“Don’t be silly.”
“I’m not silly.”
A cool draft flows in through the old, misaligned windows. The desks hold handwritten essays and class books: Jonathan Kozol,
Marxism and Society, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers.
Sterne has agreed not to return until seven o’clock. They smuggled Aviva up here, shameless. Aviva waited in the Weld entranceway, chatting with Sterne, looking like someone who had just dropped by to say hi. Detweiler stood sentry on the second floor and Giddings, Detweiler’s roommate, on the third. They made sure no
one was moving in the corridors, then signaled down. It was easy—ten seconds and Aviva was inside Seung’s room. Seung jammed the door lock with chewing gum, just in case Mr. Glass, the dorm head, hears suspicious movement and attempts an entrance with his skeleton key. Aviva would have time to crawl under the heap of coats in the corner. So Seung says.
A late October pre-dusk silence, broken occasionally by a shout outside the window. Aviva lays herself out to Seung’s touch. His fingers move slowly, sounding her. His fingers are sentient; they study and anticipate. Her veins flood. She was made for this. Seung turns her onto her belly, pushing her hair to one side, and presses his thumbs hard into the muscles along her spine and ringing her neck, bunched at her shoulders. She feels herself being put together by him piece by piece.
They are young, don’t forget this. Seung imagines what it would be like to be inside her, but it’s like imagining a field on the other side of a distant fence. It is a place it will take time to get to, somewhere he will gain eventually but cannot see distinctly now.
She is less curious about exploring his body, or in any case less forthright. To touch pleases her less than to be touched. Seung’s hairless chest, though broad and strong, is tender-looking, like paper that might tear under her fingers. The swelling between his legs she will cup and kiss if it is masked by the stiff fabric of his jeans, but when it is released, she finds it menacing and is afraid to handle it.
There is something raw and unfinished about the thing; its asymmetry bothers her, as does the massive gelatinous sack of balls. She loses confidence when she sees his penis; she sees herself being overpowered, forced. Nothing frightens her more. Her girlfriends back home had a game. If you had to choose, would you rather be raped or murdered? Murdered, she always answered.
She climbs on top of Seung, straddles him, bends down to kiss him deeply, then straightens and withholds herself from him. He reaches up and makes a breastplate for her with his palms. She stretches out next to him full-length. He kisses her neck, shoulders, hips. He trembles with the effort it takes to be gentle. When they go to the woods, hands up under each other’s sweaters, their corduroys unzipped, his briefs fill again and again with sticky ejaculate. She closes her eyes when they kiss. He watches her, always. They go on and on, then rest without talking. They daydream for a long time, and then one or the other begins the touching again. The afternoon is endless. No one will come to bother them, no one will knock on the door.
Seung falls asleep with his cheek on her naked belly. Aviva listens to his quiet snoring for a while, then falls asleep too.
Even the teachers talked about them. Seung Jung and Aviva Rossner were bewitched. Their hands moved over each other as they reluctantly separated at classroom doors. They stood kissing while streams of students passed around them. There were plenty of couples on campus about whom it was understood that they did all the things that married couples do, but the etiquette to which they adhered, always, was dissimulation. In public they were dignified, clean. You heard it said, at times, that Aviva didn’t know any better because she was a Jew—vulgar, totally unschooled in Yankee discretion. And she led Seung. So we sneered, we criticized. We even made comments about mongrel relationships, Oriental and white. But secretly we were delighted and inflamed. Most of us probably simply enjoyed imagining various acts, various permissions, but I know now that there was something more urgent in my own recreations of what
went on between Aviva and her lover. I didn’t just imagine them
doing things.
I imagined a kind of fire that flew up around them and consumed them. It sounds laughably dramatic, but don’t underestimate the metaphysical yearnings of a seventeen-year-old. That’s the secret of teenage sex, I think. For none of us was it really about asses and crotches, sucking cock or licking pussy. It’s adults who so often think in those terms, with such a lack of imagination. We beginners experienced sex as psyche more than body, as vulnerability and power, exposure and flight, being anointed, saved, transfigured. To fail at it—to
do it wrong
—was to experience (and please do not smirk; try to remember what it was like, once upon a time) the death of one’s ideal soul.
