CHAPTER 12

The Day After

The next morning she woke up thirty-six minutes before Alex. She spent the time having to pee very badly and worrying about the proximity of the bathroom to Mel. Where is the bathroom? Will Mel be in the bathroom or yell at me for using the bathroom? For lack of any other option, she decided to brave the situation. It turned out her fears were unfounded. The bathroom was just across the hall, and Mel was nowhere to be seen.

She sat on the toilet. Early daylight filtered through the scalloped glass pane of the small window, and for a moment she felt comfortable in the familiarity of morning and the privacy of the bathroom. There was little motivation to go back to Alex.

As she washed her hands she looked at her reflection in the mirror. She still had most of her makeup on from last night, although her eyeliner had smudged. Her hair was messy but manageable. She rinsed her mouth out in the sink and tried her best not to think too hard about the night before.

Alex was still asleep when she got back to the room. She climbed into bed beside him and tried to stay as still as possible. Fourteen minutes later he woke up.

“Hey,” he said, blinking and looking skinny. “Have you been awake for a long time?”

“No, I was asleep,” she lied.

“You weren’t asleep. You should have just woken me up.”

“I did.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I’m just kidding.”

“Oh.”

For whatever reason Leda had felt the need to pretend she was sleeping. There was something about sleep that perpetuated her as comfortable with sex, and with him, a submission that she felt she needed to concede to. It was a complicated dance so intrinsic to the situation that she didn’t even give it any consideration before performing the charade. She lied about it for fear of looking weak, but she would have never dared to wake him up. She didn’t understand why this was. Not even a little. Not even years later looking back on herself in that room, young, sleepless, and weak.

They got dressed in near silence. She became very deliberate with buttoning the front of her dress, her fingers pressing the cool of the plastic through the small threaded hole, her hands moving delicately in the silent, clumsy moment.

“Are you hungry?” he asked her.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Mel’s having company over so we really can’t be in the kitchen. I don’t really have any food in there that’s mine right now anyway.”

“What do you usually do for breakfast?” Leda asked.

“I usually steal one of Mel’s bagels, but she’s in there now so we can’t,” he said.

“Oh.”

“I don’t have any money so we probably can’t go out to eat.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” she said.

Alex grabbed for his coat on the floor and, reaching into the pocket, pulled out a can. “Do you want this energy drink? It’s warm, but it’s still good.”

“No, that’s all right.”

They sat on the bed a little longer and talked about basketball. Leda wondered how she managed to say as much as she did. After a long silence followed by one more basketball comment, she suggested it was time to go. Alex walked her to the door.

As they stood together in the doorway facing the delegation of future physical and emotional contact, she wanted so much. She wanted him to ask for her number, wanted him to say something about liking her and thinking she was pretty. She had an urge to jump into his arms, to run with him to conceptual playground equipment forever and ever. She held her breath; inside her ears was her heartbeat. Alex looked at her, smiled, moved in close, and put up his hand for a high five. With seemingly few other options, she high-fived him.

“Thanks so much,” he said to her.

She walked off reliving the high five over and over again in her mind. By the time she’d gotten to the end of the block, she realized how sore she was from the sex and started to cry. Her breathing was stilted and her tears were soft and few. They did little more than sting her eyes, and when she blinked she felt as if she could see a blurred reality as painful and real as it was undeniably her own. A little girl passed who looked at her and clapped in the air.

“Summer,” she said as she clapped.

To Leda everything was unearthed in that “summer”: her day, her night, the party, and the strange penis. She wanted to scoop the little girl up. Feel solace in her weight. She imagined herself and this summer girl walking through the city. Getting ice cream and just laughing the day into infinite pieces. She’d give summer a bath before bed and tell her a story as light and airy as that clap. She stopped crying by the time she’d reached the corner and decided to text Anne.

She texted as she walked: “I had sex with that guy last night…”

Anne responded nearly immediately: “WHAT??? That guy with the short hair?? What happened?? You better give me the details!!!”

