Restrictions does not make as much difference as it might. She and Seung can still sit in the common room after dinner and nuzzle, take afternoon walks in the woods. On Saturdays they hide in the bathroom of the library while the building is locked up at six, and then have the entire place to themselves, the wide concrete stairwells, the airy stacks. They watch the sky darken, holding hands. They kneel, kissing, in the 900s—books on Morocco and Tunisia and Algeria—while the heat in the building clanks off and the temperature slowly drops. At ten minutes to eight they watch for passersby and then stroll out of the building: first Aviva, then Seung. The door isn’t alarmed, Seung tells her, and she wonders how he knows the things he knows. When has he been here before, and with whom?
When the month is over they celebrate with a movie at the Guignol:
All That Jazz,
with Ann Reinking in fishnet stockings and a bowler hat, sardonic Roy Scheider, Jessica Lange as Death with a white veil and porcelain skin. Aviva would like to be all of them: Reinking, Scheider, Lange, even the little girl—the Roy Scheider character’s daughter—in pigtails and a leotard, who wraps her legs around
him, clinging, when her visit with him is over. She would like to move the way Reinking does; she would like to dance out her life in a succession of musical numbers: the sexy number, the sad number, the enraged number, the pleading number, the celebratory number, the death number.
Later that night, Carlyle tells Aviva that when the preps and lowers were checking in, their dorm head, Señora Ivarra, looked at her chart and said, “Ah, the very sociable young lady is once again allowed to stay out.”
“She said that? In front of everybody?”
“Only the ones in front probably heard. I came in early because Gene had a headache. A lot of the teachers don’t like you, Aviva. You should be careful. They can make trouble for you. I’ve been here longer than you, so I know. I’m not saying don’t live your life. Just be smart about things, okay?”
Aviva is surprised to find her feelings quite hurt. Teachers not liking her? Why shouldn’t they like her? They’ve always liked her before! She’s a good student. She participates in class. Perhaps Carlyle exaggerates. But in any case, what is there to worry about? She got the message—there are forces out there that will rein her and Seung in—and she’ll be toeing the line from now on. Just enough.
Over the years I’ve come to understand that telling someone’s story—telling it, I mean, with a purity of intention, in an attempt to get at that person’s real desires and sufferings—is at one and the same time an act of devotion and an expression of sadism.
You
are the one moving the bodies around, putting words in their mouths, making them do what you need them to do. You insist, they submit.
I didn’t give up the theater when I left Auburn. It claimed me for good. I moved from managing the bodies in my boat, shouting at them to
move your asses to your heels,
to
put your blood and piss into it,
to the supposedly more genteel managements of the stage. In college I made theater my major, against my father’s wishes, and afterward got an
MFA
at Yale. Since then I’ve worked as a director at various small companies in New York City and regionally. You won’t have heard of me; I’m just one of the many who toil on the subfloors of art, telling ourselves our time will come . . .
After Seung’s death, after graduation, I learned some things from Carlyle. She and Lena were putting together a memory book about Seung for Aviva. They hoped to fill it with anecdotes from anyone they could find with a connection to Seung: fellow students, teachers, old buddies from Jordan. Anyone from his year in Weld. Carlyle and I ended up staying on the phone for a long time. Grief—or the imputation of grief—knocks down barriers between people. Carlyle had been collecting the pictures Seung used to draw and give to people—did I have one? One of those drawings with all the intricate cross-hatching that he made with those thin-tipped pens? I didn’t.
I steered the conversation to Aviva. Asked the predictable questions: How was she holding up? etc. Our exchange then took an unexpected turn. Carlyle was talkative, even indiscreet. Aviva was never destined to be happy, she claimed. Even before what happened to Seung. She had always been tightly wound and afraid. Afraid of what? Of so many things. Of sweets and booze, of losing control. Carlyle used to catch Aviva looking in mirrors, coming close and then standing back again, over and over, as if she couldn’t quite make herself appear. Seung was good for her, pushed her to be more adventurous, to loosen up a bit. Of course, sometimes dicey things happened. Seung was, you could say, a little too enthusiastic about his drugs. And there was that time the two of them got caught in a hotel stairwell in New York, practically got arrested . . .
