The Virginity of Famous Men

by Christine Sneed

  “We’ll see, okay? If Mr. Lambert calls, I’ll probably have to say yes.”

  “Don’t answer the phone,” he says.

  Rachel shakes her head. “Maybe he won’t call.”

  “But maybe he will,” he says, distraught.

  The hamburger I’m chewing loses its flavor, and it’s all I can do to get it down. Rachel’s appetite doesn’t seem to have suffered, though, and Ben is managing to eat a second heap of hash browns. He glances up from his plate and says, “When Rachel first started at the call center, I loved hearing what kinds of calls she’d get each day. We have this list called ‘Words That Once Shocked Us,’ and we can only put words on it that we’ve heard at work. I don’t hear too many at the school, because I’m not a recess monitor, but I do hear some. What about you, Marcie? Are there any words you can think of for our list?”

  “Don’t bother her with that, Ben. It’s boring,” says Rachel.

  “It is not boring,” he says. “It’s awesome.”

  “What words are on your list?” I ask, very curious.

  “Pussy,” says Rachel, drinking from her Rolling Rock.

  “That word still kind of shocks me,” I say. “It’s so, it’s so vivid.” I laugh. “I mean, it just sounds nasty.”

  “I like it,” she says. “Always have.”

  “Me too,” says Ben.

  “A lot of people probably do,” I say. “What are some of the others?”

  “‘Faggot,’” says Ben. “‘Cocksucker.’ Those are both from my school. I heard a third grader using them on a second grader in the hall outside my classroom. She got a two-day after-school detention and the principal called her parents.”

  “Jesus H,” I say. “Rough crowd.”

  He laughs a little. “I know. A few of them are pretty hard-core.”

  “Someone asked me about my beaver the other day,” I say, blushing for what feels like the hundredth time in the past hour.

  “Really?” Rachel gasps. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “You were on break when it happened, and Sam was there, so I didn’t want to say anything when you got back.”

  “‘Beaver’ is such a strange-sounding word,” says Ben. “It’s kind of charming, though.”

  “For months after Tim told me he wanted a divorce, the word ‘adultery’ kept ricocheting through my brain,” I say. “But it’s not really shocking, I suppose.”

  “‘Adultery’ is shocking,” says Ben. “But if you didn’t hear it at work, it doesn’t qualify for our list.”

  Rachel looks toward the sofa, staring at the staring cats, but I can see that her face is pinker now than it was a moment ago.

  “No, I guess it doesn’t,” I say.

  “‘Fuckwad,’” says Rachel. “That’s another one.”

  “That’s also from my school,” says Ben. “I guess I’ve heard more shocking words there than I thought.”

  “Time to get out the bar of soap,” I say. “Tell those miscreants to line up.”

  Ben laughs. “I wish we could get away with it. Some of those kids could definitely use it.”

  “Let me get dessert,” Rachel says abruptly and stands up. “We’ve got chocolate chip cookies and vanilla ice cream. You’ll have some, won’t you, Marcie?”

  We don’t exactly linger over dessert. Rachel eats hers fast and takes her bowl back into the kitchen before Ben and I are halfway done with ours. When she returns, there is no offer of coffee or tea, and it’s clear that she’s ready for me to be on my way, whereas Ben seems in no rush to bring the evening to a close. It’s not yet nine o’clock, but she yawns and says how tired she is, though I can hardly blame her. I have done her no favors tonight, except for the accidental alibi, which makes me a little sick to my stomach to think about. She will use it, I’m sure, if she decides that she really does want to meet this Jack character with the college-professor son and the show-dog beagles.

  “Do you want to play Scattergories?” Ben asks after we’ve finished dessert, ignoring his wife’s fake fatigue. “I love that game, but it’s not as much fun when it’s only the two of us.”

  I don’t plan to stay, but I look at my friend to see her reaction. She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “Count me out. I’m going to bed, and maybe I’ll be the one to get up to go running at six thirty while you sleep in.”

  “I’m getting up then too,” says Ben.

