Fourth Comings Read online

  I had no trouble finding your dorm because as undeniable luck would have it, you were assigned to Blair Hall—the oldest Collegiate Gothic dorm on campus and the most iconic. With its stone facade, imposing four-corner turrets, and famed archway, it looks like nothing less than a castle. It was impossible for me to miss, even in my somewhat inebriated state. When we’d moved you in earlier that morning, it struck me as absurd that students would actually live there, yet appropriate that one of them was you.

  I was drawn to the noise of a volleyball game in progress on a stretch of sand near the castle that served as the campus beach. I envisioned row after row of nubile bodies in bikinis, as if this were a junior college in Fort Lauderdale and not one of the most esteemed and difficult-to-get-into universities in the world. As I made my meandering approach, I spotted you with ball in hand in the serving position—an impressive figure stretching several inches taller than any other player on the court. You were shirtless, as you often were since returning from the desert, and your lean, sinewy muscles were shiny with sweat. You’re the rarest of redheads, unfreckled, with skin that turns red first, then browns in the sun. Your ropy dreads had grown past your shoulders and bounced along with your every move.

  And then there was the Beard.

  You had all but given up on shaving, and the result was a (forgive me) scuzzy, neck-to-nose beard/sideburns combo. At its best, the Beard was sort of bohemian and Ginsbergian. But it more closely resembled that which is usually seen on the faces of crazy homeless men or even crazier Islamic fundamentalists, or lately, the batshit crazy Mel Gibson. When it got too mangy and unmanageable, even for you, the Beard was attacked with a pair of cuticle scissors. A Weedwacker would’ve been more efficient. The Beard was, without question, aesthetically unappealing and hygienically unsound, two factors that distinguished it from the very deliberate and totally played-out hipster beards that plagued Lower Manhattan and certain Brooklyn neighborhoods in the mid-2000s.

  Between the overgrowth of facial hair and the overlong dreads, I estimated that I could see only about one quarter of your face. Your kaleidoscopic eyes—always-shifting patterns of green and brown and hazel—still mesmerized, even from afar. Even when they were focused on the ball and not on me. Patches of sand stuck to your sweaty knees, forearms, and chest. I wanted to slide my body against yours until every grain succumbed to gravity, helpless.

  Yes, the sight of you swinging your arm, serving the ball, made me dizzy. Even with the Beard. Even with the words I had just spoken out loud to Dude.

  And I wasn’t alone. On the opposite side of the net was a constellation of starry-eyed teenagers in shrunken prepster polos or cleavage-heaving camis, their tawny or milky white legs curled under microscopic denim, each one in full swoon over what it would be like to lose her virginity to you. And that included those who weren’t virgins anymore.

  I wanted to end the suspense. “He’ll make you come the first time,” I could’ve said with authority. “And every time thereafter.” This wasn’t exactly true, but it felt true, which was true enough. How many there-afters have there been? I lost count long ago.

  (Sometimes when making love, I’d grip your face and force you to look at me just to confirm that you were still there, and I was still there, and that we were still there together. Sometimes I would gasp, “We’re still here.” And you would whisper back, “Yes. We’re still here.” You always knew exactly what I meant.)

  Given what I was about to do, it was not unreasonable to think that you would eventually get around to having sex with one of these girls. I wondered if any of them were your type. I wondered if you even had a type. Your number hovers around forty, so I don’t think I’m being an unreasonably jealous girlfriend when I doubt that you have a “type,” unless “has a vagina” can be classified as a type.

  I looked them over and tried to select the flower that would be first plucked from among this rosy bouquet. Her, I thought. It will be her. The sloe-eyed, pale-skinned dirty-blonde of indeterminate race. (Do you remember her? Do you?) She was pretty, but not at all perfect, with two ever-widening rings of armpit sweat soaking through the tissue-thin cotton of her shirt.

  Yes, I thought. Marcus would go for a girl like her. This outcome felt okay to me. It was strangely comforting to know that my actions wouldn’t devastate you, and that you’d be able to get over me and move on.

