The Necessary Hunger

by Nina Revoyr

  The game was late in the fourth quarter, and Raina's horrible inbounds pass was coming up. I wanted to fast-forward over it, so she wouldn't have to watch it again, but that would have drawn more attention to her mistake. So I just let the tape run, and held my breath as I saw myself knock the ball away from Keisha. Then I saw myself go up for the shot. "Shit," I said aloud, hands going instinctively to my calves. There on the screen it happened again, just like I remembered. I went down, rolled onto my back, grabbed a calf in each hand, and stuck my feet in the air. I could hear my swearing and howling even through the static of the tape. I saw my coach run out and turn me into a sitting position; I saw him frantically massaging my legs.

  Then I noticed something. While everyone else on both teams went back to their benches, one other person remained in the frame. It was Raina. She sat there on the court next to me, her hand on my shoulder, watching. Her little blue-and-yellow figure stayed there the whole three or four minutes it took for my cramps to loosen, and I didn't look up at her once. I hadn't even known she was there.

  After the game had started up again, I turned and looked at Raina on the couch. She kept her eyes down, as if embarrassed. "I didn't know you were out there with me," I said.

  She smiled, almost shyly. "You were occupied."

  I turned back to the screen, then back to her again. "Well, shit, Raina. I mean . . . thanks."

  She lifted her head and our eyes met. We looked at each other for several moments. For the first time it occurred to me that maybe I did mean something to her, that maybe I wasn't just a part of the landscape. "You would have done the same for me," she said.

  * * *

  The second thing that tipped the scale was that Toni was jealous. This came to light a few days after the videotape incident, on an afternoon when Toni had actually spent an entire hour or so in our house. I was just going out to shoot some hoops when I ran into her by the door.

  "Wassup, Toni?" I offered as greeting. She didn't answer. Instead she turned with a quick, challenging lift of the chin, and gave me what I suppose was a glare but what felt more like she was poking me with her eyes. I was confused by this and drew back, and by the time I recovered wits enough to speak, Toni was already out the door. I went into the living room and looked at Raina, who was standing next to the piano. "Who pissed in her Wheaties this morning?"

  Raina sighed. "Nobody. Well, actually, you kind of did. Or, I don't know, I guess we kind of did."

  "What do you mean?" I asked. I had no idea what Toni was mad about, but I liked the sound of being included in Raina's "we."

  "She doesn't really like the living situation."

  Silence.

  "What?"

  "She doesn't approve of this . . . arrangement."

  "You mean you and your mom living with me and my dad?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, why not?" I asked, but then I knew.

  "She thinks I spend too much time with you. She thinks that I . . . that we . . . talk to each other too much."

  "You gotta be kidding."

  "No."

  Pause. I could hear the sound of her breathing.

  "Well, that's stupid. I mean, it almost sounds like she's . . ." I couldn't say the word "jealous"; it was unthinkable.

  "Yeah," said Raina. "Yeah." As if the concept were as strange and new to her as it was to me.

  We were standing in the living room maybe five feet apart. I felt the air between us like a solid entity which lay still when we were still, and which moved when we moved it. Raina had not looked at me once.

  My reactions to Toni's "disapproval" rolled in one after another. The first was anger, as in, how dare she be jealous of me in the context of a situation where she was clearly, despite the "living arrangement," the winner? The second was a curious spite—if Toni didn't want me hanging out with her girlfriend, then maybe she should try spending more time with the woman. The third was a minor thrill at Toni's marking my existence. And the fourth was a huge and sudden rush of guilt, of all things—guilt for creating this problem between them, and causing Raina yet more undeserved pain. This reaction, for some reason, was what won out in the end.

  "Jesus, Raina, I'm sorry," I blurted. I couldn't help it. It just fell out of my mouth.

  "Why should you be sorry? You didn't do nothin wrong." She looked at me, just for a moment, and then looked away. For that one moment, though, the air in the room lifted like a layer of morning fog, and there was no space left between us.

  "I know. But I mean, it's not like you ain't got enough to deal with already, without me bein an issue too."

