Virgin and Other Stories Read online

  The next day the roads were too bad for him to drive to work, and they enjoyed what he thought of as their delayed honeymoon. That evening, as he lay back on the bed, happily exhausted and amused that they’d actually somehow torn away not only the sheets but the mattress cover, she sighed with what he at first mistook for contentment, and said, “I guess that’s it, then.”

  “What? What’s it?” He sat up, confused. She’d seemed to enjoy herself even more than he’d expected she would, it being her first time; he was almost sure she had come.

  She was not on the bed but standing beside it, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. She’d put on one of his white undershirts. She’d gotten leaner after the wedding; at dinner she seemed to eat less than half of what she herself put on the plate.

  “You know. Sex. I mean, it’s fun. But I thought…” She looked away from him, over at the basket in the corner where they put their dirty clothes. She hadn’t done laundry in a while, apparently, and clothes spilled over the basket. “I thought it would feel more … it just feels so … physical.”

  Of course it felt physical. It was sex, he said, laughing nervously. What did she mean?

  “I expected a spiritual element,” she explained. “I expected it to be physical and spiritual.”

  He felt as if she’d struck him again; his whole body rather than just his head. “You mean you don’t feel anything for me.” He stared down at the mattress, the pale gray stripes exposed.

  “No. No. I love you … I just … it’s me. I try to look in your eyes and I can’t, and I know I’m supposed to, but I can’t. It’s fun, though. It’s great. It’s just me, is all. I shouldn’t have said anything. I talk too much.”

  “Sheila.” He looked up at her. She stared straight ahead now, lost in thought. “Did you stop seeing your therapist?”

  She pulled her arms more tightly against her chest and looked into his eyes, shifted her gaze again to the laundry pile. “No.”

  She was lying, it seemed to him.

  “Okay,” he said gently.

  She climbed back onto the bed and curled up against him, her head on his chest, her red hair spilling over his arm. “I didn’t mean to ruin everything,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

  III

  He lost track of her early in the night, when, as some coworkers approached from one direction, Sheila darted off in the other with the excuse of needing another ginger ale. He chatted with them—some women from the marketing department, two of whom were young and pretty and seemed girlishly aware of their party appearances, hands fidgeting with bracelets and smoothing hair, bodies moving in the formal dresses with a self-consciousness he’d never have glimpsed at work. Though he had trouble following the conversation, he managed to hide it. How much time had passed? Fifteen minutes? Thirty?

  The women moved on.

  In the far corner of the next room (crowded, red walls) he spotted his host and hostess talking to another couple. Rachel’s husband, a bearded man with a lot of coarse blond hair, seemed to be telling a story, mock-scowling and making exaggerated gestures. But while the couple grinned back, Rachel stared blankly past him, hand cupping a full glass of red wine. The room had two openings and at that moment, from the other side, a child in a white flannel nightgown—Rachel’s daughter, the one who’d come to his office—streaked from one opening to the other, a weirdly determined look on her face. Rachel began to hurry after her, yelling her name, the anger in her voice belied by the sudden pleasure in her expression. As she passed near him she met his eye and raised her brows so that he felt included in the child’s mischief, the mother’s pursuit. For a moment he forgot where he was going. But as she vanished from his sight he again became aware of the problem, his search.

  There were many familiar faces—doctors and administrators, board members and their spouses—but also plenty of people he didn’t recognize. Laughter would erupt from one cluster, and then the next. Many of them, though youthful and well preserved in the way of successful people in a mid-size town, were much older than he. There was talk of time-shares in Europe, of health-care legislation, of encounters with unruly patients. He smiled and nodded his way through.

  Where was she? He made his way through a number of rooms, still sipping at the now-watery gin and tonic he’d gotten when he first arrived. At the bar, he got another. He passed through the kitchen, where the waitstaff was replacing trays with hors d’oeuvres, and moved out onto the broad back deck overlooking a little courtyard, a fountain. Out here white lights were strung up around the tree branches that grew along the walls, and people’s faces were harder to make out. The early spring air was neither hot nor cold. He studied the throng of bodies, but he could not find his wife’s face. He leaned against the railing and looked down into the courtyard. Below he glimpsed the little girl, now standing by the fountain that shimmered beneath the strung lights. Her pale hair, in the surrounding dimness, gleamed white by the glow of the water. She turned her face up toward the balcony, met his eye. Then, from the lower part of the house, from somewhere beneath the deck, a female voice that was not her mother’s called out to her, and she darted into the shadows. He waited for a moment to see if she’d return, but she was gone.

  Now he found himself drawn into a nearby conversation.

  “But I heard it was inherited,” a man said.

  Jake didn’t recognize these people from work.

  “No. I went to high school with them in Raleigh. Daniel’s parents were teachers and Rachel’s family was on welfare after her dad died. It was vacuum parts.” There was a pause, the clink of ice. “They owned factories in South America. Made a killing. But then it came out that handling the parts caused birth defects. Nowadays all vacuum parts are like that, if you notice. There’s usually a warning in the little instruction manual? You’re supposed to be sure to wear gloves or wash your hands after. But this was a while back and a company that used their parts ended up getting sued by a customer. The company tried to file a suit against the Delaneys’ company but it was proven that they knew what they were buying and Rachel and Daniel got out okay.”

