Seven o’clock came and went. Mrs. Friedlin refused to leave until she heard from Max, while Mr. Friedlin insisted on forging ahead without him, partly on principle, but mainly as a courtesy to Ted, Sang, and me. He scoffed at our assurances that we’d be just as happy ordering a couple of pizzas.
“Forget pizza,” he said. “You can have pizza anytime you want. Tonight we’re going to eat some real food.”
“Maybe we should wait a few more minutes,” Sang suggested, glancing at Mrs. Friedlin for support.
“Go ahead,” she told us, breaking the stalemate with a wan smile of encouragement. I got the feeling she’d be just as happy to do her worrying in private. “There’s no sense ruining everyone’s night. When Max gets back, we’ll catch up with you at the restaurant.”
It was a little weird to just leave her there and head out into the night, but it was also a relief to finally get moving. Mr. Friedlin must have felt it too. As soon as we stepped outside, he closed his eyes and inhaled the New Haven damp like a man who had just been released from prison.
I had to tap him on the shoulder to get him to make way for Trip, who was transporting a half keg of beer up the slate path on a hand truck and grinning with badly concealed smugness, the way people often did when in possession of large quantities of alcohol. Ted held open the door for him.
“Party tonight,” Trip announced, executing a smooth half turn and easing the wheels of the hand truck over the rise and into the Entryway. The keg was scuffed and dented, almost like someone had gone after it width a hammer. “After the jamboree.”
“Where’s the jamboree?” Mr. Friedlin inquired.
Trip didn’t even glance behind him as he began his nimble backwards ascent, jolting the hand truck over each successive step with an efficiency that verged on grace. If not for the tuxedo, you might have mistaken him for a professional deliveryman.
“Stiles,” he said, pausing on the landing to adjust his grip. “It’s the Spring Jailbreak. Us, the B.D.’s, and the S.O.B.’s.” He shook his head, paying silent tribute to the firepower of the groups in question. A distant, almost wistful look passed across his good-natured mannequin face, and I couldn’t quite suppress a stitch of jealousy, a resentful suspicion that, for all of his shortcomings, Trip was a lucky guy, one of those people who’d found his place in the world. As if to confirm this hypothesis, he smiled with peculiar intensity, like a kid who’d eaten too much cake.
“It’s gonna be so great,” he told us.
After a cursory glance at the leather-bound list, Mr. Friedlin tossed off the name of a forty-dollar bottle of red wine the way my own father might have ordered a Big Mac, without hesitation, embarrassment, or the slightest trace of self-importance. Our waitress accepted his order with a nod of approval that was somehow both respectful and flirtatious at the same time. She was around the same age as Sang, Ted, and me, and probably a student herself—maybe a part-timer at a state school or community college—but she barely deigned to acknowledge our presence at the table. The way she acted, Howard Friedlin might have been sitting there all by himself, with three empty chairs for company. I didn’t bother to resent her for this because I saw exactly what she did—Mr. Friedlin’s quiet authority, the top-dog aura that seemed to emanate from the fabric of his expensive suit. I wasn’t sure which had come first, his money or his confidence, but I took note of how impressive the combination could be in a setting like this, the solemn, high-ceilinged dining room with its starchy tablecloths and tasteful chandeliers, the soft buzz of conversation hovering in the background like the hum of insects on a
summer night. I couldn’t help thinking of my own parents, who insisted on taking me to a Roy Rogers on Whalley Avenue whenever they visited New Haven, their discomfort at being surrounded by black people temporarily offset by their horror at the prices charged by restaurants closer to campus. I wasn’t embarrassed by their preferences—I knew how tight money was for us, what a ridiculous luxury it was for me to be attending a school like Yale, even with the generous financial aid available in those days—but it saddened me to think that they could sip the same wine I was sipping just then and not taste anything but a half day’s work down the drain.
