What She Saw... (13 page)

It was a lie. She felt like collapsing.

Her date was due to arrive in forty-five minutes.

THAT WAS THE first night Phoebe ever wore red lipstick. She borrowed Meredith Bookbinder's, and she wore it like a gash across her face. And she powdered her face white so her lips looked even redder. Her life had taken a dramatic turn. It seemed only fitting that her makeup should match. But what about her lines? It wasn't that Phoebe didn't believe Samantha Schwartz's version of events. But she would have to tell Spitty what she'd heard. She didn't see any way around that; she was a terrible actress. Only, how could she tell him without offending him?

Or was Phoebe the one who ought to have been offended?

Maybe Maggie Green had stayed for brunch the next morning. But if nothing bad had happened, then why had the administration thrown Kappa Omega off campus? And what was Spitty doing in his friend Dummy's bed in the first place? And was Maggie the “other crap” Spitty was talking about that night in Billy Bob's Sirloin Saloon? Was Spitty's obsession with the inescapable future just a scrim for the far more pressing horror of a past he couldn't figure out how to shirk?

“Oh, Phoebe,” she heard one of her sisters trill from downstairs. “There's someone here to see you!”

She descended the stairs at half-speed.

She found Spitty in Delta Sig's communal kitchen slumped against the refrigerator. “Hi there, kiddo,” he said, straightening his back at the sight of her.

“Hey,” said Phoebe, smiling dimly as she leaned in to kiss his cheek. He smelled like Jack Daniel's. He looked her up and down. It was pretty clear he was attracted to her.

She wasn't, at that point, sure how she felt about that.

“You look really nice,” he said.

“So do you,” she lied. In fact, his tuxedo was badly in need of a press. His red cummerbund appeared to be on backward. His polka-dot clip-on bow tie was pointing northeast. He had a bad case of razor burn.

“You ready to party or what?” he asked her on the way to his car.

“Yeah,” she squeaked.

It must not have been a very convincing “yeah.” Spitty stopped in his tracks, cocked his head. “You sure now?”

“I'm sure,” she told him.

“So how come your teeth are chattering?”

Phoebe bit her lower lip, looked the other way—toward the road, the agriculture quad, the Allegheny Mountains. A light drizzle had begun to fall. She thought fleetingly of her hair. She had spent a good half hour giving it volume. “There's something I have to ask you,” she said, thinking to herself that now was as good a time as any to broach the subject. Then her eyes filled with tears. For some reason, they were always doing that around Spitty Clark.

Maybe because he was the only one who seemed to notice when they did.

“Oh, yeah?” he said. “Like what?”

“I didn't know why Kappa O was kicked off campus,” she said, her voice trembling. “Not until tonight. Someone told me the whole story.”

Now Spitty was the one who looked away. He flexed his lips, blew through his teeth, scratched the back of his neck, whispered, “Oh boy,” before he turned back around to face her—to face up to his past. “Look, Phoebe. I don't know what you heard, but she wasn't, I mean, she wasn't complaining or anything. I mean, the thing is that she stayed for breakfast the next morning. I mean, the two of us were sitting there eating—”

“I thought you weren't a breakfast person.”

“I'm not! I mean . . .” He cleared his throat. “Not generally or anything. But that weekend, I don't know, I guess I woke up hungry or something—and I guess so did she. I mean, she was sitting there eating waffles—”

“I thought it was bacon and eggs.”

“So you really did hear the whole story.” Spitty laughed wearily, his head waggling this way and that. “Okay, look— maybe it was bacon and eggs. I can't remember what she was eating, but she was definitely sitting there eating like nothing was wrong.”

“But you had sex with her?”

“I mean, yeah, we were both pretty drunk.”

“She was your friend's girlfriend?”

“She and Dummy—they were already over.”

“But she wanted to?”

Now Spitty lowered his eyes, began to scrape the heel of his dress shoe backward against the tar. It was obvious he hated talking about this—hated it more than anything else in his life. He didn't say anything for a few seconds. Then he said, “Do yourself a favor in life, Stein. Don't believe everything you hear.”

And in that moment, Phoebe wanted so badly to believe in him—to believe everything she heard Spitty tell her and nothing anyone else did—that there was nothing he could have said short of “I raped her” that would have prevented her from doing so.

