The dean closed his eyes and cleared his throat. He winced then, as if something he’d seen with his closed eyes had given him physical pain. When he opened his eyes again, he sighed and said, “Well, that in itself, Shelly, is part of the whole unfortunate situation. The student wasn’t even being paid. She simply wanted the experience, and was willing to work for free because she knew she couldn’t get the job without the work-study scholarship. So, I saw to it that she was sent your way. First of all, because she was such a lovely, fine student, and also because her mother and my wife are friends from their own college days. Sorority sisters, as it happens.”
64
“You’re kidding, right?” Craig said. He was holding her in his arms. She was wearing a bra with orange daisies on it, and matching cotton panties. It had been her idea to take off her T-shirt and jeans: “I want to feel as much of your skin against mine as I can, without—”
She hadn’t needed to say more.
He knew what she meant.
He’d agreed he’d never press the issue again after a night after winter break when he’d begged and pleaded with her to let him kiss her breasts. Finally, she’d nodded in a manner that had seemed almost ceremonious—the crucifer on the altar nodding to the priest—and Craig’s heart had nearly exploded in his chest.
But when he’d propped himself up on his elbows to unfasten her beautiful pink lace bra, he realized that she was crying, that there were matching tears sliding sideways down each of her cheeks, zigzagging into her golden hair, where they disappeared, and he pulled his trembling hands away from her bra as if they’d been burned. He let them hover in the air over her for a moment before he sagged beside her on the squeaking mattress of his bed, put his head in her neck, and said, “No, Nicole. I’m sorry.”
She said nothing.
“I won’t ask again,” Craig said.
“I love you,” she said—and, as every time she had said it since the first time, something seemed to catch between Craig’s soft palate and his throat. He couldn’t speak. He’d made a thousand declarations of love to her since October, but he could never say it in response to her declaration—because of this sharpness that caught him as quickly as a fishhook every time.
Nicole smiled, seeming to understand. He didn’t have to say it. He loved Nicole. He loved her. Nicole knew how much he loved her.
That had been six weeks ago, and since then he’d held her in his arms in her bra and panties a dozen times, and kept his promise not to ask for more.
“Tell me this is a bad joke,” he said. “Your sorority doesn’t really do this shit, right?”
“It’s not that weird,” Nicole said. “Secret societies have rituals. This happens to be ours.”
Craig couldn’t stop himself from snorting, but then he muttered an apology. He said, “Sorry. I guess I just don’t think of your sorority as a secret society. I mean, I thought it was about formals and decorating floats and making cookies and maybe helping each other clip in hair extensions. I never thought you’d have a coffin in the basement, and—”
“Shhh—be quiet,” Nicole said, and she actually glanced around the room as if someone might have overheard, although they were half-naked and completely alone in his dorm room. Perry was at his afternoon Poli-Sci lecture. Even the curtains were closed.
“Nicole,” Craig said, but didn’t bother to continue. It was cute, really, he thought. It reminded him of the way girls back in elementary school would get all excited about their own meaningless secrets, passing notes to one another, freaking out if some boy grabbed a note out of some girl’s hands, although those notes had never said anything more exciting than Deena likes Bradley!!! Like anyone cared.
“Well, the Pan-Hellenic Society could have our house closed if they found out. This is considered hazing.”
“How often does your sorority have these . . . raisings?” Craig asked, trying to make it sound like a serious question, trying not to make air quotations around the word.
“Twice a year,” Nicole said. “They did it back in November, but we—the new pledges—had to wait upstairs. They don’t let us attend until the Spring Event.”
Then, Craig couldn’t help it. He laughed out at her calling it the “Spring Event.” Basically they were getting sorority sisters drunk on tequila, having them hyperventilate until they passed out, putting them in a coffin, and “bringing them back from the dead,” all newly risen in the Omega Theta Tau sisterhood. It hardly fit, in Craig’s opinion, under the kind of seasonal “event” classification the Rotary Club might give to an Easter egg hunt or a skating party for kids with Down syndrome.
