loose (18 page)

And when I still say nothing, she says, “You must hear about the outfit Claude is designing for me for my practice’s grand opening.

It’s absolutely stunning. A black silk tunic and pajama pants. He’s sewing in beads from a bracelet Grandma got in Indonesia.”

Tyler nods. “I think you told us already. It sounds really nice.”

I wish I never agreed to spend break this way.

Snow covers the ground and dark tree branches. Plows build piles taller than me along the side of the road, and because it keeps coming, Donald goes out in the morning to shovel the walkway to the car. Something about the snow, the quiet, the blankness, highlights my panic as I think about Eli. I decide I will do whatever it takes to keep him. I’ll have sex more often. I’ll stop needing so much from him. I know these thoughts are desperate, no different from the ones I had years ago with Heath, but I can’t help it. Faced with losing Eli, I feel exactly as I did then, as though I haven’t grown at all.

• 134 •

T h e O t h e r S i d e o f t h e G l a s s Wa l l While Eli is in Florida, collecting specimens on a boat, I can’t talk with him, which makes everything worse. Anxiety knocks against my ribs, keeping me awake at night. I wish I still smoked, just so I would have something to calm myself.

At dinner, Mom talks about her new practice, how Donald, who is a brain researcher, is now going for his MD as well. When I bring up studying Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Mom gasps as though someone has grabbed her throat. I stop short.

“Did I mention yet the outfit Claude is designing for the grand opening?”

I set my mouth.

Tyler looks down.

“And the beads from Indonesia? The ones that Grandma brought back?” She looks at Donald. “You saw the sketches. Isn’t it beautiful?”

He nods. “It really is.”

“I was talking here,” I say.

“What?” Mom looks at me, innocent surprise on her face.

“I was talking about my Renaissance Literature class.”

“Oh.” She puts a jeweled hand to her throat, takes a sip of her wine. “I’m sorry. By all means, continue.” Her expression changes to feigned interest.

“Forget it,” I say.

“No,” she says. “I want to hear.”

“I don’t care,” I say, frustrated.

“OK, then,” she says. She glances briefly at Donald for approval, and he smiles, a condescending smile that says I’m the one being im-mature.

“I’m going to bed,” I say, though it’s only seven thirty.

Mom frowns. “You need to learn to enjoy other people’s company.”

I don’t say anything. Silence, I’m learning, is my only defense. I gather my plate and take it to the kitchen.

Later, Tyler comes downstairs to the room we share. I’m reading

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Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories for a class in school, his fictional exploration of coming of age. Each story recounts a traumatic event, and I’m struck by Nick’s struggle to understand himself as a man in the face of each one. For all the times I’ve given myself over to them, all the energy I spend thinking about them, I still know nothing about men, about their hardships and hurts, the things that bring them to their knees. In my mind they’re still invulnerable and too powerful. They still have all the control.

Tyler moves around the room, changing her clothes, looking for her own book. She is out of college now, and she lives in Chicago with her boyfriend. I want to ask her how she can stand it, being so far away, how she can trust he will keep loving her without being there to prove it, without his touch to know she truly exists. I don’t know whether she’s even thinking of him, if, like me, she can think of almost nothing else.

“Is it OK that this light is on?” I ask. I want to begin a conversation with her, but I don’t know how to start.

“That’s fine.” She takes off her glasses, rests them beside the bed, and gets under the covers. She rolls over.

“It won’t bother you?”

“Uh-uh.”

I hesitate, place a bookmark on the page where I’ve stopped.

“Tyler?”

“What is it?”

“Are you having any fun here?”

“I’m making the best of it.”

“I don’t want to be here.”

She sighs, still facing away from me. “But you are, so why not just go with it?”

“I don’t want to just go with it,” I say, annoyed now.

She sighs again, annoyed too. “Are we done? I’m tired.”

I set my mouth. “Fine.”

I wait, my leg bouncing furiously on the bed, and soon her

• 136 •

T h e O t h e r S i d e o f t h e G l a s s Wa l l breath becomes long and even. I lean my head back and stare at the ceiling, too pissed now to sleep.

K

t h e d a y i k n o w Eli is back in Maine, I call from a pay phone while Mom and Tyler are in the Price Chopper buying groceries.

