by Pamela Erens
A loud knock. Any good idea at Auburn always ends up like this. We all knew that from the start.
It’s not Mr. Glass but Mr. Leonov, another resident faculty member, less mild-mannered than Glass is. He’s short and brutally muscular, and I wouldn’t be surprised if even at his age, which seems to be around fifty, he could still take on a guy like Voss.
“Turn off the damn turntable and sit down on your beds and shut your mouths,” is all he says. We do that in exactly that order, and when it’s quiet we realize that it’s quiet upstairs also. A calm quiet, an easygoing quiet, with some movement and light banter in it, not our scorched-earth, chastised silence. You can always tell the difference. While we were acting like maniacs Seung and his band must have righted the beds and the desks and sat down like little angels, maybe commenced testing each other on German conjugations. Mr. Leonov walked right past them and came to us. How stupid could we have been?
“All four of you are on restrictions,” Mr. Leonov says. “One month.” Voss and Hurston groan. I silently curse; the evenings would have been my time to court actors and start rehearsing for my Seventh Seal. A month of eight o’clock check-in kills my plan pretty thoroughly; by the beginning of March kids will be looking ahead to the big spring play or spring sports and won’t want to tie up their time. And there will be the note that goes home to my parents. Just what I need. Cort looks genuinely chagrined, as if he’d like to apologize for doing wrong; I want to slap him and tell him to get some balls.
When Mr. Leonov is gone, Voss turns to me. “You’re an idiot,” he says. “What’s wrong with you?”
I don’t even bother to answer, to make the obvious retort that he was jumping up and down and yelling his head off just like the rest of us. Because he’s right. I’m an idiot. My heart fills with an astonishing hatred: for Voss, for Cort, for big lopsided Phil Hurston, for Mr. Leonov and Seung and Detweiler and Giddings and Sterne. For my father and my mother. For my two brothers and my roommate and every teacher I’ve ever had at this damn school and my coaches and the fat ticket-taker at the Guignol, the change makers at the Rexall, the operators who hook me up for my forced monthly collect call home. For Voss’s imperfect girlfriends and the pretty untouchable babes on campus and the ugly undesirable ones and Lisa Flood. For Aviva, who belongs to Seung. For myself, naturally, above everyone.
32
Now we trudge back from the library or the gym or town every evening at 8:00 PM, even on Saturdays; Hurston has to cancel a planned trip to Boston. We hardly speak to each other, each blaming the rest for his predicament. I try to use the time to study, to improve my grades in math and science, but my concentration isn’t good. I stock up on Snickers bars and Twizzlers. Good thing I’m not doing crew this spring.
Two weeks into restrictions the weather warms, just to make us really regret our confinement. Fortunately, the day-time is still free for all to enjoy. The air lightens and there’s a breeze smelling of earth and river water. The sky is a whitish blue. I feel a cheerfulness in spite of myself, and wear shorts under my blazer and tie. The girls are out in peasant skirts—tiered, floaty things—and sandals. It is maybe fifty-five, sixty degrees. Every January or February there’s a run of two or three days like this, freakishly temperate, then the season remembers itself and blows bitterly again.
Cort and Voss and I toss a Frisbee. When it suits him, Voss has a thoroughgoing amnesia about the enmity that has passed between us, and Frisbee frankly makes me whorish, I can never resist an invitation. I am very good at the game; it’s rare that I can’t run the disc down, and today, as I fly across the lawn in front of Weld, leaping and diving, never, somehow, fumbling a catch, I find myself imagining that Aviva is watching, seeing and marveling at this physical grace that I have only, it seems, at these moments, and only when I do this one thing. It’s such a beautiful happening, so odd and unfamiliar, to be out on this mid-February afternoon, that it makes me hope for fantasies to come true.
