The Virgins (13 page)

I grunt assent.

“She give it up to you yet?” Voss wants to know. “You bust her cherry? Haven’t you been working on that for, like, two years?” Once, in a much earlier era, I used to confide in Voss, having yet to learn that anything told to him eventually reached the ears of others.

“You’ll be the last one to know, Donald,” I say. The guy hates his given name.

“Ooooh, ouch. That was a tough blow, Bennett-Jones. You know how to skewer a guy. That wit. That repartee.”

“You hear that Cherie Calkins and Archie Davenport broke up?” Cort can be counted on to steer the conversation when Voss and I get too seriously pissed with each other, which is more and more often these days. I can’t figure out why the guy seems to hate me so much. To be honest, I’m not sure we ever really liked each other, but we had the loyalties of long affiliation. We were roommates as preps and lowers, until he got closer to Cort and they asked to room together for upper year, which is how I ended up with David Yee. The two of them and I would probably have fallen out long ago except that we share tastes in music and they like to have me as a third for Frisbee.

“No kidding,” says Voss in a suddenly different tone. “You going to go for her?”

“Me?” asks Cort nervously. “I dunno—you interested?”

Voss gives this a moment’s thought. “Nah. She’s got an annoying laugh.” Voss is a good-looking guy, it must be
admitted, but he rarely keeps a girlfriend for more than a month. There’s always something wrong: her laugh, her eating habits, her friends.

“I’d put up with a horse’s neigh for that body,” says Hurston.

“Well, you go for her then,” says Voss.

“Just might.”

Hurston deals the cards again. I get a king and a five. Bloody hell.

Some music goes on upstairs.

“Oh, Jesus, that whiny shit,” says Voss. It’s Seung or one of his friends, sounds like maybe Chick Corea accompanied by irritating flute. That laid-back, electronically trippy, life-is-cool sound is one that all of us particularly hate.

“Christ, I can’t take it. Bennett-Jones, put something on.” I’m only too happy to comply. I reach for Devo on Cort’s album rack, crank it up.
Yeah yeah yeah yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah,
sings Mark Mothersbaugh a million times.
Got an urge, got a surge and it’s outta control / Got an urge I wanna purge ’cause I’m losing control.
The harsh, repetitive, jerky music draws us together, pumps us up with a sort of manic-robot gladness. We wave our fists around and shout for our cards and I am not surprised when I get a six of hearts for my fifteen, earning back the money I just lost.

A banging noise on the ceiling: Seung or one of his buddies with a broom handle, probably. In reply we raise the volume. After a few moments of silence upstairs, in which we are tempted to believe we have settled this skirmish, there’s a startling explosion, which seems to be the result of three or
four sets of hands simultaneously overturning desks and beds and sending a lamp crashing to the floor. Once the surprise passes, I’m delighted. I start jumping up and down, shouting at the top of my lungs, grinning at Cort and Hurston to encourage them, and they catch on and start jumping up and down, too, and then Voss has to follow suit, and we all thrash around wildly screaming
“Are we not men? We are Devo! Are we not men? We are Devo!”
over the music. Cort runs to get his hiking boots from the closet and throws them repeatedly at the wall. Voss and Hurston and I get the rest of the shoes and follow suit. We throw them at the wall and at each other, shouting and cursing, drowning out the presences above.

A loud knock. Any good idea at Auburn always ends up like this. We all knew that from the start.

It’s not Mr. Glass but Mr. Leonov, another resident faculty member, less mild-mannered than Glass is. He’s short and brutally muscular, and I wouldn’t be surprised if even at his age, which seems to be around fifty, he could still take on a guy like Voss.

“Turn off the damn turntable and sit down on your beds and shut your mouths,” is all he says. We do that in exactly that order, and when it’s quiet we realize that it’s quiet upstairs also. A calm quiet, an easygoing quiet, with some movement and light banter in it, not our scorched-earth, chastised silence. You can always tell the difference. While we were acting like maniacs Seung and his band must have righted the beds and the desks and sat down like little angels, maybe commenced testing each other on German
conjugations. Mr. Leonov walked right past them and came to us. How stupid could we have been?

