Infandous (6 page)

Only Lucretia was where she should be—home, tending the hearth, awaiting the return of her husband. And when he darkened the doorway with his broad frame, she looked up from her needlework with a choked cry of relief, and she stumbled and fell into Lucius’s arms, and her hair was dark and soft, and her hips were rounded and supple and begging to be gripped. And her mouth—Sextus Tarquinius lusted for the taste of it.

Sextus Tarquinius left the home of Lucius Collatinus, left the presence of Lucretia, but his thoughts would not follow his form. They lingered, imagining how Lucretia would look as her robe fell away, as her hair came loose and tumbled down, as her mouth opened in a cry of passion.

And though he knew he could not cause her to open to him in passion—for he could see her love for her husband ran deep and strong—he thought it might be enough if she were to open to him in pain.

The next time Sextus Tarquinius knew Lucius Collatinus to be away from home, he visited Lucretia. He went at night and entered her bedchamber while she slept, naked but for the bedclothes. He lowered himself to the edge of her bed and stroked back her hair from her temple, a lover’s gentle caress. Slowly, so slowly, he peeled back the linen sheet and feasted on the sight of Lucretia bare to him at last—the slope of her shoulder, the crest of her breasts, and the wine-dark kiss of her nipples. From the bedside table he took a washcloth, dipped it in water, and began to bathe her, trailing the cloth along the curve of her belly.

Lucretia moaned, and her eyes opened, confused at first in the dark, mistaking in the first instant Sextus Tarquinius for her own husband. Who could tell what it was that alerted her to her mistake—to the fact that the man in her bed was a stranger? Was it that his shadow was slightly longer than her husband’s? That the fingers pressing into the flesh of her belly were thicker than those she knew so well? Or was it the knife, silently unsheathed, that touched her now between her ribs, its point both cold and sharp?

“Listen now,” Sextus Tarquinius whispered between clenched teeth. “I have come to you, and I will have what I want. That is not a question. The question is only if I will have my pleasure with my knife buried in your side or without.”

Lucretia made a sound like an animal, trapped and certain of its fate. And then Sextus Tarquinius took what he had come for.

When he left her at last, bereft in her bed, Lucretia despaired that she had allowed him to pierce her with one sword and not the other. Surely the cold steel would have been cleaner, more honorable.

It was a day and another night before Lucius Collatinus returned to his home and his wife. He found her waiting for him, but this time not with open arms and ready lips. Instead, he found her with a knife in her hands. She told him what had been done and who had done it.

And then, with the words, “Avenge me, Lucius,” she buried the blade into her chest, aiming the tip just where Sextus Tarquinius had held it not so long before.

Five

Sometimes I can’t sleep, but usually I lie there anyway on the couch and stare into the not quite darkness of our living room. Tonight, though, when I find myself awake long after Jordan has gone back downstairs, hours after Mom went to bed, I pull on my pants and walk down to the boardwalk.

It’s close to two, the quietest time of the night. The bars are closed, and the drunks have dispersed. The early birds aren’t up yet, so I have the streets almost to myself. The homeless, obviously, are out here, but they’ve curled themselves tight against buildings and park benches, their blankets or jackets thrown over their heads, and they’ve disappeared inside themselves, become as small as possible to conserve heat, to blend into the night.

I like being alone, and I like being outside in the night air. It’s like there is more of it to breathe without everyone pressed around me, competing for it. Venice is a busy city during the day, full of crazies of all shapes and sizes. And the tourists … the never-ending stream of people from all over, coming to Muscle Beach to gawk at the exhibitionists bending and lifting their weights, pressing them up and away with their arms, their thighs, their backs, their muscles straining against over-tanned skin. Exhibitionists, all of them—those lifting the weights and those posing outside the chain-link fence that surrounds the weight-lifting stations. And the girls walking around in their bikini tops and shorts. And the black guys with low-waisted pants and tank tops, headphones slung around their necks, hawking their CDs on the boardwalk. The little families on vacation who come for the day as a break from Disneyland, pushing strollers that are worth more than my mom’s car. Rubbing sunscreen on the baby’s nose. During shopping hours this place gets packed. Consumers looking to consume, coming to Venice to feast. And us, the locals, the local color, serving ourselves up.

