The Virgins (17 page)

“Like they’ll believe we’re really married,” says Aviva.

Seung borrows a friend’s car, a Mercury Capri. He drives smoothly, and for Aviva’s sake more slowly than he likes. Otherwise, she’ll press her hand nervously against the dashboard as if she is protecting them from a crash. She makes little squeaks when they round a tight curve. The woman at the manager’s hut hands them a key off an oaktag board without a second look. Their cabin is weathered and lopsided, but inside, the pine paneling is new, the kitchen gleams. They put away the groceries. Seung has brought a chicken, which he plans to roast slowly with fresh cherries, dried apricots, and a sweet white wine. He’s brought pasta, too, and tomatoes and herbs for making a sauce. He learned how to do the sauce from Sterne, who has an Italian grandmother. Seung picks up something from everybody. He assembles himself from those around him.

He’s brought cognac. He’s brought whole coffee beans and an electric grinder.

They go out to walk along the beach. The wind is up, and Aviva huddles in her down coat, a scarf around her nose and mouth. She breathes her own hot breath. Seung is never cold; heat streams off him. He wears a duffle, the hood down, the toggles unfastened. They squat in the sand. The sky is yellow-white; you can just make out the outlines of some clouds. Aviva nestles her back against Seung’s belly. He draws his coat around her with one hand, with the other he holds a book that he reads to her. It’s titled
The Truth Behind Famous Phenomena.
Seung has a weakness for the
occult. The book says that the Bermuda Triangle is a projection of rage. The angry dead of the native tribes of southern Florida and the Caribbean, abused and slaughtered by the white man, concentrated their energies into creating a force field of destruction between his ports in Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico.

“Oh, come on, Seung.”

“Don’t dismiss it. There are physical and psychological dynamics we can’t possibly understand.”

He believes in
UFO
s, in an afterlife in which he will meet and hash out old differences with his loved ones and rivals. He will never truly be dead, he says. Crystals may have power, and there are certain frequencies that can be picked up from inanimate objects. Omens exist. The ring was a good omen, the way it called out to him from the jeweler’s in Back Bay, then fit Aviva’s finger exactly, settled on her like a fragment she had been missing. More often there are bad omens. He has the sense, at times, of something malevolent approaching him, growing closer by the month. He doesn’t know what it is.

Inside his coat Aviva is warm. Her shivers subside. She unlaces her sneakers, pulls off her socks, and plunges her toes into the cold sand. She traces her name, clumsily, with her big toe. Then, annoyed with herself for not thinking of Seung’s name first, she rubs hers out and writes that instead.

Back at the cabin Seung builds a fire. He finds a metal bowl among the kitchen things and puts out flour, sugar, a bag of chocolate chips.

“What now?” Aviva asks anxiously. Sweets, peanut butter, the tin filled with sugar in Auburn’s dining hall: they fill her now with dread and longing. She no longer trusts herself. At times she worries that if she starts to eat she will never stop.

Brownies, Seung says. Hash brownies. He has the world’s best recipe.

“Well. Maybe. Just a little.”

She’s had pot twice before. Once she and Carlyle and Dorota went out to the football field and passed a joint Dorota had. How had Dorota come to have it? Aviva did not ask. All these purchases and connections—Aviva has no idea how they work, who meets whom and how. Afterward, for a long time, she thought she felt nothing, but on the walk back to Hiram the ground tipped up to meet her. She was climbing a great hill, although she did not grow winded. The landscape seemed to be stretching to meet the sky. By the time they reached the dorm, the world had settled down flat again. She thought perhaps she had imagined the change, brought it on through wishing.

The other occasion was nearly a year ago, before Auburn, with Marshall. He brought home a joint wrapped in a scrap of paper towel and asked her if she wanted to give it a try. She could tell it was a new thing for him, too. Some kid had given it to him, he said, in exchange for his help with math homework. He didn’t really want it but would feel bad to waste it. They chose a night when their parents were at the symphony and sat in Marshall’s room amid his
skateboarding paraphernalia. Nothing happened. Perhaps altered consciousness was a myth, like the myth of love, that myth that made you write that your veins were filled with fire and that you would die without et cetera.

