The Virginity of Famous Men

by Christine Sneed

  “No, just since last year. But let’s not talk about her. I’m starting to wonder if this is a stupid idea.”

  It’s about time! I want to say, but I’m not a jerk.

  “I’m sure it’ll go fine,” I say, not believing it for one second. The dread stays with me the whole way up there too, when we stop for dinner at Burger King, when we stop at the rest area near the Minnesota-Wisconsin border and he asks me to make sure he doesn’t have any food on his face or in his teeth or down the front of his shirt and pants. He looks nice, actually. His hair is combed down and he’s wearing a blue button-down shirt, and if Ellen kicks him out, she’s a heartless bitch.

  But the feeling of doom is not going anywhere. I’m pretty sure that this trip is a bad idea. Even though I think Mr. Rasmussen is a nice person, with some cool talents, like the soap carving and piano playing, I know that it can’t be easy to have a blind guy for a boyfriend, especially one who lives five hours away. You’d always have to be the one to drive, you’d always be worrying that he’s fallen down the stairs and is dying at the bottom in a pool of his own blood. You’d worry about him pulling out the twenties instead of the singles and getting shafted by greedy people. You’d also wish that he could see your new hairstyle or dress once in a while, but there’s no way.

  When we’re about to cross the Mississippi, he knows it. He can smell it coming. The window is down a few inches and he says he smells the muddy water, which turns out to be a grayish brown, not even close to the blue-green like the ocean that I’d thought it would be. He inhales and holds his breath for a few seconds before exhaling in a long gust. “I love that smell,” he says and sighs. “I haven’t smelled it in more than twenty years. Not since Apollo was a little boy.”

  For a few seconds we’re quiet, hearing the tires go over the metal bridge, the sound telling us that we’re doing something important, that we’re like other people going happily about their business—ones who have no real problems and aren’t fat or blind or worried that no one likes them enough, if at all.

  “Don’t be mad, Mr. Rasmussen, but why did you name him Apollo?”

  He laughs, a great big explosion that is all nerves and hot air. “His mother was responsible. She was a classics major in college and always wanted to name her children after Greek gods and goddesses. If Apollo had been a girl, he would have been called Athena.”

  “That’s nice. She’s probably my favorite goddess.”

  “His mother was a romantic,” he says. “To her detriment and mine, as it turned out.” He unrolls his window all the way and sticks his face in the wind. “That smells marvelous. Heaven must smell like this, if it exists.”

  “It probably does,” I say, but I don’t think I believe it.

  “We’ll all find out someday. That’s one thing I don’t doubt.”

  “What does it look like?” he asks when I tell him a little later that we’ve pulled onto Ellen’s street, after I got us lost coming off the highway and had to stop at a gas station to ask directions. “Can you describe her house for me too? She’s told me about her neighborhood, but I wonder how someone else would see it. For all I know, she’s made it sound much nicer than it actually is.”

  I say that it’s not a very long street and the houses are small, some brick, most with postage-stamp front yards and military-style hedges, all stiff and proper. The cars in the driveways aren’t flashy either—just Oldsmobiles, Fords, a couple of Toyotas. Ellen’s car is an Audi, but she probably keeps it in the garage. It’s definitely not in the driveway when we pull in. It’s after sunset and the lights in her front room are on and my stomach drops and I know we have to go through with this, after driving all this way on a Friday night when I could have been hanging out at Gina’s, looking for new pictures of Channing Tatum online and eating sugar cookie dough out of a tube.

  “Her house has white aluminum siding,” I say. “It’s just one story, with green shutters. She’s got flowers in the front, some little rosebushes by the door that are pink and red and white, none of those uptight hedges. Her yard looks pretty good, Mr. Rasmussen. The grass is green and it must have been cut a day or two ago.”

  “So it is a one-story house. I thought maybe she had a second floor but didn’t want me going up there the few times I’ve been here.”

  “She was telling the truth.”

  He breathes out and clenches his hands in his lap. “I don’t know if I should do this. Do you think I should? Am I being a fool?”

  He’s sweating. I can smell it, but for some reason, it smells more like wet dirt than b.o.

