by Jana Casale
The night alienated her more and more from the solid notion she had of herself. Anne got a bit tipsy, and she and Luke spent the remainder of the evening kissing on the couch. Leda walked around and tried talking to some people, but she kept bumping into couples. She talked to a red-haired drunk girl who kept chattering on and on about some guy named Max Sass.
“And he’s so funny,” she said.
“Yeah, but what kind of a name is Max Sass?” Leda remarked.
“But he’s so funny,” the drunk girl said.
“Yeah,” Leda said.
Even she has someone, she thought. If I were more linear I wouldn’t be alone. Maybe they can sense how sad I am. Maybe they know I’m sad and so they stay away from me. I am sad and not linear enough, and that is everything.
If she had not invited Anne, and if Luke had not come along and been so nice but emotionally distant, if the redhead didn’t have her Sass, or if she had taken Anatomy of the Mind instead of Comparative Zoology, her night would not have been the night that it became. There would not have been the desperate burn of low party lights and couples folded into each other. There would not have been the culmination of so many little things solidifying. But that was the night. It was that.
“I’m Alex.”
“Hi, I’m Leda.”
Alex was in his early twenties and skinny. His face was long, and he moved a lot when he spoke. For a second she thought there might be something wrong with him, but then she realized he was just trying to be charming.
“There used to be this guy that I’d see at school all the time and I thought his name was Frank, so I’d be like, ‘Hey, Frank, does it stank?’ I thought he and I had this, like, great thing between us.” Alex waved his hands with each syllable. “But it turned out his name wasn’t Frank at all,” he said. “He just never corrected me.”
She laughed harder than the joke warranted, but it felt good.
“I think you’re really pretty,” he said.
“Thank you.” She fixed her hair, hoping to prove it might be true.
“I’ve never heard the name Leda before, except in that poem.”
“ ‘Leda and the Swan.’ My mom loves that poem. She named me after it.”
“But isn’t that poem, like, about rape?”
“Well, it’s more complicated than that, I think.”
“Are you, like, good at reading or something?”
“I guess…I am.” She didn’t know what “good at reading” meant, but she was willing to ignore the possibility that what he said was as stupid as it sounded.
“I like you, Leda-the-swan.”
“I like you too.” She smiled.
“I live in the apartment next door. Do you want to, like, come over? I mean just to hang out.”
“Umm…” She didn’t know what she wanted, but she answered him from an impulse of wanting what it was that she did not know. “Okay, just for a little while.”
Leda had never gone to a boy’s apartment after a party. Her sexual past was short and based on ideals of love and monogamy. She’d only slept with her ex-boyfriend. They dated six months and she waited until he committed to her before she’d even consider sleeping with him. We’ll just make out, she thought, consoling herself with limitation.
The apartment wasn’t exactly next door. It was behind Kate’s place through a little park. They walked together and said common things about school and movies. When they got to the center of the park Alex ran up and jumped on top of an abstractly shaped climbing structure.
“Look at me!”
She did look at him: tall, thin, anonymous boy on conceptual playground equipment. The structure is shaped like me walking through a park with this boy at a party, she thought.
“You’re up high,” she said, not knowing what the proper response was to “Look at me.”
“Come up here. It’s kind of cool. You can see the little clock tower over there.”
Leda walked over and Alex helped her up. She could feel his warmth beside her. It was nice.
“See.” Alex pointed off.
“Oh, yeah.” She couldn’t see anything, but it was so warm standing there that she thought it was best to pretend.
As they walked up the steps to Alex’s place he held her hand, and she remembered what sex was. Years later she would remember the squeeze of his hand, the grind of his dry palm, and stairs six and seven.
Inside, his roommate was still up in the living room watching TV. She was a heavier girl with a sallow complexion and sulky face. Leda greeted her with the hi-I’m-not-a-slut-please-don’t-judge-me hello. The girl smiled slightly. Leda knew the greeting had been a failure.
“I have to go clean up my room. You can hang here with Mel for a minute,” Alex said.
Oh Jesus Christ, Leda thought. She sat down on a stained easy chair. Her thigh pressed up against a hot-water bottle that she could feel had grown tepid. The coffee table was littered with discarded boxes of candy and several remotes, as well as a cat toy. She thought for a minute on what to say. If only I could tell her everything. Tell her about the party and when I was six and skinned my knee racing with the little boy who lived next door and had just moved in from India and only knew the word “constipation.” But I can’t tell her that, because I have to pretend that I don’t care about anything in the world but right now.
“You have a cat?” Leda said.
“No.”
“Oh, I saw the cat toy…” She pointed to the fish-shaped cat toy on the table.
“No, I made that for my nephew.”
“Oh, sorry. I thought it was a cat toy.”
“No.”
“Oh, okay, sorry.”
She decided that was enough talking. The girls sat silently until Alex came back. Leda attempted to wave goodbye a little as she headed to his room, but Mel didn’t respond.
“Here it is.”