All the same I know that Aviva can’t be anywhere nearby. She and Seung will have gone to the woods with a knapsack containing a blanket, a cheap tablecloth, a bottle of wine. There will be other couples out there, too, but the woods are spacious, there is room for them all. Carlyle and Gene Murchie are there. Gene crumples Carlyle’s pants into a thick ball, wedges his wild head between her legs. If you take a walk along the creek, you can see the empty rum and whiskey bottles, dirty condoms, sometimes a sock, a lighter, an old pencil. They must have such contempt for the act of love, the couples who leave such things behind. Even their cries of pleasure they must see as pollutants. Aviva and Seung never leave anything behind, I’m sure of it. They fold the tablecloth and the blanket. They fit the bottle, not empty, back into the rucksack. Aviva checks her earrings, her necklaces. Seung runs his hand through the grasses just in case. They walk slowly back onto the athletic fields, not sorry about anything.
Carlyle doesn’t join the girls for dinner. Perhaps she’s gone to the library or is rehearsing for chorus. But Lena and Aviva are concerned. They worry about her. She’s like a big overgrown child, they think: plump, healthy, and much too good-natured. She gets herself into trouble trusting people, encouraging people, offering her help.
They discover her in bed, knees drawn up, reading The Thorn Birds. She’s wearing her nightgown and a big floppy hat. They all know immediately what has happened. They climb onto her bed, push themselves close. Even Dorota is silent, ceding her usual place at the center of a narrative. Carlyle raises her head and removes the hat. Her left cheek is a deep reddish purple. The purple seems dusted with silvery highlights, as if a painter went back and wanted to add something mystical to the composition.
“At least he didn’t get the eye,” says Carlyle.
Yes, for chrissakes, she tells them, she put ice on it, do they think she’s stupid? She puts her fingertips to the spot. Dorota says to let her have a go at it. She’s going to spread Noxema on it. She swears it heals everything.
They minister to her on the bed, three girls in nightgowns, smelling of toothpaste and Wella Balsam and soap. They have young, soft hands. They dream up violent and humiliating punishments for the wrongdoer, but they don’t speak them now. This time is worse than ever before, this time Gene has crossed the line. And Carlyle mustn’t listen to his poison, the way he makes her believe that she is to blame. Carlyle shakes her head. If they only knew, she says, if they could only understand how selfish she is, how thoughtless.
“Even if that were true it doesn’t give him the right . . .” says Aviva.
Carlyle fixes them with a look of impatience. Why doesn’t anyone really listen to her? The swelling makes her left eye look smaller than the other one. “Not just selfish, not just thoughtless . . .” She trails off. She can’t put words to the knowledge inside, the knowledge of what is wrong with her.
“Please,” pleads Lena. “Break up with him. We’ll help you.”
Carlyle nods, wipes her nose with the back of her hand. She’ll listen for a night, two nights, she’ll make promises, then they’ll lose her to him again.
33
Seung’s letters embarrass Aviva. He slips them into her knapsack, leaves them in a cubby on top of her hat and mittens while she eats her meal in the dining hall. She sees the tiny, spiky black handwriting on the envelope, her name surrounded by oceans of white space, and a depression takes her. He cannot use the English language. It is simply true. His sentences are stiff and exalted, filled with abstractions. He has been “struck by a lightning bolt.” The experience of being with her “fills his veins with fire.” His words irritate and upset her. She has never felt these things he has felt. She often longs for Seung, she relies on him, but her heart has not been pierced with a deadly arrow. Under no circumstances would she die for him. She had a pen pal once, years ago; they found each other through a pen pal service at Teen magazine. The other girl sent a photograph of herself. She had teased blond hair and the look of small-town enthusiasms. She wrote that she was in love with Donn
y Osmond. Real love, she wrote. Not just one of those crushes. What had the pen pal girl’s name been? Oh, yes, Sherri. With an i, and the i dotted with a circle.
On a sunny, snowy Sunday, I leave my room on the third floor of Weld. I don’t remember now where I was going, perhaps just out to get some air. When I reach the second-floor landing, a figure moves toward me from the direction of Sterne and Seung’s room, a girl, small, a blue scarf around her neck, snow boots up to her knees. I remember that the drawstrings on the boots were untied.
