by Lev Raphael
“You smell good,” he said, rubbing his face in her hair.
“You got so quiet,” she wondered, her words a sort of smile.
“My first time was pretty bad.” Stefan felt instantly released of a burden. “I wanted to so much—” He made himself continue: “We never even did it.”
“Well I couldn’t the first time. Frank and I tried but he just couldn’t get through and I bled—there was blood everywhere, on him, on the bed. God it hurt.”
He pulled Marsha close to feel her against him; she kissed the side of his neck, holding his head tightly. He wondered how this was possible, this miracle of simplicity. The night with Jenny now seemed just a night, no longer a doom he couldn’t escape.
He reached down to place her other hand at the back of his neck.
“You like that?” she breathed, sliding a leg over his. Touching her was so different from being with Louie: slower, softer. He reveled in slowly kissing her face and the way she seemed to open up to him, in stroking and kissing her large breasts, discovering them, pushing them together and burying his face in the cleft, licking and nibbling at her nipples until she moaned, and sliding, sinking down into her, then pulling out as she rolled him onto his back and sat astride him, rocking. Time stopped. They didn’t have to hurry for fear that someone might find them. They were alone, savoring everything. She smelled so good to him—spicy—and the second time, when she guided his head down between her legs, he was surprised at how good it tasted there and how good he could make her feel with just his lips, his tongue. It excited him to think that he had just been inside her. She called his name, which had never sounded so rich and warm.
It was a long night and even when Marsha finally fell asleep, he couldn’t, but held on to her as her body twitched and settled into sleep. He pulled the covers close; his mind was all hazy, but this wasn’t the fog that covered pain—it was different, like lying in the sun so long there was only the heat, the smell of it, the feel and sound of it.
He wanted to touch Marsha, learn more of her, but he had to let her sleep. Some time later, perhaps he’d slept, perhaps he hadn’t, she woke and moved against him, silently, and this time they said nothing, just held each other tighter and tighter until sleep.
In the morning he felt awkward and out of place sitting up looking around for something to put on—his clothes were everywhere.
Marsha appeared at the door in a large blue man-tailored shirt. She stepped over to the bed, leaned down for a kiss.
“What time is it?” he asked when she broke away.
“Seven.”
He groaned.
Marsha opened her closet and tossed him a black quilted robe. “It’s real big on me,” she offered. He slipped it on, pulled the belt tight; it covered enough of him, and he held out his arms. Marsha stood at the bed in his arms for a while, one hand firm at the back of his neck. She slipped a probing finger inside his robe. “We could have breakfast, or we could have this,” she drawled.
When he got back to his room a sign stretched across the door: *first* *score*. He ripped it down and opened the door. Gray was absorbed in the Boston Globe. Stefan crumpled the sign and shoved it into the wastepaper basket, embarrassed, annoyed, and strangely pleased—perhaps that was the most annoying, to enjoy publicity that made Marsha just “scoring.”
“I told them you wouldn’t like it,” Gray observed.
“It’s private.”
Gray shrugged. “Not when you leave a room full of people. And don’t come back. This is a dorm, people see stuff, talk.”
“They shouldn’t,” Stefan insisted, but he sounded so petulant he had to shrug, and Gray nodded. Stefan wanted to talk about Marsha, and didn’t want to; he took part of the paper and sat at his desk trying to read. Somewhere inside, though, he was writing letters to no one in particular, each of which began with “I met—” He marveled at how breakfast had been so liberating, fussing in her small bright kitchen, playing love songs on her stereo. Marsha lived in a small apartment but it was so full of books and pictures and plants and lamps and pillows it seemed large, each small thing opening up to the world of her past. A bit like the del Greco’s apartment.
“Frank gave me that,” she’d said when he pointed or asked. “That was my mother’s,” she’d smile and tell a little story about the green alabaster box, the framed Rosetti print, the spider plant; everything, even her large oak desk, had a history.
“I brought all this stuff from Rochester,” she explained. “We had a big place.”
