Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
Though she’s made 6:30 her deadline, it would probably be better – more organic – to leave now, on the cue of an unassuming prime number, to disappear, unburdened, in an artfully sloppy sequence of zippers and patted pockets and I’ll call you later’s. She rehearses her exit again. On the bedroom floor, she can see the pointed toes of her black leather boots sticking out from beneath the floral drizzle of her dress. Balled up on the electric keyboard bench, her jacket is a bristling cat-shaped shadow. Hopefully her phone and keys are still in its pockets. The path to the door is clear. Yes, it would be better. She won’t wait any longer than seventeen more minutes.
Draped across her chest, the sleep-leadened weight of the man’s arm makes each breath feel like a plea being granted. It looks bloodless in the dishwater light of the October dawn. His elbow brushes her nipple every time she exhales and when she inhales, it’s his breath she tastes. She wonders what color the bruise will be where the knob of his wrist hits her collar bone. You have to lick the top of your mouth to say violet.
Through the small barred window above the bed, she can see only the sky. The color of lard, it’s hard to tell if it’s cloudless or all clouds. She hopes it’s cold. The striped sheet beneath her is damp and the tangle of hair at the nape of her neck feels like a freshly pulled weed, whose white roots are still clotted with cold, wet soil. He had turned up the heat the night before, just in case the city was chloroformed by snow overnight. Now, the little room feels like a reptile enclosure, smelling of fermenting fruit and skin.
It had been warm, almost hot, the day before too, when they had met in Union Square for their second date. A week had passed since their first meeting, at a coffee shop near her apartment, where they had bonded over a shared love of classical music and almond croissants. He had told her she was regal-looking – an idea which delighted her. When he’d asked to see her again, she said yes.
The Square had smelled of agar and patchouli and weed. The sun had been in her eyes. People walked slowly, basking in their resurrected summer clothes, shouldering bags of farmer’s market apples, while their children squeezed vegan scones to sand. Men waved CDs in the air like censers and drummers filled the silences between honking horns.
The breathlessness of the place always made her feel like she was walking into a party she was too drunk to enjoy. When she found him in the primary-colored throng, standing near the entrance to the 14th street station, she had gasped in relief. Let’s never do this again, she said as she kissed his cheek, laughing.
The radiator whines. She hates him. She does. A part of her, an aching feeling in her molars, wants to bite him. She can see it clearly: the arm jerking, the spell lifting, and her, running for the bathroom, laces and sleeves streaming behind her, slamming the door with its bright silver lock. But God, they know the same people.
Since she woke up at 5:47 from a sleep she doesn’t remember, she’s been waiting for the arm to stretch, to drift to the pillow, for something like the parting of clouds. It could happen at any moment – not that she’s depending on it per se. She’s resolved to leave at 6:30 no matter what. But then, it doesn’t make sense to wake him, to be forced to see his eyes in the dark, how black they are, to have to kiss him goodbye –
He twitches, just barely, in his sleep. A cinder block falls through her, dropping from the place where skull meets spine. She holds her breath. Dreaming, she thinks. He’s just dreaming. Maybe he has been all night. The friend who introduced them once told her that dreaming is a byproduct of memory consolidation. Garbage, the friend had said, picking a grape from the happy hour cheese plate they were sharing. Or shrapnel, she countered. The friend looked at her, chewing slowly. I don’t know if that’s something you can prove, she said.
When he’s still, she tries to inhale without smelling him. She fails. She breathes too deeply. His elbow brushes her nipple. She hopes there’s something in her that purifies this, that her blood, when it’s oxidized, doesn’t also smell of lemongrass and Old Spice and sour milk. The mutual friend might know. She glances at the clock. 6:18. New York’s strain of silence grows a little louder.
They had walked to a trendy restaurant in the West Village. She had been talking quickly and too much, populating the space between them with stories about other people. The line of couples and chic college students waiting for tables curled around the block, but he had insisted they wait. She didn’t protest – she’s not the type – and it looks bad to be too hungry. The street lights turned on while they stood there, dusting the block in a layer of pollen.
She hadn’t wanted to sleep with him, that was true. It was true that he had annoyed her a little at dinner, that he had consistently failed to punctuate the answers to her questions with a What about you? But there were a lot of things with men that truthfully, when it came down to it, she hadn’t wanted to do, but had done anyway. She’d been fourteen when that boy, so much older, had scowled at her red face and teary eyes and said, you’ll have to do it eventually. And it was true that he had been right in the end.
