by Pamela Erens
Carlyle knows how to get to the bottle shop near South Station that will sell to underage kids. She did it all the time last year, she says, it’s a snap. The best thing to get is Bacardi 151—the most bang per swallow. Lena and Aviva wait across the street. Like Aviva, Lena is new this year and learning the way things are done. The building next to the bottle shop has no windows, no front door. The steps are strewn with trash. The girls carry the flat bottle in a paper bag, pass it hand to hand as they look for the subway. Aviva’s perfume is called Opium; Carlyle’s is something floral and sweeter. Lena wears neither perfume nor makeup. She has rather crooked features and glasses, but Aviva admires her breasts, which are ample and high, and her elegant legs. She’s of Greek stock, with a beautiful last name, Joannou. Carlyle is a different breed entirely, Virginian, with thick blond hair and generous hips and a big white Southern smile.
“There are countries you can’t even sell this stuff in,” Carlyle tells them. She heard it from the guy behind the counter. He was flirting with her. Grown men frequently flirt with her.
“Which ones?” asks Lena.
“He didn’t say.”
Aviva sips, waits a few minutes to see what the effect is, asks for the bottle again. Have I said that she is a girl who fears what is inside of her? She wants to be giddy and silly, self-forgetful, a state she has not experienced since she was perhaps nine or ten years old. At the same time she does not want to say something that cannot be unsaid, or do something that will be hard to forget. She does not want to fall down or vomit, make a fool of herself.
Her head stays cool and clear. She drinks more.
On Beacon Hill the girls go into a little shop with bright scarves and hats on ornate racks. Lena and Carlyle don’t have enough money to buy anything. The items aren’t to Carlyle’s taste anyway. She prefers traditional and tailored things: turtlenecks, sturdy blazers, argyle socks. Aviva winds a purple mohair scarf around her neck. She adds a dark fedora with a stiff purple feather stuck in the crown, pulling it down low, shading her eyes.
The others are delighted. “Get it, get it,” they urge her.
Aviva pays for the hat with her father’s credit card. He has yet to cancel all the accounts. That will happen later, when he wants to make sure her mother cannot spend any more of his money. The lovely scarf she unwinds and returns to the rack. She can’t have everything. She allows herself extravagances by denying herself other extravagances. The equation convinces her she is temperate. The hat costs seventy dollars. On the street her limbs tingle, she breathes and speaks rapidly, excited by her purchase. She grabs the rum for another gulp. It’s time for something to eat, she cries. She is growing warm under her peacoat.
“You look like a gorgeous gangster,” says Lena.
They go to Faneuil Hall, drawn past the stalls of jewelry and pottery to the smell of something hot and fried. A stout woman is patting out large disks of dough and dropping them into a vat of rippling oil. The dough is retrieved, drained on paper towels, heaped with powdered sugar. The girls each have one.
It’s delicious: the flaky, oily bread, the sugar turning into a sweet paste in the mouth. The paper towel each has been given as a napkin becomes soaked, filthy. The girls buy peanuts and pour their rum into cans of 7-Up.
Near the exit they pause before a Häagen-Dazs stall. Carlyle says she can’t, not after the fried dough. She absolutely must lose ten pounds. Lena is out of cash. Aviva hesitates while passing the money for both of them over the counter. What is this hesitation? Two scoops with generous skirts perch atop two browned cones. The stall smells richly of cream and toasted sugar. Chunks of chocolate stud the ice cream like showy jewels. Something grips Aviva, whispers that she’s gone too far. One cone is passed into Lena’s hand, already dripping from the crown. Aviva accepts the other as if hypnotized. The transaction has been concluded: she will have to eat it now. The first bite is so delicious she closes her eyes. She sucks on the chunks of chocolate that remain in her mouth after the sweet cream dissolves.
She takes another bite, and another, impatient to repeat the pleasure. She waits to feel sated, sick of it, for the pleasure to diminish, but it does not. She eats faster as if she might be able to overrun the pleasure and leave it behind. With a sudden spastic motion she flings the half-eaten cone into a garbage bin. Relief floods her.