“You and Frank?”
She nodded.
“Do you think about him?”
Marsha shrugged, played with her hair. They sat after their eggs and bacon on a low brown pillow-rich couch, watching the sun gradually light up different parts of the room.
“It’s funny, sometimes I can almost feel him, like he’s just down the street, and there’s times I can’t believe I loved him, like I wonder who that was. It’s sure good to get the hell out when you’re someplace bad. Lots of people say you should ‘Stay and face it’ but that’s bullshit, it takes a long time before you can slow down running from what happened.” She laughed. “Listen to me, I’m such an expert.”
“What does Frank do?”
“He sells dope, and thinks he’s in the peace movement,” Marsha frowned.
“Do you have a picture of him?”
Marsha shook her head. “Threw them all out. And the letters too.”
“Really?”
“I didn’t want them lying around where I could find them. A lamp’s different—even if someone gave it to you after a while it stops being theirs, it’s got its own reasons.”
Stefan thought of the letter Jenny sent him that he never read but just threw away, and that made him angry.
“Do you get mad at Frank ever?”
“For sure. At him, at me, at the whole mess.”
Now, in his dorm room, last night and their day together seemed amazing and unreal; he couldn’t picture himself with her, so different and changed, open. Maybe it was leaving home, maybe that was the difference, what let him relax.
I won’t hide from Marsha, Stefan promised himself, and then felt scared—if he didn’t hide he wouldn’t be safe, there wouldn’t be enough between them to keep them separate. He glanced up to find Gray watching him.
“You look dazed,” Gray observed.
He had no classes Monday so he walked into town to see Marsha at work. Phases was a large gleaming-floored hip supermarket, selling records, discreetly worn old clothes, paraphernalia, plants, window shades, art prints, candles, and even panty hose. Marsha worked in the record section at the far end of the store and Stefan dawdled near the door, watching her at the register. She had on a green peasant blouse and large hoop earrings, really looking the gypsy today. She was striking, shaded, with a shifting mobile face that he thought he could look and look at and still be surprised by.
Stefan finally drifted from the scarf display to where she leaned on the high black register. Marsha turned, grinning: “You like the scarves?”
“You saw me?” He reached to squeeze her hand, leaned down for a kiss.
“It wasn’t yo’ mama I saw.”
“When do you get off?” Then he blushed. “I mean—”
“I know. In an hour. I’m going to campus to meet a friend.”
“Oh.”
“She’s in trouble. But I can come to your dorm after.”
“Great.”
“Now don’t think you can chat me up and not buy something,” she warned.
They talked through the next hour and only three customers interrupted.
“I need some posters,” he remembered before Marsha was ready to go, but inspecting the bins didn’t help: Chagall? Bogey? 65 Bridges to New York? He couldn’t decide what to put on his walls.
“Hire a decorator,” Marsha suggested as they walked to her weathered red Mustang, their words misting in the air around them.
They said nothing o
n the drive in and the foot of car seat between them seemed a grave distance. Why did she like him? he suddenly wondered, afraid, afraid she wouldn’t be interested in him for long. He was too young; hadn’t it gone too well too quickly? Wasn’t something awful bound to happen?
When she dropped him off at his dorm he watched her drive away feeling gloomy and cold. It was good so far—how could it stay that way?
Upstairs Stefan lay down in a fog. Gray came in humming; “I’m going to dinner early.”
“I’ll wait.”
On Stefan’s desk glaringly open books reminded him he had a paper to start tonight and four chapters of sociology. When Gray left he rolled over and tried to sleep.
There was knocking.
“Stefan?”
He sat up. More knocking. “Come in.”
“Were you sleeping?” Marsha clucked.
He rubbed his eyes and face, feeling very dim. “Not really.” Marsha took off her down parka and hung it on the back of his desk chair—this annoyed him for some reason. The room seemed very small.
She pointed at his desk. “That your mom and dad?”
“No.”
She started at his tone.
“Sorry,” he tried.
She frowned. “What’s up?”
