I met Ben the day I moved off-campus, into Carrie’s spare bedroom. Carrie was a girl from my music appreciation class. She had beautiful, dark brown eyes, though it was hard to notice them; she hid behind a scrim of mousy hair and soft chub, which gave her the sodden air of someone who’d found a tenuous contentment on Paxil. Her pale olive skin hinted at Greek ancestry. She was technically a townie; her mom worked in the college’s printing department, so Carrie got to attend tuition-free.
I was on scholarship, which was the sole reason for my staying at this no-name liberal arts school in rural Pennsylvania. Our two-bedroom apartment had a tract housing feel with cheap, greenish carpeting that pilled and faintly stained my socks. The walls looked like they’d been repainted fairly recently but poorly so; clumps of rubbery paint clotted under the windowsills.
I was breaking down a cardboard box when Carrie knocked on the open door. Ben was standing behind her. He didn’t wait to be introduced.
“Whatever she’s told you, they’re all lies,” he said, taking my hand in a grand, debonair gesture, then shaking it with a cocky smile. He was, admittedly, a good-looking guy. He looked to be in his late twenties; he had an adult rakishness about him that agitated me. You could tell he was Carrie’s brother—they had the same dark hair and liquid eyes—but he was close to six feet tall, lean without looking skinny.
“I didn’t know you had a brother,” I said to Carrie. My voice came out in an excited, lilting tone, which made me flush.
Carrie turned to Ben. “She just moved in.”
Ben shrugged. He asked me what my major was, and when I said English, jauntily offered his opinion that English was a catchall major for people who didn’t know what to do with their lives. Then he winked. I asked him what he’d majored in.
“I studied economics for a while,” he said. “But I left. In business, you need real life experience more than book smarts.”
“So what do you do now?” I asked. The phone rang then, and Carrie went to get it.
“Internet startup.” He put on his shit-eating grin again. “Top secret. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
“Really,” I said. “Good luck with that.” By this time I’d managed to bring my high-pitched tone under control, and my words sounded more sarcastic than I’d intended. He opened his mouth into a look of surprise, then closed it for a grimace. I tried to think of something smart and ingratiating to say, but the moment tensed then tore, leaving each of us with a jagged half.
“It’s Mom,” Carrie called from the living room. “She wants to talk to you.”
He went to get the phone, then left without saying goodbye. After that he didn’t bother to make conversation when he came around, just gave me a disparaging nod of acknowledgement when he saw me, before turning his attention back to Carrie.
But I learned plenty about Ben anyway. Carrie had a high opinion of him, though I gathered that he basically just worked at the Dairy Queen, where his girlfriend Marcy also worked, and spent his nights drinking beer with his friends. Whenever Carrie and I talked I felt like she was feeling over my brain in search of a crack, then on finding one, scrabbling in her fingernails. “He looks out for me,” she said, her eyes drifting up moonily. “He doesn’t want me dating the losers around here, even the ones at college, because they’re all from hick towns too. Right?” There was a desperation in her eyes as she asked this that grated against her usual flaccid expression. She said that since she’d turned sixteen he let her drink at his parties. “Just one drink though, so I don’t get in any trouble.” I could imagine Carrie at these events, in a dingy house like our own, nursing her warm beer quietly in a corner until the pretty girls left and Ben’s friends noticed her as an easy target. Maybe it was a good thing Ben kept her under his thumb after all.
I asked her if any of Ben’s friends were cute, if she had dated any of them, and she shook her head confusedly, like the idea had never occurred to her. I wondered if she was a virgin. I wondered if she thought I was. I imagine she thought me bookish and naïve, since she didn’t spend enough time on campus to know anything different.
In fact I’d screwed things up there starting the first week of my freshman year, when I’d met Allen, an upperclassman who’d had a way of making me feel like the urbane, provocative woman I’d wanted to be. He’d also had a girlfriend at another school. When I met her at a party I told her, “You’re so lucky, Allen’s a great guy,” before getting drunk and yelling from outside his door about how he was doing to her what he’d done to me last week. “You have a lot of nerve, calling here after the shit you pulled last night,” he’d said the last time I’d called him. “And we’re gonna be fine, so fuck you.”
