by Daniel Smith
Finally the music stops, Esther throws back her head, and the room applauds. “I took a belly dancing class in college,” she says, as if this somehow explains the performance. As if, had she taken fencing instead, I might now be bleeding from multiple stab wounds.
Alcohol accelerates time; marijuana slows it down. Combine the two and time skips, hops, and twists. When in the night was it that, having gone to empty my bladder, I turned around in the coffin-sized bathroom to find that I was sharing it with Esther, who pressed her mouth to mine and ran her tongue along my teeth?
“Surprised?” she asked when she pulled away.
No. Well, no and yes. I wasn’t surprised that she kissed me—the preliminaries had after all been pretty forceful. I was surprised, insofar as I retained the capacity for surprise in my state, by how inexorable it all felt. Your average sixteen-year-old heterosexual boy has the very lowest of erotic thresholds; a picture of Mother Teresa without her habit is enough to set off a minor testicular alarm. For Esther, however, I was unable to muster even the slightest sexual attraction, not even blitzed. Something in me, something stemming from the primary sexual senses—smell and taste, the hormonal faculties—balked. I didn’t like the odor of it all. Yet I was shocked to find that none of this seemed to matter as far as what was going to happen was concerned. Not even physical disinterest could void the remainder of the script, redact and replace whatever ending had already been written for an evening that—and here was the crux of the problem—I found fascinatingly dramatic. Here I was. Here I was.
In the living room, the party was winding down. The music was mellower, softer. Exit music. Justin and Jesse were sunk into the couch with half-moon eyes, holding half-forgotten beers. I joined them. Esther, cross-armed in the kitchen, conferred with the friends that were left, nodded, crossed the room to where we sat, squeezed into the cushions between me and Jesse, and with frightful purpose said, “We’re going to leave now. We’re going to a bar. You can’t come, obviously. But I’m going to come back. I’m going to pick up a girl and bring her here. Do you want to stay? I want you to stay.”
“I’ll stay,” Jesse said.
She was solemn. “The offer is only for Daniel.”
Daniel. It was a nice touch. She’d been staring at me the whole time she was speaking. The look on her face was sisterly, at once conspiratorial and oddly benign. I hadn’t the foggiest notion of how I was supposed to answer. Were there questions that needed asking? Information to be gathered before issuing a response? Was there something I was missing?
“OK,” I said.
“OK,” she said. “We’re going to go then. Stay right here.”
And they all left. Esther and the gay men in the kitchen and, looking concerned, Jesse and Justin. On the way out someone turned off the lights.
I don’t know how long I sat in the dark before the door opened and Esther entered with an olive-skinned beauty with a head of dark ringlets. She took one look at me, a strange, bleary-eyed boy, and let out a sharp laugh. Then she took off her coat, turned to Esther, and kissed her.
Ah, I thought.
• • •
Don’t look at me. I’m ridiculous. I’m pathetic. I’m hopeless. I’m the late chapters of the Kama Sutra illustrated in the style of Archie Pals ’n’ Gals. I should have watched more pornography. I should have done push-ups, chin-ups, sit-ups, leg presses, dead lifts. I should have drunk less. I should have drunk more. I should have masturbated less. I should have masturbated more.
Don’t look at me. Let me finish. Let me concentrate on my assignment. Let me try to read the cues, the limbs, the data. Let me figure out what this square sheet of rubber is for; let me stretch it just enough so that it does not rip. (Oops.) Let me lean on my hands, my elbows, my forearms, my forehead, your chest. (Can I lean on your chest?) Let me close my eyes. I think it will help if I close my eyes.
When are we done? I don’t know when we are done. Are we done when I am done? Are we done when you are done? When she is done? When all of us are done? Do I have to make both of you done? When are you done? How do I know when you are done?
Now? We’re done now? That’s, well . . . all right. OK. Yes, thank you. That’s nice. Thank you. I thought so, too. Ha! That’s funny. Ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Yes, thank you. I would love a piece of gum.
