1.
The bedeviling notion that his new roommates would be in any position to mock him was instantly dispelled when Matt pushed open the door of Room 403. There at the end of a dim corridor, two figures stood silhouetted against a bright white wall: one large and broad-chested, his crossed arms fanning open now for a grand fool’s wave, the other lumpish, painfully hunched, even from this distance visibly a noncontender. Matt moved closer, tennis sneakers smacking on the waxed wooden floor, eyes adjusting from the fluorescence of the dorm’s outer hall. The big guy was actually wearing—dear God!—that purple freebie WELCOME NYU CLASS OF 1999 T-shirt they were giving away downstairs, a pair of khakis, puffy running sneakers, and a sublimely cheerful hick’s grin. The smaller one, idol-still, was dressed in a brown button-down that hung over graying black jeans, his feet encased in orthopedicky black shoes, his pale head protruding like a mushroom. From the vector of his glasses, he seemed to be staring at the back of the first guy’s head, an embarrassing, dreamy smile on his soft lips.
For a moment—ah, blessed moment, like hanging upside down on a swing while the whole blue-sky world spins, dizzyingly far below—Matt’s stomach somersaulted, and everything warm and kind in him went gushing toward these two strangers. To think that as late as an hour ago, skimming above the steel-blue Hudson on the George Washington Bridge, he’d still been earnestly praying for a reprieve from this Dwight Smeethman of Somewhere, Minnesota and Joshua Cohn of Brooklyn, that some miracle could blind them from whatever chink there might be in his untried social armor. Please! These two? How innocent, helpless, like puppies trying to lick your hand from the gurney, where in minutes someone would come put them to sleep—or at least so the big hick seemed, waving manically, irrepressibly happy. Well. Clearly, fate was throwing the first pitch here underhand, a giant, innocuous softball. Shifting the cardboard box pressed to his chest and surreptitiously wiping a hand free of clamminess for his practiced high five, Matt stepped up.
Then, without warning, a series of small accidents happened.
Really, Matt had timed it expertly—just at the right moment raising his hand to meet that of the sandy-haired guy lunging forward—yet what he came crashing down on was the kid’s forearm. A short struggle ensued as Matt’s hand darted about, wildly seeking to strike palm. “Whoa,” said the guy, rueful. “It’s okay, buddy—just trying to shake your hand.” The guy looked over to the right: no! Here were four other guys, two standing, two sitting in wooden chairs pulled from desks, shades of sly amusement on their faces.
Now Matt dropped the box. Now he gasped. Now the box was cracking, bits of his notes’ yellow legal paper showing through the tape. “Oh my God,” he said, “I’m so sorry.” Instantly, he knew: saying this was precisely as stupid as that time in fourth-grade science when he had clapped his hands ecstatically on seeing the green of a seedling peeking from his Dixie cup and gasped, Oh my goodness, so that Mrs. Markham the teacher, ashamed for him, had actually had to look away from those rows of kids clapping, mock-gasping, Oh my goodness! all over the room.
“It’s okay, buddy!” The guy had slapped a broad, reassuring hand to Matt’s back. “It’s your room—you can put that anywhere!” He laughed convivially at Matt, at the four kids gathered together, at the powder-pale kid standing still by the back wall. “So, welcome, Matthew! It’s excellent to meet you finally, face to face!”
“Thanks. You too, I mean. Totally excellent. Oh, um, but, actually, it’s Matt.”
“Right on!” The guy gave Matt a diplomatic grin. Okay, if you say so. “Well, I’m Dwight. So, guys, this is my roomie Matt; Matt, I want you to meet some guys from down the hall, Ken, Dan, Ben, and—ah!” Dwight broke off, skipping the fourth. “What am I thinking! Before we go any further,” with a steady pressure on his shoulder, Dwight wheeled Matt around, “our other roommate, Josh!” Dwight flourished with his free hand—voilà!
How-style, the pale kid by the back wall lifted an arm furred with tiny black hairs, then awkwardly thrust it down. “’Lo.” He flushed, glancing quickly at Dwight.
Somehow—was it Josh’s reverential look? the way Dwight casually looped an arm about Matt’s neck and dragged him this way and that over the room, to the open door of a single bedroom and then by a double, waving over windows and desks and speaking so confidently, so fait accompli of the necessity of drawing lots? who can say from what several flowers the honey of an intimation is made, but at any rate—Matt understood.
They thought yours truly their inferior! I mean, how funny! Mr. Freebie T-shirt on the one hand, and here—Dork City, this overgrown pastry of a Josh! Quite, quite droll. The hand thing was a dreadful mix-up, of course, and the box, but—please! I mean, merely let them scan his clothing, exactly in accordance with the styles he’d espied and copied down from life. These were real vintage gray fine-wale cords from the secondhand section at Urban Outfitters. This was a hipster T from Screaming Mimi’s. These were Adidas. Or maybe they didn’t know enough about sneakers to comprehend?
“What do you think, Matt?” Dwight was beaming at him.
“Hmm? Sorry, what was that?”
“It’s all right.” Dwight granted him a tired, knowing smile. “Buddy. You must be exhausted from your long drive.”
“No, no—oh.” Matt caught himself before bringing up New Jersey. “I’m fine.” He nodded vociferously at the four visitors. “Go ahead. What were you asking me?”
“What you thought of the pad,” Dwight replied.
Pad. This meant an apartment, doubtless here their suite. Okay. Now what he needed was something killer to shoot back. Just a little something. To say, hey, who’s cool? Me, not you. “The pad? I mean, it’s…” He smirked for time. “Well…”
“It’s pretty great, wouldn’t you say?” Dwight cued him like a kindly teacher.
Matt looked over at the four guys, nearly permitting himself an eyebrow raise. But didn’t anyone notice how high-handed Dwight was being? Great. He could do vastly better than that anyway. There must be something for this exigency in his slang glossary. Let’s see now. “As for me,” he patted back a faux yawn, peeking through slitted eyes, “I’d say it’s the bomb.”
But the guys did not seem impressed. Hard to tell for sure, since Matt’s view was obscured, but the Asian kid—Ken?—clearly laugh-coughed, and Ben, a short, stubby guy, seemed to exchange a look with Dwight; he may have snorted, unless that was just his chair’s scraping on the floor. What? The bomb was a perfectly good term. Hadn’t it just appeared in an interview with some rap star? Maybe it was a little too advanced for them, streetwise, slick; these four were excessively white-bread for such urban lingo. Dwight, meanwhile, had a wide euphoric smile veneered over his face, as if Matt were perhaps a dolphin that had just docilely flipped for him in the air. Neat trick!
“I like it.” Josh glanced protectively at Dwight. “I think our suite’s pretty great.”
Dwight began rubbing Josh’s shoulder like a masseur. “Oh, so does Matt. That’s all he meant. Isn’t it?” Dwight winked at Matt. Suddenly, he let his hand go still on Josh’s shoulder, then flashed him, Matt, and all four of the guests a grin. It was a beautiful grin: a masterful grin. A grin that said, Let’s you and me slip off the shackles of the world, my friend, and ride away on motorcycles into the distant California night. Yet it was also somehow a grin that said, We’re making real progress on drinking-water wells in sub-Saharan Africa—we’re going to beat this whole world-poverty-injustice thing! In all the times Matt had rehearsed the thousand-kilowatt smile called Confident back home in Teaneck, he had never quite mustered up that luster or, for that matter, lost his resemblance to a slightly daft vampire. “Dudes!” Dwight announced, overwhelmed by surprise and epiphany. “This is going to be one fantastic year!”
