Live a Little (25 page)
Then there’s the guy.
Loren. That’s his name: Loren.
Even though they’ve never spoken—okay, not exactly true; there was that time he muttered “excuse me” to her in the bustling thicket of students leaving class, his voice sending a shot of lustful terror up her spine—she knows his name because their TA, a waifish yet tyrannical postdoc out of NYU, insists on taking roll every section. By July the guy’s name rolls off her tongue like a honey lozenge:
Loren. Loren White. White, Loren. L. White. Mr. Loren White. Lor-en-zo the White.
Of course he is beautiful, Loren White. Rachel, with her extensive study of beautiful men based on thousands of hours watching romantic films and reading novels by Kathleen Woodiwiss and Shirlee Busbee, has dissected the source of his beauty. It is important to her, this task, because she doesn’t want to be the type of girl who falls in love with surface splendor, much as she appreciates it in her work. So she watches Loren White, catalogs the way he makes deep, prolonged, respectful eye contact with everyone, even the shrill Andrea Dworkin–quoting girl who buries her unhappiness under a veneer of bisexuality and the grumpy engineer with the textbook pustule-pocked cheeks and surprisingly fluid prose. Rachel notes the almost affectionate manner he employs with their bitter hag of a TA, how, by the end of the session, the scrawny nutcase is eating out of his hand. Part of his appeal, she believes, maybe the most important part, is his reluctant inaccessibility. It’s as if he wants to be open, believes passionately in the ideal of openness, but ultimately can’t breach the boundaries of social entitlement that restrain him. Because what Loren White and everybody who meets him knows is that his gifts—physical, social, familial, financial—drive a wedge between himself and others just as surely as if he spoke ancient Greek instead of English. The fact that Loren White is tall— he dwarfs Rachel by at least two inches— handsome in an architected, pedigreed way, earnest, popular, athletic, and premed doesn’t detract in any way from his essential complexity, she thinks. The fact that a girlfriend has not presented herself— some tanned, willowy blonde or aristocratically pale redhead in sexy sorority sweats with a brand name printed on the buttocks—only adds to Rachel’s case. Perhaps he is saving himself for someone more . . . singular?
Their first encounter is so magically perfect that Rachel cries afterward, convinced the gods have finally awakened from their long sleep and smiled on her.
Encounter 1: They are assigned partners for a paper to be crafted and defended in teams. Rachel’s partner—a thin, jumpy Beverly Hills product whose name Rachel remembers until at least the mid-nineties due to her role in the ensuing good fortune—excuses herself from class one brilliantly sunny day to pee and never returns. Loren’s partner, the grumpy engineer, receives a late acceptance to Berkeley, where he has been wait-listed for a year, and departs to find housing in a habitat more suited to his obsessive personality, accepting an incomplete in the course. With a dreary wave, the TA—who, they are later to discover, has been stalking the course’s professor, a married Cuban rumored to have been with Che in Bolivia in 1967— sanctions their union. Rachel and Loren exchange hellos for the first time on August 16, 1982.
Encounter 2: Rachel and Loren agree to meet after her shift at the Meat Shanty. The pimple that was threatening to erupt on Rachel’s nose miraculously recedes, leaving behind just the barest residue of pink, which she conceals easily under a layer of Sue’s makeup. The extra shirt she brings with her, a not-trying-too-hard boatnecked sky-blue tee with strategic tears across the abdomen, is deemed
“muy
sexy
”
by Martin, who, if his own heavily notched track record with the opposite sex is any indication, can be trusted to judge a book’s cover.
Encounter 3: After dispensing with the business of the paper—whose topic, the case for legalization of marijuana, is to remain close to Rachel’s heart in the years to come— Rachel and Loren segue seamlessly into a discussion of Soul Asylum, who they agree is the most underrated band of the era, quite possibly the decade. Expecting some degree of verbal paralysis in the face of such stunning yet sensitive maleness, Rachel is surprised to find that not only do words flow out of her in his presence with the sleek levity of liberated helium balloons, they are—fated miracle!—the right words. Later, when she replays their conversation in her mind, instead of the crushing regret she usually registers after an encounter with a desirable male person, she experiences only a tingly sense of pleasure. See how right they are together, how seamless? How their thoughts slide into one another like keys in a lock?
