“Can I,” he said, and he had to clear his throat. “Can I just give you a hug?”
She couldn’t figure out what saying yes meant, and she was afraid of what saying no meant, so she just continued to look at him, helplessly, and he took this helplessness for assent: he turned from his waist and reached out with his hands — abruptly, cheerfully, as if making one last effort to convince himself that everything that was happening could be taken two ways. But he couldn’t fool anyone. His suit felt beautiful under her hands, against her neck. He was shaking. They couldn’t really see each other in the green light of the dashboard. Suddenly it no longer seemed possible to hold what was happening in abeyance. Molly pulled away from him and opened her door; when she did so the dome light came on, and Dennis, his lips apart, his skin pale, flinched.
I don’t have to sell my soul
He’s already in me
Weeks before it was necessary, Richard started packing for college. He had quit his summer job in early August so he’d have time, he told his startled parents, to reflect and prepare himself mentally for the big challenge ahead of him. He didn’t feel inclined to share these reflections with anybody. When the day came for him to leave home — his flight to California was the following morning — Roger drove him to New Jersey with all his luggage in a van borrowed from a friend at work. They would stay that night in a motel near Newark Airport and Roger would drive back the next day, once he was satisfied, as he said in his stylized but peculiarly unevocative Dadspeak, that his son was “squared away.” Molly and Kay had the house to themselves. Molly had chosen to stay home that evening; she felt that something was happening which, while not momentous exactly, might be worth trying to mark in some way, even if just with a conversation which was contextually larger than they were used to.
“So Richard’s gone now,” Molly said. “It’s weird.”
“One down,” Kay said. She looked at Molly and smiled fondly.
“Soon it’ll be just the two of you.”
She nodded. “That’s what he thinks,” she said.
There came a weekend afternoon when Molly knew where each of her parents was and when they would return. She watched out the leaded-glass windows framing the door until Ty appeared, on foot, around the bend in the road. He knew why he was there. He had probably never been so eager for anything in his life and yet he chose this moment to be polite, accepting her offer of a soda, asking how her classes were, mentioning his admiration of her house, which he had never been inside of before. Finally she went up and kissed him, her hands at her sides but taking his fingers in hers. She could feel him trembling. It was what she was hoping to feel.
She took him into Richard’s room; it was a room which, for the most part, her mother never entered anymore, and so she could feel less paranoid about leaving behind any sort of unintentional evidence. Ty did exactly as he had done before, only this time things kept going past the point where they usually stopped, the way a dream often stops at the same point. The burn scars went all the way up his arms and shoulders, on to his neck, halfway down his back, and in a more random pattern — as if embers had fallen on him — on his chest and stomach. The healed skin was hairless and looked almost like bubble gum. He started to shiver, and kept shivering even after she ran downstairs in her underwear and turned up the thermostat. But it was important to her that he was completely naked; she knew all along that that’s how she wanted him, even stopping him when he tried to enter her before all their clothes were off. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to insist on anything or to contradict her at any point. A hard-on like that had to hurt, she thought, and it did seem to be hurting him in some way. The more exposed he became, in the daylight with the blinds half-open, the more his confidence eroded. You could see it. He couldn’t stay on top of the desire that he felt when he saw her, her breasts, her stomach, her hips, her hair. When he tried, in vain, to close her eyes with his fingertips, that was the moment she came closest to feeling sorry for him.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said, and though he meant it, it didn’t sound at all spontaneous — as if he were saying it in some other language, knew what it meant in a general way but still needed to take a moment to translate it from the language in which he thought.
She didn’t know what she was doing either but he was so clearly looking to her the whole way. When he lifted first one knee and then the other so that his legs were finally between hers, he was so scared, so in thrall, that she thought she had never seen anything more worth looking at in her life. He couldn’t pretend, he couldn’t hide anything from her, nor from himself, there was nothing interposing itself between the two of them and what was real. It had nothing to do with any feeling that she might have had for him.
“I love you,” he said.
Of course he didn’t love her. He was just looking for something to borrow that would approximate what he felt. It was as if, having stripped away all the outer layers of his self — the ingratiation, the fear of ridicule, the sense of his misfortune, the layers which were himself, the rest of the time — in order to discover what was essential in him, it had turned out that there was nothing there: he still said what he thought he was expected to say. Nothing at the core of him — at least not yet. That was okay. He was sixteen years old.
She didn’t have to do anything, really, not in the physical sense nor in any other. Just by fucking him she could get him to agree to show her everything about himself while she showed him nothing. The private space within her was maintained, it was defined, by this act of withholding it from him. Here he is, inside me, she thought, and I couldn’t be more of a mystery to him. The whole game, as everyone else she knew seemed to understand it, was the boy’s endeavor to solve the puzzle of the girl, to unlock the riddle, to find the trick that would make her vulnerable enough to him that she would agree to have sex with him. And often that was the end of it; once the riddle was solved, the boy’s interest evaporated. But that’s not how it is with me, she thought — triumphantly; that’s not how it is right now. She could see it in his face. It was the fucking that provided the riddle.
It was all over, at least from his perspective, in less than a minute. In his face, at the moment which was supposed to define pure sensual thoughtlessness, was shame, weakness, loss of control. He turned away from her to take the condom off. She sat up, her legs still framing him, and ran her fingertips gently, proprietarily along the tight scar tissue on his back. Belatedly she thought that the pain really wasn’t as bad as she’d been led to expect.
She had to ask him to leave pretty shortly after that, but he was obviously glad to. His face was still burning. He didn’t appear exultant or relieved or any of the things he might have expected to feel. No part of him was invisible. Molly knew it wouldn’t last long. It would last just as long as he could keep from telling his friends about it, for in the telling it would change, and soon the public version would harden over the real one and he would forget the way he felt right now. He would sacrifice her in the telling and go back to life as part of the group, go back to his popular identity. She didn’t care. So much the worse for him. Or maybe it was better, the way it was sometimes said to be for the better when a dog was put to sleep.
IN SEPTEMBER, THE phone call came to announce officially that the Doucette casual wear account was going into review. Five agencies had been selected by a search committee and granted the opportunity to pitch the account; Canning Leigh + Osbourne was one of those five, a courtesy not always extended to a dissatisfied client’s incumbent agency, but generally and pessimistically viewed as a courtesy nonetheless. The account, which CLO had held for five years, was worth thirty-five million dollars in billings each year.