At Dwight’s invitation, the visitors began chattering about their trips: Dan, a wiry type in a navy Izod and clean blue jeans, had ridden in from LA on the same plane as Cameron Diaz; Ben, the short guy, had packed while completely hung-over from a humungous going-away party he and three of his friends had thrown, which led into a discussion of graduation parties. Matt recalled the way he had celebrated his own graduation: a noontide trip to Charlie Brown’s, during which his mother sniffed at his sticking to the smorgasbord salad bar (as ever unable to appreciate the need for that dietary regimen practiced since the reception of his acceptance letter), followed by, at home, in the backyard, a well-tended bonfire of high school things—AP Chem notes, SAT prep books, and, most deliciously of all, materials from the college counseling office, such as the form where Mr. Blaine had penned a list of distant second-tier schools. Did they really think they could ship him off to “special” places like Reed College? We think you will do best in a smaller environment, where uniqueness is treasured and your distinctive gifts will not get lost… Those appalling naysayers.
They were getting up, the visitors. They were stretching, preparing to leave. Missed your chance! “Ah, g’bye,” Matt croaked out, hastily shooting up from the desk as they started to walk past. “Catch you later.” He gave the first one, Ben, a sprightly wink.
Oh. No.
Ben did not smile. Instead, his face twisted up like some sort of badly manufactured Cabbage Patch Kid. His head jolted back in disgust or astonishment, his ugly squat mouth dropping open. “Catch you later,” the guy repeated, gruff, not without perhaps a taint of irony. He was a few paces past when his voice returned, borne up from the echoey corridor. “Did you see that?”
“Ssh.”
“He winked at me.”
“Ssh.”
“I’m telling you, the kid—”
The door slammed shut, blotting them out.
Matt squeezed his eyes closed. He had chosen precisely the wrong one. It was Short-Boy-Something-to-Prove: Matt knew that type. Like Jake Garbaccio, who, in order to make everyone on the school bus forget how easily his name lent itself to Jake Garbage-io, spent the whole of to-and-fro-school transports in sixth and seventh grade inventing new tortures for you.
Dwight coughed. “So! Guys.”
Matt flashed open his eyes to see Dwight posing cross-armed.
“I’m going to join those kids for lunch in a minute, which by the way you guys are totally, totally welcome to. I want that to be completely clear: you guys are my homies. Okay? It’s all good. Right, buddy?” Dwight extended a hand low: Josh gazed and then fondly batted at it. “Right on. But should we just go ahead and get this whole picking-lots thing out of the way?” Dwight found a slip of paper and began writing out lots, with Josh looking eagerly over a shoulder. “Bro, ready for your date with destiny?” He stretched out a palm to Matt.
Please send me a sign. Just so I can survive. Please.
—But it was D for Double when he unfolded the slip.
“Oh, bummer,” said a mournful Dwight. He shook his head when Josh unfolded a D as well. “Sorry, man.” Dwight put his hands on his hips and sighed. “All right. So that’s settled. Anyone up for lunch?”
“I’ve got to go unpack my car,” Matt muttered. “See you.”
He swept out the hall door, pushing blindly through kids and parents and bags until he found the bathroom, the stall door slamming behind him and, with a wicked twist, safely barred. But what’s wrong with you? Getting all rapt in reminiscence like that. You need to open your mouth at the critical juncture. You need to go through the motions! Keep your eyes on the prize here—do you expect another shot at a vita nuova is likely to come knocking at your door? “I told you,” he whispered aloud, hands on his naked knees. “You have to. I told you. Come on.”
What kind of a creature was this Dwight? Matt was shaking his head, a grim, tight-lipped smile on his lips. Thoroughly annoying, that’s what, full of himself, fulsome. But really: focus. Not a veritable jock, though Dwight’s appearance and movements did tend in that direction; too sharp, on his toes for that. Nice, even nicey-nice, cheesily touchy-feely and inclusive. And yet—liked, apparently. How had he managed to pick up those four guys, get invited to lunch, direct their conversation like a leader? Like their president, for Chrissakes, striding about broad-chested, generously looking everyone in the eye, a student-government type. Hand-shaking! And winking—he gets to wink! Yet liked nonetheless, Dwight. Josh seemed practically in love. A strange new species indeed. Are you jealous, sir? No, of course not, sir, don’t be absurd.
Leaving the bathroom to make for his car, Matt felt his mood tilt like a feather toward upper air: why, here in the halls, outside the dorm—hoisting navy trunks, crate after crate, a lavender velvet couch riding regally through blue heaven, all manner of stereos, standing lamps, potted plants—were scores and scores! It was absolute folly to zero in on one encounter with four random kids, or to overconcern himself with two dolt roommates, when here were dizzying, limitless other friend-possibilities. The hall meeting? The Ice Cream Bash for the entire freshman class at nine this evening? Simply, when all this unloading was through, he would return, shower, gel, and slip into the first of his crafted outfits: a fresh page, a starting-over.
Preparation was finished, now. He had done his part to an utmost of which he could be proud: via cottage cheese and beets, sit-ups in his room and long walks in the nature preserve listening on headphones to the whole of the Morte d’Arthur read by Derek Jacobi, he had whittled away no less than twenty-seven pounds of flab. Now the dun-colored sweats and hideous whale-sized turtlenecks in which he had lumbered through the halls of Tenafly High lay bagged up, shoved in sepia attic light beside boxes of all the old favorite books—the real French Maldoror, the underlined Gibbon, the Nietzsche scrapbook, the hand-made map of Napoleon’s progress across Europe, all too risky to bring to school yet too sentimentally precious to leave open to his mother’s reach in his room. And wasn’t the new wardrobe a meticulously chosen thing resplendent with his devotion? Numberless were the hours he had given this summer to sartorial surveillance, sketching hairstyles and the cut of jean and sideslung bags at Washington Square Park on his thrice-weekly field trips to the city, poring, in the Astor Place Barnes & Noble, over British magazines where lean, malevolent types slouched with skateboards. And then the hours of stretching his money until, in the smelly vintage-clothes boutiques of the East Village or down at the Salvation Army, under flickering fluorescent panels and in flimsy cheap mirrors, the look came together into a semblance of cool. And further hours, week after week, riding subways and buses eavesdropping so that later, at the drafting table, he might crack open his ripe memory in the crafting of possible normal-kid conversations. Then practicing, in his bedroom fervently chanting, What’s up, Catch you later, How’s it going, to a Radio Shack recorder—and cringing on playback, and standing up and sitting down, and trying to sing first in case that helped open the mouth muscles. There in the well of his bathroom mirror he had made the pout of Aloof, the arched eyebrow of Intrigued, various species of grin till they verily trembled in readiness beneath the surface of his skin.
Matt shut the car door with a happy bang. What now could obstruct him—from friends! Real life, finally! He wasn’t totally incognizant of what that might be like. There was, after all, Max Sanders in third grade: for almost a month they had walked to the comic-book store and chewed Jolly Ranchers and sailed paper boats in the ditch behind school, before Max defected to the dorks and refused even to wave him a hello; there was Ramin Parhiscar, the Persian boy who had befriended him for the whole joyous year of fifth grade. Before Ramin’s dad was transferred to Ohio, they had done science experiments with a chemistry set in the Parhiscars’ fusty basement, watched television, pretended to be ninjas, and occasionally walked down to the reservoir, where Matt watched his friend toss pebbles and talked about those strange metaphysical enigmas, like how did you know God existed? though Ramin was always more interested in aliens. There was the gifted camp in southern Jersey in the summer after ninth—there he had managed, somehow, to make himself plausible to no less than seven other kids and slip into their group; he had written cheerful, witty letters on the most varied subjects for two more years until one April, Chip, the very last corresponder, turned silent.
