The Island Dwellers Read online

  “Did you leave?”

  “Hell no I didn’t leave. I got back on that bed and she slapped me around and it made me fucking crazy.” Livvy shook her head at me. “There’s a lot we don’t know about ourselves, Sarah. There’s just a lot we don’t know.”

  “Topher told me he loved me,” I said.

  “Did you say it back?”

  “I said thank you.”

  “That’s the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever heard,” said the girl who got a gym teacher from Craigslist to slap her around. “You’ve gotta cut this off.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Like now, Sarah. Just be nice, you’re always nice. Nicely let him down.”

  “I know,” I said. I was always nice. All of my exes liked me, and I was nice.

  * * *

  —

  TOPHER CAME OVER WITHIN FIFTEEN minutes of my text. He didn’t even try to pretend he’d been busy. I hadn’t thought the plan through, beyond the decision to break it off. I poured us both wine. Topher had once let slip that, until me, his history of drinking had been the kind of potent, low-grade alcohol that flows through undergrad parties. Sometimes the difference in our ages was inescapable and depressing.

  Topher drank his wine like grape juice and darted his eyes at me. I asked him about his day. I didn’t listen to the answer. I worked a sentence fragment around my head. “For your own best interests.” Too formal. “We can still be friends.” Too lame—and I didn’t want to be his friend, we weren’t really friends now. “Really appreciated your time and efforts”—that was so businesslike as to be cruel. The cruelty of it sent a little involuntary tingle of excitement up my spine.

  I thought of Seth breaking up with me. I love you but I’m not in love with you. I thought of Martin. He’d broken up with me like this: I just feel…—and I’d sat in front of him encouragingly, my body language saying Go on, my smile saying You are safe here. Martin had gone on to tell me that he didn’t feel like I trusted him anymore in the aftermath of the undergraduate, and feeling untrusted was restricting his emotional growth. I had told him that I wanted the best for his emotional growth. He’d left and I’d experienced a sudden flush of freedom—Now I can sleep with the windows open! Now I can drink from the carton! But straight on the heels of that freedom had come a crushing sense of failure. I hadn’t been happy with him, but I also hadn’t wanted to fail at being good for somebody’s personal growth.

  Maybe Livvy was wrong. Maybe it would be good for me to shatter somebody.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I began.

  “Me too,” Topher said, and then we stopped and looked at each other. “Go on,” he said.

  “No you go on.”

  He took a breath. “Well. I thought about what you said.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m not going to ask you for anything except what you want to give.” Topher took another breath. “I’m not going to leave Kennedy. And uh…” He searched for the rest of the phrase. He must have memorized it. “Uh…and I think that what is between myself and Kennedy, uh, and what is between you and me, these are very different things and they mean very different…uh…” The machine faltered. “But if you ever changed your mind and you wanted me to leave Kennedy…” Topher stared at me across the expanse of table, helpless as an animal.

  “Topher,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Take your shirt off.”

  Astonishment flashed over his face, and then he stood and pulled his shirt off over his head, one-armed, the way boys of that age do.

  “Topher?”

  “Yeah,” he said again, but this time there was a rising anticipation in his voice.

  “Walk backward into the bedroom.”

  “What are we—?”

  “Now. And undo your belt.”

  His mouth twitched then shut. He undid his belt. One-handed, tall and tippy like a colt, angling backward toward the bedroom on his long inelegant legs, and me, standing now, but not following. Listening to the coldness of my voice.

  “Take your pants off. And close your eyes. If you open them once, we’re done.”

  “Sarah…?”

  “Shut your mouth.”

  He did. When he was lying on the bed, eyes clenched shut, narrow boy-chest rising and falling—I stood and walked toward him. Pulled my underwear off, left the rest of it—skirt, oversize knit sweater, socks. At the first slap, his eyes sprung open, wide blue, wild. Shock erased either anger or fear—the pure enormity of a shock that wrote itself across and through his entire body. I slapped him again, hard enough that my palm stung. I imagined Livvy’s gym teacher spiking a volleyball across the net. The third time I slapped Topher, he bolted off the bed. Stood facing me, cock hard, legs shaky. He didn’t know what country this was anymore. He didn’t know the language. Neither did I, but I’d brought us here. Into the silence I said, “Lie down.” And I don’t know which of us was more taken aback when he did.