After that I’d spent most of my time drinking and hooking up indiscriminately, my living exhibition piece to show how little I cared. I’d tried out bad ideas, and when they didn’t work, tried them harder. Eventually, when my friends started seriously dating the guys that had humiliated me, I’d determined to disappear from campus.
And I had, more or less. Now a junior, I stayed in the apartment except to attend classes, most of them evening seminars that I’d trudge into in a soporific haze, staking out my usual corner seat a few minutes early. The other students would come in in an energetic patter, bounding up the stairs then reconfiguring their gaits to walk in the room with cheerful, attenuated steps. Their expressions seemed always to be holding back a mix of mirth and mockery that in my more paranoid moments seemed to be masking a rumor about me. At these times I felt an indeterminate sense of revulsion and shame.
After class I’d go rejoin Carrie on the couch, who sat with the TV on, wearing a glazed expression and an ill-fitting T-shirt, watching sitcom reruns while haphazardly negotiating her homework. I began to notice her little study habits, the laborious attention with which she formed her tidy block letters, the indiscriminate way she dragged her highlighter over her books, so that in the end, almost every line of text was painted a fluorescent blue. I got the sense she didn’t do well in her classes. Most nights I dozed next to her until she patted me on the shoulder, waking me to tell me to get to bed.
The days shuffled on this way until Carrie’s twenty-first birthday that March. For the occasion, Ben organized to take her—and by extension, me—to a local dive known as The Pub, one of the two bars in town. I knew it would be just me and the townies, but I felt vaguely excited in spite of myself; it had been that long since I’d had a night out.
Carrie too seemed in high spirits. “It’s my night,” she kept saying, plucking and painting herself at the bathroom sink. Her inexpert but dogged manner reminded me of a nurse-in-training repeatedly trying to finagle a needle into a slippery vein. Though she still wore her usual T-shirt-and-jeans combo, she’d dressed to stick out—the denim low enough to show the gentle fat of her midriff, the red top a tight low V-neck. She put on a garish lipstick to match and kept checking her teeth for smears.
Ben honked from the curb right on time, at nine. The pale blue paint of his car was rusting at the edges. Ben’s girlfriend Marcy sat in the front seat. “Nice to meet you,” she said, turning to shake my hand in an awkward fingers-only squeeze. I guessed she was about my age, though she had primped to look older. She wore harsh black eyeliner that made her blue eyes look surreal, like they were on a different plane from the rest of her face. The damaged ends of her bleached hair frizzed out around her face in a halo of blond cotton candy. The car was suffused with the scent of her soft, musky perfume.
Ben gave me his usual nod. “Always a pleasure,” he added this time. Then he saw Carrie and did a double take. He started driving, keeping his hand on the gear shift, and at the first turn, Marcy softly placed her hand on top of his, her long, violet fingernails gleaming under the streetlights. The gesture seemed oddly sensual and illicit, creating a subtle charge that silenced the car until we parked.
The Pub was a longish, windowless room with cheap wood-paneled walls, a no-frills bar positioned at one end. The place was still mostly empty. A few people stood around holding their beers in squat, dissatisfied postures. Three shaky-looking men sat in a row at the bar.
“Mickey,” Ben yelled. “It’s my sister’s twenty-first birthday!”
The bartender Mickey waved, then lined up a dozen or so shot glasses and started pouring tequila. I joined the first round, then asked for a rum and coke. “For Carrie’s friend, anything,” Mickey said, with a gallant bow that made me giggle. He was cute, about Ben’s age, maybe a little older. When he set down the drink he smiled, revealing a silver glint. I slunk back toward Carrie.
“He has a girlfriend,” Ben said, with a sardonic leer.
“And a metal tooth,” I said.
Ben shook his head like he was exasperated, then signaled Mickey for another round. Carrie reached for another shot. “Take it easy,” Ben said, grabbing her arm. “Pace yourself.”
Carrie uncharacteristically hardened her face. “It’s my night,” she said, then grabbed a shot and took it, her eyes fixed on Ben. Her look was defiant, if slightly tinged with fear.
