The Virgins (11 page)

He selects seventeen, his age. They walk along the dim corridor and into another stairwell, put down their bags.

“Now,” says Seung.

They kiss, talk, kiss again. Kissing is not the right word for it, this thing that they do.
Kiss
—a term for a beach movie or a teen magazine. I looked it up in the dictionary.
To touch with the lips esp. as a mark of affection or greeting; to come in gentle contact.
As a noun:
a caress with the lips.
What Seung and Aviva are up to is more outlandish and more significant than that. You have to try to remember back to a time when fucking hadn’t happened to you yet, not quite, when you still didn’t even know precisely what it was (though you might have thought you did) and what it would heal in you or wouldn’t. When a tongue pushing deep inside you
was
as fucked as you could possibly be. I think maybe it was, in fact, more than anything that came later . . .

And the talking has to be given its proper measure also. It is just as important, in a different way. Without it they would turn on each other, not be able to stand the pleasure. Kiss and talk . . . they never run out of things to say, Aviva and Seung. What do they talk about? What did any of us talk about in those days? Everything seemed to be of pressing interest. Friends who were in trouble and friends who were not. Studies, teachers, food eaten and anticipated, a shirt or a pair of pants worn, lost, disliked, discarded by a parent, mourned. The movies. Students one had known in past years who took on the features of heroes, remnants of the famous age just past for which we were a bit belated: the
sixties, the age of true hippies and pure drugs and rebellion with glory. Tom Petty, Peter Gabriel, Neil Young, The Band, Leonard Cohen, Joan Armatrading, Traffic, Eric Clapton, Elvis Costello. This or that prep or lower whom one looked after like a brother or sister. Parents and siblings, not so much—except that Aviva often spoke of Marshall.

They are sitting on the concrete floor, knees touching, sleepy, talking, when the two men from security open the stairwell door. The boy and girl are asked what they are doing here. Aviva says that they are just talking. They have a plane to catch in three hours and nowhere to go; they are just making the time go by. The security guards do not seem satisfied with these truths. They ask the two teenagers to please come with them to the manager’s office. The manager’s office is large and bright; the manager himself is small. He asks what they were doing in the stairwell. Aviva repeats her explanations. The scene feels like the one that took place in Dean Ruwart’s office not long ago, when he asked if she knew why she had been called in. Once again she does not know, not really.

“This hotel is private property,” the manager tells them. His name is Mr. Ianetti. The statement is meaningless to Aviva. They were using a deserted stairwell, they were talking. Even if they had had their clothes half off she cannot see what they have to apologize for.

The room is neatly furnished with a polished dark-wood desk, framed botany prints, and two armchairs upholstered in striped ticking. It looks much nicer than the lobby or the
corridors do. Seung and Aviva sit in the armchairs while Mr. Ianetti stands behind his desk and the men from security stand along the walls. Weak sunlight falls inside the room through cream-colored curtains. After an hour or so, when the two teenagers have answered the same questions over and over, have allowed their bags to be searched, have shown Aviva’s bankbook and her father’s credit card and Seung’s driver’s license, have offered to get Aviva’s mother or father on the phone, it occurs to Aviva that these three men may detain them long enough to make them miss their plane. She shows the men their tickets again, explains their need to depart. Seung says very little. He understands that the part of an Asian boy is to be silent. Nothing he can say will instill trust. And Aviva begins to understand that the door of the room will not open until these men wish it to open. For the first time she grows uneasy. If she were older and less convinced that the world works along rational and reasonable principles, she might think to make more of the fact that her uncle is a lawyer at a large firm in Chicago. She might hint at her surprise that Mr. Ianetti would be suspicious of two students who attend the prestigious Auburn Academy. She might mention some of her family’s expensive vacations: Switzerland, the Galapagos, Mexico.

But perhaps Mr. Ianetti knew from the first few minutes that there is no reason to detain them and has simply been waiting to see this uneasiness in her eyes, this fear. For suddenly he stands up and asks the two of them to promise that they will never set foot in this hotel again. If they do, he
will have them arrested immediately. They promise. They scramble for their bags, and one of the security men, like a footman, opens the door for them to depart.

