Rutting Season Read online

  She stopped at the center of the bridge, where the circle of light from the last lamppost faded out. Behind her, she heard Alexa stop as well. There was the pop of a match being lit and then the greedy noise of the flame biting into the tobacco. She turned to see Alexa flick the match over the railing, a spark swallowed by darkness.

  “Is that it?” Alexa said, nodding toward the lights of the boathouse.

  “Yeah,” she said. The sounds of the dance were clearly audible now: the thud-thud of the bass; high, ragged snatches of shouting. It was a women’s dance, put on by the college women’s center. She couldn’t imagine now why she’d ever thought of going, let alone inviting Alexa.

  “Want one?” Alexa said, holding out her pack of cigarettes.

  “No thanks. I don’t smoke.”

  “Smart.”

  Leila leaned against the railing for support, overcome by the odd weakness that had dogged her all evening, and arranged her arms into what she hoped was a relaxed position. At the restaurant she and Alexa had talked easily enough, but as soon as they’d stepped out into the darkness, they’d fallen silent, and now it seemed that nothing could be said, nothing except what didn’t matter. She looked down at Alexa’s shoes, which were thick-soled and bulky, with a stripe of fake leopard. They were the first thing she’d noticed when she came through the restaurant door: those odd shoes and the too-big leather jacket and the strange way Alexa was leaning against the hostess station, as though she’d been waiting for hours and all hope had left her. And yet when Alexa had looked up, she’d noticed her startling, gray-green eyes and then, walking to the table, her slim figure weaving ahead through the chairs. There was some quality attached to her, a kind of heat or light, as though her body left an afterimage in the air.

  Alexa took a drag and exhaled. “So you’re really not a smoker.”

  She shook her head.

  “Smart,” Alexa said again. She stood, curved-shouldered, in the center of the bridge, cradling the elbow of her smoking arm in her other hand.

  “I just never wanted to for some reason,” Leila said. “I don’t know.”

  “Very smart.” Alexa took another drag.

  She waited for Alexa to say something more, but she didn’t; she had turned her back and was staring off in the direction of the boathouse. The water falling over the dam was making the same series of sounds over and over, like a skip on a record. That was all, then, she thought, nothing would happen. Still, something in her couldn’t bear to give up. She thought of Alexa at dinner, stretching her hand out to show the tiny bump in the hollow between her fingers. The doctor had said it was nothing, just a cyst, but Alexa seemed to take no comfort in that.

  “Before it was in my neck,” she said in a low voice, leaning across the table. “It’s traveling all over my goddamn body!”

  Leila looked into Alexa’s panicked eyes and then, for some reason, burst out laughing.

  “You’re laughing? I’ve got a goddamn tumor traveling around my body and you’re laughing?”

  “It’s a cyst!” she managed to say.

  “Yeah, but it could turn into cancer. I could still die.” The start of a smile bent one corner of Alexa’s mouth.

  “Yeah, and you could get hit by a bus, too,” she said, laughing harder. “Right? Splat, the end.”

  With Alexa she had always had these unexpected moments of strength. They had met when Alexa came to campus to teach a video class during Leila’s last semester. On the first day of spring shopping week, Alexa had stood in front of the classroom, her hands on her hips, barking out the class requirements. She was short and small-boned, but the way she stood, with her feet planted and her weight back, gave an impression of power. Students were sitting on the radiators and standing up inside the open doorway, mostly lesbians and women’s studies majors. A video of Alexa’s had been shown a few days before and word had gotten out. Leila was careful not to ask herself what she was doing there.

  “This is not a course for people who just want to screw around a little,” Alexa said, running her light, impassive eyes over the crowd. “If you’re not serious, you don’t belong here.”

  A girl with short purple hair raised her hand.

  “Yes.”

  “What if you want to screw around a lot?”

  A few people laughed but Alexa’s face remained expressionless. “That’s your prerogative,” she said. “Just don’t do it in here. Next?”

