The Beginners (24 page)
Authors: Rebecca Wolff
As Cherry neared the end of her story I couldn’t help but hold it up for comparison against Theo’s approach to me, so different, and so differently received. It occurred to me that he had never once kissed me, there in the mill. I felt slighted, a hole opening in the fabric of the memory of that night. I regarded Cherry’s full lower lip: pink, tremulous, unsuspecting. I allowed myself for a moment to re-envision the scene at the mill. There I was, seated appealingly on the table, Theo’s thin jacket under my bare ass. What if I had expressed some appropriate reservations. “Mr. Motherwell—Theo—I am too young. I’ve never done this before. What about Raquel?” What if I had attempted to hold him at bay, to demur, to defer? Again I called up the scene, and myself murmuring entreaties, disclosing discomfort. I thought it quite possible that with the addition of only a very few protests on my part, Theo’s already assured advance could have been made even more so. I could have drawn him out. He might have spoken to me, might have murmured to me, cajoling, might have kissed me; I could have tasted his mouth. I remembered now, with surprising olfactory nuance, the thick, almost burnt scent of his skin, his hair, his breath, as he had brought his face near mine on his way down between my legs. Wine, wood smoke, dried sweat, inexorability.
“And then,” Cherry continued, “I didn’t know where to go, because I didn’t want to go home, and I didn’t want to make your parents suspicious, so I went over to Randy’s house and sat on his back stairs for a while, but he didn’t come home. Finally I went to my house. I was completely freaked out. I felt like I must have done something to make Theo think that I wanted to . . . or maybe it was the clothes I was wearing. Do you remember, I had on my white T-shirt that says ‘Juicy,’ and my black shorts that are kind of high . . . but Mrs. Downey says that it’s never the fault of the victim. ‘That’s typical victim thinking,’ she says, and no matter what, it’s not my fault. . . .” Again, the sharp relief she felt at being absolved from blame by this hygienic authority caused her voice to break and her eyes to fill with tears.
“And here’s the other thing I wanted to tell you. . . . That day that Randy found me at the mill, when you were supposed to come meet me . . . I . . . I did it with him.” She blushed and looked away from my eyes for a moment, then back, and continued somewhat apologetically. “I think I was just so upset, and he was being so sweet to me. He’s been
so
sweet to me. . . . I really wanted to talk to you about it. I always thought that we’d tell each other right away when we lost our virginity”—as though we had a collective hymen—“and then it was like the opposite, it was like I lost my best friend at the same time that I lost my virginity. . . . I just felt like I couldn’t tell anybody, not even you . . . or maybe especially not you. You’re so good, and you never do anything with boys, and I just felt like such a slut!” Cherry burst back into tears now, her dark eyes remaining fixed on mine this time, beseechingly, and her nose pinking up. “I got home and just crawled into bed. I didn’t feel that well the whole next day, and . . . I still don’t feel well . . . I . . .”
so
sweet to me. . . . I really wanted to talk to you about it. I always thought that we’d tell each other right away when we lost our virginity”—as though we had a collective hymen—“and then it was like the opposite, it was like I lost my best friend at the same time that I lost my virginity. . . . I just felt like I couldn’t tell anybody, not even you . . . or maybe especially not you. You’re so good, and you never do anything with boys, and I just felt like such a slut!” Cherry burst back into tears now, her dark eyes remaining fixed on mine this time, beseechingly, and her nose pinking up. “I got home and just crawled into bed. I didn’t feel that well the whole next day, and . . . I still don’t feel well . . . I . . .”
This would have been the moment at which I should have offered some comfort, should have said that it sounded like she’d been through quite an ordeal, should have effected a rapprochement. I should have asked her why she had been staying home from school—
Was anything wrong?
I should at least have passed along the kind regards of Teresa and Christine and the others. But I did not. I was thinking how odd it was that I had not even considered seeking Cherry out to tell her about my own Very Special Beginning—but then these exploits, like Mr. Penrose’s magazines, seemed to exist in a different realm from our friendship, which, after all, had been based in childhood, in childhood’s innocence. Wasn’t this what we both had been ever so swiftly paddling away from, each in her own little boat?
Was anything wrong?
I should at least have passed along the kind regards of Teresa and Christine and the others. But I did not. I was thinking how odd it was that I had not even considered seeking Cherry out to tell her about my own Very Special Beginning—but then these exploits, like Mr. Penrose’s magazines, seemed to exist in a different realm from our friendship, which, after all, had been based in childhood, in childhood’s innocence. Wasn’t this what we both had been ever so swiftly paddling away from, each in her own little boat?
