Beeman was in the kitchen, looking defeated after losing his date, though encouraged by the fact that I had also been ditched by mine.
“I should have held it in,” I said.
“You couldn’t hold it in all night.”
He pulled two Coronas out of the fridge and even handed me a lime wedge, a sign he was working me hard. He was wearing a striped polo with black sweatpants and green Crocs, trying to look like he was so rich that he didn’t need to bother with real pants or shoes. He had been hoping for seconds ever since we’d hooked up on Halloween, when I was dressed as a slutty Anna Akhmatova and he was a Tootsie Roll.
“Why do girls love Kornberg so much?” he asked me.
Where could I begin? Zach Kornberg had held my fragile post-Soviet heart in his hands since the moment he read the first poem I had ever shown anybody, freshman year, and called it shit. He could see into the darkest crevasses of my soul without judgment, and whenever he laughed at something I said, he laughed with his whole body—his throat, his shoulders, the light hairs on his head—and it made me feel immortal. But this wasn’t exactly the kind of thing I could say to Beeman.
I shrugged, trying to be “chill.” I said, “He’s kind of tall.”
“What about when he’s sitting down?” he said, but he didn’t want an answer this time. He set down his beer and moved closer to me. “Wanna check out my new video iPod?”
My options were rather limited at that hour. It was too late to call one of the prospects in my phone. My friends were probably done giggling on Sarah’s floor and recounting their wild nights, which meant Rachel was asleep so we couldn’t spoon. I supposed I could always leave my baby brother a voicemail about how much I missed him. Or I could climb under the last blanket Mama had ever knitted for me and listen to Modest Mouse and miss my dad.
“Why not?” I told Beeman, and his eyes lit up like the flecks in Goldschläger.
* * *
—
Korn and I parked behind our old freshman dorm to eat Cook Out. I felt like I’d just gotten to college, but somehow we were two months away from officially being seniors. I dipped my greasy fries in ketchup and stared at the squat brick building and pictured the kids in there gearing up to face the night. Korn and I had met in the common room when I was mulling over the first poem I’d written about my father.
The poem was called “Onward to the Bright Future,” and it was about how when I was a kid in Kiev, Papa would get me to stand on a chair at parties, lift my arm toward the sky in an imitation of Lenin, and shout his favorite Marxist catchphrase: “Onward to the bright future!” The party trick cracked up the guests every time. I wrote about how I couldn’t get this image out of my mind whenever I was drunk at parties, thinking of how disappointed my poor dead immigrant father would be if he knew how frivolous I had become in this free land.
Kornberg had scanned the poem and frowned. “Do you really feel this way when you drink, or is this just how you think you should feel? Most people drink precisely to forget shit like this,” he had said, slapping me awake. I ended up never turning the poem in.
I watched him to see if he too was feeling nostalgic.
“Ellie was fucking wild last night,” he said, and I tried not to look put off.
“Did she shit in your fish tank?”
“Do you have to be so vulgar?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Did she defecate in your fish tank?”
He sighed. “No, man, she was just wild,” he said, but he didn’t elaborate. “How was the Cock? Get any action?”
“Pen-to-paper action,” I said. I didn’t feel like telling him about my repeat performance with Beeman.
“When will I see it?”
“It’s not ready.”
Earlier that day, I had written the first thing I would never show him. Post-Beemitus, I read Chekhov in the gardens and was depressed I wasn’t Chekhov, so I began a joke poem based on his story “The Darling.” Instead of describing a woman who falls in love with a series of men, mine depicted a girl who wastes her life watching her love take a new girl up a staircase every night; he dies when she’s an old woman, and she has to carry his body down the same fucking stairs and bury him on her own. I called it “The Dumbass.”
“When will it be ready?”
“A writer’s work is never done.”
“Suit yourself, Kon Artist.”
“I don’t wear suits.”
I scooted up, but I still couldn’t see much of the dorm. Our view of the first floor was blocked by a cement wall that separated the freshman campus from the town. Some thought it was elitist and even racist given the racial makeup of Durham, but I just found it useless; there were a few points of entry and it wasn’t even that high, so it wasn’t really keeping anyone out. I didn’t give it all that much thought, though. Kornberg put an arm around me and I felt his finger grease getting in my hair. I could have drowned in it.
* * *
—
Teaberry Lane was tense and musicless when we pulled up. The house was tan and ravaged like an irresistible older man slightly past his prime. All the guys plus Stefanie with an F—who was already making eyes at Kornberg—and Becky were crowded around the TV, watching the news. I knew something terrible had happened when I saw nobody was drinking.
“A stripper said she got raped by the lacrosse players last night,” Frankie told us.
“Exotic dancer,” Becky said.
“This is terrible, terrible,” Beeman said, pacing around. This, coupled with the thirty people crowding his rotted floor, seemed too much for him to bear in one night.
