There is a new boy I like. I see him every other day when our classes let out at the same time. He has long, dark hair and unbelievably beautiful eyes. He sits on the campus lawn with a few other guys and passes around a joint. My friends, who I see more of now that Eli is out of the picture, tell me about him. His name is Leif, a music major. He plays guitar in a band, and they are pretty sure he doesn’t have a girlfriend. They walk over there with me, and almost immediately I can feel the energy between us, the promise of something to come.
The night of my upstairs neighbor’s party, a party where I know Leif will be, I lie in my bed with my friend Bevin plotting seduction. I will use pot I took from my dad ages ago and haven’t smoked, and I’ll dress as hot as possible. We giggle, excited for me, excited for what might happen tonight.
When Leif walks into the party, I keep him on my radar, waiting for the right moment. And when he is alone a moment, filling his beer from the keg in the kitchen, I pounce. He follows me downstairs to my apartment to get high, and I take out a bowl and the bag of pot and hand it to him. We sit on my bed and he lights up and passes it to me. We chat about our classes, where we’re from. Even in the haze of getting high, I can’t feel calm. All I want is for him to kiss me, to put his hands on me. There is something about him, his scent, the way he looks. I don’t know. My desire for him is fierce. I could tear his clothes off. I could eat him off a plate.
At each awkward silence, I wait, poised for that kiss.
“Listen,” he says finally, “I’m very attracted to you.”
I smile.
“But there’s a situation you should know about.”
My smile drops.
He explains he’s been seeing someone. He doesn’t think he wants to stay with her, but she’s his friend, and he should probably break up with her before anything else happens. I nod, trying to look calm. Inside, my heart is filling. He wants me more than this girl.
“Whatever you need to do,” I say. But as I do, I turn my body toward him, opening myself.
He nods, his eyes on mine.
And then he kisses me. We move quickly, removing each other’s clothes. He moves over me, then in me. Our sex is crazed, animal-like. And it doesn’t stop there. We have sex four more times before we finally fall asleep at dawn. Even asleep, though, we’re aroused, and we wake again and again for more.
At nine the next evening, we agree we should probably get some food. We joke about feeding other needs. We take a shower together, and then drive to a nearby Thai restaurant. The other customers politely chat, their napkins on their laps. They dip their chopsticks gracefully into their food. We, on the other hand, should be ripping raw flesh with our teeth, blood dripping down our chins. Or at least that’s how it feels after all the sex. We glance at each other shyly, trying to come up with things to say. There’s no way to get around the weirdness. Sure we shared bodily fluids, our most intimate places. But we’ve barely exchanged anything else.
When we get back, it’s close to one in the morning. Leif leaves to head back to his apartment. He’s explained that the girl he’s been seeing lives in the apartment above his with a group of three other girls, and they’ll all know he didn’t come home last night. It’s like a coven up there, he says. The four of them may as well be stirring a brew. But he has to face the consequences eventually.
I watch him go and then climb into bed. The sheets smell like him. We didn’t establish anything about whether we’d see each other again. I stare up at the ceiling, unable to sleep, a tangle of desire inside.
Three days pass, and I hear nothing. At night I can barely sleep; every sound is him. Twice I get up, pad into the kitchen, and open the door, sure I will see him there. But it’s just my roommates, or the wind, or strangers passing by. I tell Bevin I’ve never been with anyone so incredibly good-looking. He’s probably too good-looking for me. But she just frowns. “He’s not too good for you,” she says. “Why would you say that?”
Then, on the fourth day, while cleaning, something great happens: I find a folded piece of paper under my bed. I open it to find lines of music notes scribbled across the page. Leif.
From the student center pay phone, my heart bursting, I call him, and when he comes to the phone, I tell him about the paper. I don’t describe it, afraid he’ll determine it’s something he doesn’t need. I tell him it looks important, and he agrees to come by that evening to pick it up.
When he arrives, I’m ready. I’ve been ready for an hour. For days. Since the second he left me that night and I watched him lope away. My hair is perfect. I’m wearing an outfit that is both sexy and looks like I threw it on without a thought—well-worn jeans and an old T-shirt that hangs off one shoulder and reveals a glimpse of my stomach when I lift my arms. I lead him to my bedroom and hand him the piece of paper. He looks at it, but only for a moment. I see he’s not here for the paper. My throat is tight with anticipation.
“She was really upset,” he says. He sits on my bed. I sit beside him. I can smell him, his scent, warm and spicy.
I nod my head, trying to look sympathetic. What I want to know is, Are you mine now?
“It’s been pretty bad, actually.” He leans his elbows on his knees. He runs his fingers across the fold of the paper. I am hyperaware of him, of his hands, his legs.
“What are you going to do?” I ask.
“I don’t know.” He glances at me. “I think I should just stay away.”
Stay away. My throat tightens. Stay away from me?
“There were so many times this past week I almost came back here.”
He looks right at me now.
“Really?” I’m overwhelmed, just knowing he was thinking of me. I’m so used to my fantasies being, well, fantasies. And here, he may well have been standing at my door like I had hoped. “Why didn’t you?”
