Everyone but You (14 page)

She has said I am godless.

Cass tells me her first mistake was rooming with an ethics student, that this fact alone should have alerted her to the potential for what she calls “certain problems of spiritual affinity.” She’s very dramatic when she speaks. Cass is an actor and a second-year
graduate student in the Drama Department, both of which facts, I tell her, are something less than a miracle of nature.

Presently, we are in the bathroom, I am peeing, and once again Cass has breached the boundaries of social etiquette by barging in. Her rear end plants itself on the tub. She sits with her arms folded. Cass wears faded carpenter jeans with frayed holes in the knees and a white V-neck sweater. She has coarse black hair that falls below her waist, and she’s wearing a pissed-off Polish look that I find intimidating. She asks if I think her boyfriend, Evan (also an actor), has another girl. She has only been seeing Evan for a month. They are not committed, but she is obsessed. Cass has a certain weakness for imposters, actor-men. She says she adores anyone who looks like a young Robert Redford, even though she also admits Evan is an oversexed dog.

I find that when enclosed in a small room it’s best to say nothing incriminating. Now would not be the time to tell her, for example, about being tied to Evan’s bedposts, or about his deft use of electronic devices. Cass’s intuition can take her only so far. I have been very careful. After our lovemaking, I’ve washed Evan’s smell off of me, soaped every orifice, and arrived home from his apartment smelling of Irish Spring.

You’re awfully quiet, Moira, she says. Her look reeks of suspicion. At the beginning of the school year, I once saw Cass run down an undergraduate (the girl on foot, Cass in her Jeep). Yes, she said the gas pedal stuck; yes, she was cleared of wrongdoing. Still, I can only imagine what she might do to me.

She asks if I’m nervous. I tell her no, I’m not nervous, not especially, no more than usual, et cetera. I tell her her obsession is bound to breed psychiatric bills.

Actors are full of fictions and lies, she says. She smacks her hand against the tub. I wish I didn’t always find myself in bed
with thespians. Betrayal, she says, pervades all thespian interactions.

Whine, whine, whine. For any proposition to be meaningful, love or affairs alike, circumstances must be verified, I say. Empirical evidence, hard facts. Show me the proof of betrayal, I tell her. Then I sniff the air, somewhat tauntingly, and say: Do you smell Irish Spring?

As is customary habit, Cass slides a small medallion, a picture of Saint Stephen, back and forth across her necklace. She narrows her eyes in a most predictable way.

It’s true I am not without some feelings of guilt. But once you have committed the crime, there is always the business of cover-up. Self-preservation in circumstances of betrayal is essential, and I am all for that.

E
VAN WILL SOON PLAY
Jason opposite Cass’s role of the Colchian princess in the college’s production of Euripides’
Medea
. He practices his lines while naked, standing over me in bed, and sometimes when he is reading, he jumps up and down, causing all manner of extremities to whirl and fly about. Like many men, Evan aligns himself with the classicist school. He believes his penis is an embodiment of nobility and that he can discern truths such as love or beauty which he then approximates with sex and nipple rings. All this should make me leery of him. The truth is, I have always imagined that I would end up in bed with a man who looked like Nietzsche, a little on the morose and philological side, possibly someone who listened (as Nietzsche did) to Wagner’s music. But it seems that, like my flatmate, I have a terrible weakness for gray eyes, good looks, and clean, classical features. (I suppose Evan
does
look like a young Redford.)

Once, before we first kissed, Evan said, simply, Risk it, Moira. Before that moment, I had never risked anything. Normally I suffer from a terrible interiority of the soul that causes me to dwell in the corners of familiar, often crowded institutions—campus libraries, coffeehouses, et cetera—and pass judgments. But here, in Evan’s bed, I feel other things: sheer whimsy over our naked bodies, an unexpected affection.

Evan plops down and nibbles my belly. He quotes Jason’s lines in a zealous way:
I will listen to what new thing you want, woman, to get from me!

