The Virgins

by Pamela Erens

  “I know,” says Seung.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come in?” Mr. Glass asks. “Ellen bought some new tea, blackberry something.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Glass. I’m just going to lie down.”

  As soon as he does, the shaking overtakes Seung so fiercely that he thinks his ribs will crack. The pain deep in his bones makes him want to howl. Frightened, he forces himself to get up and walk back and forth across the room. Maybe it will be better if he stays in motion. When he passes the bureau mirror he sees himself as an elongated streak of darkness taking shape for a moment then sliding away. He stops and looks more intently. He’s motionless now, but he still can’t see himself. Is it because he is trembling so hard, or is something really wrong with his face? He drops his gaze and names the objects on the dresser: his sketchbook and two charcoal pencils, his penknife, a novel by Thomas Bernhard that he is leaving for Sterne. His heart beats very rapidly; he is sweating profusely again. Suddenly he fears that if he stays in this room he will die. He will literally die.

  He hardly sees the stairs in his panic to get outside. It doesn’t even occur to him to stop and tell Mr. Glass he is going. He plunges past the dorms, the gymnasium, the practice fields and the track, into the woods in the late-slanting light, looking for a place to hide himself. He veers off the running path and into a thicket of brambly vines where he eventually finds a small clearing. He lies on his back on the cool ground and gives himself over to the disturbance inside. His legs jerk so hard that the joints pop. His head is full of loose stones. He is deaf to anything but the sound of his graceless, thrashing body. Something rattles at the back of his throat.

  When the fit finally passes, he dozes: ten minutes, fifteen. He wakes, fishes in his pocket for a joint, and smokes it rapidly, waiting for the cloud of ease to come up and comfort him. The flame moves closer and closer to his fingers and he lets it burn there, licking and then enveloping the skin. Finally he drops the last scrap into the dirt, where it flares up with a small bright light and shrivels out. He stabs his burnt fingertips into the earth. He aches all over. He pictures Aviva in bed at his parents’ house, her legs parted, the pale tender skin there and the dark hair, and hears the extraordinary sounds that, later, he discovered how to coax from her body.

  He walks. After a few minutes he hears voices nearby, footsteps, and moves away from them. Instinct takes him in the direction of the Bog. He suspects it will be empty tonight, the night before the first day of finals. It’s so peaceful there; he’s always loved it, especially at this time of year, with the wildflowers and the light lingering late in the trees. He winds his way in and when he gets to the Bog he finds to his satisfaction that it is, in fact, deserted. He could be Robinson Crusoe on his own desert island; he could be a lone explorer on a kind and fertile moon. He lowers himself to his haunches and dips his smarting fingers into the shallow water. The water is very cold, and, after a moment of numbing, the pain returns even more fiercely. Seung can feel the blisters forming.

  And that is where I discover him, squatting by the water, trailing his fingers in it. I’ve been following the path to my meeting with David, and, pushing through some tangled brush in an attempt to take a shortcut, I find myself in a magnificent clearing. I’ve never actually been here before. The Bog is not technically a bog but rather a little lake with some algae buildup along the shallow margin. It lies in a hollow, the birch trees rising up all around it to create a secluded and otherworldly effect. You can pass within a few feet of it in the woods and not see it or even hear the kids hanging out there. Or so I’ve been told. For obvious reasons the earnest druggies at Auburn, the career visionaries, the ones who need several hours on a Sunday to take an uninterrupted acid or mushroom trip, favor it, and they have passed along certain proprietary methods for finding one’s way here. On a few occasions, Voss and Cort and I tried, for sport’s sake, to locate it, but always failed. Now here I am, having meant to go somewhere else, and I have Seung for company. It is rare to see him alone, without that gang of his. I am surprised they are not with him, on this last night. He looks less himself without them, smaller.

  I can’t tell if Seung senses my presence. I could just dip back into the woods, try another route to my destination, but instead I head toward him. I make noise as I approach, coughing, but he doesn’t look around.

  “Rough luck,” I say, when I reach him. “Administration bastards.”

  He nods slightly, without lifting his head.

