My Last Innocent Year(42)

I set strict rules for myself: I didn’t steal from anyone whose family was poorer than mine, a complicated metric based on whether their parents were divorced and whether they shared a room. I didn’t steal from close friends or from anyone who’d met my parents, but I didn’t steal from strangers either. I didn’t take anything that couldn’t be replaced, and through it all, I reminded myself that what I was doing was wrong and kept making plans to stop. But then something would happen—my mother would have a bad night and I’d find Abe crying over his toast in the morning—and I’d start up again.

Success made me bolder. Junior year, when my mother was in the hospital for a pancreatic infection, I stole cash from a friend’s father’s wallet. That spring, after the experimental protocol she’d been on all winter stopped working, I stole a pair of diamond earrings from a friend’s older sister. By the time I got to Wilder I’d stopped, the impulse largely dormant, which was good because I had ample opportunity. The girls here were so rich and careless, their closets overflowing with cashmere sweaters and corduroy pants, loafers and add-a-pearl necklaces, everything tossed on the floor or piled on their beds, things my years of stealing had taught me they’d never miss. But my days of wanting other people’s things were over.

Also, my mother was dead so I had no more excuses.



* * *



IT WAS THE last Thursday in March, and an icy rain was falling. On my way to Stringer Hall, Joanna Maxwell ran past me, pushing Igraine in a stroller she looked too big for. The little girl was sleeping; Joanna held an umbrella awkwardly over her with one hand while steering the stroller with the other. There were times Joanna reminded me of my mother, although she was smaller and, in a way that was hard to explain, clearly not Jewish. I hadn’t seen her since the day I’d asked to switch advisers, hadn’t even thought of her. I was too consumed by my own drama.

Connelly was at his desk, reading through a stack of student papers. There was a set of keys I’d never seen before next to him, hanging off an old-timey ring, the kind a jailer might have dangling from his belt. Connelly hadn’t shaved and his face was tantalizingly rough. I wanted to reach out and feel the prickle of him, but I knew not to bother him while he was working; besides, it was always better when he made me wait. I pulled off my boots, draped my socks over the heater, and lay down on the floor, warming my feet against the radiator. There was a blister on the back of my heel. I poked at it absentmindedly.

After several minutes, he looked over at me. “Well, hello there. Don’t you look nice?”

“Thank you,” I said.

“What do you have on under that sweater?”

I pulled out the neck and looked down. “Tank top. Bra.”

“Take it off.”

I did as he asked, then started to move toward him, but he stopped me. “No. Stay there. I like the way you look on the floor.”

I lay back down, and Connelly stepped over me to lock the door. I could feel his footsteps through the floor, my body vibrating with each step.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

He leaned down and nudged open my hand with something. He ran the tip of it across my palm, along the inside of my wrist and up to the crook of my elbow. I shivered as he dragged it up to my shoulder, then across the shelf of my collarbone. It was a key. I kept my eyes closed as he moved it slowly down the other arm, then in between every finger and around the base of my thumb.

Connelly lifted up the key and readjusted his stance. I could hear him breathing as he took off his sweater, then placed the tip of the key between my breasts, the metal cold against my skin. He drew a line with it down my center, my plumb line, traced circles around each nipple.

“Take these off,” he said, tugging on my jeans. I wriggled them down, kicked them over my heels, roughly, breaking the skin that protected the blister. I could hear the sleet hitting the roof, like somebody was tossing pebbles against it. Connelly placed the key at the base of my rib cage, let it dip inside my navel, then ran it down the inside of each leg from thigh to ankle and back again. I didn’t know how much time had passed, ten minutes, twenty, half a day. I remembered vaguely that I had somewhere to go but didn’t know where. My mind was filled with keys. Connelly plucked the elastic of my underwear like a guitar string and I thought about the keys to our apartment that my mother taught me to brandish like a weapon when I walked home late at night. He pulled my underwear down, and I thought about the key to the safe at the back of the store where Abe kept the cash he brought to the bank every Friday. Shabbos. Connelly spread my legs and I remembered Yetta’s drawer of keys, ones she could never bring herself to throw away because what if she needed them one day? The rain picked up. I pictured a hallway lined with doors I couldn’t open, things I needed trapped behind them: means of rescue, survival, escape. Connelly put himself inside me and unlocked everything I’d ever held there: shame, fear. There was a string of bruises on my spine when I got home, scratches up and down my thighs. He covered my mouth as I cried out, and I no longer knew what was inside me, only that I never again found a door I couldn’t open. He held the key to my undoing, and I let him undo everything.



* * *



MY NEED TO link sex with secrecy was born that spring. After that, there was nothing more erotic than a furtive kiss behind a closed door, a hurried grope in a coat closet, a man’s hand on my knee while his girlfriend sat across from us. I once asked Bo to meet me at a bar and pretend he didn’t know me. I had a dress picked out, short and backless, the kind you couldn’t wear with a bra. Black eyeliner, red lipstick—the kind of makeup I never wore. I’d leave my wedding ring at home, but he could wear his. I’d go full slut for him, be easy for once. We’d fuck in a bathroom stall. I’d let him pull off my underwear with his teeth.