loose (19 page)

At nine the next evening, we agree we should probably get some food. We joke about feeding other needs. We take a shower together, and then drive to a nearby Thai restaurant. The other customers po-litely chat, their napkins on their laps. They dip their chopsticks gracefully into their food. We, on the other hand, should be ripping raw flesh with our teeth, blood dripping down our chins. Or at least that’s how it feels after all the sex. We glance at each other shyly, trying to come up with things to say. There’s no way to get around the weirdness. Sure we shared bodily fluids, our most intimate places.

But we’ve barely exchanged anything else.

• 142 •

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 When we get back, it’s close to one in the morning. Leif leaves to head back to his apartment. He’s explained that the girl he’s been seeing lives in the apartment above his with a group of three other girls, and they’ll all know he didn’t come home last night. It’s like a coven up there, he says. The four of them may as well be stirring a brew. But he has to face the consequences eventually.

I watch him go and then climb into bed. The sheets smell like him. We didn’t establish anything about whether we’d see each other again. I stare up at the ceiling, unable to sleep, a tangle of desire inside.

Three days pass, and I hear nothing. At night I can barely sleep; every sound is him. Twice I get up, pad into the kitchen, and open the door, sure I will see him there. But it’s just my roommates, or the wind, or strangers passing by. I tell Bevin I’ve never been with anyone so incredibly good-looking. He’s probably too good-looking for me. But she just frowns. “He’s not too good for you,” she says.

“Why would you say that?”

Then, on the fourth day, while cleaning, something great happens: I find a folded piece of paper under my bed. I open it to find lines of music notes scribbled across the page. Leif.

From the student center pay phone, my heart bursting, I call him, and when he comes to the phone, I tell him about the paper. I don’t describe it, afraid he’ll determine it’s something he doesn’t need. I tell him it looks important, and he agrees to come by that evening to pick it up.

When he arrives, I’m ready. I’ve been ready for an hour. For days.

Since the second he left me that night and I watched him lope away.

My hair is perfect. I’m wearing an outfit that is both sexy and looks like I threw it on without a thought—well-worn jeans and an old T-shirt that hangs off one shoulder and reveals a glimpse of my stomach when I lift my arms. I lead him to my bedroom and hand him the piece of paper. He looks at it, but only for a moment. I see he’s not here for the paper. My throat is tight with anticipation.

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“She was really upset,” he says. He sits on my bed. I sit beside him. I can smell him, his scent, warm and spicy.

I nod my head, trying to look sympathetic. What I want to know is, Are you mine now?

“It’s been pretty bad, actually.” He leans his elbows on his knees.

He runs his fingers across the fold of the paper. I am hyperaware of him, of his hands, his legs.

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“I don’t know.” He glances at me. “I think I should just stay away.”

Stay away. My throat tightens. Stay away from me?

“There were so many times this past week I almost came back here.”

He looks right at me now.

“Really?” I’m overwhelmed, just knowing he was thinking of me.

I’m so used to my fantasies being, well, fantasies. And here, he may well have been standing at my door like I had hoped. “Why didn’t you?”

He shakes his head. “I wanted to, believe me. It’s been bad at my place. I’ve been in hell every day, afraid of what she’ll do. Her roommates trap me when I get home and try to talk me into staying with her.” His brow is creased. He’s clearly stressed. “Do you have any more of that weed?”

I take it out, watch as he lights a bowl. He holds it out to me, but I shake my head. I can’t help but think of Eli and that girl, how he had said being with her was easy compared to being with me. I don’t like to think of Leif’s ex-girlfriend, feeling the kind of pain I felt with Eli, but I push that from my mind. Leif lights it a few more times, sucking hard until it’s all but cashed. As he blows out smoke, he seems to relax a bit.

“You could just stay here,” I try. “Until things blow over.”

He nods, shakes the bowl a little, and holds it up to the light.

“Do you have a paper clip or something?”