Surprised, I stop where I am and let Aviva go by. I smile. She catches my eye but I can see she isn’t frightened. I’m nobody. I became nobody to her a long time ago. She has a protector now, a boy who’s as good as a man. He’ll never let anything bad happen to her. There’s no way, she thinks, that I could come between her and her pleasures.
She moves quickly and quietly down the stairs. Clearly she’s done this plenty of times before. Sterne holds the front door open, but his raised hand halts her for a moment. He looks out once again, in, out. “Go,” he orders.
When she’s gone, Sterne walks up to meet me. I haven’t moved. He walks slow, rolling from the hips, so I’ll be able to feel, in my breadbasket, his long muscles, how tight and strong and sudden they are. He moves across the tennis court like a panther. His backhand is his best stroke. And now I notice that someone else is near me: Detweiler, who must have been the day’s second-floor sentry, looking abashed. He’d waved Aviva on before he heard me approaching. Seung, I imagine, is still in his room, running a towel under his armpits, pulling on a fresh shirt.
Sterne finishes his slow ascent and comes up close to my face, very close. It’s just like a movie. “You say anything to anyone and we’ll paint your freak flag with your sorry brains,” he says.
“Oh . . . no,” I say, still smiling absurdly. This pathetic tatter is all I can get to come out of me. If I had another minute, perhaps I could pull myself together, draw myself up and say something more dignified. It’s cool, Sterne. Or: Don’t get your knickers in a twist, man.
“No, you won’t say anything, or no, you’re not sure, and I should go ahead and bust your skull open?” Sterne wants to draw this out, to force me to take a role in my humiliation.
I keep smiling, smiling, cursing myself. “Why would I say anything?” I ask.
34
What I do next:
I turn back toward my room, Sterne’s eyes still on me. I lock my door, not that anybody would be likely to visit, but I need to be able to put such a possibility out of my mind. I know David’s still in Boston on an overnight he took to visit a cousin.
I get into bed, pull the sheet lightly over me. If for some strange reason David did return I could roll over in an instant, say I feel sick, I threw up, I was sleeping. I reach under my boxers, but the first image that flares up in my mind is the butt of my hand knocking Sterne sharply under the chin, his smile crumpling and his teeth flying out of his mouth the way they’ve flown out of mine in certain terrible dreams I’ve had. I’m hard before I’m even conscious of thinking about Aviva. But here she is now, as my hand moves up and down; she’s riding on top of me, moving slow and deliberate and then gradually faster, hitching a little on that sensitive spot at the top that she knows is so right. I think that for once she’s actually going to stay. It’s strange, but although she often sends me here, into my bed, under this sheet, she always dissolves almost immediately into something else, one of the generic bodies that have served my purpose since I first figured out what jerking off was all about. I try to keep her, literally slow the mental film so that I am approaching her obscured figure from behind, turning her to me, pushing her gently onto my cot—gently, I repeat, so as not to scare her, so as to show her that I won’t be idiotic and clumsy the way I was at the boathouse. It never works: she becomes yet another creature with long, straight blond hair, featureless skin, a large mouth, big smooth haunches. Nothing like Aviva.
But now Aviva towers above me, as if to say all right, I can have her, but she is going to be the one in charge. Okay, okay, I silently agree, thrusting up to the rhythm of my fist, but the faster I go and the closer I get, the more my mental Aviva slows down and withholds herself, telling me to wait, I’m just going to have to wait. I don’t want to wait; I push against her, calling her bitch, saying filthy things. She bends way over me then, pinning my hands to the mattress, her hair all over my face, getting in my mouth, blinding me. She laughs like she laughed that first day I met her, in her room, a laugh of encouragement and maddening aloofness. I start to beg: Please, let me go, let me come, let me, and in a whirl of motion that shatters her image and makes her disappear yet again, she does.
35
Cynthia Pritchard asks, “Is this short story saying that love, for a girl, is like being murdered?”
The whole class laughs, but when the laughter dies down, there’s a long ripple of discomfort. Cynthia is always so earnest, so anxious, so embarrassingly undefended. Silence. Mr. Salter can hear all the girls thinking rapidly, restlessly, and no one wanting to answer. He jumps in, hoping to save the thread. “Cynthia, can you walk us through how the author might be suggesting this?”