  "Maybe, but that ain't your fault."

  "What's she gonna do? Forbid you to spend time with us? Stop you from talkin to me?" My voice was getting higher.

  "She cant stop me from talkin to you. I like talkin to you. I mean, you listen to me. You—" She cut herself off and pressed her lips together. She ran her fingers along the surface of the piano, just to the right of where the keys ended, and stared at the back of her hand as if something were written there. "Just forget it," she said suddenly, turning. I stood there in the middle of the living room floor and watched her disappear up the stairs.

  It didn't take long for me to become happy about all of this. Toni's anger, it seemed to me, was like a coded message, although it wasn't really her anger so much as what it suggested that pleased me. Ah, jealousy, that emotion that can be more unbearable than pain, but which makes you giddy with power when it's directed at you. The discovery of Toni's jealousy, and Raina's awkwardness afterward, told me that I played a bigger role in Raina's thoughts than I'd known. She liked talking to me. I meant something to her. I provided her with something Toni didn't.

  The significance of this jealousy, or at least my perception of it, grew and grew. I'd always been worried about the impression I was making on Raina, but now I was convinced that I'd been doing the right thing all along. All I had to do was be myself, and be there. And things got better between us. She noticed me more. Even the tension, and her pain at having lost to me, seemed to have faded considerably. This had already begun to happen as soon as the playoffs were over, but then Raina and I had played in separate senior all-star games. And while I had put on merely an average performance in my game, Raina, in hers, driven by the memory of her failure against us, had scored twenty-nine points and dished out thirteen assists. She'd reasserted herself in basketball, which made her happier in life, and some of the balance that had shifted between us, shifted back. I wasn't the least bit unhappy about this. I wanted her to feel better, because it made our relationship easier; we were actually beginning to get closer. The day after the scene at the piano, she kidded with me all through dinner, using a voice more familiar than she'd used with me before, like an arm thrown across my shoulder during the telling of a private joke. The next morning at breakfast she launched Frosted Flakes at me, grinning, while our parents read the paper obliviously. A few days later during Oprah, we chatted happily away at each other like old and intimate friends, and at one point Raina turned and fixed me with a broad smile, as if to say, Isn't it great that we're together? Something had changed between us; we were on firmer ground. Even the problems of December now seemed like events of a different life—just temporary setbacks, minor obstacles, which had been overcome successfully and which had quickly spiraled into the past. We never talked about the night we'd spent asleep on the floor together—we were both pretending, I think, that we had been too drunk to remember—but I knew she did remember, I knew by the way she looked at me, her eyes holding the weight of the things that her words couldn't say.

  I was on a high that was getting higher. My joy about Raina affected my perception of everything—food tasted better, schoolwork got easier, our drabby neighborhood wasn't quite so gray and sad. Even the future seemed a little less daunting, although the signing period was only a week away. We'd have to announce our decisions within the next few days, and I was certain that Raina would choose one of the schools we had in c
ommon. She'd pick Washington or Virginia—I knew it. And then of course I'd go to the same place, and we'd be teammates, and maybe we'd live together for another four years. And we'd travel around the country together on road trips, and talk all night in the dorms or the library or in big hotel rooms in different cities. We'd get closer, and maybe one day she'd open her eyes and really see me, and then our friendship would blossom into the romance it had always been trying to be.

  I was feeling so good that one Friday night I suggested we go out to a club. As a rule, I didn't like clubs, because the prospect of being trapped in a pulsating mass of sweaty strangers did not exactly appeal to me. But every once in a while, when I was feeling particularly happy and when I could go with the right group of people, I went to a club to drink and dance and generally let loose a little. I never picked anyone up, of course, but it was just nice to go to a place where I could be myself without the danger of being ogled at, or jumped. Raina didn't get out that much either, although she liked clubs a little better than I did. The whole thing was more of Toni's scene, I think.