In Venice, money cycles in and out like the tide. People too get caught up in its rhythm, coming back here again and again. My mother says it’s all connected—the tide, the cycle of the moon, of a woman.

I think about my mother, the way she smiled at Jordan tonight, and I wonder about men and boys and the gray space in between. It used to be that I enjoyed eyes on me the way Jordan’s eyes roamed my mother.

Marissa and I have always made fun of the girls who fuck tourists. It’s just too easy to be part of the summer escape, to be the local color that guys go home to tell their friends about—a picture on a cell phone, a text or two, virtual memorabilia that adds up to proof of conquered lands.

No one wants to be the conquered land.

So my first time—not last winter but when I was fourteen—wasn’t with a tourist. It was with a boy named Eugene. A terrible name. He wasn’t really a local, either. He and his friends used to caravan up to Venice from Orange County every few weekends to skate our park, down near the art walls.

I watched him skate and he watched me watch him skate and Marissa watched us both. “That boy wants you,” she whispered into my ear, her breath warm.

Boys want girls. It’s just one of those things, not worth questioning. I grew up soaking in it, that desire. Everywhere I’d ever been, men wanted my mother. I knew they wanted what was mine—her touch, her hand, her smile. As I got older, I began to recognize they wanted other things from her, things she didn’t even give me, and every now and then, when she gave it to them—never when I was around, but I could always tell from the little scrap of condom wrapper in the bathroom or the salty heavy ocean smell in the bedroom or just the look on her face, later—I hated them.
Hate
is not too strong a word.

That summer, with Eugene, I’d had my period for six months. I knew what it meant—that I could get pregnant. My mother said it meant more than that. She said it meant a fresh start every month, that my blood was a memory of our connection to the ocean, each swell of it moon-born and tidal. I thought it mostly meant a bloody hassle.

Some mothers don’t want their daughters to use tampons, afraid that they’ll deflower themselves. My mother didn’t even keep pads in the house—she had these menstrual sponges, which she rinsed and reused. And she bought me tampons—the smallest size, organic unbleached cotton.

“Your body is yours first,” she said. “Don’t be afraid to explore it.”

Flowers. Deflowering. The tampon box—“Teen” size, it boasted—featured a light pink, open-petaled flower on a baby blue background.

Eugene’s penis was way bigger than a teen-sized tampon.

***

I perch on a bench not far from where Marissa and I sat on the swings earlier today. I stare out at the ocean, a booming inky shadow in the night, the crash of the waves louder now than before, now that it’s too dark to see them break.

I met Felix out in the water. I was surfing—poorly, since that is the only way I know how. I like it out there, but I’m not a mermaid like my mother. It’s just that I like straddling the board; I like sitting under the sun, the rocking ocean beneath me, my legs dangling into the water.

He’s the kind of guy who probably doesn’t know how to do anything poorly. That was my first impression. I watched him wait his turn in the lineup. I saw how patient he was; even when a kid took off in front of the line, he didn’t freak out like some of the other guys did. The kid obviously didn’t know the rules; he could barely get up on his board. Probably he was a tourist from somewhere like Tennessee and had no clue there even was such a thing as etiquette. When it
was
Felix’s turn, I thought for a minute that he would miss his wave. He seemed to paddle slowly, languidly even, but he must have been really strong, because he caught the wave no problem even though there was none of the frenetic rush that I always felt when I was going for a wave. And he popped right up, clean all the way through, and he handled the wave like
he
was shaping it, anticipating its motion, technical in his ride, carving hard into the surf, his arms almost still at his sides, like he was enjoying himself, sure, but like he was working too, honing a skill rather than screwing around.

I saw him again later as I sat staring out at the sun getting ready to dip into the horizon. He paddled up next to me and straddled his board. We sat there awhile, side by side, not acknowledging each other but just watching the colors from the sunset blend in the water like paint on a palette. It was winter, but it was a really nice day. With the sun going down, though, it would cool fast.