For a second Ben looked like he was going to start yelling. But he relaxed and laughed. “Damn right, it’s your night,” he said, thumping her back once, rather hard, with his palm.
The night sped up. The bar filled and morphed into a glitter of glass and ice and amber liquids. People shifted subtly to reveal their fey, glamorous sides. I started to appreciate the small, hopeful efforts that had been put into the night—a gangly brunette’s blowout, the smart crease in a short guy’s khakis, Carrie’s impasto lipstick. I noticed Marcy, the way she stood displaying her nails against her glass of ice cubes, tense and taut in her tiny skirt and scuffed strappy heels as if she was en pointe, standing at the ready for some cue from Ben. She had long, thin appendages and a waistless middle. Once in a while she joined the conversation by saying, “That’s interesting,” followed by a small, knowing smile, belied by her uncertain eyes. That uncertainty reminded me of Carrie, her expression when she’d asked if I thought it was normal that Ben called every night for a rundown of her day. I said I wasn’t a good person to ask; I didn’t have a brother.
Ben seemed to know everyone who came in; I introduced myself to some of them. “So you’re Carrie’s roommate,” they each said. A heavy guy boasted he was Ben’s best friend. “Are you working on the Internet startup with Ben?” I asked. “Startup?” he said, then snickered. “Oh, the shoe store thing.” He said he worked for the city, trimming trees. I said something inane about how great it must be to work outside, and he nodded embarrassedly, perhaps for me.
Suddenly I heard my name. It was Anne, my roommate from freshman year. “I haven’t seen you all semester!” she yelled, spitting a little. “I called your number in the phone book and the girl who answered said I had the wrong number. I thought maybe you’d transferred!”
“Still here,” I said, plastering a grin. “I moved off campus.”
“I missed you!” she said. She lunged in for a hug. She was drunk, but this warmed me to her. We guzzled the drinks in our hands, talking in slurry exclamations. “You know Jillian transferred?” Anne said. “Or dropped out more like?”
Jillian was another girl from our floor, the baby-faced one at the end of the hall. I shook my head. Anne said Jillian broke her hip when a drunk linebacker who was fucking her in the bathroom at Phi Delt dropped her against the urinal. Her scream was so loud people at the party rushed in and saw her, her shirt and bra scrunched up at her armpits, her bare ass on the urine-spattered floor. It was a while before the ambulance came.
“That snobby cow,” Anne said, then cackled maliciously. “That was mean, right?”
We laughed. I offered to get us more drinks. “On me,” I said.
It was crowded at the bar, but I squeezed through. “Mickey!” I yelled. “Two more!” He nodded affably and started making them. A couple people who’d been waiting turned to look at me with curiosity and loathing. I didn’t care. My mind swam; I drummed my fingers against the bar wantonly. Smiling, I looked around, then startled. Allen was at my right, sneering. Our shoulders were pressed together.
“So you’re fucking townies now?” he said, pointing his chin at Mickey.
At that my heart started thudding in my skull. Allen’s face turned into a violent blur. I turned toward where Mickey was making the drinks. I remembered the last time I’d slept with Allen, at his fraternity’s end-of-year party, months after that final phone call. After getting drunk in the basement, I’d snuck up into his room. He was alone, studying for his sociology final. I said I’d heard he and his girlfriend had broken up. I stumbled over him. “Do you realize how pathetic you are?” he’d said, taking off my clothes.
The drinks came. I picked them up and walked away, focused on staying balanced.
Carrie was talking to some of Ben’s friends. I joined her circle but was too jittery to follow the conversation. I glanced around the bar; every sideways glance I got back seemed stained with disgust and pity. I saw Ben and could tell he wanted to leave too. He was studying the college students with a defensive sneer. “These fucking kids,” he said. “They don’t know how to drink.”
“We should go,” I said. “Take the party home. Cake time.”
“I want cake!” Carrie said. I saw across the bar that Anne had found the girls she’d arrived with, her sorority sisters. They gesticulated energetically to communicate over the noise of the crowd.
