Luster(11)

* * *



At home, I pressed the cold, flat side of the knife against my thigh. I watched thirty-eight minutes of porn on the family computer, and then I took a bus to Clay’s house. He didn’t ask any questions. He only opened the door and pulled me inside. It happened in the dark. I followed him into his bedroom, and everything smelled like cordite and ash. His body was heavy and he trembled when he came. I felt my power in the high, desperate sound of his pleasure. I felt my error in how little I thought it would mean. I didn’t tell him I was a virgin because I could not bear to be treated tenderly. I didn’t want him to be careful. I wanted it to be over with. So when it hurt and I was too proud to say stop and so said more, I believed, like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of a commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit. I left his house and bled privately at home, happy to have done the thing that everyone is supposed to do. I had thought it would feel better, but I was new. Initiated and lean, like I had been shorn of all my hair and let into a bright, secret room. Each time we fucked, there were fewer words, moments a sudden and inscrutable darkness would find its way into the room as he pressed me down. I’m not a bad person, he said, as I put on my shoes. And then I was pregnant. Then my father came home, the car smashed in on one side. I didn’t ask him where he’d been and he didn’t ask who knocked me up. When I told him, I said that it was someone from school. Without comment, he drove me to the clinic, and when it was over, he drove me back home. He brought me tea and ibuprofen, and then left the house for another week. During that week, there was more blood than reasonable. There was the vague feeling I had escaped something preposterous. And there was my mother’s record collection. I hadn’t gone into my mother’s room for months, but I unearthed Donna Summer’s Four Seasons of Love and hooked it onto the player. I opened the windows and let some air in, and a laugh bloomed and promptly died behind my teeth. A moment in which a joyless and reflexive action of the throat gave me hope that at some point, another laugh might follow.



* * *



When I turn and see Eric’s wife, a current passes through an open window and it is the perfect iteration of that stale spring—the dust and vinyl, the interior of Clay’s station wagon powdered in ash, my underwear bloodied at the bottom of the trash—and there is a sound in the room, a scream I recognize as my own laughter.



* * *



My laugh, the real one, is a robust, ugly thing that has, on occasion, startled the drink right out of a date’s hands. So full credit is due when there is only the barest inclination on her face that she has heard it. I stand there with the sleeve of her silk blouse crushed in my fist and I think how strange it would be to say her name, to acknowledge that I know who she is even as she and Eric have taken such care to arrange our separation. It seems impossible that this amorphous Essex County specter with no distinct social media presence is standing before me, and that her name is Rebecca.



* * *



I try to reconcile the woman I have imagined with the woman before me, but there is too much data, and too many of my assumptions have quietly become absolutes. I make amendments reluctantly, surprised by the beauty of her feet. Otherwise she is exceedingly regular, everything about her so nondescript as to almost be sinister, the halo of dirty-blond hair around her sun-battered face, her boyish lean, the invisible segue of thigh into calf, and the general feeling that if she took her clothes off, her body would be as smooth and as featureless as silt.



* * *



I turn away from the closet to face her as she peels off her gloves. There is a moment when I think she is preparing to punch me. She moves toward me, her carriage so upright it would be funny if it weren’t so eerie in its apparent deliberation. And it’s not that I’m scared, but the idea of forming complete sentences and listening to her complete sentences in this room with an unmade bed I have once assisted in unmaking seems unbearable, and so I turn and run down the stairs, and I look over my shoulder and see that she is coming after me, her hair catching a shaft of sun, the indignity of what we’re doing turning my stomach as I cut through the kitchen and into the backyard, where she falls through a sprinkler, her feet losing their tread on the grass.



* * *



Technically I am home free, but then I turn and see the turf on her knees. I see a neighbor kid watching from his aboveground pool, and I am embarrassed, shamed by the lazy tenor of the cul-de-sac. The gardenias and unsecured bicycles and me, breathing heavily over someone’s wife. So I walk back and take her damp hands into mine, then pull her to her feet.

“I know who you are but I don’t want to discuss it, if that’s all right with you,” she says, dusting herself off. “I just wasn’t finished looking at you. I didn’t expect you to be so young. It’s awful.”

“Awful?”

“Yes, for you,” she says, and the neighbor kid slips out of the pool and runs back into his house.

“It’s late. You should stay for dinner,” she says, thumbing a bruise that is forming on her arm, and it is an understatement to say that I would rather do anything else, but then I feel her expectation, that she is not so much asking a question as allowing me time to confirm an obvious conclusion—that in exchange for her compromise, for her coolness about what has just happened, something is owed. She directs me to a guest room with its own bathroom, looks me over, and says, Humid, isn’t it, which is an indirect way of bringing my attention to a thing I am already aware of—this glandular free-for-all happening underneath my clothes. I look in the mirror, and my face is shining. She shows me the towels and suggests that I wash up. When I emerge from the shower, a dress is laid out on the bed, cornflower blue and immediately recognizable to me as something I would likely never be able to afford, a totem of a realm where sticker price is incidental data, a realm so theoretical that when I consider what I would have to do to enter it, I can only think of my debt, an aggrieved Sallie Mae representative standing above me while I sleep.