Mr. Friedlin kept our glasses full and asked a lot of questions. An unforeseeable mellowness had taken hold of him as soon as we entered the restaurant, and I thought I understood why he’d been so adamant about coming here, despite the peculiar circumstances. This was his element. Inside it, his hard edges softened; he seemed to genuinely want to know us better, not because we were his son’s roommates, but simply because we were there, sharing his meal, and meals in restaurants like that meant something to him.
I’m not sure what it was—the wine, the atmosphere, the fact that Mrs. Friedlin wasn’t there—but we answered as though he were one of us, not a parent but a visitor from another school, someone’s brother or cousin or hometown friend. With no apparent effort, he got Sang talking about Eve, his girlfriend from sophomore year, a topic he generally preferred to avoid. After their unexpected break-up, Sang had spent the whole fall semester in a state of reckless bewilderment and was only now beginning to regain his mental equilibrium.
“You should have seen the letters she sent me last summer.” He shook his head, a fresh note of grievance entering his voice. He had referred to their correspondence a few times in my presence, but had never gone too far in the way of details. “I mean, we had a perfectly normal sex life together. Maybe calmer than normal, I don’t know. But something happened to her over vacation. She was working as a counselor at this camp for disturbed kids way out in the woods, and I guess she got lonely. At first there’d just be this
quick p.s., you know, one line saying that she missed me or whatever, maybe mentioning something we’d done before, the kind of stuff everybody does. And then it started getting more elaborate, even a little kinky. I mean, it wasn’t porno or anything. It was just Eve talking. She was kind of shy about it, almost apologetic.”
Like the waitress, Sang kept his eyes locked on Mr. Friedlin as he talked, almost as if Ted and I weren’t there, but it was uncomfortable nonetheless. Eve was a friend of mine, one of the smartest, sweetest people I knew. I had introduced her to Sang and still had lunch with her every once in a while. She had lovely red hair and big breasts that she was really self-conscious about and tried to hide under layers of baggy clothing. I didn’t want to find myself across from her in the dining hall, trying to hold up my end of a conversation about Henry James or the Russian anarchists while secretly wondering what she looked like in nothing but galoshes and a firehat.
“So there I am,” he continued, “working in my mother’s lab at UC Irvine, and I can barely function. All these phrases of hers just keep floating through my head. I want to do this to you. I want you to do that to me. I want so-and-so to join us. You can imagine the state I was in when I got back here in September. And then she goes and breaks up with me before I’ve even unpacked my suitcase.”
Ted had spent the past few minutes fiddling morosely with the date setting on his wristwatch, but now he snapped out of his funk.
“Who’d she want to join you?” he asked, making a transparent effort not to seem too interested. “Just tell me if it was a guy or a girl.”
Sang ignored him. “The thing that killed me was that she wouldn’t give a reason. I kept demanding an explanation, and she kept insisting that she didn’t have to give one. That became the whole focus of the break-up. Whether she had to give me a reason or not. I still don’t know why she dumped me.”
“Was it someone we know?” Ted had abandoned his previous pose of casual curiosity and was trying his luck with a more wheedling tone. “You can’t just leave us hanging like that.”
“It’s none of your business,” Sang told him.
“Please? Just give me the initials.”
“Forget it.”
Ted leaned forward, hands clasped together as if in prayer.
“Pretty please?”
Sang stared at him for a few seconds. Then he nodded wearily, as if Ted had worn him down and he saw no choice but to cooperate.
“Okay,” he sighed. “Y. M.”
“Y. M.?” Ted’s mouth dropped open and his brow furrowed with concentration. He looked like the poster boy for perplexity. “I don’t know any Y. M.”
“Sure you do,” said Sang.
“I do?” Ted checked in with me. “Help me out here, Danny.”
“Sorry,” I told him. “I’m stumped too.”
Ted turned back to Sang, shrugging in defeat. The mystery seemed to be taking a toll on him.
“Come on,” he groaned. “Have a heart.”
“Y. M.,” Sang repeated, as if the solution were obvious to anyone with a brain. He spoke slowly, as if Ted’s powers of comprehension were impaired. “Your … Mother.”
