Chapter 18
JOEL
The second semester of their junior year, Joel and Shay slept together.
Cornell’s campus felt empty, most of their friends away on their semester abroad, checking out books in English libraries, getting mugged on the Métro, and vomiting into canals.
It was unspoken why Shay was still at school: the cost of plane tickets and train tickets; the impossibility of everything else that would be expected, like dinners in crowded candlelit restaurants, late-night taxis, and ferry rides.
Joel simply could not miss a season of track.
They began to eat every meal together, and most evenings, Shay read in Joel’s room, stretching her body along his former roommate’s stripped mattress.
Though girls weren’t technically allowed on the floor after eight, his resident advisor didn’t care.
Late at night, Shay talked about how much she resented her parents.
How they barely paid attention to their children and argued behind closed doors.
“When I was little, it felt like he knew everyone in Chicago,” she said of her father one evening, “from the bus drivers to the mayor’s press secretary. But now he can barely take care of himself. My mom has to track his article deadlines for him.”
“What changed, do you think?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” She pulled at a loose thread at her skirt hem. “I don’t even want to go home for the summer. After I graduate, I’m going straight to law school in New York, and I’ll live in a spotless apartment with white couches and china from Italy.”
He laughed. “I’m sure you will.”
This confidence was infectious. Her moments of dancing—with endearingly little grace or rhythm—to the Velvet Underground, their own drug.
When the hallway phone rang, it was always her brother, to whom she’d given the building’s number so she’d never miss his calls.
She said she admired William’s empathy, his open heart, but Joel sensed that same gentleness within her when they were alone.
The tender part of her she wanted to hide.
He told her about the way he felt when he ran—how unless he was reading, constant movement was the only way he could feel still—and how he’d been a black sheep since the day he was born.
How in many ways it didn’t feel like he had a family.
His parents were so much stricter with him than with his brothers, as if he were a piece of metal they could bend into the proper shape, and he revealed to her what no one else knew, which was that if he didn’t work in his father’s real estate company, he’d be disinherited.
She told him what no one else had told him: Would that be so bad?
They said many things to each other they’d said to no one else.
Fears, grievances. Childish passions they’d tried to smother.
Her belief as a young girl that if she really tried, she could take flight from their apartment window.
His that he was abandoned as a baby on his family’s doorstep.
She clipped her toenails on his windowsill. She fell asleep as he read.
One night, they found a bottle of vodka someone had left in the hallway—upright, like an offering.
Though they never said as much, it was clear they were challenging each other when they began to drink, trying to see who could swallow more, who could hold their liquor like a sailor.
It was a juvenile test of strength. They sat on his roommate’s mattress.
Her head was angled against the wall, her body shifted so her dress hem rode up to mid-thigh, revealing soft skin coated with pale, silky hair, something he was not supposed to see.
It made him hard. It must have been obvious in how he tensed and pulled up his feet.
Normally, he was smoother with girls, bolder, but Shay was different, and he’d panicked until he looked back at her, finding her irises inked with pupil, a flush blossoming at her neck.
She tucked a heavy sheet of hair behind her ear.
Time moved as slowly as the seconds before a race, and then, once they’d kissed, as fast as after the pistol fired.
He felt their first kiss on every atom of his tongue, and he became even harder at the urgency of hers, how she tasted like the ghost of alcohol and toothpaste.
He removed his glasses, and they both stripped to their underwear, his fingers inside of her, circling in the exact way he knew she wanted, his certainty elemental.
When she bit his shoulder, he realized she was stronger than he thought she’d be: ridges of shuddering muscle at her thigh and back, and teeth so sharp he swore she’d drawn blood, conjuring images of selkies, sirens, a book he’d read as a child about a girl who was raised by wolves.
He tried to pull back to look at her, wanting to see the full length of her body, a part of him knowing this would be one of his only opportunities, but then she pulled down his boxers, and when he entered her, his world narrowed to a single, burning star.
He slowed down, listening to when her breath hitched.
He told himself he could tell when a girl was performing, mimicking the sounds they thought men wanted to hear, which were nothing like the guttural groans, deep and low as a church bell, that Shay made when he canted his hips.
