The Virgins (21 page)

One or another of us periodically denies the outcome we all foresee. “He gets good grades. Teachers like him. He’s brought honor to the school with his sportsmanship and athletic performance. He wasn’t in her room, just in the stairwell.”

I’m playing Frisbee in front of Weld with David Yee, which is a shame, because he hobbles my game. Normally I’ll play only with Cort or Voss or Giddings, who will sometimes join in, or Dennis MacBride from Eustis dorm, who’s even better than I am. But Cort and Voss and I—well, we don’t have much to do with each other since that afternoon I walked into their room. And sometimes I have got to feel that spinning disk in my hand, feel it fly free of me and arrow into some strict, chosen space, and I jump at the chance to play with the basest klutz if I have to.

Yee makes a decent catch of a low-skimming throw, a line-drive-ish sort of release, and then throws it back wild, so that it bounces down the little grassy slope on the north side of Weld. I turn, waggling my arms above my head to indicate to David that his incompetence has been noted and scorned,
and when I’m on my way back, the Frisbee retrieved, I see Aviva and Seung sitting on the Weld bench. Just all of a sudden there. They sit like two old people, half a foot between them, completely silent. I shoot the Frisbee back to Yee, trying to make my mark while getting a sense of what’s going on. After a few moments I feel Aviva’s eyes on me. A heat comes up in my back and arms, which loosen and stretch and deepen their grace. I feel her eyes on my chest; I feel them bold and rebellious as she sits next to Seung. I know I could be imagining it, but I don’t think so. You can feel that kind of attention on you; you know when it’s insistent, when it doesn’t move. I’m so warm I feel a little woozy. And then—I see it from the corner of my eye—Seung gets up and goes inside. It’s like a scene in a play for which I’ve been the understudy; for weeks and months I’ve been readying myself for my part, and here it is. Aviva is alone.

The way she dresses has changed in the months she’s been at school. The plunging angora sweaters don’t show up anymore, nor the cowboy boots. The look has been tamed. But she still likes her makeup, and there is still a deliberateness about her style that makes her stand out from Auburn’s sloppy-baggy or preppy norm. She still wears the three gold chains and the gold hoop earrings, and when I get closer I’ll see that there’s an addition now: a gold ring with ruby chips, worn on her fourth finger, the wedding one. She’s got on a pair of khaki-colored shorts and a boatneck top.

Since Seung was caught in her dorm my imaginary interludes with Aviva have become more leisurely. It’s as if, his
status at school shaky, Seung no longer owns her so exclusively anymore. I’ve always been aware of the small details of Aviva’s physical presence: the slightly freckled forearms, the barely pointed chin, the particular splay of her fingers. But now, in my private theater, I hold on to those details longer. I slip her blouse off her shoulders and she doesn’t fade. I unbutton her from the neck to the belly and lay bare that purple bra again. I arrange her on my bed and sketch with my eyes her surprisingly ample hips. She reaches up for me and lets me come in. Her half-lidded eyes and the soft parting of her mouth reveal a pleasure I’ve never seen on the face of Lisa Flood. Sometimes Aviva doesn’t vanish even as I get more urgent and less kind.

I’ve told myself that if Seung is forced to leave Auburn, I might even have a real-world chance with Aviva. I don’t really believe this, but the notion allows the moments after I come to be filled with something that is nearly satisfaction rather than, as usual, a vague resentment and unease.

I aim the Frisbee at a spot past the library so David will have to go far to fetch it. “Sorry!” I call to him, shrugging, feigning puzzlement at my lousy aim. Then I walk toward the bench. I don’t know how I walk. I might look false and awkward; I might glide like Fred Fucking Astaire for all I know. I don’t remember. But then I’m there, looking down at her. She’s already got a book open and is seemingly absorbed in it. Leave Aviva alone for ninety seconds and she opens a book. Could I have been right that she was watching me so intently before? I believe I was right.

“What are you reading?” I ask. A very imaginative opener. Not to mention that I can read the book’s title perfectly clearly:
Jane Eyre.