  I toss my knapsack on the ground and crouch next to it.

  “You all right?” I ask.

  “Sure,” he says. Finally he looks at me. I see the telltale redness in his eyes, but his pupils are enlarged rather than constricted. What’s he been taking?

  I don’t say anything, Seung doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t ask me why I’m here. The silence goes on for a long time. It’s only for the first few minutes that it feels strange, that I fidget and am tempted several times to make a noise, any noise. Then, slowly, that urge dissipates and begins to be replaced with the most remarkable sense of ease. I watch the spots of light on the surface of the water and hear, once or twice, a bullfrog. There’s a faint buzzing that is the sound either of tiny insects or of the silence itself. Seung squats next to me, quietly, occasionally shifting his weight. It’s as if we are friends who have known each other so long we no longer need to speak in each other’s presence. Perhaps I remember this silence as longer than it was. It felt beautifully endless. I’ve completely forgotten about David Yee and our rendezvous. And sitting here, next to Seung, I begin to sense what’s going on in his mind. No words come to me, but I feel his heaviness, his confusion and his fear. I can feel the way he’s pinned, that even his breath comes at a price. For him to raise his head, lift an arm to throw a pebble into the water: these things require supreme effort.

  At long last, I open my knapsack for the flask of 151, take a swig, and offer it to Seung. He accepts it, unsmiling, and takes a modest tipple. I urge him to continue, tell him there is plenty. That’s what we do for the next little while, pass the flask back and forth. My throat and belly sting and warm. By this time I’ve remembered David Yee but I figure the hell with him, he can wait.

  The sun slips steadily down the sky, as if making up for dawdling during the day. The rum has made me thirsty. I take off my shoes and socks, walk a couple of feet into the water to where it grows clear, and scoop handfuls into my mouth. By this time, I need a piss, so I walk a distance away and take care of that. When I return Seung is in the water. He hasn’t bothered to roll up his wrinkled army surplus pants or anything. He gets well in, up to his waist or so, then tosses himself onto his back. I stand at the edge watching him. His black hair is plastered against the sides of his face; with those sharp cheekbones he looks Indian. He strokes his way to the center of the Bog and then butterflies back, his powerful arms churning up waves. Near the bank he sinks into a back float, his eyes closed. He is smiling, serene. Water is, after all, his element.

  Afterward he stretches out on the bank.

  “Seung,” I say. “You’re lying in the dirt, man.” Why that bothers me I can’t at the time rightly say. I will swear to you now that it was a protective instinct. I didn’t want him to get his hair filthy. Anyway, Seung doesn’t hear me, or pretends he doesn’t. He lies as still as a sunbather in his soaking clothes in the growing dark and chill.

  All right, I think. I stretch out next to him, using my knapsack for a pillow. More silence. I feel again that unexpected comfort, as if Seung and I often come here and lie quietly with our thoughts, not feeling any need to communicate.

  At last, when the darkness is beginning to obscure his face, he rolls over onto one elbow. “Do you ever think about killing yourself, Bennett-Jones?” he asks.

  “Ever?” I reply. “All the time.”

  “So why haven’t you done it?”

  I blink up into the gray sky. “Laziness.”

  “No. I want to know.”

  �
�I’m not putting you on.” I sit up; it’s easier to think this way. I’m a little logy from the booze. “I’m not a person with a lot of conviction. There have been times when dying seemed important, but never important enough.”

  Seung reaches for his dry sneakers and pulls out a joint he’s stashed in one. “Care to?” he asks.

  “Sure.”

  “I pegged you as a toker, Bennett-Jones.”

  “I thought I kept that a pretty good secret.”

  “I have superb radar. But you do it yourself, on your own. That’s not good for you. It has to be a social thing. If you do it alone it turns you strange.”

  “Thanks for the concern.”

  Seung takes a deep drag and passes the joint to me. He closes his eyes when he draws in the smoke, then swallows gently, unhastily. It’s almost feminine, this savoring.

  I take a hissing inhale but warn myself to go slow. The booze is already making me heavy-headed, and I don’t want to lose too much control.

