She always had to be near the window. As a child she would fake impending motion sickness to claim the window seat in the car, and on airplanes she would spend the entire flight with her face pressed up against the tiny, sealed-off square of light. It was not from curiosity; it was just that she needed to have a sense of the distancing of things. She had been sitting at the window the first day Julian walked past. Several yards beyond her dormitory he stopped and looked upward. He was, she later found out, actually trying to guess which window was hers. When he saw her, he quickly turned away. He had not been expecting to see her there, he explained weeks after; he had hoped only for some emblem of her—a cracked prism, maybe, or a sprawling, browning plant.
He looked back again, slowly, hopefully. After a moment Claire leaned over and pushed the window up with both arms. “Hello,” she said from above.
Julian shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his windbreaker. “Oh, hi,” he said. “You probably have a lot of work, right? I should let you get back to whatever you were doing.”
Claire had been reading Hegel by the window all morning, and the room seemed hot now, closed off. She looked down and he appeared eager, even appealing. He rocked back and forth on his heels, waiting. He had been looking at her oddly the past few days, scrutinizing her. First at the water fountain, then at the snack bar, and once at the bookstore. It flattered her and made her feel self-conscious. She was used to distant attention only—discreet yet obvious glances. There was always someone looking at the death girls from across a room whenever they went anywhere. This was different. Bright-eyed Julian, the graceful Frisbee player, was drawn to her. She wondered why.
He reminded her of her brother. She did not think of Seth very often anymore, but whenever she did, or whenever he came to her unsummoned in a dream, his face was blurred, the features melded together. It was that way with all people in her life who had died; she could not visualize any of them—not her brother, her favorite grandmother or her Aunt Sybil, who had been killed by lightning in Montana just six months earlier. So she could not tell if Julian actually looked like Seth, but, like Seth, he gave off an aura of fragility. She did not know if she trusted this quality in him. He almost seemed proud of it, the way he did nothing to hide his vulnerability from her—looking away and blushing slightly whenever they made eye contact, stammering as he stood under her window. Since Seth died five years earlier, Claire’s family had become oriented toward strength. Her mother spooned heaping doses of lecithin and brewer’s yeast into glasses of orange juice every morning and talked on and on about endurance and will.
Claire looked down at Julian, and he seemed small to her. His upturned face was hopeful, almost pleading. “Do you want to come up?” she asked.
He bounded up the stairs, and she could hear his clogs clattering all the way up to her floor. Julian was the first male she had known who wore clogs, and she thought they looked good. He tapped his fingers lightly on the door. She opened it, and he seemed about to bow as he came into the room. The two of them sat in silence for a while—she smoking, he picking at some loose threads in a small tear in his jeans, as if it were a scab. She was thinking about how close to each other they were sitting. Usually she backed away, almost automatically, when anyone came too close to her. She didn’t mind Julian sitting there, though. He wasn’t demanding anything of her; he seemed to want just to sit in her room.
“Are you taking Intro. Philosophy?” he asked her. “I saw you carrying the book.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you have Parnesi? I had him last year and he’s great.”
“No,” Claire answered. “I have Stein.”
“Oh,” he said. “Did you get past the Republic yet? It seemed like we spent an eternity on it. God, the parable of the cave—I still have dreams about it. And all that ‘Oh tell me, Glaucon,’ stuff. It really starts to swamp you—you know what I mean? Wait until you reach the middle of the course and start reading about the nature of good and evil. I’ll let you look at my old papers if you want, not that they’re masterpieces.”
She realized how hard Julian was trying to have a real rapport with her. She knew that if she was at all cold to him he would be shaken. He was handsome—slim and fair. He had that rural look, she thought: he seemed to be the type of person who would be content sitting on the front porch of a farmhouse all day, plucking a guitar and taking swigs of wine. Men who looked like that were always frightened of her, completely put off. They thought she was too abrasive, and so they stayed away. Julian, on the contrary, appeared to be fascinated, and this in turn fascinated her.