  “I should probably go home,” I say. “I like to check on my aunt before ten to see if she needs anything before she goes to bed.”

  “That’s so nice of you,” he says.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “You think so? She’s the one who’s nice. She lets me rent the top floor of her house for half of what she could charge.”

  “I’ll walk you out,” says Rachel.

  “Where’s the fire?” says Ben. “Relax, baby. You don’t need to go to bed this second, do you?”

  “It’s fine,” I say. “I should head home. Thanks so much for dinner. It was delicious.”

  “Do you like to run too, Marcie?” he asks. “You could go with us sometime if you do.”

  “Thanks. Maybe I will.”

  He gets up from the table to hug me good-bye, but I feel awkward because Rachel is watching us and I know she’s mad at me.

  “Thanks for coming over,” he calls after us. “It was fun.”

  The hallway still smells like popcorn, and I also notice that Rachel is furious with me. “What were you trying to do?” she hisses as soon as we’re alone, the door to her apartment closed behind us. “I haven’t even cheated on Ben and you’re acting like I made a deal with the devil or something. You’re my friend, remember? Not my husband’s. Ben has his own friends.”

  Before I realize what’s happening, I’ve started to cry. Rachel stares at me, confused and annoyed, before worry softens her face. She puts a hand tentatively on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Marcie. I didn’t mean to yell at you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, wiping roughly at my cheeks. “Just ignore me. I’d better go.” I turn away, but she tightens her grip.

  “I was just a little surprised when you mentioned adultery,” she says. “Do you have a crush on Ben? Do you want him to divorce me?”

  I shake my head, vehement. “No, of course not! I want you both to be happy. I wish you’d never given that Jack guy the time of day. I’m sure he’s a creep.”

  She sighs. “I understand your concern, but it’s really not any of your business.”

  “You’re right,” I say. “It isn’t.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she says, “but you shouldn’t take your unhappiness out on other people. I know your husband cheated on you and he’s an asshole, but I’m not like him, and Ben’s not you.”

  I look at her but say nothing. Of course he’s not, I could say. But despite what you think, you are like my husband. He had excuses too. He didn’t think he was doing anything wrong until he had done so many things wrong that no one with half an ounce of sanity would have said that he was blameless. There are always excuses. We will never suffer a shortage.

  “Thanks for dinner,” I say. “I’ll let you get to bed.”

  “You’re welcome,” she says, uncertain now. “Don’t be mad at me. I’m just tired and I only want to have a little fun. That’s all.”

  “You should do whatever you want. I won’t say anything about it anymore. Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight, Marcie.” She hugs me and then I go down the hall and out to my car with its ailing muffler. On the drive home, I notice a lot of students walking in groups of three or four, many of them in red and white, the university’s colors. I haven’t been a student in eighteen years, but I’m still here. I have been married and divorced here. I have become an adult here, whatever that really means. I feel hollowed out and very tired as I drive slowly back to my rented rooms and elderly aunt, to the clothes that don’t fit me so well anymore, to the hairbrush on the dresser with all of its fine graying hairs. I will use it befor
e bed. There are routines that bring me comfort. There are people I have loved without them knowing it. So many more people than seems sane or worthwhile. What do you do with so much heartfelt but unessential affection, I wonder. Because I doubt there is a remedy.

  FIVE ROOMS

  Two questions you don’t ask a blind person: Aren’t black-and-white movies boring? Is that cop car following me? Another thing you have to keep in mind when you’re with a blind person is that if you move anything like the paper towels and the soap that usually sit to the right of the kitchen sink, you can bet you’re going to get chewed out for it later. No matter that you are sometimes an idiot and didn’t mean anything by it at all—you’re still going to get in trouble.

  What I don’t like about making a mistake is that no one gives you the chance to explain yourself. You’re supposed to sit there and let everyone yell at you, even Mr. Rasmussen, who when he’s annoyed, looks like he’s staring at a spot above my head, which I don’t think he knows he’s doing. Sometimes he wears sunglasses, but mostly he doesn’t. His eyes look like a person’s who can see, which is a little strange because I start to wonder if he’s faking it, but if he is, I doubt he’d want me hanging around his house messing things up.