• 144 •

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 I find him a paper clip from my desk, and he rubs it in the bowl, separating the charred bits. Then he lights it again.

“It wouldn’t be a problem,” I say. “I could leave the front door open for you at night.”

I watch him, hopeful.

He nods again. “That might not be a bad idea.” He puts down the bowl and turns to me. The crease in his forehead is gone. His gaze is loose, his eyes red. And we start to kiss.

We stay in bed again through the next afternoon.

Our conversations are brief and pointed, the kind of conversations people only have when in bed together.

“You have beautiful eyes,” I tell him.

“No, you have beautiful eyes. And this part of you,” he says, running his hand along my hip. “I love this.”

He leaves to go to class, but this time he’s coming back that night.

I go to class too, feeling sexy, light, a girl others might want to be.

Once, in the student center, I see the girl Leif left for me. Her eyes make little slits as we pass, but rather than guilt or fear, I feel elated. He chose me over her.

Leif and I have tons of sex, standing against walls, in locked bathrooms at parties, on the floor of my bedroom. We can’t keep our hands off each other. During the day, we part to go to our separate classes. I listen to lectures on The Faerie Queene, discuss symbolism in The Glass Menagerie, all the while aware of Leif’s scent still on my skin. At two or three in the morning every night, Leif comes into my apartment after working on music compositions in the studio, and he finds me in bed, waiting for him. Because I know he will come, the waiting is delicious, so different from what waiting has been in the past. My body is always aroused, just waiting.

On Spree Day, a campus tradition when classes are canceled and all the students party, Leif and I go back to my room to have sex.

Outside, I hear students yelling and laughing. Music streams from

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someone’s radio. Lots of kids take acid on Spree Day. Or they carry jugs of vodka and orange juice. They smoke joints right out in the open on the green. You can always tell which ones are tripping by their huge pupils. They look past you like you’re not even there. Leif strips off my clothes and then his. He presses his mouth to my neck.

I close my eyes, all my senses alive. I can’t imagine being happier, more filled.

Sometimes I see Eli around campus. He is still with that girl, but it’s different now that I have Leif; it’s that easy to replace the spot Eli took up in my heart. He was my first real love, but I can speak of him as someone in my past. Leif is with me now. He plays gigs at parties around campus and in the Pub. We arrive together to parties, and guys shake his hand, ask him about his playing. They nod at me, his girlfriend. While he plays guitar, girls dance. They look up at him with desire, and it gives me great pleasure to walk up to him during his breaks and kiss him, knowing they’re watching.

K

a c o u p l e m o n t h s after we start seeing each other, I go to the bathroom while at a party, and I’m horrified to see something small and crablike crawl up from my pelvis. I brush it off me. I’d been itchy down there, I realize now, but I hadn’t thought much about it.

Freaked, I set out to find Leif.

Sure enough, we both have crabs. He tells me his ex had them when they first started sleeping together, but he thought they were gone. She got her revenge, I suppose.

We use his leftover crab shampoo that night and wash our sheets, and he finds some poison that works to kill them in the carpet and couch.

Just a few weeks later, though, I notice something else strange down there, little tags of pale skin. My heart pounding, I call my mother.

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“Oh, Kerry,” she says when I describe it.

“What?” I ask, flipping out. “What is it?”

“I can’t diagnose without seeing it,” she says, “but it sounds like HPV.”

My heart stops. Three letters, just one away from a deadly disease.

“What’s that?”

She explains human papillomavirus to me. Genital warts. She talks about rates of infection and populations seeing the biggest in-creases while I grip the phone, feeling sick. When it comes to medi-cine, she’s always interested in telling me everything she knows. She doesn’t listen for what I really need right now, which is reassurance.

Being a doctor, and the prestige that comes with it, is so immensely important to her, so much more important than being a mom. That’s not new information. She left Tyler and me to become a doctor. But her preference can still sting.

