Be Mine (20 page)

From the floor, the crowd around me seemed monstrous. Tropical birds—but hungry, wild ones. I couldn't, at first, stand up, then Garrett took my hand and pulled me to my feet, and the pale girl
(Oh my god, oh my god, I'm so sorry, I'm such an idiot
) brushed off my skirt with her hand.

"Thank you," I said to both of them when I was standing again.

I looked down. My panty hose had been torn, and both of my knees were skinned, bleeding, long stripes of blood already dripping from my knees to my calves.

"Mrs. Seymour," Garrett said, looking at the blood. "Jesus Christ."

The girl, again,
Oh my god, oh my god.

But, truly, there was no pain, and the wound was superficial, I thought. That's why there was so much blood. I knew. I'd spent years and years tending to such scrapes. I assured them I was fine, that I just needed some paper towels, that no serious damage had been done.

And it hadn't.

I'd simply been knocked to the earth by the spirit of spring, which had continued its colorful, raucous babble—completely indifferent, uninterrupted, just as it would have, I thought, if it had killed me.

A
FTER
I'd cleaned myself up in the women's room, stopped the bleeding with damp paper towels, thrown my panty hose in the trash can (luckily it was warm enough I didn't need them anyway), I went back to my office. Garrett was outside it, reading, again, the poem on my door.
(But the guts were out for the crows to eat)
"Mrs. Seymour," he said. "Are you okay? I—"

"I'm fine," I said. "Really. I'm fine."

He looked at my knees.

The bleeding had stopped, but the skin was torn, a brightly raw pink on my left knee, a bruise-colored scab already forming on my right. He winced.

I opened my door, and he followed me in. We sat down across from one another, and I said, "Well, Garrett, before all that, I just wanted to talk to you about your plan. Your enlistment. I just wondered—is it too late? I mean, have you really thought this through? Don't you think you should finish school first, and then if you still want to, you can join then? Maybe after things, after the war, assuming it
ends,
ever, maybe you can—?"

"It's too late," Garrett said. He was nodding, smiling. "It's really nice that you're so worried. But, yeah, it's too late, and I feel really happy, really sure. I'm completely committed, Mrs. Seymour. It's what I want to do."

Garrett was wearing a gray T-shirt with
MARINES
written across his chest in what looked to me like incongruously girlish script. The T-shirt was so new, so fresh and stiff, it could have stood up by itself. It had never been worn until this day, I could tell—never been washed, never been put in a dryer. Inside it, Garrett's shoulders looked narrow, and bony, and I remembered the feel of them, pressed against my skirt, his tears on my blouse, his skinned knees bleeding on both of us.

I said, "Oh, Garrett," but he was smiling.

He said, "I'm really sorry, but I have to go to class, Mrs. Seymour."

He stood up, and I opened my door for him, and before more than an inch of light from the hallway had cracked between the door and the frame, I knew what was on the other side.

A scent, a vibration, a shadow, Bram.

He had his arms crossed. He said, "Hi, Mrs. Seymour, I was just reading your poem here. Hey, Garrett. Gonna be late for class, aren't you?"

Then Bram looked from my neck to my knees and said, "What the hell happened to you?"

"I
DON'T
like him. I don't want you alone in your office with him," Bram said later over dinner in the efficiency.

Chinese. I'd picked it up on the way over from work. Bram liked Mongolian beef, like Jon. I got chicken fried rice for myself. We hadn't turned the lights on. Outside, it was not yet dark, but there was a steady icy rain pouring down. Over the course of the afternoon, something cold and purple had blown in out of the west—winter back for one last blast—and the temperature had dropped, and this frozen rain had started. In the shadows, Bram's face looked featureless across the table from me, nothing but eyes and teeth.

"Bram," I said. "I've known Garrett since he was five years old. He's my son's best friend"—which wasn't true, but sounded, I thought, reasonable enough—"and there's
certainly—
"

"Have you been getting any more love notes?" Bram asked. He'd finished his plate of food. He'd put his fork down at the edge of that emptiness.

"No," I said. "I haven't."

