The Virgins (15 page)

Seung’s parents are in Boston for a research conference Mr. Jung is attending, and Seung takes the bus from Auburn to meet them at their hotel. He has something to tell them. He isn’t asking for permission. He’s already paid the deposit for two nights at the beach cabin on Nantucket; the money is his own, saved from his lifeguarding job. He’s decided—naturally he doesn’t say this—that he and Aviva need to go away somewhere, far from the ducking and hiding at school and the parental shadows at home, in order to succeed in their physical union. In a new, bare place he’ll be able to give Aviva what she seems so to need; he will be virile and whole. For a while, the two of them were able to be happy deferring the inevitable but lately he can tell she is thinking about it again, wondering, growing agitated. And he? He doesn’t know what he feels, what he wants. But there’s a vibe in the air, and it makes him jittery. Aviva is slipping from him, he senses it; or is he making things up? Sometimes
when they are together her attention seems far away; there is something she is pondering that makes him as envious and frightened as he would be of another lover.

Two nights and three days in Wauwinet, Seung tells his parents, and then he’ll come straight home for the rest of the April holiday.

His mother says very well, then, if he is such a man, if he makes the decisions around here, then she and his father will stop paying for his Auburn education. He can come home and get a job and go to public school. She says that he thinks he is a man but he is just a little—she uses the Korean word for shit. Seung’s father says nothing, which makes Seung know there is a chance everything will be all right. He watches the chopping motions of his mother’s hands as she appeals to his father in Korean. She grabs her purse and leaves the hotel room. Then Mr. Jung pours two glasses of whiskey from a bottle in the minibar and says that he does not approve of this little Jewish girl, he thinks her spoiled, lacking in propriety and good sense. She will be bad for Seung in the end. But he can see, he says, that Seung has the fire in his belly for her, and there is nothing to be done about that. He will have to let the fire burn itself out.

“Just don’t do anything idiotic. You know what I am saying. And do not think, for a moment, of marrying her. You are way too young and it would be a great mistake.”

Seung grabs his father by the shoulders, almost hugging him, and his father embraces him. They are both over-whelmed by this gesture, and they stand for a long moment before parting.

One day Giddings returns to his room after lunch to find Detweiler still in bed. He is sitting on the mattress with his legs crossed as if he is planning to meditate. Pillows are propped between his back and the wall. He wears flannel pajama bottoms and a once-white T-shirt with holes in it. His head swings slowly toward the door as Giddings enters.

“You cut classes, man?” Giddings asks.

Detweiler smiles, that sweet, slow smile they all know him for.

“No,” he says. “It’s just that I can’t leave the room.”

“Say what?” Giddings replaces his morning books in the bookshelf and selects his afternoon ones.

Detweiler doesn’t answer, just smiles.

“No shit, you really haven’t been out?” But Giddings can see he hasn’t been.

“I know it’s only a short distance between this bed and that door,” says Detweiler. “And now the door is even open.
So I should be able to do it. I should be able to stand up and put my clothes on and walk in that direction. Even if I didn’t take my books and didn’t brush my teeth, it would still be a good thing. But from here it looks very, very far. The door just looks far.”

Giddings thinks Detweiler has been toking, a stupid thing to do right here in the room. “You stand up with me,” he says. “I’ll help you get dressed, and we’ll walk together to the door.”

“No,” says Detweiler. “No. I have to do it myself and I just haven’t been able to. I’m sure it will work itself out eventually.”

At three o’clock, Giddings comes back to check on Detweiler, this time with Seung. Detweiler hasn’t moved from the bed, but now he is crying quietly. “I don’t think I’m crazy,” he says. “I know I’m me. I’m Jeremy Lawrence Detweiler. My mother is Susan and my father is Anthony. And that’s you, Giddings and you, Jung. I was supposed to be at calculus for first period and I’ve got cross-country in half an hour. I know that there shouldn’t be any problem standing up and walking across the room.”

It takes four of them to carry Detweiler down the two flights of stairs and into the ambulance that pulls onto the lawn outside Weld early that evening: Seung, Giddings, Sterne, and Mr. Glass. Before calling Mr. Glass the three boys make sure there aren’t any drugs in Detweiler’s system. “Not even coffee,” Detweiler insists. Later Dr. Van Neelan comes over from the infirmary with Ms. Merton, one of the psychology counselors. Detweiler’s parents in Michigan
are contacted and agree to have him moved to Peter Bent Brigham in Boston.