Ted accepted the punch line without protest, almost as if he’d been expecting it, squinting doubtfully in an effort to visualize the proposed encounter. I understood the difficulty. His mother was an erstwhile field hockey star at Smith, a large, no-nonsense woman who dressed exclusively in the kind of clothes you saw advertised in the L.L. Bean catalog and couldn’t believe that anyone would actually wear—ankle-length tartan skirts, knee socks, tassled moccasins, sweaters with busy snowflake patterns or reindeer motifs, white turtlenecks that covered every millimeter of her neck with lots of fabric to spare. She was the kind of woman you could imagine walking through the streets of revolutionary Iran in her usual attire and not upsetting the ayatollahs.
“You could try,” Ted speculated. “But you’d have to get her pretty drunk.”
Everyone laughed at that, even Mr. Friedlin, who expressed his amusement by closing his eyes, tilting back his head, and
opening his mouth as far as it could go, like a baby bird waiting for a worm. For some reason the sight of his face contorted like that made me flash suddenly on his wife, alone in our common room. Was she crying? Reading a book? Had she taken her shoes off? If I were her son, I thought, I wouldn’t have disappeared on her the way Max had. If I were her husband, I wouldn’t have ditched her in favor of dinner with a bunch of college kids. when his spasm of mirth had passed, Mr. Friedlin shifted his attention to Ted.
“What about you?” he asked. “How’s your girlfriend treating you?”
Even Ted surprised me that night. Until then, I’d never heard him discuss his relationship with Nancy in anything but the most contented terms.
“Girlfriend?” he huffed. “Wife’s more like it.”
“Is that good or bad?” Mr. Friedlin inquired.
“It used to be good. But now it feels like the bed’s too small.”
Mr. Friedlin scratched his chin like a therapist.
“So why don’t you get a bigger bed?”
“I meant it metaphorically,” Ted explained.
“Perhaps a smaller girl, then?” Mr. Friedlin suggested.
Ted acknowledged the quip with a sad smile.
“We even use the same toothbrush,” he confessed.
“Now that’s disgusting.” Sang gave a quick shudder, as if this practice were too distressing even to contemplate.
When Mr. Friedlin turned to me, I was ready. I wanted to tell him about Polly, how just then—that very night, in fact—I felt poised, for the first time in my life, to have a real relationship: not just sex but friendship, too, maybe even love. I’d had some flings over the past few years, but now I saw that they had all just been practice, something to pass the time until someone like Polly came along, a girl I could share all of myself with, not just carefully selected fragments. I was going to tell him how surprised I was to suddenly find myself standing in the doorway of what felt like
adulthood with no qualms whatsoever about finally stepping in, but he had something else on his mind.
“Wait,” he said, rapping his knuckles against the side of his head, as if trying to dislodge a stubborn fact. “Didn’t Max tell me you drove an ice-cream truck last summer?”
“A lunch truck,” I told him. “It’s my father’s.”
Mr. Friedlin had maintained a playful expression for most of the conversation, but now it changed. His face grew serious, quietly respectful.
“A small businessman,” he said, nodding as if this were a wonderful thing indeed.
“I guess you could call him that.”
“The independent entrepreneur is the engine of capitalism,” he informed us, as if reciting a line of poetry.
The engine of capitalism. Something about the phrase sounded funny to me, at least in relation to my father. I was debating whether to make a comment about the engine’s itchy rectum, but our waitress reappeared just then and asked if she could take our orders.
