The Rabbit
They’re back, both of them. They arrived on the island yesterday evening within minutes of each other, as if they’d planned
it. I was so mad! I’d been lying in wait for Sam Vetiver, or rather crouching in the bushes as soon as I heard her Jeep on
the causeway, but just as she got out William came bumping up in his fancy car with the chained snow tires. Then I had to
listen to “Hi,” and “Hi,” and “It’s you,” and “It’s you,” and “Love,” and “Love,” and all manner of wubba-wubba reunion bullsh*t,
including the mother of all f*ckfests that was so loud I could hear it down in the Rabbit Hole with my earmuffs on.
God forbid they’re ever parted from each other for more than a few days. The world will blow up.
I look forward to making that happen.
Meanwhile, this morning, business as usual. William wakes before dawn and makes coffee, he writes in his basement study, he
goes back up, they have breakfast. I assume the position, standing on a chair under the kitchen air vent. There’s a smell
of pancakes that practically makes me cry, plus plates clanking and silverware clinking as William says, “We’re going to get
a blizzard tomorrow,” and Sam Vetiver says, “That’s exciting!” and William says, “Spoken like a true city girl, they can be
deadly. I’ll go to Augusta for provisions. Want to come?” and Sam Vetiver says, “I may stay home if you don’t mind, I’ve got
some things I want to do here,” and I think, Me too, Sam Vetiver, me too.
I’m doing a silent happy dance about this development, final-f*cking-ly she’ll be alone!
William says, “Send me your shopping list, I know we need lube,” and Sam Vetiver says, “I noticed that, I don’t know what happened to all of it,” and William says “Well, I do,” and then they settle down to eat and are quiet.
Until Sam Vetiver says, “Oh, did you get that photo I sent you?”
“Of my lowly student digs? Yes, I did. Incredibly sweet of you.”
“I wanted to see where you lived.”
“A lot went down in that house,” William says, and I think, It sure as f*ck did. “Thank you, sugarplum.”
“Also, Zahra sends best wishes. And congrats on your career and our engagement.”
A pause. “Who?” William says.
“Zahra Alaam? From your program? Didn’t she invite you to teach?”
“No, it was arranged through my speaker’s bureau. I don’t recall any Sara.”
“Not Sara, Zahra. Beautiful East Indian woman? Dark hair, mehndi—you know, henna designs on her hands?”
“Ohhhhh,” says William. “I may know who you mean. It was so many years ago, but . . . I think I remember reading she published?”
“She did.”
“But she’s a one-hit wonder. Started strong, then fizzled out.”
“I’m not sure I’d say that,” says Sam Vetiver. “She’s the program head now.”
“Is she,” says William. “At Harrington! Of our graduate MFA workshop?”
“Yup.”
“Well,” he says. “How about that. Good for her, making the best of it. You know what they say: Those who can’t do, teach.”
His chair scrapes, and he adds, “Thanks for letting me know. I’ll get in touch. Who knows, she may want me for a commencement
address one of these days . . . And now, you luscious distraction you, I must away to the desk,” and I scurry back to the
Rabbit Hole, all the better to be hidden by the time he comes downstairs.
As if. As if William doesn’t remember Zahra.
Or Becky or me or his merry men, the guys who backed him up in everything he did.
But maybe he doesn’t. Maybe the only way William can live with himself is to forget everything the minute he does it, especially the horrible things.
The ones that do the most harm. Even if, as I bet, he doesn’t think they’re hurtful at all.
Like what he did to me the night of The Incident, when he came up to me in the cafeteria, because of course he didn’t approach
me at the milk machine to talk Shakespeare.
That’s why I was so shocked, because I knew what was going to happen. William had that reputation, but this would be like
Brad Pitt sleeping with his cleaning lady. I kept thinking, Me? Are you sure? I wondered if William was drunk or on drugs,
even having some kind of mental breakdown. But he wasn’t. He knew exactly what he was doing.
He took me to the Castle, the student pub where I’d just started picking up extra cash as a dishwasher and which actually
did look like a castle, with turrets and everything, and we went to the basement, where I sat on the customer side of the
bar for the very first time, on a velvet stool, and William bought me a pint of cider I couldn’t drink a drop of because I
was so nervous I knew if I took a sip, I’d choke. I kept thinking, You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to treat me like
a date you’re trying to impress. I’ll go to bed with you anyway.