  In the end, there had to be a lottery. The only reason Leila made it in was because seniors were given priority. She sat in the back and avoided asking questions. She had less experience than most of the other students and didn’t want to draw attention to herself. Also, she had a vague sense that Alexa might turn out to be an adversary. There were certain incidents that seemed to confirm this: an angry look when she was late to class one day; a time when Alexa called on her (“You, in the back”) and then waited, arms crossed, while she stumbled through her answer.

  Then one afternoon Leila had come in after hours to return a camera and found Alexa kicking furiously at a tangle of tripods on the floor.

  Alexa looked up. Her face had a disarranged look, like a hastily made bed.

  “I was just bringing the camera—”

  “Sure, okay. Over there.” Alexa jerked her chin toward the table at the end of the room.

  “Thanks.” Leila crossed the room as quickly as she could. She put the camera on the table and was turning to go when she realized she’d forgotten to sign the clipboard. Flushing, she scribbled the time and date under the “return” column and signed her name. When she looked up, she saw that Alexa wasn’t even watching, she was leaning against the wall with one arm wrapped around herself and a hand over her eyes.

  Leila hesitated. Whatever was going on had nothing to do with her, and yet the sight of Alexa’s small, hurt back seemed to pierce her. She went over and knelt down before the pile of tripods and began to gently tug the legs free. It wasn’t such a mess, really; it only took a few minutes. Alexa was still leaning against the wall, her face hidden, when Leila left.

  A week or so later, she came late to class again, sweating from her run across the campus. Feeling Alexa’s eyes on her as she pulled the door shut, she steeled herself. But when she glanced up, she saw that it wasn’t a look of reproof; it was more like the kind of long, absorbed gaze you might cast over a lake.

  She sat down quickly, confused. It couldn’t be, she thought, but she was suddenly conscious of the sweep of her own body—her neck, the scoop of bare skin above her breasts. Alexa was writing a list of required shots on the board. Leila opened her notebook and wrote the date on the top of the first empty page. Bird chatter and the cold smell of damp earth were coming through the window. Spring. With careful strokes, she began to copy the list of shots into her notebook.

  That had been the beginning of a season colored and bent by longing. There were little interactions flushed with promise—a moment rigging up cables together, a joke that made Alexa laugh; once, near the end of the semester, an awkward excursion for coffee. But they hadn’t said anything; whatever it was between them, if there was anything, remained unspoken, and Alexa had gone back to New York. It had ended the way such things always ended for Leila, without ever really happening.

  Suddenly, there was a surge of music from the boathouse. “You’re crazy!” someone yelled. “You’re all crazy!” Laughter and the thunk of the old wooden door shutting. They watched a figure stumble toward the bridge. It was a girl, dressed in the jeans and plaid shirt that were the unofficial uniform of the lesbians on campus.

  Alexa stepped back and leaned against the railing next to her. “Incoming,” she said softly.

  The girl looked at them as she went by, her upturned face moony in the dim light. “They’rrrrall crazzy,” she breathed at them.

  Neither of them answered. They were not being malicious, it was just that she had nothing to do with them or with the feeling that had suddenly sprung up between them. A kind of symmet
ry, it felt like, an invisible lining up, involuntary as the movement of the needle hands on a compass.

  The girl put her head down and charged unsteadily toward the other end of the bridge. They watched her disappear into the shadow of the woods.

  “She must’ve had some fun,” Alexa said.

  “Mmmm,” Leila said. For a moment they stayed there, parallel.

  Then Alexa threw her cigarette away and turned to face her. “So, what do you say—should we go to this thing?” There was something guarded in her eyes, a flatness that was almost hostile.

  Leila looked away, as one might with a nervous dog. “I think we should do whatever we want,” she said carefully. “I mean, what the hell.” She glanced back. “Tomorrow we could get hit by a bus.”

  Alexa laughed. “True.”

  They both looked off, at the murky darkness that was the pond.

  “What do you want?” Alexa said, very close.

  She looked into Alexa’s eyes looking into hers. There was a humming in her ears. “I don’t know,” she mumbled. But she did, of course; she had known all along.

