The Case of Lena S.

by David Bergen

  She said, “My father’s a bully. I’m not interested in sex these days. That worries me. My doctor says it’s the pills.” Her voice was weak, she seemed wary.

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” Mason said.

  “I’m not. I never think of you.”

  Mason didn’t answer. He could hear Lena breathing.

  “Does that surprise you?” she asked. “Because it shouldn’t.”

  Mason said it didn’t surprise him. He saw his mother’s empty wine glass on the end table by the couch. There was a trace of her lipstick on the rim and he thought of Aldous and he said, “I have no idea what’s going on. You’ve locked yourself away and then you say you never think of me.”

  “Do you like my sister?”

  “Which one?”

  “Rosemary. She said you walked to music lessons together and you were really sweet and all I could think of was when you used to spy on me. Are you following her now?”

  “No, I’m not following her and I don’t like her. Not in that way.”

  “She’s sweet. Not as sexy as me but she’s more stable. You know?” She paused and Mason waited and then she said, “These days the world, people, things, they all disappoint me. I don’t think people are generally very smart. I had a dream the other night and it was way into the future and people then were looking back at us now and laughing. We’re so important. We think we know everything. We don’t. We’re worse than a bunch of baboons. With baboons, at least, the fucking has some order. I could live the life of an ape. Did you know that one male baboon runs the horde?”12

  Mason said he didn’t know that. He said, “You wanna come over here? We could be a horde of two. My mother’s out eating egg foo yong with some guy called Aldous. A thick German.”

  “Where’s your Dad?”

  “Driving taxi tonight.”

  “Really? That’s wild. He’s driving taxi and she’s fucking another man.”

  “I didn’t say they were fucking.”

  “Well, aren’t they?

  Mason paused. “Maybe they are.”

  “Didn’t you ask her?”

  “She told me they had sex twice.”

  “She said that? My mother would never talk about that. Or even do it.”

  “She was mad at me. She said it when she was mad at me.” Mason paused, then asked. “Lena? You wanna come over? I want to be with you.”

  “Aww, Mason. I’ll come. Don’t move, okay?” And she hung up.

  She arrived with cold cheeks and snow on her coat and icy fingers. She threw her hat and scarf and coat across a chair and bent towards Mason and he saw the width of her hips and the band of flesh at her waist and he held her wrists.

  “I’ve escaped,” she said. Her eyes were bright. She’d coloured her hair red.

  “Amazing.”

  “I can’t stay long.”

  He said, “Let’s get undressed.”

  She shook her head but he held her wrists with one hand and put the other hand on her shirt and felt her bra and breast. She allowed this. He unbuttoned her shirt and removed it. She was wearing a cream-coloured bra. He removed her white pants. She didn’t stop him or help him. Her panties were black. She looked older.

  “It’s been so long,” Mason said. He pushed her down on the couch and undid his pants and took them off. He was standing above her and she was looking past him at the ceiling, her hands at her sides. He tugged her panties down past her knees to her ankles and lay down on top of her. She said, “I don’t have a condom.”

  “I’ll pull out,” he said.

  He put himself inside her. She was dry and she winced and went, “Oh.” This excited Mason and he closed his eyes and moved inside her and felt her right breast with his right hand. His arm was like a brace across her chest. He lifted his torso just before he came and he pulled out and squirted on her hip and the couch cushion. He took his T-shirt and wiped her. The couch. He was breathing quickly. Lena was watching him and her stomach moved as she breathed. He lay down on her again, his head against her chest, and they stayed like that without speaking. Lena’s arms were at her sides. Her bare knees, his own bare buttocks, the back of his legs, his mismatched socks. The sound of her heart, her head turned to the side, her panties like manacles at her ankles.

  8 They do. The night before, actually. At one in the morning Mrs. Schellendal straddled her husband and put him inside her and he held her breasts and she reached behind and cupped his balls and cried out and then ducked her head forward and bit his hand and later he said, “I love your cunt.”