That wasn’t so long ago. He might still have the aura of friendability. A certain facility, flexibility with the tongue, saying credible things. And now there was his cartonful of slang vocabulary and sketched-out conversation notes, the little black address book in which were copied the listings of hip-seeming restaurants, clubs, bars from The Village Voice, Time Out, Paper, down to little dollar-sign signifiers and asterisks in shorthand of cash-and coolness-level. Now there were these two suitcases brim-filled with vintage cords, dark denim, snapfront cowboy shirts, and pastel guayaberas; there was a white box with that pièce-de-résistance on which he’d staked the lion’s share of his summer earnings, a pair of black calf-high, two-hundred-dollar 8th-Street-bought Italian leather boots. Ready as he’d ever be to accede to the Promised Land.
And as this certainty scattered sparks in his upper body, the scalding New York that was all around took him up, enchantingly. It seemed like scenery that might be pulled down as soon as he should blink, turn: café, deli, record store, boutique with mannequins staring glassily out at the maroon tenements icinged with pigeon shit across the way—New York, New York! Matt yelped inwardly, gleeful, squeezing warm cardboard to his chest.
But when he had dragged the last of his things upstairs and was standing by his new desk, panting, sweaty, rubbing his throbbing red hands together, the buoyant outdoor mood ended abruptly, with a knock at the door. Since Josh was absorbed in manipulating a tiny speaker beside his computer monitor and Dwight nowhere to be seen, Matt walked down the corridor to answer this. There on the threshold a smiling African-American man in a cornflower-blue button-down shirt leaned toward Matt, enveloping him with a distinctly alcoholic aftershave. In a baritone, whiskey-mellow voice, this figure introduced himself as Dirk, their RA. And then, as if it were a matter of mere pleasantry, he added that the first hall group meeting would commence in five—remember?
“Christ.” Matt flashed down to the bare skin of his left wrist. Could it actually be almost two in the afternoon? Lord, he would have to keep better track of time if he really wanted to stop wearing a watch. Now what was there to do? No time to shower. No time to go over his notes. And this—this sweaty shirt, these dirty pants—no time to find that suite of clothes identified as Outfit (Casual) #1?
“Are you all right?” Dirk’s astonishing green eyes twinkled.
“Totally,” Matt promised, waving goodbye as Dirk and his aftershave moved on to Room 404. He croaked out the news to Josh (Josh was now adjusting, at a glacier’s pace, the brightness dial on his monitor, his eyes drawn in to the screen’s blue glow) and tooled down the hallway to the bathroom. Thankfully, this was empty: Matt splashed some water on his face, wet a paper towel and scooped out his underarms, ran trembling fingers through his hair, which in patches was sweat-stained to brown. It’s going to be great. You’re going to be great. Hmm—I’d even say the bomb. Oh, you kidder, you. Listen: you must never try that one again. Hear me? Do you hear? I’m talking to you. I’m listening.
Then he was walking down the hall to the common lounge.
First, he saw architecture. Here were a series of dismal oblong orange couches, their fabric pilled and worn, facing, at the end of a plush acid-green carpet, a black television squatting on a low rolling cart. Then he saw people, but merely as spatial entities, seventeen or so large boulders: it was in this still-imperfect phase of perception that he nearly plopped down beside Ben, that evil troll, but caught himself in time, doubled back to wedge on the floor between a tall, abstracted guy and a frizzyhaired blond girl whose strangely yellow-tipped fingers roved almost obscenely in the fuzzy carpet’s nether regions. Once Dirk began droning on about ID cards, computer labs, stuff any idiot with a manual would know, Matt began covertly sussing out the selection.
There were two jocks: the guy to his left, in head-to-toe unmarked navy-and-gray sweats, and a ponytailed girl opposite in a ripply purple tracksuit, both staring up at Dirk like calm cows. Out. There were two preps in short-sleeved madras shirts lounging tanned and languid next to Dwight on a couch. Negative. There was one of those skinny Asian prepubescent-ish girls, still wearing her hair shapeless, pinned up on either side with faux-pearl-encrusted barrettes, no doubt a cellist or violinist or anyway school orchestra geek. Sorry. The real jackpot appeared to be two girls on the opposite side of the room. One was dressed mod, similar in vibe to Matt’s general wardrobe, her narrow torso enclosed in a white collarless jacket and long side-folded legs in ivory trousers, her hazel eyes blackly raccoon-ringed, her flaxen hair straight and shoulder length; medium-pretty. The other, leaning back on her solid hands, was chubbier, mopped by a blunt cut of green-rimmed platinum hair, and dressed kind of futuristically in cargo pants and a net shirt. Periodically she would mutter something to the mod girl, something rude-sounding and monosyllable, while the two blatantly rolled their eyes.
Matt could feel himself growing warm. It was as if there were ovens in his fingertips and a balloon tugging upward, giant, uncontainable, in his chest. In a moment, by the end of this meeting, by this afternoon maybe, he might have these girls as friends. They could be rolling their eyes together as a threesome and smoking cigarettes and stomping around the dorm, finding others for the gang—the runaway success of a gang, the gang everyone would gawk at when it passed. How stylish, how urban, out-and-out it these two were (and the blonde really quite pretty if you looked at her right)! Oh, to meet a Tenafly kid in the city with these girls by his side! What’s your name again? he would sneer on a street corner to Rob Peterson or Rande Wilks, jockishly stupefied by his manifest thin, hip presence, You look vaguely familiar, while these two laughed along, the blonde with a proprietarily girlfriendish finger linked through one of his belt loops.
“Whew!” Dirk was grinning genially. “That’s a lot of information for you to digest! But don’t worry: you can find all of it in your student manual and you can always—always!—come talk to me. I’m right down the hall.”
The room regarded him dubiously.
“Now it’s on to our real business! Why doesn’t everyone say his or her name, where you’re from, and something interesting about yourself. All right? I’ll start. I’m Dirk, I’m Three-L. I mean, heh,” he sniggered, “that’s third-year law school to you. I’m from Atlanta, Georgia, and, let’s see—I play the banjo in a bluegrass band.”
Dwight leaned forward on the couch. “What’s your band called?”
What on earth? Matt riveted his eyes to the carpet’s waving sea of acid green.
“What’s it called? The Sweet Morning Stars.” Dirk beamed at Dwight. “You a bluegrass fan?”
Dwight smiled modestly at the room. “Been known to play a little washboard on occasion.”
Oh my God. The poor fool! Full-on hari-kari.—But oddly: was no one noticing? Not even cargo-pant girl rolled her eyes.
“Fantastic! We’ll have to jam sometime. So! Why don’t you start?” Dirk nodded at a pretty girl with an oval face on the couch to his right.
“I’m Malena Jacobs,” she said. Metal buttons on her mauve cardigan glinted, businesslike. “I live in Berlin.”
“Berlin as in Berlin, Germany?” Dirk politely bugged his eyes.
“Yes,” she affirmed. Her serious mouth was pursed. “My dad’s a diplomat.”
Something interesting. Let’s see now. Well, for starters—hmm. No reading. NO MENTIONING BOOKS: that was one of the new Rules.
“I’m Carly Hale,” an ice-blonde with a nose that tapered to a pointy tip was saying, or shrieking, in a squeaky soprano. “I live on Park Avenue—”
“—So right here in New York!” interpolated Dirk, his jaw set rigid but still unimpeachably good-natured. “We’ll be fine with just the city, folks.”
“Okay. So I’m from New York, but I went to school in New Hampshire—with him and him.” Her chin picked out the two guys in the madras shirts; actually, they looked related to her somehow: their fair hair, their loose, easy limbs. “And I sail.”
“You sail?”
“Boats,” she replied, exasperated. A sinister little smile came over her lips.