Kornberg got the last floor spot and pulled me onto his lap. The reporter stood in front of the unremarkable white lacrosse house and delivered the news: The previous night, the lacrosse team had called two strippers-slash-exotic-dancers to the house, and one of them had accused three of them of raping her later that night. Neighbors had heard them shouting racial slurs at the women as they ran off. The police didn’t reveal her identity or the identity of the accused guys. They were combing through the house for evidence now.
“She probably wants to be paid off.”
“First we get robbed in the Sweet Sixteen and now this.”
“Innocent until proven guilty.”
“Yelling racist shit isn’t great, though.”
“Different category of not great than raping somebody.”
“That still doesn’t excuse their behavior. Guilty or not, we shouldn’t root for them. They’re the reason people hate Duke,” Becky said.
“That’s bullshit,” Kornberg said.
It was possible those guys did it, even likely. Duke athletes were a different species, which I didn’t think about much except during basketball season, when I pretended to care. The lacrosse players, especially, were part of the world Papa had entered when he went to Wall Street for the sake of his family, and they weren’t exactly on my radar.
As people continued to debate whether or not the guys did it, I slowly became aware of the fact that I was sitting on Kornberg’s lap for the first time in my life. I felt his hot breath on my neck and could hardly breathe myself.
The arguing had dissipated into the latest screening of American Psycho. Kornberg kept looking at me from the corner of his eye like he was waiting for me to say something, maybe to point out that I had room to move from his lap now that half the people had gotten up for beers. But he just kept staring at me, or at least I was pretty sure he was, and for a microsecond I wondered if he was waiting for me to tell him to take me up those same fucking stairs, but this couldn’t have been true, this was not the right moment, and I was so overwhelmed and scared and freaked out that all I could think about was that I wanted him to stop staring at me.
I looked back at the screen, where Patrick B
ateman was axing poor Paul Allen, a fountain of blood spurting over his chic banker’s apartment, and thought of my father again, of how he had never watched a minute of TV in his life. The one time Mama had dragged him to a movie, he came home rubbing his eyes like a newborn, saying, “So many bright images—what do you do with them all? The horror! I will never sleep again!” This made me smile.
“Television is the opium of the pupil,” I said, quoting my father.
Kornberg laughed, but then he patted me on the side, indicating that I could move off him. Then he said, “Don’t you have anything better to do?”
I nodded toward Stefanie with an F and said, “Don’t you?”
He laughed again and we watched the movie for a while, and when I got up to get a beer I came back and he was talking to the damn girl, who had red hair and sadly looked like a nice person but who was definitely not Ellie hot, not hotter than me. Just as I was getting ready to peace out, Beeman settled at my side.
“A few of us are going to check out the house. Wanna come?”
“I’ll pass,” I said. “Too tired.”
He said it was only a few blocks away, but I didn’t budge. What was there to see? I grabbed a slice of to-go pizza and left.
I had to cross the quaint colonial freshman campus to get to West, and by the time I entered the more menacing and Gothic upperclassman world, I was stuffed and sad. I walked up the six-floor shaft of the Cock, already feeling nauseous, so I was pretty pissed when I opened the bathroom door and saw that I had company.
Ellie was on the floor, hugging her knees, blocking my path. Her long, rumpled blond hair touched the ground. She looked up like she wasn’t sure what I was doing there.
“Sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay,” I said. I faced her for a moment, wondering if I should ask what was wrong, if I should sit next to her and stroke her hair and hear about whatever heartbreak had led her down this dark path. But I was tired and needed to puke and, anyway, she wasn’t my friend.
“It’s fine,” I said pointlessly, as she put her head back down. “I’ll just…”
I stepped around her to grab my toothbrush, and I could smell my shampoo on her. Earlier that year I had discovered she had been using my shampoo, but it seemed too late to move it out of the shower. The shampoo predicament signified some terrible flaw within me, not her, and I hated her for exposing it, even then. I got out of there fast and made it to the downstairs bathroom just in time to puke up the pizza.
* * *
—
I dodged reporters and news trucks to get to poetry workshop to see what people thought of “The Dumbass.” Allen English was a sacred space, separated from the Cock by the chapel and library, which was blocked by a man standing on a podium, yelling at a small crowd about how the Durham community would not stand for the disgusting behavior of the lacrosse players. “We need accountability! We need some answers, and we need them now!” The people cheered and held signs that read, STOP THE VIOLENCE! RESPECT THE COMMUNITY! NO MORE LIES!
“Excuse me. Sorry,” I said, weaving through the people. I was sweating by the time I reached my creative writing class on the third floor.
Dr. Monroe wore a flowery dress and sat cross-legged with her wild hair falling over her shoulders, her tan, freckled skin vibrating with the auras of previous lovers. She had risen to relative fame by writing a memoir about spending her youth in a sex cult in California, where she had slept with men and women of all ages and proclivities in a variety of shocking combinations. She wore no makeup and was somewhere in her forties and was absolutely breathtaking. I hoped to be as weathered by love as she was, one day. I waited for her to acknowledge the sounds of the protesters, but she just jumped right into “The Dumbass.”
“This is really relevant to hookup culture,” said a pink-haired girl named Brooke.