  “You’d kill yourself over getting the boot?” I ask.

  “The boot?” he murmurs. He sits up now too.

  “Cannibis sativa,” he says in a deep voice, as if he’s doing a voice-over for a television commercial. “First used in the third millennium BC by the ancient Hindus of India and Nepal. Known and appreciated also by the Assyrians, the Scythians, the Thracians and the Dacians, the ancient Chinese, the ancient Greeks . . .”

  “Yet heinously outlawed by a narrow-minded and ill-informed Congress in 1937 . . .”

  “Hey! You know your facts, Bennett-Jones.”

  “. . . which did not stop it from being used as a truth serum by the OSS during World War Two.”

  “Do you know how to diagram a THC molecule?”

  “I’m sorry. That goes beyond my personal researches.”

  “It looks like a pull toy.” Seung sketches it out in the air. “You’ve got the head with your three hexagon rings, and then your tail of five carbons . . . a pentyl group. Tetrahydrocannabinol.”

  “That I didn’t know, but I can tell you that possession of pot in Saudi Arabia results in amputation of one ear and a prison sentence of no less than four years.” I am completely making this up, under the diffuse influence of the movie Midnight Express, which I saw last year.

  Seung’s eyes widen. “No! How do you know that?”

  “Read it in a book by a French journalist who got arrested there.”

  “Did he get his ear hacked off?”

  “No. The French government intervened, and he got some help from a beautiful Saudi woman who turned out to be an undercover agent for the U.S.”

  We smoke in silence, occasionally taking slugs from my flask. As soon as the joint is spent, Seung lights up another. “I planned to cut back this year,” he says, “but it didn’t happen.”

  “Cut back on weed? Why bother?”

  “Aviva. She didn’t like it.”

  Aviva. I’ve forgotten about her, truly I have. Just for this brief time she’s been taken out of the equation between Seung and me; we’ve simply been two guys lying on the bank, sharing weed and conversation in the dusk. My throat tightens up and I feel a pressure on my heart.

  “She doesn’t smoke?” I ask, for something to say.

  “She’d like to,” he replies, without elaborating.

  I glance at my watch. It’s 7:53 PM, two hours and seven minutes until check-in. One week and six days until graduation. My graduation, anyway. If I graduate. It’s starting to make me nervous, being out here with Seung when he’s so messed up. If he starts getting strange on me, I can’t be babysitting him or shepherding him home. I can’t get implicated.

  I stand up, to tell Seung I’m heading out, but my head is heavy as a bowling ball and I weave for a moment, unable to speak. I pray I’m going to pass muster with Mr. Glass and his clipboard. Mr. Glass doesn’t go out of his way to catch kids breaking the rules, but if you don’t even have the decency to try to fool him, he figures he has to take action. I sit down again and rest my head on my knees. When I feel steadier—it’s several minutes later, not a peep from Seung—I scrabble around in my knapsack. There’s a candy bar in there and a flashlight. Both are good, but finding the flashlight fills me with special relief. By some pot-induced logic, its presence seems, for now, to solve the dilemma of check-in. I can relax; things are going to be okay. I settle myself, aware that I have many problems that the flashlight does not solve, but I can’t remember precisely what they are.

  “Shit, I just noticed your ring,” Seung says.

  “This?” I say. I snatch my hand from his view. “It’s just a joke, man. My dad bought it for me.”

  He beckons me to show it to him, gets his face close to it and peers at the inscription. “Gnaritas et Patientia. Rah rah.”

  “Yeah. Dad was class of ’44.”

  “No shit.”

  “No shit. And his dad was class of ’13. And his dad . . . you get the idea.”

  “Oh, man, son of class of ’44, great-grandson of Class of Nineteenth Century. That’s almost worse than being son of Korean PhD and his doctor wife.”

  I am surprised that he understands this.

  I slip off the ring and hand it to him.

  “I’ve never actually touched one of those things,” Seung tells me. “Detweiler had one but he kept it in some sort of Kryptonite box.” He can’t get it onto his ring finger—his fingers are so broad and thick-jointed—so he slides it onto his pinky. I notice the blisters on the thumb and index fingers of his hand.