The story they’re discussing is “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates. It appears in their fat anthology, Explorations in Fiction. In it, a fifteen-year-old girl named Connie, home alone while her family is on a picnic, is visited by a mysterious and menacing man who eventually, hypnotically, persuades her to get into his car and drive away with him.
Cynthia fixes her eyes on the text and speaks slowly, her voice a bit strained.
“Well, at the beginning, Oates takes all this time to talk about how flirty Connie is, how she dresses up and wants to meet boys, and how alienated she feels from her family. Like, she’s looking for someone to take her away from everything. But then, when someone comes to do just that, this Arnold Friend guy, and talks about being her lover and holding her tight, you know that if she goes with him, she’s going to end up dead. So it’s almost like the writer is saying that when you’re female, if you fall in love, it’s, well, the end of you.”
“So,” says Mr. Salter. “You are reading the story not literally but as a metaphor?”
Cynthia exhales. “I guess,” she says.
Mr. Salter opens his arms in invitation to the class. “How did others of you read it?”
“I think you’re reaching too far,” says one of the boys. “I think the girl gets stalked and then kidnapped by a psycho and that’s the story Joyce Carol Oates wanted to tell. She’s just trying to write a suspense story.”
“The guy’s name is Arnold Friend,” another girl points out. “That can’t be an accident.”
“Are we so sure she’s going to die at the end?” asks Aviva Rossner. “I mean, it doesn’t say that.”
“It’s almost like she’s going into some sort of dreamland,” says a third girl. The boys have been conspicuously reticent during this conversation. “Maybe we’re not supposed to read this so realistically. I mean, this Arnold guy is sort of supernatural. He knows all about Connie’s family and her past and even what she thinks about. Maybe he’s just supposed to represent the inside of her mind, how she realizes she’s growing up and needs to leave her family but is scared to leave her family. Like here—page 376—Arnold says, ‘The place where you came from ain’t there anymore.’”
“That’s sort of what I was trying to say,” says Cynthia fretfully. “Right after that part, Arnold Friend says the house Connie lives in—‘your daddy’s house,’ he says—is so flimsy he could just knock it down if he wanted. Like, she can’t stay a little girl anymore, but if she goes with him she’s lost, too. He says, ‘Be nice to me, be sweet like you can because what else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in?’”
“This is one of the scariest stories I’ve ever read,” offers a girl named Jill Cohen.
“I was going to talk about point of view issues,” says
Mr. Salter, giving a slap to Explorations in Fiction, “but Cynthia has gotten us onto an interesting line of thought. Can we think of other ways in which the stories in this anthology have depicted sexuality between girls and boys, or men and women?”
The class comes to attention: the girls sit up straight in their chairs, the boys press their knees together. Mr. Salter didn’t use the evasive trick word love, he said sex.
“Ummm . . .” says Frank Corbitt loudly, breaking the tension. Everyone titters.
“What about in ‘The Dead’? Or John Cheever’s ‘The Five-Forty-Eight’?”
“I’m drawing a blank,” says Frank pertly.
“I surrender,” says Mr. Salter finally. “Think about it on your own, then. And some of you, if you’re interested, might want to take a look at a book by Erich Fromm called The Art of Loving. There are some striking ideas there about love and sexuality. It might deepen your reading of this and other stories.”
Later, in the library, Aviva hunts furtively in the card catalog, hunched over so no one else can see the cards. The Art of Loving turns out to be a slim paperback with a hot-pink cover, and Aviva skims through it wondering if she has the guts to hand it over to Mrs. Conn-Frere, the librarian, to be checked out. She decides she does. She pulls other books off the nearby shelves: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Love, Love & Death: An Existentialist Exploration, a volume merely called Intimacy. When she gets to the front desk she’ll tell herself she’s writing a research paper on the psychology of love. She’ll believe it for the one and a half minutes she needs to get the books stamped.