I am normally not a jealous person, but today, since he has asked, I give Evan a good-natured ribbing about having two women. Is it necessary to have us both? I ask. I do not mention that I have on occasion indulged horrible images of Cass and Evan naked, a thought that makes me feel slightly ill. I tell him I want to know which one of us—Cass or me—he prefers. I say, It must be difficult to have relations with two flatmates. I ask him if he has ever indulged a certain fantasy that he might, on some occasion, end up in bed with both of us, if only out of sheer confusion, carelessness, or the simple act of forgetting. And then where would you be? I say. Think about it.

I am thinking about it, he says. And wow. I’d be a guy in bed with two women.

Not funny, I tell him.

I thought you said no attachment and no jealously. I believe you said, “I’m much too smart to get attached to you.”

I said more that smart people know better than to get too attached, and then they go ahead and do it anyway.

I can’t help myself, Moira, he tells me. I always fall for my leads. And this, he explains, combined with a certain dogged
appreciation for the female form, repeatedly gets him in trouble. Condemn not, but pity me instead, he says.

Boo-hoo, I say. Poor Evan.

After more lovemaking, which today consists mainly of discourse (a carryover from my love affair with Nietzsche), Cass texts Evan. There are tears involved, drunkenness, incoherent phrases. Apparently there has been an abundance of tears and drinking and texting lately.

She’s obsessed, he says. He scratches his head. He asks, Who would have thought?

She
knows
, I tell him. Evan-Jason has taken a second lover (you know who) and Cass-Medea is planning her revenge. It’s all so very textbook, I say. Suddenly I think Cass is probably on her way to Evan’s apartment as I speak. I remember the running down of the freshman; it was no laughing matter. I get out of bed and search through the tangled pile of clothes scattered on the floor. I tell Evan every interaction is eventually terrifying.

He yawns. Like most people after sex, Evan has a very low attention span. He busies himself by draping a Kleenex over his penis like a toga. The whole draping ceremony pleases him, confirms his own spectacular wishes about the splendor of his body, its classicism, its containment. I go to the bathroom and wash. I slip into my jeans, button my shirt, and pull on a sweater. Head still wet, I rush out into the frosty air and into the descending dark.

A
PERSON DECIDES
that she is going to have an affair with her flatmate’s boyfriend, and, while in theory this should be easy, the situation is soon mired with complications. First, there is a small pang of guilt I feel constantly, along with my unexpected
interest in classical theater. Also, over the last two weeks things with Cass have gotten uglier. After each rendezvous with Evan, I arrive back to the flat and Cass sniffs the air with canine cunning to see if Evan’s warm and spicy scent clings to my coat.
Irish Spring, Irish Spring
, thank goodness for the thin scent that masks our deception.

Constant supervision! When Cass is not attending classes, she stalks me to the point where I am almost never alone. Cass has sworn that if I’m guilty, I will pay. She’s asked if I think I am beyond reproach. She’s said: Who do you think you are, some superwoman? I believe she is searching for proof of my amoral nature, secretly reading my books on Nietzsche while I am attending classes.

Now, while buying a cup of coffee, I catch her peering through the window, her eyes and hair wild, snow falling all around her. She places a gloved hand to the glass, taps, and gives me a most cunning smile. Then she comes in and stands next to me. I inhale, hold my breath. Cass studies me. She slides the medallion back and forth across her necklace, tucks it down into her sweater, and eyes me suspiciously. She says God sees everything, Moira. And in case God fails, she tells me, she is also gathering evidence.

I’ve done nothing wrong, I say, but she escorts me to the library, because she says she is
going that way
, even though Cass has never set foot near the library and cannot use the UCLID catalog to save her life. She watches, preys on my nervousness, and when she sees I am shaken, she smiles. It’s insanity. Cass is falling off the rocking horse, cracking up.

On campus it snows and snows and the tree limbs are coated with ice.

Peril lies at every corner.

T
HESE ARE
the hard facts of my guilt: When Cass and Evan first began dating, Evan stopped by the flat one morning while Cass was attending Professor Klodhaven’s History of Drama seminar. Wagner was playing on the stereo. On the coffee table lay
Beyond Good and Evil
, which I might have been reading had I not decided to paint my nails and take a quiz I found in Cass’s
Cosmo
concerning my disposition for true romance.

