Be Mine

No.

  I took a sip of the coffee. It burned my lips.

  No.

  This was just a bit of terror left over from high school, where such games had been invented, perpetrated, and then abandoned. It was just the cold bad memory of a January morning in homeroom after a weekend during which I'd let Tony Houseman touch my breasts, under my shirt, inside my bra, in the backseat of his brother's car.

  Up front, his brother was driving.

  He'd dropped us off at the movie we'd gone to see (The Way We Were), then picked us up afterward.

  All along, it had been that brother I'd been in love with. Bobby. A senior, when I was a freshman. Bobby was quiet and brooding, while Tony, his little brother, was a class clown—a boy who never shut up, who cracked so many jokes that, by default, a few of them were unforgettably funny, but mostly were lame, tiresome, crude.

  Bobby, to my knowledge, had never had a serious girlfriend, and he ran with a group of boys who seemed to be the same—indifferent to girls, but radiantly handsome, athletic boys who occasionally shook one another's hands in the hallway, a gesture so adult and masculine it made everyone else passing in the hallway appear moronic and childlike, as if we were cartoon characters who'd stumbled into the real world.

  Tony and I made out through most of the movie in the back of the theater, which was mostly empty anyway. He'd invited me to the movie, then paid for the movie, bought me popcorn and an enormous 7 UP. I felt obligated—and he was attractive enough. I let him run his hands up and down my side, put his tongue so deeply into my mouth I felt I might gag, and then he'd pulled away with his hand an inch or so from my breast and said, "Can I touch it?"

  "No," I said, moving my arm into my torso to trap his hand. "Not now."

  "When?"

  I didn't want, I suppose, to appear stingy. I said, "Not in the theater. Later, in the car."

  We hadn't been in the backseat of Bobby Houseman's car two seconds before Tony began the tongue explorations again. It was dark in the car, eleven o'clock at night, and we were on the freeway when he pulled away and whispered, "Now?"

  "Okay," I whispered back.

  Up front, Bobby Houseman seemed to be nodding to the music on the radio, watching the road ahead of him, but as soon as Tony started to push my shirt and bra up, exposing my breast in a way I hadn't anticipated at all, Bobby Houseman glanced in the rearview mirror—and I could see him looking directly into it, then directly into my eyes, and then to my naked breast. "Squeeze it, Tony," he said. "Bite it, buddy."

  My whole body flushed with shame, but it was too late. I was here, I'd allowed this, I'd agreed to this, it would do no good now to struggle away, to pull my shirt down fast. I let Tony do it. I let him squeeze my breast, and then put his face down to my chest and feel around there with his mouth until he found my nipple, which he clamped down on hard, while his brother watched, and then said, when Tony resurfaced and looked toward Bobby for approval, "Good work, Tone. Good job, little brother. Next time get into her panties. Stick your finger up her." We'd finally pulled up in front of my house by then and, heart pounding, I pulled my shirt down and hurried from the car, straight to my room, and got in bed with my clothes on.

  The next day, Sunday, I spent convincing myself that it had never happened. Bobby Houseman couldn't have seen into the backseat. He didn't see my breast. He didn't watch as Tony bit my nipple. He wasn't really talking about me. He was talking to Tony about something else. It was some brotherly conversation they'd had that had nothing to do with me. Because it was impossible that Bobby Houseman had watched his brother feel and bite my breasts. Or if he'd watched, he hadn't seen.

  But, after homeroom, during which one of Tony Houseman's pals licked his lips at my chest when I walked in, and then in the hallway—those boys, passing me in a masculine wall, starting to laugh—when one of Bobby Houseman's friends turned around and said to Bobby, "So you say they're nice little tits? Little brown nipples?" and Bobby Houseman answered loudly, "Yeah, but you have to ask my brother what they taste like," it was as if veil after veil were being ripped off of me in quick succession, exposing me to myself so quickly I could hardly keep walking.

  No.

