The Virgin Suicides (9 page)

He didn’t notice a single face as he took a seat. He saw neither teacher nor students, and was aware only of the heavenly light in the room, an orange glow from the autumnal foliage outside. The room seemed full of a sweet viscous liquid, a honey nearly light as air, which he breathed in. Time slowed down, and in his left ear the ringing of the cosmic Om started up clear as a telephone. When we suggested these details had been laced with the same THC in his blood, Trip Fontaine thrust a finger into the air, the only time his hands stopped shaking during the entire interview. “I know what it’s like to be high,” he said. “This was different.” In the orange light the students’ heads looked like sea anemones, undulating quietly, and the silence of the room was that of the ocean floor. “Every second is eternal,” Trip told us, describing how as he sat in his desk the girl in front of him, for no apparent reason, had turned around and looked at him. He couldn’t say she was beautiful because all he could see were her eyes. The rest of her face—the pulpy lips, the blond sideburn fuzz, the nose with its candy-pink translucent nostrils—registered dimly as the two blue eyes lifted him on a sea wave and held him suspended. “She was the still point of the turning world,” he told us, quoting Eliot, whose
Collected Poems
he had found on the shelf of the detoxification center. For the eternity that Lux Lisbon looked at him, Trip Fontaine looked back, and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive real life, still plagued him, even now in the desert, with his looks and health wasted. “You never know what’ll set the memory off,” he told us. “A baby’s face. A bell on a cat’s collar. Anything.”

They didn’t exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen. Even in sensible school shoes she shuffled as though barefoot, and the baggy apparel Mrs. Lisbon bought for her only increased her appeal, as though after undressing she had put on whatever was handy. In corduroys her thighs rubbed together, buzzing, and there was always at least one untidy marvel to unravel him: an untucked shirttail, a sock with a hole, a ripped seam showing underarm hair. She carted her books from class to class but never opened them. Her pens and pencils looked as temporary as Cinderella’s broom. When she smiled, her mouth showed too many teeth, but at night Trip Fontaine dreamed of being bitten by each one.

He didn’t know the first step in pursuing her because he’d always been the one pursued. Little by little, from the girls who came up to his bedroom, he learned where Lux lived, though he had to be discreet in his questions in order to avoid provoking their jealousy. He began driving by the Lisbon house in hopes of getting a glimpse of her, or the consolation prize of a sister. Unlike us, Trip Fontaine never mixed up the Lisbon girls, but from the outset saw Lux as their shining pinnacle. He opened the windows of his Trans Am as he drove by, turning up his eight-track so that she might hear his favorite song in her bedroom. Other times, unable to control the riot in his gut, he floored the accelerator, leaving behind as a love token only the smell of burning rubber.

He didn’t understand how she had bewitched him, nor why having done so she promptly forgot his existence, and in desperate moods he asked his mirror why the only girl he was crazy about was the only girl not crazy about him. For a long time he resorted to his time-tested methods of attracting girls, brushing his hair back as Lux passed, or clomping his boots up on the desktop, and once he even lowered his tinted glasses to give her the boon of his eyes. But she didn’t look.

The truth was, even the wimpiest boys were more adept than Trip at asking girls out, because their sparrows’ chests and knock-knees had taught them perseverance, whereas Trip had never even had to dial a girl’s phone number. It was all new to him: the memorization of strategic speeches, the trial runs of possible conversations, the yogic deep breathing, all leading up to the blind, headlong dive into the staticky sea of telephone lines. He hadn’t suffered the eternity of the ring about to be picked up, didn’t know the heart rush of hearing that incomparable voice suddenly linked with his own, the sense it gave of being too close to even see her, of being actually
inside her ear
. He had never felt the pain of lackluster responses, the dread of “Oh … hi,” or the quick annihilation of “Who?” His beauty had left him without cunning, and so in despair he confessed his passion to his father and Donald. They understood his predicament, and after calming him with a snifter of Sambuca, gave him advice only two people experienced with the burden of secret love could have given. First of all, they told him on no account to call Lux on the telephone. “It’s all subtlety,” Donald said. “It’s all nuance.” Rather than making overt declarations, they suggested that Trip speak to Lux only about the most mundane things, the weather, school assignments, anything that gave him an opportunity to communicate with the silent but unerring language of eye contact. They made him get rid of his tinted lenses, and keep his hair out of his face with hair spray. The next day Trip Fontaine took a seat in the Science Wing and waited for Lux to pass by on the way to her locker. The rising sun turned the honeycomb panels the color of a blush. Each time the ramp doors opened, Trip saw Lux’s face float forward, before her eyes, nose, and mouth rearranged into the face of some other girl. He took this as a bad omen, as though Lux were continually disguising herself in order to evade him. He feared she would never come, or, worse, that she would.

