"Basics"
It was the pregame for Eighties Tuesday, and most of the Kappas had come over to Delta house. It was dark outside, and in the living room the light was dim and the air was full of perfume. Zach arrived late because he’d been upstairs, lying on his bed, talking with his mother on the phone about whether or not he should buy an electric toothbrush. He took the last available seat, next to Sharon. Their only two previous conversations had revolved around professional basketball. The couch they shared was low and white, and she played with a tuft of stuffing that protruded from a tear in one of its arms. The volume on the TV was set so low that smaller explosions were inaudible. He sipped pale beer from a plastic cup.
She asked him if he liked the show. He shrugged. He didn’t like superheroes anymore, he said. He didn’t know what had changed. He’d been in love with superheroes when he was a child. He wasn’t gay anymore, he explained, but he had been gay when he was little, if he thought about it. It was something about the briefs that the men wore over their tights. They were a different color from the rest of their costumes, so they drew the eye. And their pectorals were so much like breasts that they’d seemed to him a race of hermaphrodites, though he hadn’t known the word. To be a superhero was to have parts from both sexes. That was how it had seemed.
As he spoke she drank hard cider from a narrow can she’d brought with her from Kappa. She peeled off its label in strips. She laid the strips on the arm of the couch and pressed them into the fabric with her pointer finger. She said that she, too, had been a gay child. Her first loves had been older girls, the assistant teachers in second grade. She still remembered their names: Sandra, Maura, Pauline. She hadn’t regarded them as grown-ups, because they’d looked so much younger than her mother, and their hair had been so much longer. It was as if, when she was seven, girls her own age were human, and women were human, but older girls belonged to a higher species. They glowed. She had now reached the age at which little girls fell in love with her. She saw them look her up and down. When she had looked at older girls that way, as a child, what she’d wanted was to run away with them. In her fantasies, she said, one of them would take her by the hand and run with her through the lawns of her suburb. The two of them would help each other scale the fences and stone walls. Finally, when they reached a field, they would gather momentum, leap into the air, and fly, abandoning their families.
As she said this her face took on a sleepy expression. He couldn’t tell to what degree they had discovered a special ability to be candid with each other and to what degree they were both already a bit drunk. Usually, at this point in a conversation with a girl, his throat constricted, his voice squeaked, he knocked things over with his elbow in the simple act of picking up a beer, and nothing he said sounded true. He asked her if she wanted to go up to the study room, where there was a large can of IPA from a Worcester-area microbrewery stowed on a shelf in a cardboard box that’d once contained a coffee maker. He explained that he kept it there so that his roommate wouldn’t drink it. It was much better than the beer down here. She nodded. They stood and snaked their way through the couches.
In the study room upstairs, they sat on opposite sides of a desk, passing the tallboy. Retired oars hung from the wall, their shafts chewed by oarlocks, their blades painted purple and yellow. The overhead light flickered. The pregame was a faint noise beneath their feet.
He asked her if she thought she would still find the assistant teachers attractive, if she met them today. She said she didn’t feel that way about individual women very often anymore. It was more like, sometimes, she had the desire to be an evil man, a CEO in a pinstriped suit who slept with his secretaries. She blinked at the floor and drank, self-conscious. We can’t pause too long, he thought. He had to confess something immediately, to reciprocate her confession, or the exchange would grind to a halt.
It was the same with him, he said, in that he didn’t desire particular men so much as think it would be cool to be an evil woman. He never dreamed of being a good woman, or a normal-looking woman, or a woman of average uprightness. He only realized that this was the case as he said it. He only dreamed of being a woman who was super fucked up and off-the-charts good-looking. He thought about long, dark hair piled on a pillow in a hotel room, mirrors with brass stuff on the frames. He could imagine fucking rich morons. He couldn’t imagine being a woman with a good man, a man who had loftier aims than making money, who lived according to principles. That sounded like a nightmare.
Sharon sipped the ale, handed it back to him, and said, “We’re both evil.” She narrowed her eyes and slouched, like a crone, and pointed her finger at him. “You, too, are an evil one.” She said it in a crone’s hoarse voice. She made her finger tremble, to give the crone a parkinsonian ailment. “It’s true that you have kind of an evil face,” she continued, returning to her normal way of speaking, but doubling down on the crone’s posture, leaning even farther across the desk. “I don’t like it. I want to slap it.” She raised one hand as if to swat his cheek but she didn’t do it.
