The remainder of the summer passed in an emotionless haze. At some point I received a letter informing me that I had been placed in Winthrop House with an as-yet-unnamed roommate who was returning from a year abroad. That I cared nothing about this news is a gross understatement. As far as I was concerned, I could have gone on living with the old woman and her dirty litter boxes. About my mother, I told no one. I worked at the lab right up until the first day of the new semester, leaving no transitional interval in which I might find myself with nothing to distract me. My professor asked me if I wanted to continue working with him during the academic year, but I turned him down. Perhaps this was unwise, and he seemed shocked that I should decline such a privilege, but it would leave no time for the library, whose consoling silence I missed.
I come now to the part of the story in which my situation changed so radically that I recall it as a kind of plunge, as if I had been merely floating on the surface of my life until then. This commenced the day I moved into Winthrop House. Lucessi and I had sold off our Salvation Army furniture, and I arrived with little more than the same suitcase I’d brought to Harvard a year ago, a desk lamp, a box of books, and the impression that I had once again slipped into an anonymity so pure that I could have changed my name if I wanted to with nobody the wiser. My quarters, two rooms arranged railroad-apartment-style with a bathroom at the rear, was on the fourth floor facing the Winthrop quadrangle, with a view of Boston’s modest skyline behind it. There was no sign of my roommate, whose name I was yet to learn. I spent some time mulling over which space to choose as my own—the interior room was smaller but more private; on the other hand, I would have to endure my roommate trooping through at all hours to the toilet—before deciding that, to get things off on the right foot, I would await his arrival, so that we might decide together.
I had finished carting the last of my belongings up the stairs when a figure appeared in the doorway, his face obscured by the stack of cardboard boxes in his arms. He advanced into the room, groaning with effort, and lowered them to the floor.
“You,” I said.
It was the man I’d met at the Burger Cottage. He was wearing frayed khaki pants and a gray T-shirt that said HARVARD SQUASH, with crescents of sweat under the arms.
“Wait,” he said, peering at me. “I know you. How do I know you?”
I explained our meeting. At first he professed no recollection; then a look of recognition dawned.
“Of course. The guy with the suitcase. I’m guessing this means you found Wigglesworth.” A thought occurred to him. “No offense, but wouldn’t that make you a sophomore?”
It was a fair question, with a complicated answer. Though I’d been admitted as a freshman, I had enough AP credits to graduate in three years. I’d given this matter little thought, always expecting to hang around for the full four. But in the weeks since receiving my father’s letter, the option to bang out my education at a quickstep and skedaddle had grown more appealing. Evidently the Harvard higher-ups had thought so, too, since they’d housed me with an upperclassman.
“I guess that makes you a real smarty-pants, doesn’t it?” he said. “So, let’s have it.”
He had a way of speaking that was both elusively sarcastic and somehow complimentary at the same time. “Have what?”
“You know. Name, rank, serial number. Your major, place of origin, that sort of thing. The history of yourself, in other words. Keep it simple—my memory is for shit in this heat.”
“Tim Fanning. Biochemistry. Ohio.”
“Nicely done. Though if you ask me tomorrow I probably won’t remember, so don’t be offended.” He stepped forward, hand extended. “Jonas Lear, by the way.”
I did my best to respond with a manly grip. “Lear,” I repeated. “Like the jet?”
“Alas, no. More like Shakespeare’s mad king.” He glanced around. “So, which of these luxury compartments have you selected as your own?”
“I thought it would be fair to wait.”
“Lesson number one: Never wait. Law of the jungle and so forth. But since you’re determined to be a nice guy, we can flip for it.” He pulled a coin from his pocket. “Call it.”
Up the coin went before I could respond. He snatched it from the air and slapped it to his wrist
“I guess…heads?”
“Why does everybody call heads? Someone should do a study.” He lifted his hand. “Well, what do you know, it’s heads.”
“I guess I was thinking of the smaller one.”
He smiled. “See? How hard was that. I would have gone the same way.”
“You never told me what you were studying.”
“Right you are. That was rude of me.” He tossed a pair of finger quotes into the air. “Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.”
I’d never heard of it. “That’s an actual major?”
He’d bent to open one of the boxes. “So my transcript tells me. Plus, it’s fun to say. It sounds a little dirty.” He glanced up and smiled. “What? Not what you expected?”
“I would have said—I don’t know—something more lively. History, maybe. Or English.”
He removed an armload of textbooks and began loading them onto the shelves. “Let me ask you something. Of all the possible subjects in the world, why did you choose biochemistry?”
“I suppose because I’m good at it.”
He turned, hands on his hips. “Well, there you have it. The truth is, I’m just crazy about amino acids. I put them in my martini.”
“What’s a martini?”
His face drew back. “James Bond? Shaken, not stirred? They don’t have these movies in Ohio?”
“I know who James Bond is. I mean, I don’t know what’s in one.”
His mouth curved into a mischievous grin. “Ah,” he said.
We were on our third drink when we heard a girl’s voice calling his name and the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs.