  “Leila,” Alexa whispered, and the sound of her name was like a cord pulled through the center of her. Everything that was wrong, all that was blackened and torn and shameful, fell away.

  III

  “Have you seen it?” Mara asked.

  “No,” Leila said. They were sitting in a grassy area beside the pond in the bright spring sunlight, painting their toenails. Leila and Susan were visiting; Mara still lived there, in a spooky old Victorian a few blocks away. The nail polish had been Mara’s idea. It was the kind of impulse they liked to indulge on these rare weekends together. The frivolity, the sheer purposelessness of it gave them a taste of that time before plans and obligations had hemmed them in—those lost, sunny afternoons when the hours arced out, suspended, like a high-flung ball.

  “You really should, Leila,” Susan said, examining her from under the visor of her upheld hand. “I think it’s the best movie I’ve seen all year.”

  “I’d love to,” Leila said.

  Susan looked back down at her toes and Leila felt a trace of relief. That was something she had learned from them, that tone of affirmation. They spoke like that, they said “I’d love to” or “She’s amazing” or “This is delicious.” None of it was false, they meant what they said; it was a bias they had, an instinct for the positive, just as she, in the past, had leaned toward the negative. So now she had learned. She said, “I’d love to”; she kept her foot in the ring. Although the truth was, she couldn’t care less if she saw that movie; she couldn’t care less if she saw any movie, ever again.

  She looked out across the glassy surface of the pond. On the banks here and there people were sunning, their skin showing greenish white where they had rolled back their clothes. Spring had come again, with its flowers and bugs, its painful, vivid beauty. She seemed to be noticing it with a peculiar intensity this time: the shiny, unfurling leaves; the birds frantically nesting. She felt the miracle of it and at the same time the wasting to come (a crow would steal the eggs; the leaves would dull and wither), so that even an ordinary sight, like the bright green pollen lying squandered on the pond, cut her to the quick.

  Susan tipped her foot to see the polish sparkle. “Nice color!” she said in a fake Brooklyn accent. “What’s it called?”

  “Love Her Madly,” Mara said, “and let me tell you, this shit is hot.”

  They laughed. Leila smiled, so as not to seem left out. They had come to comfort her, ditching their men for the holiday weekend because they knew she was in trouble. She could feel their concern, the push and tug of it, like an invisible net around her, and was grateful. But it was not a net that could hold, she knew. Nothing could hold a person once she began to fall, nothing external, anyway.

  They had been coming to this pond ever since they graduated, she and Mara and Susan, because it was green and nearby, because they had come the year before. For a long time these visits had found them more or less unchanged. A lover would have vanished or a new job been taken, but they were still safely the same, still in that long, slow glide of young adulthood. Now it was finally ending. There had been signs for a while: wrinkles setting in, a gray hair or two, the looming biological milestone of thirty-five. But now they really had turned the corner. Susan was pregnant, Mara was getting married, and Leila and Alexa were splitting up.

  She pictured the kitchen at home as it must look now, the cupboards pulled open and pillaged, the stacks of boxes labeled in Alexa’s neat hand. She and Alexa would not own a farm in France or travel to Mongolia. They would not adopt a child or raise their own goats or any of the other things they had dreamed up over the years; they would not be together.

  “You could use a justice of the peace,” Susan was saying.

  “That’s true,” Mara said. “I wonder about Derek’s mom, though, you know? You should put on a second coat, by the way,” she added, squinting at Susan’s toes.

  “Really? Okay. Why his mom? Is she religious?”

  “Well, yes and no—actually, I can’t say that. I don’t really know. I just get the feeling that, you know, she wouldn’t like it.”

  “Yeah, but Mar, this is your wedding, not hers.”

  “True,” Mara said.

  They were silent and Leila heard the sound of the water spilling over the dam at the end of the pond. Ruthless, it seemed to her, excessive, like someone dumping pitcher after pitcher of water onto the ground. Better than listening to them blather about weddings, she thought, and then: How awful. She was awful, with her dry, bitter seed of a heart.