  I was having trouble breathing, the air was so humid with pheromones.

  The full weight of drunkenness was settling deep into my limbs.

  The crowd cheered and the game was over.

  You had served the winning point.

  Hooray.

  You loped over to me and pressed your mouth to mine with the fair amount of force necessary just to get through the Beard. Sometimes it was like kissing a scouring pad. My face from the mouth down was scrubbed raw and red, but I ignored the irritation.

  “Hey,” I said. I reached out for the sand trapped in the strands of your chest hair, which was darker than that on your face or on your head. I freed the granules with my fingertips. You made note of my touch with a smile, but you didn’t bother brushing the rest of the sand off your body. You cocked your head in my direction and a single dread swung and hit my cheek. You reflexively soothed the spot with your thumb, eyebrows flattening in a silent, Are you okay?

  I silently lied, Yes, I’m fine.

  “Everyone, this is my girlfriend,” you said. Your hand pressed the small of my back as you presented me to the crowd. “This is Jessica.”

  (Did you notice that you introduced me as your girlfriend first and Jessica next? Did anyone else?)

  “Hey, um, everyone,” I muttered. I wanted to keep the conversation to a minimum, to disguise that I was totally shit-canned in the middle of this brilliant afternoon. And also because I could not have cared less about getting to know Everyone. Everyone consisted of about a dozen eighteen-year-olds whose names I heard and promptly forgot, with the obvious exception of the freshmeat you would use to get over me.

  “I’m Marjorie,” she said, her heart-shaped face flushed with youthful ebullience.

  (How is Marjorie these days?)

  My clairvoyance made me feel superior, and I tried not to let on that I knew what would happen between you two.

  I turned to you. “Can we go to your room?”

  Giggly twitters agitated the air. The question “Can we go back to your room?” is tantamount to foreplay on college campuses. And even those first-years who had enjoyed certain freedoms because of boarding schools or absentee parents were suddenly reminded of one of the greatest promises of the next four years: We can fuck whenever we want to!

  “Sure,” you replied, unconcerned. Then to the children: “Later.”

  And they all enthusiastically agreed that yes, they would be seeing you later. You already had plans that did not involve me. As it should be. Would be. Will be.

  You took my hand as we walked across the sand.

  “They’re all so young.”

  “They’re all adults.”

  I snickered. “I’m twenty-two and I’m not an adult.”

  “That’s you,” you said, pushing open the door to your room. “Not them.”

  Your tone was light, and it reminded me how much I’ve missed hearing you talk.

  I told myself then that I couldn’t possibly miss your voice any more from seventy-five miles away than I did when you were walking right beside me.

  three

  We entered the wood-paneled carrel that will be your home away from home for the next academic year. Your roommate, an eighteen-year-old named Nathaniel “Natty” Addison who had come to Princeton, New Jersey, all the way from Mobile, Alabama, was sitting cross-legged on his bed, tapping away at his laptop.

  “Hey, y’all.”

  I was born and raised in the Garden State, yet I have never, ever pronounced my homeland as “Joisey.” But good ol’ Natty proved that not all Southerners are Dixie Hicks, but some really do say “y’all.” Y
oung Natty was barely taller than me, and slight, which meant that he was dwarfed by you in every way. He had rosy cheeks, a sprinkling of freckles across his nose, and shaggy blond hair. I wanted him to spout off charming red-state aphorisms in his disarming drawl—you know, deep-fried wisdom about airborne bovines or armless skeeter-beaters that make no sense to Northern ears but sound just so goldanged adorable. I just wanted to sit and listen to him talk and talk and talk.