Certain nights, Lena cries, saying that she’s afraid of dying a virgin. Aviva and Carlyle stay up talking to her, reassuring her that she will find a boyfriend someday, that she will be loved. Privately they are not so generous: Lena is not pretty. Perhaps she never will find a boyfriend. They are glad they are not Lena, with her nervous gestures and hopeless crushes and anxieties. They can’t foresee that Lena, by her twenties, will have more lovers, and more pleasures, than both of them put together.
It’s been a bad week for Lena. Her aunt phoned to say that her mother had had another breakdown and was back in the hospital.
“I’m sorry about Thanksgiving,” Lena tells Aviva. Her aunt already has more people coming than she can handle.
“Stop it. How can you be sorry? Anyway, Seung wants me to go home with him. He’s going to ask his parents about it.”
“What if they say no?”
“I can always stay in the dorm.”
Carlyle says, “Don’t
ever
do that. It’s the saddest thing in the world. You have Thanksgiving dinner with the faculty who stay, and in the afternoon you have to sing at the Portsmouth soup kitchen.”
“I can’t sing,” says Aviva.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Carlyle’s boyfriend is Gene Murchie, a senior, large, shaggy-haired, abrupt. He and Carlyle have been seeing each other for over a year; during the summer, while they were parted, he grew a mustache. He plays varsity lacrosse and wants to be a sculptor. In warm weather he strips off his shirt at any opportunity to allow the other boys to observe and envy his perfect pecs. He flies into rages, claiming that Carlyle flirts with his friends, that she steals money from him, that she has written letters to his teachers slandering him, in an attempt to lower his grades. This is why, he says, he will end up at University of Vermont instead of Stanford. He is crazy and nobody seems to know it or do anything about it. He has hit Carlyle more than once. For days she sobs and talks about killing herself, and then she reports that their love has never been stronger, all the hard times are finished and behind them.
Carlyle smokes Pall Malls, Lena clove cigarettes imported from Indonesia, Aviva the lowest-tar brand she can find, usually Carltons. She is thinking of quitting; she’s afraid of what smoking is doing to her insides, and sometimes she cheats on the inhaling. Lena can do smoke rings, and rings within rings. There are other regulars in the butt room:
Kelly Finch and Dorota Noel, who has a single on the third floor. Dorota is from London. She has a barking laugh and likes to command the conversation. Aviva grows silent in the basement room filled with torn and stained furniture, the refuge of decades of Auburn’s would-be rebels. She does not love Seung the way Carlyle loves Gene; she cannot find within herself that self-abasement. She does not nurture obsessions like Lena or go on adventures like Dorota. She fears that if she speaks, her feelings will be found wanting.
Seung’s room is sunny and smells of fresh laundry. He puts Jean-Pierre Rampal on the turntable. He and Aviva kneel on the bed, moving their hands over skin, taking off their clothing piece by piece. Three hours of kissing is nothing to them. Nothing else calls them. The sun falls in the sky. They doze and wake. Again Seung touches Aviva into being: she is here, large, alive. Her good fortune is immense. Seung still cannot get over the deep hourglass of her body: the strenuous indentation at her waist and then the wide flare of the hips. The breasts spread out like huge coins. They are on the floor; she asks him to come inside her. More and more she wants to be done with this thing, this virginity, that keeps her from the ultimate pleasure, knowledge, and power.
Seung rocks back on his heels, hesitating. It can’t be so simple: just to be asked, just to do it. He’s frightened:
What if
. . . He doesn’t know what the
what if
is. Something dark flies up in front of his vision. He didn’t think that Aviva, even with all her forthrightness, would ask for this so
matter-of-factly, and so soon. He thought the prerogative to ask would be his.
Please,
she says. She smiles.
He takes her face in his hands, happy now too, kissing her exuberantly, resting his forehead briefly against hers.
“I have condoms,” she whispers. She’s had them since Chicago, got them at a drugstore in a neighborhood not her own, looked the older woman behind the counter straight in the eye. She would be ready when the opportunity came. She doesn’t want to be stupid. She knows a girl has to take care of herself.