  9 She is not being entirely honest. It depends on how you define sex. She sucked him off once in Assiniboine Park, bending across the stick shift of his Boxster, and they had actual penetration twice, once in his apartment in the middle of the afternoon, a day she called in sick, and the other time in the corner of a dark crowded bar, when he took her by surprise from behind. She had allowed this. That surprised him – that she had allowed this – and it surprised her as well. And so, three times.

  10 He did. It was thicker and longer.

  11 “If you want to be a jewel in the church tower, expect the crows to peck at you.” The Schellendal family has heard this before. It reflects Mr. Schellendal’s distrust of ego, his affection for hard work and self-effacement. Later, Mason will ask Lena what her father meant and she will translate: “Who do you think you are?”

  12 Lena is subconsciously borrowing from her doctor, who just the other day told her that some people fear relationships with real live people and can relate only to phantoms of their own fantasies, or to things, or animals. “Are you saying that’s me?” Lena had asked, and the doctor said, “No, not yet. You’re still very much Lena.”

  Mason Crowe – she saw him first in Ms. Abendschade’s class and even then she had decided upon him. That whole spring and summer she let his being penetrate hers. She observed him sitting there when she walked to voice lessons. He was so obvious. Sometimes she wanted to enter the Bagel Shop and face him but she never did. The waiting, the anticipation was a painful pleasure.

  In early September she confronted him outside her house. She said that there was no one home and did he want to come in. She was happy when he said yes. She played piano for him and she was aware of him watching her and she felt naked and wished that both of them were naked. Her hands were trembling but she hid this with jokes and small talk. She explained that she had quit school and she said, “I’m throwing my life away,” but really she was thinking that she would like to touch him. She said she knew everything about him and she listed off his activities and the facts of his life and his surprise pleased her. He didn’t eat the pear she had given him. She said, “You should stay away from me. I am mad.” She took his hand when she said this. He could have told her to do anything and she would have done it. He said, “What do you mean?” She said, “I can tell a hawk from a handsaw, not that kind of mad. More a melancholy sort of mad.”

  One time, when they drove up to get eggs from Koops’, she stopped the van and pulled him into the back and undressed herself and him and she told him that they could have sex. His body was thin and light. She discovered the down on his lower back and said, “Look at you.” She straddled his bum and squeezed blackheads from his shoulders and held them out like trophies for him to see. She liked his smell, the way he walked, his bare feet against the floor of the van, the way he looked at her as if she were a mysterious object, something worth considering. She wanted to fit inside him. She wrote his name everywhere: on bathroom walls, with a pen on the inside of her thighs, in the grease of the grill at The Nook, on cards she never sent.

  She had long legs that were too thin and her left breast was smaller than her right. Her nipples were copper aureoles, slightly bumpy and large. She looked at herself naked in the mirror. Her hips and the slight roundness at her belly that held yards of entrails that carried her shit. Her body was made of water and enzymes and blood. She was not ashamed of her nakedness.13

  Or
his. In those early days, when they were first discovering each other, she studied his dark sac with the mercurial balls that moved, it seemed, on their own, two slippery mouthfuls that carried all those seeds. She knew by heart the texture of his nipples, the hairless chest, the smell of his armpits, the frame of his ribs as he lay down, arms raised and thrown back. Between his anus and his scrotum ran a raised furrow like a perfect line dissecting the fundament, as if a man were an assembly-line product, two halves glued together.

  There were times as they lay together on his bed in the late afternoon when Lena felt the weight of something on her head and during those moments she imagined she was a shell and Mason was a shell and what they had seen and touched, their skin and hair and orifices, all of that was the covering of the empty shell. When this thought arrived she panicked and opened her eyes and sought out Mason and, finding him, was relieved.

  One night she sat in her bedroom with her three sisters and showed them the tattoo she had gotten the day before. It was on the inside of her thigh, just below the crotch, a tiny black anchor, and Margot asked, wide-eyed, “You let a man do that to you?”

  “He was very practical,” Lena said. “I had to forge Mom’s signature for this.”

  “You have so much hair,” Margot said.

