NORMALLY, HE LOVED the buzz of campus life, but now Eph cherished the quiet. A heavy, muffling snow blanketed Havenport, accentuating the silence. Things had gotten weird, and maybe winter break would give everyone some needed pause. D’Arcy had gone home for a week to New Jersey to spend Christmas with her family, leaving Eph to his own devices. He took advantage of her absence to go out for pizza, which D’Arcy hated. Havenport was famous for pizza. Big yet thin, irregularly shaped, and cooked in coal-fired ovens, the pizzas were a culinary transcendence. Eph loved the layer of tasty black soot on the underside, rumored to be charred cornmeal. His favorite order was white clam, which left his mouth in garlic-infused ecstasy.
Most of his time, though, was spent grading term papers. Forty students times twenty pages each meant eight hundred pages of reading, plus critiques. He was glad to have some time on his hands for this daunting task. As always, Tom Petty helped. Next year Eph might have to get a teaching assistant from the grad school.
Eph considered the pile in front of him. He still liked to mark up physical paper, unlike many of his colleagues who had gone completely digital. The first paper he pulled was titled “Gender and Sexuality in 19th Century Literature.” He groaned, grieving for the next half hour of his life. Without reading a word, he knew that the paper would judge the nineteenth century through the lens of contemporary social standards. The author would be outraged, just outraged. He also knew that moral indignation would outweigh any deficiencies in grammar, syntax, or even logic, at least in the author’s view. Eph noticed more students like this had been slipping through the net of the admissions department of late. Or did they get trained to think this way after they got here?
A few hours in, he came to Lulu Harris’s paper on Alcott and Thoreau: “Louisa May Alcott and the Birth of the Modern Woman.” It wasn’t half-bad. Lulu theorized that Alcott’s unrequited love for Thoreau, her much-older schoolteacher, may have influenced her political sensibilities, which then informed her later work. Alcott never married and became an outspoken feminist and often championed female protagonists, unusual for the era. Lulu made a reasonable if occasionally tenuous case. Overall, not bad for a freshman.
What happened that day in his office was still perplexing. If Eph was being honest, he was flattered, and he found the girl more than a little attractive. Was this why he hadn’t told D’Arcy about the encounter? And even though he knew he shouldn’t, he felt a lingering guilt over the unceremonious way he had dumped Lulu on the floor. But what else could he have done? After the incident in his class, even the suggestion of an inappropriate relationship with a student would have severe repercussions.
He gave the paper a B+, then took a break to eat some Chinese takeout, another culinary transgression only committed in D’Arcy’s absence. He’d suffered more than one lecture on the evils of monosodium glutamate and high-fructose corn syrup.
D’Arcy.
With the distractions of the last few weeks, he felt that he hadn’t paid much attention to her, and he’d been short at times. He missed her.
Christmas Day wasn’t much different from the rest. Eph was raised a Baptist and still associated religion with the Bible-thumping, revival-tent world in which he was raised. He now fully embraced the secular version of Christmas, which in his case meant listening to a Christmas channel on Spotify and giving his sister, Ellie, a call. He didn’t call her as much as he should, he knew, and he hadn’t seen her in over five years. This was the source of some guilt, which he dealt with mostly by not thinking about it. He loved his big sis, but she was still in Ashley, and talking to her was kind of depressing. He got the call over with and Ellie sounded fine, her kids were fine, et cetera. Ellie’s husband had left some years ago and wasn’t in the picture and Eph hadn’t seen his two nephews since they were little. They were playing football now, of course. Big Mike had been under the weather. They said their good-byes.
That out of the way, Eph was free to exchange presents with D’Arcy, which they did via Skype. D’Arcy’s face filled his laptop screen. Eph gave her a yellow cashmere sweater, which she opened on camera and appeared to love. The yellow contrasted beautifully against D’Arcy’s ebony skin. “It’s gorgeous,” she said.
Her present to Eph came in an envelope delivered the day before, which he opened. It contained two tickets to a contemporary art exhibit at the Whitney in Manhattan, Moral Excavations: Deconstructing the New Urban.
“Great!” Eph tried his best to appear enthused.
“It’s in a couple of days. We can meet and go back to Havenport together.”
“It’s perfect.” Eph forced a smile. Just then there was a knock. “Hold on a second, there’s someone at the door.”