Finally, he spoke. “I didn’t see you catch anything today.”

“That’s because I didn’t.” I turned to look at him, now that the sun was gone and the sky was that milky-rosy hue. Up close I saw that he was older than I’d figured him to be. Mid-thirties, maybe even older. Brown hair worn short, no gray yet; if he let it grow out, I’d bet it would curl. Hazel eyes, the kind that have lots of colors in them all mixed together, with creases around them when he smiled. Clearly strong but not overbuilt. Not tall, but not short. Too old for me.

But I decided that I wanted him anyway, and so I shifted myself on the board so that the fading light was behind me and I used both hands to wind my hair at the base of my neck, knowing perfectly well that this gesture thrust my breasts out in front of me, pushing them against the sealskin of my black wetsuit, knowing from his gaze that he liked what he saw.

“Sun’s down,” he said, smiling at me. “Can I buy you dinner?”

We couldn’t go anywhere too fancy because all I had besides my bikini and my wetsuit was a pair of jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and two-dollar flip-flops.

He was staying at a hotel not too far away, and we stashed our boards in his room before dinner. He rode an Al Merrick Remix, about six feet long. It was a clean board, pretty new, no dings or repairs. I stood my board next to his in the hotel room, and it looked shameful by comparison: there were about a half dozen yellowed ding repairs and a few more spots that needed attention, and the leash was frayed and tired-looking.

“That board looks too big for you,” he said.

“Yeah, thanks, the next time I have a few hundred extra dollars I’ll size down an inch or two.”

He laughed a little. “Well, considering you spend most of your time out there just floating around, it doesn’t matter too much.”

His name was Felix. I told him mine was Annie. I told him I was nineteen and finishing up my AA at Santa Monica Junior College. I told him that I lived with three other girls and that was why we couldn’t go back to my place. I told him I’d moved to California from Arizona with my friend Marissa who wanted to be an actress and that my job was to keep her from answering any Craigslist postings for “Young Actress Needed/Some Nudity Required” on the days she was feeling desperate.

The only reason I mentioned Marissa at all was because she ran into us as we were heading to dinner. I introduced her as my roommate, and she shook hands solemnly, not giving me away. When we turned to leave, she hissed in my ear, “That guy’s an
X
all the way!”

We had dinner.

He bought a bottle of wine, and even though I might be able to pass for nineteen, I’m pretty sure I don’t look twenty-one, but the waitress brought two glasses anyway.

Here’s the thing. I have nothing against girls who like to have sex with lots of random guys. That’s their prerogative. It’s never been my thing, but whatever.

So I don’t know what it was that night—the sunset or the wine or Felix himself. But I did go back with him to his hotel, and not just to reclaim my surfboard. I did allow him to kiss me, across my neck and down my shoulder. I did stand still as he slid my jeans down around my feet, as he pulled the strings that held on my bikini.

“I’ve been wanting to do this all day,” he murmured as the bows came undone, first the one across my back and then the other, behind my neck.

No one held a knife to my rib cage. No one made me do anything. I put myself in that room. And when he laid me on the bed, the soft white duvet pluming up around me like a cloud, I wanted to be there.

It was different from how it had been with Eugene, different from how it had been with the other couple of boys I had played around with. With Felix there was this rush of warmth and wetness, this sensation of desire that hit me wavelike and intense.

On that hotel bed, the metaphor felt true, the one promised by fairy tales and tampon boxes. I was a flower and I opened, I softened, and I ripened and warmed. I felt, I thought, like a woman rather than a girl, and as he found his way inside me, I wondered—fleetingly—if this was what sex was like for my mother.

***

And so if I feel like this later, with distance and knowledge I wish I could unlearn, whose fault is it?

There is no one to whom I can appeal, no one to plead for revenge.

I am cold now, dew-damp and tired at last.

Six

It’s no big secret that I don’t much care for school. My mom knows it; my friends know it; my teachers know it. I do my best to avoid as much of it as possible, and my mom is usually pretty willing to sign whatever sick note I hand her. She hadn’t been too head over heels with school herself, she told me, so she totally understands the need to take a day off now and then.