“In here!” Lear yelled.
The two of us were seated on the floor with the tools of Lear’s enterprise spread before us. I have never met anyone else who traveled with not only a fifth of gin and a bottle of vermouth but the sort of bartending gizmos—jiggers, shakers, tiny, delicate knives—one sees only in old movies. A bag of ice swooned in a puddle of meltwater beside an open jar of olives from the market up the street. Ten-thirty in the morning, and I was completely hammered.
“Jesus, look at you.”
I hauled my addled eyes into focus on the figure in the doorway. A girl, wearing a summer dress of pale blue linen. I note the dress first because it is the easiest thing to describe about her. I do not mean to say that she was beautiful, although she was; rather, I wish to make a case that there was about her something distinctive and therefore unclassifiable (unlike Lucessi’s sister, whose ice-pick perfection was a dime a dozen and had left no lasting mark on me). I could note the particulars—her figure, slender and small-breasted, almost boyish; the petite formation of her sandaled toes, darkened by street grime; her heart-shaped face and damp blue eyes; her hair, pale blond, unmanaged by clips or barrettes, cut to her shining, sun-touched shoulders—but the whole, as they say, was greater than the sum of its parts.
“Liz!” Lear made a big show of getting to his feet, trying not to spill his drink. He threw his arms around her in a clumsy hug, which she pushed back from with a look of exaggerated distaste. She was wearing small, wire-framed eyeglasses, perfectly round, that on another woman might have seemed mannish but in her case didn’t at all.
“You’re drunk.”
“Not in the least. More like in the most. Not as bad as my new roomie here.” He propped his free hand against the side of his mouth and spoke in an exaggerated whisper: “Don’t tell him, but a minute ago he appeared to be melting.” He lifted his glass. “Have one?”
“I have to meet my adviser in half an hour.”
“I’ll take that as a yes. Tim, this is Liz Macomb, my girlfriend. Liz, Tim. Don’t recall his last name, but I’m sure it’ll come to me. Say your hellos while I fix this girl a cocktail.”
The polite thing to do would have been to stand, but somehow this seemed too formal, and I decided against it. Also, I wasn’t sure I could actually accomplish this.
“Hi,” I said.
She sat on the bed, folded her slender legs beneath herself, and drew the hem of her dress over her knees. “How do you do, Tim? So you’re the lucky winner.”
Lear was sloppily pouring gin. “Tim here is from Ohio. That’s about all I remember.”
“Ohio!” She spoke this word with the same delight she might have used for Pago Pago or Rangoon. “I’ve always wanted to go there. What’s it like?”
“You’re kidding.”
She laughed. “Okay, a little. But it’s your home. Your patria. Your pays natal. Tell me anything.”
Her directness was totally disarming. I struggled to come up with something worthy of it. What was there to say about the home I’d left behind?
“It’s pretty flat, I guess.” I winced inwardly at the lameness of the remark. “The people are nice.”
Lear handed her a glass, which she accepted without looking at him. She took a tiny sip, then said, “Nice is good. I like nice. What else?”
She had yet to avert her eyes from my face. The intensity of her gaze was unsettling, though not unwelcome—far from it. I saw that she had a faint swirl of peach fuzz, dewy with sweat, above her upper lip.
“There really isn’t very much to tell.”
“And your people? What do they do?”
“My father’s an optometrist.”
“An honorable profession. I can’t see past my nose without these things.”
“Liz is from Connecticut,” Lear added.
She took a second, deeper sip, wincing pleasurably. “If it’s all right with you, Jonas, I’ll speak for myself.”
“What part?” I said, as if I knew the first thing about Connecticut.
“Little town called Greenwich, dah-ling. Which I’m supposed to hate, there’s probably no place more hateable, but I can’t seem to manage it. My parents are angels, and I adore them. Jonas,” she said, gazing into her glass, “this is really good.”
Lear dragged a desk chair to the center of the room and lowered himself onto it backward. I made a mental note that this would be how I sat from now on.
“I’m sure you can describe it better than that,” he said, grinning.
“This again. I’m not some dancing monkey, you know.”
“Come on, pumpkin. We’re totally wasted.”
“ ‘Pumpkin.’ Listen to you.” She sighed, puffing out her cheeks. “Fine, just this once. But to be clear, I’m only doing this because we have company.”
I had no idea what to make of this exchange. Liz sipped again. For an unnervingly long interval, perhaps twenty seconds, silence gripped the room. Liz had closed her eyes, like a medium at a séance attempting to conjure the spirits of the dead.
“It tastes like—” She frowned the thought away. “No, that’s not right.”
“For God’s sake,” Lear moaned, “don’t be such a tease.”
“Quiet.” Another moment slipped by; then she brightened. “Like…the air of the coldest day.”
I was amazed. She was exactly right. More than right: her words, rather than functioning as a mere decoration of the experience, actually deepened its reality. It was the first time that I felt the power of language to intensify life. The phrase was also, coming from her lips, deeply sexy.
