Matt answered the door in his hard hat and a Boy Scout shirt, a pair of expensive binoculars hanging from a cord around his neck.
“Come on in,” he said, leading me up a creaky wooden stairway to his second-floor apartment. “Things are a little slow getting started.”
Technically speaking, he hadn’t been lying when he said that everybody was waiting for me; he’d just neglected to explain that aside from himself, “everybody” meant Nick and Matt’s landlord, Lance, a skinny, wolfish guy I often saw prowling around the library, chatting up lonely undergraduate girls. They were sitting on lawn chairs in a room full of outdoor furniture, not to mention a potted palm and a nonfunctioning barbecue grill, regarding me with a certain amount of disappointment.
“Step inside the Conceptual Patio,” Matt told me, drawing my attention to the keg in one corner of the room and the garbage can in another. “There’s the Michelob and there’s the Apollo Love Juice.”
“Apollo Love Juice?”
He handed me a rinsed-out mayonnaise jar filled with a nasty-looking orange concoction. “Grain alcohol and Tang. One glass and you’re in orbit.”
“Two glasses and you’re on the dark side of the moon,” Lance added, popping a pretzel into his mouth. He had stringy, gray-streaked hair that fell well below his collar, and the haughty demeanor of a flamenco dancer.
“Three and you’re on the edge of the known universe,” Matt continued with a giggle.
“All right.” Nick held up his hand, silencing Lance before he could describe the effects of glass number four. “I’m gettin’ a little tired of this.”
I pulled up a chair to form a circle of sorts with Matt and Lance, who were sipping their Love Juice and bobbing their heads in time with “Cold as Ice,” looking like they were about two seconds away from jumping up and dancing. Nick was sitting off to one side, glancing nervously in our direction.
“There are going to be females at this party, aren’t there?” he asked.
Matt and Lance exchanged amused glances.
“What do you think, Karnak?” Matt asked his landlord. “Will there be females at this party?”
Lance closed his eyes, pressed two fingers to each of his temples, and gave the question his full psychic consideration, struggling unsuccessfully to maintain a straight face.
“Yes,” he said finally, sputtering with suppressed laughter as he carved an hourglass figure into the air. “I foresee a large number of females.”
“Just checking,” Nick told him. “I don’t want to get in over my head here.”
The mood on the Conceptual Patio darkened as time passed and our number remained steady at four.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” Matt was standing by the window, training his binoculars on the street below. “I figured more people would be here by now.”
“It’s early,” Lance reminded him. “The real party animals haven’t even climbed out of their coffins yet.”
“You sure you invited girls?” Nick asked again, this time more anxiously.
Lance sat up straight in response to this question, crossed his arms on his chest, and treated Nick to an imperious, heavy-lidded
stare. I half expected him to leap up from his lawn chair, snap his fingers, and shout, “Olé!”
“Do I look like a fool?” he inquired darkly. “I invited only girls.”
“Thirty-seven of them,” Matt added. “We made a list.”
“Fifteen were possible no-shows,” said Lance. “Twelve were likelies, and the rest were probables.”
“What about the band?” Nick asked. “Didn’t you say there was going to be a band?”
“They backed out,” Matt informed him. “There was some confusion about the date.”
“No girls, no band,” Nick grumbled.
“Don’t worry, though,” Matt continued, trying to cheer us up. “I’ve got some live entertainment lined up that’s even better.”
Nick wasn’t reassured.
“You call this an orgy?” he asked, glaring at me like the party was my idea.
“I never said it was an orgy. It’s just—” I paused, searching for the right description. “It’s just a little get-together.”
“Don’t pull this get-together shit on me,” he warned. “You called it a fucking orgy.”
By ten thirty, Lance and Matt had each consumed enough Apollo Love Juice to have pushed beyond the boundaries of the known universe, though neither one of them seemed particularly drunk to me. Nick was halfway through his second cup, and he had become a lot more cheerful since making the switch. I was the laggard, not even in orbit yet, content to sit on my lawn chair and sink deeper into the melancholy that had taken hold of me since my talk with Cindy. I wondered if she and Max were still in the common room, making awkward stabs at small talk, or if they had migrated to a fancy restaurant, where they were laughing over a bottle of wine, planning their big summer in Colorado. I was jealous, of course, but not in the obvious way—it seemed to me that Cindy was the interloper, not Max,
that she was the one homing in on something that was rightfully mine, though it was hard for me to identify what that something was.