  Yes, you are! I want to shout, but all I say is, “If you don’t go knock on her door, you’ll probably feel worse about chickening out. I can go with you if you want.”

  How I got so damn compassionate is one of the world’s great mysteries, but despite what my mom thinks, I’ve always been like this. At least I think I have, except for the pennies and the old people.

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “Do you want me to go with you?” I ask again. “I don’t mind.”

  “Maybe you could walk me up but go back to the car before I ring the doorbell.”

  We get out of the car and I go over to his side and put my hand on his elbow when he and his cane are ready. I’m looking hard at the curtains in the front window, wondering if Ellen is standing behind them, watching us, but everything is so still it doesn’t seem like she’s even home.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” I say once we’re standing at the door. He has his cane in his right hand and is standing so rigidly that he looks like a soldier, which he never has been. He told me once that he would have gone to Canada to avoid the draft if he’d been old enough for Vietnam. I don’t blame him one bit for not wanting to go and get his ass shot off in the jungle with a bunch of other scared people on both sides. “Everyone’s scared,” my history teacher said to us when we were talking about a bunch of wars last fall. “Don’t think that the so-called enemy isn’t scared too.”

  “I’m all right,” he said. “You can go.”

  I run back to the car and get inside and he rings the doorbell and waits. Then he rings it a second time and waits some more. I’m about to go up to get him, but then the door opens and it’s Ellen in a pink bathrobe, even though it’s not quite nine o’clock. She looks annoyed, but also sad. Her hair is in two long braids, like she’s trying to be Pocahontas, and I don’t think she’s wearing any makeup, but Mr. Rasmussen wouldn’t know if she looked crappy anyway. Then the door shuts and he’s inside and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. He hasn’t rented me a motel room yet and didn’t tell me if I should hang out at McDonald’s or somewhere while he talks to her. I have my pirate lord book but don’t feel like reading. It’s too dark now to do it without turning on the light and that would drain the car battery and then we’d really be stuck.

  After an hour of sitting there and calling Gina and a couple of other friends on my cell, none of them bothering to pick up, Mr. Rasmussen is still inside and I have to pee. It’s gotten to the point where I either have to squat by the side of the house or knock on the door and ask Ellen if I can use her bathroom, but I don’t feel like it because (a) she’s a wench, and (b) they might be doing it.

  Things are getting pretty bad after fifteen more minutes, so I get out of the car and go to the back of the house, but there are lights from the neighbors’ backyards on all three sides, and if I tried to pee by the little vegetable garden Ellen has growing back there, I’d probably get spotted by some goody two-shoes who would call the cops and then I’d get arrested for indecent exposure or peeing on someone’s lawn without permission. It’s now past the point where I could drive somewhere and find a bathroom, which means I have to knock on the damn door. I’m starting to get really mad at Mr. Rasmussen too—he could have thought to check on me instead of leaving me in some kind of shitty limbo in his girlfriend’s driveway while he begs her to take his blind ass back.

  Ellen answers the door and this
time she isn’t so slow about it. “Can I use your bathroom?” I say, not bothering with hello. “Sorry to interrupt you.”

  “Yes, of course, Josephine. Think nothing of it.” She opens the door wider. “It’s down the hall on the right.”

  Her house smells like chocolate brownies and my stomach growls, loud enough for half of Minnesota to hear, but we both pretend to ignore it. I don’t see Mr. Rasmussen anywhere, and Ellen is still wearing the pink bathrobe but her braids look messier, like someone’s been pulling the hairs loose.

  The bathroom is painted a light purple and has loads of matching hand towels in a basket on the toilet tank. There are about sixty-five million little bottles of hand cream in a second basket, and I put three of them in my handbag—lemon meringue, cranberry, and ginger. When I come out, she’s waiting for me. I wonder if she has all of the lotions marked and will know later that I swiped some, but her expression is friendlier than usual. She doesn’t look like a crazy woman on a soap opera anymore, the kind who sizes up the new girl because she plans to stab her in the back with her extra-long fake nails.

