Rebecca Schiff - The Bed Moved - Stories

Some of the men carried condoms in their wallets, like it was the fifties. It was not the fifties. One day, it would be the 2050s, and she would have to do this all over again in a retirement community. In between, she’d get married, get widowed. She’d miss him, but would be grateful for all the years they’d had together. Where was she going to meet her future late husband? At work? At work, she’d met an anthropology professor by the copy machines who called her “little girl” in bed. She was thirty-two. But he was even older. He didn’t like what she had been photocopying, a text by a continental theorist whose opinion of history most straight men considered misinformed. Her students handed in papers about the theorist’s work that began, “This story confused me at first.” She didn’t sleep with her students. They were too confused.

She slept with a man who didn’t keep any food in his house. He was a used-book dealer, and there were piles of signed first editions in his oven. Another used-book dealer had hair on the shaft of his penis and a panic attack in her bedroom. Used-book dealers, she decided, were the worst. She liked books, but she didn’t care about the edition. New things were okay with her. Everything got old soon enough anyway.

She slept with younger men. She didn’t really have a choice. Men her own age were busy going bald, acquiring bald offspring. Men her own age had jobs like “head of school,” “program facilitator,” and “lawyer.” She tried to be excited that the men she slept with were younger, but she was just as excited if they were older, or the same age. Her body acted the same no matter who touched her. It had been that way since college, when she’d slept with a man who didn’t take his sweater off during the act. She’d found it a nice break from skin. He had later transferred. Some of the men she slept with had studied abroad, some had taken time off, but all of them had gone. Her body valued education.

Her body valued her body. She took long showers, ate avocados, stretched while chanting in Sanskrit, and slept her way through the phone book. There was no more phone book, but she had names in her phone, first names only: Davids and Adams, Lukes, Sams. She’d get a message at night— What are you doing right now? — and go. What was she doing? Sometimes she didn’t know exactly who was messaging her and it would be a surprise when she got there: which David, which Sam. Some of the buildings had elevators and she enjoyed the anticipation on the ride up, the soreness on the ride down. What happened in between almost didn’t happen. She’d wind up back where she started, walk into the street, and hail a cab.

THERE WERE WAYS to touch Schwartz wrong.

If I pulled too hard, he would say, “Ow! Are you trying to pull my dick off?”

Everyone would agree that was wrong. Schwartz’s dick should not be pulled off.

If I pulled too soft, Schwartz would say nothing, maybe even lose the hardness, and the softness would be my fault. Then Schwartz would say, “Never mind,” and Spiegel would tell him, “Never trust a girl to do what you can do better yourself.”

So why bring us in? To do what you can do, worse?

The place to do it worse was here, in the absence of parents, at Geology Camp. Last year, I had gone to Space. The year before that, International Relations. The nerds stayed the same. In the sunny summer sun, they took measurements, reenacted diplomacy. I was small and eager, though I often forged my data. Some days I skipped Topography, claimed menstrual headaches, took puberty-enhancing naps. I was working toward a certificate in Stratification, which meant you got to handle plastic models of rocks not native to the area, but I had learned you could make yourself invisible to a science teacher making summer money by simply not showing up at the allotted time. After a while, they stopped calling your name, assumed you’d gone home.

There was no science at home, but there were also no boys. I wasn’t about to call my parents from Geology Camp’s one pay phone and demand they come get me. They believed that I was learning and that all learning mattered. It didn’t matter that the moon at Space Camp wasn’t the moon. On the night of our lunar mission, we lay in sleeping bags on a tennis court, ate dehydrated ice cream, walked around in slow motion. The real moon we ignored, or justified as the moon of a distant planet.

The oldest boys with the deepest acne wore the T-shirts of the colleges they planned to be accepted to. They called each other by last names only — Schwartz, Spiegel, Zaveri, Cho. They studied maps like we were actually going somewhere. They made jokes about cleavage, where rocks break apart. They made jokes about hardness, their own, calcite’s. It was unclear what any of them had touched or been touched by. Cho often spoke of “girls from home.” A possibility existed that there were girls from home whose reputations were so besmirched that they were willing to service a member of the National Honor Society, but I couldn’t imagine Cho unzipping for one. We all aspired to orgasm, but were afraid of our GPAs slipping.

Everything counted. We aced Sex Ed. We took up the clarinet, got too good for regular band, and hung out with the band teacher in a special class devoted to jazz. Spiegel brought his trombone to camp, Zaveri his tenor sax. I spent rest hour practicing my trumpet. The two of them could play backup. We’d call it an independent project, rack up extra credit at our respective schools.

Yet I wasn’t sure a camp counted. This was the beginning of a crack between where I then stood and where I would one day kneel. Most of these boys ruined their legs with the wrong sneakers and ankle-gripping socks, but through their basketball shorts I caught an outline of what I could learn. The edge of a Cornell tee brushed against a new pectoral. I liked the way Schwartz said “Feldspar” and the way he held a graphing calculator. It had weight in his hands.

“Can I borrow your calculator, Schwartz?”

He looked confused, then annoyed. Didn’t I have my own calculator? The calculators cost more than we had ever spent on a school supply.

“I lost it and I’m scared to tell my parents.”

Schwartz rolled his eyes. He wasn’t scared of his parents. I shrugged (I was scared of mine), then poked his calf. That seemed low enough on his leg that he could mistake it for a mistake.

“I need this,” he said, catching on, poke-wise. “But there’s an extra in my cabin.”

“During evening activity,” I said, “they don’t take attendance.”

Schwartz took me to his cabin while everyone else was applauding the visiting fossil expert. The cabin smelled like incense, socks, spunk, the woods. Schwartz showed me a Playboy. He was showing himself the Playboy, but I needed to be a witness. The Playboy didn’t come with instructions for what to do with Schwartz after it was done with its job. Schwartz presumably knew.

“Is this alright?” said Schwartz, reaching up my shirt.

“Is this alright?” said Schwartz, reaching up my shorts.

I wasn’t sure why you were supposed to stop them. I wasn’t sure why you had to call them by their last names. It had to do with too many of their first names being the same name.

Schwartz did a couple of things wrong and then it was my turn. I wanted to ask about the skin. Did you pull the skin along the core of hardness, like a sleeve, or did you grab skin and core together as one?

My hand stayed in place. I didn’t ask Schwartz “How?” I wanted to already know. I didn’t want Spiegel to tell Schwartz that Schwartz could have done it better himself. Let Spiegel do it better himself, was my feeling. Schwartz had brought me here.