“Oh, I could have continued with my graduate work,” Lance declared, drilling Nick with the unnerving gaze he used to plumb the souls of the girls he befriended at the library. “I could have finished my thesis, taken a professorship, and committed slow intellectual suicide. But I chose the road less traveled.”
“Took some guts,” Nick commented. “Professors got a pretty good deal.”
“I respect the life of the mind too much to reduce it to a job,” Lance replied, pausing to shovel a handful of peanuts into his mouth. “I prefer the Greek ideal of leisurely contemplation.”
“That’s Greek?” Nick seemed puzzled. “The Greeks I know work their asses off. A lot of them are in the restaurant business.”
“I’m not talking about modern-day Greeks.” Lance’s expression soured, as if the mere thought of non-ancient Greeks left a taste in his mouth. “I’m working from a classical model.”
Nick swirled the Love Juice in his plastic cup as though it were expensive brandy. “So what do you do for a living?”
“I live,” Lance told him, delivering this pronouncement with melodramatic conviction.
“I mean for money,” Nick explained patiently.
“Ah, money.” Lance’s face relaxed. “It always comes down to that, doesn’t it?”
“The almighty dollar,” said Nick.
Lance smiled in rueful agreement. “The monthly pound of flesh.”
“What can you do? Gotta pay the man his money.”
“Render unto Caesar and so forth.”
“Amen,” replied Nick. “You mind passing those peanuts?”
Matt excused himself to make some phone calls and returned with a somber expression. He shook his head in response to whatever question it was Lance hadn’t yet asked him.
“Really?” Lance looked baffled. “Not even Caroline?”
“No answer,” Matt told him.
“Maybe she’s on her way,” Lance speculated. “What about Sarah and Mary Beth?”
“Sarah thinks she’s got food poisoning. Mary Beth’s line was busy.”
“At least Amy and Michiko will come,” Lance insisted. “That much I’m certain of.”
“I’m sorry,” Matt told me. “I didn’t expect it to turn out like this.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s a perfectly good party.”
“Don’t forget Allison,” Lance called out. “She said she’d probably be a little late.”
Just then the doorbell rang, the harsh cry of the buzzer slicing through the accumulated gloom. Matt cocked his head at a drastic angle, like a dog hearing a distant whistle. When it rang again, he stumbled backwards, clutching at his chest.
“Oh my God. It’s gonna happen. I can feel it.”
“See?” Lance held out both hands with an air of personal vindication. “What did I tell you?”
Matt took a couple of steps toward the door, then turned back around. He stared at us for a couple of seconds, shaking his head as if we didn’t quite measure up.
“Come on, you guys. At least try to look like you’re having fun.”
In spite of this injunction, we fell into an immediate and embarrassed silence the moment he left the room. Nick whipped a comb out of his back pocket and went to work while Lance sprayed a few blasts of Binaca into his mouth, then made some last-second adjustments to his eyebrows. I untucked my shirt and began polishing my glasses. By the time Matt stepped back into the apartment with the new arrival in tow, all three of us were staring right at the door, unable to conceal first our curiosity, and then our disappointment. Matt’s crestfallen expression mirrored our own.
“Guy’s,” he said. “This is Eric. Eric, this is the guys.”
Eric was a bold statement in his orange flight suit and black velvet cape, his eyes glittering with intellectual challenge. To my amazement,
he only considered me for a fleeting second before turning the full force of his attention on Lance, who had suddenly become very interested in what may or may not have been a spot on his pants.
“You,” Eric said, as if picking the landlord out of a lineup. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Lance looked up and nodded sadly, a condemned man accepting his fate.
“Hello, Eric,” he said. “It’s nice to see you again.”
Eric pounced on the empty chair next to Lance and immediately launched into a diatribe against Carl Jung.
“Don’t tell me you fell for that archetype bullshit,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe that such a terrible thing could happen to such a nice person.
“I think there’s some validity to it,” Lance countered. “I think all of us are born with a certain set of images and beliefs buried deep in our unconscious minds.”
“That’s garbage,” Eric shot back. “If there really was a collective unconscious, we wouldn’t all feel so alone.”
I glanced at Nick, curious to see what he was making of this face-off, which looked like it might go on for a while. After a few seconds, he turned to meet my gaze, then got up and walked across the room. He sat down in the chair to my right, scooting it closer so he could whisper in my ear.
