The Island Dwellers Read online

  “Hey. Are you okay?”

  The American-accented English jolted me into looking up. The foreign host boy was standing above me, hands in the pockets of his dark jeans. I stared at him blankly, and he repeated the question: “Are you all right?”

  “No,” I said. It didn’t occur to me to lie.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “The trains aren’t running.”

  He looked at me quizzically. Everybody knew the trains stopped at midnight, I’d known it too. Right then I just couldn’t seem to know the things that I knew. “Do you want me to call you a cab?”

  I kept staring at him, and all I could think was that Iseya doesn’t like host boys, he thinks that what they do is cheap, that you shouldn’t take a gift like beauty and use it to get money from lonely people. And I wanted to say to Iseya: But what about the people who are lonely, isn’t it their fault as well?

  “A cab,” the host boy repeated gently. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Pretoria,” I said, and put my head in my hands.

  “Where’s that?”

  I heard myself answer as if in a dream, instructing this poor American kid who’d had the misfortune to stop and be kind to me. “South Africa. It’s in South Africa.”

  The host boy crouched down on the ground next to me, careful not to get his jeans wet. I could hear him from beyond the darkness of my cupped hands, could feel the heat of his closeness. A silence, and then, tentatively, awkwardly, his hand patted the top of my head.

  “That’s very far for a taxi,” he said, apologetically. “You’d never get there in time.”

  * * *

  —

  HE GOT ME A PEN and a sheet of paper, after I stopped crying. The pen was his, but he didn’t have paper, and had to go ask one of the Japanese host boys lingering in the plaza. He asked me my name, as if it would tell him anything about why I was sitting on the ground. He told me his was Ancash, then gave me crumpled bills for cab fare and left me with my back against the column. The letter I wrote to Iseya then is not one I ever gave him. I wrote it not because I intended to show him, but because it was what he deserved to hear. I don’t know where it is now—I lost it later, perhaps deliberately. But one line stays with me: The things that make me love you aren’t things I love in myself. None of the rest of it was so honest.

  When I finished, I sat for a long time. Nobody spoke to me, so I didn’t have to find a language to reply in. I tried not to think of my phone, left in the love hotel, or of Iseya trying to reach me—how many frantic messages he would have left, at what point he would have switched from English to Japanese, then back to English. As if the right combination of words could conjure me. As if there was a language that could bring us together.

  Time stopped, and then suddenly it restarted. The sky grew light and the sidewalks stirred, the first crowds, the first trains, a first morning as if there had been no previous morning to ever arrive and find us all so raw and new. I picked myself up. I didn’t know what I would say when I got there, but I put my face to that anemic, early sun and began the slow walk back.

  The thing about Topher was that he was the kind of guy who had never been anywhere. Everything I did was new to him. Everywhere I had been (Rhode Island! “Is it really an island?”) was exotic, by virtue of the fact that he’d never seen it with his own eyes. He was born and bred here in Iowa, and he wore it like his baggy jeans and plaid shirts. “We’re real different, you and me,” he said, and the comparison was flattering, because Topher was someone you liked, but didn’t want to be like. “You are gonna break that kid in two,” Livvy said when Topher and I started fucking.

  Unlike Topher, Livvy had seen it all. She had a mouth like a sailor and no one she knew would ever have accused her of friendliness. We got along like a house on fire, despite the fact that she disapproved of everything I did, and I thought she was a little crazy.

  “He’s not a kid,” I said, which was my best and only line of defense. “He’s twenty-two.”

  “And you got fifteen years on him.”

  “A decade,” I said, increasingly defensive. “A decade is ten years.”

  “A decade,” Livvy repeated, “is ten years.”

  She proceeded to point out that he was my TA, and that he had a girlfriend who was twenty, whose mother I could technically be, if I had been unfortunately impregnated at twelve. (“It happens,” Livvy had said, “and if it had happened to you, you would be her mother.”) But Livvy’s main issue with our sordid affair was not actually its sordidness, the details of which were inarguable. It was that he would eventually be damaged by our affair ending, and Livvy felt this damage, even if slight to him, would be traumatic for me.

  “It will warp your psyche forever,” Livvy informed me. We were having hamburger night at I.C. Ugly’s Saloon, as we did every Monday after I taught my evening class. “You aren’t the sort of person who damages people. You’re nice.”

  “I could totally damage somebody,” I said, sensitive to the implied character defect.

  “In thirty-two years, I bet you’ve never left first. I bet you’ve never cheated, stolen, or lied. And I bet you’re friends with all your exes.”

  My silence let her know she was right. Her tone let me know that she was my opposite in each of these regards. She stole one of my sweet potato fries. Somebody put a quarter in the jukebox but nobody danced. “I’m just saying,” she just-said, “you’re a good person. And after you destroy him, it will be worse for you than it is for him.”

  * * *

  —

  OVER THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, I kept replaying the conversation in my head, and it bothered me more and more. I couldn’t have said why. I was raised by decent, honest Protestant stock to be decent and honest. My mother was proud of me. My exes all spoke well of me. Somehow, under the penetrating spotlight of Livvy’s gray eyes, this seemed less like an achievement than an indictment.