“All four of you are on restrictions,” Mr. Leonov says. “One month.” Voss and Hurston groan. I silently curse; the evenings would have been my time to court actors and start rehearsing for my
Seventh Seal.
A month of eight o’clock check-in kills my plan pretty thoroughly; by the beginning of March kids will be looking ahead to the big spring play or spring sports and won’t want to tie up their time. And there will be the note that goes home to my parents. Just what I need. Cort looks genuinely chagrined, as if he’d like to apologize for doing wrong; I want to slap him and tell him to get some balls.

When Mr. Leonov is gone, Voss turns to me. “You’re an idiot,” he says. “What’s wrong with you?”

I don’t even bother to answer, to make the obvious retort that he was jumping up and down and yelling his head off just like the rest of us. Because he’s right. I’m an idiot. My heart fills with an astonishing hatred: for Voss, for Cort, for big lopsided Phil Hurston, for Mr. Leonov and Seung and Detweiler and Giddings and Sterne. For my father and my mother. For my two brothers and my roommate and every teacher I’ve ever had at this damn school and my coaches and the fat ticket-taker at the Guignol, the change makers at the Rexall, the operators who hook me up for my forced monthly collect call home. For Voss’s imperfect girlfriends and the pretty untouchable babes on campus and the ugly undesirable ones and Lisa Flood. For Aviva, who belongs to Seung. For myself, naturally, above everyone.

Now we trudge back from the library or the gym or town every evening at 8:00
PM
, even on Saturdays; Hurston has to cancel a planned trip to Boston. We hardly speak to each other, each blaming the rest for his predicament. I try to use the time to study, to improve my grades in math and science, but my concentration isn’t good. I stock up on Snickers bars and Twizzlers. Good thing I’m not doing crew this spring.

Two weeks into restrictions the weather warms, just to make us really regret our confinement. Fortunately, the day-time is still free for all to enjoy. The air lightens and there’s a breeze smelling of earth and river water. The sky is a whitish blue. I feel a cheerfulness in spite of myself, and wear shorts under my blazer and tie. The girls are out in peasant skirts—tiered, floaty things—and sandals. It is maybe fifty-five, sixty degrees. Every January or February there’s a run
of two or three days like this, freakishly temperate, then the season remembers itself and blows bitterly again.

Cort and Voss and I toss a Frisbee. When it suits him, Voss has a thoroughgoing amnesia about the enmity that has passed between us, and Frisbee frankly makes me whorish, I can never resist an invitation. I am very good at the game; it’s rare that I can’t run the disc down, and today, as I fly across the lawn in front of Weld, leaping and diving, never, somehow, fumbling a catch, I find myself imagining that Aviva is watching, seeing and marveling at this physical grace that I have only, it seems, at these moments, and only when I do this one thing. It’s such a beautiful happening, so odd and unfamiliar, to be out on this mid-February afternoon, that it makes me hope for fantasies to come true.

All the same I know that Aviva can’t be anywhere nearby. She and Seung will have gone to the woods with a knapsack containing a blanket, a cheap tablecloth, a bottle of wine. There will be other couples out there, too, but the woods are spacious, there is room for them all. Carlyle and Gene Murchie are there. Gene crumples Carlyle’s pants into a thick ball, wedges his wild head between her legs. If you take a walk along the creek, you can see the empty rum and whiskey bottles, dirty condoms, sometimes a sock, a lighter, an old pencil. They must have such contempt for the act of love, the couples who leave such things behind. Even their cries of pleasure they must see as pollutants. Aviva and Seung never leave anything behind, I’m sure of it. They fold the tablecloth and the blanket. They fit the bottle, not
empty, back into the rucksack. Aviva checks her earrings, her necklaces. Seung runs his hand through the grasses just in case. They walk slowly back onto the athletic fields, not sorry about anything.

Carlyle doesn’t join the girls for dinner. Perhaps she’s gone to the library or is rehearsing for chorus. But Lena and Aviva are concerned. They worry about her. She’s like a big overgrown child, they think: plump, healthy, and much too good-natured. She gets herself into trouble trusting people, encouraging people, offering her help.