Hmm? Oh, yes, please do. That would be great. It feels late. What time is it? Really? Really? Wow. Oof. So . . . what should I do, then? Should I go outside? No, I think I know where I’m going. If they can get me back to campus I can find my way. I have money, yeah, I think I have enough. How much will it be? . . . Yeah, I have enough. Well. OK, then. OK. Yeah, Sunday. I’ll see you Sunday. Right. OK. Right. See you then. Bye-bye.
[Kiss.]
• • •
The way I see it, the remainder of the trip is insignificant. Everything that followed over the next forty hours, all the emotional vacillations—the self-satisfied trip I took in the back of the taxi, my arms draped over the faux-leather seat in a tableau of conquest; the late-night shower in which I was suddenly overcome by the need to scrub myself raw with a fingernail brush and antibacterial soap; the compulsion the next morning to be tight-lipped, shielding what had happened from exposure; the compulsion the next night to brag, mythologizing what had been at best a blur of confused, mechanical heaving; the unpredictable fillips throughout of doubt, amazement, guilt, pride, disgust, anger, lust, self-hatred, self-love . . . none of it matters. None of it matters because in retrospect all of it lies buried beneath the avalanche of what followed. Even the car ride home, with its awkward imperative to make small talk and the breathtaking obliviousness of Esther’s suggestion, made at a rest stop, that we send a postcard to the guys at the bookstore announcing that we’d fucked—even that, looking back, was just a car ride. Toll booths, gas pumps, coffee cups, FM radio. Just a ride.
No, it was only when Esther turned into my cul-de-sac and I pulled my canvas bag from the back of her car that the events of the weekend came sprinting and windmilling from behind to collide definitively with the present, creating the future. It was only then that the events materialized as my new, steadfast mental reality.
The house was quiet. My father was out grocery shopping. Scott was away at college. David was at a friend’s. I’d spent all my life in this house. How many hours beneath this one gray roof? Fifty thousand? A hundred? Once the roof had sprung a leak. Over months, the rainwater seeped into the attic insulation, the sodden fibers pressing down on the ceiling above the stairs, cracking it at the seam. Worrying the split one morning, Scott felt something give above him. He had to hold the ceiling up like Atlas until his arms went numb. Such was the force with which the mass fell at his feet that we were scraping pieces of insulation off the walls, laughing, for days.
In my parents’ bedroom the TV murmured. My mother was sitting cross-legged on the comforter, folding laundry. I noticed my own white socks, my white shirts, my underwear. She smiled a maternal smile when she saw me in the doorway. “Welcome back,” she said. “How was your weekend?”
That’s all it took to make me collapse. It was a flood. Everything convulsed. Everything released. Everything upswelled. It was a sudden, nauseating pivot of the senses, as if someone had injected a poison into my blood that made even the comfortable sights in this reliable sanctum—the walnut jewelry box on the bureau, the carved whirls on the round tips of the bed frame, the last dregs of the day mixing with the lamplight—seem speckled and sharp with malevolence. Incredible panic ruled. I rushed to my mother, weeping. I told her everything. Everything. I told her about the trip, I told her about the party, I told her about the seduction, I told her about the sex. It was reflexive and without will yet still mortifying beyond experience. She cradled me like a baby, wept with me. She rocked me as I asked her, desperate, what had just happened.
“What happened?” she said. “What happened? You were ra
ped! That’s what happened!”
“No.”
“I knew it. I knew I shouldn’t have let you go. Those bitches! That awful bitch!”
“No. No.”
“You were raped, Daniel. It isn’t your fault. It isn’t your fault. You’re a victim. You were raped!”
“No.”
“You were raped! You were statutory raped!”
6.
the dagger
It took some doing, but eventually I managed to extract myself from my mother’s embrace and shuffle off to bed. I felt that what I needed above all else was quiet. I needed space and solitude to understand the spasm that had occurred.
Bed, for me, was a loft my father had constructed out of plywood, two-by-fours, and a scrap of industrial carpeting. The loft’s frame bisected the room’s only window three-quarters of the way up from the sill, leaving a sort of thin rectangular porthole through which, while lying in bed, I could survey a narrow strip of our neighbor’s yard.
