Oksana, Behave!

by Maria Kuznetsova

  When I got out of the Cock shower the next morning, Ellie was standing right where I had found her curled up just days ago. But she wasn’t crying this time. Her hair was falling all over the place, still unstraightened, but she had full makeup on and the orange glow of her spray tan was brighter than ever.

  “I know Kornberg is your friend, but you should be careful around him. He raped me a few weeks ago, back at the house. I thought you should know.”

  “Kornberg is my friend,” I repeated. I took a step back and put one hand on the wall.

  “Your friend raped me,” she said. She stared at me like she expected me to launch into a long defense. When I didn’t, she said, “The lacrosse case made me realize I can’t stay quiet about this. I wasn’t going to do anything about it, at first.”

  “We don’t even know if they did it.”

  Ellie narrowed her eyes. “You’re so in love with him it’s pathetic.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I’m looking out for you.”

  “I already have a mother who does that.”

  She stretched her arms out toward me, palms up. The bones stuck out below her wrists. “You can’t see them now, but I had crazy bruises on my wrists,” she said. “From when he held me down.”

  I tried to stay calm, knowing that if I balked it would make her think I believed her. There was nothing on her wrists. Were they bruised the last time I’d seen her in the bathroom? I had been too drunk to notice.

  “You should have taken a picture,” I said. I felt terrible after that and searched the high-ceilinged, nearly private bathroom for a way to make up for it. “I’ve been letting you use my shampoo all year long,” I said.

  She laughed bitterly. “It’s easy to share when you have a lot of something,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Dr. Monroe was standing up when I got to class a few minutes late thanks to Ellie. Her hair was combed and she was wearing lipstick and a solid-colored dress. She closed her eyes before she spoke.

  “I have tried to keep this a sacred space for art, but that seems impossible now, doesn’t it? It is impossible that you have not noticed the cameras, the reporters, the papers—the world out there,” she said, waving at the window. “Words. There are so many perverted uses for them. Words will sell you things. They will make you feel like less of a person. They will lull you when you should be alert. They will make you believe the wrong things. Words have a different purpose in literature—an exalted purpose. Literature reminds us that there is more that binds us than tears us apart,” she said. We nodded tentatively, awaiting further instruction.

  I stared at my notebook, in which I had most recently written a stanza about my grandmother as a child, watching Kiev burn for five straight days when the Nazis first took it over, and then a page-long ode to Kornberg’s forearms, and thought I was beyond fucked. Somewhere along the line, I had decided that writing was what I believed in, the only thing. The email Ryan McFadyen had dashed off in probably two minutes would define him for the rest of his life, while nobody would care that much about anything I ever wrote, even if I kept at it until my dying day.

  “Go home,” Dr. Monroe said, opening her eyes but making no move to sit down. “Write something true. Write something that makes the reader feel as if a hand is emerging from the page and clutching his heart. Give it your full consideration,” she said.

  We had many questions for her.

  “Should the poem follow a particular form?”

  “Do we need a rhyme scheme?”

  “When you say true, do you mean factual?”

  “Writing is a privilege,” she said. “What will you do with that privilege?” Then she waved us away.

  She turned to the window, where a protester’s voice blared through a megaphone. Dr. Monroe was one of eighty-eight professors who had signed a petition against the players, which appeared in The Chronicle that week. I wondered how she could be so sure those guys did it, how I could be pretty sure they did it, and yet how I could be certain Kornberg would never rape anybody, and how this certainty was like a rock I could feel in my shoe.

  * * *

  —

  “What’s up, Konnikova?”

  Kornberg was waiting for me on his roof. I could see by the smirk in his eyes that he hadn’t heard, that I would be the one to tell him the news. His smile crushed me. I couldn’t put up with a moment of banter with him. I picked up a stray plastic handcuff and opened and closed it.

  “She’s saying you raped her,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Ellie. She’s saying you raped her.”

  I told him everything I knew and watched him lower his head into his hands. The sun was setting and a few boys gathered by a fire pit in the yard. The boys cheered inside the house. His eyes were brimming when he looked up.

  “My dad always told me that respecting women was the most important thing in the world,” he said. “He kept saying it before I left for school. And I promised him I would never, ever, treat a woman badly. Not ever.” He moved closer to me. “I didn’t do anything she didn’t want to do. You have to believe me, Oksana.”

  “Of course I believe you.”

  “Then why didn’t you ask? Don’t you want to know if I did it?” he said.

  “I already know you didn’t.”

  He was biting down on his lip so hard I thought he’d draw blood. I needed to fill the silence, so I added, “She was saying that the lacrosse case inspired her to speak up.”

  “That’s fucking crazy,” he said, slamming his hand on the roof. “Fuck,” he said, punching it this time, bloodying his knuckles. “What do those guys have to do with me?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” I said. They were fifty times as rich; they were not Jewish; they wore Lacoste polos; they hung out with super-tan six-foot-tall scary model girls; they did not know how to do laundry. He was just a normal kid from Philly.