  “I’m sorry you’ve been sitting out there by yourself this whole time,” she says. “Why don’t you go into the living room and watch TV? I don’t think Forest and I will be too much longer.”

  This is good news for me, cruddy news for him.

  “Thanks,” I say. “But I’ll just wait in the car.” If they’re going to be doing any yelling or crying, I don’t want to hear it.

  It’s forty more minutes before he comes out. I’ve been sitting there, calling Gina every five minutes and bitching to her voicemail for not picking up. Sometimes she doesn’t answer because she’s playing online Scrabble like a total nerd or else has her headphones on, listening to crappy seventies music and going deaf.

  The look on Mr. Rasmussen’s face when he walks out of Ellen’s front door makes it pretty clear that there isn’t going to be a room of my own at the Holiday Inn tonight. I wonder if I should call Mom and warn her that she and Ron had better not be having an orgy in the living room when I get there or else I’m going to call his ex-wife, who I think is actually still his wife but I don’t know for sure. Mom says he isn’t married anymore, but I would not be surprised if he’s lying to her. It would hardly be the first time.

  Mr. Rasmussen has something in his hands that he passes to me before I help him into the car. You’d think Ellen would have helped him this one last time, but she’s nowhere to be seen. Or maybe he told her not to do it. “These are for our ride back,” he says. “You can have all of them.”

  I look down and see that she’s packed us a bag of brownies. They’re still warm, and she’s left the bag unsealed so they won’t get soggy. It’s so sad, one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. She’s cut the brownies in such perfect squares for a guy who doesn’t want them at all because he just got dumped a second time. Mr. Rasmussen is so gloomy and closed up right now; it’s like he’s covered over every single window with bricks.

  After we get on the highway, I say that I’m sorry.

  He doesn’t say anything.

  We cross the Mississippi for the second time that night, the window down on my side but not on his. It does smell good, and it’s weird how it makes me feel hopeful, despite how depressing the night has been. “Should I drive us all the way home?” I ask when we’re a mile or so past the bridge.

  “If you think you can,” he says.

  I’m not that tired but I’m starving, and I can’t help it—I have to reach into the bag and grab one of Ellen’s breakup brownies. Then I eat it so fast I’m almost dizzy. It is the most insanely delicious piece of junk I’ve ever had. She’s added chocolate chips and the walnuts are big and meaty and it’s better than anything I can imagine right then aside from being home in my bed reading and this night never happening. If Mr. Rasmussen were to eat one, he might feel better. He’s said that tastes are more intense than when he could see. Sounds are louder too, and textures are smoother and harder or softer and slipperier. But he’s told me that he lives in four rooms now instead of five—the fifth room, his sight, is like a forbidden chamber at the top of the stairs that he’ll never be able to go into again, unless something magic happens, like the princess getting her enchanted kiss, but instead of a kiss, he’d get a new pair of eyeballs from a doctor.

  I’m dying to know what happened with Ellen but I don’t have the nerve to ask. He’s put in one of the Dylan CDs, and when I look over at Mr. Rasmussen, his eyes are shut but he must sense me looking at him because he opens them and says, “She’s got someone else. That’s all there is to it. He lives nearby, he’s not blind, he’s got more money too, I’m sure. There’s no way I can compete. No way in hell.”

  “You have to compete, Mr. Rasmussen. Write her love poems. Send her soap flowers every day for a month. I’m sure she still loves you.”

  He shakes his head. “She wants a guy who won’t trip over a seam in the linoleum when he’s trying to walk from the kitchen to the bathroom. She wants someone who can drive a car and isn’t as needy as an infant.”

  “You’re not like that.”

  “I’m not? That’s news to me.”

  “You’re not, Mr. Rasmussen. You can do so many things that other people can’t. Did you give her the turtle?”

  “That stupid fucking turtle. I’m such a fucking idiot.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  He snorts.

  “You’re not.”

  “I’m sorry I made you drive all this way for nothing.”

  “It wasn’t for nothing. I think it’s good that you came up here to see her. I bet she’ll change her mind. Tomorrow she’ll call you and tell you she made a mistake.”

