“But I don’t think that other one could be a real case either. Why would a girl fuck an entire football team? Do you think anyone could be that insecure? Or pathetic?”
The two announcers in Lizzie’s head were gleeful. “He’s nailed her,” one said. “Pathetic and insecure: couldn’t have done better myself.” “Absolutely,” said the other. “Describes her to a T.” Lizzie shook her head, trying to dislodge the voices. She wanted to say something but wasn’t sure what. She just wanted Jack to stop talking.
“It’s not the sex part of it,” he continued, “that’s just sex, but . . . I don’t know, I guess every school has a slut or two. There was a girl in my class that might have done something like that. Everybody felt sorry for her, but it was hard not to laugh at her too. She was so damn desperate. A lot of the guys were happy to sleep with her, but nobody wanted to date her.”
Lizzie started to cry. She reached over and grabbed the magazine, trying to tear it in half. Jack stared at her in confusion. “What’s wrong? What did I say?”
Lizzie ignored him. Trying to tear the magazine in half wasn’t working, so she began pulling out handfuls of pages and ripping them into shreds. When the magazine was no longer intact and she was surrounded by tattered and torn bits of paper, she said through her tears, “First of all, it wasn’t the whole team, just the starters. That’s a huge difference. And I don’t think that I was pathetic at all. I think I was pretty popular. At least before.”
“Wait a second,” Jack said. “This is you? That part is about you? You did that?”
He walked over to his desk and started rearranging the piles of books there. Without turning around to face her, he said, “God, Lizzie, I never would’ve said those things if I’d known it was you. What I said, I know you’re not like that girl at all. Honestly.”
Lizzie got up and went over to him. “Will you hug me?” When his arms were around her, she muttered into his shirt, “I just have one question and then I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Does knowing I did that change the way you feel about me? Are you, like, shocked? Or disgusted?”
“No, of course not,” he assured her (but it didn’t assure her). “I’m just surprised, that’s all. If you don’t want to talk about it, we won’t; but if you ever want to tell me about it, I’m here for you.” He pulled away but kept his hands on her shoulders. “Now, on to the important stuff. When are you going to pay me the ten bucks for the magazine you’ve just destroyed? Should I put it on your tab?”
They both laughed (although the laughter sounded false). Lizzie took a collection of Philip Larkin’s poetry off Jack’s bookshelves and sat down to reread some of her favorites, and Jack sat down at his desk and began making notes on Clarissa. It could have been any evening at all.
But when they got back from a depressing dinner—neither Lizzie nor Jack had much to say—and had sex, Lizzie felt disengaged from her body, as though she were floating above it, watching but not participating in what was going on. She understood that Jack was trying to please her, doing everything he knew she liked, but she wasn’t any longer inside the experience with him. Her mind, racing madly along a circuitous path that always ended up where it began, and then beginning again, kept her so tense that she couldn’t feel Jack’s touches. That feeling—or lack of feeling—was all too familiar to Lizzie. It reeked of the Great Game. It was exactly how she’d felt with Rafe and Lafe and Leo and with Billy Jim and Loren and all the rest of the team.
Lizzie was panicked now by the thought that, even loving Jack, sex with him was reduced to something much less than pleasure and much more like an onerous task. “Stop,” she said.
“What’s the matter?”
“I want to ask you something.”
“Right now? This isn’t such a good time. Maybe we could find a better time to talk.” He started to stroke her breast again.
Lizzie pushed his hand away. “Jack, do you promise that knowing what happened with the football team won’t change anything about us being together? Do you absolutely promise me that?”
Of everything that was terrible about that afternoon and evening, Jack’s hesitation before he answered her was perhaps the hardest for Lizzie to bear. He finally spoke, very slowly, searching for the right words. “No, I don’t think it changes my feelings for you, but I guess I wonder why you did it. It just doesn’t seem like you.”
“For fun,” Lizzie answered shortly. “I did it for fun.”
“But it’s an odd sort of fun, isn’t it? And then what about everything else? Does that mean that something like this”—indicating the rumpled sheets—“isn’t fun? Or what about going to a poetry reading? Or some movie, or to Gilmore’s for breakfast with me? Are those fun too? How do they compare?”
Lizzie bit down hard on the inside of her cheek, forcing herself not to tear up again but perhaps making her words difficult to understand. “It’s too complicated to explain,” she said, “but, yes, of course all those things we do together are fun. What I did, it was a huge mistake.”
“Okay, I can accept that it was a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes, right? Maybe we can just forget that article. I promise that it doesn’t change anything about you and me.”
But it does, Lizzie thought with sadness. Everything is different now.
*?A Confrontation, or Not?*
When Lizzie got back to the dorm later that night, Marla was drinking tea and listening to an old Lyle Lovett tape. She took one look at Lizzie, though, and immediately turned off the music. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Jack found out about the Great Game,” Lizzie said, giving in to the tears she didn’t cry during her last discussion with Jack. “And now he despises me.”
“He said that to you? Really? That he despises you? That doesn’t sound like the Jack I don’t really know.”
“Well, no,” Lizzie admitted. “He didn’t exactly say that, but it’s how he acted after he found out. Like I was all of a sudden not who he thought I was.”
“Go back—I still don’t understand how he found out about it.”
“It’s my parents—it’s always my parents who ruin anything good that happens to me.”
“They told Jack?”
“No, of course not, I’d never let them meet Jack. He read an article they wrote in Psychology Today that was partly about that and sort of put two and two together and came up with me. But it was really my fault.”
“Why?”
“I told him the truth, because I was so upset by something he said. It’s my fault,” Lizzie said gloomily. “If I learned anything from my parents, it’s that I can never do anything right.”
Those ever-present voices in her head, always alert to any weakness she showed, agreed with one another that it was about time to take her out of the game, maybe for good. “She’s a loser, pure and simple,” one of them said. “Hardly pure,” the other replied. “But definitely simple.” They mimicked cheerleaders and chanted, “Loser, loser, loser, loser.”
Lizzie cried harder.