He shakes his head. “I wanted to, believe me. It’s been bad at my place. I’ve been in hell every day, afraid of what she’ll do. Her roommates trap me when I get home and try to talk me into staying with her.” His brow is creased. He’s clearly stressed. “Do you have any more of that weed?”
I take it out, watch as he lights a bowl. He holds it out to me, but I shake my head. I can’t help but think of Eli and that girl, how he had said being with her was easy compared to being with me. I don’t like to think of Leif’s ex-girlfriend, feeling the kind of pain I felt with Eli, but I push that from my mind. Leif lights it a few more times, sucking hard until it’s all but cashed. As he blows out smoke, he seems to relax a bit.
“You could just stay here,” I try. “Until things blow over.”
He nods, shakes the bowl a little, and holds it up to the light. “Do you have a paper clip or something?”
I find him a paper clip from my desk, and he rubs it in the bowl, separating the charred bits. Then he lights it again.
“It wouldn’t be a problem,” I say. “I could leave the front door open for you at night.”
I watch him, hopeful.
He nods again. “That might not be a bad idea.” He puts down the bowl and turns to me. The crease in his forehead is gone. His gaze is loose, his eyes red. And we start to kiss.
We stay in bed again through the next afternoon.
Our conversations are brief and pointed, the kind of conversations people only have when in bed together.
“You have beautiful eyes,” I tell him.
“No, you have beautiful eyes. And this part of you,” he says, running his hand along my hip. “I love this.”
He leaves to go to class, but this time he’s coming back that night.
I go to class too, feeling sexy, light, a girl others might want to be.
Once, in the student center, I see the girl Leif left for me. Her eyes make little slits as we pass, but rather than guilt or fear, I feel elated. He chose me over her.
Leif and I have tons of sex, standing against walls, in locked bathrooms at parties, on the floor of my bedroom. We can’t keep our hands off each other. During the day, we part to go to our separate classes. I listen to lectures on The Faerie Queene, discuss symbolism in The Glass Menagerie, all the while aware of Leif’s scent still on my skin. At two or three in the morning every night, Leif comes into my apartment after working on music compositions in the studio, and he finds me in bed, waiting for him. Because I know he will come, the waiting is delicious, so different from what waiting has been in the past. My body is always aroused, just waiting.
On Spree Day, a campus tradition when classes are canceled and all the students party, Leif and I go back to my room to have sex. Outside, I hear students yelling and laughing. Music streams from someone’s radio. Lots of kids take acid on Spree Day. Or they carry jugs of vodka and orange juice. They smoke joints right out in the open on the green. You can always tell which ones are tripping by their huge pupils. They look past you like you’re not even there. Leif strips off my clothes and then his. He presses his mouth to my neck. I close my eyes, all my senses alive. I can’t imagine being happier, more filled.
Sometimes I see Eli around campus. He is still with that girl, but it’s different now that I have Leif; it’s that easy to replace the spot Eli took up in my heart. He was my first real love, but I can speak of him as someone in my past. Leif is with me now. He plays gigs at parties around campus and in the Pub. We arrive together to parties, and guys shake his hand, ask him about his playing. They nod at me, his girlfriend. While he plays guitar, girls dance. They look up at him with desire, and it gives me great pleasure to walk up to him during his breaks and kiss him, knowing they’re watching.
A COUPLE MONTHS after we start seeing each other, I go to the bathroom while at a party, and I’m horrified to see something small and crablike crawl up from my pelvis. I brush it off me. I’d been itchy down there, I realize now, but I hadn’t thought much about it. Freaked, I set out to find Leif.
Sure enough, we both have crabs. He tells me his ex had them when they first started sleeping together, but he thought they were gone. She got her revenge, I suppose.
We use his leftover crab shampoo that night and wash our sheets, and he finds some poison that works to kill them in the carpet and couch.
Just a few weeks later, though, I notice something else strange down there, little tags of pale skin. My heart pounding, I call my mother.
“Oh, Kerry,” she says when I describe it.
“What?” I ask, flipping out. “What is it?”
“I can’t diagnose without seeing it,” she says, “but it sounds like HPV.”
My heart stops. Three letters, just one away from a deadly disease.
“What’s that?”
She explains human papillomavirus to me. Genital warts. She talks about rates of infection and populations seeing the biggest increases while I grip the phone, feeling sick. When it comes to medicine, she’s always interested in telling me everything she knows. She doesn’t listen for what I really need right now, which is reassurance. Being a doctor, and the prestige that comes with it, is so immensely important to her, so much more important than being a mom. That’s not new information. She left Tyler and me to become a doctor. But her preference can still sting.
In the morning, Leif and I go together to the Planned Parenthood, where they take us into separate examination rooms. My nurse is tall and no-nonsense. She pulls the hot light down so it showcases my vagina and pushes at the folds of skin down there with her fingers. Then she slides in a speculum.
“Did you have sex recently?” she asks.
I nod. Of course I have.
“You shouldn’t have before you came here,” she says, her voice tight.
“Not since last night,” I tell her defensively. “And I took a shower this morning.”