She raises the cover higher for me. “It’s so-so,” she says. “Lena’s always trying to get me to read the Brontës. Am I supposed to find Rochester sympathetic? He’s a jerk. The one I hate most is
Wuthering Heights.
It’s an embarrassment to anyone female.”

“No, tell me what you really think of it,” I say. “Don’t hold back.”

I get it out of her—a little smile. Thin, transient, but there.

I take that moment to sit down next to her, remaining alert to any rejectionist vibe. We’ve never spoken since that day at the boathouse. I don’t feel anything overtly hostile coming from her. Perhaps, after all, I didn’t shake her enough that day to make her hate me. Perhaps it already seems like a long time ago to her, as it does, somewhat, to me. She seems a little chilly, that’s all, sitting there holding her book impatiently, as if wondering how many seconds of politeness are required until she can go back to it.

“How’s your brother?” I ask. “The one who writes you all the time?”

She smiles more fulsomely now. It wasn’t what she expected to hear next, I guess. She tells me that Marshall is good, he’s going to summer school because he failed seventh-grade English and social studies, but he’s cheerful enough about it, and he knows the material . . . He mailed her a build-it-yourself radio kit for her birthday, and it made her burst out
in laughter: When did he think she was going to find time to build it? And when had she ever shown any interest in electronics? But it kills her, really; he probably spent hours choosing it. Aviva sighs. Marshall. He shaved off all his hair over Christmas vacation, but it’s growing back.

I can’t imagine why she’s giving me so much detail. Maybe she just likes talking about her brother. Maybe all anyone wants to talk to her about these days is Seung, and she’s tired of that. She seems to lighten when she talks of her brother, lose her wariness. In my peripheral vision I sense David approaching, damn Frisbee in hand, fed up with waiting for me. It looks like he’s going to be stupid enough to ask what’s up, is the game still on. But he stops at a distance, watching us for a moment, then turns toward the library. Good man, David. Just so long as you give me back that Frisbee. It’s my best one, a Discraft Sky-Styler.

“How’d he look?” I ask Aviva, about her brother’s shearing.

“Terrible.”

“So why’d you do it, too?”

Her eyes widen. A moment passes, and I think she realizes I don’t mean it unkindly, that I’m actually pained by it, missing those heavy tresses.
Tresses:
a good, romantic, old-fashioned word.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It seemed to make sense at the time.”

“I wish you hadn’t.”

“I went home,” she says slowly, as if she really wants me to see the matter through her eyes, “and everything in my house
seemed dingy and wrong, just out of place and worn out and . . . and spoiled. I can’t explain it.” She tells me that her parents split up back in the fall; her father closed her mother’s credit card and checking accounts and is already behind on his child support payments. He’s living with another woman, who makes strange comments about Jews. Aviva is worried he’s not going to come through with her Auburn tuition for next year. He claims that he will, no problem, but the letters arriving in Chicago from Auburn’s bursar’s office prove he hasn’t.

“Anya says not to worry, she’ll keep me here somehow. She says his new lady is old money, new vulgar. In that accent of hers.”

“Who’s Anya?”

“My mother. I call her Mom or
Matka
—that’s Czech—to her face, but when my brother and I talk about her behind her back we call her Anya. Because she’s just such an Anya.” She explains that her mother was born near Prague and got sent out of the country when she was nine, on one of the
Kindertransports
set up to rescue children from the Nazis. When the war was over, her parents, Aviva’s grandparents, were dead. Anya’s not as young as most mothers. She was thirty-four when Aviva was born. She teaches sociology at a college in the Chicago suburbs—“about images of women and women’s roles in society and that sort of thing.” As if all this explains something to me.

“You come from the same town as Seung, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I say. I wish Seung didn’t need to come back into the conversation.

“Do you know his family?”

I know who they are, I say. They live in a different part of town. I don’t say it’s where the smaller houses are, where you have more immigrants and blacks and even some crime. I mention that they’re not the kind of parents you saw all the time at school basketball games or the damn used-book fundraiser.

“His mother told him she wished for something very bad to happen to me.”

This startles me. “She said that?”

“Apparently. But in Korean. With some choice epithets. I think one of them meant ‘pale chicken.’”

I can’t help laughing. She laughs too, then it vanishes.