  We took my dad's car, and collected Stacy, Telisa, and Shavon on the way. Toni was visiting her mother that night and couldn't come, which caused me no great sorrow. The five of us went to the Executive Suite in Long Beach. I liked the Suite because it was big enough to get some serious dancing done, but not overwhelmingly huge and anonymous. The crowd was mixed, composed of roughly equal numbers of black, Latina, and white women. There were usually a few scattered Asian women, and also a few gay men. It depended. That night there were even two straight couples doing it up on the dance floor. In terms of dress, it ran the spectrum—some women were wearing heels, lots of makeup, and sexy dresses so tight it must have taken hours to shoehorn into them. Some were in jeans and T-shirts. We were in the middle. I wore a sleeveless blue dress, and Telisa, Shavon, and Stacy all wore nice pants and tight, flattering shirts. Raina wore jeans and a loose green short-sleeve blouse. Simple, but she looked sexier in this outfit than all the divas in their tight black dresses.

  We'd had some beers in the parking lot, so we were feeling pretty good by the time we finally got inside. "I'm gonna go do some window-shoppin," said Stacy, and so she, Shavon, and Telisa went off to watch the dancers. Raina and I got drinks from the bar and took a table near the edge of the dance floor. Soon the other three were back with reports of their findings—who they knew and who Stacy wanted to know. They asked if we wanted to go take a look. "I know enough people already," Raina said, and smiled at me from behind her glass.

  Stacy went over to talk to someone she recognized, and the rest of us took to the floor. We danced in a loose square, drunk and laughing, almost falling into each other. People were getting mad at us for bumping into them, but we didn't care. Everything was funny that night—the guy behind us who danced (Telisa said) like he had a stick up his ass, the very butch waitress who kept winking at me as she passed by to deliver someone's drink, the strange colors we all turned because of the strobe light. Raina laughed at all of this delightedly, more relaxed than I'd ever seen her, and halfway through the fourth song she grabbed my hand. So we danced like that, sides of a square, hands and shoulders touching. Finally the other two went off to get some drinks, and Raina and I were left out on the floor alone. I took a step away from her, not trusting my feelings or my self-control under the power of the three beers I'd consumed. But God, it felt good to be carried along in that music, with Raina just inches away. We were seventeen then, the perfect age—no job, responsibility, or other trapping of adulthood stood between us and the living of our lives. I looked at Raina, my chest bursting with love. It felt like a sea full of thunderous waves; like a huge flock of majestic birds rising from the ground and taking flight; like a thousand voices were shouting joyfully in my heart. She was smiling, her smile so warm and open that I knew I'd finally touched her, and I thought to myself that this was it, this was happiness—and it was, until Toni showed up.

  I don't know where she came from. She just materialized right there next to us on the dance floor, as permanent and inevitable as a rock. And I don't know whether she'd heard we were going to be there and had come to meet us, or had just happened to show up at the Suite that night by chance. What I do know is that Raina's face changed the moment she saw her. It was as if she'd been wearing a mask, so skillfully made and genuine that it was impossible to identify as a mask until it was lifted to reveal the face beneath it, a face recognizable but not quite familiar, which at this moment was filled with confusion, desire, love. I knew she'd forgotten me, just like that. I might not have even existed.

  Without either of them noticing, I slipped off the dance floor and went back to our table. Our friends were nowhere in sight. I ordered another drink, a whiskey, and although everything else in my vision was blurry, Toni and Raina were clear. I sat there holding on to that drink like it was my only friend, and forced myself to watch them.

  I should say that whenever I thought of Raina, I imagined her alone. For some reason I never pictured her on the basketball court, although that was the place where we both spent most of our time. I don't know why this was so. But the fact was that when she appeared in my memory, she did so by herself, with no one else around or even possible. She was usually staring out at something—those ducks in the green reeds at Blue Star, or the ocean that night in December—totally unaware that anyone else existed. I remembered watching her at the beach that night, thinking that she seemed so profoundly alone, and that I understood her then, because I felt that way myself. And I remembered wondering if I could reach her somehow, if she would ever let me in, and thinking that maybe by easing her loneliness and pain, I could do something about my own.