Seung tears open the foil package. Aviva’s already opened a couple in her stash, to see what they look like and how they work. She likes the smell of the slippery, flesh-colored coil, an industrial smell that reminds her of certain plastic playthings she had when she was little. Seung turns the condom over in his hands, studies it with that engineer’s brain of his, as if figuring out how it was manufactured. Then he places it over the head of his penis and worries it down. Aviva drops her eyes; the sight is too stark. She lies back, supporting her head with one arm so as not to feel so stiff and defenseless. Seung stretches out on top of her as she parts her legs uncertainly. He moves himself around, shifting and poking as if he can’t quite locate her. It doesn’t occur to her to reach down and help him. In the dirty books she’s read, and in her fantasies, the man enters, that’s all there is to it. Seung pushes; the moment is here at last. She reaches up to clasp his shoulders.
It’s happening
,
she thinks. She’s going to dissolve now, to expand. She is going to know, completely, how to live. The sensation of pressure recedes; Seung is not there after all. She feels him move against her a few more times and is puzzled. Finally, to change the rhythm, she struggles up to a sitting position and embraces him.
Wrapped around each other they kiss deeply. She could spend all afternoon with her mouth softly open against his, the press of his lips making her aware of every nerve in her own. She feels him harden once more against her thigh. He cups her cunt, holds his hand there, like he’s weighing her. She sighs. He rolls her onto her back and approaches again. The moment the tip of his cock touches the thatch of curly hair something pulls back in him again; he shrivels internally and then externally. He cannot believe what is happening. His heart grows hot with desire and anger. He does not understand. He pitches himself against her, butting against her cunt, clumsy as he never is clumsy. She stirs uneasily beneath him. Her buttocks ache; there’s a pain in her side and she wriggles to relieve the pressure. Seung begins to pant, not with arousal but with frustration, with grim intent. Aviva feels like a thing beneath him, an object he wants to conquer. “Stop,” she says. “Just stop.” She sits up. Her open legs shame and grieve her. She closes them. Then she begins to cry.
Dorota is giving them the latest installment on Marvin Geohagen. Marvin Geohagen weighs 280 pounds. He is a shot-putter; his hands are the size of catcher’s mitts. He is one of those athletes, boys almost exclusively, who come to
Auburn after they’ve already graduated from high school. They are most of them not that bright, but passing grades in senior-year courses and continued athletic prowess mean they might make it into Notre Dame or even Dartmouth. They sit together at one table in the dining hall, razz each other in their deep voices, and ogle the girls who have obvious breasts. They can’t have any of them and they know it, not for real; the girls all think they’re too good for these meatheads.
Last week Marvin Geohagen asked Dorota to take a walk with him. They went far out into the woods. I want you to be my girlfriend, he said.
Suddenly she found herself on her knees, his enormous hands gripping her head. “What was I supposed to do?” Dorota asks. She blows a stream of smoke toward the mold-stained ceiling.
The upshot is that Marvin is in love with her now. He follows her out of the dining hall, waits for her outside of her classes. They must be together, he says; she is the love of his life. She’s told him that they’re not right for each other (“because you’re a bloody oaf, Marvin”—that’s what she
should
have said); she has invented a serious boyfriend back in England. He can’t hear a thing. Today, finally, she told him she didn’t love him. That, in fact, he repulsed her.
“He said, ‘You cunt. I’m going to hurt you.’ And then he walked away.” Dorota pauses, then screeches with laughter.
Aviva cries on Seung’s bed, on and on, the way she hasn’t cried since she was a child, her sobs deep and shuddering,
involuntary gasps seizing her like hiccups. She hides her face. The shock is the confirmation that she cannot be loved. She wails, pounds the mattress. She has been expecting the proof for years, expecting to be blindsided by it even as she hoped to deceive and evade it. And here it is. He cannot enter her. Something in her repels him. She knew it, she knew it. Seung believes that he wants her, but his body tells the truth. She puts her nails to her face, pulls at her hair, but even this kind of abandonment she is incapable of: she does not want to scar herself. Even in despair she is self-protecting.