“I would have taken that!” cries Lena.
Aviva is safe now. Her fright has passed. She reaches up and strokes the feather on her hat. It is all right.
At South Station they take some last nips from the bottle before shoving it into the pocket of Lena’s down vest. “Are you drunk?” they ask each other. Carlyle smiles, nodding. Lena hums to herself, swaying from side to side. Her fingers start to play Rhapsody in Blue. Whenever she is happy or high, she moves them to the notes of Gershwin.
“I don’t feel anything,” complains Aviva.
“You’re too careful, baby,” Carlyle tells her.
13
Early November, flat skies, weak light, early nights. The dormitories are cold. In Aviva’s mailbox Monday is a letter asking her to come see the dean of students.
The dean asks if Miss Rossner knows why she has been called in. She does not.
“Saturday’s dance . . .” he explains.
It was a dance sponsored by the Afro-Am society, heavy on the disco. Aviva isn’t fond of the sound or the beat but she and Seung never miss an opportunity to dance. Before heading over to the Student Center, Aviva drank tequila from a bottle Seung keeps in one of his winter boots. She let long streams course into her mouth. She and Seung kissed on the dance floor for a long time, pressing into each other. After a while they left the Student Center and walked toward the sports fields, stopping behind the tennis courts. They lay down, throwing off their coats and unbuttoning their shirts. These are the things that Aviva remembers. She does not remember the crowd on the dance floor falling back to watch the two of them, their mouths and their hands. She does not know that a knot of students followed them out to the tennis courts to spy from a distance. Dean Ruwart has to tell her about that.
Aviva frowns, folds her arms, looks down. This foolish man, with his close-cropped hair, his babyish cheeks, behaving as if she has done something wrong. Shame and fear rise up in her, but it is the shame of having been seen without knowing it and the fear of becoming not the mysterious object of boys’ desire but a punch line in their dirty jokes. As for what she and Seung were actually doing—she refuses the idea that she has anything to apologize for. Has she cheated on a test? Has she stolen something from the science lab? Sex is natural, sex is her birthright, the pursuit that has at long last arrived to make sense of her world.
The dean tells her that the two of them are being put on restrictions. Restrictions means checking in to their dorms at 8:00 PM, same as the preps and the lowers, even on Saturday nights. The normal check-in hour for uppers is 9:00 PM, for seniors, 10:00 PM. Another violation of school decorum during this time will mean probation. Beyond probation, Dean Ruwart doesn’t need to add, looms expulsion. Does she understand why this action is being taken?
“No,” she says.
She tells a friend or two about the encounter, how she said “no” to the dean and he merely shook his head and let her go. It becomes a little story going around: Aviva stood up to old Ruwart, wouldn’t be cowed. Didn’t apologize. But for a long time Aviva is secretly mortified by the image of all those bodies forming a circle around her and Seung on the dance floor, ogling them in the dark, the lights strobing on and off their damp, drunken faces. Then all those eyes watching for a flash of breast in the grass.
Restrictions does not make as much difference as it might. She and Seung can still sit in the common room after dinner and nuzzle, take afternoon walks in the woods. On Saturdays they hide in the bathroom of the library while the building is locked up at six, and then have the entire place to themselves, the wide concrete stairwells, the airy stacks. They watch the sky darken, holding hands. They kneel
, kissing, in the 900s—books on Morocco and Tunisia and Algeria—while the heat in the building clanks off and the temperature slowly drops. At ten minutes to eight they watch for passersby and then stroll out of the building: first Aviva, then Seung. The door isn’t alarmed, Seung tells her, and she wonders how he knows the things he knows. When has he been here before, and with whom?
When the month is over they celebrate with a movie at the Guignol: All That Jazz, with Ann Reinking in fishnet stockings and a bowler hat, sardonic Roy Scheider, Jessica Lange as Death with a white veil and porcelain skin. Aviva would like to be all of them: Reinking, Scheider, Lange, even the little girl—the Roy Scheider character’s daughter—in pigtails and a leotard, who wraps her legs around him, clinging, when her visit with him is over. She would like to move the way Reinking does; she would like to dance out her life in a succession of musical numbers: the sexy number, the sad number, the enraged number, the pleading number, the celebratory number, the death number.
