She moved in the bed, and he lay next to her under the blanket, and they were not quite touching. Leaning up on one elbow, a shadow-shape in the darkness, he tried to kiss her, and missed her mouth. His lips were cold; they pressed her nose, and quickly he moved down. His body seemed to fall against hers. The first sensation was of a kind of sorrow. She realized how little she knew, for all the movies she had seen and the books she had read. She thought again of Mr. Stapleton. Everything was null inside. Dom moved, and was on top of her, his arms on either side of her head, the surprisingly light weight of him along her abdomen and chest. Nothing was happening. He was soft, the rubber had come off, and he lay back over, sighing. She went with him, still kissing his mouth, reaching down to caress him. His prick felt like a formless, furry pod. The shaft was smaller than she had thought it might be, and when she moved her hand along it, there was a slight change. “Come on,” she said. “It’s okay. It’s really okay.”
“I have to put another one on.”
She waited again, while he worked at it. He couldn’t stay erect, and the prophylactics wouldn’t work.
“Forget them,” she said. “Come on.”
“You don’t want a baby.”
“You can pull out. Just pull out, Dom. Come on.” She had reached a moment of determining that she could go through with this, and make it good; she could put the badness in her mind away, and concentrate on him.
There was reluctance in his voice. “Okay.”
“Don’t you want to?”
“I feel so lame with these freaking rubbers lying around. Christ, I can’t even get a rubber on.”
“Come here.” She took his arms and pulled him to her, lying back, and finally she guided him into her. For a few moments there was discomfort as he pushed, and then it felt good, it was fine, it was gliding and smooth and good, and she could let go of thinking; he kept thrusting, and slowly it seemed to play itself out, even as he strove to increase it. He had gone flaccid again, sliding out of her. He put his hand there, his finger, working into her, and manipulating the flesh. She stared into the dark, above the faint outline of him, and tried to allow herself the pleasure of the touch, the tactile warm otherness of him, there in the bed with her. But she was worried; she couldn’t concentrate. He lay over on her once more and pushed, and entered, and moved, and for a while she felt him going deep inside her again, let herself go toward the enjoyment of it for itself, almost separate from him. She strove not to think of anything but this; she whispered his name aloud, opening her legs wider, reaching up to his face. But then he lost it again, dying out of her, so that she moaned with frustration and reached for him, trying to put him back.
“Ow,” he said.
They moved apart. For a few seconds they were just breathing, and outside there was the sound of wind sweeping across the world, thunder drumming in the distances beyond the city. She reached for the lamp by the bed and turned it on, and looked at him.
“Jesus Christ, I’m sorry,” he said, running his hands through his hair.
“Did I do something wrong? What did I do?”
“Nothing. It pinched a little. I’m fine.” He had his back to her.
“What do you want me to do.”
“Get me a doctor?” he said.
“Did I hurt you that bad?”
“Not that kind of doctor.”
She was quiet.
“I’ve been hoping if I could just get talked to by the right person. You know?”
“Tell me what you’re feeling.”
“Not that,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”
“I’m sorry.”
He put his hands behind his head, and stared at the ceiling. “Talk to me.”
“Okay,” she said. But she could think of nothing whatever to say.
“Well?”
“Pick a subject.” She tried to sound casual.
“Nuclear war’s really a scary prospect, isn’t it?”
“That’s keeping it light.”
“Something we agree on.”
“Dominic, do you want to talk about—” She halted.
“Not about this. No. This. You mean this—as in, this?”
“I don’t know what I mean.”
“Tell me what you’re reading.”
“I can’t read anything, lately. I can’t concentrate.”
“I’m reading about Torquemada. The Inquisition. And Bleak House, for the literature final I’m not going to take. I’m reading the Kama-sutra, too. And I still can’t get it right.”
“Something’s been happening to me,” Lily told him. “I can’t explain it. I have this awful space opening out in my soul.”
“I have this big need to get inside something,” he said. “Soon.”
She pulled the blankets back and moved to take him into her mouth. He tasted badly of the latex and lubricant of the rubbers, and so she got up and went quickly, wrapped in the blanket from the bed, across the dorm hall to the bathroom, where she filled a paper cup with warm water and hand soap, then came back and closed the door, ranged herself over him in the bed, and with her hands and the warm soapy water, washed him. She got a towel from the bureau and dried him off, and he was erect again.
“Good,” he said.
Very gently she put everything aside, came back to the bed, and knelt to take him into her mouth. Now he tasted of the soap; she kept going. He lay very still while she worked over him. The shaft went soft once more. His hand caressed the back of her head, so she kept at it for a while, but then her gag reflex started, and she trailed her lips back up his body, to his mouth. His eyes were open and he seemed to be looking at her for some reaction. She stopped.
“Aw, God,” he said, and began to cry.
She wrapped herself in her part of the blanket and waited for him to speak. But he just lay there, quietly crying.
“I’m sorry, Dom,” she said. “Is it something I’m doing wrong?”
“It’s not you.” He sniffled, then covered his face with his hands.
“Tell me what you want me to do,” she said.