He left after an hour of halting, broken conversation. He asked, leaning against the doorframe as if, she thought, to make it look like an afterthought, whether he could come back and study with her the following day. She nodded and could tell he was elated. Claire returned to the window as he clattered back down the stairs. She let herself fantasize for a moment about putting her arms around someone like Julian. She had not had a lover in almost two years, and the prospect of touch suddenly interested her. She watched him as he walked away from her dormitory. Even from the back he looked like Seth.
For a week after Seth’s funeral, Claire had sat up nights with her parents and her older sister, the four of them hunching over the round kitchen table, as frazzled and grubby as Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters.
“In death there is a sharing,” Rabbi Krinsky said at the funeral. Claire wondered if her parents believed him. He was a sullen, brooding man who had been with the congregation only a few months.
“All I want to do,” Seth said the day he came home from the hospital, “is get real high. Like I used to in high school, when Jimmy Katz and I went out behind the basketball courts during Phys. Ed., and did up two bowls of Acapulco Gold. Get me nice and high, Claire.”
She remembered the day very well and her own fingers putting together a joint, clumsily and wetly. She was fourteen then and had done this only three times in her life. She scratched a match to the joint, and brother and sister smoked quietly until there was nothing left. Seth inhaled one last time; he seemed to be smoking his fingertips. Later, high, he said to her, “I just thought I saw things in black and white for a second. I guess that’s the way dogs see. I wonder what they dream about—maybe visions of Milk Bones dancing over their heads.” He giggled to himself.
It rained all that afternoon, and Claire could hear the tin buckets her father had placed in the leaky basement clank with water. It was warm and damp inside, like a sick child’s vaporized room. The smoke and the rain and the August heat were soporifics; Seth lay down on the tweed couch, his eyes blinking slowly, like a lizard’s. He was falling asleep. Good, Claire thought, good. She felt relieved when her brother was asleep. When he was awake there was that constant knowing look, the expression common to all martyrs—Iphigenia, walking barefoot up the incline, fire sprouting up around her ankles like chickweed, that same expression on her face: I know, I know. Claire could not bear that look. When Seth slept he was just like anyone else.
Claire had read in some magazine that you could never have a dream in which you actually die, because the impact of it would be too much of a shock to the system and would cause you, in real life, to have a coronary or a stroke or something equally fatal. The mind and the body, working together in glorious synchrony, drag you up from rock bottom of sleep, so that you twitch and blink into consciousness before your falling dream body has the opportunity to make contact with the pavement below, or before your drowning dream body has the opportunity to swell its lungs with dark salt water and sink slowly and finally into the deepest regions of the ocean. Not even Seth could die in a dream. The sleep psyche is as innocent as a child, as protective as a mother.
In the beginning, they filled vials with his blood. There was an entirely new vocabulary to be learned; its words were odd and vaguely familiar, in a tongue that seemed as artificial as Esperanto: Basophil. Leukocyte. White count. Platelet. Claire’s mother recited them on the telephone, and the words jumbled together made Claire giddy as she listened. Platelet: a tiny piece of dinnerware used at Lilliputian banquets, easily mistaken for a chink of green bottle glass on a beach.
Seth’s remission, that most desperate of furloughs, had ended. Her parents phoned her at Buck’s Rock Camp, where she was spending the summer on scholarship, taking classes in batik-making. “I think you should come home early, if you possibly can,” her mother said, and the long-distance connection crackled and spat as though to convey the urgency her words could not express.
—
Seth had slept heavily all that afternoon, and when he woke up there was a patina of sweat on his face and neck. “I’m so tired,” he said, “and so stoned.” He propped himself up on one elbow and smiled, patting the couch. “Come sit here.” Claire sat down lightly. It was routine; every day she had visited him in the hospital she had sat on the edge of his high, wide bed, barely resting her weight on it, not wanting to change the balance of anything.