Lear gave an admiring whistle through his teeth. “That’s a good one.”
I was frankly staring at her. “How did you do that?”
“Oh, just a talent I have. That and twenty-five cents will get you a gumball.”
“Are you some kind of writer?”
She laughed. “God, no. Have you met those people? Total drunks, every one.”
“Liz here is one of those English majors we were talking about,” Lear said. “A burden on society, totally unemployable.”
“Spare me your crass opinions.” She directed her next words to me: “What he’s not telling you is that he’s not quite the self-involved bon vivant he makes himself out to be.”
“Yes, I am!”
“Then why don’t you tell him where you were for the last twelve months?”
In my state of information overload, and under the influence of three strong drinks, I had overlooked the most obvious question in the room. Why had Jonas Lear, of all people, needed a floater for a roommate?
“Okay, I’ll do it,” Liz said. “He was in Uganda.”
I looked at him. “What were you doing in Uganda?”
“Oh, a little of this, a little of that. As it turns out, they’ve got quite a civil war going on. Not what the brochure promised.”
“He was working in a refugee camp for the U.N.,” Liz explained.
“So I dug latrines, handed out bags of rice. It doesn’t make me a saint.”
“Compared to the rest of us, it does. What your new roommate hasn’t told you, Tim, is that he has serious designs on saving the world. I’m talking major savior complex. His ego is the size of a house.”
“Actually, I’m thinking of giving it up,” Lear said. “It’s not worth the dysentery. I’ve never shat like that in my life.”
“Shit, not ‘shat,’ ” Liz corrected. “ ‘Shat’ is not a word.”
These two: I could barely keep up, and the problem wasn’t merely that I was smashed, or already half in love with my new roommate’s girlfriend. I felt like I had stepped straight from Harvard, circa 1990, into a movie from the 1940s, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn duking it out.
“Well, I think English is a great major,” I remarked.
“Thank you. See, Jonas? Not everyone is a total philistine.”
“I warn you,” he told her, wagging a finger my direction, “you’re talking to another dreary scientist.”
She made a face of exasperation. “Suddenly in my life it’s raining scientists. Tell me, Tim, what kind of science do you do?”
“Biochemistry.”
“Which is…? I’ve always wondered.”
I found myself strangely happy to be asked this question. Perhaps it was just a matter of who was asking it.
“The building blocks of life, basically. What makes things live, what makes them work, what makes them die. That’s about all there is to it.”
She nodded approvingly. “Well, that’s nicely said. I’d say there’s a bit of the poet in you after all. I’m beginning to like you, Tim from Ohio.” She polished off her drink and set it aside. “As for me, I’m really here to form a philosophy of life. An expensive way to do it, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I’ve decided to go with it.”
This luxurious ambition—four years of college at twenty-three grand a pop to amass a personality—struck me as another alien aspect of her that I was hoping to learn more about. I say alien, but what I mean is angelic. By this point, I was utterly convinced that she was a creature of the spheres.
“You don’t approve?”
Something in my face must have said so. I felt my cheeks grow warm. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t say anything. Piece of advice. ‘That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man, if with his tongue he cannot win a woman.’ ”
“I’m sorry?”
“Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona. In plain English, when a woman asks you a question, you better answer.”
“If you want to get her into bed,” Lear added. He looked at me. “You’ll have to excuse her. She’s like the Shakespeare channel. I don’t understand half the things she says.”
I knew almost nothing about Shakespeare. My experience of the bard was limited, like many people’s, to a dutiful slog through Julius Caesar (violent, occasionally exciting) and Romeo and Juliet (which, until that moment, I’d found patently ridiculous).
“I just meant I’ve never met anybody who thinks that way.”
She laughed. “Well, if you want to hang around with me, bub, better bone up. And with that,” she said, rising from the bed, “and speaking of which, I must be off.”
“But you’re not half as drunk as we are,” Lear protested. “I was hoping to have my way with you.”
“Weren’t you just.” At the doorway, she looked back at me. “I forgot to ask. Which are you?”
One more question I had no answer for. “Come again?”
“Fly? Owl? A.D.? Tell me you’re not Porcellian.”
Lear answered in my stead: “Actually, our boy here, though technically a junior, has yet to experience this aspect of Harvard life. It’s a complicated story I’m much too drunk to explain.”
“So, you’re not in a club?” she said to me.
“There are clubs?”
“Final clubs. Somebody pinch me. You really don’t know what they are?”
I had heard the term, but that was all. “Are they some kind of fraternity?”
“Um, not exactly,” Lear said.
“What they are,” Liz explained, “are anachronistic dinosaurs, elitist to the core. Which also happen to throw the best parties. Jonas is in the Spee Club. Like his daddy and his daddy’s daddy and all the Lear daddies since fish grew legs. He’s also the whattayacallit. Jonas, what do you call it?”
“The punchmaster.”
She rolled her eyes. “And what a title that is. Basically, it means he’s in charge of who gets in. Honeybunch, do something.”
