CHAPTER 11

Stars

Like so many times before, Leda only thought she wanted to go to the party. All her young adult life she clung on to the idea of party as a representation of social perfection. In her mind there were streams of colors and dancing and pithy conversation between bright cocktails and four-inch heels. If she were ever to stop and consider what party actually was, not solely as the conceptual fantasy she envisioned but in its naked and fluorescent reality, she would have been aware that what it meant was the physical realization of how alienating social interaction could truly be, and she would not have gone. Instead she put on lipstick and a short dress.

When she walked in, Sonic Youth’s cover of the Carpenters’ “Superstar” was playing in the background. It’s such a sad affair, she thought along with the lyric. The party unfolded in the living room before her eyes. People standing around, talking, holding drinks. Someone somewhere laughed, but she wasn’t sure where.

In the kitchen was Kate, the girl who invited her. Kate wore crop tops in winter and was blonder than necessary. Leda didn’t particularly like or dislike Kate. For her, Kate fell into one of those in-between categories of friendship. They met in their Comparative Zoology class, where their tentative interactions developed through confusion over exoskeletons and homeostasis. After the semester ended there was the standard moment of will-this-friendship-continue-now-that-we-don’t-have-to-try-to-understand-homeostasis? For a while it did. Kate asked Leda to coffee, and Leda texted Kate on occasion. If they bumped into each other they would always embrace. She even thought: I like Kate. She’s my friend, after they chatted about pesto for a few minutes waiting in line at a sandwich shop.

A few weeks later she asked Kate if she wanted to grab lunch. Kate said yes and motioned excitedly. The Friday they were supposed to meet up Leda didn’t hear anything from her, so she texted, “Hey, girly, are we on for lunch??” She never heard back. The rest of the day she envisioned all the reasons Kate hadn’t responded. Maybe she had a death in the family or her phone broke. Maybe she doesn’t like me, she thought. That night on her way home she went for a slice of pizza. Kate was there with some friends, sitting in a booth, laughing and motioning excitedly, just like she had the day they agreed to have lunch. She’s so fake, Leda thought, and walked all the way around the restaurant to avoid bumping into her. As she fell asleep that night she relived the moment Kate mispronounced “horticulture” in class.

Three months later she got the mass e-mail invite to the party. It said: “Come to Kate’s Super Fun Unbelievably Cool Over-the-Top Amazingly Excellent Party!” Underneath there was a picture of a sloth with a party hat. Leda thought the invitation was obnoxious and pretentious, and she was also still very hurt about the lunch, but it didn’t stop her from wanting to go. She knew that fickleness was the exchange for loneliness and was hoping that at least she’d meet someone.

“Leda! I’m so excited you came!” Kate enveloped her in a flurry of blondness.

“Yeah, thanks so much for having me!”

“Your hair looks so cute.”

“Thanks. I love the apartment.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s great, right? Good for parties, anyway.”

“Yeah, it’s so big.”

“Well, help yourself to a drink. We have beer on the porch.”

That was the last time Kate and she ever spoke. Kate had six more parties, but Leda didn’t attend. Years later she would hear Kate married a guy named Gage and worked at a bank.

Leda waited near the door for her friends to arrive. She had invited Anne, a friend her mom once described as having a slutty face. While she waited she pretended to admire Kate’s book collection, which consisted of the Twilight series, three diet books, and Chaucer. Fat: The Enemy and The Canterbury Tales. It was a lot of looking busy to do, but she didn’t feel like forcing conversation with strangers. Once Anne was there she figured things would be easier.

Despite her slutty face, Anne was a good friend. She and Leda had become close over the last few years and would sometimes spend hours on the phone chatting about boys and being bloated. Anne was one of the few people on earth who rarely judged the emotional impulses of others, and because of this, Leda confided in her long secrets of quiet desperation with little worry. Anne invited her boyfriend, Luke, to the party. She was never single and Luke was her newest boyfriend.

“He’s nice but emotionally unavailable,” she would say. Leda had never met him before.

“Leda!” Anne walked in just as Leda was about to pull out a book on the dangers of processed foods. The girls gave each other a big hug.

“This is Luke.”

“Hey, I’m Luke.”

Leda shook his hand. She could see what Anne meant about him being emotionally unavailable.

They got drinks and started to talk about school in an empty, distant way. Had Luke not been there they would have been talking about him, but since he was, they danced around their familiar conversation topics while Anne worked to occasionally include him.