The bus to Boston leaves after the end of Saturday classes and returns at seven. Aviva makes the trip with Lena and Carlyle, who sit together. Aviva has the opposite bench to herself. She opens her novel: Hardy’s
Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
The bus sends its vibrations through the vinyl banquette seats and into her thighs. She tenses experimentally, shifts position. Her jeans tighten against her crotch and she feels herself contract to a sharp, sparking point. Turning a page without reading it, she daydreams: a boy, not Seung, tracing circles with his finger around her cunt, which is open, exposed, afraid. The boy is faceless: blond curls, strong hands. A tongue licks the open space. Her breasts hum against the dense cloth of her oxford blouse. It is so simple just to tighten gently inside the way she does when she wants to hold back her pee, channeling the shuddering of the moving bus. A man—the boy is gone—places
her on all fours, shoves his stiffness in and out of her. She is whole once again, a delicious liquor spreads into her arms. In the bus seat she moves not at all, no one could possibly tell what she is making happen. She turns another page, for show. At the end, when the deep cramping pleasure comes, she pretends to stretch—Ah, doesn’t reading on a bus make one feel tired and restless!
Carlyle knows how to get to the bottle shop near South Station that will sell to underage kids. She did it all the time last year, she says, it’s a snap. The best thing to get is Bacardi 151—the most bang per swallow. Lena and Aviva wait across the street. Like Aviva, Lena is new this year and learning the way things are done. The building next to the bottle shop has no windows, no front door. The steps are strewn with trash. The girls carry the flat bottle in a paper bag, pass it hand to hand as they look for the subway. Aviva’s perfume is called Opium; Carlyle’s is something floral and sweeter. Lena wears neither perfume nor makeup. She has rather crooked features and glasses, but Aviva admires her breasts, which are ample and high, and her elegant legs. She’s of Greek stock, with a beautiful last name, Joannou. Carlyle is a different breed entirely, Virginian, with thick blond hair and generous hips and a big white Southern smile.
“There are countries you can’t even sell this stuff in,” Carlyle tells them. She heard it from the guy behind the counter. He was flirting with her. Grown men frequently flirt with her.
“Which ones?” asks Lena.
“He didn’t say.”
Aviva sips, waits a few minutes to see what the effect is, asks for the bottle again. Have I said that she is a girl who fears what is inside of her? She wants to be giddy and silly, self-forgetful, a state she has not experienced since she was perhaps nine or ten years old. At the same time she does not want to say something that cannot be unsaid, or do something that will be hard to forget. She does not want to fall down or vomit, make a fool of herself.
Her head stays cool and clear. She drinks more.
On Beacon Hill the girls go into a little shop with bright scarves and hats on ornate racks. Lena and Carlyle don’t have enough money to buy anything. The items aren’t to Carlyle’s taste anyway. She prefers traditional and tailored things: turtlenecks, sturdy blazers, argyle socks. Aviva winds a purple mohair scarf around her neck. She adds a dark fedora with a stiff purple feather stuck in the crown, pulling it down low, shading her eyes.
The others are delighted. “Get it, get it,” they urge her.
Aviva pays for the hat with her father’s credit card. He has yet to cancel all the accounts. That will happen later, when he wants to make sure her mother cannot spend any more of his money. The lovely scarf she unwinds and returns to the rack. She can’t have everything. She allows herself extravagances by denying herself other extravagances. The equation convinces her she is temperate. The hat costs seventy dollars. On the street her limbs tingle, she breathes
and speaks rapidly, excited by her purchase. She grabs the rum for another gulp. It’s time for something to eat, she cries. She is growing warm under her peacoat.
“You look like a gorgeous gangster,” says Lena.
They go to Faneuil Hall, drawn past the stalls of jewelry and pottery to the smell of something hot and fried. A stout woman is patting out large disks of dough and dropping them into a vat of rippling oil. The dough is retrieved, drained on paper towels, heaped with powdered sugar. The girls each have one.