“On Christmas? How odd.”
Eph walked to the door—all of four steps in his small apartment—and opened it. Standing there was a man he recognized as a neighbor from down the hall. For some strange reason, especially since it was snowing outside, he had a bicycle. Then Eph noticed a big red bow on the handlebars.
“Hi, I’m Mike from 3C? I actually work at Devon, too. I’m a director in community engagement? Anyway, D’Arcy just texted me and asked me to make this delivery. I’ve had the bike for a couple of weeks.”
Focusing on it now, Eph saw it was a Specialized Allez Sprint, an ultra-high-end road bike. “Holy shit.”
“Anyways, Merry Christmas.” D’Arcy’s little Christmas elf handed the bike to Eph and wandered off.
Eph got on the bike and rolled it in view of his MacBook. “I can’t believe you did this.”
“Now you can get rid of that junker hanging on your wall.” Eph eyed the ten-year-old Schwinn that was rack-mounted on the exposed-brick wall. You served me well.
“But how—”
“Mike? I’ve known him for a while. He comes by Stockbridge now and then. I only found out recently he lived in your building, and that’s when I hatched my little plan. Couldn’t very well gift wrap the darn thing, could I?”
“You might have tried…”
“Oh, shut up.”
Eph lovingly examined the bike’s shift pedals and carbon handlebars. “You are such a little schemer.”
“By the way, you were a very good sport to pretend to like the tickets.”
“But I do!”
“Liar! But I still think it would be fun to meet there on my way back from Montclair.”
“Done. Love you.”
“Love you, too, baby. See you soon, and Merry Christmas.” The little b-bloop noise told Eph that Skype had been disconnected. He sat there, thrilled with his new toy and immediately missing D’Arcy. He also felt a little embarrassed—a sweater didn’t quite match a Specialized Allez. He’d been outgifted. That D’Arcy was from a well-to-do family in the New Jersey suburbs—her father was a senior insurance executive—assuaged his guilt slightly.
Despite the snow, Eph decided to take his bike out for a short spin, at least around the block. Leaving the bow on the handlebars, he threw on some warm clothes, went downstairs, and rode off down the silent street.
The art show at the new branch of the Whitney met Eph’s exceedingly low expectations. One artist made small Lucite cubes filled with garbage purloined right from New York City trash bins. There were cigarette butts and fast-food wrappers and even blobs of moldy food. Eph could hear one nearby aesthete gush about the artist’s “urban truthfulness.” Another artist featured a painting of a rose done entirely in menstrual blood. The flaw, Eph thought, was that blood dried brown, not red, but nobody seemed to be pointing that out. He also wondered what it had to do with the “New Urban.”
“There are no words,” said Eph, sotto voce in case the artist was lurking among the people nearby.
“Art is meant to provoke,” said D’Arcy. “If you have a reaction, even a negative one, then the artist has succeeded.”
“Then this art is really, really good.” That comment earned an elbow jab from D’Arcy.
They wandered among the art world hangers-on until Eph thought he’d been a sufficiently good boyfriend. “Can we leave?”
“Fine, be a closet redneck.”
“There are sometimes limits even to my considerable sophistication.”
That made D’Arcy honk.
The Whitney was at the southern end of the High Line, so they climbed the stairs and headed north. The elevated park, a hit with both the public and critics since its opening in 2009, was crowded with tourists despite the cool weather. After a mile or so, they descended back to the street and found hot chocolate at a Starbucks. D’Arcy, checking her phone, said, “Oh, look. There’s a Camille Thornton retrospective playing at the Film Forum.”
“That is truly fascinating information.” Eph knew where this was going. D’Arcy loved Camille Thornton. She had been the queen of romantic comedies for years but was now aging out of those roles. No doubt Thornton would be mortified to be the subject of a retrospective, but nostalgia cycles had been shortening up in recent years. (Eph thought it had something to do with culture itself speeding up, but he wasn’t a sociologist.)
“The Lost Diary is playing. I love that one! She went to Devon, you know. The drama school.”
Eph didn’t know. “If you love it, I love it.” D’Arcy had probably seen The Lost Diary five or six times, so he lied like any good boyfriend. It beat menstrual art, anyway. Camille Thornton it was.
“We can just make the five o’clock if we call an Uber.”