The Virgins

by Pamela Erens

  Why do women say the things about men that they do? It’s not only my disappointed partners. Many of my female colleagues, when the conversation turns to love, are inclined to say, Oh, all men are like that—by which they mean defended in a certain way, inexpressive. But I know they are wrong. I know that certain men, like Seung, do not defend themselves when it would be better if they could. And certain women, like Aviva, can’t find in themselves the thoroughgoing surrender that they think would make them happy and whole. Perhaps the years since have reassured Aviva, given her that soul-shaking union, or maybe she’s learned that there are other ways of feeling, more natural to her, that deserve to be ennobled by the word love. But I wonder if it could really be so. All this time Aviva has surely believed that Seung died because of her. What has that done to her?

  21

  An envelope arrives from Aviva’s brother, stuffed with his drawings. There are figures on skateboards: boys, but with the heads of wolves—fanged, scowling—and wings. The boys wear the same kind of T-shirts Marshall wears: dark, with the baroque insignias of Jethro Tull or the Grateful Dead. In the postures of the figures Marshall has successfully captured his dream of great speed. They are flying, somersaulting, their long hair streaming behind them. Accompanying the drawings is a short letter. Marshall tells Aviva that he is growing his hair long. Mom hasn’t said anything. Then he mentions that he was beaten up by three older kids from school, ninth graders. It happened in the park; he’d decided to take a walk before getting on the bus home. He’d been lost in thought, didn’t see them coming. He’d been thinking about a skateboard move called a Bert Revert, rehearsing it in his head. His arm was broken but he’s otherwise fine. The principal wanted to know who the kids were, but he hasn’t told. Anyway, it’s all worked out okay; he and the three boys have made up, nothing more will happen. With Marshall it is always as if Aviva’s reading a foreign language, in which the words don’t signify the customary things. This is not because Marshall is cagey or deceptive. He means precisely what he says. Moreover, one learns to believe him. Somehow, this twelve-year-old boy has had—if she knows Marshall—an unexceptional, even pleasant talk with his three attackers and everything has been amicably settled. Nothing more will happen, and none of the adults will ever know what did happen in the first place.

  Aviva takes the letter with her to the dining hall. She eats lunch on the late side so that she can wait for Seung while he finishes kitchen duty. He has a work-study job three days a week. He rinses dishes, loads the two huge dishwashers, wipes down counters, mops the floor. When Mr. Carlton, the dining hall supervisor, isn’t there, Aviva follows the conveyor belt into the kitchen and visits. She likes to watch Seung’s muscular arms plunged deep into the sudsy yellow water. The femininity of the task throws his masculinity into relief. It is the same with his skin—satin, hairless—which only sculpts his swollen biceps and thick wrists more nakedly. His arms, so capable, so bent to his duty, stir her profoundly. She slips behind him and wraps her own around his waist. It pleases her to think that the other kitchen lackeys may grumble at this exhibitionism. Let them; she is happy. She lays her cheek on Seung’s back. If Mr. Carlton is present she instead sits in the empty dining hall drinking cup after cup of weak coffee. She does not eat enough at her meal: perhaps a slice of American cheese, a slice of bologna, a smear of mustard. She can’t say why. The coffee is what fills her, but after a while it gives her the shakes. She is light, disoriented.

  When Seung is done she accompanies him to the pool. They walk out of the dark, cloudy afternoon into the well-lit mouth of the gymnasium. The hall is wide and high and even on overcast days sun seems to stream in from the skylights. One can hear hollow thwacks from the hockey rink, the muffled slap of water against poolside, footfalls and shouts from the basketball courts. Who gave the money for all of this amplitude? It costs so much more, unthinkably more, to make a building not just serviceable but solid and beautiful. Someone has thought it worthwhile. In return his name is carved above the entrance: Arthur J. Eggleton IV.

  Next door is the old gym, a dimly lit building with nets hanging from the ceiling to hold footballs and basketballs, a balcony converted into a running track. You can practically see the boys of bygone days with their leather football helmets and their skin scrubbed with harsh soap, lines of boys facing off, staring each other down, grappling and wrestling: a damper, danker time, a time without girls or women. The competition between boys must have been something purer then, less veiled and more prized.