  I rode him until I came, and he came just after me, in a full-bodied lunge. After he came, he wanted to talk.

  “Go home,” I said.

  “But can we…?”

  “Go home.”

  And after a moment, puzzled, he did.

  * * *

  —

  I RESOLVED TO BE A bad person only with Topher. Otherwise, I would remain good. This was the way in which I could justify both Topher’s presence in my life, and also my history of unobjectionable blandness. And, for a week, it seemed to work. Topher texted me, and my replies were brusque. He came over, and I didn’t worry about his feelings. He took his clothes off, and I fucked him selfishly, rearranging his hands when he got it all wrong, pushing him around like a rag doll. When he said that he liked me, I just gave him directions: faster, harder, not so hard. After he left, I could be found grading papers, leaving encouraging notes in the margins for my students, and paying my bills on time. It was, for the short time that it lasted in this way, exhilarating.

  But then it all started to slip.

  The badness started surging through me, even when Topher wasn’t there. It welled up like blood from a cut. It leaked. It could not be contained. One morning I found a piece of neighbor’s mail in my mailbox, and instead of leaving it for her, I threw it out. The next day, I dropped a piece of trash on the ground, and didn’t pick it up. And that weekend, standing in line at the co-op, I slipped a pack of vegan Simply Gum into my pocket. I stood there, suddenly paralyzed, amazed at myself, while the cashier rang up my groceries. The gum in my pocket felt like a hand grenade. I couldn’t move or it would detonate. “Have a nice day,” the cashier said. I opened my mouth to chirp “You too!” but no words emerged. I grabbed my paper bag and walked out, having said nothing at all, feeling the cashier’s puzzled gaze briefly flick after me.

  * * *

  —

  “YOU LOOK DIFFERENT,” LIVVY SAID. I.C. Ugly’s, Monday night. In the dimness of the saloon she squinted sharply at me over her beer.

  “No I don’t,” I lied.

  “Yes you do.” She had a bad spring cold, and it made her sound like Brigitte Bardot. “You break up with Topher, or get a MacArthur?”

  “We’re not dating, and no.”

  Livvy kept her stare trained on me for another few seconds, and then moved on. She had her own news: she thought she might be in love with the gym teacher. They were thinking about moving in together.

  “Moving in? You just met her!”

  “My lease is up soon.” Livvy shrugged.

  “In like, three months!”

  “Yeah but I could Airbnb my place for three months, make some cash. Amy’s place is nicer. I’m over there all the time anyway.” Livvy grinned, unzipping her hoodie partway: “I’m wearing her T-shirt right now. This was from high school, can you believe she still fits into the T-shirts she wore in
high school?”

  When we paid the bill, I didn’t tip. Walking home in the dark, I couldn’t tell if I’d forgotten, or just decided not to.

  * * *

  —

  TOPHER MOVED AROUND MY APARTMENT like a dancer or a fish, never still, his eyes always on me. I poured wine into jam jars because I hadn’t washed the long-stemmed wineglasses. I’d started eating off paper plates. Yesterday I’d thrown out a ceramic bowl after eating pasta from it—just tossed it into the dumpster behind the house and listened to it shatter. In the aftermath, I felt both guilty and elated. Topher was talking about his day, his term paper, his bike. He talked as he moved, nervous, restless, hungry. His mother (more socks), his grades (low Bs). He started to talk about his summer plans.

  “Stop talking,” I said. “I don’t care.” In the sudden silence, I realized I’d wanted to say that to him for months. “Strip.”

  He did, immediately. He’d been waiting for this.

  “Get down on your hands and knees.”

  This was new. He hesitated.

  “You heard me.”