After a week without seeing her, he decided to take extraordinary measures. The next Friday afternoon he left his carrel in the Science Wing to go to assembly. It was the first assembly he had attended in three years, because skipping assembly was easier than skipping any other period, and Trip preferred to spend the time smoking the hookah pipe running from his glove compartment. He had no idea where Lux would sit, and lingered at the drinking fountain, intending to follow her in. Against the advice of his father and Donald, he put on sunglasses to conceal his staring down the hall. Three times his heart jumped at the decoys of Lux’s sisters, but Mr. Woodhouse had already introduced the day’s speaker—a local television meteorologist—by the time Lux came out of the girls’ bathroom. Trip Fontaine saw her with a concentration so focused he ceased to exist. The world at that moment contained only Lux. A fuzzy aura surrounded her, a shimmering as of atoms breaking apart, brought on, we later decided, from so much blood draining out of Trip’s head. She passed right by him without noticing, and in that instant he smelled not cigarettes as he expected, but watermelon gum.

He followed her into the colonial clarity of the auditorium with its Monticello dome, Doric pilasters, and imitation gas lanterns we used to fill with milk. He sat next to her in the last row, and though he avoided looking at her, it was no use: with organs of sense he hadn’t realized he possessed, Trip Fontaine felt Lux beside him, registered her body temperature, heartbeat, respiration rate, all the pumping and flow of her body. The auditorium lights dimmed as the weatherman began showing slides, and soon they were in the dark together, alone despite four hundred students and forty-five teachers. Paralyzed by love, Trip didn’t move once as tornadoes flashed on the screen, and it was fifteen minutes before he got up the courage to place a sliver of forearm along the armrest. Once he did, an inch of space still separated them, so over the next twenty minutes, with infinitesimal advances that made his whole body sweat, Trip Fontaine moved his arm toward hers. As all other eyes watched Hurricane Zelda tear toward a coastal Caribbean town, the hairs on Trip’s arm brushed Lux’s, and electricity surged through the new circuit. Without turning, without breathing, Lux responded with equal pressure, then Trip applied more, she responded, and so on and so on, until they were joined at the elbow. Right then, it happened: a prankster in front, cupping his hands over his mouth, made a farting noise, and the room rippled with laughter. Lux blanched, pulling her arm away, but Trip Fontaine took the opportunity to whisper the first words he had ever spoken in her ear: “That must’ve been Conley,” he said. “His ass is grass.”

In response, she didn’t so much as nod. But Trip, still leaning toward her, continued: “I’m going to ask your old man if I can take you out.”

“Fat chance,” said Lux, not looking at him. The lights came up, and all around them students began clapping. Trip waited for the applause to peak before he spoke again. Then he said, “First I’m going to come over and watch the tube at your house. This Sunday. Then I’m going to ask you out.” Again he waited for her to speak, but the only sign she’d heard came from her hand which, turning palm up, suggested he could do what he liked. Trip stood up to go, but before doing so leaned over the back of his vacated seat as the words he’d been keeping down for weeks came pouring out.

“You’re a stone fox,” he said, and took off.