  I brought it up to Seth one night when I was walking Chester, our dog. Seth had moved to Chicago right after our recent breakup, but we still conferred often about things like Chester, and car payments, and which of us was going to tell his mother that we had ended and so had her dreams of grandchildren. I’d taken to calling Seth during the nightly dog walks, in part because his voice was comforting in the thick Iowan dark. Also in part because Topher was usually waiting on my porch, ready to take his clothes off as soon as I returned, and so I made all my phone calls while walking.

  “Do you think I’m nice?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Seth said. He was waiting aboveground for the L, and I could hear the wind on the other end of the phone.

  “Well, how come?”

  “You just are. You’re polite, you’re considerate—”

  “Do you think I could be a bitch?”

  “Jesus,” Seth said. “Who said that?”

  “Nobody said that. That’s what I’m asking. Do you think anybody could say that?”

  “No,” Seth said, firmly. “Sarah, is this about what happened with us? You know I love you, I’m just not in—”

  “It’s not about us,” I said hastily.

  “Okay.” He was quiet. Chester peed. I stood still, letting him take his time. A streetlight two blocks behind me cast a dim glow through the shadows, and another one flickered three blocks ahead. Everybody always tells you how safe Iowa City is in comparison to wherever you’ve come from, especially if you’re a woman, but the density of night here is unsettling. It occurred to me right then that, if I became a rapist, Iowa City would be a good place to start my career. I said this thought out loud to Seth. He was shocked.

  “Jesus, Sarah, that’s not funny.”

  “I’m a woman,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter, rape isn’t funny.” Seth identified as a staunch feminist. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “It was a joke.”
I wanted to sound as magnificently scornful as Livvy, when she tells people to lighten up, but I just sounded guilty and defensive.

  “You don’t sound like yourself.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It wasn’t funny.”

  “It’s okay.” The tension eased in Seth’s voice—I guess I sounded like myself now. “It’s a stressful time for us both.”

  When I got back to my apartment, Topher was waiting. Even in the dim porch light, his skin was a dull gold, like cut fields after the corn. I let us in and he told me about his day. His mother had sent him a care package, it included new socks. He didn’t need socks, but she never listened. I unbuttoned his shirt, and he shrugged it off eagerly, unzipped his jeans, pulled my shirt off with reverence. Undid my bra, but fumbled a bit—the hook and eye still bewildered him. We fucked gently on the couch, touching each other’s faces. “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered. For a moment I imagined flipping him facedown. What would it be like to pound into someone without having to see their face? “I like you so much,” he whispered, his breath damp on my cheek.

  “I like you too,” I said, politely.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT MONDAY AT I.C. Ugly’s, Livvy brought Topher up. She was telling me about how much she hated teaching history to undergraduates, whose only ability to contextualize the importance of the field was in terms of one’s sexual history. “History is a series of choices,” she lectured me, “but before you know it, your history has condensed into your identity. I tell them: Know where you’re from, know who you’re choosing to be. I tell them: You can be more than your histories, if you know your histories!”

  This jarred me a little. Thinking of my entire history as a series of choices suddenly made me feel as if I had made all the wrong choices. I asked how her kids had reacted when confronted with this wisdom.

  Livvy sighed. “Same way they react to everything. They stare at me with their blank little eyes and they chew on their fingernails and think about who they’re fucking.”

  “My kids mostly write essays about their breakups,” I offered. “So…an equal and ongoing preoccupation with who they’re not fucking.”

  “Two sides of the same coin,” Livvy shrugged. But I could tell she was preparing a segue, and when it came, it was not a gentle one. “Speaking of the children, has Topher fucked anybody before you?”

  “Livvy,” I said sternly, “can we not call him a ‘child’?” We’d gotten the $1 Frosty Mugs, and the thick layer of frost that coated our mugs was leaving rings on the table.

  “Oh my God he’s a virgin,” Livvy said, with a sudden burst of intuition.

  “For your information, he has a girlfriend.”

  “She’s a twenty-year-old Christian from Iowa. Bet you they’re waiting till marriage.”

  “I don’t think millennials wait for anything these days.”

  Livvy snorted. Then: “Do you have concrete proof that he has formed the beast with two backs on any previous occasion?”

  “Livvy please. I’ve never asked him. He’s twenty-two and he’s hard all the time, one has to assume.”

  “You can always tell,” Livvy declared. “You know you can. Is it kind of like slow, sentimental fucking? Does he squeeze your tits like Nerf balls? Has he ever cried?”

  “I don’t want to discuss this,” I said. Topher had cried the first three times, and I’d had to adjust his grip on my breasts until, disconcerted, he’d asked, “Am I doing this bad?” and I’d said, “Maybe just don’t squeeze so hard?” and in the embarrassed silence I’d said, “That’s nice, that feels good,” even though nothing had changed.

  “Yeah, okay,” Livvy said triumphantly. In the silence, she drank from her Frosty Mug, then from mine. Livvy liked to drink from both of our drinks whenever we got the same thing, to make sure they tasted the same. (“That way you know up front if there’s been any funny business.”)

  “Anyway,” I said, “so what if he is a virgin?”