  Wednesdays, we go grocery shopping. Thursdays, I do his laundry so that I’ll learn to be a good person. Supposedly I don’t know what that means, like most kids of my “ingrate generation” who would trample a nun on crutches if one got in the way on our headlong dash to the store to buy the latest piece of technological garbage.

  Something my mom probably wouldn’t like is that Mr. Rasmussen pays me a little for helping him. For the first month or so I tried to give him back the money, but he wouldn’t let me. He’d shake his head and smile toward the floor when I tried to hand it back. I know that some people would say it should be easy not to take his money because I could leave fast and he wouldn’t be able to catch me, but I wouldn’t want to slam the door in his face, or worse, slam it on his foot and make him fall over if he tried to go after me without his cane. When he pays me, he always gives me five singles. Every Thursday it’s the same thing, five of them folded over into a little wad, and I wonder how he knows for sure they’re singles, not twenties, which I wish they were even if this makes me greedy. If he did pull out some twenties, I’d give them back, all but one of them, because that last one would be my reward for not keeping a hundred dollars when he only meant to give me five.

  He used to work with my mom at the school where she’s the principal’s secretary. He took care of the computers there, including the ones with all of the grades and IQ scores, but then his eyesight got so bad that he had to quit and go on disability. He told me once that he knew for months that he was going blind and it was like knowing someone you loved more than anything was going to die very soon but there was nothing in the world you could do to stop it. The doctors had told him it would happen, but he had hoped someone would be able to cure him. He went blind nine years ago, when I was seven, but I didn’t meet him until last year, because before then, Mom hadn’t yet had the great idea that I needed to be a compassionate dork.

  During this whole time he hasn’t been able to see, he’s been doing things that are a little strange for a guy, like learning how to knit and taking piano lessons and carving sheep and dogs and cows out of bars of soap and selling them at a Christmas craft fair that the Catholic church on Fir Street holds the weekend after Thanksgiving. I’m not sure how the piano lessons work, because he has to learn everything by ear and by feel, but when he practices while I’m over, it sounds like he knows exactly what he’s doing. The pieces he plays are long and soft and remind me of someone turning slow cartwheels. I suppose it’s kind of impressive that he isn’t sitting around feeling sorry for himself and turning into a grouchy old man. Technically he isn’t that old, being only fifty-something, and he has a girlfriend named Ellen who lives in another state, which is pretty damn convenient for her. From what I can tell, when she breezes into town once or twice a month, all they do is eat and get naked, which I don’t really want to think about, but like the piano lessons, I suppose that having sex with Ellen keeps him from turning into a crab. She’s a professor at a college three hundred miles away in Minneapolis and teaches political science, which means that she is obsessed with things that are mostly pointless—no matter which person gets elected, nothing changes, at least not in my town. Since I was a little kid, there have always been the same unemployed weirdos standing around the same corners laughing and talking with their friends at the top of their voices about nothing.

  Mr. Rasmussen’s name is Forest, a name no one else I know has. He once had a son named Apollo (he swears this is true), who died when he was fourteen because he fell out of a big tree at summer camp. I know this must make Mr. Rasmussen very sad and probably angry too, but we don’t talk about it. My mom is the one who told me. His son died a few years before he went blind, but Mr. Rasmussen and the boy’s mother had been divorced for a while before any of these things happened. If he gets mad at me because I moved something in the kitchen, I try to remember that he has had it pretty bad—if I couldn’t see and had a dead kid too, I’d probably be a lot more moody than he is.

  I’ve been helping him out for about five and a half months when Ellen calls and dumps him. She does it when I’m over on a Thursday afternoon doing the laundry and I’m sure she planned it this way—she has to know my schedule as well as her own, because she seems like the type of person who keeps track. The two times I’ve seen her, she’s looked me up and down like I’m the competition or something, which is so ridiculous because, for one, I’m not interested in Mr. Rasmussen and never would be, and two, it wouldn’t matter if I looked like a supermodel or a drooling troll because Mr. Rasmussen is friggin’ blind. He and I don’t flirt, and we definitely don’t touch, except when I take his elbow to help him through the door or down the stairs or he takes my elbow for the same reason.