She sighs, annoyed. “There’s still semen in here, making it difficult for me to determine what’s your fluid and what’s someone else’s.”
I press my lips tightly together, ashamed. I can’t even determine who gave me the warts. According to my mother, incubation for HPV is three months, so it could have been François or Amos in New Mexico. Or it could have been one of the guys I slept with before Taos. I don’t need anyone to tell me how bad that is, I can’t even isolate where I got them. I don’t need anyone else to tell me what a slut I really am.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Well,” she says, “we’ll just have to do our best.”
She does a Pap smear and then takes a small bottle out of a cabinet. She explains she’ll need to use some type of acid to burn off the warts, and I’ll need to come back for a few more treatments until they are gone. She also explains the Pap will reveal whether I’m in danger of cervical cancer, which some forms of HPV threaten to cause.
I close my eyes, scared, as she applies something to my labia. The acid stings like crazy, but I hold myself still, not wanting to further disappoint the nurse. When I sit up, she looks me in the eye. Her face is stern. “You shouldn’t have sex again until these are gone. Otherwise you risk infecting your partner.”
I lower my eyes, sick with shame.
I find Leif waiting for me, and we go out to my car. He’s happy because he didn’t get infected, and I’m relieved. If he had, I would have felt even worse than I already do. I lower myself slowly into the driver’s seat like an old person, my rear still sore. But I don’t complain. I got what I deserve.
Mom calls later that day.
“How are you doing?” she asks. “I’ve been thinking about you. I know today’s the day you went to the clinic.”
“I’m OK.” I lie in bed, cradling the phone with my head. She can be caring like this sometimes, like the mother I’ve always wanted her to be. I think of what Eli’s mother told me about the Alzheimer’s releasing her mother’s more loving self. It helps me to know there is this part to my mother. There is a possibility that somewhere inside, if it weren’t for all her own hurts and insecurities, she might really love me. I close my eyes, wishing as I do at times she were here with me, smoothing my hair.
“Be sure to take care of yourself,” she says. “Is Leif there? Is someone tending to you?”
“I’m really OK,” I say again. “Leif is in his studio, getting a composition done before class. But I’m fine. Only a little sore.”
“All right. Don’t stay there all alone. Call a friend.”
“I will.”
We hang up and I force myself to rise. I turn on the CD player, which plays a Tom Waits song. I think about going somewhere. A coffee shop. The student center. Calling Bevin, maybe, like Mom said. But ultimately I just get back into bed. Some days nothing sounds good.
WHEN SUMMER COMES, Leif goes home to New Hampshire to perform with his band, and I stay in my apartment at school. I have nowhere else to go, no friends left in New Jersey, no internship or job like some of my friends. I’ve allowed Eli, and then Leif, to occupy my entire life, enough that I have not begun to focus on anything meaningful in my life. In high school, Jennifer A once told me she aspired to be a housewife. She wanted to live the cliché, watching soap operas and eating all day. She didn’t want to have to perform out in the world. But I don’t feel like that. I love vibrant discussions about literature. I love to write. I sit in the front row of most classes with my hand raised. There are things I know I’m good at, if I’d only keep my focus there.
Seeing this discrepancy in my life begins to nag at me, like a child tugging on my sleeve. What am I doing? Why can’t I ever just focus on me? My therapist and I discuss this, and she encourages me to create something in my life that will hold my interest. So I apply for an August writing workshop and am accepted.
As often as possible, I drive up to Leif’s to see him. His family lives in a big, sterile house in the country. The front yard is a long, lovely stretch of wildflowers, and at the end of the driveway, behind the house, woods encase a pristine lawn. Leif is so perfect to me, so surreal, it is hard for me to grasp the idea of him growing up here, with parents, in a small town, like any other kid.
Leif’s father is friendly, also a musician. He works with computers, but in his spare time he sits with Leif and they work out phrases or play jazz. He watches Leif play with admiration and pride, and he admits he wishes he could play music rather than work in his field. Leif’s mother is different. She admires Leif’s talent and drive like his father, but she holds herself at a distance, cold and detached. I try to engage her in conversations, but she rarely wants to talk. We don’t think the same, like Susan and I did. I can tell she thinks I’m flighty with my interest in psychology. Or, who knows, maybe she’s worried I’m analyzing her. Either way, I can feel her disapproval of me. She thinks I’m not good enough for her son.
As soon as we are out of his parents’ house, Leif gets high. We meet his bandmates, he smokes some more with them, and I watch them rehearse or play gigs in town. We regularly get back to his house in the early morning hours, and then Leif sleeps until two or three the next day. He keeps his room dark to ward off daylight, and when I stay there I find I’m always groggy and often bored. I wake long before him and sneak down to the kitchen to find something to eat, thankful his parents are at work. When I grow bored enough, I crawl back into bed and nudge him to have sex, just for something to do.
When he does wake, he moves slowly. He gets himself something to eat, goes to the piano room, and plays with a composition he’s been working on. I follow him from room to room.
“Let’s do something,” I say, sitting on the piano bench next to him.