Dwight expatiated on his Habitat for Humanity work, the rewarding fun of student government (aha! bullseye), and his plan to try for an a cappella singing group (this was three things, but Dirk didn’t stop him); a girl named Mary with a floating bob of black wavy hair and a strange collarless button-front tunic said in mellifluous British tones that she was from Alexandria, Egypt, and had never before visited America; Josh spoke rather impressively about his internship in international news at The New York Times; a predictable burnout in actual tie-dye and high-top Converse, Thomas Riggles of Newton, Massachussetts, announced with uncontainable glee that he had followed Phish on tour that summer; Heather Thorndike, the mod girl, tossed her long flaxen hair and sneered that she had spent the summer as a fashion assistant (going to shows, you know, parties, that sort of thing) at Sassy magazine while Sara Carter, the cargo-pant girl, had been touring with her band; and just as things got down to the wire, the frizzy-haired girl beside Matt jerked up from the carpet to announce that she, Elaina Kazides from Scottsdale, Arizona, was one of a team of inventors for a new computer language currently being packaged for release in 1997—thereby throwing him off entirely.
Dirk was nodding at him.
“That’s very interesting,” Matt said. “Wow.”
“Yes, it is,” Dirk agreed. “Now what about yourself? I’m sure you’ve done something just as interesting. You see, everyone, that’s what I think you’ll find here at NYU. Your entering class is gonna have concert pianists, Westinghouse scientists, champion golfers; I know for a fact there is a champion ballroom-dancing duo right in this dorm—yup! anyone here like ballroom dancing? They’re going to practice in the dance studio in our basement, all spectators welcome. Anyway, trust me when I say you won’t believe the richness and diversity of your peers. So. I’m getting carried away here. What interesting thing do you have to tell us?”
Jesus Christ, did the guy have to put it that way? “I’m from New Jersey,” he said. “I mean, ah, first, I’m Matt.”
In hindsight, in the God’s-eye of retrospection—where everything recurs eternally, like the figures on a carousel over and again spooling by with their ghastly frozen, lacquered, bestial smiles—there would always be this feeling of fumbling through the matériel of his life up to now: his mother, behind the register at A&P, wearing her cheerful smile and plastic purple-triangle earrings; the dilapidated front of their house, with its peeling gray paint and broken, slanted gutters, probably the shittiest of anyone at Tenafly High; his Math Counts! medals and Bergen County Debate Tournament trophies lined up on the tops of bookshelves in his blue bedroom; the rotting hammock supposedly hung by his father, making it at least fifteen years old and magically alluring, suspended between oaks in the tiny backyard; himself red-apron-clad, cooking lasagna, his specialty, when his mother, tired from a bad shift, needed to soak in Calgon, put her feet up; the nature preserve, its overgrown paths with flapping markers about the tree trunks red, yellow, blue. And over and again, however many times he reviewed this common room scene, implacable Memory, that cruelest of faculties, would always at the appointed moment whomp him on the back so he coughed out finally: “I like to take long walks in the woods.”
Matt kept his gaze locked on Dirk and a dazed half smile plastered on his lips despite the chasming moment yawning open, the circle of faces trained on him turned prismatic, cubist, by peripheral vision. Don’t. Don’t what? Start weeping, screaming, foaming?
“Great.” Dirk nodded at the jock to Matt’s left. “Uh—next?”
Another opportunity shot out of the sky. When the meeting concluded, Matt rose with the others. He watched Heather Thorndike and Sara Carter slip out, Josh get caught up in a group talking incomprehensible sports, and Dwight, cross-armed, fresh-faced, discharge expansive laughs at the preppy guys and Carly Hale. He watched his own hand dip into a ceramic bowl for pretzels to stuff into a dry mouth. How encircled we are, isolated as if by magic unicorn-horn powder, squeezed into a parallel, airless dimension, unobserved. But come on. Couldn’t long walks be parlayed as sensitive-boy, a wild Rimbaud? A gaffe, yes, but as serious as that? Perhaps they were simply too bland. Just look whom he was dealing with here—a handful of jocks, preps, goody-goodies!
Matt brushed himself clean of crumbs, heavy-lidded his eyes, and strode out to the hall.
Now. Now would he find them, the real ones, by going back and forth in the dorm, by walking up and down in it. Two at a time he took the steps to the fifth floor, eyes shorn of innocence and reverie. Ordinary sorts wearing baseball hats passed by in a cloud of sulky intransigence. A girl with a long chestnut braid and Life Saver–colored knee-highs (on someone else maybe cool but not with her large glasses, her faux Keds) turned from a corkboard to give him a probing look—directly he bent to the water fountain. Close call! Looking studiously at the wall, he scurried past. Floor Six. A number of doors here were open; Matt slowed, digging a hand around in his pocket as if distracted by searching. Framed in one door, girls sitting cross-legged on the floor beside a bed done up in lace and pink satin were chatting animatedly, a buzzing circlet of boring feminine energy, saccharine. Oh, quit, came a Southern soprano. Silly. Suddenly in a burst of merriment the voice trilled, That just is not the way the bond market reacts! Well! Really quite advanced for their age, no? Matt passed three pallid, malnourished male hippies and one plump hippie girl in a raggedy dress hacky-sacking, awkwardly jerked by invisible strings. More stairs. Oh, he would find Them, all right. Merely, a touch of patience. Probably they were more selective with their presence; they wouldn’t be seen hovering about, desperate.
On the seventh floor a water-gun battle was in progress; the eighth was oddly deserted, and, ugh, rather stinky: what was that rancid scent? Matt bounded all the way to floor eleven, bending by a fountain to wash out the taste.
When he stood up, a being of utter cool was striding past.
In one bulb-shattering flash, the kid exploded on the brain’s film. A thin-lapeled black blazer worn, cheeky, over lowslung jeans, jeans with that magical stiffness along the edges never-to-be-found in the stores Matt had seen. Beneath the blazer, a battered Sex Pistols T-shirt, ripped at the collar, where a slim sash-tie was looped, to drape along an enviably scrawny lean chest. Boom, boom, boom went his boots along the waxed hallway as—his lips knotted up in a pernicious smirk, his bold blue eyes grazing the top of Matt’s head, his black hair marvelously bed-headed, waving unkempt tendrils in the air—the stranger passed by, and with a rude leap took the first couple of stairs downward. “Babe, I’m not waiting for you,” he warned, not bothering to turn.
And now a second body appeared, a towering girl in a red mod jacket and black miniskirt, shoving her feet into gold sandals. She was blond and ponytailed and oval-faced and model-gorgeous, a version manyfold cooler than Heather Thorndike from the meeting, blooms of rose on her creamy cheeks, her brow marble-smooth, a pair of wide-set topaz eyes. “You asshole,” she drawled in a low, husky voice, and brushed past Matt as if he were part of the wall.
Matt hung over the railing of the stairwell to watch their heads sinking down the flights, first the guy’s, impetuously shooting forward without once looking back, then the girl’s, her cord of angel hair swinging behind like a last sympathetic tassel of the whole beautiful mirage. When they vanished, Matt rushed over to the window that looked onto the courtyard: where the two figures soon reappeared, walking over to a little group of bodies draped around some concrete benches.
Well, you have to go down now; that’s obvious. Oh, is it? he’s in a hurry: look, he isn’t even sitting; besides, what are you going to do? This isn’t a museum where you join the rear of a tour. What’s up? that’s what, walk down these stairs and say it to them.
Whirling through the stairwell’s turnings, Matt thudded down flights, nine, seven, six, until he was standing before the glass door looking onto an empty courtyard.