“I only just met the guy. Maybe he’s not interested.”
“Sure I am,” I said, though I wasn’t sure at all. What was I letting myself in for? And what did something like that cost? But if it meant spending more time in Liz’s company, I would have walked through fire. “Absolutely. I’d definitely be interested in something like that.”
“Good.” She smiled victoriously. “Saturday night. Black tie. See, Jonas? It’s settled.”
I had no doubt that it was.
The first problem: I didn’t own a tuxedo.
I had worn one once in my life, a powder-blue rental with navy velvet accents, paired with a ruffled shirt that only a pirate could have loved and a clip-on bow tie fat as a fist. Perfect for the island-themed senior prom at Mercy Regional High School (“A Night in Paradise!”) but not the rarefied chambers of the Spee Club.
I intended to rent one, but Jonas convinced me otherwise. “Your tuxedo life,” he explained, “has only just begun. What you need, my friend, is a battle tux.” The shop he took me to was called Keezer’s, which specialized in recycled formal wear cheap enough to vomit on without compunction. A vast room, unfancy as a bus station, with moth-eaten animal heads on the walls and air so choked with naphthalene it made my sinuses sting: from its voluminous racks I selected a plain black tux, a pleated shirt with yellow stains under the arms, a box of cheap studs and cuff links, and patent leather dress shoes that hurt only when I walked or stood. In the days leading up to the party, Jonas had adopted a persona that was somewhere between a wise young uncle and a guide dog for the blind. The selection of the tux was mine, but he insisted on choosing my tie and cummerbund, examining dozens before settling on pink silk with a pattern of tiny green diamonds.
“Pink?” Needless to say, it wasn’t anything that would have flown in Mercy, Ohio. A powder-blue tux, yes. A pink tie, no. “Are you sure about this?”
“Trust me,” he said. “It’s the kind of thing we do.”
The party, as I understood it, would be a sort of elaborate first date. Members would have the chance to look over fresh prospects, called “punchees.” I was worried that I didn’t have anyone to bring, but Jonas assured me that I was better off alone. That way, he explained, I would have the opportunity to impress the flotilla of unescorted women imported for the occasion from other colleges.
“Get two of them into bed, and you’re definitely in.”
I laughed at the absurdity. “Why only two?”
“I mean at the same time,” he said.
I had not seen Liz since my first day in Winthrop House. This did not seem strange to me, as she lived in Mather, far down the river, and moved in an artsier crowd. I had, however, through discreet, well-spaced questioning, managed to learn more about her connection to Jonas. They were not, in fact, a strictly Harvard couple but had known each other since childhood. Their fathers had been prep school roommates, and the two families had vacationed together for years. This made sense to me; in hindsight, their verbal jousting had sounded as much like an exchange between two precocious siblings as a romantic twosome’s. Jonas claimed that for many years, they actually couldn’t stand each other; it wasn’t until they were fifteen, and forced to endure two foggy weeks with their parents on a remote island off the coast of Maine, that their mutual antipathy had boiled over into what it really was. They’d kept this from their families—even Jonas confessed that there was something vaguely incestuous about the whole thing—confining their passions to secret, summertime trysts in barns and boathouses while their parents got drunk on the patio, not really thinking of themselves as boyfriend-girlfriend until they’d both wound up at Harvard and discovered that they actually liked each other after all.
This account also explained, at least partly, the oddness of their relationship. What else but shared history could bond two people who possessed such fundamentally incompatible temperaments, such divergent visions of life? The more I grew to know them both, the more I came to understand how truly different they were. That they had traveled in the same social circles as children, attended virtually interchangeable country day and boarding schools, and been able to navigate the New York subway system, the Paris Métro, and the London tube by the time they were twelve said nothing about who they really were as people. It is possible for the same circumstances that draw two souls together to keep them forever at arm’s length. Herein lies the truth of love, and the essence of all tragedy. I was not yet wise enough to understand this, nor would I be, until many years had passed. Yet I believe that from the start I sensed this, and that it was the source of my affinity, the force that pulled me to her.
The day of the party arrived. The daylight hours were all desultory preamble; I got nothing done. Was I nervous? How does the bull feel when he is marched into the ring and notices the cheering crowds and the man with his cape and sword? Jonas had gone off for the day—I didn’t know where—and as the clock neared eight, the appointed hour, he had yet to show himself. The midwesterner in me was forever disturbed by the regional differences in what was and was not considered late, and by nine-thirty, when I decided to dress (I had entertained the girlish fantasy that Jonas and I would do this together), my anxiety was such that it verged on anger. It seemed likely that his promise had been forgotten and I would spend the evening like a jilted groom, watching TV in a tuxedo.