“Am I confused, or is that guy wearing a cape?”
“Either that or a really big handkerchief.”
I thought it was a pretty good line, but Nick didn’t crack a smile. He just grunted quietly, as if in confirmation of his own thoughts.
“Live and learn,” he said. “Live and learn.”
By midnight it was a whole different scene, not a blowout but at least a halfway respectable party. Kristin, Djembe, and Sarah had
arrived around eleven, along with half a dozen of Sarah’s friends, from the Slavic Chorus. They were followed a short time later by a contingent of dining-hall workers that included Lorelei, Brad Foxworthy, Milton, and Dallas Little, the three-hundred-pound dishwasher, and now Matt’s apartment was humming with activity. Lance had escaped from Eric’s clutches and had installed himself by the garbage can, where he was ladling out the Love Juice and happily explaining its supernatural powers to anyone who cared to listen. In the meantime, Eric had glommed onto Djembe, who was nodding without enthusiasm and glancing around anxiously for assistance as he bobbed and weaved to avoid Argument Man’s jabbing index finger. Kristin couldn’t rescue him, though; she was too busy dancing with Brad and Lorelei, and Dallas in the big empty room that separated the Conceptual Patio from the actual kitchen. I was watching all this from my lawn chair, while carrying on a conversation with Nick and a member of the Slavic Chorus who’d introduced herself as Katrinka, though I’d known her freshman year as Michele.
“Have either of you been to Russia?” she asked, fixing us with her urgent green eyes. Her thick eyebrows formed a single emphatic bar across her forehead.
“Russia?” Nick snorted. “Why would I want to go to Russia?”
“Me neither,” I said, leaning forward to get a better look at Lorelei, whom I’d never seen dance before. Her jeans were tight and her eyes were closed. Her leotard top looked like it was made for a much smaller girl, and all the sexual energy in the house seemed to have gathered around her like a halo. “I’ve never even been on an airplane.”
“You’re kidding,” said Katrinka. “I’m going to Moscow this summer.”
“Why would you want to go there?” Nick asked.
“I’m in love with Russia.” She said this with real emotion in her voice, as if Russia were a person. “The music, the language, the history.”
Nick looked offended. “What are you, some kind of Communist?”
“Not at all,” Katrinka explained. “I’m a Russophile.”
I had to lean forward at an extreme angle to see around Dallas, whose enormous body was blocking my view of Lorelei. He barely moved at all when he danced, yet he had a way of standing not quite still that was oddly graceful, as if he were completely at one with the music, as if dancing were less an activity than an attitude toward the world.
Nick tugged on my shirt. “Yo, Pencil Dick, where’s the bathroom?”
“Through the kitchen,” I told him. “There’s no light switch, though. If you need to see what you’re doing, there’s a flashlight in the sink.”
Nick smiled uncertainly. “You’re shittin’ me, right?”
“See for yourself.”
“Unbelievable.” He smiled at Katrinka as if she, at least, would understand. “A flashlight in the sink.”
Nick headed out the room and across the dance floor. Lorelei caught me looking and waved for me to join her. I waved back, pretending not to understand.
“Who is that guy?” Katrinka asked.
“Who, Nick? He’s a cook in the dining hall.”
“You hang out with a cook? That is so cool.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just like Russia.”
Her smile faded. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Luckily, Matt sat down in Nick’s chair before I had a chance to answer. He shoved a fat white envelope in my face like he was serving me with a summons.
“This is for you,” he said.
“What is it?”
“The letter.”
“Oh, right.” I accepted the envelope. On the front, in elegant calligraphy, Matt had inscribed the words, Mea Culpa. “You really didn’t have to.”
He watched with a peculiar half-smile as I tucked it into the back pocket of my jeans.
“Aren’t you gonna read it?”
“Now?”
“What is that?” Katrinka asked.
“A letter of apology,” he told her.
She seemed pleased by the concept. “What are you apologizing for?”
“I was bad.” Matt grinned. “I committed a heinous act of solipsism.”
Lorelei had slipped back into view on the dance floor and was beckoning me with her index finger, a sweetly pouty expression on her face. She seemed oblivious to the fact that Brad Foxworthy was lying at her feet, waving his arms and legs in the air like an insect. I held up one finger, trying to buy some time. Beside her, Kristin was staring down at Brad with a gaze that mingled pity and disgust in equal measures.