  “Then you are the conduit of his worldly knowledge,” Livvy said. She’d clearly been thinking about this. “You are a cumulative series of choices that he keeps making. You are his history.”

  “Sexual history,” I qualified.

  “History is history,” said Livvy.

  * * *

  —

  I INVITED TOPHER OVER FOR dinner the next night. I wasn’t much of a cook but I cut up and stir-fried some vegetables, and we ate in awkward silence for a few minutes until I poured us both another glass of wine and broached the subject of his sexual history.

  “How’s your girlfriend? Uh…Kelly?”

  Topher eyed me warily over the glass. “Kennedy. She’s good.”

  “How long have you guys been together?”

  Topher blinked a little. I thought I saw him take a quick huff of breath. “Uh, three years?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Wow.” Three years ago I was still living in a tiny studio in Brooklyn with the boyfriend before Seth. His name was Martin and he was an adjunct professor, and he’d cheated on me, just once, with an undergrad. (That was his phrase: “Just once!”) He broke up with me because, in his words, I “couldn’t let it go.” But post-breakup, he spoke very highly of me. When asked, he told people that I was reasonable and that I’d let him keep the couch and also paid his rent for three months after he left, which was true, I did. I hadn’t wanted any kind of confrontation—nice girls behave well, regardless of how they’ve been treated.

  Topher set his wineglass down. “Sarah…I’m glad you asked me about her. I’ve been meaning to tell you something.”

  I blinked at the resolve in his tone. It made him sound strangely adult, this boy who said things like “wow” and “cool” and “dang,” who squeezed my tits like he was turning a doorknob. It made him sound like he had firm adult thoughts and the need to communicate them.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I just want to say that: I have never met anybody like you. And. Whenever I see you, I just. I feel like nobody else has ever. Kennedy and I have never. We were kids, when we started. But you made me a man, and I’ll leave her for you. So.”

  I stared at him, alarmed. His broad ungainly shoulders, the hair on the backs of his large hands. All plaid and gold, eyes as wide and lucid as mason jars of water. I was the entirety of his history.

  “I don’t want you to.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No,” I said. “No no. This isn’t…We’re just. You know? We’re just.”

  “Oh,” Topher said. Disappointment wrote itself across his eyes like a color. “Oh.”

  I wanted to comfort him, I poured him more wine. Topher took a hasty gulp, without taking his eyes off me. “I’m still going to leave her, though.”

  “Okay…” I thought I wanted to comfort him, but now the troubling thought occurred to me: What would it be like to hurt him?

  “Whatever time I have with you,” Topher said, stiff as an undergrad essay, “I will cherish it.”

  A slight nausea rose in my chest. “That’s lovely,” I said.

  “And I know that maybe you just see me as a kid, but I have a much older soul.” Topher blinked. His eyelashes were so pale they almost disappeared. They reminded me of very fine antennae. “And that soul is capable of great love, and that is just what I have wanted to tell you for some time now.”

  Livvy and I went to a poetry reading once at Prairie Lights, where we ran into her ex-girlfriend. This was the one who moved out in the middle of the night with Livvy’s cat in tow, and then left her vaguely threatening voicemails for months. Staring at her ex over a small sea of poets, Livvy had said, in her Poetry-Reading Voice, “The Car of Our Evening Is Crashing over the Cliff of This Encounter.”

  I stared at Topher. The car of our evening did a swan dive.

  “Actually I think I love you,” s
aid Topher.

  The car of our evening descended onto the rocks.

  Through the sound of everything silently shattering, I said: “Thank you.”

  * * *

  —

  LIVVY CAME OVER A FEW nights later, with news and a jar of Nutella. As she ate Nutella out of the jar with a spoon, she informed me that I hadn’t seen her for two days because she’d been sleeping with a gym teacher. The gym teacher was a tall and sandy blonde, in her late forties, “translucent in that Scandinavian way,” and here Livvy took a deep breath, which alerted me to the fact that the best was yet to come. “At first she seemed sort of docile and beaten down by life, so I agreed to go on a date as a favor to her.”

  “OkCupid?” I asked.

  Livvy grinned. “Craigslist.”

  “Oh Livvy, you didn’t!”

  “Oh yes I did. I thought it might be sordid. But then she was very…well, docile…and translucent…so I gave up on all that. We just had a few beers and talked about the weather. So then she invited me back to her place, and I assumed there was going to be a lot of soft kissing and hair-touching, which frankly I don’t have a lot of space for these days, and then.” Livvy sucked a triumphant gob of Nutella off her spoon. “She threw me around.”

  “She threw you around…”

  “The bedroom. She threw me around the bedroom. She was like, Hulk Hogan in the bedroom. She was a freak.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s great?”

  “And here’s the thing. You know I’m the alpha. Like, I’m always the alpha.” Livvy looked at me severely over the jar, and I said yes, I knew that, even though I hadn’t. “Well, when she started throwing me around, I was like, What the fuck is this? So I sort of pushed back. And then she slapped me in the face.” Livvy grinned, lifting her fingers to her face, feeling for the echo. “Nobody’s ever hit me before! My parents didn’t even believe in spanking!”