The other difficulty lay in the fact that I did not know how to tie a bow tie. Probably I couldn’t have accomplished this in any event; my hands were actually shaking. Managing the studs and cuff links felt like trying to thread a needle with a hammer. It took me ten full minutes of cursing like a longshoreman to lodge them in their proper holes, and by the time I was done, my face was damp with sweat. I mopped it away with a bad-smelling towel and examined myself in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, hoping for some encouragement. I was an unremarkable-looking sort of boy, neither one thing nor the other; although naturally slender, and without significant blemishes, I had always felt my nose was too big for my face, my arms too long for my body, my hair too bulky for the head it sat atop. Yet the face and figure I beheld in the mirror did not look so unpromising to me. The sleek black suit and shiny shoes and starch-hardened shirt—even, against my expectations, the pink cummerbund—did not appear unnatural on me. Instantly I regretted the powder-blue getup I’d worn to prom; who knew that something as simple as a black suit could gentrify one’s appearance so thoroughly? For the first time, I dared to think that I, this plain boy from the provinces, might pass through the doors of the Spee Club without an alarm going off.
The door sailed open; Jonas charged into the outer room. “Fuck, what time is it?” He marched straight past me to the bathroom and turned on the shower. I followed him to the door.
“Where have you been?” I said, realizing too late how peevish this sounded. “No big deal, but it’s almost ten.”
“I had a lab due.” He was peeling off his shirt. “This thing doesn’t really get going until eleven. Didn’t I tell you?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, sorry.”
“How do you tie a bow tie?”
He had stripped to his boxers. “Hell if I know. Mine’s a clip-on.”
I retreated to the outer room. Jonas called out over the water, “Has Liz been here?”
“Nobody’s been here.”
“She was supposed to meet us.”
My anxiety had now focused entirely on the matter of my tie. I returned to the mirror and withdrew it from my pocket. The gist, I’d heard, was to tie it like a pair of shoes. How much harder could it be? I’d been tying my own shoes since I was two.
The answer was: a lot harder. Nothing I did made the ends come out even close to the same length. It was as if the silk were possessed.
“Now, don’t you look spiffy.”
Liz had come in through the open door. Or, rather, a woman who resembled Liz; in her place stood a creature of pure understated glamour. She was wearing a slender black cocktail dress scooped low at the neck and high-heeled shoes of shiny red leather; she had added something to her hair, making it full and rich, and exchanged her glasses for contacts. A long string of pearls, no doubt real, dangled deep into her décolletage.
“Wow,” I said.
“And that,” she said, tossing her clutch on the sofa, “is the very syllable that every woman longs to hear.” A cloud of complex scent had followed her into the room. “Having some troubles with your neckwear, I see?”
I held out the villainous article. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“Let’s have a look.” She stepped toward me and took it from my hand. “Ah,” she said, examining it, “here’s the problem.”
“What?”
“It’s a bow tie!” She laughed. “As it so happens, you’ve come to the right person. I do this for my father all the time. Hold still.”
She draped the tie around my neck and positioned it under the collar. In her heels, she was nearly as tall as I was; our faces were inches apart. With her eyes intently focused on the base of my throat, she engaged in her mysterious business. I had never been so close to a woman I was not about to kiss. My gaze instinctively went to her lips, which looked soft and warm, then downward, following the path of the pearls. The effect was like a low-voltage current passing through each cell of my body.
“Eyes up here, buster.”
I knew I was blushing. I looked away. “Sorry.”
“You’re a man, what can you do? You’re like pull toys. It must be awful.” A final adjustment; then she stepped back. That heat in her cheeks: was she blushing, too? “There you go. Have a look.”
She retrieved a compact from her clutch and gave it to me. It was made of a material that was smooth to the touch, like polished bone; it felt warm in my hand, as if it were radiating a pure, womanly energy. I opened it, revealing its bay of flesh-toned powder and small round mirror, in which my face looked back at me, floating above the flawlessly knotted pink bow tie.
“Perfect,” I said.
The shower shut off with a groan, widening my awareness. I had forgotten all about my roommate.
“Jonas,” Liz called, “we’re late!”
He bounded into the room, clutching a towel around his waist. I had the feeling of being caught doing something I shouldn’t have.
“So, are you two going to stand around and watch me dress? Unless—” Looking at Liz, he gave his towel a suggestive jostle, like an exotic dancer teasing an audience. “Ça te donne du plaisir, mademoiselle?”
“Just hurry it up. We’re late.”
“But I asked in French!”
“You’ll want to work on your accent. We’ll meet you outside, thank you very much.” She gripped me by the arm, steering me toward the door. “Come on, Tim.”
We took the stairs to the courtyard. A college campus on a Saturday night follows principles of its own: it awakens just as the rest of the world is readying for slumber. Music came from everywhere, pouring out of the windows; laughing figures moved through the darkness; voices lit the night from all directions. As we stepped through the breezeway, a girl hurried past, holding the hem of her dress with one hand, a bottle of champagne in the other.
“You’ll do fine,” Liz assured me.
We were standing just beyond the gate. “Do I look worried?” Though, of course, I was.
“All you have to do is act like you belong. That’s really the whole point. Of most things, actually.”
Away from Jonas, she had become somebody slightly different: more philosophical, even a little world-weary. I sensed that this was closer to the truth of her.
