In mid-January Wogs and I drove back to Bryn Mawr together to begin the new semester. That is, she drove, and I sat, feeling useless, as usual. My injuries didn’t hurt any more, but I felt as if I had a log where my leg was supposed to be. An itchy log. It drove me nuts. I kept a chopstick from Kennebunkport’s one Chinese restaurant to stick down the cast when it itched too badly.
We kept the radio on, since communication between us had been awkward ever since the Judy thing. Judy refused to admit the theft and claimed someone had planted the jewelry in her suitcase. She accused me, and I was afraid Wogs half-believed her.
There was also my niggly fear that Wogs hadn’t told me the full story of the argument between Judy and Alistair. All she would say was that Alistair might indeed not be a full time student at Princeton—Judy had heard he might be a day student or something—but it was only a rumor. Whenever I tried to press her further, she’d start talking about Jack Poirier and how he thought I was “cute.”
Today I suggested she might go back to dating Jack herself, now that she was over the Judy thing.
That made her turn the radio even louder, and the dawning of the Age of Aquarius drowned out any possibility of further communication. Fine with me. I didn’t know why she disliked Alistair so much. After all, she was the one with the larcenous paramour.
But when we stopped for a meal on the New Jersey Turnpike, and we were stuck in silent awkwardness as we waited for our burgers, I decided to launch the conversation we’d been avoiding.
“I’m sorry, Wogs. I like Judy. I never would have done anything like put that jewelry in her suitcase. I hope you know that…”
Wogs didn’t let me finish. “You? I know you didn’t do it Nick. You couldn’t be devious if you tried. It’s my mother. I have this awful feeling she had a hand in it. She had a bee in her bonnet about the damned garnets before we even knew they were missing. Besides, it’s her modus operandi. She’s done stuff like this for years. She’s always stealing dad’s car keys to keep him from drinking and driving. She makes him think he’s too drunk to find them. It works, but it’s mean. My mom is mean, Nicky. And she didn’t like Judy.”
“Gaslighting,” I said, remembering my first meeting with Alistair. “You’re saying she gaslights people. Like in the Ingrid Bergman movie. It’s hiding things and moving stuff around to make people think they’re crazy. I guess a person could do it to make somebody look guilty, too. It’s kind of icky, isn’t it?”
Wogs stared at me for a moment. “That’s exactly what my mom does. Oh, my god, I hope Judy will forgive me.”
But Judy didn’t forgive Wogs. She was still icily silent a week after we got back to campus—which Wogs told me with despair when we met for coffee at the College Inn.
And I had heard nothing from Alistair, which was making me start to despair, too. I’d been hanging around the phones waiting for word from him, night after night. But he didn’t call. Or even leave a message. I knew Princeton was back in session because Lois and Leonard were up to their usual antics in our suite.
I haunted the post office, thinking Alistair might still be in London, but I didn’t get so much as a postcard. The maid on bells started giving me exasperated looks whenever I approached.
After three weeks, I got so desperate I called the forbidden number on Alistair’s business card. But it was “no longer in service.”
I spent sleepless nights, imagining one horrible scenario after another:
1) Alistair’s plane had crashed on the way to London.
2) He’d been run over by one of those huge red buses.
3) The Gorgon had murdered Alistair in a final act of meanness.
Or worse—
4) He had been so disgusted by my unmade-up, battered self when he saw me in the hospital that he’d concocted the story of the summons from the Gorgon as a ruse to escape from me.
5) He’d bolted because I’d ballooned up to a goddam size sixteen.
6) He was furious with me for kissing Jack.
The bells tolled, but not for me.
Actually, I did get one phone call. One night in mid-February I heard somebody near the hall phone call my name, and I crutched frantically down the corridor, half-dressed, to take the call. But it was only my father. He was phoning from the rehab hospital in Western Mass, where he was taking what he called a “sabbatical.” I sensed Aunt Livy’s hand in it, since Dad had obviously talked with her recently. He was doing his twelve steps, and wanted to make amends. I let him deliver his teary apology, but it felt icky—almost worse than when he was drunk. At least he said he’d sent the Portuguese girlfriend packing—she just enabled his drinking, he said.
He was so good at finding people to blame. I only half-listened until he started talking about the reason he’d decided to seek treatment.
“I realized I’d drunk the wine, Nicky: the Chateau Margaux your mother and I were saving to celebrate the Ph.D. she never finished. I promised myself to keep it to celebrate your graduation from college. No matter how drunk I got, I’d never touched those two bottles, but over Christmas, after you left, I got so drunk, I must have polished them off. I couldn’t even find the empties. I suppose Catarina must have tossed them, so I wouldn’t see the results of my behavior…”
Wow. The Chateau Margaux. My thievery had got my dad into rehab. Maybe I was good at deviousness after all.