“Luke plays softball. Don’t you, Luke?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, really? That’s cool,” Leda said, and took a small sip of her beer. She hated beer, but it was preferable to standing there with a soda having to explain why she wasn’t drinking. She’d grown accustomed to drinking intolerable drinks at parties by holding her breath and taking small sips. Once a doctor asked her if she drank.

“Socially,” Leda said.

“What does ‘socially’ mean? I always wonder,” the doctor asked.

“It means that you drink enough so that no one asks you why you aren’t drinking.”

She often looked back on that conversation as one of the most profound and true things she would ever say. It was the cornerstone to her doctrine of personal drinking habits.

“Leda, are you here?”

“What?”

“Do you know any guys here?” Anne said.

“Oh, I thought you said, ‘Leda, are you here?’ ”

“No.”

“Oh…No, not really.”

“Babe, do you want another beer?” Luke said, wrapping his arm around Anne. He tucked his hand in her back pocket. Leda tried not to show her disdain, but she hated couples who couldn’t stop touching each other in public. She remembered a couple at the train stop sharing an ice cream. They were giggling and passing the cone back and forth between kisses. She seriously considered pushing them onto the tracks. It wouldn’t be until years later that she realized all the anger was just loneliness.

“Thanks, babe,” Anne said as she kissed Luke before he walked off.

“Luke seems nice,” Leda said.

“Yeah, he is.”

“And he’s cute!” She didn’t really think he was cute, but this was courtesy.

“Thanks, yeah, he is. We got in a huge fight today, though.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t want to come to the party ’cause he wanted to play video games. Yes, that’s a true story, and this is my life.”

This was a common fight between the two of them. Leda spent many Saturdays texting with Anne as she sat in Luke’s apartment watching him play video games. Sometimes he’d take her out for Applebee’s afterward, and her texts would dramatically switch from things like “I can’t stand this” to “We’re eating breadsticks!” Breadsticks appeared to be the difference between a good relationship and a bad relationship.

“That’s insane. How did you get him to come?”

“I promised him he could play video games all day on Saturday and Sunday next weekend.”

“That seems worse than not coming to the party.”

“Seriously, I know.”

“He seems sweet, though.”

“Yeah.” Anne smiled. “He is.” She looked warmer and more relaxed than she had seconds before, as if she’d thought of something wonderful and bright. It was the same kind of look a person gives when they get good news or are nearing the start of a vacation. Leda felt an intense pang of jealousy.

The rest of the evening Luke didn’t leave Anne’s side. He kept touching her elbow or wrapping his arm around her or kissing her cheek. Leda tried to look away for the most part, but it was impossible not to acknowledge. “Aww,” she said when he kissed her hand. Anne pretty much ignored the situation or playfully fought him off. She’d whisper apologies to Leda from time to time about him being all over her, but clearly she loved it on some untouchable level that their friendship fell beneath. In the tiers of Anne’s life I fall below neck kisses, Leda thought. It wasn’t anything to feel bad about, really; what there was to feel bad about was the lack of kisses on her own neck. If only, she thought, taking a breathless sip of beer.

The night alienated her more and more from the solid notion she had of herself. Anne got a bit tipsy, and she and Luke spent the remainder of the evening kissing on the couch. Leda walked around and tried talking to some people, but she kept bumping into couples. She talked to a red-haired drunk girl who kept chattering on and on about some guy named Max Sass.

“And he’s so funny,” she said.

“Yeah, but what kind of a name is Max Sass?” Leda remarked.

“But he’s so funny,” the drunk girl said.

“Yeah,” Leda said.

Even she has someone, she thought. If I were more linear I wouldn’t be alone. Maybe they can sense how sad I am. Maybe they know I’m sad and so they stay away from me. I am sad and not linear enough, and that is everything.

If she had not invited Anne, and if Luke had not come along and been so nice but emotionally distant, if the redhead didn’t have her Sass, or if she had taken Anatomy of the Mind instead of Comparative Zoology, her night would not have been the night that it became. There would not have been the desperate burn of low party lights and couples folded into each other. There would not have been the culmination of so many little things solidifying. But that was the night. It was that.

“I’m Alex.”

“Hi, I’m Leda.”

Alex was in his early twenties and skinny. His face was long, and he moved a lot when he spoke. For a second she thought there might be something wrong with him, but then she realized he was just trying to be charming.

“There used to be this guy that I’d see at school all the time and I thought his name was Frank, so I’d be like, ‘Hey, Frank, does it stank?’ I thought he and I had this, like, great thing between us.” Alex waved his hands with each syllable. “But it turned out his name wasn’t Frank at all,” he said. “He just never corrected me.”

She laughed harder than the joke warranted, but it felt good.