“Give her the letter,” Matt told me.
“What?”
“Give Katrinka the letter.”
On the way back from the bathroom, Nick walked past Brad without a glance. I pulled the letter out of my pocket and surrendered it to Katrinka.
“You sure it’s okay?” she asked, glancing nervously at Matt.
Matt didn’t answer, though. He was staring with dismay at Lance, who had leaned over the rim of the garbage can and lowered his head into the Apollo Love Juice as though bobbing for apples.
“Oh shit,” said Matt, rising suddenly from the chair.
As if the move had been choreographed, Nick reclaimed his seat the instant Matt vacated it.
“First time I ever pissed with a flashlight,” he announced with a smile. “It’s a little confusing.”
Katrinka smiled at him, still clutching my letter.
“Are you really a cook?” she asked him.
All hell was breaking loose. Matt had his arms around Lance’s
waist as though he were trying to yank him out of the garbage can. Djembe was clutching his ears, shouting at Eric to leave him alone, to go find someone else to torment. Dallas Little was standing over Brad, attempting to pour a beer into his open mouth, though much of the liquid was missing its mark. Kristin looked on, utterly appalled by this display. Lorelei seemed to have disappeared.
“Are you really a pinko?” Nick shot back.
“Excuse me,” I said, though by that point neither of them seemed to know I was even there. “I’ll be right back.”
She was waiting in Matt’s room, sitting on the edge of the bed in total darkness. I shut the door behind me and sat down next to her. After the chaos of the party, it was a relief to be someplace calm and private.
“Took you long enough,” she said. Her voice was playful, but there was a hint of irritation in it as well
“What do you mean? You couldn’t have been here for more than a couple of minutes.”
“I don’t mean tonight. I’ve been trying to get your attention for weeks.”
My eyes were just beginning to adjust to the darkness, and I could have sworn Lorelei was glowing a little around the edges, this nearly invisible corona of sex lighting up the air around her head and shoulders.
“Well, you’ve got it now,” I told her.
She put her hand on my knee, a gesture more comradely than seductive. I felt light-headed and wondered if the grain alcohol was finally kicking in. Maybe Matt and Lance were right; maybe two glasses of the Love Juice really did put you on the dark side of the moon.
“So how’s your townie girlfriend?” she asked. There was a taunting note in the question, but I decided to ignore it.
“It’s over. She’s not my girlfriend anymore.”
“Too bad.”
“What about you? What’s up with you and Eddie?”
“Nothing. He won’t even talk to me.”
“He got beat up pretty bad,” I pointed out.
I’d only seen Eddie once since he’d gotten out of the hospital, and he looked awful. He was using a cane to get around, and one side of his head had been shaved for reasons that were unclear to me. He said he was having trouble concentrating and was thinking of taking a medical leave.
“He was kind of a pussy about it,” she said. Maybe it was the moonlight leaking in around the edges of the shade or something, but she seemed to be burning a little brighter than before. Her eyes had an odd catlike gleam. “He didn’t even try to defend himself.”
By that point, I couldn’t help myself. I reached up and began stroking her hair, surprised to discover that it wasn’t giving off heat. She leaned into the caress, pressing her head into my palm. She closed her eyes and let out a low moan of pleasure.
“That’s nice,” she said. “Don’t stop.”
I brought my face down to hers. Like her hair, her lips felt unexpectedly cool against mine. Her tongue explored my mouth with strange thoroughness, as if she wanted to make contact with every nook and cranny in there, every taste bud and ridge, the whole topography of teeth and gums and skin. I pulled away from her, trying to get my bearings.
“Why am I doing this?” I asked. “I don’t even know you.”
“You don’t have to know me,” she laughed.
I kissed her again. She reached down and tugged my shirt free from my pants. Her hand slid over my belly and onto my chest. She pressed her lips against my ear.
“Aren’t you worried about my brothers?”
I touched her breast. There were only two weeks left in the semester. Her brothers had never laid eyes on me. They didn’t even know my name.
“I love how tight your clothes are,” I told her.
“This is nothing. I’ve got stuff way tighter than this.”
“I want to see you in it.”
“You like the way us townies dress, don’t you?”
“You know I do.”
She pulled off her shirt and lay down on the bed. Her breasts were perfect.