Or maybe it was less that she needed to believe in Spitty than that she was suddenly, however perversely, attracted to him— thinking she could be with him the way Maggie Green had been with him, albeit in a more overtly consensual way. Because the thought of Spitty forcing himself on her made sex seem possible where so often it seemed impossible—impossible because it seemed to require her participation, and she didn't know if she was up to that. “Just lying there” sounded a whole lot easier. And wasn't that just what Maggie Green had been doing when Spitty climbed on top of her—Spitty, who had spontaneously mutated into the faceless, pouncing, ravenous thug of countless adolescent dreams Phoebe hadn't known how to think about when she woke up, her forehead damp, her throat parched, her legs akimbo, her sheets asunder? He'd catch her in alleys, he'd drag her into forests, he'd be waiting under the eave. It was never her fault. It was always his.

He always took her from behind.

He disappeared shortly thereafter, never to be heard from again.

Indeed, it was the aftermath of sex that Phoebe found the most daunting to contemplate. How were you expected to act normal with someone you'd been rolling around naked with the previous night? Plenty of the guys she knew—and plenty of the girls, as well—seemed to turn their sexual personae on and off at will, engaging in intimate acts one minute and idle chatter the next. By comparison, even if she'd only just kissed someone, Phoebe found conversation strained the next day. True, she'd developed a relatively garrulous friendship with Jason Barry Gold after the fact of their fooling around. But the more experience she garnered—the more eyeballs she saw lolling about their sockets like so many loose marbles—the more it seemed to her that the state of arousal and the state of amity were two distinct principalities with no diplomatic ties.

“Do you want to go to the party now?” she asked Spitty, suddenly sick with herself for having brought the whole rape business up—and only minutes before her fall formal was due to begin! Now she was the guilty party, trying to make it up to him, worrying he hated her, grabbing on to his arm.

But he yanked it out of her grip. “Whatever,” he said, on his way around the car.

He opened his own door, then Phoebe's. Then he turned on the motor. Then he changed his mind, turned it off, took her by the shoulders, pushed her flat against the gray velour seat cushions, and kissed her like a flame igniting gasoline. At least, that's how it felt to Phoebe. Then he straightened up, turned the engine back on, and proceeded to back out of the Delta Sig parking lot at a terrifying speed. “Slow down!” she shrieked.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

They didn't speak again until they got to the formal. Phoebe couldn't think what to say.

Neither, apparently, could Spitty.

DELTA NU SIGMA had rented a banquet hall on the outskirts of Hoover. There was an abandoned strip mine on one side, a home-furnishings warehouse on the other. Before it was a banquet hall, it had been a bowling alley. All in all, it was a pretty desolate spot. Spitty skidded into a parking space next to the Dumpster. Their shoulders brushing in solidarity, he and Phoebe made their way inside.

Purple streamers had been stretched from one end of a low corkboard ceiling to the other. Brass candelabras outfitted with frosted glass bulbs adorned pale peach walls. In the center of every table was a rainbow glass vase containing a single stem rose. All the band members were wearing skinny black ties decorated with keyboards. All the waiters were wearing cropped purple blazers. Phoebe and Spitty had been assigned to a table with a bunch of junior and senior guys, the majority of whom were Kappa Omegas, and their mostly younger Delta Sig dates, including Randi Rugoff, dressed in a pale mauve tube dress with a white squiggle pattern that lent her hipless body the appearance of Thuringian bratwurst. She'd come with Spitty's good buddy, Scooter, famous for having fallen asleep in the middle of his physics final. “Captain Clark!” he said, offering Spitty a manly hug.

The rest of the Kappa Omega brothers crowded around Phoebe's date in a similar fashion. If they were still sore at him for allowing their beloved fraternity to be kicked off campus, Phoebe thought to herself, they had a funny way of showing it.

“Spitty my man,” declared Scummy.

“How goes it in Shangri-La?” inquired Fatty.

“Cruise Director Clark,” intoned Dukes. “You ready to party or what?”

“You boys know where the bar is?” Spitty asked them. Four index fingers pointed across the room at the same time. “Excellent navigational skills,” Spitty complimented his brothers. Then he turned back to Phoebe. “Hey, Stein, would you care for a cocktail?”

