The Virgins (23 page)

At last, when the darkness is beginning to obscure his face, he rolls over onto one elbow. “Do you ever think about killing yourself, Bennett-Jones?” he asks.

“Ever?” I reply. “All the time.”

“So why haven’t you done it?”

I blink up into the gray sky. “Laziness.”

“No. I want to know.”

“I’m not putting you on.” I sit up; it’s easier to think this way. I’m a little logy from the booze. “I’m not a person with a lot of conviction. There have been times when dying seemed important, but never important enough.”

Seung reaches for his dry sneakers and pulls out a joint he’s stashed in one. “Care to?” he asks.

“Sure.”

“I pegged you as a toker, Bennett-Jones.”

“I thought I kept that a pretty good secret.”

“I have superb radar. But you do it yourself, on your own. That’s not good for you. It has to be a social thing. If you do it alone it turns you strange.”

“Thanks for the concern.”

Seung takes a deep drag and passes the joint to me. He closes his eyes when he draws in the smoke, then swallows gently, unhastily. It’s almost feminine, this savoring.

I take a hissing inhale but warn myself to go slow. The booze is already making me heavy-headed, and I don’t want to lose too much control.

“You’d kill yourself over getting the boot?” I ask.

“The boot?” he murmurs. He sits up now too.

“
Cannibis sativa,
” he says in a deep voice, as if he’s doing a voice-over for a television commercial. “First used in the third millennium BC by the ancient Hindus of India and Nepal. Known and appreciated also by the Assyrians, the
Scythians, the Thracians and the Dacians, the ancient Chinese, the ancient Greeks . . .”

“Yet heinously outlawed by a narrow-minded and ill-informed Congress in 1937 . . .”

“Hey! You know your facts, Bennett-Jones.”

“. . . which did not stop it from being used as a truth serum by the
OSS
during World War Two.”

“Do you know how to diagram a
THC
molecule?”

“I’m sorry. That goes beyond my personal researches.”

“It looks like a pull toy.” Seung sketches it out in the air. “You’ve got the head with your three hexagon rings, and then your tail of five carbons . . . a pentyl group. Tetrahydrocannabinol.”

“That I didn’t know, but I can tell you that possession of pot in Saudi Arabia results in amputation of one ear and a prison sentence of no less than four years.” I am completely making this up, under the diffuse influence of the movie
Midnight Express,
which I saw last year.

Seung’s eyes widen. “No! How do you know that?”

“Read it in a book by a French journalist who got arrested there.”

“Did he get his ear hacked off?”

“No. The French government intervened, and he got some help from a beautiful Saudi woman who turned out to be an undercover agent for the U.S.”

We smoke in silence, occasionally taking slugs from my flask. As soon as the joint is spent, Seung lights up another. “I planned to cut back this year,” he says, “but it didn’t happen.”

“Cut back on weed? Why bother?”

“Aviva. She didn’t like it.”

Aviva. I’ve forgotten about her, truly I have. Just for this brief time she’s been taken out of the equation between Seung and me; we’ve simply been two guys lying on the bank, sharing weed and conversation in the dusk. My throat tightens up and I feel a pressure on my heart.

“She doesn’t smoke?” I ask, for something to say.

“She’d like to,” he replies, without elaborating.

I glance at my watch. It’s 7:53
PM
, two hours and seven minutes until check-in. One week and six days until graduation.
My
graduation, anyway.
If
I graduate. It’s starting to make me nervous, being out here with Seung when he’s so messed up. If he starts getting strange on me, I can’t be babysitting him or shepherding him home. I can’t get implicated.

I stand up, to tell Seung I’m heading out, but my head is heavy as a bowling ball and I weave for a moment, unable to speak. I pray I’m going to pass muster with Mr. Glass and his clipboard. Mr. Glass doesn’t go out of his way to catch kids breaking the rules, but if you don’t even have the decency to try to fool him, he figures he has to take action. I sit down again and rest my head on my knees. When I feel steadier—it’s several minutes later, not a peep from Seung—I scrabble around in my knapsack. There’s a candy bar in there and a flashlight. Both are good, but finding the flashlight fills me with special relief. By some pot-induced logic, its presence seems, for now, to solve the dilemma of check-in. I can
relax; things are going to be okay. I settle myself, aware that I have many problems that the flashlight does not solve, but I can’t remember precisely what they are.

