Fraternity Page 6

  Then I look up and see Swordfish. He’s holding the strap-on, still attached to Ollie, who has lifted off. For a bit the wings go extra-fast, to achieve the proper altitude, and then it soars, Swordfish dangling and still reaching for the clasps. They go up over the house, toward the red sky, through these black dead trees, and when Swordfish’s legs hit a branch, the snow shakes off.

  Over the soccer field, Swordfish falls, silhouetted by the setting winter sun. I run down the man-made hill to where he lies. He’s on his back, holding the strap-on. I kneel beside him.

  “Christina Richman,” he says. “Tell her.”

  “Tell her what?” I take his hand.

  “That I sweat her. Sweated.” His eyes close. He releases my hand and holds the strap-on tight against himself.

  After the ambulance comes we find Ollie the Owl, with its wings folded, about fifty feet away, by the tennis courts. I never realized it before, but it always looks like it’s sleeping. Borat, Dracula, and I bury it by the generator near the Robert Frost Trail.

  Swordfish’s parents freak out at his funeral. His bald dad puts his hands on the sides of his head, by the tufts of hair around his ears, looking down into the casket, in this room with really thick brown fleur-de-lis wallpaper, and says, Oh my God, Oh my God, and keeps looking down there. Swordfish’s mom and aunt walk him out of the room and lower him onto a bench in the hall, where he sits the way Swordfish used to sit sometimes, with his legs spread and his head in his hands.

  Borat is in the next room, holding hands with Christina Richman. I want to say what I’m supposed to say to Christina Richman but obviously I don’t. When Swordfish’s mom and aunt go to talk to Coach, who gives them this photo of Swordfish smiling with his mouth guard in, I sit next to Swordfish’s dad on the bench and try to think of something to say.

  I’m thinking this, as I look at Swordfish’s dad: Now, when I look up and focus on nothing in particular and the geese are over the library tower, I can hear things. Like the feral cats that gnaw the pizza boxes that we lean against the house on recycling day are asking for help. Even like, when I look at something like the shitty houses with the brown lawns by Route 9, all the powerless things are asking for me, like there are these tiny fingers everywhere reaching out. But obviously I don’t say that.

  THE TREASURER

  When one of Pete’s fraternity brothers posted the video to a closed Greek Facebook group, people said that what happened in the video was rape. At first Pete thought the commenters meant that he had raped the girl. But then he scrolled down and realized they considered him the victim.

  It hadn’t occurred to him to think of himself as having been raped any more than it had occurred to him to think of himself as a rapist. He rose from his swivel chair and looked in the mirror. His polo shirt still hugged his gut tighter than it hugged his pecs. His curls were still dark and springy. He still had abundant ear hair, and chubby cheeks. He took off his clothes, held his shoulders, ass, thighs, and package. In this way he confirmed that he was still Petey, whom everybody loved.

  By the time the event captured in the video took place, he was used to being the object of disrespectful acts. In Delta, having disrespectful things done to you was a pathway to prestige. When you were a pledge, you did the whale, where the actives bailed pissed-in water from the toilet, poured it in the sink, and made you blow bubbles in it. When you surfaced, you recited the names of ten actives. If you did it without complaint, you got to become an active yourself.

  It was a similar deal when he had a girlfriend sophomore year. Once word got out, they made him sit in the crab apple tree wearing an apricot taffeta gown they kept in the basement. After a few hours they let him come down, and everyone shook his hand. No one ever really gave him any shit after that. Everyone in Delta who had a steady girlfriend had had to do the same thing; it was a way to prove that even though you had a girlfriend you still had self-esteem, because an insecure douche would have refused to put on a dress. An insecure douche would have refused to get in the tree.

  When Pete was elected treasurer at the beginning of his senior year, having crushed a junior who’d spoken of “planting seeds” and making Delta a “lean start-up, not a government,” he knew that he would have to pass another test of character before his inauguration. Every Delta voted into leadership had to weather a ceremony designed to test his confidence. For some it was a gauntlet of slaps, for others butt-chugging, in which vodka was funneled through a broken bottle into the anus, for others eight hours on all fours.

