loose (20 page)

the house, woods encase a pristine lawn. Leif is so perfect to me, so surreal, it is hard for me to grasp the idea of him growing up here, with parents, in a small town, like any other kid.

Leif’s father is friendly, also a musician. He works with computers, but in his spare time he sits with Leif and they work out phrases or play jazz. He watches Leif play with admiration and pride, and he admits he wishes he could play music rather than work in his field.

Leif’s mother is different. She admires Leif’s talent and drive like his father, but she holds herself at a distance, cold and detached. I try to engage her in conversations, but she rarely wants to talk. We don’t think the same, like Susan and I did. I can tell she thinks I’m flighty with my interest in psychology. Or, who knows, maybe she’s worried I’m analyzing her. Either way, I can feel her disapproval of me. She thinks I’m not good enough for her son.

As soon as we are out of his parents’ house, Leif gets high. We meet his bandmates, he smokes some more with them, and I watch them rehearse or play gigs in town. We regularly get back to his house in the early morning hours, and then Leif sleeps until two or three the next day. He keeps his room dark to ward off daylight, and when I stay there I find I’m always groggy and often bored. I wake long before him and sneak down to the kitchen to find something to eat, thankful his parents are at work. When I grow bored enough, I crawl back into bed and nudge him to have sex, just for something to do.

When he does wake, he moves slowly. He gets himself something to eat, goes to the piano room, and plays with a composition he’s been working on. I follow him from room to room.

“Let’s do something,” I say, sitting on the piano bench next to him.

“Like what?” He leans forward and erases a note, writes a new one in. His handwriting is chicken scratch, but his musical notes are always neat and perfectly shaped.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Anything. Let’s go out for lunch.”

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“Isn’t it too late for lunch?” He begins to play again. He really is very good.

“Then dinner.”

He grimaces. “I just got up. I don’t really want to go anywhere.”

I sigh, resigning myself. After a few more minutes of sitting I walk around the house, looking at art and photos on the wall. There is a traditional painting of a man on a horse, another of a bouquet of roses. I think about how different Leif is from this art, which is safe and straightforward, nothing beneath the surface. Leif is intensely creative. His music takes risks. I wonder how he fits in amid this family, if he shoulders the burden of being the family risk-taker, so they don’t have to. I can’t help but notice how he acts around them, always happy and even, but then as soon as he’s away he gets high or he sleeps.

I also don’t find any pictures of Leif as a child. When I ask him, he goes into his closet and takes down a shoebox of photos.

“I was fat as a kid,” he explains as I sift through the pictures of Leif and his friends. It’s true he was chubby, but he wasn’t so big as to be called fat.

“There are no baby pictures?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I suppose there are somewhere.”

I examine each picture, wanting more. “How could your parents have no baby pictures of you?”

He shrugs again, and I notice I’m annoyed. Annoyed he doesn’t demand more from his parents. Annoyed by the hazy film that seems to cover everything in this house, including him.

I nod and put the photos back in the box, not wanting him to see my frustration. I wrap my arms around his neck and pull him to me.

He hugs back, which makes me feel better. Connected to him again.

K

a f t e r t h e h p v s c a r e , a small panic remains in my stomach.

What if there’s something more going on? What if I have HIV?

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Most of my friends have gotten tested. It’s the reasonable thing to do if you’ve had sex with more than one person, especially unprotected sex, of which I’ve had lots. One friend even gets tested every six months as a precaution. I nod along with them, but I’m a terrible hypocrite. I’ve slept with many more strangers than they have, and I’ve yet to get tested. I’m too scared. In the eighties, AIDS plagued gay men, IV drug users, and people receiving blood transfusions. It felt unrelated to me. Now HIV is showing up in the blood of more and more heterosexual women. We’re getting it at the fastest rate in the country.

