“Show me what you do,” he says.
“Show you . . ?”
“Just do what you do.”
She reaches down and brushes two fingers across the mound. He expected something more intricate and forceful. She might be stroking a kitten. She makes the same movement over and over, never deviating or altering the pressure. It could make one sleepy, watching the unwavering rhythm of it. Gradually he perceives a stirring,
something buried nosing its way up; her mouth parts. He takes her hand and places it gently at her side, bends and replicates with his tongue the slow restrained motions her fingers made. Her head turns slowly from side to side, like someone’s refusal filmed in slow motion. Her belly grows hard, her legs tense. Her moans contain a growl, a register he’s never heard before. It thrills him. At the peak she seizes his head, thrusting into him, his parched and aching lips. He clutches the sides of the bed to stay against her.
Afterward she will not let him go. She clamps his legs in hers, presses her chest to his chest. Grasps his head tight. Her short, coarse hair is in his mouth. “Hold me, hold me,” she begs, over and over. He can still feel the throbbing of her cunt against his lips. She begins to weep. “I didn’t think that could happen,” she says. Gradually her grip relaxes. She nestles back on the bed. Her eyes, dilated, blink at him. He watches the lashes go up and down.
“You are beautiful,” he says.
Her eyes close. She dozes. Protectively he watches the parted legs, the breasts settled down against her rib cage. He strokes himself a little, paying homage.
Aviva opens her eyes in alarm.
“How long . . ?”
“A minute, two minutes.”
With some effort, Aviva sits up, and stares pointedly at Seung’s lap. Carefully she fits her hand around his cock. She’s never quite gotten used to doing this, it never feels as natural as everything else. In the beginning she expected
that her hand would move as if over ice, an unimpeded gliding, but discovered that skin had more friction than that. Her palm snagged and frustrated her attempt at a rhythm. It didn’t do much for Seung, either, and she hated feeling clumsy, not knowing how to make the pleasure happen. So mostly she avoids touching him there. But now she has an idea. She reaches for the hand lotion on her dresser and puts a dollop in her palm. She holds her palm out to Seung.
“Do you think . . ?”
Seung nods. She strokes him up and down slowly, then faster. “God,” Seung murmurs. “God.” For once his eyes close. The power Aviva feels sends a shock through her entire system. She wants this, she wants him. Guided by instinct she reaches with her free hand to cup his balls. All of Seung’s patience flees; the starved animal rises up. Trembling, willing himself not to lose control, he pushes her back on the bed and kneels above her. Her hands rise up and flutter down—should she help him? Not help him? She watches his bent, frowning head. She has the sudden image of his penis as a swollen weapon, a black and purple nightstick, a punishment, something large enough to damage her. Her heart pounds.
But he wilts at the entrance. She reaches down to hold him, to force matters, feels how sopping she is. He grows, subsides, grows, diminishes. And diminishes more. A radio suddenly goes on outside, spilling a bass beat into the morning. It’s over, she thinks.
He kneels at the side of the bed, his face buried in the sheets, and cries silently. His whole body shakes. It goes on
forever. It’s unbearable. She wants to strike him. She wants him disappeared, out of her room, removed from her: all his tears, needs, the dumb, weak slab of him. Her rage freezes her over. She does not hold him.
He rises, puts on his shirt, his jeans. His clothes are damp and his hands are like paddles. He stands like a man lost in a cavernous train station, a stranger in town. She will not look at him.
“Aviva.”
She will not look at him. She has stopped being a girl and she cannot be a woman; she has no fate; she’s been emptied out.
“Aviva. Aviva. Sweetheart.”
No answer.
At the Disciplinary Committee hearing, Señora Ivarra reports that at about three thirty on that Sunday afternoon she encountered Seung Jung descending the side stairs leading from the second floor to the ground floor of Hiram, heading toward the side exit. She asked the boy what the devil (“my exact phrase,” the Señora testifies) he was doing there. “Leaving, ma’am,” Seung told her. Señora Ivarra did not appreciate the humor. She asked Seung how long he had been in the dormitory.
“A few minutes.”
“And what exactly, if I must repeat myself, were you doing?”
“I was planning to go to Aviva Rossner’s room. I was going to surprise her. Then I thought better of it.”
“Oh, why was that?”
“I realized it was a stupid idea. I realized I could get caught and that it would get Aviva in trouble.”
“Come with me, please.”
They knocked on Aviva’s door. Number 21.
“It’s Señora Ivarra. I will need to come in.”
Aviva opened the door. Dorota was sitting on her bed. There were cards dealt out for gin rummy. The bed was made, the quilt drawn up.
“Hi, Señora Ivarra.”
Seung had had the presence of mind to fall behind the señora and as he caught Aviva’s eyes he shook his head very slightly from side to side.
Say no.
No, she said to everything the señora asked. No, no, no.
Not long ago, at a theater fundraiser, a man came up to me and greeted me, and I recognized an old Auburn classmate—a lacrosse player, he reminded me—a kid I’d probably never talked to in my entire time at the school. Nevertheless we got to talking now, and it came up that he’d been on what we called Stud Jud, or the student judiciary committee. These were the kids—good students, high moral fiber—who sat in on expulsion and probationary hearings. They didn’t get to vote on the outcome, but they had advisory privileges. I asked him what had happened at Seung Jung’s hearing.
He paused, frowned. Naturally he remembered. The proceedings were confidential, he explained. Stud Jud was never supposed to reveal what went on.
It was a good while ago, I argued. And whom could the information hurt now?
“Those two,” he said. “If only they’d just bothered to hide it a little more. You know? I think that’s what drove everyone crazy, that they wouldn’t hide it.”
I pressed him—he wasn’t giving me my answer.
