad, and exhausted, and when I took off my jacket I could smell the sex and sweat beneath the leather.
Then Lacie came barreling from the bedroom in a flannel and black jeans, barefoot, with a fleck of Crest by her lip. When she saw me she slyly smiled: “Someone didn’t come home last night.”
Her trust enraged me. “Yep.” I tugged on yesterday’s stupid sweater dress.
“Was it fun?” she called from the kitchen.
There had been a frost that morning, the season’s first. Leaving Ian’s place, we had walked into a world of silver, every blade of grass etched. The sunshine dazzled, the sky was a fierce blue, and the wind whipped: weather that required an energetic response. At the subway, Ian had pressed my body to his and hugged me hard, his belly pushing into mine.
“Thanks, I guess,” I had mumbled. I hadn’t felt up to the weather. I might puddle out in a million directions; my insides might come up. I was weak, in danger of dissolving.
He had pressed me to him more gently. I kept waiting for him to issue some kind of verdict on the night before, but all he did was kiss my forehead and squeeze my hand.
“It was okay,” I said now. “I’m so hungover, though.”
“Oh, boo.” Her head appeared around the wall. “That sucks. Want me to make you some toast or something?”
Suddenly I wanted to cry. “Just go,” I said. “You’ll be late.”
* * *
—
When she had finally gone, in a flurry of tote bags and Please, please promise you’ll text if you need anything AT ALLs, I collapsed on the daybed. Lacie had left her whiskey glass from last night, and a fruit fly hovered by its sticky lip. I knocked it away, and it buzzed back and settled on the sticky mess, rubbing its front legs together. Disgusting how its thorax heaved.
I lay back and let my thoughts swirl, giving myself over to doing nothing while my stomach clenched. Okay, I thought. This thing I’ve done, it’s not great. It’s not awesome. It might even, in its resemblance to a certain act of long ago, be called perverse. But it’s not—it’s not—gradually my skin shrank, tighter and tighter, hotter and hotter. When I stood up I found my insides had jellied. Rather than a midsection of muscle, I now had a tumbler of queasy grease sliding around.
Gingerly I moved from the daybed to the floor, from the floor to the chair, trying not to upset my quivery organs quaking over what I had swilled the night before. My insides were holding me hostage, slithering evilly around. But, I begged. It’s not about Lacie. It’s about him. For so long, this thing between us. Last night proves it. He feels it too.
My organs twisted and jabbed.
But she doesn’t even care, I pleaded. Here I waltz in, smelling of sex, and she doesn’t even ask his name. Maybe she already knows. Maybe Ian had texted her from the train. Maybe I was a cute toy to them, maybe they thought it was sweet how I got all mealymouthed around him.
My stomach cinched. A cold film of sweat coated my arms.
It’s okay, I coached myself. It’s okay. You messed up a little, but it’s okay. I hunched over the toilet, mouth open, waiting. Cat watched with hazel eyes. Eventually I began to feel a bit melodramatic, and slunk back to the couch, totally defeated, unable even to vomit up my mistake.
* * *
—
For days I edged through the world as if a sudden move might slosh out my guts. Nausea burbled in me, dread and sickness, a hangover that didn’t end.
It wasn’t that I wanted him to get in touch so we could see each other again. No; nothing like that. I just wanted him to give me some clue about how he was feeling so I could know how I should be feeling. Of course we were never going to do it again. I had done it just to touch the darkness inside me. To know again the girl I was trying daily to summon to the desk. But we should just confirm this plan. We should agree on it. He should text me to tell me he wasn’t going to text me anymore. God, how I wanted it.
“You still feel sick?” Lacie surveyed me slumped on the couch. “Maybe you have a stomach bug or something.”
“Maybe. I honestly feel worse.”
“You need tea.” Without waiting for an answer she slipped into the kitchen. I heard water rushing into the teapot, and then the click and hiss of a burner. “God, who was this guy?” she called. “I didn’t even know you were dating anyone.”
She appeared in the doorway, a twist of ginger root in her hand, a quizzical expression on her face. Did she suspect? It was rare for Lacie to reference as conventional a category as “dating.”
“I’m not. He was just this guy at the bar. He works at Credit Suisse.” Shame thudded in me. On top of everything, I’d betrayed Franklin.