  Aviva sits in the stands reading Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, in which the chapters may be read in any order. The impishness of this delights her. When she reads she unconsciously tears off the corners of the pages and chews on them like bits of gum. Her books all look like mice have gotten at them. Seung’s teammates gaze up at this girl, so carnal, so oblivious, so unimpressed. They wonder how in the hell a girl like that ever ended up with a slanty-eyed kid like Seung.

  How the kids used to hassle Seung in our middle school. “Butt-sniffing,” we called it: figuring out who the alphas were going to be. I hadn’t known Seung before. There weren’t that many Asians in our town, and most were the classic type: scrawny, bespectacled, very down with their math and science homework. If you had a name like Jim or John, you had a chance, but Li-Yu or Seung . . . I remember Seung getting grabbed in the hallways, called a sneaky Chink. Someone would turn out his pockets, remove his lunch money and breath mints. Teachers weren’t like they are today, didn’t care what went on in the hallways, who got beaten up. I probably would have been beaten up more often myself if it weren’t for my family. It’s not as if the other sixth graders really knew or cared that the Bennett-Joneses were landed gentry as far back as the 1700s, that one of my great-great-grandfathers had been on the Supreme Court and another had been lieutenant governor of Rhode Island. And yet kids somehow absorb, who knows how, a sense of caste. So although I was pudgy and had kooky blond curls, although I wasn’t particularly good at any sports besides Frisbee, if that even counted as a sport, I was left more or less alone. I had my crowd and I kept my more suspect inclinations, like Dungeons & Dragons and New Wave music, under wraps. I was well above a Seung in the pecking order. When we got to Auburn, the two of us, I couldn’t understand how he rose so high, so free of his name and his looks, how he became a leader, while I was just some other guy from the joke state of New Jersey.

  Seung enters the pool area in his team’s crimson Speedo. His primary event is the butterfly. It’s a stroke that makes no sense to Aviva: the swimmer seems to be sending himself backward nearly as much as forward. The whistle blows and Aviva watches six boys plunge simultaneously under the water. The swimmers rise slick and gasping, slam down again after capturing the air. Up once more. Seung’s arms move like the wheels on a crooked axle. It’s a quick race, only one length, no time for her to look away. She tracks his black head now leading, now lagging. The whistle shrills again; Seung hits the wall second. The first boy leaps out of the water. There is no trace in him of fatigue. Water sloshes off him in sheets. He is lean-legged for a swimmer, with small buttocks in his brown-and-white-striped suit. One by one the other swimmers heave themselves from the water. Seung will be pleased with his second-place finish. He neither expects nor aims to win, which is not the same as saying he does not push himself to his limits. It is just that he is no star. His value is in his dependability. His performance is steadily strong without being outstanding. He doesn’t complain about 6:00 AM practices or about swimming until his arms burn and seize. When the coach says grunt, he grunts. He never loses his temper. I am a team player, he tells her. That’s what I am.

  22

  My mother and the Judge drive up to see the Sunday afternoon performance of my Macbeth. I’ve cast the show against type, with big Janny Pettigrew, with her long teeth and rounded shoulders, as Lady Macbeth. For weeks I had to work training the whinny out of her. She laughed at inapt moments. Lady Macbeth doesn’t laugh, I told her. Yreni Arsov, who was
used to being the diva in Auburn productions, who’d been Masha in Three Sisters, I gave the part of Lady Macduff. Lady MacD has, I believe, nineteen lines. I watched Yreni struggle to lace in all that vanity and frustration as she acted the sensible, affectionate wife and mother, and I congratulated myself, I thought the result good. For Macbeth I did the best I could: Peter Malkin, short and round and blond-curled like me, an unprepossessing warrior and king. But Peter drew it out of himself. I saw that he was the one, of the whole cast, who would go on, that in years to come we’d be reading about him. When he entered with the bloody daggers and said, “I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?” I saw what he had brought up in himself, a true mean troubled desire to kill. He frightened himself, the poor boy. It made the play. People shifted in their seats, uncomfortable. The curtain fell; at first no one would cheer for Peter. They clapped slowly, solemnly. The unhealth, the evil, clung to his person. Then the audience began to shake off its daze, recognize the actor in the part. The applause grew louder and louder; people whistled and stamped; they almost screamed. In the green room Peter laid his sword on the props table, ran his sweaty hands through his dusty hair. For a while no one went near and he remained entirely alone. He’d marked himself; he’d entered the art of the thing and none of us would ever be able to see him as innocent again.