  The distortion and heavy-headedness are passing out of me in a series of waves. I’m beginning to trust my faculties again.

  “You’ll give it to your own son one day,” Seung tells me.

  “I doubt that.”

  He flexes his fingers, staring at the seal of the ring. “Bruce Bennett-Jones,” he muses. “Bruce Bennett-Jones. I’ve wasted my fucking life.”

  “Wasted your life?” I laugh. “Come on, Jung. You’ll go home, go to Jordan High, and you’ll be in college by the winter if you don’t do anything seriously boneheaded.”

  He isn’t even paying attention to me. “I’ve lost the respect of my parents,” he says very calmly, clenching and unclenching his fist. “I’ve lost my girlfriend. I’ve pissed away forty thousand dollars my parents spent to send me here. I’ve pissed away my self-respect.”

  He’s lost his girlfriend?

  He knocks himself on the head a couple of times and I can’t tell if he’s really hurting himself or not. It doesn’t look good.

  “I tried, Bennett-Jones. I tried so fucking hard.”

  “Come on, Jung. Quit that.” I’m trying to decide if he could really mean what he seems to mean: that he and Aviva have broken up. What could have led to that? It’s impossible to take in. They are famous, they are the sexual and romantic templates for the rest of us.

  “Aviva . . ?” I croak.

  “I’ve destroyed her. I’ve humiliated her,” he says. “I’m not a man.”

  I figure he’s just talking crazy—weed talk. I can’t speak her name again; it will sear me. “Maybe she’ll change her mind,” I say clumsily. “Girls are like that. Maybe tomorrow she’ll want you back.”

  “She won’t want me back. You don’t know her.”

  I stare at him, unable to reply. Because I do know her. I’ve imagined every part of her: her body, her thoughts, the conversations she has with her friends, with her brother and father and mother, the things she says to him, Seung, the books she reads and the fantasies that make her touch herself. I know the look of the apartment she’s grown up in and the park near her old high school and the arrogant marginalia she scribbles in her schoolbooks. “You’re right,” I say finally. “She won’t go back to you.”

  He studies me. Then he nods, as if he understands something finally: who I am, what my relation to him is. For the first time he recognizes that we’re in competition, that once, in our childhoods, I was more than he was, and that now, because of what has happe
ned, I’m going to be the stronger once again.

  Seung pitches a stone into the water.

  “I cheated on her once,” he says. “Over spring vacation. A girl in Jordan.”

  I feel a rush of indignation on Aviva’s behalf. The bastard. “Why?”

  “Why?” he looks momentarily puzzled. “I had to.”

  Something unlocks in me. I intuit something—I couldn’t have put it in words at the time. No, I pieced things together only later. Still, there is something I realize I am going to say, that perhaps I’ve been meaning to say all along, from the very beginning, from the first time I ever saw Seung and Aviva together on the Weld common room couch. My words appear to me full-bloomed and with such vividness that as far as I am concerned they are the truth and not a lie. I feel steady and very strong. I stand up, stretch my arms as if I could reach up and grab the moon.

  “You know,” I say, “I wasn’t going to tell you this, but since you’re leaving now and you’ve broken up with her, I think you ought to know. I fucked her, Jung. It was a while ago, back in the winter. Remember the Kent swim tournament, your team stayed overnight? Then.”

  I don’t even notice him getting to his feet. All at once he’s right up close to me, big and broad, and I think he’s going to take a swing at me. I stand my ground. Somehow I know that, no matter what he does, he can’t hurt me. I could bleed to death right here and I’ve still won.

  “Bennett-Jones, don’t mess with me over something like that.”

  “I’m not messing with you. It’s the truth. There was a dance that night, right? At Pepperdine dorm. She was there with no one to dance with. Or everyone to dance with. We went for a walk along the river and then we went to her room.”

  Seung grabs me by the shirt. His face is dark, dark. “Why would you say this to me, man? You’re sitting here sharing my weed, we’re talking together . . . why do you want to shit on me?”