This was our crazy neighbor. We all have one. She was raven-haired, ours, manic and unpredictable, a fearsome driver, a terrific shouter-at of relatives, and the owner of two breed-nonspecific dogs into which she appeared to have infused all her lunacy, like some immoral scientific experiment the ASPCA lobbies against. They never stopped running, those dogs. They ran back and forth across the yard, back and forth, from the driveway to the fence, yipping and yapping and whining and thinning out the grass as our neighbor, whose name was Dolores, shrieked at them to be still. This ad hoc dog run, the bane of the cul-de-sac, was my bedside view. It was what I watched, like a prison inmate, whenever there was nothing else to do, and it is what registered on my physical senses as I tried to calm myself, clear my mind, and think.
It was a hopeless effort. My mind refused to cooperate. Every time I thought I had hollowed it out the same mocking memory came rushing in to fill it back up. It was a memory I didn’t even know I had, a piece of debris from a cable television sitcom I liked to watch. The show was about the adventures of an oversexed Manhattan divorcé, and the memory was of a heartfelt monologue the protagonist gives about the loss of his virginity. In the monologue, the protagonist tells how as a boy around my age he’d made love for the first time, to a cherub-faced girl in her father’s basement. The experience had been everything a person could want from such an experience: sweet, sweetly terrifying, vivid, confusing, innocent. There had even been kittens involved. Kittens! A basket of them, crawling around and attacking his feet with their kitten-sharp claws as they (his feet) squirmed and undulated under the blanket. The experience had been wonderful. The excitement had been wonderful. The naïveté had been wonderful. The innocence had been wonderful. The whole point of the monologue was that there had henceforth in the protagonist’s life been nothing more wonderful. For all the sex he got—great sex, imaginative sex, sex involving sporting goods and fresh produce—nothing came close to matching the beauty and purity of that first awkward encounter and nothing ever would. He’d been expelled from the Garden and there was no going back.
But at least he’d been to the Garden! At least he’d seen what it looks like! The terrible message I took from that monologue, which played on a loop in my head as I watched Dolores’s mutts sprint mindlessly back and forth over the same worn strip of ground, was that I had squandered that precious opportunity. A boy, after all, is only given so many cherishable firsts—they’re valuable commodities, those firsts!—and I’d gotten drunk and thrown away the best one. I’d frittered away my birthright as a privileged American male. “Rape!” my vengeful mother had cried. “Rape!” And her invocation of that most innocence-murdering of crimes only increased my anxiety—not because I believed the crime of rape had been committed against me, but because I believed that, in a vital way, I had committed rape against myself. If rape is having sex with someone against that person’s will then I was quite clearly a victim. But no one had violated my will but myself. No one had coerced me but me. I hadn’t wanted to have sex with Esther or that nameless stranger. I’d had no desire. Yet I’d acted. I’d performed—and not badly, or so I was given to understand.
Why? Why had I done it? That was the stone that rankled as I lay in bed. I could almost feel the question lodged in the mattress, as if I were the princess and it were the pea. Guilt at least has a purpose; it tells us we’ve violated some ethical code. Ditto for remorse. Those feelings are educational; they manufacture wisdom. But regret—regret is useless.
Why! I wanted to climb backward into the past. I wanted to burrow back to Friday evening and decline Esther’s offer, nestle drunkenly with my friends on the bus back to the college, safe and sleepy in the bright fluorescent light. Better yet, I wanted to go further back, to when Esther returned to the store, and decline her offer of a ride upstate. Or further, to when she descended on my town and my life, and adopt a more aloof demeanor, one that would ward her off, one that would truly be wise beyond my years. Or further, to the simpler days at the grocery store. Further, to elementary school, to terrors unformed and unreflected, to car trips, stuffed animals, Legos, Lincoln Logs, footie pajamas, picture books, to a time when adulthood meant the hushed rumble of voices floating from the kitchen up the stairs, down the hallway, and through the crack at the foot of my door. To a time when you could be drawn into your mother’s arms, held, and actually feel comfort.
