At 4:00
PM
Seung interrupts her. Where has he been, what has he been doing? Maybe he took a walk; she does not
inquire. It is getting close to dinnertime and he says they need to make a show of offering to help. Maybe they will run to the supermarket for a forgotten drink or vegetable. Aviva doesn’t have a license; Seung will take the wheel. By bed-time, she will be pressing kisses on him again; she can’t help herself. He’ll forget his shame in the pure pleasure of exploring her mouth, of running his hands down her smooth flat belly and over the fullness of her hips, both generous and hard, startling in the way you can feel the bones inside.
The last morning, as a tribute to Aviva, Seung drives into town and picks up bagels, cream cheese, tomatoes. I saw him there, at Benny’s Bagels, asking for sesame, poppy, and plain. We greeted each other, learned we would be taking the same train back to Boston. The Roach Coach, the kids called it; you could smoke and drink freely, the Amtrak conductors never interfered. Seung told me Aviva was staying with his family. He stuttered a bit when he was in a hurry or anxious or happy. He seemed to be all three right now. I lived on the opposite side of the valley running through the middle of town, the side where the bigger houses were. I pictured Aviva moving through the rooms of Seung’s home, that thick hair of hers filled with the scents of the day: the household cooking, her perfume, decomposing leaves.
My own girlfriend was visiting, Lisa Flood; I told him so, to make it clear Aviva’s presence in his home gave him nothing up on me. I watched him jog to his parents’
double-parked car. Have I spoken about the way Seung walked? He was slightly flat-footed; his center of gravity was low and his feet splayed a bit. I wondered why no one at Auburn seemed to notice this obvious flaw, the way we had in middle school.
Nights in my own house my mother no longer shared the Judge’s bedroom. The guest room had become her own; she’d re-wallpapered it in red and black roses, deep bloody tones. Lisa had my brother Dan’s old bedroom, still filled with his hockey trophies, his school achievement awards. The bastard had to frame and mount every one of them; it looked like a physician’s office. Nine, ten o’clock, my mother already drunk and in bed, the Judge reading biographies of famous jurists and politicians, I came into Lisa’s room and lay on top of her. Before we arrived at my parents’ I’d determined that on this vacation from the campus (for Lisa was one for the rules; she would never have agreed to close a door meant to be open, or sneak off to an illicit location) I would finally take her virginity. And she mine, although I had never let on to her that this would be the outcome. The previous year I had been courtly if a little grumpy, acceding to Lisa’s pleas that we ought to wait, it wasn’t yet the right time . . . I had been sure, like any sap, that my patience would eventually be rewarded.
But now, with my memories of the boathouse, of what it had felt like to be pressed up against Aviva, desperate to sink in, I no longer wanted to fuck Lisa so that I could enjoy what there was to enjoy and take what there was to take, or even so I could finally see myself as a man. I wanted Lisa so
that I could close my eyes and pretend that she was Aviva, imagine losing myself part by part and being submerged. Maybe, in fact, I didn’t want either one of them, just that sensation of self being stripped away until there was nothing left. I coaxed and coaxed Lisa until she finally gave way, on Thanksgiving evening. She was very still beneath me, attempting with smiles alternating with winces to be encouraging if not enthusiastic. So patient, such a trooper. By the third night I was lifting her legs and wrapping them around me so that she was bent almost perpendicular, so I could drive farther, disappear further. But I could not
get
further, could not obliterate either myself or her, and my frustration mounted: I began to hate her. The poor girl: a nice girl, not a terribly pretty girl, with blond brittle hair and pale skin dotted with blemishes. Her bottom already heavy and middle-aged, defeated-looking in her tan corduroys. She must have wondered what the ferocity was about. I told myself she would think it was for her, her boyfriend driven to frenzies by her appeal or by his worship, but I’m sure she was far too smart for that. She was a very smart girl. She became a doctor—an endocrinologist, as it happens—married, and had four children. Four children! I was startled as they began to arrive, at regular two-year intervals, in the pages of the
Auburn Bulletin.
I am sure she is a very good mother, and I pray she has a husband who respects and admires her, and who craves her matronly buttocks and breasts. I imagine she does. I always detected that she had the dignity and self-respect to choose someone more full-hearted than me.