  His eyes were watering. Snot leaked down his left nostril. I wiped his nose with my sleeve and then I pulled him up by his bloody hand and led him to his room. It was messier than last time. Three trays of takeout were stacked over a Domino’s box and a few Bud Lights, and Cook Out shakes were stationed on his desk like soldiers, guarding books he might never finish. Phillies and Blue Devils tickets were taped to the wall. A photo stood on his nightstand of him and his parents and brother squinting into the sun outside the Roman Colosseum. A few stray bright earrings were scattered at the foot of his bed, none of them pairs, none of them mine.

  We climbed into his bed and he closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around me. We stayed like that all night long and I was awake the entire time, feeling his chest rising and falling against my back. I didn’t move an inch, because I didn’t want to ruin the moment, such as it was.

  * * *

  —

  Kornberg received official notice from the school board that his case would be going to trial. It would be kept out of the papers, unlike the lacrosse case, which was all over the national news; that week, Jesse Jackson had come to protest in Durham, and a reporter for The News & Observer wrote an accusatory op-ed that started with the words Members of the men’s Duke lacrosse team: You know. We know you know.

  Kornberg’s name, however, or Ellie’s, would not be revealed. He would make his case before the end of the semester—there were two weeks left before summer vacation. Ellie would speak behind a screen, and they would never see each other. That was all he told me. As far as I could see, nobody else knew; it seemed cruel that I had to. After I’d told him, he said he would never have another sip of alcohol.

  “I feel so much better now,” Kornberg said when we drove to the airport for no reason a few days later. “I finally feel like I’m doing what I’m meant to do….”

  “An
d what would that be?” I said.

  He shrugged. “I’ve been running more. Becky’s teaching me to cook.”

  “That’s cute,” I said. Boring Becky was cooking for him? What, did he not think I knew how to cook? Well, I didn’t, but that was beside the point. I could always learn.

  “I’ve almost finished Das Kapital,” he added, all excited about his sober life that didn’t include me.

  “What was your favorite part of the book?” I finally said, trying to sound as uninterested as possible, but he was undeterred.

  “This one part has been haunting me,” he said. “Marx wrote that when a worker finishes a product, part of him becomes congealed in that thing. I just got this image of myself walking around with all these bits of people congealed inside me, you know?”

  “That only happens to me when the condom breaks.”

  “Jesus, Konnikova. What is the matter with you?”

  “What?” He seemed more pissed than the occasion called for. “I was just joking.”

  “I thought you’d have more insight,” he said. I didn’t know if he was referring to my dumb poem about me as a kid imitating Lenin or my family’s sad history or if he just meant I was being an idiot.

  “What insight?” I said. We pulled off 85 toward campus and he slowed down. “Marx had a decent idea, Lenin fucked it up, millions of Jews died, my family left the Soviet Union, and now I get to write poems and fuck people named Conrad Champion.”

  He sped up again and sighed. “You have it all figured out, don’t you?”

  He didn’t say anything else after that, not even after we pulled up at Teaberry. He found Becky in the kitchen and began playing with her necklace and whispering in her ear, and I wasn’t sure why he hadn’t taken me back to the Cock.

  I should have left, but I sulked on the couch next to Beeman instead. The news was on, and the pearled girlfriend of Reade Seligmann talked about what a great guy he was, how there was no evidence against him. She was so slick, with her straightened hair and Lacoste shirt. I was pretty sure I could find more common ground with an eggplant than with her. Beeman seemed alarmed by how intensely I was glaring at the screen.

  “You all right?” he said.

  “Do you think she bleeds if you cut her, or do pearls come out?”

  “Probably blood?” he guessed. He was so stupidly sincere. I ran my hand up and down his arm, as if to ignite a spark between us.

  * * *

  —

  I returned to my dorm the next morning to an email from Dr. Monroe. I’ve been thinking about you, she wrote. Have you considered applying to MFA programs? I hadn’t given it much thought, but I was flattered by her suggestion and determined to write the best and truest poem I could for her class. But I was out of Adderall. I paced around campus, hoping to get inspired while walking, just as Mandlestam had, but all I did was dodge a reporter putting a mic in my face and a guy I’d hooked up with at a foam party sophomore year.

  In the end, I returned to the “Onward to the Bright Future” poem I had put in a drawer freshman year and tweaked it until I was convinced there was nothing false, and certainly nothing funny, about it.

  I got to class early and volunteered to go first. Dr. Monroe was in her usual position, cross-legged and wild-haired. As I began to read, I could picture her face without looking up. She would glow with stern approval and say, “Your work is really maturing, Ms. Konnikova.” But when I finished, she appeared slightly bored, even angry.

  “Lies,” she said, waving the poem away.

  She kept looking out the window as the students read their poems; none seemed to satisfy her. She waved us all away and told us to try again next week.

  * * *

  —

  Kornberg and Becky went public at the house, holding hands and whispering like conspirators. They weren’t all over each other like two horny people on the verge of fucking either, which was the only way I had ever seen him be with any other girl. He even let her wear his dumb Phillies cap. No, this was definitely something new. Those two had the confident maneuvers of people in love. Of people who didn’t drink either.