Leda’s hands were shaking as she typed. She didn’t want Anne to think she was happy. Anne had had sex with strangers before. She’d always act like it was some funny thing. She’d say things like, “I totally had sex last night.” And, “Remember that hot guy I mentioned? I totally had sex with him.” Leda would go along with it, but she knew Anne well enough to know it wasn’t so funny. It wasn’t so totally. On one occasion Anne started crying and confessed that she bled all over the bed midway through.

“I don’t know,” she said through sobs, “he must have just ripped my skin or something. It was just awful, and he hasn’t called.”

Leda talked to her for three hours that night, reassuring her that he’d call, that she was skinny and looked good naked. The next day when Leda texted her asking how she was, Anne acted happy. She acted as if everything was okay, and she never mentioned the bloody sex ever again.

Leda didn’t want to text about the sex she had with Alex. She wanted to call Anne and explain it all to her. To explain the high five, as if somehow that would make her feel better. She knew that it would. She texted back:

“Can I call you?”

Anne: “Can I call you in an hour? I’m still with Luke and we’re going to get bagels.”

Anne: “Actually maybe two hours?”

Leda stared at the flat message on her phone. She wanted to ignore it or to write something like: “No! I’m not a whore like you, Anne! Call me now!” But she just said: “Sure! No worries!”

She walked the rest of the way home checking her phone, hoping that Alex would message her on Facebook or something. It was completely irrational, but she didn’t care.

When she got home, the apartment seemed emptier and more lonely than ever before. The auburn bookshelves were still there as always. Her disheveled bedsheets looked accusatory in their two-day-old misshape. She watered the plant as if that was something she did daily. For some unknown reason she felt bad going straight to her computer. It was as if her room and all her things would judge her, see her for her pathetic self, or maybe it was her need to hold on to the momentary hope that he had left her a message when she knew that it was really just her and the plant all along.

She sat down and checked her Facebook page. No messages. No friend request. Nothing. She tracked him down immediately even though she didn’t know his last name. He was friends with Kate. His page was private so she couldn’t see anything but his profile picture. It was of him standing on a surfboard with his arms in the air in what must have been a surf shop or something to that effect. His face was nearly indistinguishable, as he had sunglasses on and the picture was a little bit out of focus. For whatever reason it infuriated her. There he was, distant and smudged, just laughing it up in some surf shop.

She Googled him. There was a soccer team he’d been a part of in middle school and a bike race he did in college. There wasn’t much else. She clicked through his Instagram account, but he’d only posted a few pictures of a vacation to Montana. A cliff. Some mountains. A rusted bicycle. She scrolled through the pictures again. With little else left to do, she did a Google image search. A lot of “Alexes” appeared. Some were the famous “Alexes” you’d expect, and some were regular-people “Alexes” and some were naked porn “Alexes.” She clicked on one of the naked ones. His face was fat and meaty and his body was muscular in the expected way. He was holding his grotesquely large penis. She thought back to the sex, her Alex, and the way he was stilted and having to change condoms. She thought of her belly fat and cellulite. An image of herself in an unfortunate pair of khaki shorts flashed through her mind. It seemed plausible that her current angst could be understood by the width of her thighs. Maybe I really am gross, she thought, and then Anne called her.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” Anne said. “So what happened?”

“Well, I talked to him for a long time, and he was like really funny. I don’t know, then he just invited me over to have sex, and then we just did, but now I’m, like, freaking out, and I don’t even know why.”

“Why are you freaking out?”

“I don’t know! I just want to hear from him and I don’t know why.” Her voice started to crack over the phone.

“Did you give him your number?”

“No, I wanted him to ask. I did find him on Facebook.” She didn’t feel it necessary to elaborate on the rest of her search. “His page is really private. I don’t want to friend him first though. I just want him to initiate things.”

“You could go to his house and pretend you forgot something, and then give him your number.”

“I’ll look crazy if I do that.”