On a Monday morning, I drive back to the same Planned Parenthood. I tell the receptionist why I’m there, and a young woman takes me into the back. As we walk, my heart beats so fast I feel like I might pass out. This woman is kinder than the last one. She’s young, not much older than me. Perhaps it’s more acceptable to get a voluntary test than to show up with an STD. She puts a warm hand on my arm as she guides me into a small, white room that has only a desk and two chairs. She sits across from me and sets a clipboard on the desk.

“I need to ask you some questions before we take your blood,” she tells me.

“Questions?” My voice quakes.

“These are standard questions we ask everyone. It’s mandatory counseling before the test.”

I bite my lip. “OK.”

She looks down at the paper. “Are you currently sexually active?”

I nod.

She makes a mark. “Do you currently have more than one sexual partner?”

“No.”

“In your sexual history, have you had more than five partners?”

“Um, yeah.”

“More than ten?”

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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 bite my lip again. “Yes.”

She doesn’t look at me, just marks her paper.

“In your sexual history, was there ever a time when you had more than one sexual partner in the span of a month?”

I take a breath, let it out slowly. “Yes.”

“Are you currently using birth control?”

“The Pill,” I say.

“Good.” She writes that. “What about condoms?”

I shake my head. What must she be thinking of me?

“In your sexual history, did you consistently use condoms?”

I shake my head again.

She makes a few more marks. “OK,” she says. “I need to advise you to use condoms every time you engage in intercourse. It’s the only effective way to protect yourself from disease.”

“I know that,” I say. I want to tell her I’m not stupid. I know everything there is to know about protecting myself. I’m well aware of how HIV and STDs are transmitted. But I also know my behavior defies my knowledge.

“Listen,” she says, perhaps hearing my defensiveness. “You’re not the only one who comes through these doors and tells me about multiple partners without condoms.”

I smile slightly. “I’m not?”

“God, no.” She smiles too. “It’s frustrating, though. I mean, if you know to use condoms, why don’t you?”

She stares at me. She’s not being condescending. This is an honest question. There are many more like me, and she wants to understand.

I shake my head. “I’m not sure,” I say.

After, another woman draws my blood and tells me to set an appointment for fourteen days from then—fourteen long days—to get my results. Driving home, I think about the first woman’s question, wishing I had said more. I do know why I haven’t used condoms when I should have. In the moment, when I’m busy trying to make some guy mine, thoughts about death or disease are furthest from

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my mind. I’m too caught up in desperation, in filling what I can never seem to fill. It’s a terrible realization that I’m willing to risk my life to get to that place.

I visit Leif in those fourteen days, trying to keep my mind off it.

He brushes me off, tells me my anxiety is irrational. But he doesn’t know the truth about my past, those two random guys in Taos, all those nameless guys before them. When the day comes, I’m a wreck.

I didn’t sleep much the night before. Then I drank too much coffee to compensate. I stand in the waiting room, too jumpy to sit. I feel like I might throw up. That same woman, the one with all the questions, comes to get me, and as we walk down the hallway I try to interpret the look on her face. Is she about to tell me I’m going to die?

She opens the door to the same stark room and sets a folder in front of her as she sits. I’m going to throw up right here, in this tiny white room.

“Your test was negative,” she says.

“Oh, my God!” I say, relief flooding me. Then, “You really shouldn’t act so stoic on the way in here. You might send someone into cardiac arrest.”

She smiles. “I’ll work on that.”

“So I can go?”

“Just use condoms,” she says. “OK?”

I smile. I think about telling her what I came to in the car, the answer to her question last time. But I just want to get out of here now. Out of this ridiculously small room and back into the world.

“I will,” I say.

And then I do what everyone must do in this situation. I tell myself I will do things differently from now on. If Leif and I should split, I’ll use condoms. I’m nobody’s fool.

K

i n a u g u s t , I drive to Vermont for my monthlong writing work -

shop, and all the anxiety I avoided by not doing something like this,

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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 all my fear about leaving the world of boys, fills me. I’m not nervous about my writing or being somewhere new. I’m nervous about being away from Leif. Out of his sight, I’m afraid I don’t matter. I hate admitting it. I still experience myself like I did in high school.