  “I heard she had a nervous breakdown,” a woman said in a low voice.

  “From the guilt. I heard she thinks her cancer was punishment from God, and that’s why they donate all that money.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said a man wearing thick-rimmed glasses. “That’s just a rumor.”

  “It amazed me that she let them write about her like they did—her treatments and reconstruction. I’d feel weird when people looked at me and just knew, well…”

  “You couldn’t beat the promotion they got for the center from that, though. That was smart. Nothing beats the personal-narrative stuff. People eat that shit up.”

  “Didn’t she hire the designer, too? I like the paintings in the lobby there. Who is it who did those paintings?”

  “The Japanese woman from Charleston?”

  “No, it was someone local. Smythe or Simms or…”

  The conversation veered into a discussion of the prices of local art. He turned and went back inside the house.

  * * *

  It had been afternoon when Rachel knocked on the door to his office. At first he hadn’t answered, hoping whoever it was would go away. The little girl with her was very blond and wore a black pair of galoshes, with a gold-and-white jumper. She looked five or six, her eyes the water-blue of her mother’s. Though it was March, Rachel wore another black T-shirt, and the same flip-flops, pale legs bare. Her long hair was pulled into the same plastic tortoiseshell clip.

  “She knew you were in here,” the little girl said.

  “Violet,” Rachel said in a warning voice. To him, “I don’t mean to bother you, but I just wanted to talk about the press releases for the mammography unit, and…” She was looking around his office as she spoke, and now paused. “Does it bother you to work in here?”

  “Why would it bother me?”

  “It’s just, this was a room for pat
ients.”

  “So?”

  “So people have suffered and died in here.”

  “People have died in here,” the little girl repeated in a low, wondering voice.

  “It’s a hospital,” he said in his most rational tone. He wanted them to leave, but Rachel was moving deeper in. She walked toward his window and began to speak of how this view of his must have been for a significant number of people a “last view of the world.” The little girl began to pick up and examine objects on his desk: his brass paperweight, his Post-it notes, his pens. She looked at these things as if they were fantastic, turning them in her small white hands while the water-colored eyes contemplated their sides from multiple angles.

  Now Rachel reached into her purse and extracted the chocolate, her back to him. He imagined her white skin beneath the thin black fabric of her shirt. He tried to think of something else but the only something else his mind would turn to was the deceased peering out of his window. His head ached. He did not feel well. He wanted a cigarette. The little girl, with a look of intense concentration, was sticking blank Post-it notes—pink, yellow, mint-green—all over his paperwork and desk. Her mother still stared out his window, out at the overcast afternoon. His office smelled of chocolate.

  “Could I have some of that?” he said.

  She turned from the window to smile at him. She stepped close to him, his head level with her waist, his eyes drawn to her breasts. With one hand she self-consciously wrapped her cardigan around her chest, and with the other handed him a square of the candy. She watched his face too long.

  “I see,” she said softly.

  “See what?”

  She reached out, as if to touch his cheek, but retracted her hand. He felt, still, as if she were touching him. She might have been touching him all over with the water-colored eyes: they wanted each other. Then she averted her gaze, broke the spell. “Violet, Mr. Harrison is tired and we need to get out of his hair now. Come back another time.”

  “Wait.”

  He quickly began to sift through the contents of his desk drawers for something that might interest the child. Found himself handing over pens, an old Rolodex, a small green clipboard bearing the logo of a pharmaceutical company. The child accepted these things with the air of one accepting precious gifts. Suddenly he had the feeling that all things in his office were sacred, were less and also more than what they were.

  “That’s all she can carry,” the mother said, smiling. “Say thanks.”

  “Thank you,” the child said to him, arms full of his things.

  Gone.

  He was very tired. He laid his head down on his desk, face buried in arms.

  * * *

  The upstairs of the house appeared smaller than he expected. Smaller and plainer. But that was probably because the hall was narrow and all of the doors shut. Would he really have to go around opening all these doors? And what would happen if someone saw him up here? They’d think he was being nosy.

  What he imagined was opening the door to a bedroom, a guest room, perhaps, to find a couple embracing on a made-up bed. He imagined lamplight, auburn hair, her back turned to him. Some man fumbling with the zipper at the back of her dress.

  He felt light-headed. He’d forgotten to eat anything. They could go to a diner, he thought, as soon as the party ended, after he found her. What he expected, as much as he expected to catch her with a man, was to go through all these rooms and find them empty, then go back down and run into her, find she’d been searching for him at the same time he’d been searching for her, and they’d simply kept missing each other, as they did sometimes after having drifted apart in the mall, at bookstores.

  The first two doors opened to darkness, the hall light skimming the outlines of an office in one room, a treadmill and weight-lifting equipment in the other. Without thinking he opened a smaller door he should’ve known led to a linen closet.

  The next door he opened brought him face-to-face with his hostess.

  He started.

  She showed no surprise, only amusement at, he guessed, his embarrassment, his getting caught. The child was with her.

  “Strawberry,” the child said to him.