At four-thirty Matt slipped out of Third Avenue North, sped home—the plan without a hitch, his unsuspecting mother already two miles away on her shift—he parked the car, left the keys near the fridge with a red scrawled crayon note, and was speeding back via bus by seven. One might have felt guilty to ditch her so; though she had not exactly been looking forward to helping move him into school—indeed had seized each opportunity that came her way to knock all things touching his scholarship to NYU—she had at least planned on it. In the dim kitchen before he’d jetted this morning, the pencil-printed letters of his clumsy excuse had fallen against one another so awkwardly: Sorry, Mom, just found out, freshman orientation at nine-thirty and didn’t want to wake you, the sentimental bushwa of you need your rest and I’ll call as soon as possible. Yet what else could he have done? Bring her with him to school? That was no way to honor the single chance granted after black years. Simply, his mother was the magic ingredient for social doom: mix and watch all contents sink to the bottom. Well. He was doing a marvelous job of that all by his lonesome. Come on, now, sir: the time was not for the dissipations of despair but action.
How brilliantly promising was the sky as he rose on the escalator out of the subway at Astor Place—blue-black, a comic-book ink spread out lavishly, drowning all stars: though wasn’t New York always so starless? Walking back to the dorm he lit a cigarette, just as he’d practiced all summer: instantly his mind was singing with nicotine. Then, on the strength of this, in an I-can-do-anything spirit, he decided, approaching Third North with a quarter hour to spare, to set a certain thing right. After all, authority figures, though of no social importance themselves, could nonetheless skew the reception of a persona through all manner of cue, from the dubious intonation they lent your name to that singularly damning thing, their empathetic glances in your direction. Not if he could help it! He gave Dirk’s door a neat rap.
“Hello, Matthew! Matthew, come in!” Dirk seemed genuinely delighted to see him. He ushered Matt toward two leather armchairs grouped on either side of a slim mahogany end table. “Good of you to stop by!”
Jeez—did Dirk think he was trying to brown-nose? “It’s Matt.” He creaked into the near armchair.
Dirk’s peremptory hand executed a quick pencil note. “So, have you looked into the hiking trails on offer around here? You know,” he delivered of himself a sage, raspy jaw-scratch, “I believe there’re even some in the city; I might have some literature if you—”
“Um, actually, actually that’s exactly why I came over,” Matt pointed out, sighing perhaps a tad bombastic. “I just wanted to clear up—I feel like I gave you a wrong impression. Of me. What I said today. It was just really…inaccurate, you know.”
Dirk’s wide grin didn’t budge. Then he nodded, still vaguely smiling. “Okay. Why don’t you tell me again what you said today?”
“I mean, right down in the lounge. When I was all, like, I like to take long walks alone. Like, I just didn’t want you to think: whoa, weird, ax murderer!” A jaded chortle.
But Dirk’s grin seemed to tighten, to grow entrenched. “Actually, I didn’t know you meant alone—”
“Or with friends,” said Matt. “I like it both ways. I just meant it sounded, I don’t know. I mean, there’s lots of other more normal things I like to do. Even interesting things. I don’t know why I said that one.” Stop talking. “It just popped out. I could have said something else.” Please stop talking. “That’s all I wanted to say.”
“Matthew, I’m really glad you came in this evening—which, by the way, I hope you’re planning on going to the Bash?” Dirk checked his watch and looked over at Matt. “Good. You know, Matthew, starting school is a difficult thing. I hope you realize that. You’re leaving home, you’re coming all this way—”
“I’m from New Jersey,” Matt interrupted. “Teaneck? Just across the George Washington Bridge? It’s really close, it’s practically New York.”
“That’s nice.” Dirk showed his teeth like a toothpaste commercial. “Not too far from your mama’s cooking!” Indeed, as long as Matt was near the frozen aisle of a supermarket, he could never be very far from his mama’s cooking. “But, you know, the thing I realized when I left Atlanta is that home isn’t a place that you can measure by miles. It’s a feeling. A feeling of security. A safety zone. And the truth is, when you come to school, you lose that. Hang on a second.” Dirk pushed up from the armchair and walked to a dark-wood armoire, which he opened. He retrieved a slim yellow piece of paper and returned. “Everyone goes through this. It’s just a fact that for some people, the transition is more difficult than for others. You know? Nothing to be ashamed of. Here, take a look at this.” Dirk pushed the yellow sheet on the table toward Matt.
HOMESICK?1
The Wellness Center of NYU welcomes all first-years to a special two weeks of Anxiety Counseling…
“Oh no,” mumbled Matt, pushing the paper back. “This isn’t me.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Dirk’s startling green eyes were sun-lightened seas of pure empathy.
“No, no,” he said. He was getting up now, grabbing his courier bag. “It just, it isn’t me. I mean, ha, I’m not homesick in the least.”
“Matthew…” Dirk was following him to the door. “As your RA—would you, could you just take the information? I have a responsibility here. Could—”
“Okay,” he said. Whatever would make this end. He already had the door open. He was one foot into the hallway.
“Great. Thank you. I appreciate that. And by the way—oh hey, Dwight!”
Somewhere between releasing the doorframe he had been gripping with one hand and trying to stabilize the loop of his courier bag as he turned, Matt let go of the little yellow piece of paper, which tilted weightless in the air and touched down, one side, then the other, and skidded to a stop by Dwight’s feet. The giant block letters of HOMESICK? faced up.
“That’s mine,” said Matt, snatching it up.
Dwight traded a look with Dirk. “Okay.” He tapped an orange Frisbee against his leg. “Um, heading back to the room?”
“Yes,” croaked Matt.
“Be there in a sec, man, just returning this.”
It was not a disaster. It was not a disaster. Merely a mix-up, with Dirk—and easily explainable to Dwight. Later, he would try to cajole Dwight into a good chuckle over it: Ho, administrative paranoia! he could say. Back in the bedroom, Matt scanned for a place to put the paper; Josh might find it in the trashcan; he slipped it in his courier bag; get rid of it outdoors later. Not to let this incident rattle his concentration. The Bash near Washington Square Park was the culmination of his day: it was designed as a mixer, a way to meet freshmen; it would therefore singularly, by necessity, afford the chances he had either failed to spot or squandered, even in great numbers. He must be unruffled.
Suddenly, in a burst of sportiveness—just as Matt had donned Outfit (Party) #1 (a pale blue guayabera, acid-green slacks, and his irresistible new boots)—Dwight popped up at the double room. In a striped button-down, halfway preppy and halfway loud, he leaned against the door-frame to inquire if Matt was ready. “Let me get it,” offered Dwight, jabbing the light switch with his elbow so the suite sank to darkness, then led the way out, elaborately holding open the hall door. In the plaza outside the dorm, Dwight shot up an arm, barking yo to guys who barked back; “Frisbee kids,” he explained apologetically. When they had cleared the environs of the dorm, Dwight began to whistle. Abruptly he stopped and turned a face radiating contrition and sympathy on Matt. “Called my parents today. You know, I can’t believe I won’t see them for four whole months.” Voice almost cracking with priceless sadness.
Matt gazed at sweet-faced Dwight out of louvered eyes. So, that was the way it was going to go down, was it? A clever one, a slippery one. A maestro, in his own hick way. Taking advantage of this opportunity to firm up the hierarchy of underling and lord: why, bravo, applause was in order! “Listen, Dwight.” Matt tried to even his voice, to iron it offhand. “I know what you’re trying to do, and I appreciate it. However, I am not, contrary to whatever Master Dirk Proctor may believe, in any way homesick.”
“Hey buddy, I didn’t say you were homesick! I was just—”
“That’s all right,” Matt interrupted, showing Dwight a knowing smile. “You’re very, ah, kind.” An ironic torque on kind. “Your point is taken!” he said, quavery, though managing to quell a violent Let’s skip the charade! “Okay?” He opened his hands wide.
“I hear you, buddy. I hear you.” Dwight thoughtfully ran a hand through his clean sandy hair, unpersuaded, clearly. Then he scratched his nose. “Well, all right! Let’s rip this party up!” He swung his arms in wide circles, clapping his hands.