"Well," he said, "since you know now that the notes weren't from me, who do you think wrote them?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Yeah, you do," he said.

I put my own fork down. I asked, knowing the answer, "Who?"

"Garrett Thompson, obviously," Bram said.

I inhaled. I said, "Well, Bram, even if it was—"

Bram stood up. He said, "Whether or not it was, that motherfucker better watch himself."

Bram came over to me at the table and took my hand, pulled me up to stand against him. His erection against me felt uncomfortable, insistent. He put his mouth to my neck, one hand at the small of my back, pinning me to him, and the other on my breast.

W
HEN
I woke, I realized it was much later than I should have slept. I'd forgotten to set the alarm, and the sun pouring through the window was high and bright. I could barely open my eyes, and when I finally did, they were filled with water, a landscape of brilliance and tears before me, painted on the blank space of the ceiling.

I didn't bother to hurry out from under the sheet, or to rouse Bram. Without looking at the clock, I knew it was already too late. My first class on Thursdays started an hour and a half before the sun could have gotten this high in the sky.

I lay there, resigned to it.

(Too late, too late, no hurry now)

And, with my eyes full of water and sun—too bright to see—I was reminded of how, when Chad was only three years old, Jon and I took him to Lake Michigan after a trip to the west side of the state, after visiting my father. It had been July, a day so bright blue that, even with my sunglasses on, to glance toward the water was blinding—that vast, frothing nothingness, impossible to really look at, shining as if it were generating its own super-radiance, a kind of white fire all the way to the horizon.

Before we'd gotten to the beach, I'd imagined laying our towels down, then taking Chad by the hand, walking him down to the edge of the water, letting his pudgy little feet baby-step themselves across the damp shingle of sand, over the layer of pebbles between the shore and the water, then his toes into the lake. Maybe we would make our way farther, up to his tummy, until he got scared, and then I'd take him in my arms, or pass him over to Jon, and we'd reassure him that if he stayed with us, he was safe.

But, while I was spreading the towels out, and Jon was taking his shoes off, shoving his car keys into the toes, tying the string around his bathing shorts tighter, each of us thinking the other was watching our son, Chad ran straight to the lake, and into the waves. I looked down at my side, where my son had been standing, and there was nothing.

When I turned and saw that he wasn't with Jon (two seconds having passed, really, or maybe only one), I opened my mouth and heard the words
Where's Chad?
come out, and then the bright empty shock of it crossing Jon's face. He looked toward the lake and said, pointing, "There!"

But what did
there
mean on a day of such luminous nothingness?

The water, an illusion, the sun smeared over it—
there
did not exist.

It was as indistinct as
nowhere.

I was a blind woman in a bathing suit looking for the silver glint of a needle, and then both of us were running toward the water.

"There!" Jon continued shouting. "There!"

But there wasn't
anything
there. Water, sun; sun, water.
Nothing.

And, then, suddenly, I saw him—a silhouette at the edge of the world, just before the world crashed over him in layers of brilliance and darkness, a huge flume of it snatching the silhouette off the edge of the horizon.

And then I was in the water, too, searching it wildly, unable to see anything but my own fingernails, painted red, and the pink back of Jon's neck as he bent over searching the water, still shouting, "There!
There!
"

White foot—or fish?—I lunged at it.

Grabbed it.

A miracle.

Something nature had snatched away, then tossed back up to me. My baby. Dragged out of Lake Michigan, laughing. I held his squirming happy form to me for too long. He started to cry.

After we dried off and calmed down enough to even speak to one another again, Jon and I packed up.

We drove home, in stunned silence.

In bed that night, we spoke of it in monosyllables.

"God."

"Lord."

"If—"

"I know."

"Fuck."

"Oh. Jon."

"
So
close."

"I can't—"

"I know."

Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw it:

That nothing,
there,
blazing, with my baby at the center of it.

"What are you thinking about, babe?" Bram asked. He'd propped himself up on one elbow and was looking down into my face. The shadow he cast there made it possible for me to open my eyes. I looked at him, and said, "I'm thinking we're too late."

"What difference does it make?" he asked, pulling me to him. "I can't think of anywhere I'd rather be than here."