Out on the street Seung says, “Christ, it could have been worse—much, much worse.”

“What do you mean?”

He has a quarter bag of pot tucked into the inside zip pocket of his knapsack. They didn’t even look there.

She wants to strike him—the stupidity of it! What the fuck—she says that to him—was he thinking, planning to bring this shit on the plane? She pictures the knapsack passing under the X-ray camera, the operator stopping it, reversing the belt. Someone saying
I’m sorry
and asking for their boarding passes. Moreover—and she says this, too,
moreover
—was it his expectation that she was going to use this stuff with him in Chicago? What made him so sure she would say yes? Or had he been planning to go off and get high all by himself? Seung stares into the traffic. His eyes can go so hard at times. She tells him that she doesn’t care how much the stuff cost, how much trouble it was to get; when they get to the airport he has to flush it down the toilet. She waves wildly for a cab—it’s the only way they’re going to make their flight.

He’s such a child sometimes, but all the same, she admires him. He sat as naturally and easily the whole time as if there were no danger at all. If she had his fearlessness! His face betrayed nothing; he never once glanced at his bag.

Without speaking of it they have agreed not to try to make love again for now; they won’t risk further disappointment and recriminations. They are lighthearted and happy. They sleep pressed together in Aviva’s childhood bed, a four-poster with a twin mattress. The four-poster was the one girlish fantasy in which she was ever indulged. It is hung with double curtains: the inside curtain a stiff, old-fashioned white cotton with lace eyelet, the outside curtain a sheer panel that flutters in the summer when there’s air conditioning. The canopy has scalloped white borders. The mattress lay so high up for the six-year-old girl that to get into bed she had to make a running leap from the other side of the room. Anya Rossner still doesn’t know what got into her, that she arranged to purchase it, had the curtains made up. In the rest of the house she brooks no ornamentation, no soft, sentimental aesthetics. “You so wanted it,” she says to Aviva, as if apologizing to herself.

Aviva and Seung lie in bed late and read the Sunday
New York Times,
what sections of it they can get their hands on. Mrs. Rossner always makes off with Arts, and Marshall gets Sports, which no one else wants. He also reads the news, but says he doesn’t understand any of it. He comes into Aviva’s room to give over the front section, and greets the lovers. Already he likes Seung, and Seung likes him. He pushes himself up onto the bed, swings his feet over the side.

The front page says that the Soviets are continuing to build up land forces at the Afghan border, apparently in preparation for an invasion. A sixty-four-foot Christmas card was delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Teheran for the fifty-three hostages.

“What’s up, buddy?” asks Seung.

“Nothing. Mom says we have to leave at three thirty.”

“Fine.”

Silence. Seung’s hand strays up the back of Aviva’s neck. It grabs a hunk of hair, pulls suggestively. Aviva wriggles to move her thigh against Seung’s thigh. A low growl of appreciation escapes him.

“Am I not wanted?” Marshall asks seriously.

Seung grins. “You’ll be more wanted later.”

When Aviva saw Marshall at the airport she couldn’t help crying out. He’d shaved his head. He’d done it himself, apparently, and there were nicks and scabs especially in the back. He’d left little tufty patches, too.

“I thought you were growing your hair out,” Aviva said.

He thought a moment. “I was beginning to look skanky.”

They drive to the university. Mrs. Rossner drives like an
old woman, creeping up on the traffic lights, then slamming the brake pedal as if she’s just narrowly averted a collision. Marshall stares moodily out the window. Aviva’s never seen him like this. She wonders if her absence has left him in too difficult a position after all. He’s alone in the big apartment with his mother, with no one to help him grow up.