“Craig,” Nicole said, and punched him softly on the arm. “You said you wanted me to tell you everything. And you swore you wouldn’t tell anyone.”
Craig held his hand over his heart and said, “I swear. I mean it. Your secret society’s secret is safe with me. But don’t go brain dead on me or something, okay? You’re sure this shit is safe?”
“It’s so safe,” Nicole said. “Hundreds of girls have done it since the fifties. Nothing’s ever gone wrong.”
“Yeah, but what if it does? You read about this stuff all the time. People with heart conditions they didn’t know they had, that kind of thing—”
“Well, we have a dozen founding sisters present at the event. And this year I’m just a celebrant. I don’t get to be raised until next year.”
“Well, that’s good,” Craig said, although it still vaguely alarmed him. (For one thing, who were these blue-haired old ladies from the fifties who showed up for this weirdness, and why? Jesus Christ, would Nicole still be doing this stuff when she was eighty years old?) “I love you,” he said, “but the idea of wiping the drool off your bib for the rest of your life is less than sexy. Still, I’d do it.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry. Anyway, we have our own EMT. The sorority pays him to be at the events and—”
“That guy,” Craig said, and propped himself up on his elbow. “That guy. You said you didn’t know who he was.”
“What guy?”
“The one who’s always hanging around your sorority. I pointed him out. I said, ‘He’s got a patch on his pocket that says EMT,’ and you were like, ‘What’s EMT stand for?’ ”
“Huh?” She pulled Craig back down to her and kissed his temple. “Your eyebrows are all furrowed, Craig. I hate that.”
She’d said that a lot—that she couldn’t stand to look at him when his eyebrows were “furrowed,” and when he’d tried to explain to her that it would be his forehead that was furrowed, because furrows were lines and you couldn’t have furrowed eyebrows, she’d said, “I don’t care. I can’t stand that face you make.”
“You know perfectly well what EMT stands for,” Craig said. “Do you play dumb with me a lot, Nicole?”
“So, like, are you asking if I’m playing dumb or just actually dumb?”
He laughed, and she kissed his forehead.
“Don’t make fun of me,” Nicole said, but she wasn’t angry. She licked his forehead then and nuzzled into his neck, and he let his hands drift around the safe, soft, bare skin of her torso.
65
Kurt embraced Mira in front of the students with all that Eastern European physicality she remembered from her year in that part of the world—smelling strongly of cologne, literally lifting her off her feet.
“Mira!” he said, and set her back down.
When she turned back around to her class, they were staring at her with what could have been alarm, but mostly, she supposed, they were registering their surroundings (the starkness, the coldness) and smelling the lively, corporeal presence of Kurt against the antiseptic smell of the autopsy room on the other side of the sliding doors, from which he’d emerged wearing his white smock, red hair tucked up into a gauzy blue cap, big grin sans one front tooth.
“Mira,” he said again, and then looked at her students looking at him. He raised a hand to them and said, “Welcome to the morgue.”
&nb
sp; There was a burst of laughter, followed by nervous silence. The students nodded back with more energy than usual. Mira could already tell which of the girls were hoping to faint—although these were rarely the ones who actually fainted. The actual fainters were usually the tough guys or the serious young women who’d always wanted to be surgeons.
“We’ll be entering the ‘Waiting Mortuary’ in a moment,” Mira said, and gestured for the class to follow her through the sliding glass doors. “This is the part of the morgue that was specifically designed for the purpose of confirming that a dead body was actually deceased. Until very recently, as we’ve already discussed, there were no trusted methods for verifying death, and people had sincere fears of being buried alive. The Waiting Mortuary was designed to house the dead for a period of time during which attendants would be on alert for any sign of life. Right, Kurt?”
Kurt nodded sincerely. He was nothing if not sincere. When Mira had first met him, they had been leaning over a grave full of Serbian dead together, peering down.