“I think you’re really pretty,” he said.

“Thank you.” She fixed her hair, hoping to prove it might be true.

“I’ve never heard the name Leda before, except in that poem.”

“ ‘Leda and the Swan.’ My mom loves that poem. She named me after it.”

“But isn’t that poem, like, about rape?”

“Well, it’s more complicated than that, I think.”

“Are you, like, good at reading or something?”

“I guess…I am.” She didn’t know what “good at reading” meant, but she was willing to ignore the possibility that what he said was as stupid as it sounded.

“I like you, Leda-the-swan.”

“I like you too.” She smiled.

“I live in the apartment next door. Do you want to, like, come over? I mean just to hang out.”

“Umm…” She didn’t know what she wanted, but she answered him from an impulse of wanting what it was that she did not know. “Okay, just for a little while.”

Leda had never gone to a boy’s apartment after a party. Her sexual past was short and based on ideals of love and monogamy. She’d only slept with her ex-boyfriend. They dated six months and she waited until he committed to her before she’d even consider sleeping with him. We’ll just make out, she thought, consoling herself with limitation.

The apartment wasn’t exactly next door. It was behind Kate’s place through a little park. They walked together and said common things about school and movies. When they got to the center of the park Alex ran up and jumped on top of an abstractly shaped climbing structure.

“Look at me!”

She did look at him: tall, thin, anonymous boy on conceptual playground equipment. The structure is shaped like me walking through a park with this boy at a party, she thought.

“You’re up high,” she said, not knowing what the proper response was to “Look at me.”

“Come up here. It’s kind of cool. You can see the little clock tower over there.”

Leda walked over and Alex helped her up. She could feel his warmth beside her. It was nice.

“See.” Alex pointed off.

“Oh, yeah.” She couldn’t see anything, but it was so warm standing there that she thought it was best to pretend.

As they walked up the steps to Alex’s place he held her hand, and she remembered what sex was. Years later she would remember the squeeze of his hand, the grind of his dry palm, and stairs six and seven.

Inside, his roommate was still up in the living room watching TV. She was a heavier girl with a sallow complexion and sulky face. Leda greeted her with the hi-I’m-not-a-slut-please-don’t-judge-me hello. The girl smiled slightly. Leda knew the greeting had been a failure.

“I have to go clean up my room. You can hang here with Mel for a minute,” Alex said.

Oh Jesus Christ, Leda thought. She sat down on a stained easy chair. Her thigh pressed up against a hot-water bottle that she could feel had grown tepid. The coffee table was littered with discarded boxes of candy and several remotes, as well as a cat toy. She thought for a minute on what to say. If only I could tell her everything. Tell her about the party and when I was six and skinned my knee racing with the little boy who lived next door and had just moved in from India and only knew the word “constipation.” But I can’t tell her that, because I have to pretend that I don’t care about anything in the world but right now.

“You have a cat?” Leda said.

“No.”

“Oh, I saw the cat toy…” She pointed to the fish-shaped cat toy on the table.

“No, I made that for my nephew.”

“Oh, sorry. I thought it was a cat toy.”

“No.”

“Oh, okay, sorry.”

She decided that was enough talking. The girls sat silently until Alex came back. Leda attempted to wave goodbye a little as she headed to his room, but Mel didn’t respond.

“Here it is.”

The room was small with three big piles of clothing on the floor and a bed. On the walls were a few band posters. She recognized the bands and wasn’t impressed. Alex’s musical aesthetic slipped him into the category of guys with pedestrian tastes that she tried to avoid. It was disappointing.

“I like your room,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s kind of messy.”

Alex stood by the door and started to point out different things in the room. She began to wonder when they’d actually sit down. It was late, and she was tired. His nervous tour of his hideous bedroom was making the night more and more depressing. She thought back to Anne and Luke. They’re probably having sex right now, she thought. Anne once said Luke was good in bed, and the comment plagued her. She’d never had good sex and wasn’t sure if it existed, at least for a woman. But maybe Anne was doing something she wasn’t, and that was the problem. She sat down on the bed quickly to distract herself from the thought.

Alex sat down next to her and for a while they talked about bike riding and jawbreakers. She felt bored and alienated by the conversation. What’s wrong with me? she thought. I’m not having fun with this cute guy. He’s kind of cute, isn’t he? I should be happy.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said.

Alex kissed her. There were preemptive tongue thrusts and the taste of beer. He held her face, then let go, then held it again. She appreciated the effort despite the awkwardness. He stopped kissing her suddenly.

“Do you want to have sex?” he said.

She felt a wave of heat through her body.

