The Virgins (14 page)

“Oh . . . no,” I say, still smiling absurdly. This pathetic tatter is all I can get to come out of me. If I had another minute, perhaps I could pull myself together, draw myself up and say something more dignified.
It’s cool, Sterne.
Or:
Don’t get your knickers in a twist, man.

“No, you won’t say anything, or no, you’re not sure, and I should go ahead and bust your skull open?” Sterne wants to draw this out, to force me to take a role in my humiliation.

I keep smiling, smiling, cursing myself. “Why would I say anything?” I ask.

What I do next:

I turn back toward my room, Sterne’s eyes still on me. I lock my door, not that anybody would be likely to visit, but I need to be able to put such a possibility out of my mind. I know David’s still in Boston on an overnight he took to visit a cousin.

I get into bed, pull the sheet lightly over me. If for some strange reason David did return I could roll over in an instant, say I feel sick, I threw up, I was sleeping. I reach under my boxers, but the first image that flares up in my mind is the butt of my hand knocking Sterne sharply under the chin, his smile crumpling and his teeth flying out of his mouth the way they’ve flown out of mine in certain terrible dreams I’ve had. I’m hard before I’m even conscious of thinking about Aviva. But here she is now, as my hand moves up and down; she’s riding on top of me, moving slow and deliberate and
then gradually faster, hitching a little on that sensitive spot at the top that she knows is so right. I think that for once she’s actually going to stay. It’s strange, but although she often sends me here, into my bed, under this sheet, she always dissolves almost immediately into something else, one of the generic bodies that have served my purpose since I first figured out what jerking off was all about. I try to keep her, literally slow the mental film so that I am approaching her obscured figure from behind, turning her to me, pushing her gently onto my cot—gently, I repeat, so as not to scare her, so as to show her that I won’t be idiotic and clumsy the way I was at the boathouse. It never works: she becomes yet another creature with long, straight blond hair, featureless skin, a large mouth, big smooth haunches. Nothing like Aviva.

But now Aviva towers above me, as if to say all right, I can have her, but she is going to be the one in charge. Okay, okay, I silently agree, thrusting up to the rhythm of my fist, but the faster I go and the closer I get, the more my mental Aviva slows down and withholds herself, telling me to wait, I’m just going to have to wait. I don’t want to wait; I push against her, calling her bitch, saying filthy things. She bends way over me then, pinning my hands to the mattress, her hair all over my face, getting in my mouth, blinding me. She laughs like she laughed that first day I met her, in her room, a laugh of encouragement and maddening aloofness. I start to beg:
Please, let me go, let me come, let me,
and in a whirl of motion that shatters her image and makes her disappear yet again, she does.

Cynthia Pritchard asks, “Is this short story saying that love, for a girl, is like being murdered?”

The whole class laughs, but when the laughter dies down, there’s a long ripple of discomfort. Cynthia is always so earnest, so anxious, so embarrassingly undefended. Silence. Mr. Salter can hear all the girls thinking rapidly, restlessly, and no one wanting to answer. He jumps in, hoping to save the thread. “Cynthia, can you walk us through how the author might be suggesting this?”

The story they’re discussing is “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates. It appears in their fat anthology,
Explorations in Fiction.
In it, a fifteen-year-old girl named Connie, home alone while her family is on a picnic, is visited by a mysterious and menacing man who eventually, hypnotically, persuades her to get into his car and drive away with him.

Cynthia fixes her eyes on the text and speaks slowly, her voice a bit strained.

“Well, at the beginning, Oates takes all this time to talk about how flirty Connie is, how she dresses up and wants to meet boys, and how alienated she feels from her family. Like, she’s
looking
for someone to take her away from everything. But then, when someone comes to do just that, this Arnold Friend guy, and talks about being her lover and holding her tight, you know that if she goes with him, she’s going to end up dead. So it’s almost like the writer is saying that when you’re female, if you fall in love, it’s, well, the end of you.”

“So,” says Mr. Salter. “You are reading the story not literally but as a metaphor?”

Cynthia exhales. “I guess,” she says.

Mr. Salter opens his arms in invitation to the class. “How did others of you read it?”