Later that night, Carlyle tells Aviva that when the preps and lowers were checking in, their dorm head, Señora Ivarra, looked at her chart and said, “Ah, the very sociable young lady is once again allowed to stay out.”
“She said that? In front of everybody?”
“Only the ones in front probably heard. I came in early because Gene had a headache. A lot of the teachers don’t like you, Aviva. You should be careful. They can make trouble for you. I’ve been here longer than you, so I know. I’m not saying don’t live your life. Just be smart about things, okay?”
Aviva is surprised to find her feelings quite hurt. Teachers not liking her? Why shouldn’t they like her? They’ve always liked her before! She’s a good student. She participates in class. Perhaps Carlyle exaggerates. But in any case, what is there to worry about? She got the message—there are forces out there that will rein her and Seung in—and she’ll be toeing the line from now on. Just enough.
14
Over the years I’ve come to understand that telling someone’s story—telling it, I mean, with a purity of intention, in an attempt to get at that person’s real desires and sufferings—is at one and the same time an act of devotion and an expression of sadism. You are the one moving the bodies around, putting words in their mouths, making them do what you need them to do. You insist, they submit.
I didn’t give up the theater when I left Auburn. It claimed me for good. I moved from managing the bodies in my boat, shouting at them to move your asses to your heels, to put your blood and piss into it, to the supposedly more genteel managements of the stage. In college I made theater my major, against my father’s wishes, and afterward got an MFA at Yale. Since then I’ve worked as a director at various small companies in New York City and regionally. You won’t have heard of me; I’m just one of the many who toil on the subfloors of art, telling ourselves our time will come . . .
After Seung’s death, after graduation, I learned some things from Carlyle. She and Lena were putting together a memory book about Seung for Aviva. They hoped to fill it with anecdotes from anyone they could find with a connection to Seung: fellow students, teachers, old buddies from Jordan. Anyone from his year in Weld. Carlyle and I ended up staying on the phone for a long time. Grief—or the imputation of grief—knocks down barriers between people. Carlyle had been collecting the pictures Seung used to draw and give to people—did I have one? One of those drawings with all the intricate cross-hatching that he made with those thin-tipped pens? I didn’t.
I steered the conversation to Aviva. Asked the predictable questions: How was she holding up? etc. Our exchange then took an unexpected turn. Carlyle was talkative, even indiscreet. Aviva was never destined to be happy, she claimed. Even before what happened to Seung. She had always been tightly wound and afraid. Afraid of what? Of so many things. Of sweets and booze, of losing control. Carlyle used to catch Aviva looking in mirrors, coming close and then standing back again, over and over, as if she couldn’t quite make herself appear. Seung was good for her, pushed her to be more adventurous, to loosen up a bit. Of course, sometimes dicey things happened. Seung was, you could say, a little too enthusiastic about his drugs. And there was that time the two of them got caught in a hotel stairwell in New York, practically got arrested . . .
15
Certain nights, Lena cries, saying that she’s afraid of dying a virgin. Aviva and Carlyle stay up talking to her, reassuring her that she will find a boyfriend someday, that she will be loved. Privately they are not so generous: Lena is not pretty. Perhaps she never will find a boyfriend. They are glad they are not Lena, with her nervous gestures and hopeless crushes and anxieties. They can’t foresee that Lena, by her twenties, will have more lovers, and more pleasures, than both of them put together.
It’s been a bad week for Lena. Her aunt phoned to say that her mother had had another breakdown and was back in the hospital.
“I’m sorry about Thanksgiving,” Lena tells Aviva. Her aunt already has more people coming than she can handle.
“Stop it. How can you be sorry? Anyway, Seung wants me to go home with him. He’s going to ask his parents about it.”
“What if they say no?”
“I can always stay in the dorm.”
Carlyle says, “Don’t ever do that. It’s the saddest thing in the world. You have Thanksgiving dinner with the faculty who stay, and in the afternoon you have to sing at the Portsmouth soup kitchen.”