Seth looked up at her, his face flushed, his pupils as full as gourds. “I want to ask you something,” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“Are you afraid of me? I mean, I read in a book by that woman Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, that people are scared off by people with diseases because it reminds them of their own mortality and stuff.”
He was wearing an old T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts, and he looked as if he were made of balsa wood. His elbow knobs and knees jutted out in hard points, like the edges of furniture you catch yourself on over and over. Claire thought it was the saddest question ever asked. How could she possibly be frightened of him? You can be frightened of death, but not of doom. It was easy to tell the difference: death does not have arms and legs as hairless and pale as a chihuahua, or fingernails bitten down to tiny smiles.
“No,” Claire said. “I’m not afraid of you.”
She leaned into him then, in a way she had not done in a long time. Born two years earlier than she, Seth had never been a forceful older brother. Neighborhood brothers—lifeguards, varsity soccer stars—had bent down and lifted their younger sisters up into the air in one fell swoop, and Claire had always been envious. During games of Running Bases in the backyard, she would charge into Seth as hard as she could, only to feel him sway and give like a tarpaulin in a storm.
Now he hugged her tightly, pulling her down next to him. “Oh,” he said, the word coming from somewhere deep in his throat. “Oh.” First Claire thought there was only despair in his voice, the lowing of a cow being carted off to the marketplace, but then she realized, as he hugged her even tighter, that there was also need. Seth’s arm curved around her and drew her smack up to him. They were both high; this was craziness. “Claire,” he whispered, “I can’t take it.”
She understood, in that one terrible moment, that he was somehow depending on her. She shivered, thinking that if she were to squeeze him as hard as he was squeezing her, he would snap cleanly, split apart down some invisible seam.
Seth was going to die; this was something she couldn’t change. She felt the magnitude of it then, and it made her ache. She had grown up thinking that it was good to be close to people. There were times when the two of them had had pillow fights, had played board games, had had their photographs taken in one of those little booths together, contorting their faces in different ways for every frame. She had always been told that this kind of closeness was good, and her parents were delighted that she and Seth were real friends. Most siblings seemed to hate each other. The older kid was often a dictator, the younger one a whiner. It had never been that way with Claire and Seth.
But now she wished desperately that they had never been close in the first place. Maybe that way she wouldn’t be feeling so awful now, so sad. For the first time in her life she wanted to keep a certain distance from him. There was already a space there, the kind of wall that separates the sick from the healthy. She and Seth were pressed together but it was not enough, and never could be. There was dead air between them; she could feel it.
Seth brought his face up to hers and kissed her mouth, fully. His breath was as sweet as a baby’s—too sweet, as though he had been eating sugar beets. She kissed him back then because it appeared to be her responsibility, her calling.
Claire had once seen a woman die. She was nine and spending the day in the city with her mother. They were buying Italian ices from a vendor on Seventh Avenue when it happened. The woman who had been before them on line took one lick of her cherry ice, then walked out into the afternoon traffic. For weeks afterward Claire would think, I could have told her to be careful. I could have offered to help her across the street. I could have done something.
In the core of the bystander there is always a false sense of power, of responsibility. There was nothing she could do—not a laying on of hands, nothing. She lay in her brother’s arms, his heartbeat frantic, his frame like a kite, and she eased away from him gently, thinking, I cannot save you.
—
Claire did not tell Julian that he reminded her of her brother. In fact, she did not even tell him that she had ever had a brother. She told very few people, not because it especially pained her to talk about Seth, but because such confessions were always responded to with lowered eyes, murmured words and quick, sharp hand squeezes, all of which made Claire feel like a faker. In truth, she did not grieve for Seth. He had been dead for five years, and she could not even picture his face. No one in her family ever talked about him, so it was, she kept telling herself, as if she had made him up.