“You’re an easy one,” she told me, reaching down to unbuckle her jeans. “I’m gonna make you so happy.”
We might have been in there for twenty minutes or two hours. All I knew was that I was lying on top of her, dazed and naked, when the door creaked open and the light came on. I rolled over in a panic, blinking through the glare, and saw Matt standing in the doorway, scrutinizing us with drunken interest.
“Here you are,” he said. “I’ve been looking all over.”
“Go away,” I yelped, snatching up a pillow for a fig leaf. “Leave us alone.”
“Get your clothes on,” he told us. “Everyone’s waiting for you.”
“Leave us alone.”
“Hurry up,” he said. “I don’t want to start the entertainment without you.”
“The entertainment?”
“Come on. Just get your clothes on.”
Lorelei was sitting up, arms crossed over her breasts, the lower half of her body concealed by a sheet, her expression hovering somewhere between anger and embarrassment. When I glanced back at the doorway, Lance was peering in over Matt’s shoulder, scrutinizing us as though we were a museum exhibit. There was a towel wrapped around his head like a turban.
“Shut the door!” I snapped. “We’ll be right out.”
We dressed as quickly as we could, pausing occasionally to trade shy smiles of disbelief. Lorelei’s face was red; her hair was a mess.
She had already wriggled into her jeans by the time I located her panties inside one of my sneakers.
“You can keep them,” she told me.
I shoved them into my pocket and followed her out the door.
It seemed like a different party than the one we’d left. Order had been restored. The dancing had stopped and everyone was packed into the Conceptual Patio, staring at us as we entered, as if we were the entertainment.
There’s nothing you can do at a moment like that except pretend that everything’s normal. Holding hands, Lorelei and I walked past our friends and co-workers and acquaintances as if we’d just returned from a quick trip to WaWa’s. Although a number of people were standing, one empty seat remained, a bronze folding chair with the number twenty-two stenciled on it in faded black paint. I sat down in it, and she made herself comfortable on my lap.
“Excuse me,” Dallas Little called out. He was holding Lorelei’s pink panties in his enormous hand, dangling them in front of his face like a handkerchief. “I think you dropped something.”
The whole room burst into laughter as Dallas handed me the panties. I was mortified, but all I could do was smile and act like I was in on the joke.
“I always carry an extra pair,” I mumbled. “Just to be on the safe side.”
My quip was drowned out by a noise that sounded something like a herd of cattle being driven up a flight of wooden stairs, or a football team charging out of a locker room. When the door opened, though, what it disgorged was not cows or football players, but a dozen or so clean-cut college boys in tuxedos. The Whiffenpoofs surged into the apartment, then drifted over toward the edge of the Conceptual Patio, their faces collapsing into assorted degrees of confusion as they took the measure of our unlikely gathering. I made momentary eye contact with Trip, who shot me with
an imaginary gun, his hand encased in an immaculate white glove. Through a gap between two tuxes, I saw Matt hugging the Pitch, the two of them clapping each other on the back like old buddies.
Relieved to no longer be the focus of attention, I let my eyes stray around the room as the Whiffs began to assemble themselves into their usual formation, in the shadow of the potted palm. Nick and Katrinka were right where I’d left them, though I saw that they’d removed my letter from the envelope and appeared to be reading it with great interest and amusement. Sensing my gaze, Nick looked up and wagged his finger at me, as if scolding me for being a naughty boy.
Standing behind Nick and Katrinka, also peering in my direction, were two guys I hadn’t seen before. They were scrawny and criminal-looking, definitely not Yalies. One of them wore a leather biker vest over a black T-shirt with a skull and crossbones on the front. His hair was long and greasy, and when he smiled at me I saw that one of his front teeth had turned brown. The other guy had a denim jacket and the ducktail hairdo of a 1950s juvenile delinquent. He gave me a little wave that didn’t make me want to wave back. Something about their faces seemed oddly familiar.
“Lorelei?” I said. “Do you see those guys?”
She looked where I was looking.
“Oh shit.” She stiffened in my lap. “What are they doing here?”
At that same moment, the Pitch tooted on his little pipe. The Whiffenpoofs looked at each other. A hush settled over the room, but it wasn’t an ordinary hush. It was an almost miraculous absence of sound, the kind of quiet that seems to begin in your body and spread outward, a silence trembling with possibilities, the kind you only ever notice the instant before something terrible happens, or a large group of singers burst into song.