“Jesus. I hope he paid for the drinks, at least.” She disappeared into the kitchen, and soon there came the steady whack of ginger dicing, a sound I had heard many times over the past few days. Her kindness was making me ill. I couldn’t take much more of it.
* * *
—
That night she went out. Still no word from Ian. I paced around the apartment, looking for the millionth time at all Lacie’s things, telling myself I wouldn’t finish the tub of caramel gelato in the freezer, and then finishing it. As day became night I began to wonder if they were fucking right now. God. I finished off the blackberries, the brie, the sourdough.
Eros has always been structured by waiting. Anne Carson has something to say about this. Roland Barthes too. Such elegant, beautiful things! They almost make you wish you had a little bit of waiting to do. Real waiting’s not like that. Real waiting’s murder. Waiting! A half dozen times an hour I snatched at my phone, clicked it on, and growled. The very air hummed. Whatever I was doing—staring into space at my desk, staring into space on the daybed, staring into the blue-white space of the fridge—it was blackly bordered by the fact of waiting.
Torture: every minute that Ian did not text me confirmed that he was not thinking about me. Eventually my very actions seemed defined by this implicit indifference from him. It was the opposite of imagining someone is watching you. Someone was not watching me. Not wondering about me. Was probably totally absorbed in deeply meaningful art-making, and/or looking deeply into Lacie’s eyes as they made passionate love. Regardless. Not thinking about me.
All I could do was think about him.
“Let’s go home,” he had said.
“Stand on my feet,” he had said.
Under the soles of my feet, his cool skin and brittle tendons. “Oh, you’re so wet,” he had moaned, and bent me over the bed. Slid into me. The bone lust, the revelation. I played that tape again and again. I wore that tape out.
It was hot, my senior spring. The week they announced my play had won, the dogwoods bloomed and wilted, bursting whitely out one Monday and sagging from every branch by Friday. Tulips bloomed and shriveled; the forsythia had just one day of glory. All around me there were brown flowers.
Play rehearsals began, official rehearsals, for the staged reading that would happen downtown. I rode the R3 from Swarthmore to the city, back and f
orth, over and over. My face close to the glass, I watched scenes from my childhood slide by. Always, when we crossed the bridge that spanned the creek, I craned my neck to see the dappled water scattering light.
One pale sunny afternoon on the train I heard my character’s voice. I heard it. Eve. She was speaking to me; she was telling me why the garden was paradise, and why she had to leave. From my bag I slipped my notebook and began to scribble, desperate not to lose any of the words as they fell into my mind. Eve’s monologue. That was what my play needed. I was an idiot—a fool—not to have seen it before.
It was my first taste of that particular intoxication, the hours of drudgery at the desk rewarded with a song you simply wrote down. Eve told me how good it felt to want things. To take, the way a man took. Going for it, going into it. Wanting something. Desiring. Desiring and not giving a fuck. Just like a man. I wrote and wrote, and when I brought the pages in the next day, neatly typed, the director read the lines with his mouth agape. “This is incredible,” he told me. “You’ve really got something.”
* * *
—
Even though I had been literally running along Yale Avenue to flag down a car, the EMTs insisted on strapping me to a board. Over and over they shouted, “Your head! Your head! Do you want to be paralyzed?” I kept asking about Leo and they kept telling me my friend was fine.
As they carried me to the ambulance, hot pricks of tears stunned my eyes. The pink Philly sky, light-polluted and crossed by black branches, was like a Japanese woodblock print. It was so beautiful I thought I must be dying.
But at the hospital the young intern said I was fine, maybe a little whiplash, but fine. Lucky, really. No, she couldn’t tell us anything about another patient, not even if we had been in the car together. By then my mom had arrived—she had come barreling into the ER, black fleece over a yellow nightie, flip-flops wetly kissing the linoleum—and when she saw my eyes roll back at the doctor’s intransigence she slipped out, somehow found Leo’s mom, and learned that he had already been released. Head wounds: they bleed a lot even when they don’t go deep. Concussion? I asked. Maybe, the nurse shrugged. He was knocked out. But he should be fine.
Everyone Knows How Much I Love You Page 15