When he gets to the phone, he sounds different, distant.

“I miss you,” I tell him. “I’ll do whatever I need to make this work.”

“Winter break isn’t even over,” he says. “Let’s give it some time.”

“I don’t want to give it time,” I say. “I just want you.”

He doesn’t say anything. I wait, my heart sick, knowing something has changed. People walk by behind me, scolding children, pushing rumbling carts full of disposable diapers and Diet Coke.

“Kerry,” Eli starts.

“Oh, God.”

“There was someone there, in Florida,” he says.

“No.”

“She goes to Clark,” he says.

I squeeze my eyes shut, afraid I might throw up.

“Did you have sex with her?”

“No,” he says. “We spent some time together. And we kissed.”

I try to take a deep breath, but my lungs are too tight. I can’t stand to think of it, of Eli and some nameless girl, his face close to hers.

“It’s so easy with her. Relaxing.”

“Don’t,” I say, stopping him. I want to cry. I can feel it lodged in my throat, but it won’t come. The implication is clear: It’s too hard with you. You’re too hard. “Don’t do this to us.”

“It’s already done,” he says. “Before Florida it was already done.”

“But I love you.” For the first time I notice an elderly man is waiting for the phone. He stands back, respectful, seeing my face.

He makes me feel even worse.

• 137 •

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“I love you, too,” Eli says. “I just don’t think that matters enough anymore.”

When we are done, I walk quickly along the sidewalk. Gray snow sits in piles against the curb. The air is icy. I hadn’t noticed it while on the phone, but now it begins to seep into my skin. I like it, this physical sensation. It distracts me from the dull ache I feel. I stand at the entrance to Price Chopper. I cannot go inside. An old lady pushes her cart. A woman walks by with a little boy who jumps and jumps.

It is all too ordinary. Too sharply different from the chaos I feel inside. So I wait for Mom and Tyler in the cold.

K

b a c k a t s c h o o l , I waste no time. Shawn thinks I’m cute, so I start with him. Then Alex. Then Greg. One of them, I can’t remember which, tells me I’m a femme fatale because I suck men in and then spit them out. He has no idea.

Eli takes up with the girl he met in Florida. The first time I see her, I want to slit my throat—or hers. She is beautiful, with porce-lain skin and straight black hair. She’s the picture of old money, right out of a J. Crew catalog. She’s what I imagine the estranged part of Eli’s family looks like, the part that owns that island. I do my best to avoid anywhere I know Eli might be, but there are times I’m blindsided. When I catch glimpses of them together I feel physical pain, like someone has punched me in the gut. I take up smoking again, and more and more boys.

Nights I’m alone, I lie in bed, aching, hating my need, my big, nasty need, the thing that makes me unlovable.

K

a w e e k e n d a t h o m e . I sit around the apartment, not wanting to do anything. Dad offers to take me shopping, but even that sounds depressing to me. Nora makes me egg breakfasts with good bagels from the local deli. She sits with me while I read a book.

• 138 •

T h e O t h e r S i d e o f t h e G l a s s Wa l l

“Honestly?” she says. “He was too handsome.”

“This isn’t helping,” I tell her.

“I mean it.” She sets down her book and her red wire-rimmed glasses. “Miranda’s father was very handsome. So was the man I dated just after him. But they were also schmucks. Good-looking men think they can have whatever they want. They get coddled too much.”

I pull my legs up beneath me. “But I’m attracted to them.”

“We all are, honey. But take it from me. I stopped dating very handsome men a long time ago.”

“Hey,” Dad says as he comes out of his bedroom. “I heard that.”

Nora just smiles. “Don’t take it too personally, love,” she tells him.

Spring vacation, I get Dad to take me skiing in Taos, New Mexico. I have wanted for a long time to see the Southwest—the muted colors, the long, sloping mountains, landscape celebrated in the books and films by and about Native Americans I read and see in my classes. As we drive in our rental car from Albuquerque, I am not disappointed. The mountains are like sculpture, the sky an ashen blue. This is exactly what I need.

