by Doyle, K. T.
There were seven of us, six guys and myself. We stood before Matt, each cradling a guitar. I hid in the back row to the far right, just in front of the door so I could make an easy and quick escape if necessary.
We started with a warm-up exercise—reviewing the different chords. Matt had us align our fingers on the combination of strings that formed each chord. Then we were supposed to open strum in down strokes a few times with a guitar pick.
No matter what I tried, I couldn’t do it right. Either my fingers wouldn’t stretch or I was covering one or two strings too many or too few. The beautiful sounds that should’ve emanated from my guitar when I strummed sounded more like the howls of a wounded animal.
Noticing my struggle, Matt walked over and stood behind me. He wrapped his arms around me and placed his hands on top of mine. He pushed his chest hard against my back.
“Like this,” he whispered in my left ear, guiding my fingers. “Take it easy…nice and slow.” His breath tickled my earlobe.
Our fingers moved in unison, entwined as they searched for strings to press and hold and strum. I stared at the long, slender neck of the guitar, suddenly aware of his closeness. I was caught between the hardness of a wooden guitar and the soft embrace of a human body; I was trapped between the need to push away and run and the urge to spin around and kiss him.
He whispered in my ear again. “Got it?”
I nodded.
He released my hands and our fingers untangled. He gave my wrist a soft, parting stroke and then slowly backed away.
Suddenly all my nerve endings were alight with fire and my body tingled as if it had received a bolt of lightening. The burning sensation spread through every inch of me, but was concentrated in my lower abdomen, just below the bellybutton. It was a feeling I hadn’t experienced since my night in the grass with Bobby: the intimate touch of a lover quelling the pang of physical contact.
An hour passed. The guitar lesson was over. I had fudged my way through the whole thing, feeling more lost and overwhelmed every minute.
There was so much to learn. There were riffs and licks and frets and down strokes…and something about arpeggios and hand muting. These were all things Matt said we would learn in time.
What the hell had I been thinking two years before as a junior in high school when I decided to take guitar lessons?
Oh, right. I was trying to impress Bobby. Prove to him that whatever he could do I could do too.
But I didn’t know the first thing about playing the guitar. I couldn’t even read music.
I was in way over my head and suddenly feeling like I had chosen the wrong hobby. I wanted to be a writer, not a musician. Why hadn’t I joined the newspaper staff?
But at the moment I had bigger issues to contend with, like that tingling sensation in my lower abdomen. When Matt caressed my wrist, I felt a spark of mutual attraction, and it made my belly burn.
While everyone put away their guitars and gathered their things to leave, I stood frozen and silent—too afraid to move, too embarrassed to speak. All I could do was stare off into space and wonder what the hell had just happened. A few people brushed passed me on their way out, shouting their good-byes to one another.
Matt and I were alone once again.
He walked over to me. We stood looking at each other for the first time in an hour.
“You plan on giving it back?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“The guitar.”
I looked down and realized I still had the guitar around my neck. “Oh, sorry,” I mumbled, lifting the strap over my head and handing over the guitar.
He leaned it against a nearby chair. “Am I moving too fast?” he asked.
I raised my eyes from his black shirt until I saw the green of his eyes. I tilted my head at him, as if looking at his eyes from a different angle would make me understand what he meant. Moving too fast musically or romantically?
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
His eyebrows furrowed and he looked at me quizzically. “So you don’t know if you were following along?”
“Yes,” I said. “Wait! I mean no! Well, yes and no.” I sighed. “Let me start again.”
He crossed his arms. “Okay.”
“No, you weren’t moving too fast and yes I was following along. Sort of.”
He gave me a crooked smile. “All right.” He dug his keys out of his pocket and hoisted his duffel bag over his shoulder. “See you next week!”
Had I fallen asleep during the lesson and dreamt the part where he pushed himself against me, whispered in my ear, and seductively caressed my wrist? Had he not felt the spark? The chemistry? The attraction?
I did the only thing I could at the moment. I casually grabbed my coat and said goodbye, walking down the stairs as if completely unaffected by what had just happened. Once I reached the kitchen door, though, out of Matt’s sight, I darted through the chandeliered room and burst through the front door into the cold darkness outside. I didn’t stop running until I reached the safety of my dorm room.
II.
I had a party on my seventeenth birthday. The day had been spent opening presents, playing games, and eating lots of cake. Bobby was there, and he brought a few of his friends so that the girls didn’t outnumber the boys. Every time one of my parents tried to enter the room I shooed them away with a wave of my hand. I didn’t want them embarrassing me in front of my friends. Not that it mattered. It happened anyway, the minute I blew out the candles on the cake. My mother sobbed in front of everyone that her little girl was no longer Sweet Sixteen.
Later that evening she tapped her tear reservoir for the second time that day. She didn’t cry happy tears, however. These were angry tears, ones that surfaced from the deepest bowels of her being—the place where wrath befriends your worst fears.
It was the night she confronted her husband about his infidelity; it was the night I learned of my father’s affair.