  “You have an eyelash,” Becky said, brushing a hand over his cheek while he smiled like a farting baby. “Got it,” she said, blowing it off her hand. “I made a wish.”

  “Don’t tell me what it was or it might come true,” he said.

  “It already has,” she said.

  She kissed him where the lash had been. Or phantom lash, for all I knew. This was some kind of love porn—it felt indecent to watch.

  It was enough to make you puke, which was exactly what I went to the bathroom to do, though to be fair it had more to do with the Jell-O shots than with my broken heart.

  Afterward, I wiped my face and stared at myself in the mirror. I pictured Kornberg standing behind me with his hands on my shoulders. “You have vomit on your cheek,” he said to me, stroking my blotchy face. “Let me get that for you.”

  I saw the real Kornberg standing in the kitchen by himself, holding a Coke, looking like the king of his manor. He was waiting for Becky to finish her intense conversation with some girl with short bangs on the couch. I thought of Tsvetaeva’s “An Attempt at Jealousy”:

  Are you bored with her new body?

  How’s it going, with an earthly woman,

  with no sixth sense?

  Are you happy?

  I took a step toward him, wanting to blurt out such poetry to echo my pain and show him what a fool he was.

  “Are you happy?” I said, as harshly as I could.

  He smiled and shook his head. “Happy doesn’t begin to describe it. Man, what did I do to get so lucky?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “That’s what makes it luck.”

  He didn’t seem to hear me. He was just looking at the room, waiting for his girl to emerge. I could have been talking about eating a koala’s asshole, or getting fingered by Dick Cheney. I wanted to get his attention. I lowered my voice. “Does she know about this thing with Ellie?” His verdict was coming in by the end of the week.

  “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” he said. He took a long sip of his Coke and said, “Yeah, she knows.” That was it, the only trump card I had over the girl gone. I was just a Cook Out wrapper, a skunky Bud Light, a king’s cup nobody could be coerced into drinking. He was pretty pissed until Becky returned, evaporating the creases in his face. Had he really told her everything? I couldn’t be sure. He put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Don’t let anybody call you Olivia,” he told me.

  If he hadn’t walked away, I would have told him he’d been right earlier—I had exaggerated the story for comedic effect. What really happened was that the poor boy did forget my name and had a bewildered look on his face, as if he were trying to conjure me, a look that changed to gratitude once I told him what I was called.

  * * *

  —

  I crawled out of Beeman’s room with a top-ten hangover on the morning of the biggest drinking day of the year. I scrubbed my face and saw that I was wearing his oversize T-shirt that said LEHMAN BROTHERS: WHERE VISION GETS BUILT. My dress and shoes were MIA, so I put on Beeman’s green Crocs. I grabbed a slice of pizza and kept my head down during my stride of pride back to the Cock as I devoured it. This was the state I was in when I found Ellie at the bottom of the stairs, holding a tower of boxes.

  “Fuck!” she said, both at me and at the shit she was about to fall under.

  “I got it,” I said, grabbing a few of them, and she didn’t stop me.

  “Whatever,” she said.

  I hadn’t seen her in our hall or bathroom since our last chat and assumed she had been using a different one. But her hair looked so greasy and her collarbone protruded so much that I wondered if she had left her room at
all since then. She was transferring to Oberlin for her senior year. I followed her to the lot behind our dorm, where her car was parked, its trunk open to reveal a box of biology books and a pink blanket. I was surprised that she drove a beat-up Volvo instead of an Audi or something, and even more surprised to see her Michigan plates; I had assumed she was from California or Connecticut.

  “My friend Lily loves Oberlin,” I said. “Well, she dropped out last year, but, like, she said it was this incredibly welcoming school.”

  She would have none of my pleasantries. “This place is diseased,” she said, practically spitting the words.

  “I’m getting an MFA after this,” I told her. “I’m not going to end up like these people.”

  She snorted. “Good luck with that.”

  It was the last day of classes and I had already wrong-night partied. The students had started drinking on the quad, and “Gold Digger” was blasting from a room above us. Girls were out with their pearls and pastel dresses and gladiator sandals. Soon everybody would get liquored up and head to class anyway, a time-honored tradition I would uphold after I showered.

  We put the boxes and a lamp into her trunk and she shuffled her things around in the back seat, trying to push them down. I pictured myself getting in the passenger seat, joining her at Oberlin next year, where I would drop acid and roll around naked in a cornfield, reciting Elizabeth Bishop, and have women tenderly going down on me—a place where I wouldn’t wear fake pearls, where I could stop shaving my legs.

  I tugged down my shirt to make sure it covered my ass.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You shouldn’t have to leave.”

  “This is my choice.”

  This was the first time I had seen Ellie without makeup and she looked prettier without it, her face as fresh and lost as a high school girl’s. She had stopped with the spray tan too, and her skin was pale and wonderful and I wanted to touch it.

  I tried searching her face for signs she had been raped; would she really go through all this trouble if it wasn’t true? Why couldn’t I learn the truth from looking at her, or at Kornberg? What the fuck else did I not know? Asking her would be pointless, invasive. But I wanted her to confirm it, to tell me what a terrible person the love of my life had been all along. I wanted her to release me.