“Like what?” He leans forward and erases a note, writes a new one in. His handwriting is chicken scratch, but his musical notes are always neat and perfectly shaped.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Anything. Let’s go out for lunch.”
“Isn’t it too late for lunch?” He begins to play again. He really is very good.
“Then dinner.”
He grimaces. “I just got up. I don’t really want to go anywhere.”
I sigh, resigning myself. After a few more minutes of sitting I walk around the house, looking at art and photos on the wall. There is a traditional painting of a man on a horse, another of a bouquet of roses. I think about how different Leif is from this art, which is safe and straightforward, nothing beneath the surface. Leif is intensely creative. His music takes risks. I wonder how he fits in amid this family, if he shoulders the burden of being the family risk-taker, so they don’t have to. I can’t help but notice how he acts around them, always happy and even, but then as soon as he’s away he gets high or he sleeps.
I also don’t find any pictures of Leif as a child. When I ask him, he goes into his closet and takes down a shoebox of photos.
“I was fat as a kid,” he explains as I sift through the pictures of Leif and his friends. It’s true he was chubby, but he wasn’t so big as to be called fat.
“There are no baby pictures?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I suppose there are somewhere.”
I examine each picture, wanting more. “How could your parents have no baby pictures of you?”
He shrugs again, and I notice I’m annoyed. Annoyed he doesn’t demand more from his parents. Annoyed by the hazy film that seems to cover everything in this house, including him.
I nod and put the photos back in the box, not wanting him to see my frustration. I wrap my arms around his neck and pull him to me. He hugs back, which makes me feel better. Connected to him again.
AFTER THE HPV SCARE, a small panic remains in my stomach. What if there’s something more going on? What if I have HIV? Most of my friends have gotten tested. It’s the reasonable thing to do if you’ve had sex with more than one person, especially unprotected sex, of which I’ve had lots. One friend even gets tested every six months as a precaution. I nod along with them, but I’m a terrible hypocrite. I’ve slept with many more strangers than they have, and I’ve yet to get tested. I’m too scared. In the eighties, AIDS plagued gay men, IV drug users, and people receiving blood transfusions. It felt unrelated to me. Now HIV is showing up in the blood of more and more heterosexual women. We’re getting it at the fastest rate in the country.
On a Monday morning, I drive back to the same Planned Parenthood. I tell the receptionist why I’m there, and a young woman takes me into the back. As we walk, my heart beats so fast I feel like I might pass out. This woman is kinder than the last one. She’s young, not much older than me. Perhaps it’s more acceptable to get a voluntary test than to show up with an STD. She puts a warm hand on my arm as she guides me into a small, white room that has only a desk and two chairs. She sits across from me and sets a clipboard on the desk.
“I need to ask you some questions before we take your blood,” she tells me.
“Questions?” My voice quakes.
“These are standard questions we ask everyone. It’s mandatory counseling before the test.”
I bite my lip. “OK.”
She looks down at the paper. “Are you currently sexually active?”
I nod.
She makes a mark. “Do you currently have more than one sexual partner?”
“No.”
“In your sexual history, have you had more than five partners?”
“Um, yeah.”
“More than ten?”
I bite my lip again. “Yes.”
She doesn’t look at me, just marks her paper.
“In your sexual history, was there ever a time when you had more than one sexual partner in the span of a month?”
I take a breath, let it out slowly. “Yes.”
“Are you currently using birth control?”
“The Pill,” I say.
“Good.” She writes that. “What about condoms?”
I shake my head. What must she be thinking of me?
“In your sexual history, did you consistently use condoms?”
I shake my head again.
She makes a few more marks. “OK,” she says. “I need to advise you to use condoms every time you engage in intercourse. It’s the only effective way to protect yourself from disease.”
“I know that,” I say. I want to tell her I’m not stupid. I know everything there is to know about protecting myself. I’m well aware of how HIV and STDs are transmitted. But I also know my behavior defies my knowledge.
“Listen,” she says, perhaps hearing my defensiveness. “You’re not the only one who comes through these doors and tells me about multiple partners without condoms.”
I smile slightly. “I’m not?”
“God, no.” She smiles too. “It’s frustrating, though. I mean, if you know to use condoms, why don’t you?”
She stares at me. She’s not being condescending. This is an honest question. There are many more like me, and she wants to understand.
I shake my head. “I’m not sure,” I say.
After, another woman draws my blood and tells me to set an appointment for fourteen days from then—fourteen long days—to get my results. Driving home, I think about the first woman’s question, wishing I had said more. I do know why I haven’t used condoms when I should have. In the moment, when I’m busy trying to make some guy mine, thoughts about death or disease are furthest from my mind. I’m too caught up in desperation, in filling what I can never seem to fill. It’s a terrible realization that I’m willing to risk my life to get to that place.
I visit Leif in those fourteen days, trying to keep my mind off it. He brushes me off, tells me my anxiety is irrational. But he doesn’t know the truth about my past, those two random guys in Taos, all those nameless guys before them. When the day comes, I’m a wreck. I didn’t sleep much the night before. Then I drank too much coffee to compensate. I stand in the waiting room, too jumpy to sit. I feel like I might throw up. That same woman, the one with all the questions, comes to get me, and as we walk down the hallway I try to interpret the look on her face. Is she about to tell me I’m going to die? She opens the door to the same stark room and sets a folder in front of her as she sits. I’m going to throw up right here, in this tiny white room.