  I met Young Natty’s parents briefly that morning during the move-in. His dad was an alum, Princeton Class of 1970, a doctor whose substantial belly and crimson face were at odds with his profession. He looked more like a suckling pig on a spit than the go-to guy for medical advice. Young Natty’s stepmother was about twenty years his father’s junior, and most of her remastered face and body were significantly younger than that. Her lips were inflated into such a trout pout that I didn’t know whether to offer lip gloss or tarter sauce. Mrs. Addison hadn’t mentioned her career, but if this hot-rollered platinum blonde wasn’t a former beauty queen—Miss Alabama Blackberry 1985—then she had tragically missed her true calling. Dr. and Mrs. Addison were professionally pleasant, and yet their rhinestone smiles couldn’t hide the horror—oh, the horror—over their son’s being randomly assigned to room with this hirsute and tattooed man of sketchy provenance and dubious sanitation who arrived on campus parentless, with little more than two dusty duffel bags and an unsmiling girlfriend. Perhaps Dr. Addison should have contributed a more substantive alumni gift to Princeton’s coffers.

  I gave you a look heavy with meaning. It’s the type of look that only long-term couples understand, or half-understand in this case. You knew what I wanted you to say, but alas, not why I wanted you to say it.

  “Natty?”

  He looked up at you, then me, then again at you. I didn’t get a gay vibe from Young Natty, but that wouldn’t stop him from falling totally heterosexually in luuurrrve with you.

  Young Natty caught on quickly. “Sho-wah thang,” he said affably, but I’m pretty sure that he says everything affably. “Ah was a-baht finished up he-ah anah-ways.” He slapped his laptop shut, grabbed his messenger bag, and headed out the door with a goofball grin. You offered a convivial pat on the shoulder as he passed.

  “Thanks, man.”

  “Sho-wah thang,” he said to you. Then to me: “Sho-wah was a pleh-shuh, Jess Darlin’…”

  I blinked hard in disbelief.

  Young Natty’s words transported me back six years, to one of my first encounters with you, in the principal’s office of Pineville High School. A cornball secretary, not usually graced by the presence of straight-A students with spotless transcripts, had just expressed surprise to see me. “Well, if it isn’t Jess Darling!” Moments later, you—whom no one was ever surprised to see in the principal’s office—mimicked her hokey delivery. “Ain’t you Jess Darling?” But it came out sounding like “Ain’t you jus’ darlin’!” A drawling, Confederate mockery of my name.

  Months later, when the Brainiac and the Dreg were talking every night on the phone yet still not acknowledging each other in school, you said my last name over and over and over again —darlingdarlingdarlingdarling— until it morphed into something else: Darlene. For a while, that was my nickname, which you claimed was a representation of my trashier alter ego. This was still a year before we slept together, and I’m sure you were using the powers of nomen et omen to hurry up and get inside my pants already.

  I looked at you today, hoping for a mutual, miraculous remembrance that might have given me a reason not to fulfill the breakup prophecy. It was a futile wish, as I knew that such mind-melding was impossible, even among symbiotically entwined lovers, even among soul mates, as my thirteen-year-old self would have earnestly put it. And yet I was still disappointed to see no sign of the shared recollections, only you smiling at Young Natty’s back as he bounded out the door.

  “Marcus…”

  “Jessica.”

  Then you dropped your shorts to the floor. You weren’t wearing underwear, another luxury item disposed of during your retreat to Death Valley. So there was precious little to prevent what happened next and next and next: You placing your hands firmly on either side of my hips, and then pulling my shirt up over my head. Sliding down the length of my body, granules of sand roughing up my torso before falling away. Kneeling at my feet. Breathing hot on the sensitive gooseflesh around my navel. Unbuttoning, unzipping, and unburdening me of whatever clothing remained.

  And me, surrendering to the last thereafter.

  Middle-of-the-afternoon sex is notable for its complete lack of modesty. The window shades had minimal impact on blocking out the sun, and I was thoroughly and unself-consciously exposed in its light. I stretched my naked body before you, inviting you to do whatever you wanted, which was everything I wanted.

  Your teeth nipping my lower lip. Your fingertip tracing the curve of my hip. Your tongue teasing the tender underside of my breast. Your nose nuzzling my innermost thigh. The Beard tickling nerve endings I couldn’t locate. Cognition was overcome by sensation…. If I was thinking about anything, it was how I wish I wish I wish I could live my whole life within those exquisite moments of dumb pleasure right before I come….