“Do you think Seung is going to be kicked out?” she asks. “Everybody tells me no, and I’m tired of being lied to. What are the odds, do you think?”

“When a kid goes before the committee?” I rub my hand on the iron arm of the bench. “Usually they get kicked out.”

She nods. She faces straight ahead, so that I see her in profile.

“What would you say if I told you I might be glad if Seung got kicked out?”

I take my time in responding. First, there’s a sharp thrill—is she hinting something to me? Something connected to the way she watched me while I played? Then I decide I’m out of my mind. She couldn’t be coming on to me. Probably what’s driving her is something less sneaky and more desperate—she simply needs to talk. Because I
happen to be here. Because I’m listening. And somehow she knows it won’t go any further.

Slowly, I answer, “I wouldn’t say anything. Or I’d say you have your reasons.”

“Well, don’t worry,” she says, dropping her gaze to her knees. “I was just joking.” A pause. “I feel like I can tell you things. I don’t know why.” Then: “It’s probably a terrible idea.”

As though that were a cue, a window opens above us. It’s Sterne, his T-shirt sleeves rolled up over his ropy shoulders. “Hey, Bennett-Jones, take a hike,” he calls down.

Aviva’s head snaps up. “Tell Seung to chill out,” she shouts back to Sterne.

“I’m sorry,” I murmur, wishing she’d let me speak up for myself.

“Don’t be. He’s being ridiculous.”

“Are you moving your flabby ass or what?” asks Sterne. “You’re bothering the lady.”

“Jesus,” says Aviva. She turns away from the window and yanks open her book. She looks tired and a little cowed, and I don’t want to cause any more trouble for her. It’s time for me to go. I swallow the sting of once again being silenced by Sterne. I feel that if I give it back to him the way he deserves, I’ll lose Aviva’s respect. So I’ll take the high road and all that. Look like the better man. Fuck. I get a sudden craving for something sweet. I think I’ll head into town.

“Take care,” I say to Aviva—a phrase that until now I’ve heard only from a grown-up’s mouth. I touch her arm.
Sterne fades and all I’m aware of is that I’ve sat here for ten or fifteen minutes, talking to her, hearing what she had to say. My head is light; I’m beginning to fly. I don’t care if Aviva dislikes me, or is using me. Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t. I don’t think she knows herself. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. She’s telling me things. She’s telling me things even Seung doesn’t know.

Those last weeks of school the sun doesn’t set until eight, eight fifteen in the evening. You can walk late in the woods or along the river. The smell of lilac and wisteria follows one to classes. The town is in bloom: baskets of impatiens on the porches, azaleas in the yards. Until the very last minute, it’s hard to take our final tests and papers seriously. We’re seniors. We have our spots in our colleges, our summer plans. We are just waiting to be gone. For the next part of our lives to begin.

David Yee closes our door and gestures me over to his bureau. He opens his underwear drawer and fishes out a flat, tear-shaped bottle of Courvoisier XO. I whistle.

“We worked really hard all year,” he says.

“You devil dog.”

He smiles, nervous, pleased with himself.

“You little charlatan. You pretend good boy.”

He holds on to his flickering smile.

It’s really good stuff that he has, aged thirty years or something like that. I don’t ask where he’s gotten it. It is the kind of booze your parents might give you when they’ve decided it’s time to treat you like a man. I look forward to drinking it. We make a plan to meet at a spot along the creek and walk somewhere we won’t be seen. David is so anxious about the whole thing, this first foray into delinquency, that he insists we go there separately rather than together. Fine, I say. I tell him I’ll bring what I have—the usual, 151. We’ll be aristocratic and ceremonial with the cognac and make sure we get plastered with the 151. As a goof I put on the hideous class ring my father ordered for me at the start of school, saying that once I graduated (he reserved his certainty in regard to this outcome), he would have it engraved with my initials and the year.

It’s two weeks until the end of the term. Seung’s bags are packed. His trunk is at the dock behind the gym and will be sent by freight to his home. He’ll be in Jordan by tomorrow afternoon. His brother is coming down from Ithaca and will meet him at Jordan Station. “To be a buffer against the duffers, man,” he says. Number One Son. He’s not so bad.