Chances are, my dad needs this too. Just a few months ago he lost his job as vice president of engineering at the company where he had been for thirteen years. Some kind of management takeover. He got a hefty severance, and as an innovative designer, he won’t have trouble finding a new job. But he’s quick to anger, and he also seems depressed. He was a head honcho in his last job, worked up to be vice president and had been offered the presidency many times. He had designed the company’s star products, and his staff admired and de-ferred to him. He had attained celebrity status in the world of water heating design. Years later, someone in the field will say to me, “That’s your father? That man is your father? Will you introduce me?” as though I just told him my father was Robert DeNiro. He was also losing a salary that had grown to tremendous proportions over the years.

• 139 •

L o o s e G i r l

Now he has to establish that somewhere else. At his age, he tells me, he shouldn’t have to reestablish himself in his career. Even though he’ll be footing the bill, taking this trip together is my way of trying to help him feel better, just like those shopping trips used to do for me.

The day after we arrive in Taos, the Gulf War begins. We watch on the wide-screen television in the bar with the other resort guests as the United States bombs Iraq. We sip our drinks, wide-eyed for four days. And then it is done.

At dinner, eating dirty rice and ceviche, we discuss the war, its distance, its irrelevance to our lives. A child of the Cold War, I didn’t think I would experience real war in my lifetime, and if I did, I thought it would be monumental. This feels like a movie I just happened to catch on TV. Dad talks about the media and the ways in which what we saw about the war is shaped to make us feel good.

“We don’t know what really happened,” he warns.

One night, a guy catches my eye. He smiles at me from the bar where he sits alone. On my way back from the bathroom, he touches my arm and invites me to join him. He has a strong accent, from France it turns out. He has been visiting for the past week, and his friends have gone home already. Tonight is his final night.

Two hours later, François and I are naked in his room. We have sex three times before dawn, when he leaves in a taxi and I climb into the sleeping loft in Dad’s and my room and sleep for most of the day. Dad asks no questions, as usual.

The next night, I meet Amos. Amos works at the resort, so he takes me to the staff’s private hot tub where I give him a blow job before we fuck.

To my delight, I haven’t thought of Eli more than once the whole trip.

• 140 •

9

There is a new boy I like. I see him every other day when our classes let out at the same time. He has long, dark hair and unbelievably beautiful eyes. He sits on the campus lawn with a few other guys and passes around a joint. My friends, who I see more of now that Eli is out of the picture, tell me about him. His name is Leif, a music major. He plays guitar in a band, and they are pretty sure he doesn’t have a girlfriend. They walk over there with me, and almost immediately I can feel the energy between us, the promise of something to come.

The night of my upstairs neighbor’s party, a party where I know Leif will be, I lie in my bed with my friend Bevin plotting seduc-tion. I will use pot I took from my dad ages ago and haven’t smoked, and I’ll dress as hot as possible. We giggle, excited for me, excited for what might happen tonight.

When Leif walks into the party, I keep him on my radar, waiting for the right moment. And when he is alone a moment, filling his beer from the keg in the kitchen, I pounce. He follows me downstairs to my apartment to get high, and I take out a bowl and the

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bag of pot and hand it to him. We sit on my bed and he lights up and passes it to me. We chat about our classes, where we’re from.

Even in the haze of getting high, I can’t feel calm. All I want is for him to kiss me, to put his hands on me. There is something about him, his scent, the way he looks. I don’t know. My desire for him is fierce. I could tear his clothes off. I could eat him off a plate.

At each awkward silence, I wait, poised for that kiss.

“Listen,” he says finally, “I’m very attracted to you.”

I smile.

“But there’s a situation you should know about.”

My smile drops.

He explains he’s been seeing someone. He doesn’t think he wants to stay with her, but she’s his friend, and he should probably break up with her before anything else happens. I nod, trying to look calm. Inside, my heart is filling. He wants me more than this girl.

“Whatever you need to do,” I say. But as I do, I turn my body toward him, opening myself.

He nods, his eyes on mine.

And then he kisses me. We move quickly, removing each other’s clothes. He moves over me, then in me. Our sex is crazed, animal-like. And it doesn’t stop there. We have sex four more times before we finally fall asleep at dawn. Even asleep, though, we’re aroused, and we wake again and again for more.