  You murmured softly, not a word exactly, something untranslatable. The sound brought my brain back to my body. And once the corporeal/cognitive connection was restored, there was no way I would return to that blissful, dumbfucked state.

  “Jessica?”

  I knew what you were really asking. We’re still here…aren’t we?

  No.

  We were not. I was not.

  I was elsewhere. And I wanted the erotic interlude to be brought to its end. What’s more, I wanted it to end in a dramatic way, one that could’ve justified my intentions.

  four

  I don’t hear the click-click-click of the lock.

  Or see the door opening.

  Or Young Natty’s parents getting a clear, Kama Sutra view of you neck-deep in my nether regions.

  “Ohhhhhhhmaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!”

  “Jayyyyyyysuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhsssss!!!!!!!!!!!!”

  I freak (“OOOOOHHHHHFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!”) and scramble under the sheets. You calmly remove yourself from my crotch and cover up with a pillow.

  If you recall, when I walked in on my own parents catching lumpy humps on the couch at their condo a few years back, I still had the presence of mind to put aside my gut-churning horror and slam the door shut on the image that would haunt me for the rest of my life. In this dramatic scenario, Young Natty’s parents don’t have the sense to shut the door. No, they gawk and gawk and gawk some more, as if we are the first humans in recorded history to do what we are doing, as if no one before us has ever thought to unite mouth and vagina for the purposes of female pleasure, as if we have, in fact, just put our perverted minds and bodies together to invent the act of cunnilingus. And can you blame them? Because sometimes it does feel as if we have invented it and all intimacies. Our bodies surging and retreating in innumerable positions and countless combinations for us and us alone…

  I imagine Dr. and Mrs. still just standing there, with no sign of bringing the awkwardness to its desperate end. No, only you can do that.

  “Dr. and Mrs. Addison,” you say in a surprisingly dignified tone considering the only thing separating Young Natty’s parents from your formidable boner is a small foam-filled pillow that, quite frankly, is not up to the task. “Would you mind leaving us alone?”

  I’m awestruck by your ability to collect yourself so quickly. But then I remember how my parents were so shamelessly unflustered when they reopened the door with their clothes on. I take this as a cue that those responsible for the interruptus have more reason to be embarrassed than those engaged in the coitus. Dr. and Mrs. Addison reach a similar conclusion and suddenly get all tangled up in a flurry of apologetic “Pahdons” and “Ahm so sorrys” as they make their (belatedly) hasty retreat from the room.

  Young
Natty gets much mileage out of the “On My First Day of College My Parents Busted My Roommate Going to Town on His Girlfriend” story. As a getting-to-know-you gambit on campus, that story is tough to beat. And just when the story starts getting old at Princeton, and he’s told everyone he can possibly tell, he recycles it for his high school friends when he returns to Alabama on breaks. Oh yes. Such a tale can be told many times over.

  five

  But that’s not what happened. That dramatic scenario only exists in my mind. (And now in this notebook.) As it really happened, the erotic interlude ended not dramatically at all, but modestly, with a whisper.

  “Jessica?”

  You had fully extracted yourself from my body and were sitting up in the sheets. I had no idea how long you’d been sitting like that, looking at me. You were slightly out of breath, and when the exhalation hit my face, my stomach twisted in recognition of the brackish scent I knew as my own. I turned my head away, disgusted.

  I’d already decided that when I returned to Brooklyn, I would tell Hope this story, the real one, in its entirety. I wouldn’t even censor the nasty bits. I’ve always refrained from discussing the most delicate details of our sex life because my love for you transcended dishy fuck-and-telling. But there was already a shift in my brain that said, Nothing is sacred anymore.

  So I couldn’t fall back on a histrionic deal breaker like the previously described dramatic scenario. I had to rely on the truth.

  “I don’t think I can do this.”

  You rested in the sheets, eyes closed, mouth open just wide enough to slip a pinkie finger inside. I couldn’t see the airflow, no telltale rippling of nose hairs, but I imagined that you were breathing in one nostril and out the other like a master yogi.