After the funeral that August, all of the relatives returned to the house. Someone had pushed back the furniture in the living room and replaced it with a circle of hard-backed bridge chairs. Claire had forgotten those chairs existed; the last time they had been used was when her mother had held a PTA meeting in the house several years before. The family was forced to weep sitting up straight; they were no longer allowed the spineless posturing of grief.
Claire could not remember what it felt like to mourn. One time when she was home on Long Island for Christmas vacation freshman year, she stopped by the local King Kullen to see an old friend who worked there as a checker. Claire and Joanne had been friends the year Seth died. It was a mindless friendship, really; they passed notes back and forth during Social Studies and spent Friday nights at Burger King, giggling at people in other booths. The one remarkable trait that Joanne possessed was her ability to remember details, no matter how slight. Nothing went past her.
After Claire left for Swarthmore, she and Joanne saw each other only once or twice a year, and when they did it was only because Claire had some questions she knew Joanne could answer.
“What can I do for you this time?” Joanne asked her as she packed up an old man’s groceries. Claire watched as each item was hurried into the brown bag: a tin of cat food, a package of luncheon meat, a single can of Diet Sprite—the man lived alone.
It must be depressing, Claire thought, to work in a supermarket. The foods people selected told a great deal about their lives, about the emptiness of their lives. This probably never occurred to Joanne, though. “It’s just a job,” she said once. “I never think when I’m at the supermarket.” She smiled at all of her customers, and she sometimes hummed as she worked.
Claire sat down on the edge of the express counter. “I want to know what I wore to my brother’s funeral,” she said, running her hand along the conveyor belt. “I thought you might remember.”
Joanne thought about this as she rang up a woman’s purchases. “Twelve forty-nine,” she said. “You wore that maroon dress with the little flowers around the edge.” She did not appear to find the question at all odd. She was very proud of her ability to remember things.
“Did I cry a lot that day?” Claire asked.
“No,” Joanne said. “You were pretty quiet. You didn’t cry half as much as your parents did. That aunt of yours, I think her name was Maddy, or something with an M, whispered to one of your other relatives that you were probably in shock.”
Claire had hoped that such details would help her recall what it felt like to be in mourning for Seth, but they didn’t. She questioned Joanne for half an hour. When she could think of nothing more to ask, she thanked her, wished her a merry Christmas and walked out through the magically parting doors of the supermarket.
The only kind of grief Claire could remember feeling was her grief for Lucy Ascher. She had mourned the poet’s death for months; in fact, she had never completely stopped mourning. Every day when Claire woke up, she thought of her. Ascher’s face appeared out of nowhere, mouthing the words to one of her poems. Claire had tried to explain the whole phenomenon to Julian that evening in the stacks of the library. She told him more than she had planned to, and he listened intently. But he could not possibly have understood, she thought later that night as she climbed under the covers of her bed. Even Naomi and Laura did not really understand, although they certainly came closer.
There had been a split between the three death girls lately. “It’s because of that Julian person you spend all your time with,” Laura said one day. “He’s responsible for the way you’ve been drifting away from us. You never come to our late-night meetings anymore.”
“We miss you,” Naomi chimed in.
“I know, and I’m sorry,” she said to them. “Things will change soon; don’t worry.”
Claire missed the frenzy of their nighttime meetings. She had not been thoroughly honest when she told Julian about them. It was surely a lot more than just candles and notebooks and conversations about poetry. It was not a literary salon, the way she had made it out to be. It was, she decided, nearly a spiritual experience. She had seen documentary films of Southern Baptist revival meetings and had been awed by the passion of the people—the way they shook, trembled, could barely contain their love for Jesus. That was exactly how she felt when she thought about Lucy Ascher.
She would close her eyes, sitting cross-legged on the hard floor of Naomi’s room, and think, Lucy, Lucy, blotting out all else. Soon there would come an odd lifting feeling in her stomach, and she would begin to recite the lines of one of Ascher’s poems. Claire’s favorite was “Of Gravity and Light,” which was from Ascher’s first collection. Naomi and Laura would respectfully wait for her to finish, and then they would each take a turn.