“What kind of medicine are you going to practice?” she asks him.
They are sitting six inches from each other at Mesa Beach, on a Tahitian blanket. It is their fourth study session. Rachel wants to call it a date—don’t the flask of Captain Morgan and the presence of the fat, sensual strawberries warrant it?— but allows herself only occasional forays into that particular fantasy.
Loren nips from the flask. With his gleaming yet untamed forelock and tatty lacrosse jersey, Rachel is reminded— thrillingly—of the delicious Finny from
A Separate Peace.
Loren is that beautiful. So what if Rachel cannot match his careless elegance? The clash of them, of distilled beauty against graceless need, is what will enflame his patrician senses.
Loren takes a moment to let the profundity of his mission sink in before he speaks. “Tropical diseases, maybe. Biostatistics or epidemiology. Did you know that diarrheal diseases have killed more people in sub-Saharan Africa in the last ten years than all war casualties since World War Two? It’s a disgrace.”
The idea—not the diarrhea but the intended eradication of it—sounds ripe and sexy. Rachel closes her eyes briefly. She is not sure what the African climate will do to her skin, but she is fairly confident that Loren—witty, generous, incandescent Loren—will write her a prescription. She has already read
Out of Africa.
Several years later, she will rent the video, watching in a disbelieving swoon as Robert Redford tenderly rinses the soap from Meryl Streep’s hair; she is conjuring Loren’s hands twined in her own thick brunette locks.
“Rachel.” He says her name with reverence, as if he has been practicing it in the shower. In the intervening seconds, he has moved closer, is looming over her. Loren’s eyes, she realizes, are an unpredictable hazel, rimmed in amber, green where one would have forecast blue. His nose is so aquiline and fine, it has to be real. She hopes her slightly nobler version does not injure it in the forthcoming tussle.
They kiss deeply, tongues sliding against teeth, fingers exploring the hot dampness of cleft and crevice.
He tastes better than anyone—anything—I have ever tasted,
Rachel finds time to marvel.
The young lovers roll around on the blanket until the sun abandons them, cooling the horizon with its departing emerald glow. Rachel feels herself grow raw, punch-drunk, with glad yearning.
This is it,
she thinks as she stands in the warm breeze, letting sand granules fall like sugar from her damp body while Loren folds the blanket.
I am finally going to fall in love. I am finally going to be fucked senseless. This is my last night as a callow virgin from the suburbs.
Skip ahead two and a half months. School drifts gently by, riding the trough between midterms and finals. Loren has spent the night at Rachel’s twice. By some unspoken alchemy, they do not have intercourse. Rachel is frustrated but relieved: She does not want her first time to take place within earshot of her roommates. She does not want witnesses to what she is sure is going to be an explosive mating of mammoth passions. The specialness of it, the rarity, demands restraint. So they simply turn out the lights and spoon, exploring each other in the benevolent glow of the candlelight, leaving their imminent consummation hanging like a bulging Christmas stocking.
“Thad’s going home next weekend,” Loren says, running his hand across Rachel’s forgiving but not too fleshy belly. No roommate means he’ll have the pillbox, beachfront one-bedroom to himself. He hooks his fingers under her white cotton bikini underwear, a style Raquel likes to think he imagines her in for years to come.
Rachel presses herself against him, relishing the cocked-gun sensation of him. She does not respond; her answer is the involuntary parting of her legs beneath his hand.
The day in question unfolds unremarkably except, perhaps, for the pulsing glow that envelops Rachel like mist at the bottom of a waterfall. She is vaguely aware of being suddenly, happily more
visible
than she has ever been, of men’s eyes following the sweet curve of her legs as she skips across the street to buy wine for the evening’s dinner, which Loren is preparing in the small but renovated beachside apartment.
