Carrie Pilby (5 page)

“I haven't yet this year,” he said. “I was waiting for the right inspiration.”

How's it going to start,
I wondered. Would he use a bunch of tricks that would get me into his bedroom? Or was that not going to happen? I was assuming it would, even if I wasn't sure whether I wanted it to happen. He did know I was inexperienced, right? He had to. He couldn't expect much. Then again, maybe he
liked
inexperience.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked. No one had ever done that before, simply asked me what was in my head. He put his now-empty glass on the kitchen counter and walked toward me. He looked serious and intense. I noticed a slight wobble in his step.

“Your syllabus,” I lied.

“Ah,” he said, sitting on the other corner of the couch. “That reminds me. I published a paper on
Speech and Phenomena…
” He began telling me about it, and I liked that in the middle of our sitting in the living room, work was still on his mind. It was strange, though, that after we'd been kissing in his car, we were back at the chaste distance we'd been at before.

I wondered if maybe he was going to tell me to sleep on the couch and tuck me in and read me a bedtime story. Despite myself, I feared it.

“You know,” he said, “when I say things about you, like that you're brilliant, or that you look beautiful with merlot on your
lips, it's because I really think that. I'm not just saying it to flatter you.”

I pointed to the empty glass on the counter. “Wow,” I said. “That stuff works great.”

He laughed. “It's not the alcohol,” he said. “You are just so…”

I cocked my head to the side.

“Are you nervous?” he asked.

Without waiting for an answer, he leaned over, put his hand under my chin, lifted my head and kissed me.

He ran his hand down the front of my shirt, then down my slacks until he got to my kneecap, which he held. He wrapped his arms around me, and we kept at it until I was out of breath. After a while, we went into his room.

He was happy with what happened, and I was left unfulfilled. I wasn't so surprised. It was more academic for me. Something I should experience to know what it was about. But after he was asleep, I looked at him, ran my hand over the comforter and felt lucky to be there.

 

Class held a new excitement after that. David would lecture, pace the room, then stop and look up and down the aisles with a slight smile on his lips, acting as if nothing was going on when we both knew it was. It was our game. Occasionally, when I thought it was safe, I would catch his eye and raise an eyebrow, and once in a very rare while, he'd wink at me quickly. Sometimes, I would just get a surge of excitement watching him walk around in his soft sweaters, knowing that no one else in class had snuggled against them, knowing that later that night, I would. And when Brian Buchman was droning on and on, and Vicki was swooning, I would feel happy instead of miserable because I knew that later, David and I would laugh about it.

One time, David was a few minutes late to class, and everyone started yammering.

“Maybe we can leave if he doesn't show,” said a guy named Rob, who only came to class half the time anyway.

“I
like
this class,” a girl said.

“I do, too,” Brian said.

“He loves
you,
” Rob ribbed him.

“Yeah, and he ignores the rest of us,” a girl complained.

“He's probably just busy,” Vicki said.

“Is he married?”

“I don't think so.”

“Maybe he's gay.”

“That would be a shame. He's so cute!”

I told David about this later, and we both cracked up.

In my other classes, I daydreamed. I was somehow able to take notes, but my mind was elsewhere. I would return to my dorm room to find a message from him on my machine, either an invitation to come over or just a call to say he missed me. If there was no message, I'd lie in bed on my stomach and gloss over my reading materials until he'd call. That usually didn't take long. Then, he'd pick me up outside the dorm and we'd head out to eat or to his place. On the nights in which he had to get his work done, I stayed in my dorm room and did my own work. I maintained my good grades because when I wasn't with him, studying was all I did. I had no need for anything else. No need to force myself to head out to some club, meeting or coffee bar to feel as if I was making a lame stab at socialization. No need to wander through the Square alone, looking at everyone else having fun and wondering how I could join in. I had one person who cared about me and wanted to hear my thoughts, and that was all I needed.

The winter was a snowy swirl of schoolwork, fireplaces and him.

As for the physical part, I never got the hang of the Main Event, which seemed to be uncomfortable and ended really quickly, but I didn't care because everything else was great. On weekends, we drove all over Massachusetts, through colonial towns and historic villages and country roads, stopping for cider or chowder or pie. We walked along the harbor hand in hand, talking about places we could travel to, about places we'd never been and places we'd dreamed of as kids. At dinner in a waterfront restaurant, I'd watch the reflections of orange lights shimmering in the harbor, and he would reach across the table, dunk his roll in my bisque, and ask me if he should put this or that book on the syllabus for next semester. I couldn't believe I was affecting what his next semester classes would be reading, or that he considered me intelligent enough to offer suggestions. But he always listened closely to what I said and either nodded or gave me a new perspective. It felt wonderful.

Each of us should have the feeling, even if only for once in our life, of having someone so entranced by us that every inconsequential thing about us becomes an object of fascination. Any old piece of debris that's poking around in our soul can be offered up for voracious consumption.

David and I commiserated on the perils of being smart, of thinking too much. One time, we were driving through a small town, the gray-brown branches of naked trees crossed above us like swords, and I told him the story of how, for a few months in seventh grade, I couldn't sneeze.

“It started out of nowhere,” I said. “I was in social studies in seventh grade, and I was about to sneeze, and then I thought about it, and I couldn't. The sneeze got all bottled up under the bridge of my nose and wouldn't come out.” Every time I had to sneeze after that, I tried not to think about sneezing, but the more I tried not to think about it, the more I
had
to think about it, so I couldn't sneeze. Finally, one night, I confessed everything
to my father, and he arranged an emergency meeting with the school psychologist. The psychologist told my father he was concerned that I might have obsessive-compulsive disorder. I had to see him for four weeks in a row. But somehow, I started forgetting to think about sneezing during my sneezes, and the problem disappeared as quickly as it had come on.