In the morning, Leif and I go together to the Planned Parenthood, where they take us into separate examination rooms. My nurse is tall and no-nonsense. She pulls the hot light down so it showcases my vagina and pushes at the folds of skin down there with her fingers. Then she slides in a speculum.

“Did you have sex recently?” she asks.

I nod. Of course I have.

“You shouldn’t have before you came here,” she says, her voice tight.

“Not since last night,” I tell her defensively. “And I took a shower this morning.”

She sighs, annoyed. “There’s still semen in here, making it difficult for me to determine what’s your fluid and what’s someone else’s.”

I press my lips tightly together, ashamed. I can’t even determine who gave me the warts. According to my mother, incubation for HPV is three months, so it could have been François or Amos in New Mexico. Or it could have been one of the guys I slept with before

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Taos. I don’t need anyone to tell me how bad that is, I can’t even isolate where I got them. I don’t need anyone else to tell me what a slut I really am.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Well,” she says, “we’ll just have to do our best.”

She does a Pap smear and then takes a small bottle out of a cabinet. She explains she’ll need to use some type of acid to burn off the warts, and I’ll need to come back for a few more treatments until they are gone. She also explains the Pap will reveal whether I’m in danger of cervical cancer, which some forms of HPV threaten to cause.

I close my eyes, scared, as she applies something to my labia. The acid stings like crazy, but I hold myself still, not wanting to further disappoint the nurse. When I sit up, she looks me in the eye. Her face is stern. “You shouldn’t have sex again until these are gone.

Otherwise you risk infecting your partner.”

I lower my eyes, sick with shame.

I find Leif waiting for me, and we go out to my car. He’s happy because he didn’t get infected, and I’m relieved. If he had, I would have felt even worse than I already do. I lower myself slowly into the driver’s seat like an old person, my rear still sore. But I don’t complain. I got what I deserve.

Mom calls later that day.

“How are you doing?” she asks. “I’ve been thinking about you. I know today’s the day you went to the clinic.”

“I’m OK.” I lie in bed, cradling the phone with my head. She can be caring like this sometimes, like the mother I’ve always wanted her to be. I think of what Eli’s mother told me about the Alzheimer’s releasing her mother’s more loving self. It helps me to know there is this part to my mother. There is a possibility that somewhere inside, if it weren’t for all her own hurts and insecurities, she might really love me. I close my eyes, wishing as I do at times she were here with me, smoothing my hair.

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“Be sure to take care of yourself,” she says. “Is Leif there? Is someone tending to you?”

“I’m really OK,” I say again. “Leif is in his studio, getting a composition done before class. But I’m fine. Only a little sore.”

“All right. Don’t stay there all alone. Call a friend.”

“I will.”

We hang up and I force myself to rise. I turn on the CD player, which plays a Tom Waits song. I think about going somewhere. A coffee shop. The student center. Calling Bevin, maybe, like Mom said. But ultimately I just get back into bed. Some days nothing sounds good.

K

w h e n s u m m e r c o m e s , Leif goes home to New Hampshire to perform with his band, and I stay in my apartment at school. I have nowhere else to go, no friends left in New Jersey, no internship or job like some of my friends. I’ve allowed Eli, and then Leif, to oc-cupy my entire life, enough that I have not begun to focus on anything meaningful in my life. In high school, Jennifer A once told me she aspired to be a housewife. She wanted to live the cliché, watching soap operas and eating all day. She didn’t want to have to perform out in the world. But I don’t feel like that. I love vibrant discussions about literature. I love to write. I sit in the front row of most classes with my hand raised. There are things I know I’m good at, if I’d only keep my focus there.

Seeing this discrepancy in my life begins to nag at me, like a child tugging on my sleeve. What am I doing? Why can’t I ever just focus on me? My therapist and I discuss this, and she encourages me to create something in my life that will hold my interest. So I apply for an August writing workshop and am accepted.

As often as possible, I drive up to Leif’s to see him. His family lives in a big, sterile house in the country. The front yard is a long, lovely stretch of wildflowers, and at the end of the driveway, behind

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