Home with the car, Seung carries in the bags of food. Chaz left the previous evening, to pick up his girlfriend in Binghamton and return with her to school. The mood around the table, with its red-checked breakfast cloth, is festive. On the brink of Seung and Aviva’s departure, the four of them find enough to say to each other. The Jungs like bagels as much as any good Jewish family. At the research facility where Mr. Jung works (virology: later he will be one of the first researchers to isolate the new virus called
HIV
), people bring in platters of them for birthdays and other celebrations. Seung slices the tomatoes—“Gentile lox,” he says—and makes with them a pretty arrangement. Aviva agrees the tomatoes on top of cream cheese taste good. She and the Jungs banter about the train ride back to Boston. They want to know does she have enough money for the meal car, does she have a good book to read (they have noticed how often she has her nose in a novel; does she also read serious books like the new biography of Nikola Tesla?), what time will the shuttle bus arrive back at Auburn? And are Aviva’s parents pleased with how she is doing in school? There is much to talk about; why didn’t any of them notice that before? Mrs. Jung’s round face looks benevolent, positively maternal. Mr. Jung gently teases the girl: His son must make sure she puts on some weight when she returns to school; she is too skinny! Does she have a portion of meat every day? “Eat kimchi!” he cries when he drops the two young people at the station, waving his arms around. “It will make you strong!”
We run into Voss at Penn Station, Lisa and I, on the way back to school. He and his mother live in a big penthouse in the East Eighties. His father died of a heart attack when he was a kid; he doesn’t have siblings. I’ve seen this penthouse all of once. Although I’m supposedly one of Voss’s closest friends, on vacations he is somehow always too busy with his old St. Albans classmates and their fast Spence and Brearley girlfriends to remember to invite me to the booze-and blow-soaked parties he throws. The funny thing is that Voss’s mother is a serious, serious teetotaler. I know this because the one time I was over I saw
AA
paraphernalia all about the place—the
Big Book
in both the kitchen and the living room, the Serenity Prayer in the bathroom. Voss explained that his mom had been active in AA for years, was a sponsor to many other members, and had even become something called a general service representative, meaning she went to conferences all over the country. It’s because
of this regular travel that Voss has an empty apartment in which to host his bacchanalia. You have to ask yourself if it’s really possible his mother doesn’t know. The disarrangement of things even after obsessive cleanups, the leftover fumes . . . Maybe Mrs. V finds some perverse satisfaction in letting her son live out the dissolution she’s sworn off.
Voss looks like he hasn’t slept for a week. Maybe he hasn’t. His old friends are dreaming hangover dreams in their comfy beds, getting ready to return to their day school lives, so he’s suddenly willing to enjoy my inferior conversation and company. It’s the kind of morning that makes me wonder, once again, how it is that Voss thinks himself so superior to me. In middle school I swam with one of the cooler crowds; something about my family and its longevity in our town kept me in its company, even though the girls in the group often opined that I was “so negative.” I expected Auburn to be a simple continuation of that. When it comes down to it, I have a better pedigree than Voss or many of his day school friends. At a place like Auburn, you’d think that would matter, and for generations it
did
matter, but somehow, by the time I arrived, it didn’t so much anymore.
The Dramat is partly to blame, I know that. Taking part in the productions now and again is fine, if it’s seen as just for fun, or if you’re a girl. If you’re a guy, and you really
care
. . . My passion for the theater nudged me into the category of kid who is a bit suspect, whom you can snub when the mood takes you.
Lisa dislikes Voss very much. She thinks he’s coarse and a bully, and who can really disagree? Cort doesn’t rub her
quite so much the wrong way; at least he makes an effort to include her in his jokes and to sound out her opinions. Voss, for his part, doesn’t take too much trouble to hide the fact that he considers Lisa even more socially negligible than me. She’s too earnest, right-minded, and intelligent—all things Voss, on some level, knows he is not. You may be wondering how it is that I myself would end up with such an earnest and right-minded girl. And what such a girl would want with me. But there is more connecting the two of us than it might seem. Lisa genuinely enjoys theater, for one thing. And I can find it a relief to be with someone apparently devoid of my primary personality trait, sourness. As for what Lisa gets out of it, all I can say is that her choices, like mine, are rather limited. Neither of us has been anointed as one of Auburn’s Top Sweethearts.
Lisa is silent as we follow Voss into one of the rearmost train cars. It’s an axiom that the farther back the car, the noisier it is and the more drinking that goes on. I can see that Lisa hates the raucous laughter, and she tenses as Voss keeps needling her to accept a swig of his Wild Turkey. When a kid who must have started the day with a cocktail throws up just past Stamford, she says it’s time to move. Frankly I’m ready for a little quiet myself. The headache I always develop when I visit home is going into its fifth day and is outstripping Extra-Strength Tylenol’s ability to keep it in check.