I heard their fight in the bathroom…that moment of clarity that made her scream…the exact moment when my mother had figured it all out.
She had found a stash of letters scented with perfume. That’s all she told me. To this day, a dozen or so years later, I still don’t know who they were from, what they said, how many there were, or how my mother found them. She never told me any of that. To this day we still don’t talk about it. All I know is that one piece of information she shared with me—and that happened after I had already figured it out on my own.
While lying in bed that cool spring night, listening to my Walkman in the dark, I heard a commotion in the hallway outside my room. Then I saw shadows pass underneath the door. A minute later I heard the scream.
It wasn’t a scream of fear, but certainly not one of anxious joy, like the sound your throat makes when you crest a hill and go hurtling down the tracks of a roller coaster. This was a scream of release—of dreams shattered and nightmares confirmed.
I switched the music off and removed the headphones to listen for more sounds.
All seemed quiet. Pulling the layers of sheets and blankets down with one swoop, I swung my legs out over the edge of the bed and dug my toes hard into the fibers of the carpet. The welcoming softness beneath my feet would be the only comfort I enjoyed that evening.
My bedroom was tucked away in the corner of the house on the second floor. Even if the door was open a crack, the view from my room allowed me to see the entire hallway, including the steps right outside my room that led downstairs, all the way down to the bathroom at the other end of the hallway.
I crept across the floor, braced myself against the doorframe, and pressed one ear to the closed door. I heard only hollow, muffled voices. My parents were arguing, but over what I was still unsure. Do I really want to know? I thought. Should I just crawl back into bed, stuff a pillow over my head and escape into the sweet oblivion of sleep?
I decided I had to know.
I opened t
he door an inch, enough so that I could peer one eye through the crack. And that is where I stood, transfixed.
“Our daughter, Paul!” my mother hissed. “Do you know what this will do to her?”
I heard the whisper clearly, floating in the air and echoing off the tiled bathroom walls. And I heard what sounded like the rustling of paper forcibly being shaken. But I could not see my parents’ bodies; the half-open bathroom door obscured them from my view. I saw only long shadows cast on the floor.
“Claudia, I’m sorry. I—”
“I’m your wife!” my mother interrupted. “I just don’t understand why! How could you do this?” She released all her anger on my father. “WHO IS SHE?” she demanded.
And then, finally, I understood.
My father didn’t answer. His shadow danced on the floor, flooding the room with guilt.
My brain was also being flooded—with shock, with disbelief, with doubt.
Was it true? Was my father cheating on my mother? How could that be? I thought I knew everything about my father. I thought there were no secrets between us.
Suddenly I felt dizzy. My room began to move. The hallway became a long, spinning tunnel in a fun house. All I saw before me were psychedelic colors floating and spinning in space. I tried desperately to focus my eyes at the end of the tunnel, at the shadows of my parents in the bathroom at the end of the hall.
My vision finally connected. The shadows were jumping frantically and wouldn’t stand still. Then, like the turn of a knob on a blender, the shadows moved faster and faster, pulsing and throbbing and twisting like a whirlwind, until they started to spin out of control and I was left with nothing to do but watch until finally…
…There was a loud ripping noise that pierced the confines of the bathroom. It traveled out into the hallway, through the crack of my bedroom door, and settled like a snap on my eardrum. My shoulders flinched instinctively.
All became silent and still. The shadows clung motionless to the floor, the whispers struck mute from the blow. I relaxed my shoulders and waited. As if in slow motion, shards of paper fluttered down like snowflakes, blanketing the shadows on the bathroom floor.
I closed the door slowly, tiptoed across the carpet and crawled into bed. If there were more whispery voices to be heard in the bathroom, I was unaware. I closed my eyes and, numb with emotion and pained for sleep, drifted off into a sweet oblivion.
CHAPTER 4
I.
I woke to the humming buzz of my alarm clock, as I had countless days before in Kessler Hall, the all-girl dormitory.
It was 7:00 a.m.
The sun was starting to shine, but it wasn’t quite high enough in the sky to reach the third floor window. Our room was bathed in a hazy gray.
I reached across to shut off the radio, pausing long enough to hear the weather forecast for partly sunny skies and a high of fifty degrees. Bleary-eyed, I looked across the room at the other bed. The pillows were firmly plumped and a teddy bear lay in the middle of the neatly folded bedspread.
Lisa was out for her morning jog with Adam.
It hadn’t taken my roommate long to find a boyfriend. Two weeks, to be precise. She met him in her Early Childhood Development class. Adam was a sophomore and an education major, like her. He also ran track. Hurdles, I think. And maybe the fifty-yard dash.
Every morning Adam and three of his track friends went for a jog around campus. Lisa thought it might be fun to take up jogging too, so she awoke early every day to join them.
She was always quiet in doing so, and not just out of courtesy. It was just her nature. Between her early morning jogs, her full course load of classes, and lots of time spent with Adam, Lisa was a busy girl. There were days when I didn’t see her at all. I wondered if this was partly the reason why we got along so well.
