loose (9 page)

Soon, Ben and Amy disappear, and Dave guides me toward the black, contemporary leather couch. We kiss, and he peels off my shirt, his shirt, his jeans. He undoes my bra, hikes up my skirt, slips a hand between my hip and my underwear. I look at the windows as

•

A H o u s e w i t h N o M e n he slides them down. Our bodies reflect there. It is beautiful almost, the curves of our bodies connected. I can do this now, I think. I can let him in this far. This is what I wait for every night: a face hovering close above mine, his breathing fast and out of control. Him wanting me, all mine. He kisses my neck, my collarbone. So sweet, I can almost believe he loves me. And then he is inside me. He moves, gripping my hips and butt. Like he needs me, too. Our skin comes together and apart, growing slick with sweat. I wrap my arms around his back, holding on.

And then it is over.

He pulls his body away, the air suddenly cold. He pulls on his jeans, runs a hand through his dark hair, and goes off to the bathroom.

I turn again to see my reflection in the window. I am lying on the couch, alone, shadowy. A corpse. I quickly pull on my shirt and underwear. I fasten my bra beneath my shirt. I hear Dave in the kitchen and turn to see him pouring more whiskey. He holds a glass toward me, and I shake my head. I ask instead for water, which he brings me. That’s nice.

When Amy and I leave that night, Dave hugs me then chucks me under the chin. It is sweet, affectionate, a big brother’s gesture. I smile, not knowing what else to do. I guess this is just how it is.

Having sex is lukewarm, something you share for an evening. It’s friendship-building. What else should it be?

In our cab heading uptown, I tell Amy. I’m not sure why. I guess if this is going to be a regular thing, which I know it will be, I don’t want to be so alone with it. I realize I’m going to need a friend. But Amy is aghast.

“You had sex? You didn’t even know him.” She stares at me, in-credulous. Her open window whips her dark, thin hair into her face.

I bite my lip. I don’t know what to say. “It’s not like he was my first,” I say.

“What was he, then? Your fifteenth?”

•

L o o s e G i r l

“Ha ha,” I say, though I know she’s not trying to be funny. “It’s not a big deal, OK? I lost it to Greg when we were seeing each other.

I just thought it was time.”

She turns away from me, eyes straight ahead. “It’s a big deal to me.”

I shrug, hurt. “That’s your problem. Besides, what were you doing with Ben that whole time?”

She looks right at me. “Kissing,” she says. “He took my number.”

I shrug again, trying not to reveal my envy. “Lucky you.”

She doesn’t say anything more, and neither do I.

But I keep having sex with strangers.

One day, we wake up late at Nora’s and find Dorrian’s Red Hand is in the newspaper. Jack brings it to show us. A boy and girl met there, left together at four thirty a.m., and went to Central Park, where she was found strangled by her own bra two hours later. Amy and I read, our mouths open. Robert Chambers and Jennifer Levin.

We know who they are. We saw them leave together the night before after Robert’s then-girlfriend had broken up with him, jealous about other girls, including Jennifer. Robert is the tall, handsome boy we had watched from afar, one of the boys always in a blazer and topsiders. Jennifer was one of those tiny-waisted girls. They were regulars, part of the wealthy in-crowd. Amy and I both thought Robert was hot. His dark hair, the way he kept half his button-down shirt out of his khakis. He seemed so likable with his affable smile. But the article painted him in another light. Robert had been kicked out of a number of preparatory schools, and he had recently been expelled from Boston University for stealing and for hosting a party in his dorm. His lawyer claimed Robert didn’t need to force anyone to have sex with him. Jennifer had been the sexual aggressor that night.

Amy and I take showers. We eat some breakfast. We try to go about a regular day. We talk about Robert Chambers as a badass, the reports of him having yelled obscenities in the street and then torn

•

A H o u s e w i t h N o M e n up the summons he received from a cop. We discuss the claims that he was kicked out of one boarding school after another for his defiant behavior. Inside, we are both shaken. Things have changed for good.

Looking for guys in bars is suddenly not quite so innocent, and my having lost my virginity makes that even truer.

In the evening, we head to Dorrian’s, hoping to talk to others, but there’s a new bouncer at the door, and he shakes his head. Media attention, he tells us. The owner got in big trouble for all you underagers. Don’t bother coming back. We go to a nearby diner, upset.