“I can’t sing,” says Aviva.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Carlyle’s boyfriend is Gene Murchie, a senior, large, shaggy-haired, abrupt. He and Carlyle have been seeing each other for over a year; during the summer, while they were parted, he grew a mustache. He plays varsity lacrosse and wants to be a sculptor. In warm weather he strips off his shirt at any opportunity to allow the other boys to observe and envy his perfect pecs. He flies into rages, claiming that Carlyle flirts with his friends, that she steals money from him, that she has written letters to his teachers slandering him, in an attempt to lower his grades. This is why, he says, he will end up at University of Vermont instead of Stanford. He is crazy and nobody seems to know it or do anything about it. He has hit Carlyle more than once. For days she sobs and talks about killing herself, and then she reports that their love has never been stronger, all the hard times are finished and behind them.
Carlyle smokes Pall Malls, Lena clove cigarettes imported from Indonesia, Aviva the lowest-tar brand she can find, usually Carltons. She is thinking of quitting; she’s afraid of what smoking is doing to her insides, and sometimes she cheats on the inhaling. Lena can do smoke rings, and rings within rings. There are other regulars in the butt room: Kelly Finch and Dorota Noel, who has a single on the third floor. Dorota is from London. She has a barking laugh and likes to command the conversation. Aviva grows silent in the basement room filled with torn and stained furniture, the refuge of decades of Auburn’s would-be rebels. She does not love Seung the way Carlyle loves Gene; she cannot find within herself that self-abasement. She does not nurture obsessions like Lena or go on adventures like Dorota. She fears that if she speaks, her feelings will be found wanting.
Seung’s room is sunny and smells of fresh laundry. He puts Jean-Pierre Rampal on the turntable. He and Aviva kneel on the bed, moving their hands over skin, taking off their clothing piece by piece. Three hours of kissing is nothing to them. Nothing else calls them. The sun falls in the sky. They doze and wake. Again Seung touches Aviva into being: she is here, large, alive. Her good fortune is immense. Seung still cannot get over the deep hourglass of her body: the strenuous indentation at her waist and then the wide flare of the hips. The breasts spread out like huge coins. They are on the floor; she asks him to come inside her. More and more she wants to be done with this thing, this virginity, that keeps her from the ultimate pleasure, knowledge, and power.
Seung rocks back on his heels, hesitating. It can’t be so simple: just to be asked, just to do it. He’s frightened: What if . . . He doesn’t know what
the what if is. Something dark flies up in front of his vision. He didn’t think that Aviva, even with all her forthrightness, would ask for this so matter-of-factly, and so soon. He thought the prerogative to ask would be his.
Please, she says. She smiles.
He takes her face in his hands, happy now too, kissing her exuberantly, resting his forehead briefly against hers.
“I have condoms,” she whispers. She’s had them since Chicago, got them at a drugstore in a neighborhood not her own, looked the older woman behind the counter straight in the eye. She would be ready when the opportunity came. She doesn’t want to be stupid. She knows a girl has to take care of herself.
Seung tears open the foil package. Aviva’s already opened a couple in her stash, to see what they look like and how they work. She likes the smell of the slippery, flesh-colored coil, an industrial smell that reminds her of certain plastic playthings she had when she was little. Seung turns the condom over in his hands, studies it with that engineer’s brain of his, as if figuring out how it was manufactured. Then he places it over the head of his penis and worries it down. Aviva drops her eyes; the sight is too stark. She lies back, supporting her head with one arm so as not to feel so stiff and defenseless. Seung stretches out on top of her as she parts her legs uncertainly. He moves himself around, shifting and poking as if he can’t quite locate her. It doesn’t occur to her to reach down and help him. In the dirty books she’s read, and in her fantasies, the man enters, that’s all there is to it. Seung pushes; the moment is here at last. She reaches up to clasp his shoulders. It’s happening, she thinks. She’s going to dissolve now, to expand. She is going to know, completely, how to live. The sensation of pressure recedes; Seung is not there after all. She feels him move against her a few more times and is puzzled. Finally, to change the rhythm, she struggles up to a sitting position and embraces him.