Claire barely listened when the other poetry was being read. She had no real affinity for the works of either Sexton or Plath. They were too common, she felt, too accessible, too whiny. Ascher was more complex, more difficult to take, because her pain was up front. She emphasized the fact that simple existence was filled with nightmare, as if this were already generally understood. When she could no longer stand the pain of it, she took her life.
A year after Lucy Ascher died, her notebook was published under the title Sleepwalking, from the name of one of her early poems. The book received much attention; critics called it deadly and devastating and apocalyptic. Claire thought it was merely realistic. It chronicled a life far more truthfully and painfully than anything else Claire had read. It gradually became a cult book, as Plath’s Letters Home had been. Unlike Plath, Lucy Ascher never planned to have her words read by anyone, and that, Claire thought, gave them a stark, exposed quality. The notebook had been fished up from the very back of the poet’s dresser drawer, underneath piles of underwear and little sachet pillows. The original notebook had, her mother wrote in the introduction to the book, smelled of gardenias.
Claire often pictured Lucy sitting curled up in a corner of her room, scribbling in her notebook until the early hours of the morning. She wished she could have been there with her, peering over her shoulder, fetching her a brand-new pencil when the old one wore down into a tiny yellow wood chip from overuse.
She could not voice her feelings to Julian; he would not be able to follow them. He was so simple—it seemed that he required almost nothing to sate him. “What do you need in life?” she asked him once when they were together in her bed.
“Just you,” he replied, cupping her breast for emphasis. She was not amused.
Julian stopped by her room every day for two weeks after the time she saw him from the window and invited him up. In the beginning they studied together, sitting close and not talking for long stretches. Sometimes they played endless rounds of Botticelli, a game in which one player has to guess the famous person the other player is thinking of. Julian gave her difficult ones: Judge Crater, Mrs. O’Leary, and once, to be witty, Roy G. Biv.
In the middle of studying one afternoon, Julian leaned over and lightly bumped into her. His forehead knocked against hers—he drew in a long breath and then kissed her. Claire was not surprised. She moved away from him, annoyed, and said, “Just wait a minute, will you?”
He apologized to her, blushing as he spoke, and picking once again at the widening tear in his pants leg. Neither of them said anything for a few minutes. She knew that he was waiting for her to do something—to speak, to breathe, to light a new cigarette. It was her turn. His mouth looked very soft, and she was moved by him. She wanted him to touch her; she knew that. With a slight sigh, Claire stood up in front of Julian, placing both hands on his shoulders. He was up in the next second, as if his shoulders were points of reflex, like the knees. They kissed, and she brought him closer to her, gathered him in.
When they slept together that evening, she wondered if his initial awkwardness had been an act. After all, hadn’t he seemed just a shade too quivery to be real? When she ran her hands up his long thighs, he said in a voice rich with feeling, “Oh, Claire, you are just too much.” He looked as if he were about to falter, to pass out beneath her, and yet at the same time a smile was spreading on his face. Julian was clearly enjoying himself.
In the morning she woke to find him lying flat on his back, his mouth dropped open—a remnant, he told her when she questioned him, of mild childhood asthma. She was once again reminded of Seth. Was it some hidden, protective instinct that attracted her to Julian? The men Claire had been involved with in the past were always older, coarser.
In the twelfth grade she had met a twenty-four-year-old man in Washington Square Park. She had been sitting by herself one Saturday on the lip of the fountain when someone slid over next to her. She looked up. The man was large and bearded and dark.
“Hi,” he said, “I’m Rufus.”
She introduced herself, to be polite, and he began to talk. He was a graduate film student at NYU, he said, and his favorite filmmaker was Jean-Luc Godard. Had she seen Breathless? Did she like to go to the movies?
Claire answered his questions shyly, then told him that she had things to do. “Oh, come on,” he said, tilting his head to one side. “You don’t really have to go if you don’t want to. Come back to my apartment and I’ll put on some good albums.”