Over the next few months, the Robert Chambers murder, or

“Preppy Murder,” will build national attention. The story grows daily. News critics will write incisive features about wealthy parents leaving money for their kids on the kitchen’s granite countertop as they run off to second homes in St. Barts. The parents are from the sixties hippie generation, grown up and bringing in serious cash, but still partying and rebelling. Their children grow up taking on adult behaviors—drug use, casual sex, bar hopping—without the wherewithal or guidance to handle them. Jennifer’s death will come to represent the wasted lives of socialite idle youth. The focus will also be on Jennifer, painted as a sexual vixen who knew what she was doing that night. Robert’s lawyer falsely claims she has a “sex diary,”

full of sexy tales and phone numbers. Robert claims Jennifer raped him. He and his lawyer claim Robert and Jennifer were having

“rough sex,” she wanted him to strangle her, and Robert didn’t realize his own strength. A home video leaks showing Robert and a few of the beautiful girls from Dorrian’s right after his trial. He pulls a head off a doll and utters the words, “Oops, I think I killed it.” A clear connection in the media is made: If Jennifer wanted sex, she deserved to die. This stops me. It’s not something I want to think about too much. So I watch the news, scour the papers, looking for more information.

In my mind, the Preppy Murder further equates sex and desperation. It shows I’m not the only one who brings my aching wants to

•

L o o s e G i r l

sex. They are inexorable, bound together in a tight knot. I imagine Robert and his anger, his frustration like mine. I imagine being the one lying under him, wrestling with his passion. The one beneath his strong hands, his desire. I can picture the two of them in the bar that night, Jennifer with her pretty, tamed hair and unassuming clothes, somewhat different from those perfect girls I envied. She was more down-to-earth. More like me. Robert wore his gleaming smile, walking from table to table. Had he ever come to Amy’s and my table I would have gone with him in a second. I would have held his hand in the park, as I imagine he held Jennifer’s. I would have allowed him to push me into the deep, damp grass, to wrestle off my clothes, to bite at my neck. I would have pulled him against me, into me, deep inside to that silent, painful spot. Before I remember she is dead and gone, I will think how much I would have liked that, to meet him there at that place.

•

5

Losing my virginity changes Amy and me for good. Maybe she sees my carelessness and doesn’t know how else to express her concern.

Maybe she’s jealous of how easily I can relinquish my body. Maybe she thinks I’m like Jennifer Levin, putting myself into dangerous situations for no reason she can see. Or maybe she just thinks it’s shitty that I have sex with people I don’t care about and who won’t care about me. I’m not sure. But I see it as my opening to get out.

When school starts up again, I go to a party and make my way toward Jennifer A. She’s the prettiest, the one most boys at our school would like to get. She’s also the quietest. She has a feline quality, sleek and slow-moving. She stands now with a beer in her hand, her legs crossed, one finger twirling in her hair. She looks bored. I prepared for this.

“Want to do some coke?” I whisper.

She turns to me, her eyes wide and sparkly. I can see my plan is going to work.

“You have coke?”

•

L o o s e G i r l

I nod. I took it earlier from my dad’s drawer, which he has kept refilled since that party a few years back.

She smiles. “Let’s go to my car.”

We head outside and onto the street. The night is still warm from the summer. Dark leaves rustle from oaks that stand majestically in front of the house. I don’t even know whose party we’re at. She un-locks a Honda, and we get in. I file this: Jennifer A is not so rich as to have a Beemer or a Jeep Cherokee like most of the kids at our school.

Like me, she has to come from enough money to go to our school, but maybe not as much as the others. She takes a CD case from the door cubby, and I dig out the packet of foil from my pocket.

“Here,” I say, handing it to her. “You can do it.”

She opens the foil and smiles. “This looks nice.”

“It’s my dad’s,” I tell her. “Which means it’s going to be really good.”

She dumps some of the chunky powder onto the CD case and pulls a credit card from her wallet to break it up. “Your dad does cocaine?”

I nod. “He has so much, I can take this amount and he’ll never know.”

“Very cool.” She keeps chopping with the card. “You’re Kerry, right?”

I nod again.

“Why haven’t we hung out before?”

I smile, feeling great. “I don’t know.”