The room was small with three big piles of clothing on the floor and a bed. On the walls were a few band posters. She recognized the bands and wasn’t impressed. Alex’s musical aesthetic slipped him into the category of guys with pedestrian tastes that she tried to avoid. It was disappointing.
“I like your room,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s kind of messy.”
Alex stood by the door and started to point out different things in the room. She began to wonder when they’d actually sit down. It was late, and she was tired. His nervous tour of his hideous bedroom was making the night more and more depressing. She thought back to Anne and Luke. They’re probably having sex right now, she thought. Anne once said Luke was good in bed, and the comment plagued her. She’d never had good sex and wasn’t sure if it existed, at least for a woman. But maybe Anne was doing something she wasn’t, and that was the problem. She sat down on the bed quickly to distract herself from the thought.
Alex sat down next to her and for a while they talked about bike riding and jawbreakers. She felt bored and alienated by the conversation. What’s wrong with me? she thought. I’m not having fun with this cute guy. He’s kind of cute, isn’t he? I should be happy.
“Can I kiss you?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said.
Alex kissed her. There were preemptive tongue thrusts and the taste of beer. He held her face, then let go, then held it again. She appreciated the effort despite the awkwardness. He stopped kissing her suddenly.
“Do you want to have sex?” he said.
She felt a wave of heat through her body.
“It’s just, you’re so pretty…and, I don’t know,” he said.
“I’m really not good with…I just get really emotional,” she said.
“It’s fine, don’t worry. We don’t have to.”
“I’m sorry—”
“It’s really totally fine. We can just kiss.”
They lay
on his bed together, and soon he touched her breasts. The sheets were striped and soft. She could feel the breeze from under the cracked window. It made her a little cold. Then he lay on top of her and then the flood of everything drowned out everything that for so long had made her feel so subhuman. It wasn’t so much that here she was, wildly turned on by this boy, but rather that here she was, turned on by herself with a boy.
“Do you have a condom?” she asked him.
“Yeah.”
She watched him move effortlessly through the room toward the closet. She hadn’t before seen him in such fluid motion. It was startling. This fluid man is going to be inside me soon, she thought. I am on this bed, and it is like a raft. I am on this bed, and that man is on an island getting a condom. Alex opened the closet, revealing a poster of a woman in underwear whoring an unattainable standard of beauty. After rummaging through his closet he came back and sat beside her. “So should we do it now?” he said.
“Um, okay.”
She took off her own dress and underwear and lay down, sucking in her stomach. DO I LOOK PRETTY NAKED? was the universal question of female sex, and this moment was no confirmation of the fact. He didn’t say anything about the way she looked, although had he said something she wouldn’t have believed him. It was the catch-22 propagated by the whore in his closet.
Alex took off his clothes. He was considerably thinner than he looked dressed, which was disappointing since even in clothes she could tell he was much skinnier than she was. Great, she thought, fattest by default, and she sucked in her stomach even more.
He pulled off his boxers, and then suddenly there was a naked penis in the room, jarring and unfamiliar. The worst part about having sex with a strange boy is his strange penis, she’d later reflect.
They kissed a little longer, but he was eager to get going, and she wasn’t about to stop him, or do anything expressive, for that matter. It was important to maintain some type of calm, controlled, and happy appearance of woman-during-sex, although she certainly wasn’t sure why this was.
He had a hard time getting it in, and she had to help him, to which he said “Thank you.” It was slightly painful as he moved back and forth. He tried holding her breasts, but the position was too awkward so he just gave up. Every so often he’d ask her if she was okay. She wondered what he was worrying about not being okay. Doesn’t he know if I weren’t okay I wouldn’t say anything? Maybe I don’t look like I’m enjoying this enough, she thought, and wrapped her legs around him. Above her was the ceiling, painfully still, and below her was the raft bed floating in space.
“The condom feels funny,” he said.
“Really? Maybe you should change it.”
He took it off and put on another one. She had to help him put it in the second time. She was hoping he’d finish soon.
“Is this good?” he asked.
“Yeah, is it good for you?”
“Yeah. And you’re okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Okay.”
The motion over her got more stilted and fast. Okay, it’s almost over, she thought, and where am I going to sleep? Here in this striped raft? The motion stopped.
Alex lay beside her. She looked at him. Now he was someone else. Someone she’d slept with. He was stranger and closer to her than he’d ever been. She noticed his hair had a cowlick and had probably just been cut. Now she wanted to tell him everything about her night and about the smell of a wardrobe she used to hide in as a child and why she slept with him, but instead she just said:
“Did you like it?”
“Yeah, did you?”
“Yeah.”
He kissed her, and she thought, Now our kisses are different because there is nothing more we can do. We had sex and that is it.
They each put their underwear back on and Alex gave her an oversized T-shirt and pajama pants to sleep in. They smelled strongly of him, although she couldn’t have known it because she didn’t know his smell. She tried to remember the exact feeling of what it was to be in her own pajamas, but she wasn’t able to think of it. Alex lay down and she lay beside him. They were silent for a while.