I took another glance across the room at her bed and let my head slam back down on the pillow. What day is it? I thought. I was suddenly reminded by the low rumbling of the trash truck and the loud crash as it emptied the dumpster below.
It was Tuesday.
In a fully alert state now I remembered what happened the evening before with Matt. It made me cringe, and I curled up in a ball on my side. I was seeking the soft comfort of the warm flannel sheets. I smothered my face in the pillow, hoping the pressure would force the image from my brain of Matt’s beautiful deep green eyes.
I was attracted to him. I wanted him. I wanted to be with him, figure him out, explore his mysteries. I suddenly cared more about learning everything there was to know about Matthew Levine than I did about learning to play the guitar.
But was I imagining things? Did he not feel an attraction to me? Why had he come on to me and then pretended it never happened?
Six days until I saw Matt again for another guitar lesson and then I could find out. Six days, I thought, because I was on a campus with 5,000 other students. What was the likelihood of bumping into him before then? Hell, I didn’t even know if he lived on campus.
Six days, then.
I yanked the covers back and forced myself out of bed.
…
Lisa had class that evening. I decided to study for about an hour and then watch TV until she got back. No doubt she would have more stories about her senile Early Childhood Education professor she’d want to share.
I left the door open. Several girls shuffled past in baggy pajamas and Big Bird and Scooby-Doo slippers, whispering under their breaths. Then a barefoot girl wrapped in only a towel whizzed by, carrying a bucket of toiletries. Several minutes later a dozen or so girls sauntered by wearing tight clothing and strong perfume and heavy make-up, gossiping about the frat party they were about to attend.
I was just settling in to study my biology notes when the phone rang. It sat next to my bed on a nightstand. I let it ring twice before picking it up.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Alex?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Matt. From yesterday.”
The tingling sensation in my lower abdomen arose almost immediately and my heart started to pound. “Hi.”
“Is it okay that I called?”
“Sure. How did you get…” My thoughts interrupted my words and I couldn’t finish asking the question.
“Your number? I called the front desk and asked for it.”
“How did you know I lived in Kessler?” I asked.
Visions suddenly emerged in my head, romantic scenes of Matt running through the cold after me after our awkward guitar lesson, following me into my dorm, searching frantically through the hallways in a desperate attempt to confess his attraction for me after all, calling out my name. I hear his voice and emerge from my room, and the two of us stand face to face, silent. And then, breathless and reeling and shaking for want of release, he grabs me and kisses me in the middle of the hallway in front of a dozen giggling girls.
I hardly knew Matt at all, but even so, I should’ve known he didn’t have to go to great lengths to find me. A little common sense was all it took.
“Aren’t most freshman chicks assigned to Kessler?” he asked, as if this was a no-brainer, rule number one in the Kilmore University handbook.
The tingling sensation in my abdomen abruptly stopped. “Usually.”
“Anyway,” he said, “got a minute?”
“Sure.”
“Listen, the group guitar lessons aren’t going to help you much.”
“Um, okay,” I said, taken aback by his abruptness.
“The guys in the class have been taking lessons since the beginning of the semester.”
Suddenly I had the feeling he was trying to get rid of me. He was probably thinking I was in over my head for wanting to play the guitar, that after one lesson he knew I didn’t have a knack for it, that I was a complete idiot for trying, and now wanted nothing to do with me. I was a waste of his time.
I wondered if I should plead my case, admit that I knew it would take time but that eventually I’d catch up, that I’m not a lost cau
se. And I wondered if I could do all that without sounding desperate and sad and weak.
“W-what are you suggesting?” I stammered.
“Private lessons.”
“Private lessons? Like, just you and me?”
“Just you and me.”
My body once again tingled all over. I was shocked and a little confused, but I suddenly wanted what he wanted.
“Okay, yes!” I blurted out. It didn’t matter to me what his motive was, and I hadn’t even thought about what was in it for him. All that mattered was seeing him again.
“What are you doing next Monday at six?” he asked.
I glanced over at the calendar on the wall above my desk. “Nothing.”
“Meet me outside Kilmore. After the private lesson you can stick around for the group lesson if you want.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“All right. Well, I gotta go.”
“So I’ll see you Monday at six?”
“You got it.” Then, just as I was preparing to hang up the phone he said, “Wait. One more thing.”
“Yes?”
“How do you feel about sex?”
There was a long pause and some crackling on the phone line.
“What do you mean?” I asked cautiously.
“Well, in exchange for the private guitar lessons I’m giving you…” He trailed off.
“Yes?”
“I thought you could read and edit the report I wrote for my psychology class about human sexual behavior.”
My shoulders slumped, the tension in my body finally released.
“You’re an English major, right?” he asked.
“How’d you know that?”
“The girl at the front desk who answers the phone is real chatty.”
It was a good thing Matt kept talking, because I was completely speechless.
“Words aren’t my thing,” he was saying. “Numbers are. So what do you say?”
I don’t remember saying yes. I don’t remember saying goodbye. I don’t remember hanging up the phone. All I remember is Lisa asking if I was okay when she came in from class. And those green eyes of his.