  The party where it happened was like all other members-only Delta parties: Kendrick and a keg hose coiled in its nest, ska and the aftertaste of Domino’s garlic bread. Pete no longer found such parties exciting, but they were comforting, evenings spent among friends. They were the kind of fun he had yearned for back in high school, when he’d forced himself to spend his evenings alone, hoping to grind his way into an Ivy, trying in vain to bring up his grades. He passed hundreds of hours staring at the homework modules, unable to complete them; they all required web-based research, and when he was online he couldn’t not go on Facebook and Instagram to see what people were up to—making space for grief after the death of a dog, or posting photos of a caf worker whose mislabeled milks had compromised a vegan—so that by the time he thought to return to the window where the module lay in wait for him, he had to remind himself what he was supposed to be learning about, and after he had reoriented his attention so much time had passed that he had to check his feeds again. Adderall was helpful and then less so. He learned the hard way that he couldn’t focus on anything if there was no one around to watch him focus. His one victory was to lose ten pounds and keep them off, using a step machine his mother had abandoned. As he climbed, he listened to Spotify and imagined that every band was an attic quartet consisting of himself and his future friends at Dartmouth: a troubled friend on vocals, a practical friend on drums, a studious black friend with wire-rimmed glasses on guitar, and he, Petey, on bass. A bassist, he felt, was a motor, a shortstop, and a mother.

  The party had been going strong for three hours when the headlights of a 4Runner lit the street in front of the house. A short woman hopped from the driver’s seat. She was broad-shouldered, with hair that hung straight like Snoopy’s ears, and she was older than Pete, twenty-six or thirty; he could never read grown-ups’ ages. It was warm, early October, but she wore a trench coat with a floppy belt. She walked briskly with her hands in the coat’s pockets, chin up, pug nose horizontally creased. She had that pleasing aspect that female rugby players had, especially the short ones, of seeming dense in the flesh. She looked like she could thrust from a ruck with her eyes on the grass and pound the crown of her head into an interloper’s face. There was a long, heavy-looking gray bag thrown over her shoulder, and she wouldn’t let anyone help her with it as she walked up the soft, creaking steps and slipped through the smokers on the porch.

  When she reached the living room she conferred with Gavin, the vice president of social programming, businesslike with her hands on her hips. He pointed and she dropped the bag with a swish of nylon and a bell-like clang.

  On her knees she removed three telescoping cylinders, which, when joined via spring-loaded knobs, composed a pole, to which she locked a square plate at either end with a hex key. She stood on a chair to tap the ceiling for a joist and made the top plate exert upward pressure by cranking a screw with a wrench that had been stored in a wrench-shaped pocket in the bag’s interior. In essence, the stripper pole was a curtain rod, friction fit between ceiling and floor. She shook it with both hands. Judging it steady, she vanished into the bathroom. Gavin lowered the shades. He summoned all present and put on Marilyn Manson, and as if conjured by the music, the girl minced out bare-breasted in a silver skirt. The crease in her nose remained as she gripped the pole with four limbs and revolved. It was, Pete felt, the crease in her nose that his brothers cheered, or the mix of smooth performance and frank disgust.

  When the dance was ov
er, Gavin took Pete by the elbow and escorted him to the bathroom from which the dancer had emerged. Once a scrawny, slope-shouldered boy, Gavin had widened and hardened at the age of twenty. He had shorn off his hair, and the result was warlike majesty. Shortly after he’d become attractive, Gavin had become quiet. You could barely hear him. “Go ahead and take your pants and shirt off, Petey,” he said, standing in the doorframe. When he smiled, the bathroom brightened, and his voice grew even softer. “I’d rather not do it for you, even though you’re a beautiful man.” That was when Pete knew for certain that the ritual performed on him that night would be more frightening than the whale, and that the dancer would be part of it.