All my life I’d been an enthusiastic carnivore. In the dining hall, I’d once consumed nine French dip sandwiches in a single sitting, supposedly on a dare from Sang, but mostly just because I thought they tasted so great. Until that night, though, I’d never eaten filet mignon. It wasn’t nearly as exotic or elaborately prepared as the name seemed to promise, but that was okay with me. It was just this thick lozenge of beef, maybe the size of a squashed baseball, so tender that employing my teeth in its consumption seemed almost unfair, a form of overkill. I sat there in a daze of primal ecstasy, gazing into its pink bull’s-eye center, feeling like one of Plato’s cave dwellers who’d suddenly been offered a rare—or should I say medium rare—glimpse of the Real Thing in place of the pale, trembling shadows I’d been settling for up till then: the greasy,
paper thin Steak-Ums with their crimped and shriveled edges, the too-round industrial hamburger patties studded with pearls of cartilage, the disagreeably veiny or suspiciously squishy mystery cubes of “meat” floating in bowls of stew or lurking in furtive disgrace beneath blankets of brown gravy. How, I wondered, would I ever face them again?
“So,” said Mr. Friedlin, releasing a soft preliminary sigh of resignation. “I don’t suppose you guys are big Reagan fans.”
The three of us traded a quick round of glances.
“We kind of hate him,” said Sang.
“Why’s that?” Mr. Friedlin didn’t seem upset, just curious. We all knew that he had given a lot of money to Reagan’s campaign, and that photographs of Gail and Howard with Ron and Nancy were prominently displayed in the Friedlins’ den, to Max’s undying shame and outrage.
“He supports all those dictators,” I said.
“He acts like the rich are oppressed by the poor,” Sang complained. “Like it’s the people on welfare who are getting away with murder.”
“Plus,” said Ted, “isn’t he kind of stupid? Didn’t he say that trees cause pollution or something like that?”
“And that we could retrieve nuclear missiles after they’d been launched,” I added. The litany was lengthy and familiar.
“And what about those idiots he surrounds himself with?” Sang wondered. “Ed Meese and James Watt and those other guys.”
Mr. Friedlin laughed. “You’re right about that,” he conceded. “It’s not exactly the Institute for Advanced Studies over there on Pennsylvania Avenue.”
I wished I could say that we’d scored a point, but I could tell that we hadn’t. He was laughing, but the laughter was affectionate, the way it usually was when people who liked the president contemplated his intellectual deficiencies. It was like they were proud of him, like it was a point in America’s favor that a man of such dim wattage could get himself elected to the highest office in the land.
The whole Reagan phenomenon eluded me. I had arrived in
college in 1979 with an open mind and very little political baggage. Freshman year I was too focused on my own life—to be specific, on not flunking out of Yale, which I secretly believed had made an enormous error in admitting me—to pay much attention to the world beyond New Haven. In fact, I had so much reading to do first semester that I didn’t learn that Americans were being held against their will in Iran until something like Day 17 of the crisis, when my history TA made an offhand comment about Ted Koppel’s hairdo.
My political education hadn’t really begun until 1980, when I belatedly began to accept the fact that millions of American citizens not only took Ronald Reagan seriously—a mental leap that struck me as preposterous enough in itself—but were actually prepared to place their lives in his hands. I remember watching the debate between Reagan and Carter and feeling a huge abyss open up at my feet when the commentators began declaring Reagan the winner, even though he’d seemed to me to have performed a fairly plausible imitation of a twinkly-eyed village idiot. I wondered if it was Yale that had made me such a stranger to my own country or having smoked too much pot as a teenager. In any case, it was unnerving to find myself dwelling in a separate reality from the majority of my fellow citizens, my parents included. I was enough of a believer in democracy-or maybe just safety in numbers—to not be able to derive much comfort from the stubborn conviction that they were wrong and I was right.
A couple of years into the Reagan presidency, I’d pretty much come to take this abyss for granted, but Mr. Friedlin made me contemplate it again as if for the first time. I’d already figured out why my parents liked Reagan. He appealed to an idea of America they cherished—i.e., that we were innocent and fair-minded and better than any other people who had ever lived on earth. But what about an educated man like Mr. Friedlin? He hardly seemed the type who thought that the fifties were better days, or that General Pinochet was by definition better than Nelson Mandela, or that welfare queens picked up their checks in pink Cadillacs. I must
have been staring, because he looked right at me, as if answering my unspoken questions.