Without a man loving me, I feel like I don’t exist.

He has promised to visit me for the third weekend, and I’ve already begun to count down the days.

The Vermont campus is beautiful. Purple and yellow irises cluster near huge, heavy oaks. Maple trees wave leaves as big as my hand. Mountains hover in the distance. After I settle into my single room, I go for a run, a new activity I have taken up under Deirdre’s advice. I run along gravel roads, thick greenery on either side. The sky is a piercing blue, the air hot. When I return I feel enlivened, sharp. I can do this, I think.

That first evening I meet the other workshop participants at a welcome dinner. There are only a few of us who are young, so we gravitate toward one another. One girl, Kelly, slinks toward me and whispers, “Where are all the hot men?”

I laugh. “All the hot men are painters and musicians. Writers aren’t hot.”

She smiles. “Speak for yourself.”

Kelly is a few years older than me, though she seems even older.

She scans the room, her eyes dark. She wears red lipstick that ex-tends just beyond the lines of her lips, and she holds her lips in a well-rehearsed pout. Maybe she doesn’t realize how obvious this is, how it looks like she’s trying too hard. I don’t know her at all, but I feel both sad and scared for her, seeing those lips.

Before the dinner is through, two older men approach her. She opens her body toward them, and when they speak she lowers her head and widens her eyes. Another practiced move. I squirm inside, aware I have my own moves: big smile, wide eyes, cocked head.

Days, I work on my first short story. It is about a girl who is struck mute in an accident. In my critique, the teacher tells me the

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character remains undeveloped. Her muteness doesn’t go anywhere.

It stays static, which makes the whole story incomplete.

I work on it some more.

In between I go running, allowing the fresh, flowery air to clear my head.

I think about Leif. Only seven days to go.

I call him twice from the pay phone in the dormitory lobby. The first time he’s not home, and I leave a message with his mother. The second time, he sounds groggy, like he just woke up. We talk briefly about the workshop and his gigs, and then he has to go.

“I miss you so much,” I tell him.

“I miss you, too.”

I want to make him promise, but I hold myself back.

“I’ll see you in just five days.”

“That’s right.”

“You’re still coming, right?”

“I just said I was.”

“OK,” I say, not wanting to let him go.

“Right. I’ll see you then.”

And he hangs up.

I find Kelly and a few others lying on a blanket in the grass, and I join them. They’re discussing the writing life, submissions and rejections, magazines with which they’ve placed work.

“What about you?” one of the girls asks. “Do you send your stuff out?”

“I just started writing,” I say. “I’m not ready.”

“That’s good,” Kelly says. She stretches out her legs in the sun.

She has less makeup on today, and you can see how pretty she really is, freed up from all that pretense and effort. “You should wait. Too many people send out their stuff before it’s ready.”

“That’s right,” the other girl says. “Too many are focused on publication, not the writing. But if you rush the process, the writing isn’t good. You lose the whole purpose of having written.”

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“That’s one of the things I love about writing,” Kelly says now.

Her eyes are lit up. “I love the surprise. You never know where it will take you.”

I listen, rapt, excited. This. I want this. The first thing, other than boys, that feels meaningful to me, that I can feel in my veins, can lit-erally feel moving its way through me like a drug.

I go back to my room to work on my story some more.

K

t h e d a y l e i f arrives, I’m ecstatic. I can’t wait to get my arms around him, to get him near me. I pace my room, making myself wait to take my shower and get ready. It would be unbearable to be dressed too early. I try to read, but I can’t keep the sentences in my head.

As soon as he arrives, we strip down and have sex. Then we go out for some food. He comes with me to a poetry reading that evening, but he fidgets beside me. I know he has no interest in any of this. So after the reading, when I would normally socialize with the other participants at the reception, discussing the reading and our own writing, I go back to my room with Leif. He takes out his guitar and noodles around on it for a while. I lie on my bed and watch him, then take out a book and try to read. But that restlessness moves right in again as though it arrived with him, a package deal.