After a full minute of my silence it must have become clear that I was not going to offer any of the expected condolences. Cherry’s face screwed up into an unbecoming ball and she sobbed. “Doesn’t anything matter to you anymore?”
I WOULD NOT SAY that nothing mattered to me. I felt protective of my new life with Raquel and Theo, of its special distinction. I did not want to lose the hope it offered me, hope for a future in which nothing that I already knew would continue. In which I was already different.
It is not true that nothing mattered to me. It is more accurate to say that for me such seemingly pressing questions as the ones Cherry asked, albeit indirectly—who to trust, of whom to be afraid—had the quality of dilemmas faced in a dream, a lucid one, one from which I could wake up whenever I wished; one whose decisions I could therefore delay making indefinitely, and whose implications would only grow richer, more fascinating, the longer I delayed both decision-making and awaking.
I looked up from my lap just in time to see one large, pure, crystalline teardrop fall into Cherry’s lap, onto the hand in her own lap, where it lay still and quiet. I looked up farther, to her face, where in her eyes more tears gathered, silently, waiting to follow their leader. I looked up further, above her dark hair, to the stony face of the mill, whose dark windows had once contained and reflected our shared majesty, our secret royal ancestry, our unlimited power and freedom. I looked above the mill’s peaked roofline into the deep blue October sky and saw my real freedom moving, like an alternate sky, or like a veil dropped over the sky, over and above any of these realms I had known before. My real, true freedom was a mystery—was, itself,
mystery:
I didn’t need to know anything more about Cherry, or about myself, or about the Motherwells, for the moment. When all was revealed to me, when the veil was dropped from my one, true face, then I would truly be a prisoner.
mystery:
I didn’t need to know anything more about Cherry, or about myself, or about the Motherwells, for the moment. When all was revealed to me, when the veil was dropped from my one, true face, then I would truly be a prisoner.
CHERRY LEFT ME THERE at the mill. She did not say goodbye, just stared at me as I sat silent, and then rose up clumsily, stiffly, like a doll with no hinge at the waist, and walked away. I watched her figure moving down the road, then climbing the hill toward the big white house on the green.
29.
Mid-October
Y
ou’re never going to understand the profound sense of alienation that I experience when in nature. Are you.” Raquel spoke somewhat rhetorically to Theo. I was listening, crestfallen and relieved in equal measure to find myself back in my usual role, a lucky bystander to their extended collision. My own run-in with Theo did not seem to have altered this relationship, and I do not know what I would have done with the transfer of Theo’s full weight onto me—the attempt to visualize such a development left me with yet another blank spot in my cortex, a blot of unthinking—though I allowed myself to glance at him often in the simple, unpredicated hope that I might find him glancing at me.
ou’re never going to understand the profound sense of alienation that I experience when in nature. Are you.” Raquel spoke somewhat rhetorically to Theo. I was listening, crestfallen and relieved in equal measure to find myself back in my usual role, a lucky bystander to their extended collision. My own run-in with Theo did not seem to have altered this relationship, and I do not know what I would have done with the transfer of Theo’s full weight onto me—the attempt to visualize such a development left me with yet another blank spot in my cortex, a blot of unthinking—though I allowed myself to glance at him often in the simple, unpredicated hope that I might find him glancing at me.
We were out in the woods behind the high school, on a sunny late afternoon, following one of the many paths forged by kids in their desperate search for a quiet place to smoke pot at recess. This path, if followed for three-quarters of a mile, took one all the way to the muddy, overgrown edge of the reservoir. The fallen leaves on the ground seemed to hiss.
“Well, yes, I do understand it, I believe.” He stopped on the path. “Probably not in the way that you would want me to. Talk and think, that’s all you ever do. When you have only to act.” He retreated from this typically abbreviated outburst, his back to us, hands clasped at his ass, looking at the ground, or at a stunted tree trunk growing diagonally out of the ground. He turned around quietly and we resumed our walk.
“I hate it when you say things like that. Things that ring so true. When it seems to me that you could just as easily say ‘I love an orange when it’s in segments’ as you could say ‘Niggers are filthy,’ or ‘Your mother sucks cocks in hell.’ You are just as much of a monster as I am, Theo.”
She watched his face very closely as she said that. Then she turned on her heel and ran off the path, into the forest. She ran a little clumsily but with great force, like a bear, or a stone that has turned to flesh. Soon she was out of sight.
We walked in the direction of her flight for a bit, then Theo suggested—and my heartbeat quickened at the suggestion—that we’d better wait for her at home. “That way she’ll know where to find us,” he said. We turned around and walked in silence.