The barbarous vapors of charred hot dog hovered above Washington Square Park; now the perimeter of the “Bash” was dimly visible in a brick courtyard, crowds of white T-shirts circulating like slow moths.
“Hey, it’s Caleb! Hey, buddy!” called Dwight.
Caleb Houghton, one of the two preps with Carly Hale in the hall meeting, had changed into a blue blazer with gold buttons. Looking like a cross between Kermit the Frog and someone from an L.L. Bean catalog, he swiveled his elongated neck, nodded politely at Dwight, and waited for them to catch up.
“I’ll find you guys later,” promised breathless prevaricating Matt.
Then he dashed into the orbit of swirling bodies.2
Showtime. He should scan the crowd first. Keep an eye peeled for that supercool duo and their crew of before. He should just make a circuit, purposeful, aloof, and map out the promising. Only then should he move to a first strike.
A fatal twenty minutes clicked away as he circled, ducked under arms, squeezed through crevices: fatal, for his nerves got jangled through sheer suspense. So once he finally zeroed in on a girl hanging to a line of hipsters—here at last the bootcut dark denim, the vintage shirts similar to his own look—his fortitude faltered when, after meeting his eye, she giggled toward another girl. He darted quickly off; three whole minutes ran their course before he realized: come on, now. Probably she’d laughed at an unrelated joke? Not to be rattled—that, that was the key.
There were gorgeous clouds of cool-kid smoke by a back left corner group, and he, too, slipped one out and lit up, nonchalantly as you please, and with a perfect bored flâneur face grazed their margin. This time Matt tried male: a tall guy in goth black, leather pants, studded belt, daubs of black under somewhat woeful eyes. He was slightly detached, draping his tremendous hulk along the metal railing.
“What’s up?” Matt squinted and blew out a stream of smoke.
The guy shrugged and waved a lethargic hand in front of his face, which for one bad moment meant Get lost instead of implying Yuk, smoke. Matt half-giggled at his own skittishness and mumbled a sorry. Amicably, then, he twisted so his smoke floated aside and asked where the guy was from (his veins froze a little to hear Jersey, as if he might be discovered, but next it was Holmdel, South J, too far), and was still gearing up toward references to Steppenwolf and A Clockwork Orange, which he knew to be shareable teenage talking points, when his ship felt the first pinprick of the iceberg.
“Freshman?” said the guy. “Oh, I don’t go here. I’m just waiting for some friends. They went to hit on those girls over there.” He pointed to three other kids, also dressed in black but scruffier, messier, so that the townie B&T provenance was unmistakable, who were making two budding slatterns laugh in a way that required constant smoothing of their loose, greasy ringlets. “You can see the party from the street.”
“Oh.” As there was nothing else: “Actually, um, I have to go find the bathroom.”
Matt made his way through a considerably thinner crowd; at the sidewalk, groups of four or five kids departed, yelling, Wait up! or Where’s Chris? or unintelligible plans. Across the courtyard stood Dwight absorbed in a universe of preps, Caleb, Carly, others. Ice cream entered Matt’s mind. Let there be ice cream, sir, just this once, to boost our morale. All right, then: just this once. Shy as a bride, he slunk up to the folding tables holding punch bowls with paper cups floating in cool water, all strawberry, the singularly inedible strawberry. Whatever. He picked up a soggy cup and balsa stick, sat on a low pediment, and dug in.
Then something unaccountable happened: whoever in heaven was playing merciless tetherball with Matt’s heart, perhaps weary of a sudden, left off for a spell. For now, when least expected, while he sat gorging on the chess-pawn-shaped pediment, a plumpish boy3 with soft brown eyes drew to his side and growled, “What a selection.”
“Indeed. Would you believe all they have left is strawberry?”
“Not the ice cream!” the boy snorted. “I’m talking about the, er, Ice Cream Bash.” He plopped down on the curb. His dark jeans flipped up at the cuffs; his hair, raked into spikes, was brown but for a bleached streak purplish under the lights.
“Oh. Well, yes—of course, that,” Matt spat out. “Ugh.”
“The people are just so…” The plump cheeks scrunched up in distaste. “So fucking preppy! I thought I came here to avoid that shit. NYU—hello! It’s like fucking Scarsdale all over again.” He smiled. “I’m from Scarsdale. Jason. Hey.”
“Hey. Matt.” Matt made a waving gesture, which he was able quickly to turn into wiping his pants. “So, you were saying?”
“The baseball haaats! The J. Crew.” Jason rolled his eyes. “And for another thing, there’s not, or at least I haven’t met that many kids who are like, you know…” He cocked his head and gazed coquettishly into nowhere, sliding out a Newport. “On the bus.” He winked at Matt, conspiratorial.
What? Matt cycled through slang, lighting a smoke to buy time. A way of saying with-it? Branché, as the French say? “Tell me about it”—deep exhale—“there’s nobody here on the bus.”
“It’s like, where are they?”
“Exactly. I mean, they have to be here…”
“…but I don’t see them.”
“It’s like—” Matt shaded his eyes, miming scanning the crowd. “Come in, Houston, Houston, come in.”
Jason giggled, a genial hiccup, like the Pillsbury Doughboy. “Yes!” He adjusted his ample ass on the curb. “I might join QU, I don’t know. Are you going to?”
And for anyone who has spent painstaking summer days poring over the veriest crannies of the manual, that meant: Queer Union, the gay and lesbian student group.
“But—how am I gay?!” Matt gasped.
“What? On the bus, hello?” Jason mimed crowd-looking with his fat dove hand. “What was all that about? Who were you looking for, girl?”
A long moment while Matt stared at Jason’s chipmunk cheeks as the boy drummed his fingernails on a denim-covered knee. “Someone nice,” he heard himself say. He cleared his throat. “Sorry. It was a…misconstruction. I thought we were still on the whole loathing-preppies thing.” He looked down into his cup, where the strawberry ice cream lay melted into bland waves.
“Well,” remarked Jason at last. “Don’t worry, you have.” Matt looked up to find Jason smiling. “Found someone nice.” He gave a neat pat to Matt’s shoulder. “Hmm. Are you going to eat that?” He took the cup and shoveled pink ooze into his mouth, crumpled the paper and set it by his foot in the gutter, then turned back to face Matt. Suddenly he cackled, folded his arms, and laid his head on his knees.
“What?” But the curve of Jason’s back just shook, evidently with laughter. “What’s so funny here? What? What! Spill it, bucko!”
Jason actually fell over on his side now, sprawled along the curb, face scrunched up like a newborn’s. Finally he could breathe. “Spill it, bucko? Who are you, crazy boy?” He dabbed at his eyes. “Sorry, I totally don’t mean to bust your balls, but, um, it’s just: are you sure? I guess I never saw a straight boy wear boots like those.”
His Special New Boots that had cost the best part of his summer earnings trucking groceries, watering plants, all manner of shit work for—“What’s wrong with my boots?”
“No-thing, nothing’s wrong with your boots.” Jason smoothed his spiky hair. “They just scream West Village Fag, that’s all!” He snorted, laughing and flailing his hand on the curb. “Sorry to bruise your um, fashion sense.” He dabbed at his eyes with a knuckle. “Oh dear. Oh dear.” He cleared his throat primly. “If it’s any consolation, I happen to like West Village Fags very much.”