Exiting the bar was like entering another world, an eerie silence amplified by the glow of a lone streetlight. During the quick drive home Ben seemed preoccupied, but once back at the house we were united by our effort to have a good time. I helped him unload the party stuff from the trunk, then we created a mini assembly line in the kitchen, me chipping apart the ice cubes to put in the red plastic cups, Ben filling them with equal parts Bacardi and Coke. Marcy cut generous slices of supermarket sheet cake onto paper plates. Carrie tuned the radio to a top 40 station, and we started drinking in earnest.
“To Carrie,” Ben said.
“To me!” Carrie said. She was a happy drunk, if slightly belligerent. She commanded us to dance and we did, bopping to a new hip-hop track none of us had heard before. After a while of this, a slow love song came on. I plopped down on the couch and took some gulps from my drink. Ben grabbed Marcy and started slow dancing. Carrie kept gyrating on her own for a while off rhythm, then gave up and sat down too.
By this time it must have been around two in the morning. My drunkenness was settling into a lethargic buzz. We watched Ben and Marcy dance. Ben started putting on a show. He pulled Marcy in really tight so their whole bodies were pressed against each other, making it hard for them to move. Then he started kissing her. Marcy complied, miming passion.
“Get a room,” Carrie said.
Ben seemed to relent, sitting down on the couch and pulling Marcy down to sit next to him. But then he started kissing her again. The song droned on to its third verse. As it ended Ben snuck another glance at us before sliding his hand down to one of Marcy’s breasts, rubbing his palm over it, then squeezing it.
“Just fuck in front of us, why don’t you,” Carrie said.
“Yeah, seriously,” I said.
Ben looked up. “If you don’t want to see it, don’t look,” he said. Then he jammed his face into the crook of Marcy’s neck. Marcy closed her eyes and tilted her head back affectedly.
Carrie and I looked at each other, then burst out laughing. Then Carrie got an impish gleam in her eye. “No, we mean it,” she said. “Do it.”
Ben and Marcy kept kissing.
“Do it, do it,” Carrie said in a rhythmic chant. She looked at me, nodding, and I joined her. “Do it, do it, do it.”
He shifted his eyes to look at us, his mouth stuck on Marcy’s. We kept chanting. “Do it, do it, do it, do it …” We watched his expression morph, going from puzzled to questioning to scared, his hands groping about Marcy’s body aimlessly, until our chorus lost its energy and faded out. Carrie picked up her drink, took a big gulp, then turned to me. “He’s always all talk,” she said loudly.
I snorted. “Pathetic,” I said.
Ben acted like he didn’t hear us, but I saw his jaw set. Suddenly he started kissing Marcy more aggressively. He unbuttoned her shirt, then pushed it off her shoulders to reveal a beige bra, a thick, padded polyester thing with cups that looked like they could stand up on their own. At this, Carrie and I got quiet. The radio was playing a Matchbox Twenty song. Marcy’s body turned rigid but didn’t make any move to stop him. He unlatched the bra, then as he took it off glanced over at us to make sure if we were watching. We were. He pushed Marcy on her back, and at this Marcy put her left arm over her breasts, hiding them. While leaning over and kissing her, he put his hands under her skirt and started taking off her panties. They were a basic cotton pair with a daisy print and blue elastic trimming, the kind a kid would wear. Marcy had her face turned away, toward the back of the couch, her eyes closed in an expression simulating sexual concentration. Ben then positioned himself between her legs, got up on his knees, then unzipped his pants and took out his erect penis. He stroked it, peeking at us again, this time with a look that seemed somewhat shy, like he was seeking our approval.
The radio was now playing a Shania Twain song. Ben lay down on top of Marcy and appeared to enter her, though I couldn’t see; the skirt was in the way. Once he started thrusting, Marcy’s body seemed to go limp, like she’d passed out. He kept going at it somewhat alone, then clutched Marcy’s hair near her scalp, pulling it roughly. At this she started emitting small, squeaky moans to his rhythm, like a squeeze toy. He started fucking her harder. He balanced himself up on one hand and played with the waist of Marcy’s skirt, eventually sliding it off; it was a wraparound. When he did that Marcy bent her legs and with her feet pushed off Ben’s pants and boxers. He helped by wiggling until they were half way down his thighs. Then he pushed Marcy’s right leg so it was hanging down over the couch, and tilted their bodies so that we could get a better look at his penis moving in and out of her. She had reddish pubic hair.