“I forgot to mention,” Liz said, “I’ve got somebody I’d like you to meet. She’ll be at the party.”
I wasn’t sure what I thought of this.
“We’re cousins,” she went on. “Well, second cousins. She goes to B.U.”
The offer was disorienting. I had to remind myself that what had transpired upstairs had been an innocent flirtation, nothing more—that she was somebody else’s girlfriend.
“Okay.”
“Try not to sound too excited.”
“What makes you think we’d hit it off?”
The remark came off too blunt, even a little resentful. But if she took offense, she didn’t show it. “Just don’t let her drink too much.”
“Is that a problem?”
She shrugged. “Steph can be a bit of a party girl, if you know what I mean. That’s her name, Stephanie.”
Jonas caught up with us, all grins and apologies. We made our way to the party, which was just three blocks away. Previously, he had pointed out the Spee Club building to me, a brick townhouse with a walled side garden I had passed a thousand times. A college party is usually a loud affair, belching out a wide perimeter of sound, but not this one. There was no evidence that anything was going on inside, and for a second I thought Jonas might have gotten the night wrong. He stepped up to the door and withdrew a single key on a fob from the pocket of his tux. I had seen this key before, lying on his bureau, but had not connected it to anything until now. The fob was in the form of a bear’s head, the symbol of the Spee.
We followed him inside. We were in an empty foyer, the floor painted in alternating black and white squares, like a chessboard. I did not feel as if I were going to a party—parachuting at night into an alien country was more like it. The spaces I could see were dark and masculine and, for a building inhabited by college students, remarkably neat. A clack of ivory: nearby, someone was playing pool. On a pedestal in the corner stood a large stuffed bear—not a teddy bear, an actual bear. It was rearing up on its hind legs, clawed hands reaching forward as if it were going to maul some invisible attacker. (That, or play the piano.) From overhead came a swell of liquor-loosened voices.
“Come on,” Jonas said.
He led us back to a flight of stairs. Seen from the street, the building had appeared deceptively modest in its dimensions, but not inside. We ascended toward the noise and heat of the crowd, which had spilled from two large rooms onto the landing.
“Jo-man!”
As we made our entry, Jonas’s neck was clamped in the elbow of a large, red-haired man in a white dinner jacket. He had the florid complexion and thickened waist of an athlete gone to seed.
“Jo-man, Jo-Jo, the big Jo-ster.” Unaccountably, he gave Jonas a big smooch on the cheek. “And Liz, may I say you are looking especially tasty tonight.”
She rolled her eyes. “So noted.”
“Does she love me? I’m asking, does this girl just love me?” With his arm still draped around Jonas, he looked at me with an expression of startled concern: “Sweet Jesus, Jonas, tell me this isn’t the guy.”
“Tim, meet Alcott Spence. He’s our president.”
“And roaring drunk, too. So tell me, Tim, you’re not gay, are you? Because, no offense, you look a little gay in that tie.”
I was caught totally off guard. “Um—”
“Kidding!” He roared with laughter. We were being pressed on all sides now, as more partygoers ascended the stairs behind us. “Seriously, I’m just messing with you. Half the guys in here are huge fags. I myself am what you call a sexual omnivore. Isn’t that right, Jonas?”
He grinned, playing along. “It’s true.”
“Jonas here is one of my most special friends. Very special. So you just go ahead and be as gay as you feel you need to be.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I’m not gay.”
“Which is also totally fine! That’s what I’m saying! Listen to this guy. We’re not the Porcellian, you know. Seriously, those guys cannot stop fucking each other.”
How much did I want a drink at that moment? Very, very much.
“Well, I’ve enjoyed our little chat,” Alcott merrily continued, “but I must be off. Hot date in the sauna with a certain sophomore from the University of Loose Morals and some cocaina más excelente. You kids run along and have fun.”
He faded into the throng. I turned to Jonas. “Is everybody here like that?”
“Actually, no. A lot of them can come on pretty strong.”
I looked at Liz. “Don’t you dare leave me.”
She laughed wryly. “Are you kidding?”
We fought our way to the bar. No lukewarm keg beer here: behind a long table, a white-shirted bartender was frantically mixing drinks and passing out bottles of Heineken. As he shoveled ice into my vodka tonic—I’d learned my freshman year to stick to clear liquor when I could—I had the urge to send him some clandestine message of Marxist-inspired fellowship. “I’m actually from Ohio,” I might have told him. “I shelve books at the library. I don’t belong here any more than you do.” (“P.S. Stand ready! The Glorious Workers’ Revolution commences at the stroke of midnight!”)