“Thatta girl.”

They kiss as the room warms and fills with the rich smell of chocolate. Seung feeds Aviva little chunks of warm brownie. She nips his fingers.

“Do you think one brownie is enough?” she asks. “I want to feel something this time.”

“You should have more.”

She eats another one.
I am getting dreamy,
she thinks.
I’m getting calm, happy. Or something.
Seung runs a bath; he wants to wash her hair. She closes her eyes as she slips into the water, like a child who feels invisible when she can’t see. Her nipples are buzzy, sentient. She stretches out and lets her head go under the water. Warmth bathes her eyes and cheeks, and her ears fill with murmurs. It’s true: even in a bathtub fed by pipes from municipal waterworks, from urban plants, you can hear the ocean. Her hair floats away from her in long ropes.

Aviva’s hair is like a sack of coins in Seung’s hands: heavy, heavy. He works the shampoo through the coils, combing with his fingers, tugging gently against the knots. He presses her scalp with his fingertips, improvising a massage. He makes her rinse and then starts with the conditioner. The suds join around her, hiding her naked body from view.

“You have to leave it in for five minutes,” she tells him. She has coarse, difficult hair; it takes the stuff time to penetrate.

While they wait he sings her a tune, beating out time on the rim of the tub. The goose bumps come up on her arms as the warmth slowly leaches from the water. When she’s all rinsed out, Seung wraps her in one of the large worn towels the rental agency has provided, and combs out her hair. Then he discards the damp towel and wraps her in another, dry one.

“I’m not feeling anything,” she complains. For a while she thought she was, but she isn’t. She eats two more of the brownies. Seung’s had six already, seven.

She lies on her belly on the couch, the towel lightly covering her waist and buttocks. Seung’s shirt and jeans are unbuttoned. He begins to massage her neck. He presses the small of her back and the burning sensation there brings tears to her eyes. It is as if he’s found an extra storehouse of pain, hidden away like outdated munitions, and is emptying it. She begins to cry in earnest now. “I’m not sad,” she says. He presses his lips to her neck, kisses her from the knob where her neck meets her shoulders vertebra by vertebra down to the coccyx. He says it:
coccyx.
Another scientific word he likes. On the way back up he uses his tongue instead. He turns her over and continues on her neck, breasts, belly. He gets up to drink a glass of water. Aviva begins to shake all over; she has grown very cold, every pore feels open. A cold wind is pouring through her without cease. She forgets Seung for a time; she doesn’t know how long. She is not aware of thinking. When she begins to surface again she has the sensation of having taken up residence somewhere else entirely. She sees before her a great maze, with endless branching
pathways. She knows precisely what has happened: she has been transported to the inside of her own skull, and the pathways she sees are the pathways of her own brain. She calls out to Seung, alarmed. She seems to be moving along these pathways, not in a bodily way but as some other form of presence. She is following corridors, some wide and some narrow, with a sense of burrowing farther and farther away from the outside, the outside where she can stand and look at herself, see a head, shoulders, legs. She is inside, and so she can’t see anything. She thinks she may become lost, that she will forget how to make her way back.

Seung is right there, next to her, asking her what is it. He’s been there all along. His shirt is off; she remembers pressing one cheek and then the other against the smooth surface of his skin. She explains as best she can. She knows, she says, that she’s on the couch, in the cabin. Suddenly that seems obvious; there’s nothing to worry about. She asks him what time it is. One thirty in the afternoon. “That’s good,” she tells him. It’s another bit of data anchoring her to the world. But she knows that if she relaxes her vigilance she will slip inside the maze again. There is an inside and an outside to thoughts, and to be utterly inside them means dissolution. She feels herself moving down the corridors again. She grabs Seung’s arm, calls to him to hold her. But even the warmth of his body doesn’t draw her fully back.

It’s an anxiety reaction, he tells her. There’s nothing dangerous in the stuff. He’s with her, he says, nothing is going to happen to her.