“Your test was negative,” she says.
“Oh, my God!” I say, relief flooding me. Then, “You really shouldn’t act so stoic on the way in here. You might send someone into cardiac arrest.”
She smiles. “I’ll work on that.”
“So I can go?”
“Just use condoms,” she says. “OK?”
I smile. I think about telling her what I came to in the car, the answer to her question last time. But I just want to get out of here now. Out of this ridiculously small room and back into the world.
“I will,” I say.
And then I do what everyone must do in this situation. I tell myself I will do things differently from now on. If Leif and I should split, I’ll use condoms. I’m nobody’s fool.
IN AUGUST, I drive to Vermont for my monthlong writing workshop, and all the anxiety I avoided by not doing something like this, all my fear about leaving the world of boys, fills me. I’m not nervous about my writing or being somewhere new. I’m nervous about being away from Leif. Out of his sight, I’m afraid I don’t matter. I hate admitting it. I still experience myself like I did in high school. Without a man loving me, I feel like I don’t exist.
He has promised to visit me for the third weekend, and I’ve already begun to count down the days.
The Vermont campus is beautiful. Purple and yellow irises cluster near huge, heavy oaks. Maple trees wave leaves as big as my hand. Mountains hover in the distance. After I settle into my single room, I go for a run, a new activity I have taken up under Deirdre’s advice. I run along gravel roads, thick greenery on either side. The sky is a piercing blue, the air hot. When I return I feel enlivened, sharp. I can do this, I think.
That first evening I meet the other workshop participants at a welcome dinner. There are only a few of us who are young, so we gravitate toward one another. One girl, Kelly, slinks toward me and whispers, “Where are all the hot men?”
I laugh. “All the hot men are painters and musicians. Writers aren’t hot.”
She smiles. “Speak for yourself.”
Kelly is a few years older than me, though she seems even older. She scans the room, her eyes dark. She wears red lipstick that extends just beyond the lines of her lips, and she holds her lips in a well-rehearsed pout. Maybe she doesn’t realize how obvious this is, how it looks like she’s trying too hard. I don’t know her at all, but I feel both sad and scared for her, seeing those lips.
Before the dinner is through, two older men approach her. She opens her body toward them, and when they speak she lowers her head and widens her eyes. Another practiced move. I squirm inside, aware I have my own moves: big smile, wide eyes, cocked head.
Days, I work on my first short story. It is about a girl who is struck mute in an accident. In my critique, the teacher tells me the character remains undeveloped. Her muteness doesn’t go anywhere. It stays static, which makes the whole story incomplete.
I work on it some more.
In between I go running, allowing the fresh, flowery air to clear my head.
I think about Leif. Only seven days to go.
I call him twice from the pay phone in the dormitory lobby. The first time he’s not home, and I leave a message with his mother. The second time, he sounds groggy, like he just woke up. We talk briefly about the workshop and his gigs, and then he has to go.
“I miss you so much,” I tell him.
“I miss you, too.”
I want to make him promise, but I hold myself back.
“I’ll see you in just five days.”
“That’s right.”
“You’re still coming, right?”
“I just said I was.”
“OK,” I say, not wanting to let him go.
“Right. I’ll see you then.”
And he hangs up.
I find Kelly and a few others lying on a blanket in the grass, and I join them. They’re discussing the writing life, submissions and rejections, magazines with which they’ve placed work.
“What about you?” one of the girls asks. “Do you send your stuff out?”
“I just started writing,” I say. “I’m not ready.”
“That’s good,” Kelly says. She stretches out her legs in the sun. She has less makeup on today, and you can see how pretty she really is, freed up from all that pretense and effort. “You should wait. Too many people send out their stuff before it’s ready.”
“That’s right,” the other girl says. “Too many are focused on publication, not the writing. But if you rush the process, the writing isn’t good. You lose the whole purpose of having written.”
“That’s one of the things I love about writing,” Kelly says now. Her eyes are lit up. “I love the surprise. You never know where it will take you.”
I listen, rapt, excited. This. I want this. The first thing, other than boys, that feels meaningful to me, that I can feel in my veins, can literally feel moving its way through me like a drug.
I go back to my room to work on my story some more.
THE DAY LEIF arrives, I’m ecstatic. I can’t wait to get my arms around him, to get him near me. I pace my room, making myself wait to take my shower and get ready. It would be unbearable to be dressed too early. I try to read, but I can’t keep the sentences in my head.
As soon as he arrives, we strip down and have sex. Then we go out for some food. He comes with me to a poetry reading that evening, but he fidgets beside me. I know he has no interest in any of this. So after the reading, when I would normally socialize with the other participants at the reception, discussing the reading and our own writing, I go back to my room with Leif. He takes out his guitar and noodles around on it for a while. I lie on my bed and watch him, then take out a book and try to read. But that restlessness moves right in again as though it arrived with him, a package deal.