Yet as he placed the drink in my hand, a new feeling came upon me. Perhaps it was the way he did it—automatically, like a high-speed robot, his attention already focused to the next partygoer in line—but the thought occurred to me that I’d done it. I’d passed. I had successfully snuck into the other world, the hidden world. This was where I had been headed, all along. I gave myself a moment to soak in the sensation. Joining the Spee: what I had believed utterly impossible just moments before suddenly seemed like a fait accompli, a thing of destiny. I would take my place among its membership, because Jonas Lear would pave the way. How else to explain the extraordinary coincidence of our second meeting? Fate had put him in my path for a reason, and here it was, in the rich atmosphere of privilege that radiated from everywhere around me. It was like some new form of oxygen, one I’d been waiting all my life to breathe, and it made me feel weirdly alive.
So caught up was I in this new line of thought that I failed to notice Liz standing right in front of me. With her was a new person, a girl.
“Tim!” she yelled over the music that had erupted in the room behind us. “This is Steph!”
“Pleased to meet you!”
“Likewise!” She was short, hazel-eyed, with a spray of freckles and glossy brown hair. Unremarkable compared to Liz, but pretty in her own way—cute would be the word—and smiling at me in a manner that told me Liz had laid the groundwork. She was holding a nearly empty glass of something clear. Mine was empty, too. Was it my first or my second?
“Liz says you go to B.U.!”
“Yeah!” Because the music was so loud, we were standing very close. She smelled like roses and gin.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s okay! You’re a biochem major, right?”
I nodded. The most banal conversation in history, but it had to be done. “What about you?”
“Poli-sci! Hey, do you want to dance?”
I was an awful dancer, but who wasn’t? We made our way to the light-confettied ballroom and began our awkward attempt to perform this intimate act, pretending we hadn’t met each other thirty seconds ago. The dance floor was already full, the music having been strategically withheld until everybody was adequately liquored; I glanced around for Liz but didn’t find her. I supposed she was too cool to make a fool of herself in this way and hoped she didn’t see me. Stephanie, not to my surprise, was an enthusiastic dancer; what I hadn’t banked on was that she’d be so good at it. Whereas my moves were an ungainly mimicry of actual dancing, wholly unrelated to this song or any other, hers possessed a lithe expressiveness that verged on actual grace. She spun, twirled, gyrated. She did things with her hips that elsewise might have looked indecent but under the circumstances seemed ordained by a different, less constricted morality. She also managed to keep her attention on me the whole time, wearing a warmly seductive smile, her eyes focused like lasers. What had Liz called her? A “party girl”? I was beginning to see the advantages.
We broke after the third song for yet another drink, slung them back like sailors on leave, and returned to the floor. I’d eaten no dinner, and the booze was doing its work. The evening dissolved into a haze. At some point I found myself talking to Jonas, who was introducing me to other members of the club, and then playing pool with Alcott, who was not such a bad fellow after all. Everything I did and said seemed charmed. More time passed, and then Stephanie, whom I’d briefly lost track of, was pulling me by the hand back toward the music, which pumped without ceasing like the night’s own heartbeat. I had no idea what time it was and didn’t care. More fast dancing, the song downshifted, and she wrapped her arms around my neck. We’d barely spoken, but now this warm, good-smelling girl was in my arms, her body pressed against mine, the tips of her fingers stroking the hairs at the back of my neck. Never had I received such an undeserved present. What was happening to my anatomy was nothing she could have missed; nor did I want her to. When the song ended, she placed her lips against my ear, her breath a sweet exhalation that made me shudder.
“I have coke.”
I found myself, then, sitting beside her on a deep leather couch in a room that looked like something in a hunting lodge. From her purse she produced a small packet made of notebook paper, sealed by complex folding. She used my Harvard ID to arrange the coke in two fat lines on the coffee table and rolled a dollar bill into a tube. Cocaine was an aspect of college life that I had not experienced but did not see the harm of. She bent to the table, sucked the powder deep into her sinuses with a delicate, girlish snort, and passed me the bill so that I might do the same.
It wasn’t bad at all. It was, in fact, very good. Within seconds of the powder’s purchase, I experienced a Roman-candle rush of well-being that seemed not a departure from reality but a deeper entry into truth. The world was a fine place full of wonderful people, an enchanted existence worthy of the utmost enthusiasm. I looked at Stephanie, who was quite beautiful now that I had eyes to see, and sought the words to explain this revelation on a night of many.
“You’re a really good dancer,” I said.
She leaned forward and took my mouth with hers. It was not a schoolgirl’s kiss; it was a kiss that said there were no rules if I didn’t want there to be. It did not take long before our bodies were a confusion of tongues and hands and skin. Things were being slid aside, unlatched, unzipped. I felt like I had plummeted into a vortex of pure sensuality. It was different than it had been with Carmen. It had no edges, no roughness. It felt like being melted. Stephanie was astride my lap and drawing her panties aside and down she went, enveloping me; she began to move in a wondrous, aquatic fashion, like an anemone undulating on the tides, rocking and rising and plunging, each variation accompanied by the creak of leather upholstery. Mere hours since I’d been pacing my room, consigned to a night of humiliated loneliness, and here I was, fucking a girl in a cocktail dress.
“Whoa. Sorry, bud.”