Another good piece of news I got that week was that Judy had finally forgiven Wogs. And Aunt Livy wrote that the odious Grayson Bell had been dismissed from Conway Industries. Apparently he had a drinking problem.
But still Alistair did not call. I put on the earrings he gave me and never took them off, as if they would somehow connect me to him. I started smoking cigarettes because the Brontës said they’d make me lose weight.
One mopey Saturday night in March, three of the Brontës tried to talk me into going with them to a dance, where Haverford’s own rock band, The Federal Duck, was playing. They hinted there would be an extra man in their party, a freshman like me, and he didn’t dance, so he wouldn’t mind hanging around a girl with a broken leg.
I politely declined, reminding them I already had a boyfriend.
Emily rolled her eyes.
“Nick, it’s time to wake up and smell the Maxwell House.”
Charlotte gave my shoulder a pat.
“Alistair is gone, sweetie. And he wasn’t anybody’s boyfriend. Any more than he was a Princeton man. He was just a weirdo day student at Villanova who would say anything to get laid.”
I felt like they’d hit me.
“Villanova? Alistair goes to Villanova?”
For some reason the first thought that came into my head was how disappointed Uncle Con would be. Then the rest of the information started to sink in.
“What do you mean he’s gone? And that he wasn’t my boyfriend? That’s a terrible thing to say. He spent Christmas with my family, for god’s sake.”
“Because he was trying to get your cousin into bed,” Anne said. “He haunted hockey practice all last fall until Wogs’ friends threatened to tell you.”
Hot tears stung my nose. My eyes blurred.
“You’re the meanest people I’ve ever met!”
I pushed past them and crutched blindly toward the stairs, bumping into a gang of long haired men who had just come in the door, smelling of pot and beer. I tried to move faster than my crutches would allow, which made me lose my balance. I gave a stupid giggle as I avoided falling on my derrière, only to lurch forward. I screamed as the bottom stair came up to meet my face.
The next thing I was aware of was somebody screaming.
“Oh gross. Blood!”
Somebody gave me a paper napkin for the nosebleed and two of the guys pulled me up and draped my arms around their shoulders. They lifted me and somehow carried me outside and across the street to the infirmary. The whole party followed: Three Brontës and their dates and the extra man, whose name was Billy. He wore a Donovan T-shirt and had braces on his teeth and freckles. He kept saying sweet, encouraging things to me and carried my crutches, for which I was grateful. But the whole situation was beyond humiliating.
My nose wasn’t broken, although the nurse bandaged it up and assigned me to a room and gave me a pain pill—“in case of complications.” Mercifully, the pill knocked me out almost immediately.
Wogs and Judy showed up in my infirmary room the next morning. They’d heard about my accident while at a brunch for the supporters of the hockey team, and were dressed in lovely tailored suits—probably both from Wogs’ wardrobe. But as soon as I saw their earrings, I felt a horrible knot in my stomach. They wore identical pairs: gold, with dangling pearls—exactly like mine.
“Alistair gave us each a pair,” Wogs said, all nonchalant. “Mother, too. It was very sweet of him.”
Crying when you have large gauze bandages on your nose makes a soggy mess. When I couldn’t stop the waterworks, Judy went for the nurse. Wogs kept asking me what was wrong.
I tried to make rational thoughts of the jumble in my head—the rush of understanding—and the rage. At that moment, I realized everything the Brontës had told me was true. The earrings provided the final bit of evidence I couldn’t explain away. It was Wogs Alistair wanted. And probably Aunt Livy, too. And Judy, for god’s sake. Anybody but me. I was nobody to him. Not even worth a goodbye.
Finally I got words out, “I was an idiot,” I said. “I thought I was special.”
“Of course you’re special Nick,” Wogs said, giving me a Kumbya hug.
“Just not to Alistair Milbourne” Judy said, her voice booming from the corridor. “Nobody’s special to that damned asshole but Alistair.”
Wogs tried to shut her up, but I interrupted her through my hiccuppy sobs.
“It’s OK. I get it. Thanks for telling me the truth, Judy. I know Wogs is trying to protect me, but Judy is right. Alistair is a damned asshole. And a damned fraud. And a damned day student at Villanova. He never cared about me. He only wanted you, Wogs.”
“No,” Wogs said. “Alistair doesn’t care about people—only houses. He didn’t want you—or me. He wanted Goose Hill.”
Later that afternoon, Billy Bradford—the guy with the braces—showed up. He brought a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. And as we chatted, he drew a bunch of flowers and peace signs on my cast. Even with the braces, his smile was cute. And genuine. Not a hint of deviousness about him. On Wednesday, when I got out of the infirmary, he phoned to ask me to go to hear the Federal Duck on Saturday night.
I said yes.