He hesitated, but then knew he could say it. “Scared, I guess.”
She nodded quickly. “Me too.”
“You?”
“Me. For a long time I didn’t want anyone to touch me ever again, just the idea made me pissed. I wanted to be left alone.”
He rose and went to her, took her hands; touching Marsha banished the murkiness.
“It’s really hard sometimes to enjoy what you can have,” she murmured as he hugged her, rested his chin on her head, breathing in the spicy scent of her hair.
“Gray’s at dinner,” Stefan said, smiling.
“Terrific!” Marsha locked the door, and he pushed her back against it, sliding a hand into her jeans where she was already a little wet. Just the feel of his fingers in her got him hard. She caught her breath, closed her eyes, and he pulled down her jeans, crouched in front of her to bury his face. “Come on,” she said, and he unzipped and plunged into her, rocking against the door, not caring that they could probably be seen from the dorm across the courtyard.
A few days later he got a call from Sasha who wanted to see how he was. It embarrassed Stefan, especially since the stereo was playing a sonata Sasha had taught him, but he had only listened to the pure lines of it without thinking of his uncle. They talked for a while and Stefan promised to write that week.
He hadn’t called or written to Brooklyn either, or thanked his father for the check. Marsha had come between him and his parents—all four of them. Stefan hurried some notes, sealed and stamped them to take downstairs, but they said almost nothing because he kept thinking of Marsha’s hungriest smile.
He liked walking across campus or in town with an arm around her, or holding hands. He liked kissing her whenever he wanted, wherever they were. It was a freedom he hadn’t known he was missing. He liked waiting on campus for Marsha, in the Hall of Languages, or one of the corkboard-lined coffee shops; the waiting relaxed him and he could read or go over notes with concentration that was unlike him.
A lot since he’d met Marsha was unlike him; sometimes he wondered who he was, what he’d become in just a month of being with her. He knew he wasn’t the same, but what did that mean? He couldn’t tell—what he did know was that waiting for Marsha filled and quieted him.
“Hi.” She placed some books on the corner table, sat and leaned to him for a kiss, stroking the back of his neck.
“Why do you like that?” she wondered, eyes glowing curious.
“Well why do you like it when I—?”
Marsha clapped a hand over his mouth. “Let’s not put all my business in the street.”
He kissed her palm and they decided to see a new French movie in town after dinner at her place.
“How was your friend?” he asked, closing the campus paper. Marsha had been seeing her troubled ex-roommate a lot lately.
“Candy? Bad.”
Candy and she had lived in a house at the edge of town last year with four other people from the university but the whole arrangement collapsed because Candy was in love with Tom who lived in the room next to hers; she’d slept with him, disastrously, since it obviously hadn’t meant more than a few nights of not being alone to Tom, and Candy, a year later, was still trying to recover.
“I keep telling her to go somewhere, get out of this dump so she can forget Tom, not ever run into him.”
“What’s he like?”
She grimaced. “One of those beautiful hunky men who makes everyone miserable, especially themselves. He just oozes sex—it’s horrible, and it’s not really his fault.”
Marsha told Stefan that there’d been fights at the house, latenight reconciliations, side-choosing, sneaking around, tension—lots of tension—and an explosion at a party when Candy tried to push Tom off the porch.
“It’s like a soap opera.” Stefan wondered at the brutality of love.
“Except there weren’t any commercials—we could’ve used a station break.”
Later, in bed, Stefan asked: “Why do people get involved like that? I mean your roommate.”
“It’s exciting,” Marsha breathed, at the edge of sleep. She fell asleep and he turned that over and over. Was she right? Marsha rolled onto her back and began snoring in tiny gasps; he nudged her and she stopped. She knew so much about people, had done so much more than he had; it was frustrating to think he knew almost nothing, had been so separate and closed off, held back from everyone around him. Was being with Marsha a real change or would he slip back into the fog without her, lose this new tenuous hold on—what?—life? Stefan turned to her, lay very close stretching an arm across her waist, reassured at least until she woke.
