There’s a mirror above the dresser. I catch a view of myself: sweaty forehead, damp curls. Aviva’s roommate is not here yet. The closet yawns open, wire hangers empty.
“Thank you
so much
,” she says.
I give the front door a push. It hits dully against the frame, doesn’t shut. Aviva has plenty of time to do something: slip into the hallway, order me to go away. She regards me with a patient smile. I am going to slow down the action now, relating this; I want to see it all again very clearly. Like a play being blocked—my stock-in-trade. And so: I push again and the door grinding shut is the loudest and most final sound I have ever heard. Aviva steps back to lean against it and let me approach. She’s a small girl and moving close to her I feel, for once, that I have some size. The waxy collar of her jacket prickles the hair on my forearms. Her neck is damp and slippery, and her mouth, as I kiss it, tastes like cigarettes and chocolate. I picture her smoking rapidly, furtively, in the little bathroom on the plane. Her hair smells a little rancid. The perfume she put on this morning has moldered with sweat and travel and now gives off an odor of decayed pear.
“Don’t open your mouth so wide,” she says.
My feet are sweating in my sneakers. My crotch itches. My scalp itches. She drops her hand and I see that her fingernails are painted a pearly pink.
She tilts her head against the door and laughs. Her thick curls swarm. I could bite her exposed neck. I do not want to get caught, sent home. I see my father’s hand raised up to hit me and know I’m about to step off a great ledge. In a panic I reach for the doorknob, startling Aviva. I open the door carefully, listen to the stairs and hallways. “It’s all right,” she says, although how can she know this? But she happens to be correct. There’s the oddest emptiness and silence as if these moments and this place were set aside just for us amid the busyness of moving-in day at the Academy. Aviva gives the door a bump with her ass to shut it again, but I insert myself into the opening and slide past her, fleeing down the stairs and out into Hiram’s yard.
Cort and Voss are no longer sitting on the bench in front of Weld. A lone bicycle is chained to its arm.
Later I see Voss in the common room reading a
New Gods
comic book. “How was the chick?” he asks. I shrug. Big nose, I say. Too much makeup. Not my type.
It’s late September, early October. Let’s say October, that first week, the peak of foliage season. I see Aviva Rossner and Seung Jung meeting during that time, amid the flaming yellows and deep reds. Seung was a kid I knew from my New Jersey hometown; we’d been in middle school together. I don’t really know when the two of them met, or how. One day she was simply there, Aviva, on the couch in our common room, sitting on his legs. He lay back, his head on the arm of the couch. She sat astride him, one leg dangling off the couch, the other bent beneath her. Her legs were bare; she had come from the gym. She wore gray gym shorts and a hooded sweatshirt that said
AUBURN ACADEMY
. His eyes were closed, he was smiling.
They meet in music theory. Let’s say that. Aviva is always trying to broaden herself, to try things for which she has no aptitude: music theory, volunteering in the nursing home,
drugs. She was afraid during her childhood and tried nothing, and now she wants to discover she is not really a coward. She sits in the big music room with the sheet-music stands pushed to the sides, listening to old Barnet Fretts with his muttonchops, his Down East accent.
Sing B flat,
he says. She cannot imagine B flat. How can one conjure it up from all the other tones? She sees the words
B flat
as if a typewriter were striking out the letters one by one. She tells herself that if she simply concentrates on those letters, the note that comes out of her mouth will be correct; her mind will find a way to arrange this. She sings her note. Old Fretts frowns.
Seung has the seat next to hers. The chairs are welded to scalloped desktops. He puts his hand on her arm. He is olive-colored, muscular, wearing a white Lacoste shirt with the required blazer and tie. A senior. “You have a nice voice,” he says. It’s true. She can’t sing the right note but her voice is sweet. Seung’s composition book is filled with tiny black notes like teardrops, inked carefully in his miniature, exact handwriting. When he tells her his name, she says it’s perfect for this room, this hour:
Seung,
pronounced like the past tense of
sing.