“I'll have a glass of red wine,” she told him.

It was only after Spitty had left for the bar that Randi Rugoff got in Phoebe's face and asked her if she was “having fun yet,” a malevolent grin cracking the seams of her pancake makeup.

“What's it to you?” jeered Phoebe. She couldn't believe she'd said that. She felt strangely elated by her own bitchiness.

Randi Rugoff must have felt differently. Her lips puckered like a fish, she looked like she was about to spit.

Spitty reappeared at Phoebe's side before Randi had the chance to do so. He had a glass of wine and three gin-and-tonics woven between his thumbs and fingers. He was steadying them all with his chin. He finished off two of the g & t's even before the Oysters Rockefeller had been brought out. They were followed by Greek salad, baked chicken with raspberry sauce, rice with fresh almonds and mushrooms, and asparagus topped with cheese sauce. Phoebe ate the rice. Spitty gobbled down everything on his plate. There wasn't much conversation through dinner. Fatty and Dukes spent most of it trying to balance spoons on their noses. Dukes's date, Debbie Rosenzweig, snuck off to the ladies' room to do a line of cocaine and never came back. Randi appeared not to be speaking to Phoebe or anyone else at the table.

No sooner had the dinner plates been cleared than Spitty went back to the bar for another round. He returned just in time for the fruit flambé, and devoured his in ten seconds flat. Then he tapped his knife against an empty highball glass and bellowed, “Quiet!” over and over again until the room fell silent— even the band stopped playing halfway through a jazzy version of Hall and Oates's “Maneater.” That's when Spitty stood up, steadied himself against the back of his chair, and began to weave undetectably—except maybe to Phoebe. “I'd just like to take this opportunity to say a few words on behalf of Delta Nu Sigma,” he began. “A truly excellent house.” There were cheers, whoops. “Comprised of a truly excellent bunch of girls.” More cheers, more whoops. “I'd also like to thank my date here. Thank you for inviting me, Phoebe. Thank you for believing in me . . . Phoebe.” He raised his glass. Phoebe reached for hers. She wanted to crawl under the table. She saw her private obsessions writ as large as billboards. She saw the lie she called her life about to be unmasked. Heat rose up the back of her neck. She remembered why she liked to hide. “I fuckin' love you, man,” Spitty completed the thought before he fell back down in his seat.

The crowd shrieked with vicarious titillation. Someone in back yelled, “Spitty, you fuckin' whore!”

Other than her father, no member of the opposite sex had ever told Phoebe he loved her before. She didn't know if she wanted to kill Spitty Clark or marry him right then and there. “You're drunk,” she whispered.

“I'm not drunk,” he roared back, to the stomach-clutching amusement of his fraternity brothers. “Come on.”

He grabbed Phoebe by the elbow and dragged her onto the dance floor. The band had picked up where they'd left off, and Spitty spun her round and round and round some more. Until the floor became the ceiling and the left wall became the right wall. And the “other crap” faded into the background. And it was just Phoebe and the moment and the moment was “righteous”—just like Spitty said it would be the day she stopped thinking, started living. The dance floor started to fill. One song replaced the next. Suddenly, it was two in the morning. She and Spitty were slow-dancing to Eric Clapton's “Wonderful Tonight.” “You want to get out of here?” he slobbered in her ear.

“Where would we go?” she asked him.

“What about my house?”

Phoebe may still have been a virgin, but she wasn't dumb. She knew what she was getting herself into. She couldn't wait to get it over with. “Let me just get my coat,” she said.

“My moat?”

Phoebe rolled her eyes. “I'll meet you out front in five minutes.” TRUTH BE TOLD: Spitty was in no shape to drive them home. But he swore he was up to it. And Phoebe had had a bit to drink herself. And in that particular moment, she couldn't imagine Spitty letting anything bad happen to her, for the very reason that Spitty himself seemed no realer to her just then than his blatant disregard for the dictates of the white line that separated the northbound traffic from the southbound appeared to pose a threat to her personal welfare. Indeed, Phoebe watched the world slalom in and out of focus through the side window of his Crown Victoria that night as if watching a movie version of her own life. As if she could rewind at will. As if the ending had already been decided. As if she were a spectator as opposed to the lead.