  After he gets off the phone with her, he tells me that I can go. His voice is so quiet that he has to say it twice. I’ve been at his house for only an hour and a half, but he wants me to leave. He says he’ll put the second load of clothes in the dryer; he’ll fold them and put them away himself this week. Then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out some money and hands me a ten.

  “That’s okay, Mr. Rasmussen. I really don’t need it. Ten is too much anyway.”

  “Take it,” he says, mad. “Just take it, Josephine.”

  I still don’t want to. It feels too strange, like he’s bribing me not to tell anyone that I saw him so upset, which I wouldn’t do anyway. I know what his conversation was about because from the other room where I was watching Jeopardy! and waiting for the dryer to stop, I heard him begging her, “Can’t we talk about this in person?” “Are you sure you really feel that way?” “Can’t you come down here this weekend so I can at least see you one more time?” She knew what he meant, because obviously he isn’t going to see her or anyone else ever again unless there’s a miracle, but he still says things like this all the time: “I’ll see about that,” or “I’d like to see you here at four o’clock, not four thirty.” Talking to her, he sounded so hurt and beaten down that I got a little choked up for him. If I hadn’t had the laundry to worry about, I would have sneaked out before he could remember I was there.

  “I really don’t need it, Mr. Rasmussen, honestly.”

  “Take the fucking money, Josephine. I don’t want to discuss this right now.”

  I take the ten and get my book bag and go. His face is all red and his wavy gray-black hair is a mess, like he was trying to pull it out while he was on the phone, getting his heart stomped on. I walk out to my car (which is really my mom’s car but she lets me use it when I help Mr. Rasmussen) and the air is filled with an enormous lilac smell. It is a beautiful day, but for Mr. Rasmussen, it is shit on the bottom of his shoe, tracked through the whole house.

  The reason my mom thinks I need to learn compassion is because my fri
end Gina and I used to go to the Lakeside Mall and drop pennies on old people from the second floor. It wasn’t because we were mean; it was only because we were bored and it was the funniest thing we had ever seen. Whenever a penny would land in front of an old guy, he would start wildly looking all over the place, as if someone had thrown a rotten tomato at him instead of a little penny. He’d open his mouth and lean his head back as far as it would go and it just looked so funny we nearly peed our pants every time.

  But then we got busted by a security guard on break at the Starbucks and that was the end of our fun. He took our names and called our parents and they bitched us out and it was so dumb. It’s not like we were stealing or hurting anyone, but we still got in trouble because no one was supposed to be throwing anything, nothing whatsoever, not even hundred-dollar bills, from the second floor down to the first. We could have injured babies—had we thought of that? Or we might have blinded one of the old people if the penny had landed on their eye, which seemed pretty impossible to me, especially with the huge glasses some of them wear, but no one had asked my opinion. When I told Mr. Rasmussen why my mom had made me help him, he started laughing and said that he had done a lot worse when he was a teenage punk, but girls weren’t supposed to be interested in practical jokes, so he suspected the guard had come down on us extra hard because he was sexist. That was the first time I’d ever heard a guy accuse another guy of being sexist. I liked it.

  When I get home an hour early from Mr. Rasmussen’s, Mom gives me a funny look. “Laundry takes three hours, unless he didn’t want you to dry his clothes, but I’m sure he did.”

  “He wanted me to leave.”

  Her face gets that bunched-up look, which means she’s about to yell at me. “What did you—”

  “I didn’t do anything. He got a call from Ellen and then he told me he’d finish the laundry himself.”

  Mom is quiet after this, and I start down the hall to my bedroom, which, incidentally, is “an abominable pigsty,” according to Mom, who is the foremost authority on any and all things I am supposed to be doing with my life.