  “Nope. Won’t happen.” He laughs, an angry sound, and reaches out a hand to grope the buttons on the stereo, turning it up loud enough that I know I’m going to get a headache pretty soon, but I don’t say anything.

  We stop only once, for gas and the bathroom, a few miles past the Dells. By now it’s after midnight and I’m exhausted, but I’m not going to stop. Mr. Rasmussen takes a long time to come out of the men’s room and I have to stand outside the door and wait for him, like some gas-station hooker hoping to snag a trick. When he finally appears, he has streaks of soap lather on his face. I tell him, and he asks if I can rub them off. I feel strange touching him in a way that I’ve never touched any guy before, but I do it, and when I’m done, he puts his arms around me and hugs me hard. Then he’s crying onto the top of my head, and no one, thank God, is there to see us. I feel bad for him, but weird too, and pull away after a few seconds and take him back to the car. When we’re turning onto the highway, I tell him we’ll be home soon, that he’s just tired and will feel better in the morning.

  “That’s not true,” he says. “But I realize you don’t know what else to say to me.”

  I look over at him but he’s facing the window. His hands are gripping his knees so hard that I can feel my own hands start to cramp up. He keeps staring out at the road, but I know he doesn’t see anything, not even in his head. There’s not much out there anyway, only other speeding cars and faded billboards that advertise $3.99 breakfasts and high-stakes bingo every Wednesday afternoon. I want to tell him he’s not missing a thing, that soon he’s going to forget about tonight, but I know he doesn’t want to hear another lie.

  ROGER WEBER WOULD LIKE TO STAY

  How it happened isn’t clear to her. Roger Weber is possibly the product of a dream that made the leap from her subconscious into waking life, but his habits are human enough in their predictability. He sticks to a strict schedule, disappearing during the daylight hours into the walls or the cedar chest at the foot of her bed, an heirloom that was a wedding gift from her grandfather to his second wife and had once held lacy, confining undergarments, Irish linen, family snapshots, and picture books he purchased in France, the sort that true gentlemen were not supposed to spend time examining.

  Roger’s presence doesn’t scare her,
though she isn’t sure why. Maybe it’s because if he were still alive, he would probably be the handsomest man Merilee has ever seen. His hair is black, his deep-set eyes sapphire, though she cannot know for certain because he appears before her solely in shades of gray. He knows many of her secrets and seems unconcerned that she once used the opera glasses her great-aunt Anna Maria willed to her to spy on the next-door neighbors while they ate dinner in the nude, their long-haired dachshund sitting obediently at their feet. He does not care that her elbows are covered with sandpapery skin, or that she rubs her right knee obsessively when she is nervous, or that sometimes she has trouble concentrating on her job and on her pleasant-enough lover, Brian, because she is more intrigued by Roger, who claims he is a concert pianist resembling Glenn Gould, though of course even more handsome and less prone to ingesting dozens of prescription drugs for real or imagined ailments. Her ghost is not a hypochondriac or in the habit of eating one meal a day, usually of scrambled eggs submerged in ketchup.

  Roger seems not to have been flashy and vain while still alive, despite his public career. He says that he did not spend frivolously or waste time on gossip, nor did he grumble about his neighbors when they failed to mow the front lawn before its dandelions turned to puffballs or forgot to take in their garbage cans from the curb. He wasn’t particularly concerned with what others thought of him when he questioned the ruling class’s habit of prescribing strenuous work for everyone but themselves either. Even now he does not seem to bear any serious grudges, unlike Brian, who often complains bitterly about noisy children, his richer younger brother, and the clerks at the bank who continue to ask for his ID when he makes a withdrawal, despite the fact he has been a customer there for six and a half goddamn years!

  Unlike Roger, Brian also frequently forgets to ask about her day. Though Brian is only forty-three, four years older than Merilee, he is affably absentminded, as if he were an aging uncle who can’t remember what his nieces and nephews do for a living, or whether they went to college. As for herself, she no longer remembers if it was she or Brian who made the first move on the back porch at a mutual friend’s New Year’s party, if it was she who leaned close for an awkward kiss that quickly became heated. Afterward, his skin looked mottled, almost angry.