  Rosemary went, “Gaawd.”

  “Isn’t it pretty?” Lena asked.

  Margot said that she didn’t think it was pretty. “Looks like Devon Ashcombe’s head,” she said.

  “No,” Lena said, “I mean the tattoo.”

  “Mom’ll kill you if she sees that,” Rosemary said.

  “How’s she gonna see it?” Lena asked. She stood by the mirror and inspected her back. There was a pimple near her shoulder blade. In the mirror she saw Rosemary’s head and neck, her small nose.

  “Do you love Mason?” Emily asked.

  “Absolutely,” Lena said.

  “Have you seen him naked?”

  Margot and Rosemary giggled, though they waited for the answer.

  “Hmmm hmmm.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Do you like him better with clothes on or with clothes off?” This was still Emily, quite serious.

  “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what we’re doing.”

  Margot asked, “Have you had sex?”

  “It’s obvious,”Rosemary said.

  Margot asked, “Does it hurt?”

  Lena said no, though there were times when it was slightly uncomfortable, like opening your mouth too wide for the dentist.

  “Is he circumcised?” Margot asked.

  “What’s that?” Emily asked.

  Rosemary explained. She was clinical and moved her hands about.

  Margot said she’d watched a porno at Willow Poole’s house and all of them were circumcised. She pronounced “them” with a certain horror.

  “You shouldn’t be watching stuff like that,” Lena said. “You’re barely thirteen and what they show you is warped.” She studied her face in the mirror. Her sisters watched her. She could see all three of them reversed in the mirror. She said, “I shouldn’t have told you about Mason. He wouldn’t like it.”

  “Daddy’ll kill you,” Emily said.

  “He can’t do anything. That’s important to understand. Mom and Dad are helpless. Just look in their eyes when you say you aren’t going to obey. They’re scared.” She took a pair of jeans from her drawer and sat on the edge of the bed. Pushed a foot through one leg and paused to examine her toes.

  Rosemary said, “Look who’s brave. You wouldn’t be talking so big if you knew that Mom and Dad were talking about sending you away somewhere.”

  Lena turned towards Rosemary, her one leg still bare. “What are you talking about, send me away. I’m not a pet. They can’t.” She stood and faced all three sisters. Saw them, at that moment, as Russian dolls, with her as the biggest doll. She was pleased by the poetry in the image but the responsibility frightened her. She said, “Oh,” and then she finished putting on her jeans and asked, “When did they say that?”

  Rosemary hugged her knees and said, “They were just talking. I overheard them. I’m sorry, Lena.”

  Lena thought about where she could be sent. She wanted to see Mason. To hold him. She sighed and said, “Anyways, why would Mom and Dad send me away? They like to keep track of me. You three are lucky, you know. I’m doing all the work here. Emily, you’re especially lucky.” Emily looked up with anticipation. “By the time you’re my age, Mom and Dad’ll be completely broken. That’s what happens. What else did Dad say?”

  Rosemary lifted her small shoulders. She lay down on the bed and reached up a hand and played with Margot’s hair. “He said you’re depressed.”

  “Oh, he’s so smart. Isn’t he? Isn’t he smart? Depressed. What does he know? Because I dropped out of school? Because I think? I don’t want to talk about him. Mason’s Dad? He just leaves everybody alone. That we could be so lucky.”

  At the dinner table that evening Lena told her father she was thinking of quitting her job at The Nook. When she said this she looked at him and waited for his answer. He put his fork and knife down and looked over at Lena’s mother and then back at Lena and said, “Do we want to talk about this now?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lena’s mother said. “It’s not fair to the girls and it certainly isn’t fair to me. I worked hard at this meal and I don’t want it ruined by an argument.”

  “Fine, get out your Palm Pilot, Dad. Let’s make an appointment.”

  “Don’t, Lena.” This was her mother.

  Her father nodded slowly. He said, “You could go back to school.”

  “I’m doing correspondence, Dad. Remember? Right now I’m writing an essay on Robert Herrick. Do you know who Robert Herrick is?”

