It is at these times that Seung sees, in the hollow of his palm or hiding in a stand of trees, the things that later he must make—the drawings of leopards with golden eyes, the perfect spheres carved out of wood.
Seung’s words tempt Aviva. She too would like to go somewhere else, to see into the nature of things. She would like her heart to open; she would like to see the astonishing colors Seung speaks of. She would like beauty to supplant fear.
But she
is
afraid. She suspects that in the honeycomb of her subconscious brain there do not, in fact, lie caverns of benevolence and fellow feeling. Rather, she expects there are evil things lurking there: rage, a lust for conquest, cruelty. Why would she want to loosen the chains? Here is a girl for whom even the phantasms of movies are too much, sometimes, to endure. She’s learned to say no to thrillers, gangster films, anything having to do with supernatural powers or aliens. Anything along those lines terrorizes her, makes her clutch her head as if the control and good sense in it might be sucked away.
Seung lends her books to read, trying to explain where he’s coming from: Aldous Huxley’s
The Doors of Perception,
Albert Hofmann on
LSD
.
“Nothing can happen,” Seung promises. “I’ll be with you the whole time.” But that’s not good enough, she thinks. He can’t be
inside her mind,
where the caverns are. She could wander away from him down there, out of his protective grasp. She—her very being—might be stolen.
She says she’s sorry, really, really sorry, but no. No Quaaludes. No nothing.
He badgers her for a while, is gloomy and disappointed, then lets it go.
When I began to piece together this account, I did so simply to make sense of things, to create a plausible whole out of the fragments left behind after Seung’s death. Later, as I amplified and embroidered (yet every little detail, every flourish I added seemed to bring me closer to the truth), I began to see my tale as a kind of restitution, the only type of penance I could then see to pay Aviva. An attempt to understand her—or rather, to allow her complexity to grow beyond the possibility of my understanding. And to Seung also I owed—well, everything. As long as Aviva was only what I thought she was (Seung’s sex kitten, tease, the girl stolen from me by those who thought themselves my betters), and as long as Seung was only what I thought
he
was (the thief, the golden boy who’d plumbed the depths of a woman and got to go back for more and more), then I could still say to myself,
They got what they deserved.
I needed to
see
who they were,
to strip the myth from them, and that is what I labored to do, year by year, piece by piece.
There’s another aspect of this, too. Only very far along in this labor of construction did I glean that there was an affinity between Aviva and me that went beyond whatever I had been trying to get out of her and she out of me. I saw that there was something in her dilemma of my own. I’ve never wholly believed in love, and perhaps that’s why, over the years, women have gone in and out of my life, sometimes quickly, sometimes staying for long enough that there is talk (fortunately eventually cut short) of marriage, a future. Before they leave, these women take the time, a great deal of time, to tell me exactly what is wrong with me, above all what they perceive as my failure to feel. How can I explain that it is not precisely that? I could tell them about a time when I felt altogether too much—too much desire, too much rage. If I did, would I receive some sort of compassionate exemption? To be perfectly frank, I’ve never thought that any of these women have themselves been good and kind and feeling enough to be entrusted with my story. I hope to meet the right listener one day, the one I can unburden myself to. Perhaps then things will change, or I will be forgiven for being unable to change.
Why do women say the things about men that they do? It’s not only my disappointed partners. Many of my female colleagues, when the conversation turns to love, are inclined to say,
Oh, all men are like that
—by which they mean defended in a certain way, inexpressive. But I know
they are wrong. I know that certain men, like Seung, do not defend themselves when it would be better if they could. And certain women, like Aviva, can’t find in themselves the thoroughgoing surrender that they think would make them happy and whole. Perhaps the years since have reassured Aviva, given her that soul-shaking union, or maybe she’s learned that there are other ways of feeling, more natural to her, that deserve to be ennobled by the word
love.
But I wonder if it could really be so. All this time Aviva has surely believed that Seung died because of her. What has that done to her?