“Shut up. I want you to shut up.”
She lay back, legs together, arms at her sides. They were not touching now. Her mind was racing.
“Look,” he said, sitting up. “I’m sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry for. Can’t I do anything?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s supposed to be fairly common the first time,” she told him. “Isn’t it? Nerves and the strangeness of it. I mean, the strange place. This terrible little room—” She halted.
“This isn’t the first time,” he said, low.
She waited.
“Or the second.”
“Well, the first few times. I’m sure—”
He broke in, rising from the bed. “Oh, come on.” He had stood. But then he sat down, hands folded in his lap.
She saw the buttonlike row of bones in the center of his back. “Tell me one of your fantasies. I’ll try and do whatever it is,” she said.
“You don’t understand.”
She thought perhaps she did. “Let’s just lie here and be close,” she said. “We’ve got all night.”
“I’ve got stuff to do.” He had stood, and was putting his clothes back on.
“Dominic, you don’t have to go.”
When he faced her—half in, half out of his pants—she saw that he had clenched his jaw, and there was a resistance in his eyes, a kind of opaqueness that intended itself, keeping her out. He finished getting into the pants, then put the shirt on and buttoned it, without quite returning her look. When he had put his coat on, he walked over and leaned down to kiss her on the cheek.
“I don’t want to see anybody for a while,” he said. Then he turned and strode to the door.
She sat up. “What’re you going to do?”
“Think of it,” he said. “I get to be the one you tell about. I get to be the fumbling virginal boy in your movie or your poem or your play or whatever
the fuck it is that you’re writing.”
“I’m not going to tell anybody anything,” she told him. “How can you—how can you say that? It’s not fair of you to say that.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Okay?”
“You don’t have to be sorry.”
“Oh,” he said. “Are you one of those people who thinks we actually have a choice about what we feel?”
“I mean,” she said, “you don’t have to say it.”
He opened the door, and the light in the hall made it hard to see his face clearly; he was only shadow, standing there, facing the dim lamplight, with the shower of brightness pouring down on him from the hall. “God,” he said. Then he closed the door and was gone.
She got up, wrapped in the blanket, and went to the window to look out. She saw him cross the grassy lawn, slow, hands in his pockets, appearing casual enough, going on with that faintly Chaplinesque gait. When he disappeared beyond the bend in the road across the way, she closed the curtain, and went out into the hall and across to the shower. She spent the better part of an hour washing herself, over and over, standing under the needlelike spray, watching the rivulets of soap trail down the small bulge of her lower abdomen. It had happened now, and she could never take it back, but it had been accomplished in such a strange, unsatisfying, guilty, not-quite-actual way. She was fairly certain of the reasons for his trouble, yet couldn’t shake the sense that she was his trouble; that something in her makeup, something stemming from her first terrifying experience, and something of her present inner lassitude, had stopped him. She had a moment of what she knew to be selfish concentration on the fact that he had said it was not the first time he’d had the trouble. Then she went about the practical business of drying off and brushing her teeth, trying not to think at all.
As she came out of the bathroom, three girls from across the hall strolled in, drunk, reeling, from the elevator. They looked down the long perspective of the hallway and regarded her. “Lily,” one said. “I saw your boyfriend leave.”
“Did he look happy?” Lily called back. “What do you think?” She entered her room and shut the door, then leaned against it, listening for them. They were laughing, struggling with their own door. She went to the phone and picked it up, dialed the first five digits of the number at home, then hung up, and reached down and unplugged the phone with a violent pull of the cord. She got into her nightgown, started to lie down, then stopped. For a time she just stood there gazing upon the rumpled white field of the sheets where she had so recently been with Dominic. She wanted to cry, and couldn’t.
In the corridor, the others were laughing and wrestling with each other, saying the name of a professor of psychology everyone hated, a tall, heavy, gloomy older man whose scowl everyone was afraid of. “I’m having an affair with the hulk,” one shrieked, laughing. “That’s why I flunked psych 102!”
Lily changed the bed, and lay down. It was quiet now. She turned the bedside lamp off and folded her arms across her chest. She could still feel a kind of burning between her thighs, as though Dominic were still working at her. She might have dipped toward sleep, but then she was aware of it again, a ghost pressure there, and she wondered at the fact that she would take this night with her, as she had already been doing with another night, through the years, into old age, all the way to her grave, without ever breathing a word of it to anyone, lover or friend.
FOUR
1
ALL THE NEXT DAY, a Saturday, she wandered the streets of the city, looking for Dominic. It was sunny and cool and felt more like fall than spring. Gusty breezes sounded a repeated murmur in the trees, and tossed the upper branches so the undersides of the leaves showed a lighter shade of green. There was a floral perfume in the air, a sweet freshness of blossoming; even the bus exhaust couldn’t dispel it. People wore sweaters and light jackets and caps, and they looked happy, or else too busy to think about questions of happiness and discontent. The wind whipped around in no predictable direction, erratically kicking up grit and dust from the street.
That evening, Sheri called again, and asked her to come to Oxford. “We’d have so much fun and there’s lots to do down here.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Lily told her. “I can’t really do anything right now but study.”