After class they walk together toward his dorm. It is on the way to her own. He knows who she is; he’s watched her walk near him, past him, toward the library, up the stairs of the Assembly Building. Everyone knows who she is: she’s that girl with the long, kinky hair and pale skin, the dark eye makeup, the V-neck sweaters that tease you
into thinking you will catch a glimpse of her breasts. She wears high-heeled boots and gold hoop earrings. Another day, she might be costumed in the clothes that everyone else wears, turtlenecks and Fair Isle sweaters, but no one is fooled; she still doesn’t look like anyone else.
She tries not to glance into the plate-glass windows of the art gallery as they pass. She finds it almost impossible to resist checking herself to make sure that she is sufficiently vivid, not fading away. She half expects, each time she looks, to see nothing there.
“What other classes are you taking?” Seung asks.
She wonders if she heard or only imagined a stutter on the word
taking.
Seung has short, thick legs, slightly bowed, a long, broad torso, and broad shoulders. His straight black hair, parted in the middle, completely covers his ears, grows past his chin. His face is a square. He gives an impression of intense physical strength, and Aviva soon learns that he swims butterfly on the varsity team. She has to look up to speak to him, though he is not especially tall. Tall maybe for an Asian kid. She is always having to look up. She compensates by standing back from other people, a little farther away than is natural. If you saw a photograph of her you would think she looked fragile—bony arms, narrow shoulders—but in person, something tough and irreducible overshadows that impression.
Seung is a proctor in his dorm, a position defined in the
Auburn Rule Book,
he tells Aviva, as
a liaison between the student body and the faculty on matters of student welfare
and discipline.
“I try,” he says, winking. He plays keyboard for a school band and loves jazz and a good old down and dirty rock-and-roll tune. The Southern groups are the best: Little Feat, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers. They make you want to get up off your butt and dance.
“Are you from the South?” she asks. He doesn’t seem it.
“New Jersey. Joisey. You’re from the Midwest. Or Buffalo.”
“Someone told you!” It does not surprise her that people should be talking about her.
“No. But you sound like those people you talk to when you order something from a catalog. They’re all in Wisconsin or Chicago.”
“What do you know about ordering from catalogs?”
“I got my mother a Lands’ End sweater for her birthday. Korean mothers love Lands’ End.”
She tells him, almost proudly, that she has no talents whatsoever. She plays a little piano, badly. She can hit a tennis ball. She can’t draw or paint. She likes to read, novels and psychology especially. She points to the library, the one built by the famous architect, with its brick piers and warm wood and many windows flooded with light. “I love that building,” she says.
“I’ve seen you there,” he tells her.
“Probably,” she agrees. She often sits on the second floor in one of the big square armchairs, looking over the great lawn with its changing colors. She stays late. She doesn’t like to be in her room; she and her roommate don’t get along.
Her roommate won’t lend out shirts or sweaters and doesn’t approve of smoking. Every night the roommate carefully folds and hangs the clothes she has worn that day. She goes to bed early and wakes up early.
Aviva shifts her books to one side to make sure Seung gets a glimpse of her breasts, her waist. Already she has gathered that there’s something resigned and self-doubting in his nature, something that makes it hard for him to think:
me
. If they part now, she will lose him.
“Are you taking anyone to the dance this Saturday?” she asks.
He expels a short, tight laugh. He’s not. He rarely goes to the dances. He walks out to the woods with Detweiler and Sterne, his closest friends, occasionally with others from Weld, too. They smoke reefer or drop acid and listen to some goodness: Jean-Luc Ponty, Traffic, the Köln concert, with Keith Jarrett kicking the piano’s footboard and moaning.
“Why don’t you ask me?” she says.
I’m convinced that she made the first move, not the other way around. She’d had a few entanglements already; word had it that she came on strong. Then, after a week or two, she’d get tired of the guy, or maybe he’d decide it wasn’t wholly an advantage to be linked to the new talked-about girl on campus. Anyway, my version fits with what I knew of Seung. Even back in middle school, when we pushed him up against the lockers and called him Chinky and Chinaboy, there were girls who liked him, and they liked him more as his shoulders broadened and his muscles hardened and he became one of the school’s better athletes. But he never reached out for what he could get. Likewise at Auburn. He had his group of buddies, smart stoners and good-time guys mostly, but you rarely saw him with a girl. As if he didn’t believe any of this female attention ran deep. He was waiting for someone to insist—to master him.
