After my game, I went by Sin-Jun’s dorm room again and was glad that Clara wasn’t there. I found Sin-Jun’s passport where she’d said it would be and walked to the infirmary, my wet hair refreezing in the cold. I tried not to think about the exchange with Dave, tried to just be a body in the world, moving forward among the trees and buildings, beneath the darkening afternoon sky. From now on, I thought, I would pass over surfaces without leaving a mark, without entangling myself. After I’d been in a place, there’d be no evidence.
Partly I felt relieved that I wouldn’t be going out with Dave the next night, or ever. Partly I felt angry at him for having approached me so publicly, for having made me act bitchy. (So all along, I’d just imagined that we were colluding in making our interactions occur on the side, at night, behind buildings? It had been happenstance on his part, not discretion-was that it?) And partly, of course, I felt ashamed. But my shame, being the largest and truest of my emotions, required the least attention; it was a rock in my gut and would remain with me.
No, it was relief that was most immediate. At that time in my life, no conclusion was a bad conclusion. Something ended, and you stopped wishing and worrying. You could consider your mistakes, and you might be embarrassed by them, but the box was sealed, the door was shut, you were no longer immersed in the confusing middle.
At the infirmary, I checked in with the same nurse who had been on duty when Mr. Kim and I had dropped off Sin-Jun three days before. “You girls are good friends to her,” the nurse said. “There’s no way she’ll get lonely with this many visitors.”
I knocked on Sin-Jun’s door, then turned the knob, and then I simply stood there, staring. They were both on the bed, writhing and clawing and panting-they were fully clothed, and if they hadn’t been, I truly think I might have fainted-and Clara was on top. Because Clara was so much bigger and because I myself had never been part of such an arrangement with another person, the first thing I thought was, Isn’t she smashing Sin-Jun? Clara was licking Sin-Jun’s neck and Sin-Jun was gripping Clara’s backside and the bed was shaking as they bucked against each other. Another thing I thought for a while afterward was that sex was always that frenzied. I’d have imagined, if I’d given it real thought beforehand, that it would be different to see two girls than to see a boy and a girl, but it really wasn’t. I would like to say here that we are all voyeurs, but maybe what I should say instead is that I, clearly, am a voyeur. It was riveting to watch. Who’d have guessed? Even with Clara involved, it turned out, sex was sexy.
Clara got onto her knees, dropping her face from Sin-Jun’s neck to her breasts to her navel and just at the moment she lifted Sin-Jun’s shirt and exposed her bare skin, Sin-Jun turned her head to the side, opened her eyes, met my gaze, and yelped. Clara reared up, and both of them stared at me-Sin-Jun looked frightened and furious and Clara looked disoriented.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Sorry, I just-”
“Aigo!” Sin-Jun cried. “Nagar-ra! Get out! Get out!”
“I’m sorry,” I said again. I tossed her passport onto the floor and ran into the hall and out of the infirmary. How strange, I thought, that freshman year, when I’d been so consumed by the meaning of my preoccupation with Gates Medkowski, I’d had no idea my own roommate not only thought about kissing girls but actually did it. When the image of Sin-Jun and Clara came back to me later that day, as it did repeatedly, the feeling I had was that I’d seen it in a movie, that a scenario of such passion (what else can I call it?) certainly would never have played out anywhere on the Ault campus.
I didn’t see Sin-Jun again before she left with her father, and I thought that maybe I’d never see her again, but I was wrong; she returned the next fall for our senior year. That summer between our junior and senior years, I received a letter from her, the address of my parents’ house in Indiana printed in her careful script on a pale blue international envelope. My mother suggested I save the envelope for my scrapbook, forgetting, I think, that I did not keep a scrapbook.
You know I have love relationship with Clara, but it ends, the letter read. I will not roommate with Clara next year. I will hope you don’t tell no one what you saw.
She signed the letter Your friend always, Sin-Jun, and she drew a smiley face next to her name. And when we saw each other again the following September, our relationship functioned, amazingly enough, just about as it had before she took the aspirin, which is to say we treated each other with affection and never spoke about anything of substance. But later-Sin-Jun was one of the few classmates I stayed in touch with after Ault-after she’d come out to the extent that it was clear to everyone except her parents she was a lesbian (she kept her hair short and spiky, she wore silver hoops up one ear), I did learn the whole story. She was the one who’d pursued Clara. We were sitting on a deck in Seattle, off the apartment Sin-Jun shared with her girlfriend, Julie, and Sin-Jun worked by then as a neurobiologist in a research lab outside the city. It was never that we’d had a breakthrough after which we talked candidly to each other; I think it was more that separately, in college and after, we grew up and certain topics came to seem ordinary rather than forbidden.
“But why Clara?” I asked.
“She was my roommate,” Sin-Jun said. “This was very convenient.”
I almost laughed. By this point-she had been one of the first ones from our class-Clara was married and even had a son. She and her husband had met at UVA; apparently, he was from West Virginia, which was where they moved after the wedding so that he could oversee his family’s coal mines. The photo of them that ran in The Ault Quarterly showed Clara, bosomy in a long dress and veil, standing beside a portly fair-haired guy in tails.
Sin-Jun had believed all along, she said, that Clara was straight. But she had also known that Clara was malleable, and the longer they were involved-it had started just after Christmas-the guiltier Sin-Jun felt. When she’d try to end the relationship, however, Clara would become hysterical. “She says she love me so much,” Sin-Jun said. “But I think she just love sex.”
I did start laughing then-I couldn’t help it-and Sin-Jun started laughing, too. Yet it is hard for me not to feel a certain admiration for Clara. I am not so sure that she was merely dumb or horny; I think maybe she was also a little brave.
I never talked to Dave Bardo after that lunch, and for the rest of my junior year, I avoided him completely. I even avoided making eye contact, and it wasn’t that difficult. But near the end of spring term, I felt a burst of remorse, or maybe it was that the remorse I’d felt all along expanded. I began peeking behind the counter. By early June, his arms were tan-he must have been spending time outside-and he often seemed to be kidding around with other staff members. He was never looking at me, and it occurred to me that maybe there was a reason it had been so easy to ignore him for the past few months. By my senior year, he wasn’t working anymore at Ault, though his sister, Lynn, had returned. Several times I was tempted to ask her where he’d gone-maybe he’d made it out to California, and liked it so much that he’d stayed-but I was afraid to remind her who I was.
I think now that it would have been better if Dave had known I was on scholarship; he might have understood, as opposed to agreed with, why I acted as I did. (Aspeth Montgomery could have gone out with him and gotten away with it, it could have been ironic. But my parents’ car was barely nicer than his Chevy Nova.) Of course, I didn’t imagine then that I could have had a real relationship with any guy. I thought that by virtue of being me I was disqualified.