The ex-lacrosse player finally relented, and even seemed relieved to speak. At a certain point, he said, it seemed as if Seung had some chance of being let off, that he might only get probation. Two teachers attested to his solid academic standing, his consistent class attendance, the fact that he turned his work in on time. Mr. Glass described the positive atmosphere Seung had encouraged in Weld among the younger classes, his ready ear for kids in need. Seung had no history of probation for any reason, he told the panel, and only one incident of restrictions, back in the fall, for his behavior with Aviva Rossner at the school dance. When Mr. Glass was asked if he had any reason to believe that Seung had previously violated school rules with Aviva Rossner, Mr. Glass answered that Seung was not up for any infraction of the rules other than this one. Then a silence fell and the faculty members looked down at their notes or off into the distance, and, according to the ex-lacrosse player, everyone knew what everyone was thinking, which was that Aviva Rossner and Seung Jung had been flouting the rules for months, had been violating Auburn’s ethic of healthy moderation by spilling sex into every cranny of the school, and that, to maintain the proper separation between adult and child, decency and decadence, somehow it had to come to a stop.
Dean Ruwart spoke first. He brought everyone’s attention to the fact that Seung was a proctor. He read from the
Auburn Rule Book:
“The proctor is a model for his peers and is held to the highest level of accountability.”
That must have been the reason they were especially hard on Seung.
Dorota said, “Thank God I was coming out of the bathroom just then and saw them, Seung and the señora. I saved your skin.”
“You did,” said Aviva. She wished it had been Carlyle or Lena. With Dorota there was always a mysterious debt of some sort, some leftover sense of obligation. But perhaps only Dorota would have thought so quickly, would have walked directly and without obvious hurry to Aviva’s room and told her they must make the bed, right now, and open the window to air the place out, and do you have a pack of cards or a crossword puzzle? Everybody on the floor knew about the questioning within minutes. A community such as this one instantly picks up the vibration of inquisition. Carlyle and Lena said: You were supposed to come tell us when Seung was ready to leave! We were supposed to be the lookouts. What in the world happened? Were you crazy?
The
Auburn Rule Book
states that being called up for an offense punishable by expulsion is stressful and difficult for a student and his or her family, as well as for the larger school community, and so every attempt is made to ensure that hearings will be held quickly. The Disciplinary Committee is made up of six faculty members and four non-voting students who rotate on an annual basis. The process is this: the faculty member bringing the charge must report the violation to the student’s advisor, and the student’s parents will be notified. After obtaining a written statement from the student, the advisor will submit it to the Disciplinary Committee, which will also receive a written statement from the accusing faculty member. The dean of students reviews the statements and presents the case to the committee. The accusing faculty member, the student, the student’s advisor, the dean, and two of the student’s teachers must appear at the disciplinary hearing. The student may make an oral statement at that time, or his teachers may speak on his behalf. After all of the documents and statements have been offered to the committee, the student is asked to leave the room and the committee decides whether or not the student has committed the offense of which he is accused. If the answer is yes, the first motion must be for Requirement to Withdraw. If that fails, the next motion will be for probation. If a student is required to withdraw he must leave the campus within thirty-six hours.
Seung’s advisor is Mr. Leonov, a man he has never trusted to give him any advice at all, although in this case the older man
has some that is wise. Aviva and Seung, he suggests, should probably not spend too much time together in the coming days. He asks if Seung would like to contact his parents, before he, Mr. Leonov, makes the required phone call. Seung laughs. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he says. He’s not being disrespectful, and Mr. Leonov seems to understand. If you’re a Korean kid, you keep your head down and don’t look for extra trouble.
Umma
and
Apah
will come after you soon enough.
The call comes in the afternoon. Some prep on the fourth floor beckons him to the pay phone. Seung imagines his mother’s shrieks are audible throughout the entire building: The lack of gratitude. Their sacrifices. The embarrassment for the whole family. The shame.
“Yes,
Omoni,
” he murmurs.
“And over a white girl, a—” Seung doesn’t catch the Korean word, but it’s clear it means
loose
or worse.
Seung’s father gets on. “You will amount to nothing,” he says. “Colgate will not take you now. What will you do with your life?”
Seung tries to explain that it’s not a sure thing that he’ll be expelled. There’s a real chance that he’ll get probation. And if the worst occurs, he’ll do his senior year over at home, and apply again to Colgate for next year.
“How do you think that will happen?” asks his father. “Do you think you will just come back and live at home? You have no home.”
It will be all right. Seung has to let them storm and curse him like this; later they will calm down, they will come
around. It’s always been so, although never before has his infraction been so great. What a good job he has done until now in hiding his delinquencies from them. They will not refuse to let him be their son again. They will not kick him out of house and home. He can almost convince himself of this.
Now Aviva walks past Weld each day without stopping, gripping her knapsack to her shoulder, reduced, alone, and once more the Auburn storytellers spin their tales. Aviva is a tragic figure, threatened with separation from her great love. Or she is a careless, self-involved bitch who has brought Seung to ruin. She is suicidal; she is indifferent. No disciplinary charges were ever brought against Aviva; no one could prove that things were not as Seung said: that he impulsively went up to surprise her, that he had never been in her room. He too walks alone now to and from his meals and classes, looking like a man made of separate parts that do not hang together, like a body that has died and is activated by something external.
In Weld there are passionate huddled conversations. Students rail at the unfairness of the authorities; someone calls for starting some sort of petition. We are all swept up in
these feelings of outrage, from the preps and lowers who know Seung only as a superhero, an embodiment of elder glamour, to seniors like Cort and Voss and me, who have never been part of Seung’s group but are newly seen as authorities on the mysteries of Auburn’s disciplinary procedures. None of us can remember having heard of a time when a kid caught in a boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s room did not get a Requirement to Withdraw.