“Are you tired?” he asked.
“Yeah, I am.” She wasn’t tired.
Alex leaned over her and shut off the light. They sat in the darkness. So this is what it’s like to not be sleeping alone but to still be lonely, she thought. She ran her hands over her thighs and touched the elastic on her underwear. It was the same as it was so many times in the morning after a shower when she pulled them on.
Alex turned over a few times beside her and then sat up.
“Do you mind if I put on my star lantern? I usually can’t sleep so well without it.” He didn’t wait for her answer. He leaned to the side of the bed and turned on a small lantern. The room lit up with stars. Leda was familiar with these stars, not because she had seen them before, but because she knew she’d never slept without them either. Alex was soon asleep. She lay there staring at the ceiling and the fantasied constellations. In the closet was a naked girl and under the blanket was herself lying in the universe of this boy she met at a party. She fell asleep.
CHAPTER 12
The Day After
The next morning she woke up thirty-six minutes before Alex. She spent the time having to pee very badly and worrying about the proximity of the bathroom to Mel. Where is the bathroom? Will Mel be in the bathroom or yell at me for using the bathroom? For lack of any other option, she decided to brave the situation. It turned out her fears were unfounded. The bathroom was just across the hall, and Mel was nowhere to be seen.
She sat on the toilet. Early daylight filtered through the scalloped glass pane of the small window, and for a moment she felt comfortable in the familiarity of morning and the privacy of the bathroom. There was little motivation to go back to Alex.
As she washed her hands she looked at her reflection in the mirror. She still had most of her makeup on from last night, although her eyeliner had smudged. Her hair was messy but manageable. She rinsed her mouth out in the sink and tried her best not to think too hard about the night before.
Alex was still asleep when she got back to the room. She climbed into bed beside him and tried to stay as still as possible. Fourteen minutes later he woke up.
“Hey,” he said, blinking and looking skinny. “Have you been awake for a long time?”
“No, I was asleep,” she lied.
“You weren’t asleep. You should have just woken me up.”
“I did.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m just kidding.”
“Oh.”
For whatever reason Leda had felt the need to pretend she was sleeping. There was something about sleep that perpetuated her as comfortable with sex, and with him, a submission that she felt she needed to concede to. It was a complicated dance so intrinsic to the situation that she didn’t even give it any consideration before performing the charade. She lied about it for fear of looking weak, but she would have never dared to wake him up. She didn’t understand why this was. Not even a little. Not even years later looking back on herself in that room, young, sleepless, and weak.
They got dressed in near silence. She became very deliberate with buttoning the front of her dress, her fingers pressing the cool of the plastic through the small threaded hole, her hands moving delicately in the silent, clumsy moment.
“Are you hungry?” he asked her.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Mel’s having company over so we really can’t be in the kitchen. I don’t really have any food in there that’s mine right now anyway.”
“What do you usually do for breakfast?” Leda asked.
“I usually steal one of Mel’s bagels, but she’s in there now so we can’t,” he said.
“Oh.”
“I don’t have any money so we proba
bly can’t go out to eat.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” she said.
Alex grabbed for his coat on the floor and, reaching into the pocket, pulled out a can. “Do you want this energy drink? It’s warm, but it’s still good.”
“No, that’s all right.”
They sat on the bed a little longer and talked about basketball. Leda wondered how she managed to say as much as she did. After a long silence followed by one more basketball comment, she suggested it was time to go. Alex walked her to the door.
As they stood together in the doorway facing the delegation of future physical and emotional contact, she wanted so much. She wanted him to ask for her number, wanted him to say something about liking her and thinking she was pretty. She had an urge to jump into his arms, to run with him to conceptual playground equipment forever and ever. She held her breath; inside her ears was her heartbeat. Alex looked at her, smiled, moved in close, and put up his hand for a high five. With seemingly few other options, she high-fived him.
“Thanks so much,” he said to her.
She walked off reliving the high five over and over again in her mind. By the time she’d gotten to the end of the block, she realized how sore she was from the sex and started to cry. Her breathing was stilted and her tears were soft and few. They did little more than sting her eyes, and when she blinked she felt as if she could see a blurred reality as painful and real as it was undeniably her own. A little girl passed who looked at her and clapped in the air.
“Summer,” she said as she clapped.
To Leda everything was unearthed in that “summer”: her day, her night, the party, and the strange penis. She wanted to scoop the little girl up. Feel solace in her weight. She imagined herself and this summer girl walking through the city. Getting ice cream and just laughing the day into infinite pieces. She’d give summer a bath before bed and tell her a story as light and airy as that clap. She stopped crying by the time she’d reached the corner and decided to text Anne.
She texted as she walked: “I had sex with that guy last night…”
Anne responded nearly immediately: “WHAT??? That guy with the short hair?? What happened?? You better give me the details!!!”