Trip Fontaine became the first boy after Peter Sissen to enter the Lisbon house alone. He did so simply by telling Lux when he would arrive and leaving her to tell her parents. None of us could explain how we had missed him, especially as he insisted during his interview that he had taken no stealthy measures, driving up in plain sight and parking his Trans Am in front of an elm stump so it wouldn’t get covered with sap. He’d had his hair cut for the occasion, and instead of a Western getup wore a white shirt and black pants like a caterer. Lux met him at the door and, without saying much (she was keeping track of her knitting), led him to his assigned seat in the living room. He sat on the couch beside Mrs. Lisbon, with Lux on her other side. Trip Fontaine told us the girls paid him little attention, certainly less than a school heartthrob would expect. Therese sat in the corner, holding a stuffed iguana and explaining to Bonnie what iguanas ate, how they reproduced, and what their natural habitat was like. The only sister who spoke to Trip was Mary, who kept offering to refill his Coke. A Walt Disney special was on, and the Lisbons watched it with the acceptance of a family accustomed to bland entertainment, laughing together at the same lame stunts, sitting up during the rigged climaxes. Trip Fontaine didn’t see any signs of twistedness in the girls, but later he did say, “You would have killed yourself just to have something to do.” Mrs. Lisbon oversaw Lux’s knitting. Before the channel could be changed, she consulted
TV Guide
to judge the program’s suitability. The curtains were thick as canvas. A few spindly plants sat on the windowsill, and this differed so much from his own leafy living room (Mr. Fontaine was a gardening buff) that Trip would have felt he was on a dead planet had it not been for the pulsing life of Lux at the sofa’s other end. He could see her bare feet every time she put them up on the coffee table. The soles were black, her toenails flecked with pink polish. Each time they appeared, Mrs. Lisbon tapped them with a knitting needle, driving them back under the table.

And that was all that happened. Trip didn’t get to sit next to Lux, nor speak to her, nor even look at her, but the bright nearby fact of her presence burned in his mind. At ten o’clock, taking a cue from his wife, Mr. Lisbon slapped Trip on the back and said, “Well, son, we usually hit the hay about now.” Trip shook his hand, then Mrs. Lisbon’s colder one, and Lux stepped forward to escort him out. She must have seen the situation was futile, because she hardly looked at him during the short trip to the door. She walked with her head down, digging in her ear for wax, and looked up as she opened the door to give him a sad smile that promised only frustration. Trip Fontaine left crushed, knowing that all he could hope for was another night on the sofa beside Mrs. Lisbon. He walked across the lawn, unmown since Cecilia died. He sat in his car, gazing at the house, watching as downstairs lights traded places with those upstairs, and then, one by one, went out. He thought about Lux getting ready for bed, and just the idea of her holding a toothbrush excited him more than the full-fledged nudity he saw in his own bedroom nearly every night. He laid his head back on the headrest and opened his mouth to ease the constriction in his chest, when suddenly the air inside the car churned. He felt himself grasped by his long lapels, pulled forward and pushed back, as a creature with a hundred mouths started sucking the marrow from his bones. She said nothing as she came on like a starved animal, and he wouldn’t have known who it was if it hadn’t been for the taste of her watermelon gum, which after the first few torrid kisses he found himself chewing. She was no longer wearing pants but a flannel nightgown. Her feet, wet from the lawn, gave off a pasture smell. He felt her clammy shins, her hot knees, her bristly thighs, and then with terror he put his finger in the ravenous mouth of the animal leashed below her waist. It was as though he had never touched a girl before; he felt fur and an oily substance like otter insulation. Two beasts lived in the car, one above, snuffling and biting him, and one below, struggling to get out of its damp cage. Valiantly he did what he could to feed them, placate them, but the sense of his insufficiency grew, and after a few minutes, with only the words “Gotta get back before bed check,” Lux left him, more dead than alive.

Even though that lightning attack lasted only three minutes, it left its mark on him. He spoke of it as one might of a religious experience, a visitation or vision, any rupture into this life from beyond that cannot be described in words. “Sometimes I think I dreamed it,” he told us, recalling the voracity of those hundred mouths that had sucked out his juice in the dark, and even though he went on to enjoy an enviable love life, Trip Fontaine confessed it was all anticlimactic. Never again were his intestines yanked with such delectable force, nor did he ever again feel the sensation of being entirely wetted by another’s saliva. “I felt like a stamp,” he said. Years later he was still amazed by Lux’s singleness of purpose, her total lack of inhibitions, her mythic mutability that allowed her to possess three or four arms at once. “Most people never taste that kind of love,” he said, taking courage amid the disaster of his life. “At least I tasted it once, man.” In comparison, the loves of his early manhood and maturity were docile creatures with smooth flanks and dependable outcries. Even during the act of love he could envision them bringing him hot milk, doing his taxes, or presiding tearfully at his deathbed. They were warm, loving, hot-water-bottle women. Even the screamers of his adult years always hit false notes, and no erotic intensity ever matched the silence in which Lux flayed him alive.