Skeletal remains. Some scraps of clothing. A couple of wristwatches. A ring.
Kurt had turned to her, looked at her for what seemed like a long time, and then he’d reached over and put his hand over her eyes.
Since his move to the States, Mira had seen Kurt only during these visits with her classes to the morgue. She’d asked him to have coffee with her once, but he’d said he was busy. She invited him over to dinner once, but he’d declined.
“Your husband wouldn’t like it.”
“No, he would like it,” Mira insisted. “Clark would like to meet you. He’s heard so much about you.”
“No,” Kurt said again. “I am a single man. He looks at me one time. He knows I feel for you. I am a shy man, Mira. Large, yes, but timid. I do not want to fight your husband.”
“Fight?” Mira had exclaimed, and laughed out loud, but Kurt was serious, and she realized that because of this seriousness, there could be no dissuading him without insulting him, without implying that her husband would never have considered him a rival, that there would be no fight. So she hadn’t argued—although, when Clark had laughed and laughed after she told him about Kurt’s fears, so adamantly amused, she’d briefly considered telling him, that, actually, Kurt had been a figure for quite a while in her sexual imagination.
His large Eastern European presence with his scent of cologne and his experience of the world, and war, and hardship, and death.
Kurt bowed a little to Mira’s students then and said, “You must be very quiet, although of course the dead cannot hear.” (Again, excited and uneasy laughter.) “But because, you know, the word morgue, it is a French word. It means, at one and same, ‘to look at solemnly,’ and ‘to defy.’ ” Kurt waited for this to sink in, and then said, “You see, the sameness? And the strangeness?”
They were all nodding by this time. Perhaps they did understand, or maybe they were starting to feel as if their lives depended upon the goodwill of this man, their diener.
They stopped at the sliding glass doors. Mira turned and said, “Here we are in what the Victorians quaintly referred to as the Rose Cottage. At children’s morgues, they called it the Rainbow Room. And though these euphemisms might be charming, and funny, we have to remember that eventually most of us will find ourselves in a morgue, not viewing, but viewed.”
“Too-day,” Kurt said, “we have a man who has had a brain aneurysm. We have a woman of old age. We have a suicide. But I must warn you, because it is disturbing, there are a family, two children, father, grandmother, they were hit by a head-on. It is a busy day at the morgue.”
One or two of the students took a step backward, and began to look around as if in a panic to find the exit.
“As I’ve said,” Mira said (pointlessly, because no one ever left), “this is optional. You can wait for us here, or leave altogether if you need to. No penalties.”
The shock turned to resignation then. In some, it looked like excited anticipation. They might insist that they did not want to see dead bodies, but they did. And each semester this viewing was a turning point in her class. For a while afterward, anyway, they would feel in a way they hadn’t felt before that the living body was a temporary condition. Funereal black would no longer be a fashion statement. They would communicate with one another and with her more carefully.
The glass doors slid open, and Kurt stepped through them, and Mira and all of her students followed.
66
“I love you,” Nicole said again, and squeezed her eyes and kissed him. “I love you, and I love you, and I love you. But now I have to go.”
He watched Nicole’s small, tight, perfectly smooth body as she got out of his bed to slip into the black dress she’d bought to wear that night to her sorority’s ridiculous ritual. Except for the girls who were being raised, who wore white dresses, the others were to wear funeral black. The ones who’d already been raised, and the ones who were yet to be raised, were “mourners.”
It was ridiculous, he thought, even as he admired the dress as Nicole unfurled it from the hanger she’d so carefully put it on when she brought it to his room—and even more ridiculous that the sorority hadn’t been imaginative enough to come up with a name for it that didn’t rhyme with hazing.