They could hear the pregame draw to a close. People whooped with excitement at the prospect of marching through the cold to the Hangar and dancing on a floor with shifting patterns. In anticipation of Eighties Tuesday, someone had put on a song from the eighties. You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, the man sang, and the lyrics that followed were indecipherable. Zach knew that his brothers were lacing their brogues and sneakers. He knew that Sharon’s sisters were pulling on their heels. This was the last chance to go downstairs and join them. They sat and listened to the departure.
He went to his room to find his roommate’s cigarettes. They smoked on the porch. They stood barefoot in the inch of snow on the grass, to see how long they could bear it. She said his cologne was so strong that standing next to him was a greater test of endurance than standing in the snow. She said it was like he was a dying Abercrombie store trying to attract customers with its smell. For the first time in his life, he genuinely wanted to dance with a person. He almost suggested they join the others at the Hangar for Eighties Tuesday, but he was worried that his dancing would depress and embarrass them.
Instead he worked up his courage and told her she could slap him in the face if she did in fact want to. He blushed, surprised at how much this sounded like an offer to have sex. He felt like a cat that had turned around and raised its hindquarters in the air. She bit her lip, struggling with a decision.
“Okay,” she finally said, with some ambivalence. “Yeah. I’ll slap you.”
“Cool,” he said. They decided to go inside first, and stood facing each other in the living room, warming their feet on the carpet, drinking the last of the beer from the keg.
“I’d feel more comfortable,” she said, “if we both hit each other. You can hit me in the stomach. It’s actually strong. I don’t know why.”
It was; she took his hand and pressed his palm to her belly, to show him. She never did any sit-ups, she said, it had something to do with her genes. He agreed that he would hit her in the stomach, but he said that he thought she should hit him in the face first, since she was the one who had brought up the idea of hitting, by saying she wanted to slap him. She nodded and grazed his face with the tips of her fingers.
“Sorry,” she said, “that was terrible.” He told her not to worry, that it was okay. They were both standing behind the white couch on which they’d sat earlier that evening. A small amount of her beer had spilled on the floor when she’d slapped him unsuccessfully. She really should have put down her beer first, she said. That was one of the reasons she’d slapped him so clumsily. Once she had placed the cup by her feet she assumed a stance that she said she’d learned on her high school volleyball team: feet planted shoulder-width apart, low center of gravity. And then she hit him in the stomach, which surprised him, though it wasn’t very hard. It was different from how it felt when he’d put on boxing gloves and sparred with other Deltas. He could feel the impact of her two front knuckles, each of them distinct and sharp.
“Why can’t you hit me in the face,” he asked her, “if you don’t like my face?” He became conscious of his breathing. She had risen from her volleyball posture. She seemed to consider his question, her head tilted to one side. She looked out the window, at the snow that was being picked up by the wind, and back at him again, and nodded, as if to say, Yes, there’s a small amount of snow lifting off the ground. And then they were lurching across the room as a single inelegant creature, kissing, knocking over cans, spilling beer and cider. The fizz of the spilled drinks on the carpet was a dirty sound. His eyes were closed but he could hear a truck slicing through the slush in the street, splashing cold water as it passed. There was traffic on North Pleasant. Someone was leaning on a car horn. Massachusetts was covered in snowdrifts that were stained by exhaust around the edges. Was this what people meant by “dirty,” when they spoke of a mood that could descend on lovers, this feeling of being part and parcel of the world?
They looked at each other, their arms wrapped around each other’s waists. They took the narrow back stairs that led to the third floor holding hands.
“I hate your room,” she said, as she followed him in and shut the door. He said he hated his roommate’s fridge. She said she hated that it had no beer inside. He said that he hated his rug, as he rubbed his feet against it, and it was an ugly rug, its pattern alternating squares of black and gray. His roommate had ordered it from Lowe’s and they’d never had an honest conversation about it. It was like Goodnight Moon, the game of declaring their hatred for each object. He chose a playlist on his phone and connected his phone to his speakers. The music was unobtrusive, instrumental hip-hop, and now its very unobtrusiveness struck him as contemptible. “I hate this music,” he said.
They climbed into his bed and undressed each other. She said that she hated men. Their hatred for all the things they’d mentioned was a kind of languor, a drug. He felt oddly inoculated against judgment, taking his clothes off in front of her. It was better to feel her hands on his skin and think, She hates my skin, than to think, Does she love my skin? It was better to feel her hands in his hair and think, She hates my hair, than to think, Does she love my hair? He could feel that he had become a better kisser than he usually was, because he wasn’t as nervous.