“There are some strong immigrant themes in here. They could be played up, though,” said a boy named Cooper, who thought he was Jack Kerouac.
The roar of the protesters kept me from focusing.
“Yes, yes,” Dr. Monroe said slowly, after my classmates lost steam. She even closed her eyes, which was something she only did when she was making a particularly important point. “There is some humor here. It’s all very funny, really, isn’t it? We need humor, especially in difficult times, but we need to feel the hum of humanity below the surface. We can’t just laugh into the void, can we, now? We have to ask ourselves, what is worth noting about this wild life?”
I didn’t want to ask myself anything. I wanted someone to give me the answers.
* * *
—
The news released the names of the accused players a few weeks later: Collin Finnerty, Reade Seligmann, and David Evans. Someone also leaked an email written by a player named Ryan McFadyen after the strippers left. It said, I plan on killing the bitches as soon as they walk in and proceeding to cut their skin off while cumming in my Duke issue spandex. He was riffing on the way Patrick Bateman talked in American Psycho, though nobody cared about the context. President Brodhead suspended the team after that; the coach resigned before he could get fired. A bunch of community members, students, and faculty were going to protest at the house.
I thought about going, but I wanted to write a serious poem first. I couldn’t focus. I went for a run through the gardens to clear my head, but it didn’t help. When I came back, I just sketched Kornberg’s face about ten times before I realized it looked more like Pushkin than Kornberg. Then I snorted some Adderall and tried to avoid writing about Kornberg and wrote about my recent return to Kiev, after my grandmother retired there last year, when she and her brother, Boris, got me so drunk on the banks of the Dnieper that I puked. I wrote about how much my grandmother loved returning to the Motherland, how I wished there was a place, or maybe a person, that could make me feel at peace like that. The poem was sentimental and stupid, so I shoved it in a drawer. By the time I looked up, the darkness was creeping in from outside.
Everyone was in a festive mood by the time I showed up at Teaberry. Beeman had just gotten hired at Lehman Brothers and was as high as a kite, deliriously happy he could move to Manhattan and wear a suit and eat twenty-two-dollar sandwiches and probably die of a heart attack by fifty. I congratulated him and Kornberg gave me a look, as if he thought I was going to tell him what I really felt. To be honest, I was glad there was something to celebrate.
Kornberg and I took a break from flip cup and went to his room to get high. He rolled a joint on a copy of Das Kapital and we climbed on his roof and he told me about his encounter with Stefanie with an F, who wanted to cuddle after they fucked. I told him about my recent night with a senior named Conrad Champion, from my British Romanticism class. He was doing Teach For America next year and his bed had been littered with handouts and textbooks. As he’d cleared the educational materials so our romance could take off, he had said, “Can you believe I’m going to be somebody’s teacher?”
“What a tool,” Kornberg said.
“It was actually kind of sweet.”
The boy’s name stopped being funny eventually, and afterward he’d talked about growing up on a ranch in Montana. He would go off into the world and become somebody’s husband, and I would be his anecdote. I saw his eager face floating before me and knew I was having a benevolent high.
I pictured each boy I had been with as a thick-stemmed flower I was delicately placing into a giant vase. There was room for many more. It was startling and beautiful and wild and sad.
It couldn’t be more different from the life my parents had; they’d married at nineteen so they could get their own apartment and, as Mama insisted on telling me, “a place to make love at last!” Now Mama was moving in with her boyfriend, Sergei, a serious, bearded, and rich banker who actually seemed to enjoy his criminal job. She seemed happy enough, but I couldn’
t imagine that finding a place to make love was a big priority for her now. I guessed it was better for her than being alone, but I would rather be like Dr. Monroe, alone and free instead of settling.
Kornberg leaned back on his roof with his hands behind his head, and I did the same. Our elbows were touching and I felt electric. The roof felt like sandpaper and the stars were gratuitously bright. A big, friendly tree rose above the roof, and its leaves rustled with the wind.
I said, “I can’t imagine marrying the first person you’ve ever been with.”
Kornberg laughed. “It’s too late for either of us to do that, isn’t it?”
“Just a bit.”
“You, Kon Artist,” he said, “are the kind of girl I could marry by the time I’m, like, twenty-five.”
I turned toward him to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. I said, “What, you’ll be done fucking around by then?”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Twenty-five is so old,” I said. “Twenty-five is in forever.”
I tilted my head closer to his to try to see what he did mean, but he just looked at the stars again. I was feeling too good to push it right then.
Nobody hooked up that night. We listened to Guster and played about fifty rounds of pong. I was on fire, I was burning up, my fingers were flames, and the plastic white ball sailed into those red Solo cups with a vengeance. Kornberg didn’t try to get with anyone, Frankie was too high to try, and Beeman fussed around installing black lights in the living room. When they finally flickered on, everyone screamed, because the leather couch was covered in a million stains. Everyone acted like it was the most disgusting thing they had ever seen, but that was where I crashed that night, the lights still on, thinking it was kind of wonderful.
II.
Oksana, Behave! Page 10