An envelope arrives from Aviva’s brother, stuffed with his drawings. There are figures on skateboards: boys, but with the heads of wolves—fanged, scowling—and wings. The boys wear the same kind of T-shirts Marshall wears: dark, with the baroque insignias of Jethro Tull or the Grateful Dead. In the postures of the figures Marshall has successfully captured his dream of great speed. They are flying, somersaulting, their long hair streaming behind them. Accompanying the drawings is a short letter. Marshall tells Aviva that he is growing his hair long.
Mom hasn’t said anything.
Then he mentions that he was beaten up by three older kids from school, ninth graders. It happened in the park; he’d decided to take a walk before getting on the bus home. He’d been lost in thought, didn’t see them coming. He’d been thinking about a skateboard move called a Bert Revert, rehearsing it in his head. His arm was broken but he’s otherwise fine. The principal wanted to know
who the kids were, but he hasn’t told. Anyway, it’s all worked out okay; he and the three boys have made up, nothing more will happen. With Marshall it is always as if Aviva’s reading a foreign language, in which the words don’t signify the customary things. This is not because Marshall is cagey or deceptive. He means precisely what he says. Moreover, one learns to believe him. Somehow, this twelve-year-old boy has had—if she knows Marshall—an unexceptional, even pleasant talk with his three attackers and everything has been amicably settled. Nothing more
will
happen, and none of the adults will ever know what did happen in the first place.
Aviva takes the letter with her to the dining hall. She eats lunch on the late side so that she can wait for Seung while he finishes kitchen duty. He has a work-study job three days a week. He rinses dishes, loads the two huge dishwashers, wipes down counters, mops the floor. When Mr. Carlton, the dining hall supervisor, isn’t there, Aviva follows the conveyor belt into the kitchen and visits. She likes to watch Seung’s muscular arms plunged deep into the sudsy yellow water. The femininity of the task throws his masculinity into relief. It is the same with his skin—satin, hairless—which only sculpts his swollen biceps and thick wrists more nakedly. His arms, so capable, so bent to his duty, stir her profoundly. She slips behind him and wraps her own around his waist. It pleases her to think that the other kitchen lackeys may grumble at this exhibitionism. Let them; she is happy. She lays her cheek on Seung’s back. If Mr. Carlton is present she instead sits in the empty dining
hall drinking cup after cup of weak coffee. She does not eat enough at her meal: perhaps a slice of American cheese, a slice of bologna, a smear of mustard. She can’t say why. The coffee is what fills her, but after a while it gives her the shakes. She is light, disoriented.
When Seung is done she accompanies him to the pool. They walk out of the dark, cloudy afternoon into the well-lit mouth of the gymnasium. The hall is wide and high and even on overcast days sun seems to stream in from the skylights. One can hear hollow thwacks from the hockey rink, the muffled slap of water against poolside, footfalls and shouts from the basketball courts. Who gave the money for all of this amplitude? It costs so much more, unthinkably more, to make a building not just serviceable but solid and beautiful. Someone has thought it worthwhile. In return his name is carved above the entrance: Arthur J. Eggleton IV.
Next door is the old gym, a dimly lit building with nets hanging from the ceiling to hold footballs and basketballs, a balcony converted into a running track. You can practically see the boys of bygone days with their leather football helmets and their skin scrubbed with harsh soap, lines of boys facing off, staring each other down, grappling and wrestling: a damper, danker time, a time without girls or women. The competition between boys must have been something purer then, less veiled and more prized.
Aviva sits in the stands reading Julio Cortázar,
Hopscotch,
in which the chapters may be read in any order. The impishness of this delights her. When she reads she unconsciously
tears off the corners of the pages and chews on them like bits of gum. Her books all look like mice have gotten at them. Seung’s teammates gaze up at this girl, so carnal, so oblivious, so unimpressed. They wonder how in the hell a girl like that ever ended up with a slanty-eyed kid like Seung.