“You guys are missing the point,” he said, in a patient and friendly voice. “All that stuffs just window dressing. Foreign policy, who’s smarter than who, who’s got the better statistic. The bottom line is that Ronald Reagan’s been a great president for people like us.”
Whoa, I thought. Stop right there. “People like who?” I wanted to ask. But before I could open my mouth, Mr. Friedlin reached across the table and topped off my wineglass, filling it so completely that the ruby liquid began to dribble a little over the rim. To avoid spillage, I bent forward like a dog and took a big sucking sip to remove the excess. When I looked up, my lips still pressed to the glass, Mr. Friedlin was smiling at me, and I couldn’t stop myself, from smiling back, nodding my silent thanks. He stretched his arms overhead like a man who’d just awakened from a refreshing nap.
“So?” he said. “Who wants to check out the Whiffenpoofs?”
I had to stop back at J. E. to change my clothes for the party. I’d expected my companions to come inside with me to check on Max and Gail, but they only accompanied me as far as the front gate.
“We’re twenty minutes late as it is,” Mr. Friedlins said, consulting his watch with an expression of grave concern. “Just tell them to meet us at Stiles.”
I looked at Sang, but he just shrugged. He was about as enthusiastic about singing groups as I was, and on any other night I would have been surprised by his decision to go to the jamboree. But we were having a good time with Mr. Friedlin, and I couldn’t blame him for not wanting it to come to an end. If not for my date with Polly, I probably would have gone too. Ted delivered a brotherly punch to my shoulder.
“You better go,” he said, unsuccessfully fighting a smirk. “Better sharpen up that pencil.”
Sang cast a suspicious glance at my crotch. “Hey,” he said, “is
that the stub of an Eberhard-Faber in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”
“All right,” Mr. Friedlin said, draping an arm around each of their shoulders and gently steering them away from me. “Enough of this nonsense. Let’s get moving.”
I’d felt oddly sober throughout dinner, but the sight of them heading down Library Walk without me, their arms snaking around each others’ shoulders as if they were Whiffenpoofs themselves, or soldiers helping a wounded comrade to safety, made me feel suddenly tipsy. Reaching into my pocket for my keys, I found myself dreading the prospect of making small talk with Mrs. Friedlin if Max hadn’t returned. There was no way around it, though; I was not about to jeopardize my standing with Polly by showing up at a big party in a borrowed leather tie, a sport coat from Sears, and factory-reject cowboy boots.
When my companions had finally drifted around the corner onto York Street and out of sight, I selected the key marked SWOG from the sneaker-shaped key ring my father had given out at Christmas as a promotional gimmick—Dante’s Roach Coach, it said, Good Food in a Hurry—and fitted it into the lock. At almost the same moment, the strangest feeling came over me, a burning, overpowering rush of shame, though what it was for I couldn’t say. The intensity of it literally buckled my knees, and I spent a few seconds squatting on the ground by the emergency phone, clutching my head in my hands and moaning in a soft singsong. Then I forced myself to stand up.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said in a soft, shaky voice, as if answering a question posed by someone other than myself. Then I turned the key in the lock and leaned my shoulder against the heavy wrought-iron gate. It resisted for a moment before giving way, issuing the familiar creak of protest that always accompanied my entrance.
Mrs. Friedlin had, in fact, taken her shoes off. She was resting on the couch with a damp washcloth clamped to her forehead, listening
to a Joni Mitchell record that had mysteriously attached itself to our collection, probably via Nancy. At the sound of my arrival, she lifted the washcloth and inclined her head in the direction of the door.
“Oh,” she said, not bothering to conceal her disappointment. “It’s you.”
“I’ll only be a minute,” I assured her, as if she were the resident and I the visitor. “I just have to change for this party.”