But she put her coat on and went out again. The air was calmer, and some of the chill had gone. She went into the Mexican Café. There wasn’t anyone she knew. Even the waitress who knew Dominic was gone, her day off. Lily went along the sidewalk, muttering low, and realized, too late, that others were turning their heads to watch her. When she returned to the room, she stayed there for the better part of two days. She did not go to her last classes.
She ate little. It was impossible to read or think. When her mother phoned and wondered what school she had settled on for graduate work, she was evasive, and they argued. Lily hung up on her, and then called her back. They reconciled with a complex little series of exchanges about the practical matter of looking for summer work, paying the bills, and when Doris said she had to get off, Lily kept the tears back and let her go. Everything felt like a weight on her mind, and she moved through the hours in a slow, half-drowsing stillness, though she couldn’t sleep. The nights were endless. She lay in the bed and tried to read, saying the same line over and over, drifting, nearly dropping off, and then waking with a start.
During the morning of the third day, the telephone rang several times. She didn’t answer it; but then it rang and kept ringing—twenty, thirty times, insistent, her mother, she was certain. Finally she picked up.
“It’s about time there, girl.” Her father’s voice.
“Oh,” Lily said. “It’s you. Hi.”
“I’m glad you’re so happy to hear from me. I have called before, you know. Lily, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I thought you were Mother.”
“If you think it’s your mother, you’re not answering the phone?”
“I just got here and the phone was ringing. I thought you would—I thought Doris was calling, and it turned out to be you. I was explaining what I said when I answered, Daddy, okay?”
“I was teasing you, sweetie. Why don’t you call me Scott? You call your mom by her name.”
She said nothing.
“I’m calling about graduation. Doris says she’s worried—”
Lily interrupted him: “I don’t know what my plans are.”
“Well, can we talk about that? You’re finishing up—are you gonna go to the graduation ceremony? We’ve got some planning to do, don’t we?”
“I’m not going to any ceremonies.”
Silence. Then, a small sigh of exasperation. “Talk to me, Lily.”
“There’s nothing to say. I’m not graduating. I’m not going on.”
“You mean you’re not going to finish the work?”
“Not right now, no. I need a break and I’m taking it.”
“Do you want to come up here and do some work at the theater? Maybe I could arrange some understudy work.”
“I don’t want to do that, Daddy, no.”
“Are you coming home?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Is there—are you in some kind of trouble? How’s your life, darling?”
“I have to go now,” she said. “Scott.” Then, after a pause: “I’m fine, really.”
“I think you’d better keep calling me Daddy. And you don’t sound fine. Please tell me what this is, Lily. I can’t do anything if I don’t know anything.”
“I’m okay. It’s the end of the semester. Look, I’d like the chance to lead my own life a little.”
He left a pause. Then: “All right, you know where we are, each of us. Let us know if you need anything. And stay in touch—you know, the way you would with, say, an acquaintance you don’t much like.”
“I’m sorry,” she said to him. “Really, Daddy. Please. I’m okay, and I’m not in any trouble I can’t handle. It’s school stuff.
Stress and studying and not getting enough sleep, you know? And I haven’t made any plans. I’ll let you both know, I promise.”
“Your mother doesn’t know you’re not graduating. I think you ought to be the one to tell her that. I think it would hurt her if that came from me. And I’d sure like to know what we put all this money into if you were going to chuck the whole thing in the last semester. Now, Lily, you’ve got to explain a thing like that. Don’t you think you owe us that much?”
“There’s no dark reason. I’ll finish next year. Okay? I’d like to get off on my own a little. Please.”
He sighed again. “Just let us know what your plans are.”
When he broke the connection, she sat there holding the receiver, listening to her own breathing. At last, she put the receiver in its cradle, reclined on the bed, and tried to sleep. Nothing. Her mind wandered over the terrain of her unhappiness. She was ashamed of herself, yet couldn’t bring herself to rise or move. Perhaps an hour went by, perhaps more.
When she called her mother, she was fairly certain that Scott had already spilled everything: it was as if Doris were following some prearranged script; Lily could almost hear her father’s voice saying, Don’t let on that you know anything. Her mother said, “Well, are you coming home, then?”
“I don’t know,” Lily told her. “Sheri wants me to come down to Oxford.”
“Mississippi? What’s in Mississippi?”
“Sheri’s in Mississippi.”
“Honey, I don’t understand.”
“I just mean for a visit,” Lily told her. “I’m thinking of spending part of the summer down there. See some things. Maybe New Orleans. She said there was a community theater in Oxford that was looking for people. Maybe I’ll see about that, try out or something. I’d like not to get into anything because I’m Daddy’s girl. And that’s how it would feel getting into something at the Washington, everybody knowing who I am and why I got in.”
“What would you do at this community theater in Oxford? I thought I remembered you talking about not wanting go on with the acting.”
“Maybe I’d write. I don’t know. I’m looking to find out what I want to do. And I don’t think I’ll find that staying in my old room at home, you know?”
Hello to the Cannibals Page 10