A few facts: The $4.99 bottle of cabernet is drunk. Dinner, however, remains untouched, the mossy aroma of mushroom risotto saturating the drapes so deeply that Loren’s roommate Thaddeus Park eventually has to take them down and have them professionally steamed.
“I’m here!” Rachel calls as she lets herself in. For her deflowering, she has modeled herself after Sophia Loren in
Two Women,
all tawny cleavage and thinly smocked abundance awaiting ravishment.
Here’s where things get fuzzy.
Ren must have entered the living room from the kitchen at that point. How else could we have migrated to the bedroom so seamlessly? In the years since that fateful encounter, I have repeatedly gone over the minutes that followed my arrival in my mind, worried them into vacant smoothness, so that I am no longer sure what is real and what is the product of bitter disenchantment. I know we never started our meal. That Ren, correctly forecasting delays in consumption, turned off the oven, I am sure. It is likely we did not exchange a word before Ren stripped off my flowing, cinch-waisted, forties-style dress, the miniature print daisies piling up like dirt on snow. I don’t remember if we pulled the covers back or lay down on top of them. Were the upstairs neighbors playing the headachey narco-rock they favored, or were they mercifully out? I can’t recall. Where the condom came from is a mystery.
If I close my eyes now, peel back the layers of time and disappointment and peer at Rachel and Loren’s first—only— attempt at sex with as much cool detachment as I can muster, I see this: a fumbling hand, shaking as it draws the rubber column down over the reddening shaft of penis (it sticks up higher than Rachel expected, pointing toward the sky as if it were attached upside down). I see a grim stream of yellow light seeping under the door to the bathroom, mingling with the weak glow of streetlamp that slices the venetian blinds. I see Rachel hurrying Loren into bed so that she can conceal herself under his comeliness. I see male shoulders silhouetted against the night, arching over the cradle of a young girl’s hips. I see two bodies trying to join, banging against each other futilely while a teakettle screams next door. I see the man’s body coming down to rest against the woman’s, rigid with thwarted effort. I see the girl turning away as tears snake through her moisturizer, scenting the pillow with the stench of dead flowers. I see them disentangle their bodies and get dressed, maybe already, at that early stage of angst, gravitating toward tertiary existences. I see glasses filled with wine and a young woman walking home on legs not nearly wobbly enough for peace.
Did my brother-in-law’s penis pierce my body that night? I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure. The Gothic taint of virgin’s blood I’d expected did not appear, nor did the triumphant soreness chronicled in doctors’ pamphlets and romance novels.
Did our incomplete coupling qualify as sex? I don’t know. Maybe that makes me a fool, or a denier, or just plain ridiculous, but something makes me unable to apply the label, to boil the ingredients of that night into digestible broth for easy consumption. Also possible: Although I have never completely recovered from the loss of Ren, it is still easier to think I never officially slept with my sister’s husband.
“Did you?” Laurie’s face is purpling. It seems right somehow that this conversation should take place upside down.
Memory offers no clues. I decide on the answer that matches my current level of culpability. “Yes,” I say, the word skipping across the water and plunging like a stone.
You Haven’t Changed a Bit
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Phil says.
How did my life come to this? Yesterday, as per my personal Time Line to Truth, I was explaining the concept of remission to the kids under a fragrant canopy of Nestlé Toll House. Today I find myself defending my moral fiber to my cheating husband before a gaggle of feather-haired, corduroy-flare-clad, Kenny Loggins clones who seem to have been airlifted directly out of 1982. Plus, I have a date, and he’s. . . well, not Phil. Let me be clear: I have a date and
He. Is. Not. Phil.
It is confusing; the girl who was voted Most Likely to Be Mistaken for a Football Player in a Nun’s Habit should not be attending her high school reunion with a surf god.
“Give us a minute?” Phil says directly to Duke in his sternest teacher’s voice.
“Sure, dude. Whatever.” Duke ambles over to the buffet table and is promptly set upon by Misty Hughes, who seems to have kept up with her tenth-grade habits of stealing other people’s boyfriends and wearing multitiered teal miniskirts.