Soon she was coming apart beneath him, and then it was impossible to wait. He began to move faster.
“Is this okay?” he asked, even as he lost the ability to control himself.
“Yes,” she breathed. “Yes.”
And that was all it took to make him come.
Carmen tugged her dress over her head the moment she walked into the hotel room.
She flicked her feet so that her heeled sandals thudded against the wall, as if these items held some essence of the party she didn’t want in contact with her skin.
Her eyes were too bright for the hour. Her underwear nude, a shade lighter than her stomach and thighs.
As a boy, Joel would have found it impossible to believe he could ever be standing in front of a girl wearing only a bra and panties and feel no arousal, only a pit of dread.
He had gone to Carmen, by the golf cart. From her vantage down the hill, he knew she was watching him and Shay as clearly as if they were on a stage, and he wanted to do what was right, to at least act the part.
“We were just getting ready to leave,” he told Shay, gesturing to Carmen.
Shay’s eyes followed his hand, but Carmen had already turned away, flicking the ash of her cigarette onto the ground.
Up close, he could see a line of blood on Shay’s bottom lip, as if she’d been worrying it with her teeth, and he remembered a night at the library when he’d gotten a paper cut and she’d absentmindedly reached out and licked the blood off his thumb.
“I’m sorry I didn’t find you earlier,” Shay said.
“Me too.”
“I’ll find you tomorrow?”
He’d nodded, and they stared at each other for a beat, all he’d allow himself before descending the hill. Carmen bid the waiter farewell by kissing him on both cheeks, as if they themselves—not Joel and Shay—were the pair of old friends.
Their drive home had been silent. In the hotel room, the desk lamp cast everything in shadow. Carmen sat on the edge of the bed.
“And when were you going to tell me that we were attending your ex-girlfriend’s wedding?” she asked.
“We never really dated,” he said.
“You never slept together?”
Joel swallowed. He wanted to take off his shoes and suit jacket, but some part of him knew that he couldn’t have these small comforts, that he had to stay standing in front of her, fully clothed.
“I didn’t say anything because it was years ago,” he said.
“She and Andrew have been together since our senior year.”
“Why haven’t I met her?” Carmen asked. “I’ve met Roger, I’ve met Jack—”
“I told you. She was involved in that—organization. I’ve barely seen her over the past year.”
Carmen took a deep breath in and fell back onto the mattress, staring up at the ceiling. Her hands were at her sides. “I wouldn’t have cared, if only you had told me.”
“I’m sorry.” He did not apologize often.
He did not think he usually had reason to, but maybe that was wrong.
Even though he’d convinced himself he didn’t need a family, he still wanted to find someone to marry, just like his friends had, to have love in his life that, yes, would not consume him, but would sustain him in some meaningful way, just like his work did.
And this past year, with Carmen and his promotion, he’d felt on the cusp of this sort of contentment.
He lay down next to her, his shoes still on his feet. Their arms did not touch.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It was a long time ago, and I suppose I never told you I slept with John.”
“John?”
“From my play?”
“Oh.” He had a vague memory of a man leaning over a bar. A halo of curly blond hair, a leather jacket meant to signify some toughness that seemed totally unearned.
“A year ago. Just once. He was very selfish, nothing like—”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
Carmen turned her head toward him, her hands now resting on her stomach.
She looked calmer, ready for sleep, and he remembered when she had told him about her grandparents one night before she drifted off.
They’d lived in Puerto Rico until she was born, moving to the Bronx because they couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing their granddaughter every day of her life.
Unlike Carmen’s parents, their love for each other was unwavering.
Her grandfather made her grandmother coffee every morning.
She warmed his milk before bed. They give me hope, Carmen had said, almost embarrassed, as if she were admitting that she believed in fairies.
At the memory of it, he had the urge to pick her up in his arms, float out the window, over the island and up the coast, and deposit her safely back in her bed. Far away from him.
“Would you be disgusted . . .” She yawned. “If I didn’t brush my teeth?”