11

Cafeteria tables are laid in strategic rows like trenches. That’s in case they have to get to you fast, or get you out fast, or get away from you fast. Such are the grim inferences you learn to live with in high school. Madame Murat and Pat Egan, the one-armed shop teacher, circled the room, acting superior as prison guards. I wondered why they acted superior, since they were there just like we were there, only they’d been there longer and we were getting out first.

Jack and I were sitting by the windows in the corner. He was doing calculus, I was studying. Not exactly studying so much as staring at the patterns of text on the page, which were coming together and apart before my eyes like pieces at the bottom of a kaleidoscope. At the table to our left, Peter Palumbo and Daryl Sackler lunged emphatically, playing that football game boys play with the triangular folded paper. To our right, girls with tipped-in shoulders and nodding breasts huddled together over brown bag lunches.

Outside it was raining like crazy. Sheets of water pounded the roof, going straight over the gutters, past the windows, and onto the saturated ground. I could see past the parking lot, and into the sober queues of the potato fields on the opposite side of Long Lane.

The storm had started the night before at two in the morning. Twelve hours is a long time for a hard rain. I suspected it was a special rain, a monumental rain. I wanted to go into it with fanned-out arms, to bow and stomp and dance something similar to an Indian dance. I wanted to be touched by it and changed. It was rain to pray into, rain to save the world.

Jack and I had witnessed the very first drops the night before. The water tapped like rat teeth at my bedroom window. Jack said, “Listen.” His head tilted curiously, like an animal’s head. The beads of rain stuck to the glass, beached and lonely. We stared in the manner of zombies.

“Time is it?” he asked.

I said, “About two.”

“I don’t even feel tired. You feel tired?”

My head hurt and my eyes burned. My throat was sore. “A little tired, I guess, yeah.” We’d been arguing for hours, though Jack refused to call it that.

“Disagreeing,” he said, “is sufficient.” Adding, “Strenuously.”

“Are we at odds?”

“Yes.” Jack nodded once. “We are at odds.”

I did not like to be at odds with Jack. It was like being in a rowboat with only one person rowing. My oar would be raised, skimming the glassy lake, and Jack’s would flail—digging too deep, flying too high, ticking spastically. It would take us forever to go nowhere.

I had certain feelings, I’d told him. “Inside. They need relief.”

He peered through me as if to a minuscule spot on the wall.

I asked if he knew what I meant.

“Of course I know what you mean,” he snapped. Then he reminded me emphatically that I was not an animal. “You are separated from depravity by a conscience.”

Even if it was crazy to consider the activity of a few witless nerve endings as depraved, I did not disagree with him. Other girls hadn’t mentioned such feelings, so I knew that I was at the very least abnormal. It was common knowledge that if a girl was assertive in regard to sex, it was because she wanted to keep a boyfriend or steal a boyfriend or act out against her parents and society. Possibly she craved togetherness. I’d never heard of a girl who wished to alleviate the tingling sensations along the walls of her vagina, or at the posterior rim of its base, or in a third place, sort of an alcove where the seam of low underwear hits, only on the inside. No girls I knew ever spoke of seeing a boy or seeing a man and thinking thoughts.

“The job of the conscience,” Jack was saying, “is to marshal urges. Otherwise, any object in your field of vision is eligible for fucking.”

I thought he was missing the point.

“I’m not missing the point,” he said. “It’s not a particularly sophisticated point to miss.”

Jack stood and did something he never did, which was to tuck in his shirt. His scaly hands crammed the fabric down in bunches, and he began to pace. “Your problem is that you haven’t read enough. If you’d done more reading, you’d realize that desire that moves from origin to fulfillment but circumvents the intellect is corrupted by compulsion. It’s immoral and untrue—it’s feral.” Feral was his new favorite word; he used it cleverly, sometimes three or four times a day without sounding repetitive. “Understand me?”

I said, “Sort of.”

“Be specific. What don’t you understand?” He lifted a scallop shell from my desk and bit at its edge, gnawing at the corrugated reservoir of pink, dragging his lips across the veins that spread in a fan from the squared cap to the sheer, translucent edge. I felt a numb jerk between my legs, and I looked away.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I couldn’t remember what we’d been saying.

He cast the shell aside. It made a solitary clink when it hit the table, like a fork ringing out on glass. “You were saying you sort of understood.”

“Oh. Even if longings are immoral, why are they untrue?”

“Because one arrives at truth, one cultivates it. Truth doesn’t materialize instantaneously. Therefore, how can it be true to go around satisfying impulses?”

“Imagine you’re walking,” I said, “and you get the urge to run—”

“Urge is the operative word,” Jack interrupted.

“Okay, fine. It’s a physical urge or a feral urge—whatever. But instead of running, you think of all the things that running entails, like, whether you’re wearing the right shoes, and what the neighbors might say, and what if you trip, and so on. If after all that thinking, you decide not to run, that decision would be impure. It would have come from fear—fear of judgment or failure. And if, after thinking, you decide to run, that choice would also be impure, coming from a wish to defy convention or to take a personal risk. So, you could say that the first feeling, the truest feeling, the physical, feral urge, is contaminated by secondary things, things coming from thought.”

“Yeah,” he said. “So?”

“I’m just saying, maybe urges start out okay, but it’s the thinking afterward that contorts everything.”

