He puts aside the drawing and takes something out of his pocket. Two days ago he noticed the loose baluster between the second and third floors of Weld. When no one was looking, he rattled it until it came free. He couldn’t have said why he wanted it. He hid it in his room and, later, broke off the end, whittled off the jagged edges. The rest of the baluster he threw into the river, behind the boathouse. Now he begins to whittle again at the broken-off piece. He suddenly knows what he wants to make: a perfect sphere for Aviva. There will be no edges at all, no beginning or end, the same diameter in every direction. Not an oval, nothing lopsided. The wood—he thinks it is oak—is hard and has a fine grain. It will come up beautifully when polished.
“Five twenty,” says Detweiler. He doesn’t wear a watch but always knows what time it is.
They rise, groaning. Sterne has German at twenty of six; Detweiler, physics. Sterne can hardly keep his eyes open. Seung, in his role of proctor, is supposed to meet with a lower who has been cutting classes. I see the three walking back as I’m on my way to the Dramat, still shaking from my encounter with Aviva.
That’s how I imagine things were, the afternoon I spoke to Aviva in the post office, during that lull after sports. The teams have come in from the fields. She wears a lavender sweater, cream-colored corduroys, clogs, and gold around her neck: two thin chokers plus another chain, longer, with a gold heart dangling from it. I am going to say that she has just come from the girls’ bathroom, where she looked into the mirror and saw the blurred face that always frightened her. She thinks her features are ill defined, that she is too pale; the eyes of others will sweep over her and not linger. She pulls her makeup case out of her knapsack, darkens the lines ringing her eyes. She applies more mascara, more blush. She stands at different angles to the mirror, turning her head, stepping back, then coming very close. She cannot leave until her own image leaps out and startles her.
She pulls two slim letters from her mailbox. I have a letter from my father, Malcolm Bennett-Jones, Auburn class
of ’44, which will contain the usual admonitions. I ask who has written her. She answers me as if we’ve never met before. After my flight from her room I told myself I felt no attraction to her, that I found her
too:
too Jewish-looking, too artificial, too naked in her wish to be appreciated. But now that she’s right in front of me, I feel the pull. Everything about her looks rich and strokeable.
“They’re from my brother,” she says.
“Both letters?”
“Yes.”
She holds up one envelope so I can see the uneven, childish writing on the outside, the writing of a ten- or twelve-year-old.
“He must like you.” I’m aware of my high voice, my damnable stature.
“I like him even better.” She slides the letters into her copy of
Crime and Punishment.
We push past the others to get out and stand on the quadrangle.
“I could eat some ice cream,” she says.
In Currie’s Pizza on Main Street she eats ice cream from a cup with a pull-off lid, scraping at the surface with a tiny spoon. Boys in their blazers, ties loosened, watch her. The wooden tables are gouged with obscenities.
“What does your brother write about?”
“Oh, he tells me what books he’s read, what they’re teaching at school that he already knows. How the Cubs are doing. He’s like an angel. He’s always cheerful. My parents hate each other. Marshall is aware of everything, he understands
it all, but it doesn’t make him scared or mean. He told me not to feel guilty about leaving, that he would be fine. He knew I wanted to go.”
“He’s how old?”
“Twelve. He’s some kind of genetic aberration. Some kind of saint.”
She doesn’t look at me while she talks. Her gaze is on the door: who comes in, how she might make her way out if I bore her. Her head is very erect, her neck long. She seems to be posing for the striking of a coin. I’ve spent my adult life among people superlatively aware of how the angle of light in a room illuminates their faces, who know the trick of drawing attention to themselves by withdrawing theirs from everyone else. Aviva had an instinct for these theatrical techniques. I wondered if she was more natural with her brother, forgot to arrange herself to be seen.