I’m inventing Seung, too, of course. It’s the least I can do for him.
Four thirty, the grass darkening, the sky pressing near. Seung, Detweiler, and Sterne walk past the gym and the playing fields, which are emptying now, out to the track. The three friends look nothing alike. Detweiler is tall and skinny, with lank blond hair past his shoulders and granny glasses. His thoughts are always somewhere separate, tender; he smiles to himself without knowing it. No one likes to interrupt his reveries, which somehow gentle every gathering. Sterne is a different kind of thin: muscular, sinewy. He is a tennis player, shorter than Detweiler. His hair is dark, his cheeks hollowed. His family has loads of money and a ski cabin in Vermont. Next to these two, Seung looks like a weight lifter, a wrestler, a squat tree. They forget he is Asian, that his face stands out from theirs. He never forgets.
The track circles the soccer field. The boys crouch near one of the goalposts. Detweiler pulls out the narrow white
joint, puts his lips to the end to seal it. If they had more time they might walk out to the Bog, where it’s more secluded, better for a peaceful toke, but they have classes before dinner. Seung touches the joint with his lighter, and they pass it quietly. Seung watches the lanes, the way they nest inside each other, eight of them. He wishes he were out on the track the way he used to be, his chest bursting, smelling the sweat and sour breath of his nearest competitor, sensing that kid fall back while his own legs pumped on, stabbed with pain, unstoppable. He ran the 440 at Jordan Middle School: the hardest race, the one in which you can neither sprint nor spare yourself. His feet slammed against the packed dirt, he felt the vibrations up into his neck, his ears. In the eighth grade he injured his back and turned to swimming. A track is a repetition, circles, the same ground again and again. There is something comforting in that. Swimming offers Seung the same comfort: two walls, one channel between.
Sterne squints at the joint appreciatively. “California skunk—that’s what this shit is called?”
“Why skunk?” asks Detweiler. He’s got a hard-on. He always gets a hard-on when he tokes. It’s just Detweiler. No one thinks to comment or not comment. His hand strays every so often to pat it thoughtlessly.
“Skunk because the indica cultivar smells like an effing skunk,” says Seung. He’s the guy with the technical information. “They cut it with a California strain, orange-flavored, so you don’t barf.
THC
content seven to ten percent. I’m guessing this is a ten.”
“Thank you, Mr. Chemistry,” says Sterne.
They drink Coke from cans they bought in town, still cold to the touch. Sterne offers a package of almonds; they razz him for not bringing the roasted, salted kind.
“Hold still,” says Seung to Sterne. “I’m going to draw you.”
“Let me get comfortable,” says Sterne. He takes off his jacket, plumps it under his head, and stretches out on his back.
“Don’t close your eyes.” Seung draws with a fine-nibbed pen, short tiny strokes like cross-hatching. His portraits never look much like the people they are meant to represent, but they capture something true nonetheless. His friends put these pictures away somewhere safe: beneath their socks, inside a cherished old book. Each thinks Seung has grasped something of his fussy complexity, the way he is made of a million little impulses and gestures.
The sun drops lower. Sterne’s face is deeply in shadow. Seung begins to see Aviva lying there, head cushioned by the jacket, her dark hair snaking into the grass. He wants to take her out to the woods and seat her in a bed of pine needles, crouch by her and stroke her hair, touch her breasts, cup her hips. He has spoken to her only that once, in front of Weld. He is taking her to the dance on Saturday. Or is she taking him? His hands begin to shake. There’s the sweet, cindery taste of the pot at the back of his throat. Last night he dreamt that he and Aviva were in the Academy pool with its marked-out lanes; he yanked the ropes away to give them room. The water beneath them was solid as a floor
as he sank inside of her. When it was finished he was no longer a virgin.