But William was a gentleman. He drank his own beer, and he asked me what my plans were after I left Harrington. Of course,
like all of us, I was planning to write. “The Great American Novel?” William said, doing his gazing thing. I could barely
look him in the face, it was like staring straight into the sun. “Is that your aspiration?” I shook my head. “No,” I said.
“I just want to get published. To make a living writing.” It was the first time I’d said it out loud, and to my surprise it
didn’t sound as foolish and conceited as it did in my head. It sounded doable. “You said yourself I was writing commercial
fiction,” I reminded him.
William looked surprised. “Did I?” he said. “Well, that’s certainly more lucrative than striving for literary posterity. Here’s
to your enormous commercial success.” He toasted me, and we both drank. “I remember now,” he said, “you’re the one who writes
about that terrible place in upstate New York. Regina.”
I thought my face would burst into flames right there on my barstool. I muttered something like “Aegina. Yes, that’s me.”
“They’re very bleak stories,” said William. “Suffused with hopelessness. But that’s the stuff of literary fiction, like Cormac
or Dubus, and it doesn’t match your domestic content. Have you ever thought about writing romance? Something more Bridges of Madison County than Blood Meridian? It seems that might be more in line with your talents. And ambitions.”
I ducked my head. I knew he was insulting me. Any sort of genre fiction was considered brainless, paint-by-numbers stuff,
the kind of book that would be consumed on a plane or on a beach and instantly forgotten. Literary fast food. And romance
was the worst of all. William himself had called it thumb-sucking tripe for sad housewives, the print version of a vibrator.
Nobody in our program would have used it for toilet paper.
And in fact I did not want to write romance, because what did I know about love? I was in no way qualified, not even in my
imagination. But I so badly did not want William Corwyn to stop looking at me like that that all I did was mumble “Yeah, romance,
maybe,” into my cider.
“I think romance gets a bad rap,” said William. “What could be more important than love? We need more of it in our lives,
don’t you agree?”
I did brave a glance right at him then, and he smiled.
“You’re just the person to do it,” he said. “I’ve been watching you for months, and I suspect you’re a woman of great passions.”
He tucked my hair, which I’d just home-permed, behind my ear.
“There,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to do that all night.”
Of course we went to his house after that, the little green duplex by the train depot.
And he f*cked me in his apartment, on his very neat bed with the scratchy striped blankets he still has upstairs.
He had no curtains on the windows and I remember the way the moonlight and the orange streetlight fell across our bodies and how embarrassed I was and kept trying to pull the sheets up, but William stopped me.
“No,” he said. “Don’t do that, sweetie. Don’t hide from me.
I want to see you.” I threw my fists down by my side and squinched my eyes closed like I was at the gynecologist. I felt William’s hand on my face.
“Look at me,” he said, and I did. He was raised up above me like some god.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. “Do you believe me?” He waited, holding himself in his hand, moving it slowly up and down, until I nodded.
Then he said, “Good,” and drove himself into me.
“Oh,” he said, “you feel even better than I thought you’d feel,” and “You are so juicy,” and, swiveling his hips, “I knew how avid you’d be,” because at that point I was making noises I didn’t know a human being could make, let alone myself.
I wasn’t a virgin before that night with William. There had been boys back in Aegina, the guy I worked the night shift with
at the Kwik Trip and the guy I bought my car from and the ones who stuck their hands between my legs in the back row of the
school bus or movies or in parking lots or at the quarry because they’d heard I was an easy lay. And I was. I was an easy
lay. I let them push my bra up and grope me and push my head into their laps so I could suck them off and f*ck me with their
fingers and then with their d*cks because I was hoping against hope that at some point I’d do something right and one of them
would call me his girlfriend. Like the other girls. Wasn’t that how they got guys? The ones who waited for them by the lockers
and held their hands in the hallways and drove them places in their cars and gave them their letter jackets and talked about
getting married after school? It was all I wanted, to be somebody’s girlfriend, to get the f*ck out of my mother’s house,
to be loved. I thought this was how you did it. Except I must have been doing something wrong, because after every hookup
not one of those guys so much as acknowledged me or gave me a cigarette or stick of gum. They looked right past me. As if
I did not exist.