“Wrong,” Jack said. “Circumstance contorts everything. Urges are not needs; they are perversions of needs and are inseparable from circumstance. You can’t discuss the urge to drive fast without presupposing the circumstance of a car. Or jumping from a plane without presupposing being in air. Or overeating if there’s no food. An urge is like not being hungry but anyway you eat. It’s like eating cake because cake is there. What if, instead of cake, there’s celery sticks. Would your body manufacture the desire to eat celery sticks?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.” I happened to like celery.

“To the point that you would actually gorge on it?”

“Probably not.” I didn’t like celery that much.

“So is your urge to eat celery a true urge?”

I wasn’t sure anymore. It was weird to argue about celery.

“Of course not,” Jack answered for me. “An urge is relevant only in regard to urge impetus. Urges are ‘untrue’ because they change when circumstances change.”

I wasn’t sure what it all had to do with sex anyway.

“Simple,” he said. “You can’t go out fucking every time you get an urge.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘go out’? This is a conversation about you and me.”

“No, Evie. This is a conversation about you.”

I picked at the carpet.

Jack joined me on the floor and began to gesture with somber hands. “Don’t you see? Orgasm is secondary to intimacy. True bliss comes from the union of soul to soul. If you are driven strictly by the will to copulate, you are no more than a beast—unrefined, spiritually bankrupt, devoid of the capacity for distinction. You are feral,” he concluded triumphantly.

I frowned and exhaled. I knew that the second he left, things would not be as clear as he insisted.

“Okay?” Jack asked, caressing my head. “Silly girl.”

——

The falling water formed a curtain on the outside of the cafeteria glass. Birds fluttered behind it, sheltered by the overhang created by the sloped roof.

“I’m gonna take a walk,” I said to Jack. “See you later.”

“Later,” Jack mumbled, going back to his books.

It’s always a risk to stand when other people are sitting. It makes you an object of gossip, especially if you are a gossip-worthy person, which I happened to be, and there was no sense trying to change the fact. Some people try to change the fact by being extra nice or helpful to others. Some people depress me.

I was fifteen when my dad’s partner, Tony, taught me how to ward off the evil eye. “See that?” he said one day when we were walking through Washington Square Park. “That bitch is giving you the evil eye. Quick, do this.” He took my hand and curled all the fingers except the pointer and the pinky. “She don’t have to see it,” Tony advised. “You don’t gotta draw her attention to it—unless of course you want to. Just let your arm hang down, nice and casual. This way you protect yourself.” As we passed the woman, he laughed in her face. “Ha!” he said. “Comin’ right back at cha, babe!”

I moved through a maze of cafeteria tables, with each group going silent as I approached, then snapping to action as I passed, like a baseball wave. I held my hand the way Tony had taught me. When I reached the table with Kiki, Pip, and Coco, there was an outburst of laughter, probably about my hair. When we got to school that morning, Denny said I looked like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. “Big-eyed and sort of eerie.”

The doors of the gym were open. I made my way down the right side of the courts, through a corridor of idling boys waiting for the next game or recovering from the last. They nodded, saying, “Hey, Evie.” They didn’t seem to mind the way I was.

The staccato back and forth of feet trampling the court shook the wooden stands as I climbed the last section of bleachers at the farthest end of the gym. I sat and leaned forward, watching the game, thinking it must feel good to trample and to run undressed without fear of scrutiny, to be the legitimate heirs to such a definitive space as a gym. Sometimes you can feel sorry to be a woman, or at least you can forget why you’re supposed to be so glad about it.

There was the piercing squelch of rubber. “Do it! Go! Go!”

The boys signaled with clapping hands or twitching heads, and when the guy with the ball was blocked, you figured he would pass or hand off, but instead his jaw would relax, his eyes would go stony, and he would pivot low to cut past the rangy gate of arms that sought to obstruct him; then he would try the shot anyway, usually missing. In spite of the failed attempt, you had to admire the breakaway risk. Breakaway risk is kind of like the law of the sperm. They’ll unify, but only to a point.

The wooden plank depressed alongside me—creaking down, easing up. I looked back, turning almost completely. It was the man Kate had pointed to in the hallway. He moved directly behind me, placing one of his knees on either side of my back. He was soaking wet and his chest was heaving. I figured he’d been running in the rain and that he must have been running a long time, maybe miles. He’d come to give me a message. He wanted me to know he felt entitled. I understood—I felt similarly entitled. He’d come because he had no choice; there was nowhere else to go. I knew that too. I also had nowhere. His soul was not quiet; neither was mine.

The light cotton of his shorts revealed what I had never seen made so legible, a region of tenderness, and it made me both proud and sad, which was strange; to feel proud that way, as if I were connected to his tenderness, and sad because, of course, I was not. His face was like the face of a large animal, kinglike and balanced. The cheekbones were so prominent as nearly to hide the eyes, which were as dark as carbon, but glassy, like lights were shining on them. His hair was black and dripping. Kate had said his name was Harrison, Harrison Rourke.

Someone screamed, “Let’s go, asshole, let’s go!”

I did not turn back to the court. I knew his nearness was miraculous. It was nothing I could explain; it was an old knowledge. My feelings for him were like memories rising up, dormant things revivified, regaining dimension, spinning to life. To be near him, the world turned alive.

I stayed still, letting him regard me. Unlike Jack, he did not seem to be disgusted by what he saw.

As soon as I was able, I went back down cautiously into the gym. Reaching the end by the doors, I turned back. He had not moved. His elbows were on his knees, his head hanging down, his face turned to me. He was smiling.