  “Don’t be rude, Lena,” her mother said.

  Lena ignored her. She said, “School is a factory. The world likes factories. I’m not in favour of them.”

  “We worry about your health,” her father said. “And spending time with Mason. You don’t need uncertainty in your life. You know what happened last time with that Kevin boy. For whatever reason you obsess and the obsession makes you sad and we hate to see you sad.”

  “Not sad. Not sad. Insane, you mean. I embarrass you, don’t I?”

  “You aren’t insane, Lena. That’s some kind of romantic notion you like to promote. You were depressed. I won’t say more. Not now.”

  Margot said she was tired.

  Lena looked at her family and said they should take a vote. “Who thinks I’m insane?”

  “Stop it, Lena.” Rosemary was staring at the table as she said this.

  Lena paused. She stood. “Thanks,” she said, and she went up to her room and looked out the window down onto the street. She bit her hand, hard, and studied the marks her teeth had left. Emily began to practise piano. Someone was putting dishes in the dishwasher. Outside it had begun to snow, lightly, and the streetlights offered up the swirling flakes. Her mother knocked on the door and called out but Lena didn’t answer. Her mother said her name once more and then moved back down the hall and Lena imagined her perfect legs, the thighs pushing against the dark skirt she’d been wearing, the white blouse and her hair pulled back and the hard lines of her jaw. She was good-looking. Once, at a neighbourhood party, Lena had seen her mother play a role in a skit with a neighbour, Mr. Shelton. They had held hands and whimpered and at that moment, with an overwhelming sorrow, Lena had pictured Mr. Shelton unbuttoning her mother’s blouse.

  She wished, sometimes, that she was as beautiful as her mother. She put her finger against the cold glass of the window. Wrote her name in the frost. She sat on her bed and looked at her sketchbook, the self-portrait she’d done months ago, back when she’d been full of hope and brilliance. All the parts of her body chopped up and laid out and labelled. It didn’t seem so brilliant now. It was too obvious. She placed the book back under her bed and went downs
tairs and put on her jacket and stood in the darkness of the foyer. Her mother was in the family room and called out but Lena ignored her. She went outside and walked down to the park bench by the river and she sat down and smoked a cigarette. She could see into the uncovered windows of the house beside the park and there was a man standing at the sink talking to someone she couldn’t see. Once, a hand appeared and touched his shoulder, but then it disappeared, and finally the man drew the blind on the window and he disappeared as well. The falling snow had covered her shoulders, her head, and her thighs. She stood and walked over the bridge and went to Mason’s house. When he answered the door she held his hands and said, “I wanted to surprise you.” He took her in to the living room where they sat and watched TV. Lena put her head against Mason’s shoulder. Mason’s mother entered the room and offered Lena something to drink and eat but Lena said thanks, she’d just eaten. She said, “I like your bracelet, Mrs. Crowe.”

  “Oh,” Mason’s mother looked at her wrist and then at Lena and said, “Thank you.”

  When they were alone again, Lena said, “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

  She took his hand and put it on her breast. She said, “What do you like about me? My body, I mean.”

  “Everything,” Mason said. “I like everything.”

  “Be specific,” Lena said. “Me, I like your hands. I like your bum. I like the hair under your arms.” She paused. “So, what do you like?”

  Mason looked at his hand. “I like this. Your breasts.”

  “Ya? What else?”

  “And I like feeling your head with my hands when we have sex. Sometimes it’s like your head is everything, even though I’m inside you. You know? I wonder what you’re thinking about when we’re doing it. Or if you’re even thinking. That’s why I like holding your head.”

  “That’s nice,” Lena whispered. “Tell me more.”

  “It’s all so thin,” Mason said. “I mean the wall between the outside and the inside.” He touched Lena’s arm. “What we’re made of. Sometimes I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that you would allow me to put myself inside you. To me it’s unbelievable. I love you though. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m talking about the act. And then it’s over and we separate and hard as I try I can’t get you back in the same way. Not until the next time.”