  Sitting on the furred toilet seat, untying his shoes, Pete could hear, through the wall, the hiss of a mattress being manhandled down the stairs. The line of light beneath the door went dim. The music died. The crowd sound came through clearly now, a congenial drone pricked by squeals. Even in the bathroom, there were faint notes of beer, weed, cider, and cologne, good smells that spoiled when they were steeped in one another. Someone shouted, “And I was like, ‘Until you know the Dead, don’t judge the Dead.’”

  Gavin opened the door for Pete and extended his arm toward the living room in a gesture of welcome. On the mattress, surrounded by his fellow seniors save for a path that cleared before him, the girl lay naked on her back. A floor lamp had been placed near her legs; he could see the calluses on the soles of her heels. Her lavender-nailed fingers drummed on the white sheet.

  Gavin raised his hand for silence. He took out his phone and read from it.

  “Hear ye, hear ye,” he said at the volume of normal conversation. “This is Jane, a dancer from Electric Blue.” There was applause.

  “Petey”—Gavin turned to Pete—“you are treasurer-elect of this great chapter of Delta Zeta Chi. I command you to go forth and prove your faithfulness by giving your finest cunnilingus to this girl.” The dancer seemed to sneeze, as she brought her hand briefly to her face, but Pete couldn’t hear anything for the thunderous clapping, so it was hard to be sure.

  He stood for a moment with his arms folded across his chest and approached the dancer slowly, because he felt that it was possible she would be so repulsed by his body that she would decide she couldn’t go through with the gig. It was important to give her ample avenue for retreat.

  He knelt between her legs, which were bruised on the shins and pink around the knees. While he’d been worried that she would sneer at him, or roll her eyes, he could see her face now, and the set of her mouth was neutral and she blinked rapidly as if tempted to sleep. He supposed that she was spacing out, thinking of something other than what she was doing and where she was.

  When he went down on her, she was still and unresponsive, which made him feel inept and ugly. Her labia tasted like crying and fingertips. They brandished fewer affectations than his ex-girlfriend’s labia, which had smelled powdered, somehow, and had had less hair. His erection was as hard and relentless as the erections he’d had in late puberty: the seventh-grade erections on the morning bus, the erections thudding at the underside of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the erections that had refused to slacken during his oral presentations on Vietnam and the guillotine. Those erections had filled him with the sense of a newborn power even as they filled him with fear. But this was different. For if he got an erection from doing something he was forced to do, it must mean that he longed to be forced to do things.

  In order to avoid thinking about this, he pursued the same tack the girl seemed to have chosen: he urged his mind to wander. He tunneled back through the years to winters in overheated hallways, stains on perforated ceilings, that is, to high school. Not to his high school per se but to the Young Judaea Northeast Weekend Convention of 2012, for which Young Judaea had rented a school building from a district in inner Hartford, a fortress replete with basketball courts and media rooms. There, he and Dorit Gilad had become friends. They skipped nearly all of the classes, in which you were occasionally asked to share what Israel meant to you, and roamed an adultless landscape, or rather a landscape where the adults in charge were watchful but invisible, which seemed very Israel. They complained about the students at their schools who circulated boycott petitions—this was pro forma commiseration at YJ, nothing more than small talk—until it was night outside the barred windows. That was when they stumbled on a secluded teachers’ lounge with an old DVD player wired to an ancient television perched on a portable rack. The disc tray contained episode 1 of a PBS documentary, The Civil War, which they watched not seated in any of the various desk chairs but sprawled with their backs to the carpet, looking up. Bearded, apprehensive generals shone down like moons. Twenty minutes in, he felt he could touch her, and, intending to reach around her head and hold her shoulder—he thought of a Union soldier in a photograph, resting his hand on the shoulder of his wife—he rested his hand on her breast by mistake. It took him a minute to realize what had happened, because he had never held a breast before, and when he saw where his hand was he withdrew it, which was insane because she had already allowed it to be there. She neither moved nor spoke. They lay in the dark and watched the nation sink into bloodshed.

