Read Online The Virgins by Pamela Erens - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Pamela Erens
Tags: Romance
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regular two-year intervals, in the pages of the Auburn Bulletin. I am sure she is a very good mother, and I pray she has a husband who respects and admires her, and who craves her matronly buttocks and breasts. I imagine she does. I always detected that she had the dignity and self-respect to choose someone more full-hearted than me.
Home with the car, Seung carries in the bags of food. Chaz left the previous evening, to pick up his girlfriend in Binghamton and return with her to school. The mood around the table, with its red-checked breakfast cloth, is festive. On the brink of Seung and Aviva’s departure, the four of them find enough to say to each other. The Jungs like bagels as much as any good Jewish family. At the research facility where Mr. Jung works (virology: later he will be one of the first researchers to isolate the new virus called HIV ), people bring in platters of them for birthdays and other celebrations. Seung slices the tomatoes—“Gentile lox,” he says—and makes with them a pretty arrangement. Aviva agrees the tomatoes on top of cream cheese taste good. She and the Jungs banter about the train ride back to Boston. They want to know does she have enough money for the meal car, does she have a good book to read (they have noticed how often she has her nose in a novel; does she also read serious books like the new biography of Nikola Tesla?), what time will the shuttle bus arrive back at Auburn? And are Aviva’s parents pleased with how she is doing in school? There is much to talk about; why didn’t any of them notice that before? Mrs. Jung’s round face looks benevolent, positively maternal. Mr. Jung gently teases the girl: His son must make sure she puts on some weight when she returns to school; she is too skinny! Does she have a portion of meat every day? “Eat kimchi!” he cries when he drops the two young people at the station, waving his arms around. “It will make you strong!”
18
We run into Voss at Penn Station, Lisa and I, on the way back to school. He and his mother live in a big penthouse in the East Eighties. His father died of a heart attack when he was a kid; he doesn’t have siblings. I’ve seen this penthouse all of once. Although I’m supposedly one of Voss’s closest friends, on vacations he is somehow always too busy with his old St. Albans classmates and their fast Spence and Brearley girlfriends to remember to invite me to the booze-and blow-soaked parties he throws. The funny thing is that Voss’s mother is a serious, serious teetotaler. I know this because the one time I was over I saw AA paraphernalia all about the place—the Big Book in both the kitchen and the living room, the Serenity Prayer in the bathroom. Voss explained that his mom had been active in AA for years, was a sponsor to many other members, and had even become something called a general service representative, meaning she went to conferences all over the country. It’s becauseof this regular travel that Voss has an empty apartment in which to host his bacchanalia. You have to ask yourself if it’s really possible his mother doesn’t know. The disarrangement of things even after obsessive cleanups, the leftover fumes . . . Maybe Mrs. V finds some perverse satisfaction in letting her son live out the dissolution she’s sworn off.
Voss looks like he hasn’t slept for a week. Maybe he hasn’t. His old friends are dreaming hangover dreams in their comfy beds, getting ready to return to their day school lives, so he’s suddenly willing to enjoy my inferior conversation and company. It’s the kind of morning that makes me wonder, once again, how it is that Voss thinks himself so superior to me. In middle school I swam with one of the cooler crowds; something about my family and its longevity in our town kept me in its company, even though the girls in the group often opined that I was “so negative.” I expected Auburn to be a simple continuation of that. When it comes down to it, I have a
Home with the car, Seung carries in the bags of food. Chaz left the previous evening, to pick up his girlfriend in Binghamton and return with her to school. The mood around the table, with its red-checked breakfast cloth, is festive. On the brink of Seung and Aviva’s departure, the four of them find enough to say to each other. The Jungs like bagels as much as any good Jewish family. At the research facility where Mr. Jung works (virology: later he will be one of the first researchers to isolate the new virus called HIV ), people bring in platters of them for birthdays and other celebrations. Seung slices the tomatoes—“Gentile lox,” he says—and makes with them a pretty arrangement. Aviva agrees the tomatoes on top of cream cheese taste good. She and the Jungs banter about the train ride back to Boston. They want to know does she have enough money for the meal car, does she have a good book to read (they have noticed how often she has her nose in a novel; does she also read serious books like the new biography of Nikola Tesla?), what time will the shuttle bus arrive back at Auburn? And are Aviva’s parents pleased with how she is doing in school? There is much to talk about; why didn’t any of them notice that before? Mrs. Jung’s round face looks benevolent, positively maternal. Mr. Jung gently teases the girl: His son must make sure she puts on some weight when she returns to school; she is too skinny! Does she have a portion of meat every day? “Eat kimchi!” he cries when he drops the two young people at the station, waving his arms around. “It will make you strong!”
18
We run into Voss at Penn Station, Lisa and I, on the way back to school. He and his mother live in a big penthouse in the East Eighties. His father died of a heart attack when he was a kid; he doesn’t have siblings. I’ve seen this penthouse all of once. Although I’m supposedly one of Voss’s closest friends, on vacations he is somehow always too busy with his old St. Albans classmates and their fast Spence and Brearley girlfriends to remember to invite me to the booze-and blow-soaked parties he throws. The funny thing is that Voss’s mother is a serious, serious teetotaler. I know this because the one time I was over I saw AA paraphernalia all about the place—the Big Book in both the kitchen and the living room, the Serenity Prayer in the bathroom. Voss explained that his mom had been active in AA for years, was a sponsor to many other members, and had even become something called a general service representative, meaning she went to conferences all over the country. It’s becauseof this regular travel that Voss has an empty apartment in which to host his bacchanalia. You have to ask yourself if it’s really possible his mother doesn’t know. The disarrangement of things even after obsessive cleanups, the leftover fumes . . . Maybe Mrs. V finds some perverse satisfaction in letting her son live out the dissolution she’s sworn off.
Voss looks like he hasn’t slept for a week. Maybe he hasn’t. His old friends are dreaming hangover dreams in their comfy beds, getting ready to return to their day school lives, so he’s suddenly willing to enjoy my inferior conversation and company. It’s the kind of morning that makes me wonder, once again, how it is that Voss thinks himself so superior to me. In middle school I swam with one of the cooler crowds; something about my family and its longevity in our town kept me in its company, even though the girls in the group often opined that I was “so negative.” I expected Auburn to be a simple continuation of that. When it comes down to it, I have a
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