When I opened the door, Evan brushed snow out of his hair, greeted me in an informal, lazy way, and invited himself in. He sat down on the couch and propped his feet up on the table, stretched, and scratched his head. Where’s Cass? he asked. Gone, I told him. I hobbled back to the couch, wads of tissues jammed between each newly painted toe. Water trailed from his boots and onto the table. When I pushed his feet down and said
Excuse me
, he smiled in an amused way (straight, white teeth, very Redford), and patted the empty space next to him. Sit, he said. I’m not a
dog
, I told him. I don’t take orders, you know. Had I been dressed more appropriately, I might have told him I was on my way out to a class or the library. But as it happened, I wore only a T-shirt and cut-off jeans.

He watched as I leafed through the magazine in an annoyed, distracted way. He picked up my philosophy book and studied it. Finally, Evan said: I don’t
believe
in either
Cosmo
quizzes or the master-slave morality of Nietzsche; both kinds of indulgences in thinking can lead to trouble. He cited various historical instances where both Nietzsche and
Cosmo
have been misapplied to horrible ends. He said if I wanted to know where the real evil lay, I should look to women. Really, Evan has such an awkward way of flirting.

I said: That sort of thing, oppressing women and their sexuality,
feels a little old. Men have been using that kind of evil-woman nonsense since the Fall, I explained. I told him I personally was sick to death of always being mistaken for the devil.

Hmmm, he said, watching as I removed the tissues. Pleased, I admired my toes.

Nice, he said. His voice was surprisingly soft, and doting.

Thank you, I said.

Has anyone ever told you you look like Jodie Foster, very studious and intense and cute?

As a matter of fact, yes, I said.

Can I tell you something?

What?

It’s flirty, he said.

I don’t fall for flirtation, I told him, even though I was already blushing.

It’s deviant, he told me. I can’t say it.

Oh, please, I said, glad for such a disclosure so early in the day. Now you have to say it.

Red toenails make me horny, he said. Now I can’t look at you without imagining you naked.

Discourse, intercourse. They are not so totally unrelated. And in my defense, it does sometimes happen that strangers come together in a fevered, frenzied way. In such instances, the less clothes, the better.

However, of the times Evan and I have slept together since that day, and how I’ve blatantly lied to avoid detection, I cannot speak without further recrimination.

I
DO NOT THINK
she has showered in days. Cass has let her hair grow ratty-looking. She skulks around the flat with a
butcher knife in one hand and a script in the other. I am fairly certain Medea used poison, but I do not belabor the point or break her already fragile mood. Perhaps, I think, this is only Method acting and not some act of bewildered aggression or a veiled threat against my life.

Cass throws the knife down onto the floor. I can’t stand it, she says, disgustedly.

I am taken aback by her current state of being, which is something vacillating between severe depression, anxiety, and unleashed rage. She looks at me and sighs. We are in a mostly depressive episode currently, I see.

Evan hasn’t called, she says. Not once in two days. She laments his loss and curses what she now calls his “paramour.”

I say: Why is it women always get the curses? What is Evan, I say? An innocent?

That’s not the
point
, she tells me. I’m Medea, she says. He can’t just do this to me.

Uh-huh, I say, because her nerves are clearly frayed. What I think, however, is that acting = schizophrenia = illogical progression of discourse = psychiatric bills.

Take the running-down of the undergraduate, for example, an event that landed the girl in the hospital with a sprained ankle (she fell) and landed Cass on probation (the dean was present, just arriving to his office). That whole fiasco happened because before getting into her sedan, Cass had a fight with her boyfriend Gil (predecessor to Evan, also an actor), and Cass had accused Gil of flirting with the girl, an understudy. The fight put her, in Cass’s exact words, as recorded in official college documents, “on edge,” and when she pressed the gas pedal, the pedal stuck, the car flew forward, and the poor girl had to jump into a ditch to avoid being hit.

Let’s not get crazy, I tell her now. Let’s not do anything rash.

Cass sits next to me on the futon. Evan smells of another woman, she confesses. She stares at her script absently. Her hands tremble.

How many women can he have? I say. I have not slept with Evan in almost a week and have never before considered the possibility of another woman (besides Cass) in his bed, car, on his sofa, et cetera. I am not a jealous person, but I feel miffed just the same.