They stopped talking while he fingered her. When she pulled his hand away, he took a condom from a drawer in his nightstand and put it on. She dragged him on top of her, and then they were having sex, slowly, wearing expressions of affected disdain. He was twenty-two years old, a senior in college, he’d had sex four times, and every time, he knew, he had been the worst lover in the world. He’d heard of men who lasted a minute spoken of as shitty in bed, but he couldn’t fathom how any man had been able to last thirty seconds. A minute was herculean. All four times, a combination of panic, gratitude, and reverence had overwhelmed him within ten or fifteen seconds, or five. But now everything was different. It astonished him, the power of this new way of doing things, of doing things in a spirit of fake hostility. When he’d approached sex in a spirit of love, he’d felt like a rabbit, and now he felt like a sloth, in a good way. It seemed like a realistic possibility that he could go on doing it for a long time. Look at us, he thought, a couple of stupid little ugly dirtbags. He felt that he was hovering over the bed, watching two people at their work. They were both making the sounds people made on television. Look at these two little assholes, he thought, hoping to maintain the mood that had proven so helpful. It was incredible how slowly they were moving, how much time had passed, perhaps a minute already. This was what it was supposed to be like.
I am not being guided by intelligence, he thought, I am being guided by instinct. That’s how it works if you know what you’re doing. He pinned her arm to the bed beside her hair, and then, when she made an encouraging sound in response, he propped himself up on one elbow and—it felt like just another sound he made—put a hand on her throat and applied a small amount of pressure with his fingers.
Her face fell and went blank. This was the problem with the fake hostility, he saw: it was unclear how far it was supposed to go. Her face was still fallen after he took his hand off her neck, and he wondered if he should get off her and apologize. But it seemed wasteful to let everything go to hell. He thought, We’ll recover, we’ll find our way back to how it was before. He gazed into her eyes like a really nice person, as they continued to have sex.
He made the face of a gentle lover, dropping his mouth open. And these contrivances turned out to be another mistake, because she shook her head and looked away. A moment later, she told him to stop. This happened at the same time he realized that he might be about to come, and the confluence of the two events was so disorienting that he froze, as if “stop” were a demand for the cessation of all movement, rather than a demand for withdrawal. He lay on top of her, limp, breathing hard, his head resting beside hers on the pillow, for more than five seconds, less than ten, neither of them speaking, or moving, and then he came. It felt like a clerical error, like clicking send when you meant to click save. He pulled out and looked at her, and she was averting her eyes and covering them with her hands.
He sat beside her and tried to read her body language. She was lying on her side, turned away from him. He felt tenderness and regret. How was it possible he had hurt this person whom he was so intent on pleasing? And then the tenderness and regret were mingled with fear. What was it called, what had just happened? Was his hesitation in pulling out of her and getting off her when he knew he was about to come a form of aggression, for which he deserved punishment, or was it a brief stupor, a natural effect of having sex? She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the wall.
“Sorry,” he heard himself say. “I didn’t mean to be too . . .” He knew that this was an unsatisfactory description of what he’d done, but he was afraid that he would use the wrong words if he tried again to describe it. He reached out and stroked her hair, until she jerked away. She said nothing, only searched under the blanket and sheets for her clothes. He stopped talking and sat naked in bed, watching, as she extracted her underwear and socks from the bedding and started to dress.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She turned to him and shrugged. She threw up her hands and shook her head. She didn’t know if she was okay or not, she seemed to be saying, or at least she didn’t know the degree to which she didn’t feel okay. Neither of us understands what just happened, he thought. Neither of us understands the nature or seriousness of what I’ve done wrong. It seemed to him that there was a moment of accord, in which they each registered the other’s confusion. And then she left.
As soon as he heard Sharon leave the house, he called his mother. He tried her cell and then her landline. She picked up on the fourth ring and asked him if he was okay. He could tell from the sound of her voice that he’d woken her up. He could see her standing in her bedroom in the house in Agawam, bare-legged in a T-shirt. She had put on her glasses, he guessed, and now she was looking out the window at the snow caked on the neighbors’ solar panels, the black driveways with sharp corners.
“I think I might have sexually assaulted someone,” he said. “I don’t know.”
She told him that he didn’t need to stop crying but that he did need to speak clearly and slowly, so that she could understand what he was saying. “Don’t be shy,” she said. “You need to tell me exactly what happened. Don’t leave anything out.”
He told her.
“Wait,” she said, “go back. How long was it between when she said to stop and when you ejaculated in the condom, inside her?”