She went with him because she was feeling depressed and wanted a change, and also because the day was becoming cold and she couldn’t bear the thought of going home just yet. Her father would pick her up at the station and they would sit in silence during the ride. He was unable to communicate with anyone; he sat at the breakfast table each day with the newspaper in front of his face. It had been like that for years.
Rufus lived in a tiny studio apartment near the park, way up on the seventh floor. As they climbed the last flight she told him, “This is the first real exercise I’ve had in weeks.” He laughed excessively, as if she had just told him some terrific new joke, but actually she had been serious. She spent most of her days sitting cross-legged on her bed, reading Lucy Ascher’s poems. She could not even remember the last time she had walked up a real flight of stairs. Her family’s house was a split-level, but that didn’t count. It was just four short steps to the safety and darkness of her bedroom.
“You’re really funny, you know that?” he said, punching her softly on the arm.
The apartment was very messy, with cat hair on all the furniture, although there was no cat in evidence. Maybe, she thought giddily, he’s the one who sheds. He did indeed have a lot of hair. After putting on a record, he confessed to her that he was not really a film student, that he had once been a film student but had been thrown out of graduate school for poor grades. “I had to hold down a job at Ray’s Pizza, to pay my rent. I just couldn’t do two things at once. Maybe someday I’ll go back to school; I don’t know. I still work at Ray’s, but I think of myself as a student, you know? That’s why I told you I was in school. It just popped out of my mouth.”
After a while he asked her if she would like to drop a little acid. She paused, thinking she should say no and then get up and leave. She should thank him for his good music and for all the free cat hair which she would be taking home with her on her clothing. “I have to go,” she said at last, walking toward the door.
“Oh, come on,” he said once again.
She remembered a time when her parents were away and she came into Seth’s room to find him and two friends sprawled out on the floor, laughing. “What’s so funny?” Claire asked.
“We can’t tell you,” one of the friends said. “It’s a secret.” This brought forth more laughter.
“No, it’s not a secret,” Seth finally said. “Claire’s okay.” He looked at her with narrowed eyes. “Aren’t you, Claire?”
“What’s this all about?” she asked. “Be serious.”
“We did some potent acid—Windowpane—and it’s just starting to work. The walls are beginning to breathe; it’s incredible,” he said.
Seth had done a fair amount of hallucinogens in high school. He said that he was inspired by Carlos Castaneda. He and his friends went to see the movie Fantasia while on mescaline, and he told Claire that it was an absolutely amazing experience. “You know that part where they do ‘A Night on Bald Mountain’?” he said. “It really freaked me out. I felt like my mind was being waked up for the very first time, each brain cell individually—like a million little alarm clocks were going off at once.”
Claire had never tripped, although she had been curious about it. Rufus held a tab of acid in the palm of his hand, and after a moment she took it from him, and he smiled broadly. She stayed there the entire day, tripping like mad. The acid was called Blotter; it was a tiny snip of white paper with a greasy teardrop stain in the center, and she swallowed it at once so she would not have much time to think about it. It tasted like nothing, like a spitball.
She sat on his couch all afternoon, barely moving. The window shade slapped against the window, and a dog barked somewhere in the neighborhood. She fanned her hand before her eyes, looking calmly at the trails her fingers left in the air. Rufus put on the television set, and they both watched Gilligan’s Island intently, as though it were a wonderful, important show on public television. When it grew dark outside, when the sky trembled into black, she left his apartment to catch the Long Island Railroad back home.
“Meet me in the park next Saturday,” Rufus called after her. On the street, she had to blink several times to get her bearings, as though she had walked out of a dark movie theater into broad daylight.
Claire returned the next week, because she knew he would be excited to see her. She could tell he was very lonely, and she felt a kind of kinship with him. Two misfits. He was thrilled when she showed up, and as they walked to his apartment building he held her hand in his own huge, callused one. He seemed to have sprouted even more hair since the week before. He was wolflike—what was the word . . . lupine?—and this both repelled and excited her.