“Shit, I just noticed your ring,” Seung says.

“This?” I say. I snatch my hand from his view. “It’s just a joke, man. My dad bought it for me.”

He beckons me to show it to him, gets his face close to it and peers at the inscription. “
Gnaritas et Patientia.
Rah rah.”

“Yeah. Dad was class of ’44.”

“No shit.”

“No shit. And his dad was class of ’13. And
his
dad . . . you get the idea.”

“Oh, man, son of class of ’44, great-grandson of Class of Nineteenth Century. That’s almost worse than being son of Korean PhD and his doctor wife.”

I am surprised that he understands this.

I slip off the ring and hand it to him.

“I’ve never actually touched one of those things,” Seung tells me. “Detweiler had one but he kept it in some sort of Kryptonite box.” He can’t get it onto his ring finger—his fingers are so broad and thick-jointed—so he slides it onto his pinky. I notice the blisters on the thumb and index fingers of his hand.

The distortion and heavy-headedness are passing out of me in a series of waves. I’m beginning to trust my faculties again.

“You’ll give it to your own son one day,” Seung tells me.

“I doubt that.”

He flexes his fingers, staring at the seal of the ring. “Bruce Bennett-Jones,” he muses. “Bruce Bennett-Jones. I’ve wasted my fucking life.”

“Wasted your life?” I laugh. “Come on, Jung. You’ll go home, go to Jordan High, and you’ll be in college by the winter if you don’t do anything seriously boneheaded.”

He isn’t even paying attention to me. “I’ve lost the respect of my parents,” he says very calmly, clenching and unclenching his fist. “I’ve lost my girlfriend. I’ve pissed away forty thousand dollars my parents spent to send me here. I’ve pissed away my self-respect.”

He’s lost his girlfriend?

He knocks himself on the head a couple of times and I can’t tell if he’s really hurting himself or not. It doesn’t look good.

“I tried, Bennett-Jones. I tried so fucking hard.”

“Come on, Jung. Quit that.” I’m trying to decide if he could really mean what he seems to mean: that he and Aviva have broken up. What could have led to that? It’s impossible to take in. They are famous, they are the sexual and romantic templates for the rest of us.

“Aviva . . ?” I croak.

“I’ve destroyed her. I’ve
humiliated
her,” he says. “I’m not a man.”

I figure he’s just talking crazy—weed talk. I can’t speak her name again; it will sear me. “Maybe she’ll change her mind,” I say clumsily. “Girls are like that. Maybe tomorrow she’ll want you back.”

“She won’t want me back. You don’t know her.”

I stare at him, unable to reply. Because I do know her. I’ve imagined every part of her: her body, her thoughts, the conversations she has with her friends, with her brother and father and mother, the things she says to him, Seung, the books she reads and the fantasies that make her touch herself. I know the look of the apartment she’s grown up in and the park near her old high school and the arrogant marginalia she scribbles in her schoolbooks. “You’re right,” I say finally. “She won’t go back to you.”

He studies me. Then he nods, as if he understands something finally: who I am, what my relation to him is. For the first time he recognizes that we’re in competition, that once, in our childhoods, I was more than he was, and that now, because of what has happened, I’m going to be the stronger once again.

Seung pitches a stone into the water.

“I cheated on her once,” he says. “Over spring vacation. A girl in Jordan.”

I feel a rush of indignation on Aviva’s behalf. The bastard. “Why?”

“Why?” he looks momentarily puzzled. “I had to.”

Something unlocks in me. I intuit something—I couldn’t have put it in words at the time. No, I pieced things together only later. Still, there is something I realize I am going to say, that perhaps I’ve been meaning to say all along, from the very beginning, from the first time I ever saw Seung and Aviva together on the Weld common room couch. My
words appear to me full-bloomed and with such vividness that as far as I am concerned they are the truth and not a lie. I feel steady and very strong. I stand up, stretch my arms as if I could reach up and grab the moon.