  They sat on a plain white cot. The room had polished hardwood floors and ivory walls bearing soft ellipses of light from two standing lamps on either side of the room. The only shadows that broke the light came from their bodies, for there was no furniture. Rachel’s sweater lay in a black lump beside her, on the cot, her bare arms and shoulders exposed, the thin blue straps of the dress, perhaps because he was looking down at her, seeming to barely cover her nakedness. He quickly turned his eyes to the child in her white flannel gown, etched faintly with caramel-colored flowers, he saw now. Her blond hair looked mussed and after she said strawberry for the second time, she frowned.

  “He doesn’t know what we’re playing,” Rachel said to her. “He just thinks you’re being weird. Tell him what we’re playing.”

  “Word association,” the little girl said to him. In a very serious voice, “I say a word, and you say the first word that comes to your mind, and then I say the first word that comes to my mind when I hear your word, and then you say—”

  “He gets the point, Violet.”

  “Strawberry,” the girl said again, insistently.

  “Milk,” he replied.

  “Now Mommy.”

  “Cow.”

  “Hamburger,” Violet said. To Jake, “Hamburger comes from cows. People kill the cows and then they eat them. They made me eat cows but I didn’t know what it was,” she said sadly. “I didn’t know.”

  “Please don’t start again, Violet,” her mother said. “No one meant to taint you. No one knew how you’d feel about it.” To Jake, “Her nanny doesn’t know how to talk to sensitive children.”

  “I ate cows,” the little girl persisted gravely.

  “This is not the time for us to talk about that,” Rachel said. “It’s time for me to talk to Mr. Harrison now. Time for you to go.”

  “But I want to sleep in here with you tonight.”

  She latched on to her mother’s bare arm and began to whimper. When Rachel gave her a threatening look, the child let go of her mother. She got up from the cot, stomped her small bare feet past Jake at the door, and in the dim hall burst into a sprint. He watched her open the door that faced theirs from the opposite end, flooding the space with light. Briefly he glimpsed a huge high-ceilinged room with a Ping-Pong table, beyond it a sofa and a big-screen television flashing the bright pastels of a cartoon. He heard the shrieks of children. Then the door slammed shut and the hall seemed twice as dark as before.

  “Close the door behind you,” Rachel told him.

  When he turned back to face her, she was already pulling down the straps of the dress. Her blue eyes reflected what seemed to him one moment panic, the next anticipation. In the soft light and emptiness, the room might have been any room or every room he had ever known, and she had always been in this place that was also herself, waiting. The muted laughter from the party could no longer be heard. Faintly, the music he had not noticed below announced itself through the floor.

  THREE FRIENDS IN A HAMMOCK

  In a hammock strung between the trunks of two trees, she told us the story of this friend of hers, X, whose boyfriend was a successful writer on whose cell phone she found texts and photos of himself he’d been sending to other women. He had sent the same texts and photos to two women. Copy-pasted them. Not even bothered to tailor them for each individual recipient. Both thought he was in love with them, and seemed to be in some state of waiting. In the other room he napped. When he woke and came out, X confronted him and told him he had mental problems. She told my friend she was the only one close enough to him to be able to tell him, and in the way my friend described it, I intuited X had taken pride in being the woman to tell him the problem of who he was.

  I understood X must have wanted to think she was not like the other women who thought her boyfriend was in
love with them. Wanted to think she had some upper hand on the reality of the situation. Maybe she did.

  I knew what it was like to have found out some vital information about the person in the next room that he wouldn’t want you to have, and I also knew what it was like to be the one to whom such information was presented. I thought of how we try to tell people, I am the one who really loves you, maybe most especially when we are not sure that person loves us.

  I am the one who really loves you. I see you. I see how fucked-up you are at a level no one else can and therefore I see more of you and therefore I love you more.

  But so then someone really loving you might be a good reason to avoid that person.

  All three of us were divorced or about to be legally so. All three of us were artists. All three of us had left.

  The architect ex-husband of the woman telling the story watched us from the deck. The evening I’d been introduced to him, back when he and the woman telling the story of X were married, I’d felt infatuated with him at first sight, thinking they were brother and sister. But that man is a little in love with his sister, I’d thought back then, seeing it as a drawback. Now I thought, You can never go out with him because of your connection to these two. Now at this party, back in the kitchen, before we’d gone outside to the hammock, I hadn’t wanted to stand too close to him or have a conversation. One other man drew my attention, but not enough of it. I was decidedly with the two friends and more than once someone else regarded us as a sort of entity. All three of us were attractive but insecure and attracted to each other. The woman next to me had held my hand once when we walked out of a bar and had told me a story about the woman on the other side of her taking her hand in the same way as she then held mine. I had been happy and uncomfortable. A question I could not articulate was implied. I pretended it had not been asked. I have difficulty in being close to people, and as she held my hand I went outside myself, already analyzing what was happening before having experienced it. She is holding my hand, a voice in my head observed. It was night. We passed the fronts of closed shops. The city had strewn the trees along that street with strings of clear, minute lights, like the lights on Christmas trees. I said something about how even men who were friends held hands in parts of Europe, feeling only slightly detached from my own voice.