  The thing that had made me so much less jealous than I might have been was that I just couldn't imagine Raina with someone else. But now she was, with Toni, and I couldn't escape it. The only times I'd ever seen them together were at basketball games, and for a few seconds at a time at my house. Never someplace so open as a club, never someplace where their relationship was laid out for all to see.

  What can I say about watching them? They were like one person, so completely together that I couldn't tell where one of them ended and the other began. I mean this not just in the sense that they were physically close, but in that together they seemed to form a third being which contained them both. They danced just barely apart, eyes engaged in some ancient dialogue, each movement of their bodies like a sweet song sung only for the other. It was clear that they were no longer in a crowded dance club in Long Beach, but totally alone somewhere, on a deserted beach or on the path of some wooded mountain. For the first time I could see how much Toni loved Raina, see it in the way she negotiated the air, like it was a toy she'd just invented for Raina's pleasure. I saw all the pain they'd caused each other and would continue to cause each other, and I saw the overwhelming beauty of that pain. And sitting there, I knew that no matter what I'd thought, I didn't know Raina in the least, and I couldn't even begin to understand her. I remembered the joy I'd felt only moments before and was overcome with shame. I meant no more to Raina, I realized, than any other friend would, or any housemate. Or maybe I had never been her friend at all, but only, in truth, her witness. This realization didn't hit me suddenly so much as it grew, like a tumor, in my stomach. I was paralyzed with pain. In all the months I'd lived with Raina and in the two years before, I'd felt that because of her some kind of bottom had dropped away; that I'd punctured through; that I no longer skimmed the surface of life but had plunged into it. And where had it gotten me? To a hard chair in a noisy club, watching her with someone else. But I could not look away from her. I could not turn my eyes away. And as she moved there in front of me, all I knew, despite everything, was the love, the inevitable love, which was deepening by the moment, which did not exist in me but in which I existed.

  Half an hour later they left the floor. Raina disappeared down the staircase, and Toni headed straight for my table. I felt the hair on my arms b
ristle as she sat down beside me. She ordered a beer, and although I didn't look at her directly, I could feel her smiling. The drink arrived, and she sat there gulping, very self-satisfied, as I turned my own glass around and around in my hands.

  "So what do you think, kiddo?" she asked finally.

  "Of what?"

  "Of Raina's deciding to go to Michigan?"

  I didn't move. She sat there smiling. She knew I hadn't known. I gripped my glass very tightly and tried to stop my hands from shaking.

  "Michigan's cold," I managed, and Toni grinned. All right, I wanted to say to her, you won. I didn't know what upset me more—Raina's going to the other side of the universe, or the fact that she hadn't told me about it. There were too many things to feel. Why hadn't she told me? She'd probably known for days, maybe even weeks, but had kept it a secret. Worse than that, though, we were going to be separated. This year would be all I ever had of her. I felt we'd reached the end, that very night—the end of the world as we knew it. It was as if I'd been walking for months with my head down, and had finally looked up to discover that none of the landscape was familiar—that I was a stranger to it, and I was alone.

  Just then Raina appeared at the top of the stairs. She looked from Toni to me and back to Toni again, and she must have known that something had happened between us, because she hesitated there for a moment. Then she took a deep breath and straightened her back and walked purposefully across the floor to our table. She sat down in the empty chair and fixed her eyes on me.

  If I had known when I was seventeen what the next ten years would bring, I would have held on to my last year of high school even more tightly than I did. Raina would go on to have a brilliant four years at Michigan—breaking all of their scoring records, doing well academically, eventually becoming an assistant editor at a political journal in Detroit. I would have a solid career at Washington. I'd start for my last three years, and have a few great moments, but not transcendent ones; I needed Raina for that. Somehow the game wasn't life-and-death for me anymore; I had proven what I needed to; I had won the only game that really mattered to me. I finally buckled down with my schoolwork, though, and did well enough to land a job with the Community Development Department here in Seattle—a job I like, but don't put all of myself into, the way I had hoped I would.