“You know,” I say, “I wasn’t going to tell you this, but since you’re leaving now and you’ve broken up with her, I think you ought to know. I fucked her, Jung. It was a while ago, back in the winter. Remember the Kent swim tournament, your team stayed overnight? Then.”

I don’t even notice him getting to his feet. All at once he’s right up close to me, big and broad, and I think he’s going to take a swing at me. I stand my ground. Somehow I know that, no matter what he does, he can’t hurt me. I could bleed to death right here and I’ve still won.

“Bennett-Jones, don’t mess with me over something like that.”

“I’m not messing with you. It’s the truth. There was a dance that night, right? At Pepperdine dorm. She was there with no one to dance with. Or everyone to dance with. We went for a walk along the river and then we went to her room.”

Seung grabs me by the shirt. His face is dark, dark. “Why would you say this to me, man? You’re sitting here sharing my weed, we’re talking together . . . why do you want to shit on me?”

“I’m trying to protect you. I don’t want you to be all broken up about her. You should know the truth.”

“You’re a shit-sucking liar.”

“She has a purple bra,” I say. “A weird color, like a grape lollipop. It’s got a little thingy in the center, like an embroidered flower or something, with the letter
P
on it.”

Seung draws back his fist, and I close my eyes. But when I open them he’s already past me and moving toward the water. “Tell me more!” he shouts. His back is to me. “Say it louder!” I watch as he pulls off his shirt. I still don’t know why he did that—pulled off his shirt, I mean. It was already wet. The shirt was green—I would have reason to remember that later. So I tell him more, I say it louder. I raise my voice, so he’ll catch every word. I tell him how she gripped me with her thighs, I describe the sounds that came from her, and now I’m telling him it wasn’t just once, we did it a few times, once in the wardrobe room at the Dramat, I knelt above her, and . . .

Seung is in the water now, swimming toward the opposite bank, strong, furious strokes. He flips under and starts back. Back and forth between the banks he goes, wearing out his rage. I’m shouting now, and my story is the story of all the things I wish I had done, of places I touched Aviva and the feel of her skin and the purr of her voice, and, gradually, my anger turns to tenderness, and I describe not fucking but making love; I describe playfulness and appreciation, and in doing so I lose control over my tale, become implausible. I describe encounters that never could have happened, the two of us on a beach in California, a visit Aviva made to New Jersey (we made love quietly while my mother bumbled around the kitchen), but Seung can
no longer hear me anyway, or can hear only fragments; the crashing of his arms and the rushing of the water past him seals his ears. And now it hits him—I see this in my mind’s eye—the lysergic acid, which I learned about only later, metabolizes, and the Bog sparks with light, tiny winking bits of living energy that dance on the surface of the water. Seung’s breathing slows until it is as thick and slow as the water around him seems to be. But this thickened substance does not hamper him, it cradles him, and Seung sees that there’s no one to blame. He forgets there is such a thing as blame. The black trees bend and touch the skin of the Bog, which is a breathing skin, full of mouths sucking in and releasing oxygen, an unending cycle of breath and life. Seung is treading water, and he ducks down under the skin to breathe better, to breathe in this unending source of breath.

I’m on the bank, still mouthing my story, feeling the dark close in as the sun makes its last descent behind the trees. One minute Seung is treading water; the next moment I don’t see him anymore. I think he’s making an underwater turn and starting back toward the bank. When he reaches me perhaps he’ll knock me down; perhaps he’ll beat me to a pulp. That would be all right. I’m ready for it. I wait to see his shape rise out of the water. But the difference between the sky and the water is blurred by the darkness and I can’t tell where he is. After a while I begin to think he’s fucking around with me. He’s crouching in the brush on the other side of the Bog, waiting for me to get worried. Waiting
for me to start walking the bank looking for him, and in the darkness he’ll leap out and yank my fucking head off. Again, the thought of being hurt by Seung doesn’t bother me so much, but the thought of him in the shadows, manipulating me, silently laughing at me, does. I won’t play his game. I’ll just turn and go. It must be getting close to check-in time anyway. But I can’t leave. I am, in spite of myself, growing anxious. I reach for my flashlight and point it toward the water; its weak beam illuminates nothing. I call Seung’s name. Come on, Jung, I say. Don’t be crazy. Come out. Come on back. I wave the flashlight around.