"What about your class?" I asked.

"Fuck the class," he said. "They'll figure something out." He kissed me. He pushed the sheet away from my body, ran his hand from my neck to my hips. "You're so beautiful," he said. "You're like a sculpture."

His kissed my shoulder, where he'd bitten me before. He ran his tongue down the inside of my arm to the elbow. He moved down to my legs, kissed the skinned knees—first the left, which had begun to heal, and the right, which stung under his lips and made me flinch. "I'm sorry," he whispered, then moved back up, kissed my shoulder again, and then moved down my arm, from the elbow to my wrist. He kissed it. He bit it lightly. He took the wrist in his hand and pinned it over my head, then the other. He said, "I want to tie you up and make you come."

It surprised me how my whole body was electrified, involuntarily, at this suggestion—a tuning fork struck somewhere in my stomach, which caused my back to arch toward it, my nipples to harden without even being touched.

Bram got up and picked his pants up off the floor, and took from his pocket a length of rope so obvious I couldn't believe he'd been carrying it there and I hadn't noticed.

I looked at it.

He turned, smiling, and held it up so I could see it better—a laundry line, the kind my grandmother always kept strung between two trees in her backyard. I saw her, incongruously, suddenly, in a pink dress—the kind of dress she would never have worn, with big pockets stuffed with clothespins. My grandmother, twenty years dead. Bram snapped the rope and said, "Your husband ever tie you up?"

"No," I said. I was breathing so hard I could barely get the words out.

"Well," he said, and smiled. "I'm going to tie you up."

At first, despite the desire, the flicker of fear, I felt a little foolish, lying there quietly on my back, patient and naked, waiting for Bram to secure my wrists over my head, and then to tie the rope to the leg of a chair he'd hauled over to the side of the futon. I thought that, to give this anything more than symbolic significance, shouldn't I be struggling to get away? Or at least pretending to struggle?

Instead, I lay still, with my eyes closed, thinking, despite myself, about the office, about my class. It would have started and ended already. How long, I wondered, had my students sat and waited? Had they finally huffed in exasperation? Or did they high-five each other, hurrying out the door?
(Yeah!No class!)
Did someone go to the English department secretary and tell her that Mrs. Seymour hadn't shown up? Would Beth try to call me at home, or simply e-mail me, or just shrug?

But when I realized that the rope was tight enough around my wrists that, to get away now, I would have to knock the chair over, scramble away on my injured knees—that I would be awkward, trying to get away, and easily overpowered, and that Bram was spreading my legs, and moving between them, kissing my thighs, so that I could feel his hot breath there, and I opened my eyes and looked straight at the ceiling, I forgot about class, about my skinned knees, about Jon, Garrett, Chad, my father, about being a middle-aged English teacher on a futon—and my hips strained skyward, and it was all sky then, as he eased two fingers into me, and I thrashed against the rope despite myself, futilely, and Bram hardly needed to touch me with his tongue before I started to come.

A
FTERWARD
, still with my arms tied above me, as Bram slid in and out of me, I thought—is this what it is? To have sex purely for pleasure? Is this the great gift of growing older, of having procreation and marriage and the future over, to be with someone without grasping for
more,
without wanting anything in exchange for what I was giving—the negative capability of it. This pure pleasure was all there needed to be between us.

But, as I was thinking it, Bram looked down into my face and said, "Remember, babe, you're all mine."

I
TRIED
to slip into my office without being noticed, but Beth whirled around at her computer the second I stepped in and shouted, "Sherry! Are you okay? Why weren't you in class?"

"Oh," I said. "I overslept. I'm—not feeling that well."

She looked at me for a second, then said, "Well, you look great."

On my voice mail, there were seven messages.

Two were from Beth—the first one checking to see if I was in my office, the second confirming that I wasn't and that I'd missed my class. One was from a student telling me she'd left her paper in my mailbox. One was Sue, who'd heard from Robert Z that I'd missed my class, wondering if I'd be missing my afternoon class as well, and saying, "I hope you're okay," with the cold concern of a colleague, not a friend. And two messages from Jon.