By the time maintenance wraiths slid from the shadows to lift plastic tablecloths around softened ice creams and stained napkins, Jason had smoked four more Newports, sketched his life story in awful übersuburban Scarsdale, gossiped about a dining hall scene, and generally involved himself as Matt’s first college friend. As they walked to the dorm on a cushion of the night’s thick smells, rotting garbage, rank whiffs of orchid and gardenia wafting out the windows of restaurants tinkling with glass-ware and silver, Jason bobbed beside, a miniature dynamo. He talked rapid-fire, on and on, and if he stopped for a second it wasn’t shut-off time exactly, since something palpable pulsed from him through the dark muggy air: goodwill? Geniality? Warmheartedness? He gave you the benefit of the doubt: he seemed just waiting for you to say something he could love.
They parted on the fourth floor—Jason was two up—and when Matt put his key in the lock, he felt he might just manage it. In the darkened room patterned by the salmon-pink lights of the courtyard, he folded his slacks tenderly, he stood the notorious boots on his wardrobe’s floor, he pressed his head awkwardly down on the pillow: Jason Kirsch, dinnertime downstairs in the dining hall tomorrow.
EXCURSUS BY DR. HANS MANNHEIM
Here, if it may be permitted, I wish to interrupt in order to make some elaboration—yet first I should issue a warm greeting to all readers, from your fellow pedestrian on this march in the footsteps of Matthew Acciaccatura! Yes, is not reading so like a pilgrimage: one applies feet to the well-worn steps already trodden by the character, the protagonist, in this case the, if we may arrogate this word to one so young and largely self-concerned, hero? So it appears to me as my body rests in a squeaky armchair of cheery aquamarine vinyl at the rear of this library, which, though smelling as it does of the debris from books, and small as it is with only two large tables and a spread of bright modern chairs, dissolves utterly from my perception as I turn these pages so that instead I run, leap, and tiptoe among these early exploits of Matthew all through the streets of Manhattan.
My friends, I did not wish to suspend your own voyages in this survey of one of the most fascinating youths of our time. How could I? Yet I must. Although I have been cooperative in a paramount degree with my research, turning over all documentary aids and providing detailed explanatory summaries to the author of the present text, it is inevitable, is it not, that between the account produced and my understanding some substance should escape. For after all, not only am I steeped, stupendously, perhaps beyond the call of reason, in varied material qualities impossible to communicate (the precise soft gold slant of light in an afternoon schoolroom, let us say, or again the mixed pepper-bleach scent of a dormitory toilet), but in the case of Matthew there is sensitive information which I by training and experience can best interpret. Should I then hold my tongue out of politeness? No, I do not think so. As to questions of right—as in, do I have the right of interruption?—I shove these aside. Do we not all wish for the richest portrayal of Matthew possible? There can be no “mine” and “yours” in this matter. And therefore I unloose the chain from my tongue so it may race about like a jubilant dog.
However, in fact it may not race too jubilantly, for what I have here to transmit is of a dark and melancholy nature. One bitter pill, my friends, and then all will be as before, merry young bodies playing social games on warm evenings. Here it is:
Until the moment you have so recently witnessed, Matthew Acciaccatura has never truly enjoyed the bliss of friendship.
What a solitary march across desolate waste territory equals that life without companionship, without some other brought as near to one as any blood relation through the magic of this specifically human thing called friendship! Never enjoyed? What can this mean? That throughout childhood, when children play with hoops and swings and scamper over rock piles and dig tunnels to Australia and consume cups of apple nectar, there was never a single “buddy” for Matthew? Precisely. How can this be possible in our progressive world? you ask. A fine question: merely allow me to open my dossiers and notes and I shall present for you the background history of this tragic person.
Nestled in the Bergen County, some half-hour journey if free of traffic from New York City, lie two adjoining towns, Teaneck and Tenafly. Here was Matthew Acciaccatura, an only child, raised by his mother (age thirty-six at the time of the events described, of high school education, a checkout cashier at the Teaneck supermarket A&P) and for a time his father (first name lost to me by a malignant inkblot,4 divorced when the subject was three, profound traumatic loss) in a two-story abode (closely resembling a hunters’ cabin, with its loose-fitting slats, now an ancient quail’s egg grey but pregnant with signs of having once been robin’s egg blue)5 in Teaneck, though due I believe to a zoning irregularity he was educated proximally in Tenafly.
Renting a compact auto one autumn day from the firm of Hertz, I visited both towns; indeed, I witnessed the very birthplace of our subject (Englewood Hospital). Sampling local fare, I consumed one ice cream at Häagen-Dazs and one grape soda (subject’s childhood favourite) at Toni’s Slice A Pizza II; wishing to take in also the area’s recreational amusements, I attended a film at the Tenafly Cinema on Claremont Avenue and watched through a window women covered in Latex attempt a sullen style of aerobics at Karen’s Fitness Connection. Here is what I have found. Demographically, both towns are almost exclusively white, with an unusual degree of affluence; many of the women who crowded in costly autos to the Tenafly High School at the close of classes wore fur coats, golden ornaments, and that stiff hair-style peculiar to the upper-class matron. If in Teaneck there exists at least some proletariat (of which Matthew and his mother fell to the lower end) to rub jowls with the Lumpenbourgeoisie, Tenafly is more extreme; I excerpt to you from promotional real estate materials: Make no mistake—Tenafly is among the most elite communities in our country. Nationally distinguished for its superior school system, Tenafly is a haven for discerning families who wish to educate their children in a public school setting without compromising on their standards of prestigious achievement. With its quaint, small-town charm—combined with the convenience of its proximity to New York City—Tenafly has long been a byword for the ultimate in suburbia among the most affluent of buyers. It amazes me when people say this country is a mobile, effectively classless society.
Readers, hear me. In this superior school system which does not compromise on the standards of prestigious achievement of a town representing the ultimate in suburbia for the most affluent, young Matthew Acciaccatura suffered actual atrocities. The juvenile homosexual Jason Kirsch has provided me stories, and I have interviewed those members of the staff courageous enough to disobey the “publicity ban” placed by the headmaster of the Tenafly school.6 Yes, I know you wish to say, Es wird nicht so heiss gegessen wie es gekocht wird, it is not nearly so hot in the eating as it is cooked up to be. We have all suffered certain unpleasantnesses in our school years. Who has not been tied to a tree in the play-yard? Who has not been tripped when coming forward to the slate? Who has not had his undergarments stolen and hooked to a flagpole? Who has not been called by some roguish label, such as “Hans Hook-Penis”? Should my mother have had the habit of pressing me to her on my return from school and thereby inhaled that unmistakable salty aroma of tears, I am certain she would have many times discovered my splotches of facial red were not due to the cold I cursed but rather to such quirks and whims of my boyhood colleagues. These youthful games, they may feel painful at first, but eventually they will scab to fond memories; at the least, they must serve as key pathmarks in our process of socialization.
However, in Matthew’s case the gay times passed beyond bounds. So you may credit me, I shall append some examples. In no special order, thus: the incident when Matthew was locked in a supplies cage in the gymnasium on the last afternoon before spring leave (fortunately, a custodian discovered him towards evening); the incident when Matthew’s yearbook photograph was taken and, pasted above the caption SHE SUCKS IT GOOD, copied and affixed about school; the incident when his ninth-grade science experiment, an innovative hygrometer, was stolen from his hands and, during an evil game of toss-ball, smashed on the sidewalk before it could reach the library, all its costly mercury rolling off in tiny toxic balls; the incident in his eleventh grade when a way was found of squirting urine through the vents of his locker, so that when he returned in the morning he found his notebooks and textbooks wet, stained (two weeks before final examinations; he could do no more than apply disinfectant to the pages); the incident when word was spread about campus that he possessed lice, so thoroughly that even the nurse, deluded, slight-brained, summoned him to the office and insisted on herself verifying; truly, so many many incidents, and so much daily hatred, the little and constant humiliations which even insolent children many years younger than he or arrogant teachers (whom we may imagine were threatened by their brilliant pupil) felt easy inflicting on him, without any second regard.