They went at it steadily in this position for a while, long enough to feel anticlimactic. Eventually Marcy’s protective arm dropped off to dangle off the side of the couch. I noticed that one of her breasts was significantly bigger than the other. Finally Ben grunted, then sat up while simultaneously pulling up his pants. He zipped up, then looked at us. His expression was dazed and anxious, like he didn’t know what had just happened.
“Cover me,” Marcy said in a whiny tone. She looked sleepy with a sheen of sweat, as if she’d just woken up from a bad dream. Ben put his forearm over her pubic hair. He leaned over her body and with his other hand started picking up Marcy’s clothes from the floor and placing them on her chest. Once he’d accomplished this, the two started working together to get Marcy dressed, using weird, cumbersome movements that attempted to shield her nakedness. Then they sat side by side on the couch, meekly, hands on their laps.
Bon Jovi came on the radio. “I hate this song,” Carrie said, then stumbled over to change the station. She found a rock station with a thrumming beat. She made a raise the roof gesture. “Get up,” she said.
“Hey, it’s not your birthday anymore.” Ben said. He reached for his drink.
“It’s still her party,” I said. I poured more rum into Carrie’s and my cups, though they were still mostly full. I drank some then got up and danced with her.
The night returned to its former disheveled revelry, all of us dancing and drinking again. At a certain point Marcy said she thought she was going to puke and I went outside with her, rubbed her back while she took some deep breaths. For a moment I held her wrist; its pulse quivered and twitched, like a feather stuck in a revolving door.
Eventually I must have dozed off on the couch, because Carrie patted me awake. “You’ll feel better if you sleep in bed,” she said. The music had been turned off and her face looked saintly and luminous, framed by the light of the floor lamp and the quiet of early morning. When I sat up I saw Ben and Marcy collecting cups and plates in a careful, inefficient manner, awkwardly holding a gauzy trash bag between them. “Leave it, I’ll get it in the morning,” I murmured, and staggered off to bed.
The next day, after I finally woke up, I sat at the dining table with my coffee, focused on the vacant throbbing in my head. The familiarity of the sensation was oddly comforting, almost pleasurable. It was a little after ten, and the sun cut through the windows, slicing the room with bands of light, suffusing my body with a sharp, benevolent heat. I heard small, shuffling noises from Carrie’s room; I imagined her still in her red T-shirt and jeans, her face runny with makeup and bloated from last night’s alcohol.
But when she came out, she looked as she did every morning, sleepy but well-rested. “Is there coffee left?” she asked, and when I nodded, said “All right!” and went into the kitchen to get a cup.
When Carrie sat down to join me I had my eyes closed, slowly turning my head from side to side to stop the ringing in my ears. I was trying to recreate the feelings I’d had the first time Allen and I slept together, when afterwards we giggled like coconspirators, hiding under the comforter while his roommates came in, banging around looking for a basketball. But this time I could only remember Allen’s expression at the bar, his contorted lip and grimace, the ugly, taunting voice that somehow seemed more like mine than his. I remembered my shock at this change in him, but couldn’t relive that sensation either. All my memories felt dulled and flattened, like I was watching them via a faraway screen, the sound on mute.
“Hey, wake up,” Carrie said. “Seriously, you sleep way too much.” I opened my eyes. She blew on her coffee before sipping it; she’d added a creamer that smelled synthetic and luxurious. As she drank she caught me up on what I’d missed after I’d fallen asleep, which was that Ben and Marcy had apologized right before leaving. “I was actually feeling kind of bad, like we forced them into it. But when they sobered up they were like, ‘Sorry, we were really drunk.’ So I was like, ‘It’s okay, don’t worry about it.’”
“Really?” I said. I thought about Marcy’s ragdoll postures, the way she turned her face away, almost burying it from view, the way she let Ben tilt her pelvis toward us, pressing her leg down off the couch as if the appendage didn’t even belong to her. I remembered her one self-protective gesture, how she kept covering her breasts with her arm, right up until the end. The feeling behind the gesture seemed oddly familiar to me, though I couldn’t remember ever taking it on.