The stone buildings at the college squat in the snow: pale, dirty, quiet. Mrs. Rossner’s lecture today is on images of women in the advertisements of the 1940s. She wears a short belted jacket and severe black slacks. Her hair is coiffed weekly at the beauty parlor, swept thickly into snug waves around her face. When she stands there, so erect, so sure, with her precise, authoritative accent, the accent she acquired as a child refugee in England, you can’t understand how any husband could leave her. What she might lack in softness, in subservience, she makes up in the glamor of command. She’s a woman you can’t take your eyes off.

“The avatar of the forties woman in visual advertising is an almost equal amalgam of masculine and feminine traits. The hair and noticeable curve at the breasts signal femininity, as do the long shapely legs—we see this in the Betty Grable craze—yet the midbody is encased in severe and boxy lines, male-imitating suits, hiding away and denying the authentic and frightening female core—the vagina, cunt, womb . . .”

“Oh, boy,” says Aviva.

“She actually said
cunt,”
hisses Marshall. He’s blushing.

“It’s worse than usual,” Aviva tells Seung. “I think she’s showing off for you.”

Students flock the stage after the lecture. They all want a word with Anya Rossner, want her to notice them. She is among the most popular professors on campus. The accent doesn’t hurt. The students’ questions are anxious and horribly sincere. The answers matter, will help them negotiate this treacherous business of male, female, money, love, success, failure.

“I used to be so proud of her when I was little, sitting up in these seats,” says Aviva. “I had no idea she was using all those dirty words.”

“You’re still proud of her,” objects Marshall.

“I know it,” Aviva admits. “I mean, everything she says is absolutely true.”

They go out to Mrs. Rossner’s favorite diner afterward, order roast beef and rice pudding. Mrs. Rossner leaves half of her roast beef on her plate, plays with her rice pudding. Occasionally she looks up at Seung as if he’s someone she can’t quite place, someone who just wandered in. He thinks her lecture was marvelous. His mother would have had conniptions if she’d been here. His father would have laughed till he fell off his seat. Marshall stacks the packets of sugar and Sweet’N Low. It’s dark now; none of them wants to go home. None of them wants to cross the cold parking lot, get into the cold car, and drive the long lakeside roads until they arrive back at—what?

“We should go see a movie tomorrow,” says Mrs. Rossner. “There’s a Satyajit Ray movie at the Film Forum.”

“I guess,” says Aviva.

“Let’s do it,” says Seung enthusiastically.

“If it has subtitles I don’t want to go,” says Marshall.

By the time they pull into the garage beneath the apartment it is nearly nine; the garage man has gone off duty. Mrs. Rossner leaves the car in the center aisle with the key in it; John will park it for her in the morning. Aviva and Seung go upstairs. They’ll stay up until one, two o’clock, caressing, talking, falling silent, talking again. Mrs. Rossner makes another cup of coffee. She leaves her empty cups all over the house, brown rings pasted inside like open mouths. In the morning Dotty, the maid, will gather them up.

“How about a game of chess?” asks Marshall.

Seung stares. Marshall is planted there, at the door to Aviva’s bedroom, with his mauled head, his clear, knowing, innocent eyes.

“All right, one game,” agrees Seung.

The health club pool is in a vast, high, steamy room, with seven lanes fussily marked
SLOW, SLOW/MEDIUM, MEDIUM/FAST, COMPETITIVE, FAMILY
, etc. For now Aviva’s mother still has the use of the membership; later, when he gets around to it, her father will revoke it.

The pool is almost empty today. Seung picks one of the slow lanes. Aviva has complained to him that she gets winded easily when swimming, and he promised to observe her and see if he can help. She wears a plain black one-piece that makes her skin look bluish-white. Though vain about her everyday clothing, a lover of the plunging neckline, she dislikes skimpy bikinis and thinks she looks better in something simple and classic. But as usual she cannot risk being invisible, so she keeps her gold hoop earrings on and makes sure she wears waterproof mascara.

She minces about on the shallow-end ladder, oohing and ughing as if she’s sticking her toes into dry ice.

“All at once,” Seung tells her.

“I never can,” she insists. She starts to plunge down, stops helplessly in a crouch above the water. She looks like a toddler about to relieve herself. Seung laughs at her.