David smiled. “If you think a lot about anything, it can ruin it,” he said. “If you think about kissing, about the fact that two people press their lips together and move into all sorts of configurations, it seems completely bizarre.”

“I'll bet it's worse if you think about it while you're doing it,” I said.

“Let's see,” he said. And he pulled off the road.

 

After about a month of my sleeping over regularly, David began telling me a few new things he wanted me to do.

They were only slight variations on the norm, and I considered them a small sacrifice to make. Whatever kept his attention. As long as they didn't go too far.

But soon, he began to tell me some of the things he wanted me to
say.

They bothered me. They weren't the kind of things I'd ever said before, and I'd probably never say them again, if I could help it. It wasn't just that they were dirty—the words were harsh. I didn't feel I could utter some of what he wanted. But I didn't want to disobey.

“We'll start slowly,” he said kindly, one night in his room. “Just like with everything else. I just want you to say this one thing.”

I was silent.

“Carrie?”

What's wrong with you,
I thought to myself.
It's just words. You know that intellectually. So what?

But I knew that even if I could say it, it would come out unnatural. And thus, it wouldn't have the effect he was hoping for. I was sure of it.

“Come on,” he said, sweat on his brow. “Say it.”

“It won't…it won't sound like me.”

“Just say it,” he whispered. “Say it once.” He kissed my lips, then my neck. He ran his hand down my chest and rested it in my crotch, then took his index finger and began circling. “Say it. What do you want me to do to you?”

“‘I want… I want you to…'”

“Go ahead.”

“I can't.”

He sat up. He didn't look so kind anymore. “What's the matter?”

“It won't sound like me. It won't sound right.”

“Say it any way you want.” He leaned over me and kissed me again. “Come on.”

I just looked up at him.

“What's the matter with you?”

“It's not…I can't.”

He sat up and looked into the distance.

“David?”

He ignored me.

“Come on. I'm…”

He rolled over on his side and pulled his blanket up. “Forget it. What's the use?”

“Are you mad at me?”

He ignored me again.

I turned over, too, but I couldn't sleep.

I lay there, my back to him, quietly waiting for him to change his mind. I wanted to get up and put on some bedclothes, but I thought that the more silence there was, the more he'd need to
break it. I was scared even to breathe. I watched the red numbers on his clock radio change.

Eventually I fell asleep. At some point in the night, I woke up and pulled on a T-shirt. Then I went back to sleep.

In the morning, when I awoke, David was already in the kitchen, heating up coffee. I padded in there, and he gave me a silent nod and went back to the coffee. He also was quiet in the car going back to campus.

I went through my classes upset but trying to concentrate. When I came home, the light on my answering machine wasn't blinking.

I collected my introductory philosophy books and read in bed. An hour passed without a call. I was scared. Why had I been so stupid?

But he would have to give me another chance, right?

I read
Meditations on First Philosophy,
but my eyes just kept rolling over the same words again and again, as if I were highlighting the book in varnish. Nothing stuck. Every few minutes, I looked at my clock. Dinnertime was approaching. I'd have to hike down to the dining hall and sit at the end of a table alone. Doing that always gave me an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. I didn't want to do it if he was going to call.

I felt hungry. I ignored my stomach and tried again to concentrate on
Meditations,
but I decided maybe I needed something light to read. So I picked up
Thus Spake Zarathustra.

The phone rang.

I reminded myself, even as I dashed to it, to make my voice sound uninterested.

“Hello.”

I wouldn't have admitted it, and it sounds very clichéd, but clichés become clichés because they happen: when I heard his voice, my stomach jumped.

“I went out and got wood for the fireplace,” David said. “I could use a little help initiating it.”

I wanted to tell him how happy I was that it was him, how scared I'd been, how much I'd missed him and how I would say whatever he wanted. But I didn't. I told him I would meet him outside in ten minutes.

That night, we ate heaping bowls of linguine at an Italian place, then went to David's apartment. Once in the living room, we lay down on the rug in front of the fireplace, a bottle of wine between us. David put his glass down on the brown tiles and lay on his side in an S shape, his knees bent. I rested my head on his jeans and stared into his chest.
Thank God everything's okay,
I thought. It felt so good just to lie there, listening to him breathe. I closed my eyes, and we both lay quietly for a while. Then, I felt his fingers move over my wine-ripened lips. “Come here,” he whispered, and he brought my chin to his face. “Let's stay here for a change,” he said, and I nodded. Soon he said, “Say it. What I wanted you to say yesterday. Please.”

Before he'd called, I had told myself I would, and on the way over, I had told myself I would, but now I couldn't. It didn't seem like the right words. It didn't seem to fit with either me or with us. And why did he want me to say it, when he knew how much it bothered me?

“Say it!”

I started. “‘I… I…'”

“Yes?” His eyes were closed.

I couldn't finish.

“Come on,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“David,” I said.

Then I said no more.

He sat up again. “Is this it?”

“I…”

“Is that the best you can do? You're not even going to try?”

I just looked at him.

“One compromise?”

It just didn't fit.

“Didn't I teach you? Didn't I say it over and over? Why can't you learn it?”

I didn't know what to say to that.

“Is it such a hard thing to learn?”

Finally I said, “It's not something I would say.”

“But you can
learn.
”

“We're not in class.”

“Just say it!”

I looked at the rug. “It wouldn't be
me….
”

“Do you always have to be such a goddamn prude?”

Before I could say anything else, he jumped up, stalked into the bathroom and shut the door. I sat still on the rug and suddenly felt very cold.