When he leaves, I am just a tiny bit relieved.
Kelly, who has been hesitant to workshop her story, brings in copies during the final week. Having finished my rewrite, I too hand out my story. Kelly’s is about a girl whose father gives weekly ear cleanings. The writing is suggestive and harrowing, and it’s clear something terrible and lascivious happens during these ear cleanings. We all rave, impressed. By now, Kelly is the talk of the workshop, but not for her writing. The way she walks, her pout. All the men whisper comments to each other, the same way the boys did back in high school about Jeannette. The girls keep their distance. I feel sad for her. She overwhelms her talent with this need for attention. Her talent isn’t enough.
The second to last night of the workshop, Kelly shows up to the reading wearing a tight minidress patterned with big red cherries. We all watch as she approaches, flirts with, and then leaves with the author who read. Before reading her story, I didn’t see our connection. Now I get how much we’re alike. She is me in bold print. I can’t know for sure whether her story is autobiographical, but it gets me thinking about my own past, about the lack of boundaries in my family. Is this why I’ve handed over my body to so many boys?
The next day, the teacher reads my story aloud. Listening to her read, I’m amazed I wrote it. It’s actually good. She congratulates me for progressing so much in the short time we’ve been together.
“You’re a real writer,” she says.
Her words feel like salvation.
SENIOR YEAR. I turn myself toward writing. I find a fiction tutor since my college doesn’t have a creative writing department, and I start pumping out stories. As Dad warned, truths begin to slip out now that the war is long over. The long-standing fires in Kuwait, our country’s backing out of supporting the Shiites. Angry, I join other students to march and rally for peace in the Middle East. I take on an editor position for Clark’s alternative, liberal newspaper. I don’t know as much as I should, but it feels good to get behind something, to channel my anger into something real.
Leif moves into an apartment with a mutual friend and her boyfriend, and I find an apartment by myself. I try not to focus on the fact that the girl Leif lives with is stunningly beautiful. I don’t want to be one of those jealous girlfriends who doesn’t let her man have friendships with other girls, beautiful or not. But almost immediately, it starts to get to me. What I really hoped was he would want to live with me. Instead, he opted to live with the prettiest girl on campus.
“What about with the bathroom?” I ask him when I come to see his new place. “Does she come out of there in a towel?”
“I don’t know, Kerry,” he says. “I haven’t noticed.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m living with her and her boyfriend.”
I sit on his bed. I want something more from him, I’m just not sure what. To tell me I’m prettier? That he loves me only? That he’ll never love anyone else? I’m being stupid, I know, especially since I’m finding myself more and more bored with him. Our interests are too disparate. But this truth nags at me, making me cling tighter.
“Kerry,” he says, seeing the way I look, “this is ridiculous.”
“She’s very insecure,” I tell him. I wince inside. This girl I’m talking about is my friend. This is my friend whom I’m degrading.
“I don’t like her,” he says. “Can we drop it?”
I press my lips together, knowing he’s right.
TYLER’S GETTING MARRIED. Our father, in typical I-won’t-hear-it-if-it-makes-me-uncomfortable style for which we all make fun of him, calls me a month before her wedding.
“Tyler’s getting married,” he says with shock in his voice.
“I know, Dad. You do too,” I tell him. “We’ve all known for almost a year.”
But I can relate. It really is hard to believe. She’s made a point of being anti-marriage for a long time. A few years ago, when I told her I wanted to get married someday, even though our parents divorced, she said she didn’t.
“Mom and Dad never should have gotten married either,” she told me. “They were too different. Not at first, of course. But they went in different directions, like most people do over time. Humans aren’t supposed to mate for life. Patriarchal religions made that up so women would be under men’s control. Marriage is bullshit.”
But handmade invitations with sketches of herself and her fiancé, Gill, that say, “We’re getting hitched!” arrive in the mail.
Leif and I fly to Chicago for the wedding, which is really just a small party at a local bar she and her fiancé frequent. My mother is there with her boyfriend. Dad and Nora are there too. My sister wears yellow cowboy boots and a black dress that shows off the many illustrative tattoos on her back. Gill is in a charcoal gray jacket with a turquoise bolo. They stand at the back of the bar in front of a painting of Spike Lee and thank everyone for coming to celebrate their union. Tyler looks happy, but also something else. Sheepish, embarrassed. I’m not sure what. I hug her and say I’m happy for her, but really I’m bugged. Maybe it’s because she’s doing this thing she was so clearly against. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t seem to be taking it seriously. Whatever it is, I feel angry with her, and also worried.
When I tell Leif later, he shrugs and suggests I let it go. But I can’t. It’s all too familiar, her need for this security. She keeps it hidden behind her tough, anticorporate façade. She talks loudly about all the ways she’s getting screwed, about the environment, the government, everything but her real self. I know what that feels like, that kind of vulnerability. I know how scary it is to have it hang out there, how much I work to hide it too. In truth, I would marry Leif in a second. I would marry almost anyone in a second, if that would make me feel loved.