Giving in to a delayed reflex of politeness, Mrs. Friedlin forced herself to sit up. Her shirt seemed to have faded to a duller shade of green over the past couple of hours and part of it had come untucked. She looked rumpled and bleary, and I knew better than to ask if she’d heard anything from Max.
“Where’s Howard?” she asked, addressing this question to the pink washcloth draped across her palm like a slice of ham.
“They went to see the Whiffenpoofs. He said you should join them if you feel like it.”
“The Whiffenpoofs?” She pronounced the name as though it meant nothing to her.
“They’re a singing group.”
She looked up. The damp part of her forehead was shinier than the rest of her face.
“I know what they are, thank you.”
“The concert’s at Ezra Stiles. I can give you directions.”
She responded with a look of sullen contempt, clapping the washcloth back onto her forehead with unnecessary vehemence. I nodded sagely, jerking my thumb over my shoulder with what I hoped was boyish charm.
“Okay,” I mumbled. “Righty-O.”
My party uniform that semester consisted of jeans, a green pocket T-shirt, and a tattered tweed jacket with suede elbow patches that I’d recently bought at a secondhand clothing store on State Street. Vacillating for a moment on the subject of footwear, I stepped into,
then out of, my new penny loafers before settling on the safer bet of Adidas running shoes. The overall effect was surprisingly good, I thought, taking a moment to admire myself in the full-length mirror a previous tenant had mounted on the inside of the door. The outfit had a way of harmonizing the competing aspects of my personality that caused so much friction rubbing up against each other as I went about my business in the world. A powerful sense of wholeness and well-being descended upon me as I pondered my reflection, as if life were an endless costume party, and I’d finally figured out a way to come as myself.
This feeling lasted about three seconds, until I stepped out of my room and back into Mrs. Friedlin’s field of vision. It was clear that she’d been waiting for me and had taken advantage of my absence to pull herself together. Her shoes were back on, her hair brushed, her shirt tucked in and shimmering. The washcloth was nowhere in sight. Something about the way she was staring made me suddenly self-conscious, like a kid playing dress-up, a person no one in their right mind had any business taking seriously. I wondered if it was my jacket. The sleeves were too long, and I had to fold back the cuffs so they wouldn’t swallow up my hands.
“Tell me the truth,” she said, and I could hear the effort it was costing her to keep her voice calm and even. “How worried should I be?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. And I really didn’t. My gut feeling was that Max was okay and simply avoiding his parents, but I also had no idea where he could have disappeared to for the past six hours.
“Well, tell me this then,” she said. “Would you ever do something like this to your parents?”
I shook my head.
“What’s he so upset about?” she asked, almost pleading.
“I don’t know.”
Mrs. Friedlin shifted her gaze to our fireplace. There was a charred log resting on the andirons, left over from an unsuccessful blaze on Halloween night. She stared at it for a long time, as though it were actually burning. I pushed my jacket sleeve up past
my elbow, then tugged it back down again. Nothing ever fit me right. Mrs. Friedlin looked up.
“Oh,” she said. “I almost forgot. Someone named Cindy called for you. She sounded pretty upset.”
“She’s from home,” I said, feeling a vague obligation to explain. “It’s kind of a mess.”
She looked me over for a few seconds, as if something didn’t quite add up. I wondered if the jacket would look better if I cuffed the sleeves under instead of rolling them back. That way, at least, people wouldn’t be able to see how ridiculously long they were.
“You’re quite the little ladies’ man, aren’t you?” she asked.
I was about to deny the charge when I registered the grudging note of respect in her voice.
“Believe me,” I told her. “I’m as surprised about it as you are.”
She smiled, as if we’d reached some sort of understanding.
“Have fun at your party.”
“Thanks.”
I took a couple of steps toward the door, then stopped.
“Mrs. Friedlin,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
She nodded. I moved back to where I was before.
“Is this jacket okay?”
She thought it over.
“I think so.”
“What about the sleeves?”
“What about them?”
“Do they look stupid?”
“You look nice,” she told me, in a firm, motherly voice. “Very collegiate.”