He tried to remember the precise length of time, counting one-Mississippi two-Mississippi in his head as he replayed the moment. He sniffed back mucus and tasted it on his tongue. “Like maybe six seconds,” he said. “Maybe seven. But I’m not sure.”
“And then you pulled out?”
“Yeah. She looked upset.”
His mother laughed with relief. “From how you were talking about it,” she said, “I’d have thought it was two minutes.”
He waited for her to go on.
“Look,” she said. “You may have to go to some kind of counseling. But you’re not going to get expelled. If the university expelled all the guys who did what you did, they would lose a lot of money. If the cops charged all the guys who did what you did with a crime, a lot of people would have to go to jail.”
He toppled backward onto the bed and stared at the ceiling. Everything looked beautiful and new now that she’d told him he was safe. The snow sparkled in the porch light. Despite the weather, a car drove by with its windows down and its stereo on, playing dance music.
“You need to be more careful,” his mother said. She made a pained sound. “Did she seem like she was going to be okay?”
He touched the sheets where Sharon had lain naked less than ten minutes earlier. He skimmed his hand back and forth across them, still holding the phone to his ear. “Should I go to Kappa and apologize?”
There was a long silence. His palpitations came and went. He heard her fill a glass with water at the kitchen sink. Or maybe she was filling a kettle for tea.
“Well,” she said, “of course you should be nice to her, but let’s give everyone a chance to calm down. If you tell her you’re sorry, in an emotional way, like something really serious happened, she might decide that something really serious happened. Everyone’s tired and worked up. Let’s talk tomorrow, before you think about saying anything.” She spoke to him of the riskiness of all intercourse, of the possibility of unwanted pregnancy, of catching diseases. She reminded him of the importance of listening carefully to girls and paying close attention to their signals. These were things she’d told him many times, and he found it soothing to hear them again, like a storybook from childhood.
“I’m sorry,” he said intermittently, as she spoke to him.
“You don’t need to apologize to me,” she said, but he continued to do so, whenever there was a pause in the conversation. After a while, his breathing slowed and he almost felt capable of sleep.
But he didn’t sleep after he got off the phone. He went downstairs to clean up the mess he’d made with Sharon. The floor of the living room was littered with bottles and cans that they’d knocked off the arms of chairs and couches. He’d never cleaned a floor before, so he didn’t know whether to use the broom or the mop, or, if he was supposed to use them both, which came first. The carpet had absorbed most of the spilled beer, so he went with the broom. Only one of the bottles had actually shattered. He tried to sweep the shards into a little pile, but some of them were lodged in the fabric.
He was on his knees, picking out the glass with his hands, when the front door swung open. Four Deltas had come home early from the Hangar, led by Five-Hour, who was singing the song that had been playing toward the end of the pregame: “I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar / That much is true.”
He didn’t want to talk to Five-Hour, so he looked away and returned to his task.
“What are you doing?” Five-Hour asked. “Why are you cleaning at night?”
He dropped the last of the shards into his cupped palm and went to the kitchen to throw the mess in the trash.
“Did something happen?” Five-Hour asked, following him.
He could see the others settling on the floor by the TV in the living room and resuming a PS4 game they’d paused in the afternoon. He heard the clatter of hooves and remembered there’d been talk of a cavalry engagement. There was an exchange of fire, repeater carbines in a valley or ravine, and then there were the cries of shot horses. How many guys our age, he wondered, have sat together at night, during a war, and listened to the sound of horses dying?
He sat with Five-Hour in the kitchen and told him what he’d done. He told him about the talk he’d had with his mother. “I see,” Five-Hour said.
He asked Five-Hour if he should try to talk to Sharon. Five- Hour dug in his backpack and took out a box of red licorice.
“If you think about it,” said Five-Hour, chewing on a lump, “you don’t want to roll up to her and start talking if she’s not initiating it. That might make it worse.”
He shook his head, though he didn’t know why he was objecting to Five-Hour’s advice. And then he said something he hadn’t known to be true until he said it, which was that he couldn’t help but feel everything had gone wrong precisely because he and Sharon had hit it off. The thing that had happened had happened not because they didn’t care about each other, or didn’t like each other, but because they did care about each other and did like each other. That was why things had moved so fast and the whole thing had spun out of control. It was like how a sports car with an amazing engine was more likely to crash into a wall than was a minivan with a shitty engine. “Fuck it,” he said, “I’ll just message her,” and picked up his phone. There was a closed Greek Facebook group to which everyone in Delta and Kappa belonged, so she was probably in his Messenger contacts.