Can you still shake your heads and say no? Yet let me remind you I am in possession of facts, which derive from interviews, which are recorded on minuscule cassettes and annotated on small pieces of paper. Now perhaps you will sigh, so it has happened, we believe: but why? He must have deserved it. There must be something wrong with this Matthew.
Let us consider. What may be wrong? Do you recall certain small ones from your own school days, who were inserted in rubbish bins or had their books seized and transported willy-nilly, kept away in a most cruel fashion? So now please can you explain: why did this occur? Were they too slender, too round, too clumsy, too stupid, too clever, did they possess a laugh like the cry of a horse, or perhaps favoured a revolting variety of sandwich, or perhaps wore a wool sweater of an unusual colour Mother had knitted? Ah. If this is what you mean by “deserve,” as in “Matthew deserved it,” yes, why not?! He was different, of this we know. We have ample facts at our disposal: that he was poor in physical education; that he finished the textbook for all of first grade by mid-October (and an edition for second grade a pair of months later), that he was in a different socioeconomic stratum from the other children with their doctor and lawyer papas and mamas (indeed, after the age of three, he possessed no papa at all); that he preferred activities such as reading all the day indoors while other boys are out constructing tree forts and shooting off false pistols. In the photographs captioned First, Second, and Third Grades I have seen, framed on a wall of the library at Tenafly Elementary (he is absent from the class play-field round-up thereafter), Matthew presents neither an attractive nor confident appearance: he wears corduroys and unmodish leather shoes (this while his peers are in jeans and trainers) and gazes up like a well-greased dumpling. Yes, awkward, strange, even physically grotesque (before his spectacular loss of weight)—but was this a deserving? If you are a feeling person, I beg you: imagine what effect the total lack of any companion may have, when a boy has not a single other to confess the hot, trembling emotions brimming from his youthful soul. And as if this condition were not sufficient, please add that sequence of humiliations we have discussed, suppose an atmosphere of perpetual terror—now, who among you will fail to meet with stirrings of outrage and sympathy in his breast?
Do I over-speak? Not a single other to confess, etc., the skeptics query? I am not unaware of a certain boy named Max Sanders, or a certain other boy named Ramin Parhiscar, or a certain summer institute for intelligent children. We may strike Max Sanders instantly; after two happy weeks together, this heartless youth’s betrayal must have rendered more woe than he ever did joy for our hero. As for Ramin Parhiscar, who can argue that a nine-months’ incident at the age of ten counts for friendship? And may you not be as disappointed as I to learn that Tucker “Chip” Williams, now an engineering student at Case Western University and considered by Matthew the closest of his former summer “friends,” could not recall the boy (not even when mailed a colour reproduction of three photographs) and perplexingly, one might say maddeningly, maintained neither to have written nor received so much as a single postal card from our hero. Can this be friendship?
Since I do not anticipate disturbing your peace again at such length, perhaps I should take this moment to tell you some few words about my credentials and research methods, which until now I have only glanced upon and which may therefore create some doubts in your minds. I am a sociologist; since a certain fateful evening in May 1987, when I turned round my auto on the Ku’damm, recovered the distance back to the Freie Universität of Berlin, and pushed a note of resignation beneath the locked door of the Philology Department office, I have followed one goal: the study of the socialization of children. First at the FU, then at the Humboldt-Universität where I pursued my mentor, the esteemed Herr Prof. Arne Blum, back in those heady early days of reunification, I have devoted myself to Microsociology, specializing in particular on what I term the “lonely-child,” that one excluded entirely from the normal network of juvenile social relations. Now is not the time to introduce to you the urgent necessity of my work, which, as is my hope, will go some way to illuminate and thence, should my recommendations be put in practise, to alleviate the sufferings of the extreme pariah. (A matter of consequence to all, not merely the pariah: it is in this way we may eliminate the occurrence of those school shootings, those detonations of home-made explosives that disaffected lonely-children inflict upon peers/teachers, which tragedies continue to be wrongly credited to so great a variety of actually impotent sources.) Having completed my Habilitationschrift in 1994, I began a one-year lectureship at my alma mater and would have performed a second such term had I not then moved to America at the ultimatum of my wife, who lives now in Seattle where she has been able to guile her way into an associate professorship and is not important to us today.
Here in your country, I experienced certain financial pressures. Well, let us be frank each with the other, confining ourselves to the strictly professional: the linen paper I sent in a large variety of applications were unable to excite any institution into an interview, nor could they obtain a minor research purse. I was at the point of making a call to my father in München of that sort no adult wishes even once in a life (so to say, the soliciting of funds), when the generous actions of Herr Prof. Blum prevailed—in short order I was installed in an administrative position at the MPS Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements. As this limb of the MPS is nascent, never did there occur much mail in my shiny rolling cart to deliver, and thus I enjoyed an unforeseen benefit: many hours to devote to contemplative research. What happy days of exploration and discovery these were! In the warmth of a premature spring, about the hour of five, I would emerge from my office to walk some blocks and sit on a bench in the Washington Square Park, where I watched children of all ages at games and battles until long after dark. Who knows how long I might have gone on in this way had not our electrifying subject entered my life?
Yet I believe we do not choose our tasks. The world is full of accidents—accidents or happenings: who can truly distinguish between these? Was it accident I should meet with this lovable boy instantly before his name showered the newspapers, I, the right one, exactly the man enabled to understand him? No, I can not take that pessimists’ view. Although I may not discuss how my path came to cross so definitively with Matthew’s,7 I disclose that one private experience allowed me (and my scholarship in alienation had prepared me for) a matchless aperture onto the heart of this adorable boy—whom the media, concerned primarily with the economic benefits granted by titillation and fantasy, seemed to be doing their uppermost to slur. Thus did I pronounce: Hans, you are one who comprehends something greater of this tragic boy. Hans, now is the moment to enter the field. Hans, whichever danger or pain may await you, whichever risks you may run alongside, this solitary youth must be restored to true reputation.
Such momentous pronouncements for myself these have revealed themselves to be! Swiftly, after first shooting off a postal card to Herr Prof. Blum heralding my project, I leapt into the phase of data-gathering. I have already mentioned my exchange with Matthew’s former university, that presentation of my credentials which led to my being connected with the young homosexual Jason Kirsch. Further, in order to better understand Matthew’s plight, I sought out the key sites and, wherever possible, went under the identical experiences that had proved so disastrous for him: I visited the night-clubs, cafés, dining halls, classrooms, and even surveilled the dormitories where Matthew had once been, in order to certify the accuracy of my comprehension of the social workings of the university sphere. What joyful hours these were, dressed in my filched custodian’s uniform, pushing a broom along the luminous hallway right into knowledge! I may have resembled the extinct sabre-tooth tiger with my pasted-on moustache, but the ruse functioned: no one8 gave me a second glance as I glided along the gleaming rubber floor, drawing nearer to some undergraduate conversation, some flustered girl or boy caught in the foehn of social drama. I tell you, it is intoxicating to observe how like kittens or puppies in their naïve savagery they deal out snubs and jokes and even delicate shoves—all of this in preparing to be adult, which is to say caught in the exquisite net of human relations. Yet it was not all joy: when I listened to their laughter rising ghostlike out of sight in the stairwell or, equally mesmerizing, spotted through a window a bundle of children exchanging amiable punches, I felt something. I hardly know how to describe this feeling. I felt Matthew’s absence, so much I seemed almost to be moving in a cloud of his absence. But it was not the absence you may think of, his final disappearance from a bright stage. No, the one whom I felt a lack of was more this early Matthew, the Matthew of September, October, November, when he was not a part of the games, was unseen, an outsider with his nose up at the glass, watching, just as I was.