6:22. The room is brightening, pigment overtaking it. Soon, there will be no darkness left to romanticize the fact of her pale, naked body, foul with sweat. It sickens her, the thought of riding the subway home, looking puffy and plundered and somehow marked. People have a sense for these things.
She keeps thinking that when the arm lifts, when she grabs her dress and boots and jacket, when she takes the subway home, it will be over. That night, this night, will end after she showers and scrubs at her skin with a coarse sponge, watching the hairs he has left on her, curled and black, wash down the drain. It won’t, of course. When she told her mother about the older boy, she’d been pushing butter around a saute pan with a wooden spoon. The kitchen had smelled like salt and dirt and Windex. While she stuttered and tugged at her molding friendship bracelet, her mother dumped a bowl of chopped mushrooms into the belly of the silvering pan, expressionless. When she finished, her mother had sighed and, reaching for the peppermill, said, I guess you think you’re grown up now.
They had both been a little drunk. She remembers the sidewalks glittering as they walked silently back to his apartment. She had wondered, out loud, what made them do that. Second story wrought iron balconies craned their black, empty heads over the sparsely lit street. The dark was crowded and silent. She had needed to pee.
As he unlocked the door, she was already contemplating her route home. It was late. They’d stopped at a bar after dinner. She didn’t want to spend money on a cab, but she felt too unsteady for the subway and walking, of course, was out. The mace her father had bought her when she first moved to the city was currently sitting at the bottom of a dresser drawer, impotent and expired under her collection of leather belts and silk scarves. She resolved to make her choice after she sobered up a little, drank some water, counted her cash. She hadn’t wanted to stay long.
When the mutual friend calls today, with all her gold jewelry and good intentions, she’ll tell her some of this. She’ll focus on the drunkenness, the thing fungible with so many different species of shame and excuse, and compliment the friend’s matchmaking impulse – we’re so good together on paper. She’ll brace herself for the inevitable sigh, the I just don’t know what to tell you. She’ll say she’s sorry and then the friend will relent, will pause, will apologize too.
When they’d gotten to his apartment, he’d asked if he could play something for her. There was a piano in his bedroom, he said. It wasn’t really the kind of thing you say no to, so she hadn’t. Pretending not to see or understand the shoe rack by the door, she’d headed straight for the bathroom. The apartment was very white, accented by unframed Impressionist prints and movie posters, and smelling like the commercial concept of an ocean breeze. A glass box of preserved butterflies hung over the toilet. Her reflection in the toothpaste spittled mirror had a red face and cracked lips. Regal: a word that catches in the back of your throat.
Somewhere in the apartment, he was humming. She listened as she washed her hands. It sounded almost like a lullaby. It was a tune she didn’t know, something slow and complicated. She gripped the sides of the sink with both hands and turned off the faucet, suddenly dizzy. The apartment had become quiet again. Inhaling deeply, she slowly opened the bathroom door.
She could leave now. It’s 6:27, it makes no difference. But, maybe, deep down, she knows her mother was right. Maybe things like this are the cost of admission, another thing she’ll have to do eventually. Maybe the happy, coupled women with the five year plans and the compost bins just don’t talk about this. It was her choice to go home with him. The light on her face, the light now filtering through his bedroom window, incriminates her. Maybe, if she’d just laugh about it, just make a joke with a drink in her hand, all the fear and disgust and guilt and shame would die on the table she tells it around, left scattered among toothpicks and olive pits, wiped away with a dirty rag when the bar closes.
His bedroom was across the hall. She had found him sitting on a foldable bench in front of the electric keyboard. The lights were warm-toned and low. A dense book of sheet music was open above the keyboard, its pages so white it glowed in the weakly lit bedroom. He watched her take in the room from the doorway: the bed against the far wall, the barred window, the row of books on the desk, propped up by a mug that read MATH! IT’S EASY AS PI.
“Sit down,” he said. He gestured to the bed. She took a step into the dark room and her heel made a loud click.
“Sorry,” she whispered and unzipped the boots. The whole scene felt very somber. She walked to the bed with one shoe in each hand, placing them neatly beside her crossed ankles when she sat. It felt like being at the bottom of a river. There was a long pause. His hands hovered over the keys, but did not move. His back looked painfully straight. Then he exhaled and began to play.
Her mind drifted through jewel-toned images. Flowers suspended in water, Ophelia. She does not remember closing her eyes, but she must have. The overheated room, the feeling of the rough cotton duvet under her fingers, the reflection in the mirror – all was forgotten. She fought the urge to let herself sink into the bed. That last round was a bad idea. Then a harsh, dark chord sounded and it was over.