We have already seated ourselves four cars up when I notice Aviva and Seung a few rows ahead, and by then it’s too late to invent an excuse to move again. Aviva sits against the
window, smiling as she watches Connecticut roll by. The two hold hands: very sweet. I’m surprised to see them here, away from the party atmosphere Seung loves, but perhaps Aviva, like Lisa, was in charge of seating arrangements today. After a while, Mac MacMillan, a kid who apparently likes a solitary and meditative toke, passes Seung a joint; he takes a brief hit and then holds it out to Aviva, who shakes her head. He bends and puffs a little smoke into her ear. She squirms and smacks him playfully. Their eyes meet. He leans to kiss her. They don’t gobble and pant like other couples you see on the train, and their discretion stabs me more than flaunting would. They give off something of the vibe of the long-together couple who are Getting It so often that they don’t need to show off. They part every so often to gaze at each other, Aviva lifting her hand to stroke Seung’s cheek. She smiles; he doesn’t. He’s in too deep to smile. “You like watching, huh?” says someone across from me, some prep or lower punk I don’t even recognize. I fix him with a stare; he snorts and looks away. Lisa, reading her biology textbook, pretends not to hear.
Seung has got his hands on something new. Quaaludes, he tells her; methaqualone if you want to know the scientific name. There are four medium-sized white pills taped inside a packet of white tissue paper. Seung goes to the library—the public library, not the Academy library—to research the stuff he and his friends put into their bodies. It’s not so much that he’s concerned about his health, just that he likes to see the molecular diagrams with their long, hyphenated names, to memorize the chemical formulas and know that chlorine destroys
LSD
molecules on contact. It’s not useful information, but it interests him, perhaps as much as does the experience of alteration. In these explorations you can see in him the son his father wished to raise, the one who understands that science is the only truly reputable calling for a son. Seung is pulling Bs in chemistry only because he has an aptitude for memorization. He takes it on his father’s insistence. The
urgency of it all escapes him. But the poetry of ingested substances engages him:
Bioavailability. Metabolism. Half-life.
“What will it do to me?” asks Aviva.
If it’s good stuff, he explains, you go into a kind of trance, in which all the world seems benevolent and amusing. You love everyone.
And if it’s not good stuff?
You just get relaxed, he assures her.
It’s a Saturday in early December. They’re in his room. He wanted to go to the Bog, but she refused; it’s way too cold and she doesn’t like being around other kids who are half out of their minds with whatever they’re on. He swallows his pills first, to give her confidence. She doesn’t ask where he got the drugs. Seung, Sterne, Giddings, Detweiler: the pack of them returned from Thanksgiving break with supplies replenished. They have contacts at home. At Auburn, it’s harder: tricky to trust the townies, with whom there’s always the factor of resentment; Academy students have been double-crossed. And Auburn the town is very small, a hard place to keep secrets. The last thing anyone needs is a couple of police officers showing up at the dean of students’s office, asking questions. So, better to stock up over vacations.
Why should a kid like Seung, a proctor in his dorm, able student, musician, swimmer, bound for a lesser Ivy or a good small liberal arts college, why should he risk himself, why should he spend so much time in the pursuit and exploration of illicit substances? What is he looking for? Or avoiding? Is he motivated by an unhealthy need for excitement? Feelings of
inadequacy? An impulse toward self-destruction? No, no, the older generation has the wrong vocabulary altogether; they are blinded by concepts like
illegality
and
addiction
and maybe even
sin
. Seung’s passion for intoxication has to do with his discovery, that very first time an older kid passed a spliff to him at a middle school football game, that there is something behind or beyond what ordinary experience presents to him, something he privately calls
the inside.
Only rarely does that inside reveal itself; mostly it teases him with transient glimmers of radiant energy in a field of grass, the panting of a dog, the mute mouth of a doorway. But when it comes in full he has the sensation of touching reality, or at least a reality more real than the one available to him day by day. There is an end to the unease, the sense he has of never being at home. During these times of illumination he sees himself as comical, but it’s a sympathetic view, not a disdainful one. He has no family, no constricting allegiances; he is simply one golden child of the universe. He can see the suffering of each fellow creature like a brilliant steam rising from the pores, a nimbus terrible and exquisite at once. It’s the suffering that makes each person beautiful, like a bracelet, like a cage. He has enormous compassion for everyone, and the fact that the suffering will continue, that he can do nothing about it, does not unduly distress him. This is simply how things must be.