“I think you’re reaching too far,” says one of the boys. “I think the girl gets stalked and then kidnapped by a psycho and that’s the story Joyce Carol Oates wanted to tell. She’s just trying to write a suspense story.”

“The guy’s name is Arnold
Friend,
” another girl points out. “That can’t be an accident.”

“Are we so sure she’s going to die at the end?” asks Aviva Rossner. “I mean, it doesn’t
say
that.”

“It’s almost like she’s going into some sort of dreamland,” says a third girl. The boys have been conspicuously reticent during this conversation. “Maybe we’re not supposed to read this so realistically. I mean, this Arnold guy is sort
of supernatural. He knows all about Connie’s family and her past and even what she thinks about. Maybe he’s just supposed to represent the inside of her mind, how she realizes she’s growing up and needs to leave her family but is scared to leave her family. Like here—page 376—Arnold says, ‘The place where you came from ain’t there anymore.’”

“That’s sort of what I was trying to say,” says Cynthia fretfully. “Right after that part, Arnold Friend says the house Connie lives in—‘your daddy’s house,’ he says—is so flimsy he could just knock it down if he wanted. Like, she can’t stay a little girl anymore, but if she goes with him she’s lost, too. He says, ‘Be nice to me, be sweet like you can because what else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in?’”

“This is one of the scariest stories I’ve ever read,” offers a girl named Jill Cohen.

“I was going to talk about point of view issues,” says Mr. Salter, giving a slap to
Explorations in Fiction,
“but Cynthia has gotten us onto an interesting line of thought. Can we think of other ways in which the stories in this anthology have depicted sexuality between girls and boys, or men and women?”

The class comes to attention: the girls sit up straight in their chairs, the boys press their knees together. Mr. Salter didn’t use the evasive trick word
love,
he said
sex.

“Ummm . . .” says Frank Corbitt loudly, breaking the tension. Everyone titters.

“What about in ‘The Dead’? Or John Cheever’s ‘The Five-Forty-Eight’?”

“I’m drawing a blank,” says Frank pertly.

“I surrender,” says Mr. Salter finally. “Think about it on your own, then. And some of you, if you’re interested, might want to take a look at a book by Erich Fromm called
The Art of Loving.
There are some striking ideas there about love and sexuality. It might deepen your reading of this and other stories.”

Later, in the library, Aviva hunts furtively in the card catalog, hunched over so no one else can see the cards.
The Art of Loving
turns out to be a slim paperback with a hot-pink cover, and Aviva skims through it wondering if she has the guts to hand it over to Mrs. Conn-Frere, the librarian, to be checked out. She decides she does. She pulls other books off the nearby shelves:
Psychoanalytic Approaches to Love, Love & Death: An Existentialist Exploration,
a volume merely called
Intimacy.
When she gets to the front desk she’ll tell herself she’s writing a research paper on the psychology of love. She’ll believe it for the one and a half minutes she needs to get the books stamped.

For now she takes a carrel and begins to read, keeping the pink book nestled unobtrusively in her lap.

           
The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness . . .

Yes! Aviva thinks. Yes! When she goes for a bathroom break she places the little book, and the one called
Intimacy,
under the more sober-sounding
Psychoanalytic Approaches,
turns all three volumes facedown, and shoves their spines against the back of the carrel where they won’t be readily seen. But Cort, working nearby, uses the opportunity to check out her reading, and reports back to Voss and me that Seung Jung’s chippie apparently does some research to amplify her bedroom skills. We enjoy this tale greatly for a couple of days—at least I pretend to—but aren’t bold enough to pass it on; it might get traced back to the source.

Aviva takes the books to Mrs. Conn-Frere, gazes into the distance as she’s checked out, and over the next two days she reads
The Art of Loving
as often as she can, taking notes in her rounded handwriting on loose-leaf paper. She reads only when alone in the room and is careful not to leave the notes on her desk where her roommate might see them. There are passages in the book on that terrifying term,
frigidity.
Is she, Aviva, frigid? A woman, writes Fromm, “opens the gates to her feminine center; in the act of receiving, she gives. If she is incapable of this act of giving, if she can only receive, she is frigid.” Does this apply to her? Is the reason why Seung can never enter her that she only wants to receive from him and not give? Why does the book not talk about the thing that has happened to Seung and her; why does no book ever talk about it? It is unique, unheard-of—that’s why.