  That was high school. I'm a grown woman now. And Bram Smith is no high school boy—although he isn't thirty, as I'd thought he was, but twenty-eight. (Perhaps I was on that date, or one like it, the day he was born.) But, when I'd said to him, "I know you know that nobody can know—" he'd looked at me with grave sincerity, the wisdom of a man who'd had many secret lovers, who'd been one, and said, "Discretion? You bet. Of course. You have nothing to fear from me, sweetheart. I'm the soul of discretion."

  Still, when Garrett looked from Bram to me, then caught my eye and waved, I flinched. I wanted to turn, walk away as if I hadn't seen him, but then he called out, "Mrs. Seymour!" and nodded good-bye to his friend in the red nylon jacket, sprinting over to me.

  "Garrett," I said when he was at my side.

  "Just wondered how Chad's doing," he said. "I e-mailed him a couple times, and got nothing."

  "Chad's fine," I said, trying to smile more naturally than I was smiling. "Chad's probably just busy with school."

  "Yeah, well, if you talk to him, tell him I said hi. Are you walking over to your office? If you are, I'll go with you."

  "Yes," I said. "But I'm stopping in the women's room first. I'm sorry."

  "It's okay," Garrett said. "I'm just glad to see you."

  This puppylike joy. Where, I wondered, did it come from? Both of Garrett's parents had struck me as somber, if not morose, back when they were alive. And the tragedies of their deaths—how had Garrett come out of that nest with this personality?

  This optimism?

  I thought of Chad. Jon, at least, if not I, was made of optimism—and yet Chad, our son, would never have stood in a cafeteria speaking so happily and without pretense to the mother of one of his friends. He would never have worn this simple plaid shirt. A pocket with two pencils in it. The buzz cut. All this unabashed plainness, this pure spirit of it. If, somehow, Chad had found himself here instead of Berkeley, he would have been like some of the students I'd had in my classes, scowling in the back, too bright to bother shining. He would have nodded politely to the mother of his friend, certainly, but he would not have waved to her, smiling. He would not have jogged across the cafeteria on a Monday morning to ask her a question about her son.

  But, I couldn't walk to my office with Garrett. My hands were trembling. If I had to speak to him, more than a few words, I wasn't sure I could keep the sound of it, of Bram, out of my voice.

  We parted at the ladies' room.

  "I'll see you around, Mrs. Seymour," Garrett said. "You have a great day."

  IN MY Introduction to Literature class I was strangely nervous, seized by the kind of stage fright I used to have as a very new teacher.

  We were discussing the first act of Hamlet, and the students seemed to be both bored and made anxious by it—a kind of confusion that manifested itself in yawning, fidgeting, defensiveness. Derek Heng's arm shot up and he said, "What's the point of reading Hamlet if we don't understand it?" to which every other head in the room nodded. Earlier, Bethany Stout had suggested that we find a better translation, because the one we were reading was so old-fashioned—a statement that had struck me as both sadly ignorant and somehow very savvy. I was so surprised by her suggestion that I was only able to stammer out the obvious, that this wasn't a translation, that it was old-fashioned because it was old.

  "The point," I said, answering Derek Heng, "of reading Hamlet is to learn how to understand it."

  But, because it seemed obvious, then, that the problem was that I wasn't teaching them how to understand it, I felt something like the moat around a sand castle cave in somewhere near my sternum, and I could go no farther, found myself completely unable even, flipping the thin pages of the text on my lap, to find some passage that they might see the beauty and relevance of.

  (Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio,
a fellow of infinite jest.)

  My body felt cold. I was wearing a skirt that was too short, I was sure of that now. I let them go early and went back to my office.

  There, I listened to the messages on my voice mail:

  Two messages from students with excuses for missing class. A car wouldn't start. A baby had an ear infection. A message from a textbook saleswoman, a wrong number, and Amanda Stefanski asking if I would have time for a cup of coffee tomorrow or the next day, that we had a problem student in common and she wanted to ask me for some advice. And then, Jon, asking if I'd seen my "boyfriend."

  You be a good girl, he said. But not too good.