JUST A FEW months later, Leif’s and my beautiful friend and her boyfriend break up, and Leif is left with no housing. I suggest he live with me, and though he is still hesitant, he agrees under one condition: We’ll keep separate rooms, like proper roommates. I hate that he wants this. He doesn’t want our lives to meld. But I am well practiced at taking what I can get.
The fact that his marijuana dealer just moved in one floor below me can’t hurt my cause either.
He takes the room I had set up as my office, but after a few weeks I work myself into that room too, and it becomes our shared bedroom.
With Leif firmly in my grasp, I focus more and more on writing. I apply to MFA programs, my top choice in Arizona. Leif applies to music programs, including the same school in Arizona.
On Spree Day, we lie in bed, listening to the excitement and music outside the window. Leif reaches for me, and we make love. But unlike last year, I feel restless. I lie beneath him, uninterested, wishing he’d hurry up. I want to get outside, into the world. I want to feel like I did last year, enlivened and full.
I build a schedule. Every morning I wake at six a.m. On alternate mornings I write for three hours before my first class, and on the other days I run three miles around the indoor track at the gym. During the day I attend class, work at the local bookstore, and am back in bed by ten. Leif has a schedule too. He sleeps until noon, then goes to his studio until two or three in the morning, leaving only for classes or to grab a snack.
I like my days. I like that I feel productive and energized.
Many nights, though, I wake when Leif comes home. I haven’t seen him all day. I watch him disappear into the bathroom and lie awake, listening. We haven’t had sex in weeks, living on different timetables. Moon shadows shroud the room. A car hisses by outside. I listen hard, thinking maybe I hear him masturbating. Years ago I used to do the same thing with my father, lying on the futon in his living room, thinking I heard him and his girlfriend having sex. Like those times, I feel slightly turned on, a voyeur to something I shouldn’t know, but I also feel terribly alone.
When he comes to bed, I shift, wanting him to know I’m awake. I hold myself still, hoping he’ll move toward me, hoping we’ll make love, hold each other, anything.
But he turns away from me, asleep.
If things weren’t heading south enough, Dad calls to say he and Nora are splitting up.
“What’s the matter with you?” I yell, furious.
“Jesus Christ, Kerry. It wasn’t just me.”
“Why can’t you make anything work?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” he says. His voice is even, but I can hear his anger. My own anger sits in my throat like a rock. I know what happened. He doesn’t have to tell me. Nora finally had enough.
Later, Nora calls.
“You won’t give it another chance?” I ask.
“Honey, your dad’s being good to me, considering. He’s helping me buy an apartment in New York. But we’re not going to be together.”
I shake my head, anger at my father creeping up. As usual he’s spending money to assuage his guilt. Why doesn’t he try to change himself instead?
“We’ll stay in good touch,” Nora tells me. “You’re still my almost daughter.”
But I know that’s unlikely, and when we hang up, I cry.
“WHAT KEEPS YOU in the relationship?” It’s our regular weekly session, and Deirdre is asking how things have been with Leif. I haven’t told her yet about my father and Nora. I didn’t realize why I was so mad at him at first, but since the phone call it’s come to me. I’m terrified I’m destined to be like him, happy to have sex but unwilling to go much further.
The tree outside is thick with bright green leaves. It’s spring, the time of year I usually feel sexual and alive, when I tend to meet new boys. For the first time I wonder what kind of tree it is. An oak? Spruce? All this time I’ve come here and I still don’t know.
“What is that out there?” I ask. “An oak tree?”
Deirdre follows my gaze to the tree. She looks doubtful. She thinks I’m evading the question.
“Why do you want to know?” She watches me, waiting.
“I’m tired of it,” I tell her. “I’m sick of spending all my energy trying to get loved.”
An eyebrow raises. “Is that what you’re doing?”
“Isn’t it?” I want her to give me something here. She’s the therapist. Take this away, I want to yell. What was I doing here if she wasn’t going to change things for me?
“Is that why you’re with Leif?” she asks, more questions to answer my questions.
“I don’t know,” I say, annoyed. “Maybe. Yes.”
“And then what?” she asks. “What happens when you get it?”
I shrug. I don’t know what she’s getting at.
“Kerry,” she says. She leans forward, her eyes sharp. “This is where you always are. Trying to get loved. Waiting for something always out of reach.”
Tell me something I don’t know, I think.
“You just said it yourself. You’re missing your life, caught in this place that’s neither here nor there.”
I listen now.
“What is it that keeps you trapped in this place?” she asks.
I just look at her, unsure.
THE SUMMER BEFORE Leif and I will drive out together to Arizona, I go to another writing workshop in New York. This time I feel less anxious about leaving him. I’m excited to throw myself into the writing world again. I have more confidence, too. My story, about a retarded girl who gets gang-raped, was chosen for first prize in my college’s short story contest. I’ve also placed two other stories with small literary magazines. I didn’t get in to Arizona, but I plan to move there anyway, maybe take a class or two from the program, write a lot, and apply again. Leif will be starting his program in the fall. Our relationship isn’t at its best, but it’s secure. We’re moving across the country together. That’s got to count for something.