I ask her if she likes her roommate, and she shrugs. They barely speak, she tells me: different styles. I tell her it’s the same with mine, a guy named David Yee. Typical Asian dork, I say, into his books all day. Me, except for crew season, I mostly hang out at the Dramat. That makes me a dork, too, I say, defiantly: let her think so. I tell her how it happened: how as a kid I wallowed in comic books and Dungeons & Dragons and a book of illustrated Greek myths I found in my fifth-grade classroom. When, prep year here at Auburn, we were assigned Aeschylus, I saw that it was all the same stuff: gore and rage and lamentations flying to the rafters. That was when I started to spend time in the
theater. I dislike acting but I do everything else: lighting, construction, directing. This year I scored big—I’ll be directing the Dramat’s fall production of
Macbeth.
We talk about our families. I tell her I’m from Jordan, New Jersey, half an hour from New York City. My father’s a judge, my mother stays home. I’m not on good terms with my parents. My mother I don’t mind so much: she’s sad but harmless. My father I consider my enemy. “He’s against everything that I am,” I say. “Everything that makes me feel I can breathe.”
This attracts her; she leans forward on her elbows, frowning anxiously. I see what I’d hoped to see: two swellings tipped toward the sticky table. Her breasts are widely spaced, with a deep shadowed tract of privacy between them.
“I might like having an enemy,” she says. Her parents, she explains, permit everything, notice nothing.
I tell her about the first time I ever saw my father in the courthouse in Newark, sitting in his judicial robes. My mother had taken me along to do some shopping at Bamberger’s; there were still a couple of decent stores in Newark in those days. My older brothers were in school. Maybe I was six, in kindergarten, with the half day off. I guess she thought she’d bring me by to see what my father did, what a significant man he was. I was frightened the moment I saw those black robes that swallowed him up and hid his hands. He was looking down at a man who spoke up at him, a man with a bald spot and no suit, just a regular pair of pants and
a checkered shirt. My father interrupted the man sternly, rudely. In that moment I knew this man would be going to jail. He didn’t know that yet, but I did. I could see him sweating and feel his fear. I could feel the pleasure my father took in making him listen. My father had a deceptively soft voice that made the listener strain to catch everything. The balding man, the stenographer, all the people in the court—they were leaning toward my father, afraid of missing something.
There are boys who tell girls things to evoke sympathy for themselves, or to convince a girl that they have feelings, they’re sensitive. That’s not my way, and it’s not what I’m doing here. There’s just something in this girl that makes me talky, unguarded, that makes me want to tell the truth.
“What about your mother?” she asks.
“She drinks.”
Aviva’s parents don’t drink or yell. Her father is a surgeon, her mother a college professor. They don’t hit or commit crimes. There’s nothing you can actually pin on them, she says. She pushes disconsolately at the soupy remains of her ice cream. Her wrists are almost painfully slender; without the makeup and the breasts she could be fourteen. That’s it, I decide. For years and years she was the skinny, shrimpy kid in the class, the bookish late bloomer. At sixteen she wakes up to find that she has tits, that her legs have grown shapely and long. What to do with these riches? She marvels at them in the mirror but her classmates still see the little girl, the teacher’s pet. How can she show everyone
the astonishing thing that has happened? After school she takes the bus downtown to Saks or Fields. She wanders the cosmetics department: counter after counter of lipsticks and blushes and perfumes and creams. It’s like a palace: the lights, the super-reflected abundance. She has never worn makeup and has no idea where to begin. She drifts, touching the little tubes and bottles, and a young woman in a tight black suit croons to her: “Free makeup consultation . . . no obligation. Free makeup consultation . . . no obligation.” Aviva turns, slowly, and the woman smiles. “Sit right here in this chair, darling. Such a pretty girl. Such lovely skin.” One hundred and eighty-seven dollars: an hour later, that’s what the bill comes to. Aviva pulls out the American Express card with her father’s name on it, hands it over. Next she’ll go upstairs and pick out sweaters, skirts, boots. Everything about her will be different now, sleek and sexy and soft to the touch. And every morning she’ll go through the ritual the makeup lady taught her. The special soaps for cleaning, the dabbing on of foundation, the painstaking combing of mascara onto each lash. As Aviva steps on the escalator she feels heads turn toward her for the first time. She has become visible.