  And there was such a lighthearted obliviousness to the statement that it made me, briefly, angry, before I thought, No. It wasn't Jon. It was the bad class. I was cold, and tired, and even if I didn't yet, I should have been feeling guilty.

  Still, for the first time, I thought to myself that this fantasy of Jon's was insulting, that it was like the kind of market testing his software firm did when they came up with an idea—shopping it around to see if anyone but themselves would find any value in this particular piece of intellectual property before any more time or energy was invested in it—and I held the phone away from my ear until the end of the message.

  Last, the physician's assistant from Summerbrook Nursing Home calling to tell me that my father was being put on a low dose of Zoloft.

  He's been so depressed these last few weeks, she said. He's completely lost his appetite, and he never wants to leave his room. Give us a call?

  I dialed the number to Summerbrook as quickly as I could—my fingers fumbling on the numbers as I punched them. Already, however, the physician's assistant had left for the day, and the nurse's aide I spoke to didn't seem to know who my father was.

  I sighed, exasperated. "Can you transfer me to room twenty-seven?" I asked her.

  She wasn't sure, she said, but she would try.

  There were a long few minutes of dead space in which I could hear what sounded like Lake Michigan roaring in the distance—a fluid undulating rhydim that might have been coming from the phone, or from inside my own ear—and then there was a click. She'd managed it, die transfer.

  The phone rang eleven times before an old man (my father?) answered it.

  "Dad?" I asked.

  "Yes?" he said.

  "Dad, it's me. Sherry."

  "Yes."

  "Are you okay, Dad? I had a message that you've lost your appetite."

  "Huh?"

  "Dad, are you feeling okay? Are you fine?"

  "I'm fine," he said.

  "I'm going to come to visit," I said.

  "I don't need anything," he said.

  "I know, Dad," I said. "But I need to see you. I miss you."

  "Do what you need to do," he said.

  I said, "I love you, Dad"—although I still didn't feel certain the man on the other end of the line was my father.

  How could I know?

  What did my father's voice sound like now, and how could I recognize it?

  The voice of that younger father was the one I would have known him by, and that voice was gone, and now his voice was interchangeable with the voices of all elderly men—a scratchy, distant voice, like something rising from beneath a boulder, like the voice of a small bird being held too tightly in a child's hands.

  He said nothing more. There was a knocking on the other end of the line, as if he had dropped the receiver and it had bounced or rolled across the floor.

  And then a click. Someone had hung up the phone.

  I STOPPED by the grocery store on the way to my efficiency, bought a bottle of Merlot and two glasses, two steaks, two potatoes, and a bunch of asparagus that looked so green and robust it was impossible to imagine that it had been picked and bundled in California then shipped across the country in a crate. This seemed like local produce. The stems had about them all the lushness of spring, and the tips were such sharp arrows they seemed dangerous. Weapons disguised as vegetation. I stood for a moment in the produce aisle, drew them to my face like a bouquet, and inhaled.

  An old woman passed me then, both pushing and leaning on her grocery cart, which was empty except for a few brown-spotted bananas.

  She looked at me, and I looked at her.

  The skin on her face was powdery and thin, and I felt sure that if I touched it something white and sparkling would come off on my fingertips.

  I'd seen her before, I felt certain—once, in a room at a lab in the basement of the hospital where I'd been waiting for some routine blood work. Cholesterol. Hormone levels. Iron. White blood cells. A count of those things circulating in the blood that could be quantified, interpreted. She'd been there knitting, wearing a gray dress, and the quiet sound of her needles clicking against one another had felt, that afternoon, like a quiet affirmation of time passing. Seconds adding up to something. Eternity being parceled into baby blankets, being turned into winter scarves.

  But the old woman didn't seem to recognize me, or to like me, in the produce aisle. Her eyes on me were small and watery, watching skeptically as I inhaled the greenness that had stabbed out of the ground two thousand miles from here, as if I were still trying to get the sun and water and earth out, after it was gone, as if she knew how futile that was.

  She looked at me as she passed, pushing those bananas in her cart, as if she had some notion of who I was, what I was up to, and she did not approve.