  I watch for Aviva in the audiences of our three performances; I do not see her. Cort comes the second night, dragging Voss; they give their quick congratulations and disappear, turning down my invitation to stay for the cast party. My actors praise me at the party, lifting their Tabs and Sprites, and I believe they are sincere; not all of them like me, but they can see that I drove them, in inventive and devious ways, to their best performances. I enjoy their admiration without feeling fed by it, for the part of them that I understand and can speak to was shed with their costumes and face paint, and as Lisa and I circulate amid our excited, chatting classmates, I feel as out of place as she likely does.

  On Sunday, after the last show, the Judge takes my mother and Lisa and me to the Auburn Inn, orders us clam chowder and roast beef. He does not ask me how my college applications are going. It is understood that I will be going to Dartmouth, his alma mater. My grades are just good enough, and I test well. The Judge gives thousands of dollars each year to the alumni fund. On the sly I am sending applications to Bard, Oberlin, and NYU, places with theater programs I’m interested in. There’s another thing I haven’t told him yet—I’m not going out for crew again in the spring. I’ll be spending that extra time at the Dramat. Even Lisa doesn’t know.

  “That boy . . .” says the Judge.

  “Who?”

  “The Macbeth boy. He was a little short for the role, didn’t you think? A little pudgy.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “The girl who played Lady Macbeth wasn’t too bad.”

  “I thought she was very good,” says Lisa. She fishes for my hand under the table.

  My mother finishes her Rob Roy before the appetizers arrive. She signals to the waiter for another one.

  “I’ll have a glass of cabernet,” I add, before the waiter can go.

  “You will not,” says the Judge.

  The waiter looks from one of us to the other. An old man, patient, a little bent in the knees. He has seen all this before. My mother sips neatly from her water glass.

  “He’s not eighteen until February the third,” my father informs the waiter.

  “Oh, go ahead and let him, Malcolm,” says my mother.

  “That’s all right,” I tell her.

  “Where are you applying to college?” my mother asks Lisa, after she has some of the second drink inside her. She is in that phase of the evening where she is still happy, listening to some tinkly music in her head. She smiles impersonally.

  “Um, Yale, Harvard, Brown . . .”

  “Ah, then, you and Bruce will be apart next year.”

  “Well, there are the vacations,” says Lisa. She squeezes my hand again. Her palms are always clammy. “And I’m a good letter writer.”

  “I’m sure you are,” says the Judge. I can see that he’d like the food to come so that there’s something in my mother to ground the booze. As if I’m a puppet and he’s pulled a string, I casually slide the bread basket in my mother’s direction.

  The room is filling up. Our reservation was on the early side, the way the Judge likes it. I see my math teacher, Mr. Willis, sitting opposite his wife. They lift and lower their utensils in a companionable silence. I smell lobster bisque at other tables. I would have liked some lobster bisque. They make it with sherry here.

  “We’re going to Boston in the morning,” the Judge tells Lisa. Now that she’s been dispatched to a different part of the country for her college years, he feels friendlier to her.

  “Oh, what will you be doing?” she asks politely.

  “The Fine Arts Museum, of course, and then we have special passes to the new John F. Kennedy Library, which we have not yet seen.”

  “The museums in Boston really are inferior,” comments my mother.

  We talk of museums and cities and I have the feeling that none of us, even my father, actually knows what he is talking about, is sure of the truth of even his least statement. When we cannot think of things to say about museums and cities, we talk about the food. My mother orders two more drinks.