“Hello?” Aviva asks. For a moment there I wasn’t gazing at her, wasn’t absorbed in her, so busy was I with my tale. That shakes her, I can tell. Her confidence is so brittle. I won’t tell her I was with another version of her; that would give her back her power. I like seeing her a little weak, a little uncertain.
She’s waiting for me to say something. I reach across and touch her necklace, take the gold heart between my fingers, stroke it with my thumb. She grows still. Her eyes begin to blink more rapidly. I let the heart settle back on her chest, its tip pointing down toward the cleft between her breasts.
“Let’s go,” I say.
We walk toward the river, past the shingles on Nut Street—Rexall, Davis’s Photo, Nick’s Sporting Goods—and the fake Greek columns of the Guignol Theater. It’s showing the movie
Alien,
which I already saw twice over the summer. Aviva stops at the window of the little chocolate shop; her gaze falls on a box containing truffles lined up like oversized nipples. I go straight inside and buy it for her. She is still laughing with surprise as I hand her the black box tied with a silver ribbon.
She opens the box. The six truffles inside cost many times more than I imagined they would. She puts a whole truffle into her mouth and holds out the box to me. Though I love sweets of every conceivable kind, I shake my head. I don’t want to be distracted from this spectacle. And I am beginning to convince myself I truly like this girl. I can’t help but enjoy the way she moves the truffle around in her mouth, sucking it, one cheek and then the other bulging out. It’s vulgar; it’s charming. She runs her tongue across the front of her teeth to remove the brown liquid that clings there.
I tell her I want to show her the Academy boathouse, and we walk down a grassy slope in that direction. I’m a coxswain in springtime, hunched in a narrow shell in my tight
Auburn T-shirt and my sun visor, master of the eight bodies lined up in front of me. They bend, lift, and bend to my command. I may look a little plump for a coxswain, but I don’t actually weigh all that much—135 for my five feet six inches. I sweat off five of those pounds to make weight for the season. There in the shell my fluty voice doesn’t bother me; it does what it needs to do, sends us skimming over the brownish water. We’re a pretty good team. Last year our record was fourteen wins and four losses; my boat, third boat, placed second at the New England Championships.
I unlock the boathouse with a key I never returned at the end of last season. I like to come here alone sometimes to breathe in the smell of dust and damp canvas and spilled
WD
-40. Light sifts in through the high windows. There always seems to be a brackish odor too as if this shed perched on the ocean and not the river. The water outside is still and murky.
“What is crew, anyway?” Aviva asks. She isn’t joking. She really doesn’t know. They don’t have it out in Chicago, she claims.
I explain the basics: eight boys in a shell, each with one oar, the sliding seats, the various calls. There’s a skeg at the back of the shell, to help with direction. Sculling is different, doesn’t have the coxswain, the rowers have an oar in each hand. It’s maybe the oldest team sport in the world: a funerary inscription from 1400
BC
, found in Egypt, mentions crew competitions. Crew races are held in
The Aeneid.
Aviva’s mind is wandering. I can see that she is someone who can’t keep the slightest grip on things that don’t interest
her. I change tack and tell her how intimate it is in the shell, crammed tight in there, how when the frontmost rower strokes forward his face is right up against mine, his panting and my rhythmic shouting growing louder in unison, till we are skimming over the finish and I hear myself crying, in encouragement and triumph, “Oh,
yeah
. . . oh,
yeah
,” how sometimes, when the race is over, the kid and I can’t even look at each other, something so forceful has just passed between us.
She has been walking along touching the walls of the shed, an oar stand, an old rain poncho hanging from a hook, but now she turns, her mouth slightly parted. I can’t bear it, her hair loose in the gloom, her saliva darkened with chocolate, the renewed heat of her attention. I move toward her, closing her in slowly as she continues her circuit—why has she turned away? Is she teasing me? I back her against the wall next to some shelves and, moving fast so I don’t lose my nerve, yank her sweater around to get at her bra. I won’t flee this time. In the thin light her bra shines out an odd bright purple color, the color of a grape lollipop. Joining the two cups is a rosette with an embroidered letter
P.
I see it all so clearly. The bra is snug; the lacy patterns in the cup are a signal that I am meant to continue.