The first people I meet when I get to the conference are Melissa and Jen, and instantly the three of us become friends. I tell Jen my story about the three Jennifers from high school, and we laugh at our old selves, at the way we cared so much about belonging, even though in many ways I still feel the same way.
Within a day of arriving, there’s a boy. His name is Jason. He has dark eyes and messy hair. He smiles shyly when I catch him looking from across the room. He has a girlfriend, whose picture he showed me the first time we spoke, a girl named Leslie with long, curly blond hair. And, of course, I have a boyfriend. But this doesn’t stop me from thinking about him constantly.
At night, when we’re in our rooms I fantasize about him coming to me. I imagine a secret blossoming between us, the attraction too strong to control. During the day I try to time it so we’ll be in the same place, which isn’t easy since he’s a poet and I’m a fiction writer. I go for runs on the forest trails surrounding the campus, knowing he runs too, hoping we’ll have a chance meeting. For the first time since Leif and I got together, my senses feel sharp, heightened. I’m taken with everything—the way the sun dances against tree leaves, the purple irises lining a walking path. Everything appears rich with life, with meaning.
A few times Jason and I actually talk. Each time it goes something like this.
HIM: “How’s it going?”
ME: “Pretty good. How about you?”
HIM: “Good.”
[Ten seconds of uncomfortable silence.]
ME: “You write poetry?”
HIM: “Yeah, but I just started. I’m not any good.”
ME: “Oh, I’m sure that’s not true.”
HIM: [Looks down at his shuffling feet.]
ME: “I’d love to read some sometime.”
HIM: [Nervous laughter.]
[More uncomfortable silence.]
HIM: “I better get going.”
ME: “Sure. Me too.”
Jen, who has a class with him, rushes back from her workshop one day to tell me he read a poem called “Temptress.” She tries to recount it, an obscure poem about being pulled somewhere he knows he shouldn’t go. We squeal and jump up and down. To Jen, my crush is meaningless. She knows I have a boyfriend, who will visit in just a week or so. For me my crush is something more. It allows that old anxiety, the pressure in the air that tells me I might get evidence that I’m worth something. This boy might want me, making me matter. All along I thought being loved by one boy would be enough. Love would free me from my desperation. Here I am, though, no different from when I was a teenager.
Leif visits near the end of the workshop. We have sex in the small twin bed. Our movements are familiar, always the same. His hand on my breast, mine at his back. Then my leg, his neck. My hand goes to his hair, his mouth to my ear. Our kisses could be diagrammed—tongue here, bottom lip there. There are no surprises. The day he leaves, we ride down the elevator together so I can walk him to his car. Our plan is to meet in New Jersey, at my father’s apartment, and leave from there for our road trip west.
As we come off the elevator, Jason is there. My heart stops, then picks up tempo. Jason smiles nervously at me and nods at Leif. It is only a moment, but Leif sees it. I can feel the tension as we make our way through the parking lot.
“Do I need to be worried?” he asks when we arrive at his car.
“About what?” I reach for his hand.
“Leaving you here.” He squeezes back. “With all these guys.”
“Honey.” I smile and hug him, smelling his familiar scent. I love him. I do. But like Eli said long ago, I don’t know whether that matters. Maybe nothing is ever enough for me. I push away the thought. “You have nothing to worry about,” I tell him.
He gets in his car, and I watch him wind his way out of the lot. I walk back to the dorm, anxiety tugging at me. Jason is out there somewhere. How far will I actually go?
The last night of the workshop is the departure reception. I take a breath and go toward Jason. Any fool can see how irrational this is. He’s still in college. I’m moving across country. We can barely hold a conversation together. We both have long-term relationships. But I’m not thinking like this. I’m all body. All need. Going to him is only about this moment. It is only about getting to that place inside. That place so many boys have touched, but then it slips away, eluding me again.
Jason smiles, but he also looks around, as though looking for an escape.
“Have I showed you Leslie?” he asks, reaching for his wallet. I stop him with my hand.
“I’ve seen her,” I say.
He looks at me, his mouth tight, and waits.
“You should come by my room tonight,” I say quietly.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s your room?”
“Camden Hall. Room 515.”
He smiles and nods at a guy nearby. It’s one of his friends. I look at the guy and he gives me a funny smile. Jason must have told him about me. About us and this little thing we have.
“Room 515, huh?”
I smile.
“All right,” he says. “Maybe I will.”
He goes to walk away, and I grab his arm, afraid he won’t really come. I quickly try to think of something else to say.
“It will be our little secret” is what I come up with.
Later I lie in bed, waiting. There is a Lorrie Moore story in which the main character waits for her lover to arrive. She splays her hair just so on the pillow, pulls her nightgown down to reveal cleavage. She holds her position for hours, her back aching from pushing out her breasts, but her lover never comes. In the story, it’s funny. But I don’t feel humorous right now. I’m leaving tomorrow. Leif and I are about to start a new life in Tucson. I try not to think about that. Instead, I focus on each sound I hear, the elevator door opening and closing, footsteps shuffling along the carpet, voices, water running through pipes. I wait, my eyes open, until four a.m. But just like in the story, Jason never comes.