That afternoon Claire went to bed with him. She had never slept with anyone before, she told him as he opened up the couch. There were long, dark ovals of sweat underneath his arms, right where the seams of his shirt joined. He smelled of flour, she noticed, from working in the pizzeria. In bed Rufus was loud and rough, and when it was over, she was surprised that he had not hurt her in any way. She pressed her fingers gingerly against her thighs and abdomen, searching for tender areas, but she found none. I am a hardened woman, she thought.
Rufus brought over two flip-top cans of orange soda and lay back on the rumpled bed. He began to talk to her about a film he someday hoped to make. It would be a surrealistic Western, he explained, with all of the actors wearing white, featureless masks. “I’m positive I can get backers for it,” he said. “Big money.”
Claire took one sip of her soda and then said to him, “I’ve got to leave now.” It was as though she had just realized where she was and whom she was with. She put the can down on the night table and looked around her. The sheets no longer felt clean. They had the worn, rubbed-thin feel of cloth that might have been tangled through the arms and legs of scores of lovers. After the lovemaking was through, all of those couples might well have eaten boxes of cookies in bed, dropping little flurries of crumbs onto the sheets.
Claire gathered up her things, left the apartment and did not see him again. She stayed away from Washington Square Park.
There was one more after Rufus and before Julian. He was a swimming coach at the Y who always came to her right from the water, blue-lipped and eager. He had seemed to her amphibious. She wondered what it was she really wanted. All three of these men had looked bewildered when she left their beds, or rather, in the case of Julian, when she left her own bed. “I have to go now,” she would say to each of them, shooing them away or fleeing herself. “Please.”
Claire put on her make-up in front of Julian every morning. He was fascinated by the process and always sat up in bed to watch. She turned it into an elaborate routine for him, waving her stick of kohl in the air like a magic wand, and Julian was transfixed.
In bed he had said, “Tell me what you like,” and while Claire was pleased by this, she had not known what to answer, because she had not especially liked anything in the past. When she first slept with Julian, their lovemaking was slow and painstaking. They reached for each other laboriously, as if through a fog. When Julian called out to her, insisted she was overwhelming him, Claire could not understand it. She felt annoyed, left out of the great secret. Julian touched her everywhere, slid his mouth down gently between her legs, and she thought to herself, This is fine, but that was the extent of it. She felt a welling up somewhere inside of her, but it was too far away, and she could not locate it. She did not know what was the matter.
Once when she had not responded to the swimming coach’s ardent, chlorinated kisses, he had accused her of being without passion. She had believed his accusation without question. He was, after all, quite experienced sexually and had once made love underwater with a champion woman swimmer. They had gone through foreplay and intercourse, he swore, without ever having to come up for air.
Claire longed for real passion, the kind she had read about in romantic novels. She wanted to clasp Julian to her, to have their lovemaking be something new and exotic each time. She had seen that look on the faces of lovers in restaurants, on the street: a secret, meaningful glance exchanged between two people. There seemed to be a conspiracy of passion in the world.
To her, she had to admit, it was not much more than an abstract idea. The word conjured up images of fierceness: two lovers locked together as though they might never be pulled apart. She was fierce—she had that in her favor—but somehow she could not connect this quality in her with anything at all sexual.
The first day in seventh-grade hygiene class the teacher stood up and said, “We are all animals.” Everyone had laughed at this. The idea was new then, and it had seemed odd, embarrassing. Now it depressed Claire. On visits home she would occasionally run into people she had gone to school with, and she could see it in their eyes. Many of them were in love, or lust, and in that young-couple flush of desire and expectancy.
But Claire did not feel like an animal. When she slept with Julian her body was cool, straight, efficient. Smells and tastes did not lure her from sleep in the middle of the night. She had no fur, she had no heat.