“Did you like it?” She looked at him. His eyes were dark and clear. He looked like he was sitting for a portrait.
“What was it?” she asked.
“‘Pavane for A Dead Princess’,” he said. A long moment passed. He ran a hand through his hair, then, with the precision of a forensic psychologist, said, “it’s not sad.”
“It isn’t meant to be sad,” he added quickly, climbing over the bench, taking the book of sheet music with him. He sat down beside her. Their thighs touched. He held the book open on his lap, and together they stared at the title page. Ravel. Not pronounced like gavel.
“I understand,” she said finally, glancing at the keyboard. He smiled.
“It’s a tribute.” He turned his upper body to fully face her. She found it hard to focus on his eyes. His smile widened and he closed the book.
“We should do this again sometime,” she began. It was the beginning of a goodbye, or was meant to be.
She looks at the piano now, at 6:29 a.m., lying perfectly level with his desk. Despite the duct tape on one of its legs and the dust on its speakers, it sounds better to call it a piano. It had sounded like a piano, a real one, when he played. Between notes, she could have sworn she’d heard the sound of ivory on wood. She’d known only one person, her godfather, who had owned a real piano. He’d never learned to play it. But this, the arm and hand holding her, plays beautifully.
“You’re so pretty,” he had said, pulling gently at the lapels of her leather jacket. His thumb traced her collarbone. His palm had felt like a hole she could fall into.
“I should go,” she said, or had meant to say. It’s hard to remember. The light was muddy. Somehow, the jacket came off. He lifted her chin with a firm hand, conducted it, and held it in place as he leaned forward to kiss her. The book of sheet music fell to the floor, its spine making a loud cracking sound against the hardwood.
“It’s late,” she said into the space between their lips. The door seemed very far away. She did not know what a pavane was. She still doesn’t. He kissed her harder. She had made a rubber-on-pavement sound. He hushed her the way people do in cowboy movies when horses get spooked. One hand stroked her hair. She pushed lightly on his chest.
“I’m tired,” she’d said, leaning forward to grab her boots. His fingers crawled under her dress. They were spread, as if playing a chord, and were light on the flesh of her hip at first, like the legs of a wasp. His fingernails stung when he pulled her back onto the bed.
Through the rest of it, she had been still and quiet. She had thought of the song, of the word pavane, which sounded like an oath, fluttering on blue wings through her mind. The word no had been there, somewhere, lodged in a chamber of her heart maybe, but she had not been able to locate it. It was not the pianist’s fault he hadn’t heard it. Mostly, he had been very gentle.
When it was over, he rolled onto his side and sighed happily. It had lasted less than twenty minutes. Her heart beat backwards.
“You really are lovely,” he had said. She pretended not to hear.
The mattress shifted as he turned on his side to face her. He raised a finger to her face and began to trace it.
“Stay the night,” he whispered. “I want to hold you.” He kissed her shoulder.
Voices passed by on the street above them, the staccato bleating of drunks trying to contain their laughter. It filled her silence. She felt him staring at her, taking in her closed eyes, her stillness, thinking she was regal-looking despite. After a while, he reached over her for the lamp cord. He wrapped an arm around her and pressed his face against the curve of her neck. They laid like that for a long time, side by side, hand in hair, arm over chest. Awake. His heartbeat was steady even as it slowed. She sensed no guilt, no anger, no fear from him. The dark was empty. She felt only the heat of his body and his breath, sour milk and lemongrass, on her neck.
Her mother used to say, the grass is greener where you water it. Her mother would like this man, with his piano and Impressionist prints and shoe rack. The mutual friend, who hasn’t eaten meat in a decade, likes him too. He had been gentle. Gentle, when there are so many that haven’t been, and maybe more in the future who won’t be. She looks at the piano again, then at the floor, past her boots and melted dress, searching for the fallen book of sheet music. On the black hardwood, with its white pages spread, it looks like a flower suspended in water. She blinks, then blinks again. Quickly. She tastes salt. When 6:30 comes, she doesn’t see it. She turns to him and presses her cheek to his chest. The arm lifts for her, then alights again around her shoulders, tighter than it was before. She listens to his heartbeat and tries not to think about its steadiness and the regular, inevitability of seconds. Barely moving her lips, she inhales. I’m sorry, she whispers. I’m sorry. The word has an aftertaste.
Priscilla Hunnewell is an undergraduate at New York University, where she studies English and German literature. She has been awarded a Dean’s Undergraduate Research Fund Grant and was named the 2023 Tory Dent Research Scholar for work on her novel, Gertrud: A Biography.