The walls of the maze are high, golden, glowing. She cannot see above or beyond them. She pleads with Seung, but she can’t hear her own words.

He takes her by the hand and walks her to the bedroom, where he thinks she will be more relaxed, and where he can easily lie next to her. He draws the covers down, gets in beside her, spoons himself behind her. He cradles her head in his hands. She must just relax, he tells her. She is here, the hundred pounds of her, in the bed with him. There is no inside to get lost in. She has an outside as well as an inside. His statements are contradictory but they all seem sufficiently true.

She is quiet at moments, calmly forgetful, and then she remembers her fear and stiffens, breathes shallowly, cries out to him to help her leave the maze, help her get
outside,
please, please . . .

“Talk to me, talk to me,” she begs.

Seung curses himself. This brittle, fragile girl; he should have known better. He is careless, careless, an idiot entrusted with a jewel. How could he have let this happen? He himself loves to disappear, loves being drowned in the wash of shapes and lights and extravagant thoughts, being not himself anymore but part of something Other, even when that Other is brutal and menacing. The exquisite relief of not being himself, or any individual at all. But he should have known that for her, Aviva, it would be different. Her needs and her nightmares are so wrapped up in each other that it is impossible to disentangle them. She has told him in so many ways that she fears the loss of control. How
could he have ignored this? His duty now is to hold her for all the hours to come, hold her fast, cooperating with her delusion if that’s what’s necessary, riding the panic out.

“Don’t let me slip away . . .”

He talks to her, he tells her that of course he won’t let her slip away; as long as she holds on to some part of his body she can’t go anywhere, see? A lie, of course, because he knows people who have slipped away—Detweiler, for just one—but you have to make a bridge of lies for the other person to climb back on. She holds on to him and for minutes at a time his flesh makes her safe. Then she doubts it, the power of that flesh, and begins to whimper, to call out that it’s happening, it’s happening again, she’s starting to become lost. He talks to her again, puts her hand on a different part of his body.
Leg. Thigh. Neck.
Until somehow the solidity of this or that part convinces her. They just have to run down the clock. It will be a long, long afternoon.

A little after five Aviva falls asleep, exhausted, her lips dry and her eyes fluttering beneath the lids. Seung waits awhile, then steals to the bathroom and wipes his face and neck and underarms with cold water. He sits by her side with a glass of water. On the nightstand lie a pencil and a pad of paper, a small amenity of the cabin, and he takes the point of the pencil and drives it into his thigh until mere physical pain is transformed into a deep bodily objection. He holds the self-made blade there ten seconds, twenty, then slowly withdraws it. What kind of lover is he, to force on her these kinds of adventures? She wasn’t made for them.

At five forty Aviva wakes with a start, looks around. “Math class,” she murmurs. Precalculus, with Mr. Singh, it starts at five forty.

Over Seung’s protests she struggles into her clothes, runs her fingers through her still-damp hair. Her balance is off; she’s clumsy tying her sneakers. He’ll run her down on the beach if he has to. At the bedroom door she pauses, looks at him.

“Oh, God,” she says.

She comes back to bed. He can feel her humiliation. He puts his hand on her shoulder but she pushes it off. He strips off his jeans, no longer needing to be dressed, to create that makeshift authority for her benefit, and once again lies next to her, leaving space between them. He spreads his hand over his hard penis. Not here, not now, he chides himself. The chicken he bought sits in the refrigerator, fresh and trussed. The apricots and cherries are plump and good. It’s still not too late to cook. He has a vision of candlelight, of cognac winking in the glasses and the smells of stewing fruits and broth with wine. There is still something good, something hopeful to be done with the evening. He rises again and pulls on his boxers, a T-shirt. He pours himself a glass of wine, then with deliberation he chooses the pans, bowls, knives he needs. He lays out the cutting boards, looks at them with satisfaction. There is something for him to do. Aviva will sleep again, and then she will feel better. When she’s ready to join him, he’ll sit her down, make her comfortable, give her a glass of warm milk.