My Last Innocent Year
Daisy Alpert Florin
For my mother, who taught me about beauty, and my father, who taught me to tell stories
In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later, but perhaps you will see that as we go along.
Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That”
1
IT’S hard to say how I ended up in Zev Neman’s dorm room the night before winter break. It was a bitter night—December in New Hampshire—and on our way back from the library we’d been arguing, this time about whether windchill was a legitimate meteorological phenomenon, as Zev believed, or a ruse cooked up by weather executives to distract us from the threat of global warming.
“Weather executives?” Zev said. He had a light Israeli accent. “Isabel. That’s not even a thing.”
“It is so,” I said, stepping over a pile of dirty snow.
Zev stopped under a streetlight in front of his dorm and crossed his arms; his face was craggy in the shadows. “I never took you for a conspiracy theorist. A left-wing agitator maybe, but conspiracy theorist?” He shook his head.
“But it’s worth considering, right?” I tried to read his expression, but Zev was forever inscrutable. Wind blew my coat open, bit through my jeans to the skin.
“Either way, it’s pretty fucking cold.” He jerked his head. “Want to come in?”
I shrugged and followed him into the squat cinderblock building.
So I guess that’s how I ended up in Zev Neman’s room: he invited me and I didn’t say no.
Zev’s room, a single overlooking the river, was neat. Bed made, no clothes on the floor; it even smelled clean. Nothing like the other boy bedrooms I’d visited in my nearly four years at Wilder College. I attributed the cleanliness to Zev’s two years in the Israeli army defending the Jewish homeland—my homeland, as he liked to remind me. He threw off his parka and flopped on the bed. Books were piled on the only chair so I walked over and studied his bookshelf: economics textbooks, books in Hebrew, a couple of paperback thrillers thick as doorstops. I wanted to skip this part, the part where you wondered when the thing you’d come to a boy’s bedroom to do would start happening, when you could stop making small talk that only revealed all the ways this boy, any boy, would never understand you. To pass beyond language straight into touch.
I picked up a dog-eared copy of The Executioner’s Song. Next to it was a framed picture of a girl standing on a beach wearing a black bikini and mirrored sunglasses.
“Who’s that?”
Zev was tossing a Nerf basketball back and forth between his hands. “My girlfriend, Yael,” he said as if we’d just been speaking about her when in fact he’d never mentioned her, never mentioned having a girlfriend at all.
I picked up the picture. Yael was pretty. Beautiful actually. Long legs, olive skin, sun-kissed amber hair. I wondered if that’s what I might have looked like if my ancestors had made a left instead of a right on their way out of Russia. I was surprised Zev had a girlfriend, but I was more surprised she was so pretty. I glanced over at him stretched out across the bed and realized Yael gave him a currency he hadn’t had before.
“How come you never told me about her?”
“Why?” he asked. “Are you jealous?”
“No,” I said, placing the picture back on the shelf. What I felt wasn’t jealousy, more curiosity about how you became the kind of girl who let someone take your picture in a bathing suit. Or how you could have a girlfriend, a girlfriend like that, and never even mention it. If I had a boyfriend, I was certain I’d never stop talking about him.
Zev was still tossing the basketball between his hands, faster and faster without missing. “Why would I tell you about her?” he said. “Besides, she’s there and I’m here, so.” He aimed the ball at a hoop hanging over the back of his closet door. “Score!”
I looked out the window at the river glistening in the moonlight. It was the sort of thing you took for granted in college: a bedroom with a river view. I couldn’t explain to Zev why I thought it was strange he’d never mentioned Yael without making it sound like I cared, which I didn’t. Or maybe I did. Either way, I thought the whole point of having a girlfriend was so you didn’t have to do this anymore.
This. I was acutely aware of Zev’s presence: the rasp of his breath, the creak of the mattress as he shifted his weight. I ran the charm on my necklace back and forth along the chain and listened for a shift in his breathing or some other signal that he was about to touch me. After a minute or two, I heard him stand up and walk toward me, slow steps across the linoleum floor. I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned and there he was, his mouth hanging open slightly as if he had a stuffy nose. I held my breath as he clumsily leaned in and kissed me. I fell back into the bookshelf and heard Yael’s picture tumble to the floor.
I’m not sure what I thought was going to happen, or what I even wanted to happen. I was mainly relieved to know which way the night was going. I might have been as relieved if Zev had asked me to leave because he had a headache or had to study for a test, even if he had told me to get the fuck out. As I settled into kissing him, feeling his tongue probe the recesses of my mouth in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant, I started thinking about what it would be like to fuck Zev Neman and if I even wanted to. I imagined telling versions of our origin story at future dinner parties. “We met as freshmen but didn’t start dating until senior year,” I would say, turning a glass of merlot thoughtfully around in my hands as Zev stroked my knee under the table. I thought about Yael, facedown on the floor by our feet, and wondered how she might fit into the narrative. Yael, the inconvenient girlfriend whose heart Zev had to break so he could find his way to me. Zev stuck his hand under my shirt. His tongue was still going, the dinner party beginning to fade. If I had any say in the story I would one day tell about myself—and, at twenty-one, I wasn’t sure I did—I didn’t know if this was how I wanted it to begin, or if the ending was something I wanted either.