Still, he vowed, he would say no more about it. It was the kind of absurdity you had to be outside of to see. Nicole, he knew, would have found absurd the painfully hard slaps on the ass his track teammates gave each other after a meet, and the writers’ conferences he went to with his father (languid poets and novelists wandering around with glasses of wine and little leather-bound diaries), not to mention the tradition among teenage males in Fredonia every winter, just before the ski resort opened, of getting naked in the middle of the night on the slopes, dropping acid, and beating the living shit out of each other.
Briefly it crossed Craig’s mind to call Lucas and ask him to crash the party with him, but he dismissed it instantly. He couldn’t risk the wrath of Nicole’s sisters again. He wasn’t even allowed to step onto the porch to pick her up anymore. And Nicole would hate him for it.
Her black dress was made of something that seemed silkier than silk. Craig sat up with his feet on the floor, and had to will himself not to crawl to her on hands and knees and kiss the hem of it. She’d gotten her hair cut a few weeks before, and although it was still long, there were blunt little ends now that curled up a little around her shoulders. She’d started wearing it loose more often. Sometimes, when she was studying or thinking or standing in front of the mirror, she’d run her fingers through it and it would appear to pour through them like molten gold.
Now she pulled out Perry’s desk chair and started rolling a sheer black stocking up her leg, and Craig stared at her ankle until she started to laugh.
“You’re drooling, Craig,” she said, and he snapped his mouth closed.
Her other foot was still bare.
The toenails were painted pale pink. In the light that shone through the crack in the curtains, those toenails seemed to glow—and then he was on his knees, crawling across the floor, taking the foot in his hands, cradling it, bringing it to his lips, kissing first the top of it, up near the ankle, and then moving down toward the toes, until she was squealing, “Stop! Stop! It tickles!” And then he heard a key flip the lock on the door, and Perry was standing there, looking down at Craig, in his underwear, on his knees in front of Nicole, holding her bare foot to his lips.
“Excuse me,” Perry said, looking up to the ceiling. “But if you could open the door when you’re done. I’ve got to get my food plan ID out of the desk to get some dinner.” The door slammed shut behind him, but not before Craig and Nicole had burst out laughing. How could they not? What must the scene have looked like to Perry? Craig released the foot and took her face in his hands, and pulled her gently toward him for a kiss, and then sat back on his heels to look at her. All that gold hair. Her cheeks flushed.
He tried not to imagine her then, in a basement,
in a black dress, a bunch of drunk and stoned sorority girls holding hands and chanting.
“We’d better hurry,” Nicole said. “Perry will be mad.”
“Screw Perry,” Craig said, loudly, toward the dorm room door, as if for Perry’s benefit, although he doubted Perry could hear him through the solid wood of the door, and he really had no great desire to hurt Perry’s feelings or piss him off. Perry had been particularly nice lately, letting Craig go on and on about his parents’ divorce, offering commiserating head shakes. He was gratifyingly appalled by the behavior of Craig’s mother, leaving his father. Once, he’d been in the room when Craig had called home and his mother had said to him, wearily, “Craig, this has nothing to do with you. This is between me, and Dad, and Scar.”
“Between you and Dad and Scar?” Craig had shouted, and then, without waiting for her answer, he’d slapped his phone shut and thrown it against the wall.
Perry had jumped up from his computer and taken Craig by the shoulders and said, in the voice of a really mature guy, “It’s okay, man. It’s okay. You gotta calm down, okay?”
He’d helped Craig duct-tape his cell phone together again. (Perry was great at fixing broken mechanical things, as Craig had learned when Perry’d accidentally stepped on his own calculator.) Afterward, he’d gone to Z’s with Craig, and they’d gotten pretty shitfaced—Craig, albeit, much more shitfaced than Perry.
And Craig found that he had grown oddly fond of the way Perry bleached his socks and rolled them into obsessive little balls lined up in the top drawer of his dresser. When Nicole was off at some sorority function, they’d eat in the cafeteria together, and now and then they’d go down to Winger Lounge and sprawl all over the couch to watch some basketball game neither of them cared about.