  He got down on his hands and knees. I stood, looking at him. The eager box of his body, the tight anticipation in his shoulders.

  “Crawl to the bed.” Now I sounded like a guy in a bad porno. Crawl to the bed. I sounded like a guy in cargo shorts with a mustache and a wifebeater and a giant erection. He crawled toward the bed awkwardly, trying not to rug-burn his knees. His left sock had a hole in the heel.

  “You want this?”

  “Yeah,” Topher said.

  “Say no.”

  He hesitated.

  “Say no. Tell me you don’t want this.”

  “I don’t want this…?”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t want this.”

  “Tell me no. Tell me to stop.”

  “No,” Topher said obediently, his voice falling short of a question. His liberal arts degree was confusing him. Seth would think this was very upsetting, “an eroticization and fetishization of rape culture,” he would say. But Topher was twenty-two, he wouldn’t know what most of those words meant, he just knew that his nerves were jangling like church bells and his cock was stiff as a mast and nobody he knew would approve of this behavior. “No, stop, no. No, stop, no!”

  He chanted this under his breath like a nihilist mantra, and when he came, he breathed No like a Yes, and I felt filthy. He asked if we could talk about our relationship. I told him to wash the dishes if he wanted to stay, but he had to leave when they were clean. So for the next half hour he stood by the sink, naked, his large eyes following me like a chastened Mona Lisa or a Labrador, and he washed jam jars very slowly.

  * * *

  —

  AS I LEANED AGAINST THE strut of the footbridge, watching Chester piss on things, half-listening to Seth tell me about how he’d started doing hot yoga, that new uncontainable badness moved in me. When Seth paused for air, I heard myself say, “Chester’s dead.”

  “What?” Seth sounded smacked flat. Like the air had left his chest in a whoosh, and this was the voice that came after that.

  “Yeah,” I said, watching Chester lower his tiny hindquarters and prepare to take a shit that I had already determined not to collect in a bag and dispose of responsibly. “Yeah, I was calling to tell you that Chester died.”

  “You—? When—?” Seth was flailing. “You just—we’ve been talking for five minutes, you should have told me right away!”

  “I was trying to,” I said, my voice as flat and cool as a steel tray. “You weren’t listening. You were talking about your chakras.”

  In the silence, I listened to Seth’s world unravel.

  “I don’t understand,” said Seth.

  “I don’t know what there is to understand,” I said. “He got hit by a truck. We were walking, and he just got hit by a truck. Squashed.”

  “Squashed?” Seth was shaky. “Did he suffer?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If you were decapitated, would you suffer?”

  Chester finished his shit and as he looked at me, I want to think we felt the same surge of triumph.

  * * *

  —

  LIVVY AND THE GYM TEACHER were having their three-week-o-versary, and she wanted to get the gym teacher a gift. She made me go with her to White Rabbit, and we wandered through the tiny store, picking up knickknacks and putting them back down. When I asked Livvy to explain the concept of a three-week-o-versary, she looked at me as if I was crazy and said, “We’ve been together for three weeks. We’re celebrating that.” But what I actually wanted Livvy to explain was how she had become the sort of person who put words like three and week together with a nonexistent suffix like o-versary. Then again, she would have wanted to know how I could become the sort of person who made a twenty-two-year-old wash jam jars after I’d fucked him, and I didn’t have an answer for that. So we lapsed into a silence punctuated by an occasional “How about this?” and then Livvy would flip over a price tag and shake her head. “Something cheap but not that cheap,” she’d say. Or: “Do you think I’m Melinda Gates?”

  She ended up getting a porcelain rabbit that, if you looked at its ears from another angle, resembled a lady’s face. “It’s a trompe l’oeil,” Livvy said with satisfaction. “It’s never what it seems. Like Amy.” And then: “Should I explain the metaphor to her? Or is that less romantic?”

  “She’s a gym teacher,” I said. “Don’t bother.”

  I’d meant it as a joke, but Livvy stopped on the sidewalk. “That’s mean,” she said, sounding surprised and also upset. “That’s really mean, Sarah.”