How the kids used to hassle Seung in our middle school. “Butt-sniffing,” we called it: figuring out who the alphas were going to be. I hadn’t known Seung before. There weren’t that many Asians in our town, and most were the classic type: scrawny, bespectacled, very down with their math and science homework. If you had a name like Jim or John, you had a chance, but Li-Yu or Seung . . . I remember Seung getting grabbed in the hallways, called a sneaky Chink. Someone would turn out his pockets, remove his lunch money and breath mints. Teachers weren’t like they are today, didn’t care what went on in the hallways, who got beaten up. I probably would have been beaten up more often myself if it weren’t for my family. It’s not as if the other sixth graders really knew or cared that the Bennett-Joneses were landed gentry as far back as the 1700s, that one of my great-great-grandfathers had been on the Supreme Court and another had been lieutenant governor of Rhode Island. And yet kids somehow absorb, who knows how, a sense of caste. So although I was pudgy and had kooky blond curls, although I wasn’t particularly good at any sports besides Frisbee, if that even counted as a sport, I was left more or less alone. I had my crowd and I kept my more suspect inclinations, like Dungeons & Dragons and New Wave music,
under wraps. I was well above a Seung in the pecking order. When we got to Auburn, the two of us, I couldn’t understand how he rose so high, so free of his name and his looks, how he became a leader, while I was just some other guy from the joke state of New Jersey.
Seung enters the pool area in his team’s crimson Speedo. His primary event is the butterfly. It’s a stroke that makes no sense to Aviva: the swimmer seems to be sending himself backward nearly as much as forward. The whistle blows and Aviva watches six boys plunge simultaneously under the water. The swimmers rise slick and gasping, slam down again after capturing the air. Up once more. Seung’s arms move like the wheels on a crooked axle. It’s a quick race, only one length, no time for her to look away. She tracks his black head now leading, now lagging. The whistle shrills again; Seung hits the wall second. The first boy leaps out of the water. There is no trace in him of fatigue. Water sloshes off him in sheets. He is lean-legged for a swimmer, with small buttocks in his brown-and-white-striped suit. One by one the other swimmers heave themselves from the water. Seung will be pleased with his second-place finish. He neither expects nor aims to win, which is not the same as saying he does not push himself to his limits. It is just that he is no star. His value is in his dependability. His performance is steadily strong without being outstanding. He doesn’t complain about 6:00
AM
practices or about swimming until his arms burn and seize. When the coach says grunt, he grunts. He never loses his temper. I am a team player, he tells her. That’s what I am.
My mother and the Judge drive up to see the Sunday afternoon performance of my
Macbeth.
I’ve cast the show against type, with big Janny Pettigrew, with her long teeth and rounded shoulders, as Lady Macbeth. For weeks I had to work training the whinny out of her. She laughed at inapt moments. Lady Macbeth doesn’t laugh, I told her. Yreni Arsov, who was used to being the diva in Auburn productions, who’d been Masha in
Three Sisters,
I gave the part of Lady Macduff. Lady MacD has, I believe, nineteen lines. I watched Yreni struggle to lace in all that vanity and frustration as she acted the sensible, affectionate wife and mother, and I congratulated myself, I thought the result good. For Macbeth I did the best I could: Peter Malkin, short and round and blond-curled like me, an unprepossessing warrior and king. But Peter drew it out of himself. I saw that he was the one, of the whole cast, who would go on, that in
years to come we’d be reading about him. When he entered with the bloody daggers and said, “I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?” I saw what he had brought up in himself, a true mean troubled desire to kill. He frightened himself, the poor boy. It made the play. People shifted in their seats, uncomfortable. The curtain fell; at first no one would cheer for Peter. They clapped slowly, solemnly. The unhealth, the evil, clung to his person. Then the audience began to shake off its daze, recognize the actor in the part. The applause grew louder and louder; people whistled and stamped; they almost screamed. In the green room Peter laid his sword on the props table, ran his sweaty hands through his dusty hair. For a while no one went near and he remained entirely alone. He’d marked himself; he’d entered the art of the thing and none of us would ever be able to see him as innocent again.
I watch for Aviva in the audiences of our three performances; I do not see her. Cort comes the second night, dragging Voss; they give their quick congratulations and disappear, turning down my invitation to stay for the cast party. My actors praise me at the party, lifting their Tabs and Sprites, and I believe they are sincere; not all of them like me, but they can see that I drove them, in inventive and devious ways, to their best performances. I enjoy their admiration without feeling fed by it, for the part of them that I understand and can speak to was shed with their costumes and face paint, and as Lisa and I circulate amid our excited, chatting classmates, I feel as out of place as she likely does.