It’s delicious: the flaky, oily bread, the sugar turning into a sweet paste in the mouth. The paper towel each has been given as a napkin becomes soaked, filthy. The girls buy peanuts and pour their rum into cans of 7-Up.
Near the exit they pause before a Häagen-Dazs stall. Carlyle says she can’t, not after the fried dough. She absolutely must lose ten pounds. Lena is out of cash. Aviva hesitates while passing the money for both of them over the counter. What is this hesitation? Two scoops with generous skirts perch atop two browned cones. The stall smells richly of cream and toasted sugar. Chunks of chocolate stud the ice cream like showy jewels. Something grips Aviva, whispers that she’s gone too far. One cone is passed into Lena’s hand, already dripping from the crown. Aviva accepts the other as if hypnotized. The transaction has been concluded: she will have to eat it now. The first bite is so delicious she closes her eyes. She sucks on the chunks of chocolate that remain in her mouth after the sweet cream dissolves.
She takes another bite, and another, impatient to repeat the pleasure. She waits to feel sated, sick of it, for the pleasure to diminish, but it does not. She eats faster as if she might be able to overrun the pleasure and leave it behind. With a sudden spastic motion she flings the half-eaten cone into a garbage bin. Relief floods her.
“I would have taken that!” cries Lena.
Aviva is safe now. Her fright has passed. She reaches up and strokes the feather on her hat. It is all right.
At South Station they take some last nips from the bottle before shoving it into the pocket of Lena’s down vest. “Are you drunk?” they ask each other. Carlyle smiles, nodding. Lena hums to herself, swaying from side to side. Her fingers start to play
Rhapsody in Blue.
Whenever she is happy or high, she moves them to the notes of Gershwin.
“I don’t feel anything,” complains Aviva.
“You’re too careful, baby,” Carlyle tells her.
Early November, flat skies, weak light, early nights. The dormitories are cold. In Aviva’s mailbox Monday is a letter asking her to come see the dean of students.
The dean asks if Miss Rossner knows why she has been called in. She does not.
“Saturday’s dance . . .” he explains.
It was a dance sponsored by the Afro-Am society, heavy on the disco. Aviva isn’t fond of the sound or the beat but she and Seung never miss an opportunity to dance. Before heading over to the Student Center, Aviva drank tequila from a bottle Seung keeps in one of his winter boots. She let long streams course into her mouth. She and Seung kissed on the dance floor for a long time, pressing into each other. After a while they left the Student Center and walked toward the sports fields, stopping behind the tennis courts. They lay down, throwing off their coats and unbuttoning
their shirts. These are the things that Aviva remembers. She does not remember the crowd on the dance floor falling back to watch the two of them, their mouths and their hands. She does not know that a knot of students followed them out to the tennis courts to spy from a distance. Dean Ruwart has to tell her about that.
Aviva frowns, folds her arms, looks down. This foolish man, with his close-cropped hair, his babyish cheeks, behaving as if she has done something wrong. Shame and fear rise up in her, but it is the shame of having been seen without knowing it and the fear of becoming not the mysterious object of boys’ desire but a punch line in their dirty jokes. As for what she and Seung were actually doing—she refuses the idea that she has anything to apologize for. Has she cheated on a test? Has she stolen something from the science lab? Sex is natural, sex is her birthright, the pursuit that has at long last arrived to make sense of her world.
The dean tells her that the two of them are being put on restrictions. Restrictions means checking in to their dorms at 8:00
PM
, same as the preps and the lowers, even on Saturday nights. The normal check-in hour for uppers is 9:00
PM
, for seniors, 10:00
PM
. Another violation of school decorum during this time will mean probation. Beyond probation, Dean Ruwart doesn’t need to add, looms expulsion. Does she understand why this action is being taken?
“No,” she says.
She tells a friend or two about the encounter, how she said “no” to the dean and he merely shook his head and let her
go. It becomes a little story going around: Aviva stood up to old Ruwart, wouldn’t be cowed. Didn’t apologize. But for a long time Aviva is secretly mortified by the image of all those bodies forming a circle around her and Seung on the dance floor, ogling them in the dark, the lights strobing on and off their damp, drunken faces. Then all those eyes watching for a flash of breast in the grass.