IN THE HOUSE Theo went to make hot cocoa in the kitchen and I wandered up to his study. The bed was pushed against the wall in the corner and all the bedding folded into a narrow pallet in the middle of the floor. He’d been meditating. I wanted to look at his books.
And I wanted to ask him what had happened to Raquel to make her like this, to rip her off from the surface of the world like a decal. There must have been, I was convinced, some traumatic, some decisive occurrence: a schism of some sort. Someone must have done something to her. The fact that she never spoke of any such event almost seemed to me to be proof. There were so many things, in those days, that I took for granted. For instance, that none of the more ominous eventualities would pan out. That’s how we go on living our lives, after all: hoping for, if not the best, at least not the worst.
THE BOOKS on his shelf looked as though he had made good use of them, traveled with them, slept with them under his pillow, stuck them in backpacks and pockets. I picked out one and flipped open its stained, dog-eared cover. Theo’s footsteps were on the carpeted staircase and he came in with two cups steaming in his hands. I turned to him with the book like a giant clamshell I had wrestled open.
“What are you looking at?” He stepped close, setting down the mugs on top of the bookcase, and took the book from me, and it all started to feel as though it had already happened. “Ahh. The downfall of Western civilization.
Cogito ergo fuckface
. This man has destroyed more young lives than crack cocaine, broken condoms, and plastic surgery all rolled up into one secret weapon.
Cogito ergo fuckface
. This man has destroyed more young lives than crack cocaine, broken condoms, and plastic surgery all rolled up into one secret weapon.
“Here’s another one of my favorites. The tragically flawed Marquis de Sade.” He pulled a thick paperback from the shelf, allowing it to fall open where the spine of the book was cracked from frequent use.
“This man had a notion, a precursor to the modern regulatory axiom about your right to smoke that cigar extending only as far as the tip of my nose. De Sade believed that his right to smoke a cigar extended as far as using the nearest eyeball for an ashtray. He sewed up a woman’s vagina, once. I mean he wrote a philosophical tract in which this act exemplified his beliefs. He had great sex, with virgins and old women and young men alike. Every orifice was available to him.” Theo’s cool gray eyes were steadily trained on my hot face, as though he was waiting for me to signal understanding before he moved forward. I tried a smile, but it felt as though I might cry. I was waiting again, inside that space inside, which he had made for me, in which I waited for him. In which I waited in fear for him to fuck me again. In which I could not wait for him to fuck me again.
“Basically, his concept was that he could do what he wanted to when he wanted to, to whomever he wished. Not because it felt right in the moment, or because he suffered from delusions of mutuality. But because he felt free to partake in the illimitability of his actions. He loved asses. His sister’s ass, for example. I don’t know if he even had a sister. He just loved a nice hot asshole.” Theo paused for a moment, as if in contemplation. A certain tension built up in the room.
“But the thing that makes him so lovable, in the end, is his fallibility. After all, what about the day when someone decides to hit you over the head with a frying pan? Whether your name is de Sade or Motherwell or Kissinger, your head gets opened. Your head, my frying pan; my frying pan, your head.” His restive gaze sifted through my hair, fastened on my earlobe. His last words rang in the room like some kind of anti-clarion call. The silence that hung behind them was enforced as if by a curfew.
He moved past me to the bookshelf and put the book back. We sat down on the floor with our mugs, as there were no chairs. An uneventful episode. Nothing would happen, after all, between us, ever again, and I noted the voluminous relief I felt, and an equally gushing disappointment. I had just lifted my cup to drink when he put out his hand toward me and touched my breast through my T-shirt, on the top part, where it slopes positively toward the nipple. I held my cup in midair: it was the only thing I could look at in the room. I briefly considered whether we would be able to hear the door opening, closing, over whatever sounds we might make.
He said, “Are you finished with that?” I wasn’t, but he took the cup out of my hand, set it down, and pulled my shirt over my head, all one motion, like a raptor plucking a field mouse. He put his hands on my bare shoulders and pushed with a constant pressure; I moved backward and down, supporting myself on my hands and then my elbows until I was flat on the folded blanket. I thought he might now kiss me—my mouth was open—but he didn’t. I opened my legs. He took his hand away from my breast and rubbed the crotch of my jeans, hard, then unbuttoned them. I lifted my hips off the blanket and he pulled the jeans roughly down around my ankles, along with my underwear. I was exposed to the air.
This time was very different from the first. There was no sense in which I was attended to. I supposed that was appropriate: I was no longer a beginner. Now it was all for him. When he found his release, within five minutes, the hair on the back of my head was matted from his shoving and I felt like a piece of old wood, beaten against the shore by waves. Cold and porous.
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