“It’s just, you’re so pretty…and, I don’t know,” he said.

“I’m really not good with…I just get really emotional,” she said.

“It’s fine, don’t worry. We don’t have to.”

“I’m sorry—”

“It’s really totally fine. We can just kiss.”

They lay on his bed together, and soon he touched her breasts. The sheets were striped and soft. She could feel the breeze from under the cracked window. It made her a little cold. Then he lay on top of her and then the flood of everything drowned out everything that for so long had made her feel so subhuman. It wasn’t so much that here she was, wildly turned on by this boy, but rather that here she was, turned on by herself with a boy.

“Do you have a condom?” she asked him.

“Yeah.”

She watched him move effortlessly through the room toward the closet. She hadn’t before seen him in such fluid motion. It was startling. This fluid man is going to be inside me soon, she thought. I am on this bed, and it is like a raft. I am on this bed, and that man is on an island getting a condom. Alex opened the closet, revealing a poster of a woman in underwear whoring an unattainable standard of beauty. After rummaging through his closet he came back and sat beside her. “So should we do it now?” he said.

“Um, okay.”

She took off her own dress and underwear and lay down, sucking in her stomach. DO I LOOK PRETTY NAKED? was the universal question of female sex, and this moment was no confirmation of the fact. He didn’t say anything about the way she looked, although had he said something she wouldn’t have believed him. It was the catch-22 propagated by the whore in his closet.

Alex took off his clothes. He was considerably thinner than he looked dressed, which was disappointing since even in clothes she could tell he was much skinnier than she was. Great, she thought, fattest by default, and she sucked in her stomach even more.

He pulled off his boxers, and then suddenly there was a naked penis in the room, jarring and unfamiliar. The worst part about having sex with a strange boy is his strange penis, she’d later reflect.

They kissed a little longer, but he was eager to get going, and she wasn’t about to stop him, or do anything expressive, for that matter. It was important to maintain some type of calm, controlled, and happy appearance of woman-during-sex, although she certainly wasn’t sure why this was.

He had a hard time getting it in, and she had to help him, to which he said “Thank you.” It was slightly painful as he moved back and forth. He tried holding her breasts, but the position was too awkward so he just gave up. Every so often he’d ask her if she was okay. She wondered what he was worrying about not being okay. Doesn’t he know if I weren’t okay I wouldn’t say anything? Maybe I don’t look like I’m enjoying this enough, she thought, and wrapped her legs around him. Above her was the ceiling, painfully still, and below her was the raft bed floating in space.

“The condom feels funny,” he said.

“Really? Maybe you should change it.”

He took it off and put on another one. She had to help him put it in the second time. She was hoping he’d finish soon.

“Is this good?” he asked.

“Yeah, is it good for you?”

“Yeah. And you’re okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Okay.”

The motion over her got more stilted and fast. Okay, it’s almost over, she thought, and where am I going to sleep? Here in this striped raft? The motion stopped.

Alex lay beside her. She looked at him. Now he was someone else. Someone she’d slept with. He was stranger and closer to her than he’d ever been. She noticed his hair had a cowlick and had probably just been cut. Now she wanted to tell him everything about her night and about the smell of a wardrobe she used to hide in as a child and why she slept with him, but instead she just said:

“Did you like it?”

“Yeah, did you?”

“Yeah.”

He kissed her, and she thought, Now our kisses are different because there is nothing more we can do. We had sex and that is it.

They each put their underwear back on and Alex gave her an oversized T-shirt and pajama pants to sleep in. They smelled strongly of him, although she couldn’t have known it because she didn’t know his smell. She tried to remember the exact feeling of what it was to be in her own pajamas, but she wasn’t able to think of it. Alex lay down and she lay beside him. They were silent for a while.

“Are you tired?” he asked.

“Yeah, I am.” She wasn’t tired.

Alex leaned over her and shut off the light. They sat in the darkness. So this is what it’s like to not be sleeping alone but to still be lonely, she thought. She ran her hands over her thighs and touched the elastic on her underwear. It was the same as it was so many times in the morning after a shower when she pulled them on.

Alex turned over a few times beside her and then sat up.

“Do you mind if I put on my star lantern? I usually can’t sleep so well without it.” He didn’t wait for her answer. He leaned to the side of the bed and turned on a small lantern. The room lit up with stars. Leda was familiar with these stars, not because she had seen them before, but because she knew she’d never slept without them either. Alex was soon asleep. She lay there staring at the ceiling and the fantasied constellations. In the closet was a naked girl and under the blanket was herself lying in the universe of this boy she met at a party. She fell asleep.