There is a stretcher waiting behind the ambulance but when Detweiler sees it he panics and tries to twist free, demanding to be put down. He can sit just fine in the vehicle, he begs, there’s no need. They confer with their eyes, then set Detweiler on his two long legs, whereupon he climbs into the back of the ambulance very calmly. They see him reach for his seat belt. They’ve managed to get him into a pair of jeans and a pullover. “It was just that thing of getting out the door,” he reassures them.

“Don’t worry,” he continues, as the ambulance driver restarts the engine. “I’m not
totally
all right, but I’m not crazy. I’m pretty sure I’m not. I mean, I don’t believe I’m Jesus Christ or anything.”

The college envelopes arrive in the mailboxes, fat and thin. I never did fill out my application for Dartmouth. I had plenty of money in a fund from when my Aunt Marcie died, and when my father blew his gasket, as he surely would, I’d just tell him, in essence, screw you. I didn’t even think he’d hit me. Both he and I were getting a little old for that sort of thing.

Once the word goes around, kids are mobbing the
PO
, pushing to get to their boxes. I retrieve three skinny envelopes and one thick, solid one. It’s from Bard, which is my first choice. As soon as I’ve muscled my way back out of the room and reread, with pleasure, my letter of acceptance, my mind turns to Lisa. She will certainly have gotten into either Yale or Brown, most likely both. A few weeks more of school, and then I won’t be seeing her again. I feel doubly lightened.

Seung is accepted at Colgate and at Rutgers, his safety school. That evening, he phones home. There is a silence on the other end. Mr. Jung had hoped for Harvard.

“Dad,” Seung says. “I’m a reasonably intelligent kid who tries hard. I’m not Harvard material. You know that by now.”

Dak-ho Jung begs to differ. He points out various bad decisions Seung has made—taking advanced drawing instead of physics II his upper year, messing around with his school band instead of keeping up his classical music studies—but his heart isn’t really in it. “Harvard is the best,” he says at last. “Auburn is the best, and you should go from there to the college that is the best.”

“C-Colgate is a good school.”

“It’s the girl,” his father says, and now he sounds more sincere. “You waste all of your time on that girl. You’re infected, it’s like typhus with you. She’s made you frivolous. You think only about pleasure.”

“It’s not true,” says Seung grimly. If only his father knew.

A blue hand has been spread over the sky; the sun throws warm patches on the walks. We can smell it, the coming of spring. The trees are barely budded, and the air is still very cold. But the turning has arrived, it’s unmistakable.

Sterne says it’s time for the Spring Jubilee. No one has ever heard of the Spring Jubilee. It’s never been celebrated before. That doesn’t matter. They all agree to behave as if it is an ancient Auburn tradition, passed down by the sons of clergymen to the sons of industrialists to the sons of the intellectual meritocracy. They, the boys of Weld, are the latest in a long line of votaries paying homage to the Lady Spring.

They are full of busyness all at once, roused from their winter apathy. Sterne reminds them that the signal ritual of the Spring Jubilee is the making and drinking of mint juleps. He produces a pint bottle of bourbon from the winter boot collection. Giddings is dispatched on his bicycle for sugar
and shaved ice and mint. He returns to report that the grocer has explained that mint is not in season until June.

“Of course it’s not,” says Sterne. “Did you get the Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Sterne.”

“In the Spring Jubilee, Wrigley’s Spearmint is always used as a substitute for fresh mint, due to mint not yet being in season.”

Giddings takes off again. In the meantime, the Grateful Dead lands on the stereo: “Shakedown Street,” “Good Lovin’.”