She slices the powder into lines, takes a twenty from her wallet, and rolls it, just like the dollar bills I used to find rolled in my dad’s apartment before we moved in together, back when I didn’t know what they were.

“Your shit,” she says, handing me the CD case and the bill. “You get the first line.”

I take it from her and, using the bill, sniff in the thinnest line.

•

A H o u s e w i t h N o M e n The drug is sharp inside my nostril, and immediately I feel a course of lightning through my body. Razor-sharp, quick, bracing, like I’ve just plugged myself in. I give it back to her, and she snorts quickly.

She dips a fingertip—nail bitten, I see, just like mine—into the edge of the powder and rubs it on her gums.

K

a s u n d a y. Mom calls. She’s been back in the States for a few years now, living in Chicago. I sit on the leather couch in the living room and pick at a hangnail. She tells me about seeing Tyler in her new dorm room, how she thinks Tyler’s thriving there. Last time Tyler called she said she had a boyfriend. A boyfriend. My withdrawn, matronly sister. I told her I was happy for her, but really I was seething with jealousy.

How can she have a boyfriend when I don’t? What is so wrong with me?

“And you?” Mom asks. “What about you?”

I look at the rows of pictures on the entertainment stand. Tyler and me as children. Dad and Nora on a recent cruise. Most of the photos are outdated, from when Tyler and I were much younger.

Dad’s many electronics and all their wires clutter the stand—the large TV, two VCRs so he can copy Nova and war-footage videos, all the stereo equipment. Our apartment is always cluttered, old computers and their parts heaped in corners, mounds of mail that’s never been sorted, and the living room is no exception. Since hiring an in-terior designer when he first bought the apartment (one whom Mom claimed he was sleeping with), he has allowed the place to go to hell.

Dad pays a cleaning lady from Nigeria forty bucks to come once a week, and she does our laundry, dusts and vacuums, and cooks us meals that she seals in Tupperware and puts in the fridge. Without her, I guess, we would live like bachelors, eat cereal for dinner, let laundry pile up in the hallway. Mom’s apartment, by contrast, is like a wonderland. Like Dad she has lots of stuff, but hers is all valuable and carefully arranged. Local artists’ colorful work lines her walls,

•

L o o s e G i r l

bizarre sculpture juts from corners. She has an installation in her dining room, rows of tiny blue kites illustrated with clouds that flutter and wave when there’s a breeze. It’s a minuscule version by the artist of an installation actually hanging in Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Every item she owns, from toothbrush to kitchen whisk, is a piece of art. She likes to say it’s because she wants to surround herself with beauty, but her need for unique and beautiful things has always struck me as excessive, maybe even frantic.

“Kerry?” My silence makes Mom uncomfortable. She doesn’t want to know how I’m really doing. She would never approve of the way I spend my free time, chasing boys and partying. If she could have her way, I would be like Tyler, waiting at home for her calls.

“I’m good,” I say.

“No more parties?” she asks. There’s a familiar edge in her voice, the one that’s there whenever she mentions Dad. “Your father isn’t leaving you alone while he goes off on business anymore?”

“God, Mom,” I say. “That was ages ago.”

“It was a few years ago. I hope your father’s learned something.”

I sigh. He doesn’t talk about you, I want to scream. Why are you still talking about him?

“Can we drop this?”

“I have a right to an opinion when it comes to the parenting of my children.”

“Not when you’re not around to parent them yourself,” I blurt and immediately regret it.

She goes silent, her code for feeling hurt. I close my eyes, wishing for once it were my feelings that mattered here. I’m the one who got left, I want to say. But her silence warns me against saying anything more. I can’t stand her, especially when she’s like this, but I still need her. She’s my mother, after all.

“I’m going to go,” she says in a tight voice.

“Fine,” I say.

We hang up, and in the silence I hear a small moan from behind

•

A H o u s e w i t h N o M e n my father’s closed door. I get up, march down the hall, and slam my bedroom door.

K

a m y s e e s m e laughing with the Jennifers during lunch. I never say anything directly, but she gets the hint and begins to keep her distance. We say hello in the hallways. We talk briefly. There is no blow-up or tantrum, as I feared there would be last year. It turns out Amy is accepting, as though all along she knew I would leave our friendship.