In the morning he was up before her and after he made himself coffee he wandered out to the living room to look for a book. He hadn’t paid much attention to her books before, and now he noticed that most of the ones on the bottom shelf of her bookcase were on Jewish subjects. He sat down on the green rug and pulled at the nearest books to take a look. He knew Marsha’s last name was Gold, but hadn’t asked if she was Jewish, hadn’t even wondered. She had a handful of books on the concentration camps.
“I have a Jewish girlfriend,” he thought. It seemed ridiculous and strange that he had picked her.
“Good morning,” Marsha said coming to join him on the floor. She kissed him and plucked at her robe.
“I didn’t know you were Jewish.”
She peered at him. “It never came up. Is that a problem?”
What should he say? “I’m Jewish too.”
“You are? With a name like Stefan Borowski?”
He nodded, and could feel Marsha curious, alert, though he didn’t look at her.
“I hate being Jewish,” he said.
“Oh God, I know,” she said. “I can’t figure it out myself.”
“What do you mean?”
“I could never do anything as a girl. We were Conservative, so I couldn’t participate in services like the men could, I wasn’t as good as them! So I hated it. I stopped going as soon as I left home.”
He didn’t exactly follow, but he said, “What about now?”
She smiled. “I have no idea. But wait, why do you hate it?”
He breathed in very slowly, and started to tell her about his parents and Sasha, the No-Jew Club, the divorce, finding out from his father how they had all lied to him, being Jewish and too ashamed and betrayed to do anything about it. Every time he was in a library or bookstore he wanted to find the religion section, but couldn’t make himself do it.
The eager, open look on her face pulled him along. Marsha held his hands, sitting opposite him, smoothed his hair, listening, listening, shaking her head, sometimes looking like she might cry.
“What a mess,” she kept mu
ttering.
“And then in New York, if I see one of those guys with the beards and black hats and the curls? I feel like I have to throw up. It’s like, that’s me! They look so gross, and then I think how Jews are pushy and loud, they love money, I wonder if my nose is too Jewish. All this stuff I’ve heard all my life without even knowing it, and it’s inside of me!”
“What do your parents say about it?”
“We don’t talk about anything like that.”
She led him to the kitchen. “Sit down. I’m going to make you a fried egg sandwich, and fresh coffee.” The clatter and mixing smells brought back Sundays as a child. He felt open suddenly to the whole of his past, unable to push any of it away, unable to pretend he lived now, felt now and knew nothing else, nothing deeper.
He ate two sandwiches, and the coffee was a dream. Marsha ate more slowly, chatting about people she worked with, about annoying customers, guys who came on to her, even one girl who had.
“At least I thought so,” Marsha said.
“How can you handle all those customers?”
She shrugged.
“It’d make me nervous.” Stefan imagined himself behind a register, exposed, on trial, not fast enough at the keys.
“Well, I could never be a waitress,” Marsha said, clearing the table, filling the deep sink with hot water. “Keeping all that stuff straight?” She whistled. “Once in Rochester at this little place I asked the girl to bring me another knife ‘cause mine was dirty and she burst into tears.” Marsha shrugged.
They went to sit in the living room, where Marsha had reshelved the books. She turned on the radio very low.
“You know—” He sat with Marsha leaning back against him. “My roommate got all down about his girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend. We were out drinking and back at the dorm he started crying. It was embarrassing to watch.”
“You just watched?” she asked in an undertone.
“No, I tried to help.” He locked his arms around her, feeling much more solid and in control of himself—but it wasn’t rigidity, not anymore.
“Once, when it was really bad with Frank, and I walked out on him, when I came back I slept on the couch the first night and the next morning I woke up crying and I didn’t even care. I was lying with the pillow over my head, crying, it was just so damn hopeless between us and I guess that was when I finally knew it was hopeless. But you know something? Frank was there all the time, standing in the doorway, watching. Watching me cry. He told me later. It amazed me he could watch and not do anything.”