Urban Engelsted, a kid they sometimes hang out with, brings out his shot glass collection, and Seung lines up the little glasses on the windowsill. In the room now are Seung, Sterne, Giddings, Engelsted, and Engelsted’s buddy Mark Dasgupta. They are all aware of a space that would have been occupied, quietly and inwardly, by Detweiler. Every couple of months, there’s some casualty, someone you know who is expelled or fails out or cracks up. This winter it was Detweiler. Spend long enough at this school and you can do a roll call of disappearances, tally the little score marks on your heart. Sterne puts a stick of gum in the bottom of each glass and adds two spoonfuls of sugar. With the long end of the spoon he mashes the gum and sugar together. “We call this bruising the mint,” he says. “The technique was developed back on my old Kentucky plantation, before it was destroyed by carpetbaggers. Do not remove the wad of chewing gum; it is considered impolite. But do not swallow it.”

The sound of clinking glasses, cold hands high-fiving. Young men are sprawled in chairs, their knees spread. Someone—Giddings?—has found a lei left over from a vacation, a theater production, who knows what. He drapes it over Sterne’s chest. The Grateful Dead segues into Jackson Browne. They toss back the shots and refill their glasses, not bothering about the sugar or the gum. A bolt of late-afternoon sun enters the room, illuminates Sterne where he sits like the May King. Giddings has stuck an unbudded magnolia branch in Sterne’s hair. All five boys daydream, lost in secrets it is all right not to share.

Seung is the first to leap up at the knock on the door. Sterne has the glasses collected in an instant, shoved into a pillowcase. He’s noiseless and fast. Giddings nudges two empty pint bottles under the couch with his heel.

It’s Mr. Glass. The music is a little loud, he says. His eyes move around the room, landing on one boy after another, on the bookcases, the desks, the window sill.

“Oh,” says Seung, “sorry about that. We thought we were being quiet.”

Mr. Glass laces his fingers together, allows the silence to lengthen.

“Would you like to come in, sir?” Seung asks.

“Not really. No, I would not like to come in. I would not like to have to come in. Do you think you get my meaning?”

“I think so, sir. I’m sure we don’t want to give you any reason to have to come in.”

“All right, then. You’re a proctor, Seung, remember.”

“Yes, sir.”

He’s gone.

Nothing can spoil the Spring Jubilee. In one afternoon, in one incarnation, it’s become an authentic ritual, which is to say it is something that’s become necessary, non-negotiable. They won’t ever forget. The true rituals have the habit of escaping, of finding those who will perpetuate them, and so next year, somehow, someone will know about the Wrigley’s gum and the bourbon, will circle on the calendar the date exactly eighteen days after the spring solstice. In five years, some of the older alumni will believe they have memories of commemorating the Spring Jubilee themselves. The Jubilee will make its way into yearbooks and the graffiti on basement walls.

Sterne stretches out on the couch, his body lit up by the setting sun. Giddings hums a hymn sung in chapel every Tuesday and Thursday morning, a hymn that, as he doesn’t go to chapel, he didn’t know he knew. Seung closes his eyes. For long passages of the afternoon he has forgotten Aviva. When he drinks, he can sometimes forget her. When he smokes reefer or drops acid, he only feels her presence all the more, lit up in pulsing colors, more pressing in her physicality, her strange, rebuffing need.

We all felt the spring coming. I went down to Voss’s room, to see if he’d come toss a Frisbee with me. He never locked his door, I walked right in as always. He looked up at me from the couch. Cort’s back was to me. Voss’s hand lay on Cort’s shoulder and his jeans were unzipped. He didn’t
seem as if he quite saw me. His mouth was swollen. “Ah, Christ, Voss,” I said. The number of ways there are to be left out, to be abandoned. I backed out of the room, shut them in again with their privacy.

A Sunday afternoon. Aviva and Lena borrow two bikes and head to Starport Beach, about eight miles from Auburn. It’s a tricky trip that starts along the busy state road with Water-lilies, the Chinese restaurant, and McDonald’s and Friendly’s, hits the highway for a while, then gradually veers off onto the boulevard that passes along the shoreline, with its newly re-awakened motels and fish shacks and sportsmen’s dens. Aviva and Lena sit on an Auburn-issued bed blanket, sweater arms pulled low over their wrists, smoking Lena’s clove cigarettes and looking across the bay at the marshlands where a big power company wants to build a nuclear plant. Mr. Lively has told them about the letter-writing campaigns to stop the construction and the violent protest rally that was held in Starport last month. Aviva pictures the squat tubular forms that may rise on this land, sending their invisible damage, their cell-warping frequencies, out into the water lapping the beach and the homes nearby.