  Why was it, he wondered, as the cheers of “Petey” grew and flagged, grew and flagged, that he thought of Dorit now, six years later? He could still feel the heat of her breast in his hand. Perhaps it was because tonight was like that night in Hartford, in that an organization had facilitated his hooking up with a girl he might not otherwise have hooked up with. A stated aim of Young Judaea, after all, had been to help Jewish teens befriend other Jewish teens. So that, when he reached for Dorit, it wasn’t just a private charge running between two people but, like the present exercise, a submission to tribal will. And it was always that sense of his body being part of a larger body, of his being locked within a host and doing its bidding, that had been the warmest feeling of his life.

  The dancer, perhaps in response to a cue from Gavin, pressed down on Pete’s head with both hands. It was difficult for Pete to breathe. The cheering intensified. She released his head and depressed it repeatedly, giving him chances to recover between applications of force, and the fourth or fifth time she held him down, she made things simpler—she tipped his face so that his mouth rested above her genitals. Now he could do nothing but bury his nose in her stomach. We’re in this together, she seemed to say, so let’s make it easier on both of us. He closed his eyes. She released and pressed him again, and the noise of the crowd rose and lapsed with her efforts. He guessed that this was a big finish that Gavin had arranged. She was making faces, he gathered, pretending to have an orgasm. It wouldn’t make for a good ending if she just said, Okay, we’re done now. After another thirty seconds of climax, she freed him, and Gavin helped him to his feet, holding up his hand as though he had boxed and won.

  His brothers gathered round to congratulate him. He looked past them at the dancer. She was putting on her clothes, sitting on the stairs, her jeans already on. Gavin gave her a wad of bills. She counted the money and tucked it into the front pocket of the bag in which she carried the pole.

  The pole must have been disassembled, for he could see its tubes straining the bag’s fabric. Wait, thought Pete, don’t go. But he said nothing. It was unclear to him what there was to say.

  Gavin drew him aside. “I want you to know,” he said, “that when we went to make the deal, we asked her if she was clean in the region, and she said, no question, she’d been tested. That’s the reason we drove all the way to Electric Blue to find a girl, instead of just going to Castaway, because our conversations were always about safety.”

  “How much did you pay her?” Pete asked.

  “Six hundred.”

  * * *

  In the morning he sat with the outgoing treasurer, Tom McCreary, to learn the job. Tom sat at the breakfast table eating waffles with his hands, dipping chunks in a puddle of syrup that covered his plate. He talked Pete through the Excel spreadsheet you us
ed for reconciling the Delta Mastercard on the fifteenth of every month and showed him how to process purchase orders through the national headquarters in Maryland. Cool sunlight blanched the Ikea table, and crisp leaves blew into the kitchen whenever someone opened the door to the backyard. Despite last night’s moments of wretchedness, he felt a stirring of loyalty. Here was Tom, twenty-one like him, and yet already managing the money for a house of thirty students, when most people their age were still children, living only for themselves. Soon it would be Pete who carried the Mastercard in his wallet. Soon it would be Pete cracking down on actives who tapped the petty cash for food and gave their meal-plan points to girls. If he chose, he could never think about the dancer again. He could laugh if someone brought her up.

  It was after he’d showered and shaved, sitting in his attic room freshly dressed, that he read the comments on the closed Greek Facebook group. First there were girls posting, rape, this is absolutely rape, yes, rape, and so on. But then there was an argument, with the participants divided according to gender.

  The girls said:

  I love love love guys, especially Deltas, but I will never understand them. Pay a stripper to assault one of your actives? Great idea. Just explain to me, why?

  Guaranteed fucking genius way to catch mouth herpes.

  There is nothing voluntary about this, as far as I can tell. She’s holding him down and potentially giving him diseases.

  Is it still rape if he consented to that, but from peer pressure? That’s when it becomes the campus debate of free will vs. we’re all social beings.

  Think about if it was the other way around with a girl and a guy. No one would ever think that was fine. This is not paddling or something, Deltas. Perfect strategy to make sure you never get laid, btw, just in case you’re interested.

  I love Deltas but this is beyond gay-zing into something more fucked.