  “What about your dress?” Susan said.

  “Well, that’s another issue.” Mara lifted her small, pretty foot and picked something off one of the nails.

  Leila looked down at her own feet. The skin on the heels was a strange, translucent yellow. She had begun to be haunted again by the specter of her body, its disturbing particularity. That sense of grace, the secret loveliness she had found in the gray expanse of Alexa’s eyes had been snuffed out. Alexa no longer loved her; she had fallen in love with someone else.

  A shadow fell over her. It was a man in a plaid shirt, bending low to hold the hand of a little girl clad in nothing but a diaper; her small, bowed legs moved with stubborn purpose toward the water. The man shrugged his shoulders in their direction as he walked, crablike, in her wake.

  “She looks like she knows what she wants,” Susan called out.

  “You better believe it,” he said. He was a young man, although balding; younger than they were, maybe.

  Susan turned to Mara. “So cute!” she said.

  “Totally.” They watched the little girl with a pleased, almost proprietary air.

  “So you think sleeveless is okay?” Mara asked after a minute.

  “Absolutely! I mean, why not?” Susan said. “Show off those arms.”

  “Good,” she sighed.

  They would do that, Susan and Mara, they would go on to live in the happy chaos of marriage and children, that sunny carnival that went on and on—daycare and homework and college and grandchildren—until you were safe in the grave. One flesh, Leila thought. It really was like that. She and Alexa had slept back to back with the soles of their feet pressed together. Even after they fought, even when they were furious they had done that, their feet traveling to find each other under the cover of sleep.

  She gazed, stunned, at the suddenly desolate landscape. A cloud had blotted out the sun, the pond had turned dull as lead. Mara’s dress, Susan’s baby, the green buds beading the bushes—what did it matter? The future stretched out before her like a desert. Even the afternoon, even the next ten minutes and the ten that would follow, seemed as merciless, as measured as a punishment. She would have to sit there while Mara and Susan finished their nails; then there would be the walk back, slow, to accommodate Susan, then the dinner to wait through, and the whole evening and night and morning before she could get in her car and go. And then?<
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  Abruptly, she stood.

  “You okay?” Mara said.

  Leila gestured vaguely toward the open grass, not looking at them. “Walk,” she muttered.

  “Okay,” Mara said gently.

  She stumbled off with their eyes on her back. Ridiculous to take off like that, rude, even, but she couldn’t sit there another second. She walked twenty paces, unseeing, and was brought up short by the cement edge of the dam. Anguish clutched her, hard as a fist.

  Then she saw: It was Alexa’s feet—her feet and eyes and laugh and soft, freckled belly—all of it, everything she would never have again. Her eyes filled with tears. She sat down by the dam and waited, rabbit-hunched, for the pain to ebb.

  Years ago, when she was in college, she had planned to kill herself in this pond. But at the last moment things had come up—she’d overslept; a girl from the next hall invited her sledding; she’d seen a cardinal, red as a heart, in the leafless tangle of a bush. This and that small thing had happened—time had passed—and the terrible gap had closed.

  She had thought of it again in April, when she finally understood that Alexa was leaving. They were sitting on the kitchen floor with their backs against the cabinets, like squatters in an abandoned house, although the table and chairs were right in front of them. They had decided already or at least the words had been spoken—hard, definite words that she had uttered and understood with one clear corner of her brain.

  “What are you going to do?” Alexa had asked. “Will you get a roommate?”

  She was sitting next to Leila and her eyes were the same eyes, the hair on her arms the same hair that Leila had held the rights to for so many years, yet to touch her now would have been a gross violation, an ugliness.

  I could kill myself, Leila had thought.

  But she wasn’t going to; she knew that, although she couldn’t have said why, what was different this time. She watched a swallow dip low over the water and then, with a flick of its wings, sweep sideways. She had been wrong, all those years ago, about the gap in the ice. It hadn’t been in the pond, it had been on the other side of the dam, where the water rushed onto the rocks and away. She’d noticed it a few days later when she was out for a jog.