  “I was kidding,” I said. I hadn’t imagined she could actually be stung. “It was a joke.”

  “It was mean,” she said, starting to walk again.

  “I’m sorry.” I didn’t sound sorry. I tried harder, “I’m sorry, Liv.”

  “Something’s up with you,” she said, unlocking her bike from the bike rack. My bike was locked to the rail of a bench, right below the PLEASE DO NOT LOCK BIKES HERE sign. “If you’re getting your period, hurry up and bleed already, because you’re becoming a real bitch.”

  * * *

  —

  I ATE A LOT OF takeout that week, and I couldn’t seem to get out of bed. When I finally did, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and discovered I was unable to dredge up a smile. Not a polite one or a friendly one or an appeasing one, not any kind at all. I just looked blank and sunken and a little scared. I decided to cancel class too late to send the students a mass email, so Topher had to leave a note on the classroom door. The department head emailed to tell me that she hoped I felt better but wished I’d contacted everyone earlier, and I found it hard to sound like I even wanted her to believe me when I typed back, “But I didn’t have food poisoning earlier.” Topher, on the other hand, was concerned for me.

  “Do you want me to bring you chicken soup?” he asked, when I picked up the phone on his fourth call. “Or tea, or I don’t know, Advil, do you need Advil?”

  “I’m not hungover,” I said irritably. “I’m sick.”

  A moment and then he asked if I needed Jell-O. No, I said, absolutely not.

  When he arrived at my apartment twenty minutes later, breathless from the bike ride and with a box of powdered Jell-O, I let him in. I’d considered keeping the door locked, pretending to be dead. I’d considered putting on jeans instead of my sad sweatpants. I’d considered answering the door naked. In the end, I just opened it and let him through, pulling away when he tried to kiss me.

  He took in the drawn curtains and the unwashed takeout containers in the sink. “You are sick,” he said, a little amazed, and I wasn’t sure if I was annoyed that he hadn’t believed me before, or that he did now.

  We sat at my kitchen table. I made Jell-O on the stove because I
didn’t have anything better to do. He watched me and whenever I caught him staring at me, I looked away. I found myself asking if he was hungry, if he wanted a sandwich or some coffee. I was so exhausted that it felt like less of an effort to be a good host. Topher seemed disconcerted. He said no thanks, then searched me with his eyes.

  I made coffee anyway, poured myself a cup, and was looking for a clean mug for him when he said my name. The urgency of it made me turn around, and I saw he’d stripped off his shirt, his jeans were undone, and he was awkwardly on his knees.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Don’t punish me,” Topher said.

  I blinked at him. “Please…get up.”

  “Don’t hurt me,” Topher said, in his voice that said Hurt me. “Don’t touch me.” And his voice said Touch me.

  “Topher.” I could feel that great exhaustion welling up in the middle of my chest, making it hard to breathe around. “Come on.”

  “I don’t want this,” he said, standing to pull a leg through his jeans. He off-balanced, had to catch the back of the chair. “Please don’t make me do this.” He pulled the other leg off and sank back onto his haunches. His tighty-whities were beige.

  “Topher.” Oxygen wasn’t finding its way around my body. I squinted at him through a fuzziness. “I can’t right now.”

  “I can’t,” Topher said, bewildered. These weren’t my lines, they were his, and now he was confused. “I can’t, and I don’t want to.” He started backing toward the bedroom, still hands and knees. This time he was getting rug burns, but he didn’t seem to care.

  “Stop,” I said, at the same time he said “Stop.” We blinked at each other.

  “Do it,” he said, frustration clear in his voice. “Why won’t you just do this?”

  “I can’t,” I said again. I’d meant fucking him, making him wash something and then kicking him out, but as I said it, the umbrella of it all got bigger. Suddenly I meant making choices like putting on real pants and taking the trash out and teaching class and telling Seth that Chester was alive, and waking up in the morning and being a human, any kind of human, good or bad or a bewildering mix. It all just seemed impossible.