Love is active, the book tells her. Love is giving. Love puts the other person’s needs above one’s own. The woman is receiving and the man is penetrating.

For several days Aviva feels hopeful: Fromm has told her what love must be and, with her student’s sense of purpose, she will follow the guidelines and emerge with success. She will love Seung properly and something will subtly soften in her without endangering her or making her afraid. Seung will sense that new softness, that womanliness; he will come in. Aviva attempts to think of Seung’s needs, which she can hardly even picture. He wants to please his parents, even if, behind their backs, he acts the scapegrace. Other than that, he seems simply to need to be with her—her, Aviva. She wills herself to love him for himself, not simply because he loves her so blindly—but what is “himself” besides this blind lover? She doesn’t, in fact, care about his schoolwork, the nitty-gritty of his home life, his childhood memories, his plans for the future. Or not very much.

The little book, inspiring at first, becomes a scold. She will never be able to live up to it, she doesn’t even understand it. “Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says: ‘I need you because I love you.’” How can one possibly sort this out? How can Aviva even imagine a love so ideal, so disinterested? She returns the book to the library, along with the others she took out that day, which she has not bothered to open, and as they fall down the slot in the front desk, she feels a great relief.

When our month of restrictions is finished, I’m not quite sure what to do with myself in the evenings. I feel slow, fat, and blinkered—a confused mole. The first night, I wander around campus, resisting my desire to go to Currie’s for a milkshake; besides, I don’t want to sit alone. Voss has been acting again as if restrictions was all my fault, and whither goes Voss goes Cort. So I’m on my own tonight, unless I want to hang out with David Yee in the library and talk about partial differential equations. I should make some new friends. Yeah, right. My time in this place is almost over; I’m just looking to ride out the final months and make a new start next year, somewhere far away. Somewhere out of the reach of my father, somewhere I will start to be whatever it is I think I’m capable of becoming.

I walk in the direction of the Dramat, not that anything is going on there tonight, but it soothes me just to be nearby.
The spring production is
The Playboy of the Western World,
and I’ll be props master, but tryouts aren’t for another week. When I pass the Academy church, I hear singing coming from within. I keep walking, but the notes trail me and pull me back. The voices are very sweet, and maybe I want to be in a room filled with people rather than alone in a darkened theater. I make my way in, standing at the back, not yet committed to a seat and a stay.

It’s the choral choir. They have a surprisingly good turn-out; perhaps there are others besides me who feel at loose ends on this chilly, interseason evening. I see Aviva in the pews—my eye always finds her instantly in a crowd—and next to her are Lena Joannou and Kelly Finch. They are gazing up at the stage, all attention, and I see that their friend Carlyle Johns is one of the singers. The bright lights on the pulpit are distorting, but something about Carlyle’s face looks wrong, as if she fell down and bruised herself. My eyes slide to the other faces, boys and girls, all lit up, mouths open, static yet shifting like the faces I imagined I would put in my production of
The Seventh Seal.
They are wholly fixed on their task and move in perfect unison. So preoccupied am I with watching that for a while I don’t even hear any sound, I’m aware only of these sculptural faces. Then the voices return, with a purity that surprises and unbalances me, and something shifts painfully around my heart. It’s only the girls singing now, and their voices are so high and sweet; if I were at all religious I would think they were lifting me up somewhere closer to . . . what? Something
radiant and uncorrupted. After a few moments the male voices come in again, enriching the range, rumbling but still pure, and I have to sit, my legs won’t hold me. I push my way into a spot in a back pew, receiving a look of annoyance from a girl I don’t know, and once I’m there I’m so shaken I can’t look at the pulpit anymore. I drop my head and close my eyes. The music keeps coming and I know I’ve made a mistake; I don’t want to hear this beauty, which won’t stop but pushes at me relentlessly. It’s too much; it threatens to hurt me. I’m tempted to cover my ears but manage to sit on my hands to keep them still, squeeze my eyes tighter, and bear it. I should have known not to come into a room where everyone is leaning in as one, everyone is feeling as one. I’m not meant for such places. I ball my fists. It will be over soon, I keep telling myself. I try not to hear the beautiful music. Soon it will be over.