He’d barely touched the screen when Five-Hour slapped the phone out of his hand. It hit the floor some distance from the table where they sat, its rubber case causing it to bounce slightly on the linoleum.
“My brother,” said Five-Hour, “you raped her, a little bit.” He threw up his hands. “In the eyes of the school, for however many seconds, that’s what you did.” They’d all been taught the affirmative-consent policy in first-year orientation, he pointed out. Even now, he said, she might be talking to her friends in Kappa, trying to decide what to do. Would people believe her— that would be her problem, if she wanted to start a J-Board. All she needed was a DM from him saying Sorry, I fucked up tonight, and problem solved. “Turn off the phone,” said Five-Hour. “Go to sleep, and don’t turn it on again until it’s morning. Don’t confess.”
He woke hungover, his roommate snoring in the bed kitty-corner to his own. Pink sunlight had crept onto the snowy eaves of the house across the street. He put on jeans and a hoodie, went downstairs, and drank two glasses of water. To treat his headache with fresh air, he put on his coat and sneakers and went outside.
The snow was ankle-high and smooth, save for two sets of footprints created by bare feet. They ran down the slope of the yard, one slightly smaller than the other, and stopped at the arbitrary spot where he and Sharon had smoked his roommate’s cigarettes and hopped up and down, shifting their weight from one foot to the other to keep their toes from going numb.
He walked downtown, past the other fraternities, to buy a coffee at the convenience store. The day was mild enough for a little of the snow to melt. Water pattered from tree branches onto the roofs of SUVs parked in driveways, and onto an empty beer can that lay crushed beside a bush.
At the corner of Fearing and North Pleasant, children were waiting for the school bus. There were three boys and two girls, the oldest maybe twelve, the youngest seven or eight. All of them wore down jackets with their hoods thrown back, their heads exposed. They had the disconsolate look of people barred from using phones. They muttered to themselves, stomped the ice, packed snowballs only to drop them on the ground. That little girl, he thought, is in love with the older girl. The older girl is thinking about what it would be like to be an evil man summoning his administrative assistant into his office after hours. The older boy is wondering what it would be like if he and the older girl were hermaphrodites in tights, who slept in a secluded mansion with others of their kind. The children were not having those thoughts—he couldn’t know what they were thinking—but it was possible, even likely, that the thoughts they were having were equally unmentionable. The world was more interesting now that he and another person had been free with each other.
In the convenience store, he poured two thimblefuls of non-dairy creamer into his coffee. There was White Chocolate and Irish Cre?me, and today he went with Irish Cre?me. The creamer was revolting, but he wanted it, too. Was that what he had been like for her, last night, before things went wrong? That is, had she found him disgusting but also compelling? That was how it had seemed. It had been a new feeling, being liked and disliked in that way.
He took out his phone and opened the closed Facebook group. He wasn’t one of Sharon’s friends, so the pictures of her he could see were mostly shots of her whole pledge class as it advanced through the years. There was one photo of her with two other Kappas, sitting on a couch in the Kappa living room, stoned, pointing to their pink eyes. A bowl of guacamole was bathed in the blue light of the TV.
In addition to the coffee, he bought a spiral-bound notebook, a box of envelopes, and a pack of cigarettes. A bell jingled as the door slammed behind him and he came out into the cold. He sipped the coffee as he walked, spilling it down his coat. The sunlight was no longer pink. The buildings on either side of North Pleasant—a motel, a sports bar, a chain Italian restaurant—had ceased to be pretty and become their usual daylight selves. He watched a pair of joggers, a middle-aged couple with metal cleats strapped to the soles of their sneakers. Each of their footfalls splattered slush across the pavement. He wondered what Sharon thought of him, and whether she herself knew what she thought of him, as he descended the stairs to the mailroom on the edge of campus. He still didn’t know if he deserved to be punished, or, if he did, how severe the punishment should be.
In the mailroom there was a small counter with a pen on a chain. He took an envelope out of the box he’d bought at the convenience store and tore a page from the notebook.
He wrote quickly. He said that he knew he’d done something wrong, and broken the rules, that he was sorry and hoped to improve the situation in some way. He signed his name and wrote his number beneath his signature. He dropped the note and cigarettes into the envelope, and hesitated. I can still throw it out, he thought. I can still change my mind.
It was desire, even more than shame, that made him lick the envelope, seal it, write her full name on the front, and hand it to the man behind the desk. He was afraid. But he wanted to talk to her again, and this was the only way to make it happen.
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