“Well, I went to a guy’s house once and pretended I left something. It was this guy I knew from, like, mutual friends. He was, like, kind of nerdy, but, like, sweet and funny and we went on this really cute date where we got fondue, and I had just broken up with Adam so I was really on the rebound, and so we ended up having sex. And the thing was that all night long he was all, ‘Oh my god you’re so pretty. I really want to see you again. We should totally hang out.’ And so I really thought I’d hear from him. And then three days passed, and I didn’t get a text. I didn’t get a ‘Did you get home safe?’ Nothing. And then, like, randomly he friended me on Facebook so I sent him a message, which he ignored, so then I sent him another message and said I left something at his house and wanted to come get it, and so then I went to his house and knocked on the door, and I know he was home ’cause his car was there, but he didn’t answer. So then I got home and there was this long Facebook message that was him saying all this stuff about how he usually doesn’t have random hookups, and that he felt really weird about it, especially ’cause we didn’t use a condom. But it’s like, who writes that? He made me feel, like, totally slutty, like I’m just having all these random hookups and not using condoms or whatever. So then I wrote him this nasty message back saying he was bad in bed, which was kind of mean, but I really felt like he deserved it ’cause I cried for, like, two days over that. And I mean why did I deserve to cry? And why did he say all that stuff about wanting to see me when he really didn’t mean any of it? I mean why? I also told him he’d better find my bra.”

“But you didn’t really lose your bra.”

“No, but I didn’t want to seem like I was lying.”

“I just hate myself for this. I hate myself for caring about any of this. I have a paper that I should be working on, and instead I’m worrying about this idiot.”

“Yeah, but don’t beat yourself up, Led. It’s not your fault.”

Leda looked out her bedroom window. It was still bright out, but it was getting later. She could swear she smelled the cedar windowpane and the dust from behind the computer.

“It isn’t my fault, but I know I can’t stop it, and that’s what I hate.”

The girls talked for a little while longer. Anne mentioned a fight she had with Luke regarding his reluctance to make their relationship Facebook-official.

“He says, ‘Why does it matter?’ but he clearly just doesn’t want people to know,” she said.

She told Leda that she’d leave Luke if he wouldn’t really commit to her, but Leda knew better. She’d heard Anne on so many occasions suffer through such atrocities, and it never really changed. Sometimes she’d be with a guy who treated her better; other times she’d be with a guy who’d treated her worse. The selfishness of the men never wavered, and she was always caught at the mercy of someone else’s whim.

Leda heard Anne say: “Luke is just a very sensitive person,” and promised herself, I will never be like Anne. I will never do something this destructive to myself again.

After she got off the phone, she checked Facebook for the seventh time. She refreshed the page three times after that just to be sure, and between each refresh she went back to his profile. Then she decided to run a bath to take her mind off of it. She played Miles Davis’s “Blue in Green” on repeat and stayed in the water until she became dizzy from the steam. After that she ate a cheese and avocado sandwich. The bread was pretty stale, so she heated it in the microwave beforehand.

As the light in her apartment darkened into the familiar evening sable, she sat illuminated by her computer screen in the same haze that could not be amended by a bath or a sandwich or Miles Davis. She clicked between Facebook and her e-mail, as it was the only contact information she had listed on her profile. As she clicked between the two, in her lap was Balzac’s Old Goriot. You shall sound the depths of feminine corruption, and measure the immensity of the miserable vanity of men, she read, then refreshed the page. But if you have any real feeling, hide it like a treasure; never let it be suspected or you will be lost. You would no longer be the executioner then but the victim. If you ever fall in love, guard your secret well! And she refreshed the page.

It was late, and she didn’t receive many new e-mails, but she still hoped. At around eleven she got one from an animal rights group with the subject line: “Skinned Alive.” Against her better judgment she clicked the accompanying video. It was about the fur trade. In the video she watched as they ripped the skins off live raccoons. One image would haunt her forever and ever, even as the skin on her own hands became callused and loose with age, even as she was too old to remember most things, she’d think of it. The raccoon was tied to a board or a tree by its tail. There was a lady standing beside it pulling and pulling the skin off of its body inch by inch, as if it weren’t a living being. The animal struggled and fought a futile fight. It did not know that there was no hope. Leda watched that raccoon fighting against its own death. And after that she could not sleep. When she blinked she saw it every time, and there were so many blinks that night. So many little deaths in her eyes. She thought of Alex too. And in between it all she was alone in her apartment.