  AT EXACTLY eight o'clock, Bram arrived in a bleached white shirt. Outside the door to my efficiency, through the peephole, he looked like the kind of dark and mysterious stranger you might think twice about letting in—but the kind of stranger you would, eventually, let in.

  I opened the door.

  For a moment we stood awkwardly in the one room. Then, I nodded to the bottle of wine on the counter next to the kitchen sink, the two new glasses I'd rinsed and dried and set next to it, and I said, in a voice that seemed to come from behind me, from some other woman, one I'd never met, "Would you like a glass of wine?"

  He smiled and glanced down at his own shoes, as if he were willing himself not to laugh, and then looked back up at me with his eyebrows raised, directly into my eyes, and said, "Sure. But I had something else in mind first."

  He reached over, took my hand, drew me closer to him, and brought the hand to his mouth. He put his lips to it first, moving them softly across the knuckles, and then his tongue.

  The solicitous warmth of it, and watching him do it, seeing his head bowed over my hand—and my hand, as if it were detached from my body, the focus of this intense concentration, by this gorgeous younger man—made me feel, briefly, as if I might actually swoon. I had to take a step toward him, lean my shoulder against his, to steady myself.

  He turned the wrist over then and kissed the thin skin there. Delicately. He looked up at me. I was breathing deeply. He turned back to the wrist, brought it to his mouth, making small circles on it, and then his teeth, lightly, biting at the cool white flesh, the veins and nerves so close to the surface I could feel it shoot through my whole body.

  I leaned over and put my face to his neck, moaning as I did it, smelling him, smelling what must have been exhaust fumes on him, machine, and oil, and masculinity.

  And then we were on the floor, on the matted gray carpet of the efficiency.

  He kissed me deeply, and I kissed back hard, my mouth wide open, my hands on his shoulders.

  He pulled back to take his shirt off, and after he tossed it in the direction of the kitchen table, he leaned over with the expression of a serious physician, or a mechanic—an expert about to take a look at some part of me that concerned us both, and began to undo the buttons on my blouse.

  The first button, undone, and I began to tremble, and he said, "Shhh. Everything's okay, baby. Baby."

  And then the second and third, and he opened it and pushed the blouse away from my body, and reached behind my back, unhooked my bra, pushed it up over my breasts.

>   For a moment he just leaned back on his heels and looked at me, my body spread out under him. I was still trembling. He was breathing steadily, but my breath was ragged.

  I felt cold on the floor—an object, an anesthetized patient, or even a corpse, being observed in a laboratory, except that my nipples were stiff, and I couldn't help but arch my back toward him, involuntarily.

  I was pushing myself toward his touch, aching toward it, dying for it, and finally gasping and groaning when he did touch me, one hand lightly brushing a nipple, and then the other, and then two fingers on a nipple, squeezing, and then the other, hard enough this time that the shock of it shot straight through me, and I made a loud animal sound I'd never made before, and then he reached with his other hand under my skirt, inside the crotch of my panties, pushing a finger into me, and I knew I was so wet there it shamed me, and then he pressed his palm against my clitoris, rubbing it as he pinched my nipples with his other hand, knowing exactly what he was doing, what it was doing to me, watching me from what seemed an amused but excited distance as I came in shattering waves beneath him on the floor.

  Afterward, Bram just sat back and looked at me for a minute, and the silence and his appraisal of me grew so uncomfortable I tried to pull the blouse over my naked breasts.

  But he laughed and said, "Oh no you don't," and opened it again, pushed my skirt over my hips all the way and pulled the panties down over my ankles, spreading my legs, and said, "Now I'm going to fuck you, sweetheart."

  IN THE middle of the night I woke up on the futon to find Bram standing over me. Moonlight shone through the window that faced the alley, and a garage, and, beyond it, the parking lot where I'd parked my car.

  He was putting on his boxer shorts, and the shadow he cast over me was cool, blue, long.

  Seeing the length of him over me—the dark line of hair from his crotch to his breastbone, the flesh of him made tangible by moonlight—I thought it was the most sensual, earthly thing I'd ever seen.