They discover her in bed, knees drawn up, reading
The Thorn Birds.
She’s wearing her nightgown and a big floppy hat. They all know immediately what has happened. They climb onto her bed, push themselves close. Even Dorota is silent, ceding her usual place at the center of a narrative. Carlyle raises her head and removes the hat. Her left cheek is a deep reddish purple. The purple seems dusted with silvery highlights, as if a painter went back and wanted to add something mystical to the composition.

“At least he didn’t get the eye,” says Carlyle.

Yes, for chrissakes, she tells them, she put ice on it, do they think she’s stupid? She puts her fingertips to the spot. Dorota says to let her have a go at it. She’s going to spread Noxema on it. She swears it heals everything.

They minister to her on the bed, three girls in nightgowns, smelling of toothpaste and Wella Balsam and soap. They have young, soft hands. They dream up violent and humiliating punishments for the wrongdoer, but they don’t
speak them now. This time is worse than ever before, this time Gene has crossed the line. And Carlyle mustn’t listen to his poison, the way he makes her believe that she is to blame. Carlyle shakes her head. If they only knew, she says, if they could only understand how selfish she is, how thoughtless.

“Even if that were true it doesn’t give him the right . . .” says Aviva.

Carlyle fixes them with a look of impatience. Why doesn’t anyone really listen to her? The swelling makes her left eye look smaller than the other one. “Not just selfish, not just thoughtless . . .” She trails off. She can’t put words to the knowledge inside, the knowledge of what is wrong with her.

“Please,” pleads Lena. “Break up with him. We’ll help you.”

Carlyle nods, wipes her nose with the back of her hand. She’ll listen for a night, two nights, she’ll make promises, then they’ll lose her to him again.

Seung’s letters embarrass Aviva. He slips them into her knapsack, leaves them in a cubby on top of her hat and mittens while she eats her meal in the dining hall. She sees the tiny, spiky black handwriting on the envelope, her name surrounded by oceans of white space, and a depression takes her. He cannot use the English language. It is simply true. His sentences are stiff and exalted, filled with abstractions. He has been “struck by a lightning bolt.” The experience of being with her “fills his veins with fire.” His words irritate and upset her. She has never felt these things he has felt. She often longs for Seung, she relies on him, but her heart has not been pierced with a deadly arrow. Under no circumstances would she die for him. She had a pen pal once, years ago; they found each other through a pen pal service at
Teen
magazine. The other girl sent a photograph of herself. She had teased blond hair and the look of small-town
enthusiasms. She wrote that she was in love with Donny Osmond.
Real love,
she wrote.
Not just one of those crushes.
What had the pen pal girl’s name been? Oh, yes, Sherri. With an i, and the i dotted with a circle.

On a sunny, snowy Sunday, I leave my room on the third floor of Weld. I don’t remember now where I was going, perhaps just out to get some air. When I reach the second-floor landing, a figure moves toward me from the direction of Sterne and Seung’s room, a girl, small, a blue scarf around her neck, snow boots up to her knees. I remember that the drawstrings on the boots were untied.

Surprised, I stop where I am and let Aviva go by. I smile. She catches my eye but I can see she isn’t frightened. I’m nobody. I became nobody to her a long time ago. She has a protector now, a boy who’s as good as a man. He’ll never let anything bad happen to her. There’s no way, she thinks, that I could come between her and her pleasures.

She moves quickly and quietly down the stairs. Clearly she’s done this plenty of times before. Sterne holds the front door open, but his raised hand halts her for a moment. He looks out once again, in, out. “Go,” he orders.

When she’s gone, Sterne walks up to meet me. I haven’t moved. He walks slow, rolling from the hips, so I’ll be able to feel, in my breadbasket, his long muscles, how tight and strong and sudden they are. He moves across the tennis court like a panther. His backhand is his best stroke. And now I notice that someone else is near me: Detweiler, who must have been the day’s second-floor sentry, looking
abashed. He’d waved Aviva on before he heard me approaching. Seung, I imagine, is still in his room, running a towel under his armpits, pulling on a fresh shirt.

Sterne finishes his slow ascent and comes up close to my face, very close. It’s just like a movie. “You say anything to anyone and we’ll paint your freak flag with your sorry brains,” he says.