It was Jonas. Stephanie was off me like a shot. A moment of frantic activity as the pants were yanked upward, the dress downward, various articles of underclothing rammed into adjustment. Standing in the doorway, my roommate was in a state of barely contained hilarity.
“Jesus,” I said. I was pulling up my fly, or trying to. My shirttail was stuck in the zipper. More comedy. “You could have knocked.”
“And you could have locked the door.”
“Jonas, did you find her?” Liz appeared behind him. As she stepped into the room, her eyes widened. “Oh,” she said.
“They were getting better acquainted,” Jonas offered, laughing.
Stephanie was smoothing down her hair; her lips were swollen, her face flushed with blood. I had no doubt mine was the same.
“I can see that,” Liz said. Her mouth was set in a prim line; she didn’t look at me. “Steph, your friends are waiting for you outside. Unless you want me to tell them something else.”
This was clearly impossible; the balloon of passion had been punctured. “No, I guess I should go.” She fetched her shoes from the floor and turned to me. I was, ridiculously, still sitting on the sofa. “Well, thanks,” she said. “It was really nice to meet you.”
Should we kiss? Shake hands? What was I supposed to say? “You’re welcome” didn’t seem like it would cut it. In the end, the gap between us was too wide; we didn’t even touch.
“You, too,” I said.
She followed Liz from the room. I felt miserable—not only because of my painfully blockaded loins, but also because of Liz’s unmistakable disappointment in me. I had revealed myself to be just like every other guy: a pure opportunist. It wasn’t until that moment that I fully realized how important her opinion of me had become.
“Where is everybody?” I asked Jonas. The building was remarkably quiet.
“It’s four o’clock in the morning. Everybody’s gone. Except for Alcott. He’s passed out in the pool room.”
I looked at my watch. So it was. Whether from the adrenaline or the coke counteracting the booze, my thoughts had cleared. Cringe-inducing snippets of the night came back to me: knocking a drink onto a member’s date, attempting a Cossack dance to the B-52’s “Love Shack,” laughing too loudly at a joke that was actually somebody’s sad story about his disabled brother. What had I been thinking, getting so drunk?
“Are you okay? You want us to wait?”
I’d never wanted anything less in my life. I was already calculating which park bench I could sleep on. Did people do that anymore? “You guys go ahead. I’ll be along.”
“Don’t worry about Liz, if that’s what you’re thinking. This was totally her idea.”
“It was?”
Jonas shrugged. “Well, maybe not that you’d actually bone her cousin on the couch. But she wanted you to feel…I don’t know. Included.”
This made me feel even worse. Stupidly, I had assumed that Liz was doing her cousin a favor, when it was the other way around.
“Listen, Tim, I’m sorry—”
“Forget it,” I said, and waved my roommate away. “I’m fine, really. Go home.”
I waited ten minutes, gathered myself together, and left the building. Jonas hadn’t said where he and Liz were going; back to her place, probably, but I couldn’t chance it. I made my way down to the river and began to walk. I had no destination in mind; I suppose I was performing a kind of penance, though for what, precisely, I could not say. I had, after all, done exactly what was expected of me by the standards of that time and place.
Gray dawn found me, a pathetic figure in his tuxedo, five miles away on the Longfellow Bridge, overlooking the Charles River Basin. The first rowers were out, carving the waters with their long, elegant oars. It is at such moments that revelations are said to come, but none did. I had wanted too much and embarrassed myself; there wasn’t anything more to say than that. I was badly hungover; blisters had formed on both feet from my too-tight shoes. The thought occurred to me that I hadn’t spoken to my father in a very long time, and I was sorry about that, though I knew I would not call him.
By the time I got back to Winthrop, it was nearly nine o’clock. I keyed the lock and found Jonas freshly shaved and sitting on his bed, shoving his legs into a pair of jeans.
“Jesus, look at you,” he said. “Did you get mugged or something?”
“I went for a walk.” Everything about him radiated cheerful urgency. “What’s going on?”
“We’re leaving, is what’s going on.” He got to his feet, shoving his shirt into the waistband of his jeans. “You better change.”
“I’m exhausted. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Better rethink that. Alcott just phoned. We’re driving down to Newport.”
I had no idea what to make of this ridiculous claim. Newport was at least two hours away. All I wanted to do was climb into my bed and sleep. “What are you talking about?”
Jonas snapped on his watch and stepped to the mirror to brush his hair, still damp from the shower. “The after-party. Just members and punchees this time. The ones who, you know, passed. Which would include you, my friend.”
“You’re joking.”
“Why would I joke about a thing like that?”
“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because I made a total jackass of myself?”
He laughed. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You got a little wasted, so what? Everybody really liked you, especially Alcott. Apparently, your escapade in the library made quite an impression.”
My stomach dropped. “He knows?”
“Are you serious? Everybody knows. It’s Alcott’s house we’re going to, by the way. You should see this place. It’s like something in a magazine.” He turned from the mirror. “Earth to Fanning. Am I talking to myself here?”
“Um, I guess not.”
“Then for fucksake, get dressed.”