But no. No. If I had any doubts left that my days of feeling soothed were over, they evaporated when a soft knock sounded, the door creaked open, and my father entered my room. He wore a look of awkward concern, of some grim parental duty in the offing. He must have felt awful. It falls on fathers to prepare sons for erotic life, and his chance was as lost as I felt my innocence to be. There had been only one conversation, a few years earlier, and it had been too delicate, too obliquely executed, to make much of an impression. It occurred in his car. We’d gone to the store to pick up ingredients for dinner, and when we parked my father left the key in the ignition for a minute so that we could listen to the end of the song playing on the radio: “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”
You got to do what you can
And let Mother Nature do the rest
Ain’t no doubt about it
We were doubly blessed,
’Cause we were barely seventeen
And we were barely dressed.
When the song was over he turned off the car, turned to me, and asked, “Do you know what that song is about?”
I honestly didn’t. If I thought anything I thought it was about baseball, because of the famous rounding-the-bases commentary in the middle. As for all the heavy panting, I just figured you had to run pretty quick to get an inside-the-park home run. My father must have picked up on my confusion, because before I could answer he said, “It’s about teen lust.”
And that, in its totality, was the sex talk. After that we went looking for a sturdy shopping cart. And now here my father was, three years later, my big-hearted, soon-to-be-dead father, faultless, blameless, yet looking wretched.
“Mom told me what happened,” he said.
Outside the dogs and Dolores were still at it, sprinting and shouting, shouting and sprinting.
“You know,” he said, “I lost my virginity in less-than-desirable circumstances, too. I was in the army. Well, the reserves. We had leave from base for a couple of days and my friends convinced me to go to a prostitute. To a hooker . . . I lost my virginity to a hooker.”
Despite the neighborhood’s collective distaste, I’d always harbored a secret admiration for Dolores’s dogs. Their total refusal to submit to discipline, to so much as acknowledge a command, had a perverse honor to it. On more than one occasion, leashed to a fence post, they’d simply chewed through their cords and resumed their sprinting. But now I found myself pitying their master. Poor, inept Dolores. She had all the tools and none of the talent. Against the energy of her beasts she could do little but scream herself mute.
“It wasn’t great,” my father said. “But it wa
sn’t terrible. It just . . . well, it just was.”
His head was level with mine. I stayed as still as possible.
“Pal? Dan? Is there anything I can do?”
After a while when I didn’t answer my father walked out and closed the door behind him, leaving me alone with the dogs.
• • •
Of course I had to go to school. Technically I wasn’t sick—not in a way the administration of John F. Kennedy High School could be made to understand without a rather humiliating high-level meeting. But I certainly felt sick. Throughout all the anxieties of my childhood, I’d never experienced anything remotely like this. It felt exactly like what I figured mental illness must feel like. And not just any mental illness. Not some romantic melancholy or discrete phobia. What it felt like was that I had been suddenly afflicted with a kind of diluted strain of paranoid psychosis, as if my head had been stripped bare so that everything—all stimuli, all perception, all information, all thought—was a grave danger, an assault on consciousness itself. In this powerful new state, in which memory and disgust banded together like some neurological death squad to hack apart serenity, there was, as in the most paralyzing cases of schizophrenia, nothing in the world that did not speak to my anguish. Everything was a malignant reference to what I wished had not happened and to the way I now felt. Everything was mockery. I couldn’t even watch a commercial on television, because the mere sight of children playing on a swing set reminded me of the innocence I believed I had lost.
It was a state of total and isolating self-reference. I roamed the locker-lined hallways with a glassy sheen to my eyes—haunted, insomniac, shoulders hunched and chest caved in a perpetual cower, as if I were always ready for a car to backfire and send me dropping to the ground. I avoided conversation. I avoided friends, Justin in particular. I avoided physical contact. I avoided eye contact. I was totally focused on what was going on inside me.