  The waiter clears away our dishes and hands a dessert card to each of us.

  “Cherry cream pie!” cries my mother. “It has been so long since I’ve had cherry cream pie!”

  I’m worried; I can see the haze coming up in her eyes. Some memory, some fragment of childhood has been suddenly retrieved; I don’t want to hear what it is.

  The Judge’s hand comes down on her small, fragile one like a clamp. “Very good then, we’ll order you the pie.”

  Lisa orders a lemon sherbet—she watches her weight. I should watch mine, too, but I get a brownie à la mode, out of general ill temper. The Judge orders a Drambuie, his standard after-dinner drink. “I’ll share it with you, lovie,” he says to my mother. Her smile trembles. I know what he’s doing—claiming the drink for both of them so that she can’t order another of her own. I can see the rest of their evening. She’ll draw a scalding bath and lie in it, her skin reddening, the hot fumes inducing a confusion and sleepiness reassuringly akin to that of inebriation. The Judge will call out from the bedroom, where he is reading the New York Times. He will quote President Carter and Brzezinski, and say just what he thinks of what they’ve said. He will ask her what she thinks of what he thinks of what they’ve said, but she won’t answer. Every ten minutes or so he will heave himself out of his chair and knock lightly on the bathroom door, on the pretext of seeing if she needs some soap or an extra towel, but really in order to make sure that she has not drowned. And perhaps on one of those visits he will steal a glimpse of the hair between her legs, the naked soft thighs. She is still shapely, still youthful when all is said and done, just a shade past fifty. On those evenings when she looks at him with clear eyes, remembering who he is, who she is, he is glad to come back to her.

  23

  The students exit the day’s last class into darkness. Six thirty, and the dining hall is a brilliant bubble of glass. Aviva sits with her friends, Seung with his. Afterward they walk in the snow. Aviva’s toes and fingers always hurt in the cold. She wears boots with fur linings, the thickest she can find.

  Seung shows her yet another of the secret places he knows. The Science Building is built into a hill, leaving a crawl space beneath one corner of the foundation. A steam pipe exits into the crawl space; the temperature in there must be eighty degrees. They wedge themselves under the slanting foundation, unzip their jackets. The gravel floor is not uncomfortable. They can sit here, unseen, watching the snow fall, stripped down to their shirts. Outside, the lit snow, the dark figures exiting the buildings.

  “It’s beautiful,” Aviva says.

  She unbuttons his shirt, warming her hands on
his chest. He leans his head against the dirty concrete wall. She never fails to be stirred by this gesture of his, the way he bares his throat to her, like a dog acknowledging the stronger creature in a fight. It strikes her to her depths. She kisses him gently, then imperiously, crawling onto his lap and holding him fiercely around the waist with her legs.

  The paths have emptied. The snow is thickly cratered with footprints that cross this way and that and fall into each other. Aviva and Seung emerge into a private field. He stands behind her in the tracks, his wide hands on her shoulders. He takes three large steps away from her.

  “Stand tall,” he says. “Keep your arms straight at your sides. Like a board.”

  He knows she’ll do it on the first try. Her trust in him is absolute. Obediently she lets herself fall. She watches the dark sky rise up over her and then rush away again. Then she lies, safe, in Seung’s hands.

  “Again,” she murmurs.

  They do it over and over. But they agree she can’t catch him; he weighs so much more than she does.

  24

  A week before the Christmas break Aviva buys an enamel mug for each girl in Hiram and fills it with M&M’s, Hershey’s Kisses, miniature Reese’s cups, caramels, peppermints, licorice sticks. The slashed bags of sweets carpet her room. She bought too much and doesn’t know what to do with it all. She spent a long time in the drugstore, comparing the heavy packages glittering with colored foil. She was first drawn to the aisle by a pressing desire to treat herself, to bring a bag of M&M’s back to her room and gorge on it until her head swam and her hands shook with sugar tremors. At the same time she told herself no, no, you mustn’t, and so she stood there, paralyzed, unable to make the purchase, unable to leave the store.