2.

School began on the fifth of September. And its inception marked the beginning of a gray period Matt occasionally referred to as hell, which was to say the infernally perpetual iteration of the same disappointing day.

Morning after morning he woke in the haze of Josh’s sweat stench, unsealed the hall door and marched the seven squeaking steps to the bathroom, where, under the sink or shower’s marvelous water, he tried to wash off the particles of nightmares—which were these very days, blown up and reconfigured. Then he pivoted on a heel and walked back down the hallway, fashioned from a mysterious bouncy rubber and tinted nauseating purple and mint, where if there were kids, lingering by the water fountain, dangling plastic baskets of Pert and Zest, brushing crusts of sleep from their eyes, he felt his heart surge hungrily forward at the bars of its cage—but they scraped pitiless glances over him a moment, then were past.

What should he have done? Wave? Approach at eight A.M., with nothing to say?

Back in the room he flung his legs through a pair of pants, in the oyster-colored light that the courtyard window threw, while Josh’s insistent snore rapped against his ear until, dressed, he grabbed his courier bag, shoved it full of notebooks, and bolted into a fresh heartsickening day. In the stairwell a feeling belled up in the gut like vertigo, while he stood staring down at girls and guys in jeans and T-shirts who skipped along, swapping chitchat or in-jokes—just pursuing them with pathetic sticking eyes. Next came the dining hall, that vast savanna where zebras and lions and giraffes, distanced in their social groups, grazed at tables upon bagels and mugs of coffee, immersed in their own sphere unless some earthshattering laughter or terrifying ding of spoons on bowls called them to some loser who’s dropped his tray in a spectacular clatter of plastic and Cap’n Crunch. There Matt trembled, clutching his rhomboid tray, his fear skyrocketing out like a flare set off into the sky; pacing the aisles, he sought some kind eye among these faces, skirting the preps’ table where Carly and Caleb might be seen glittering and rich and angular, skirting the table of jocks, huge statues draped in fleece, skirting the goody-goodies in button-downs who hailed from Iowa or Indiana and were smilingly, irrepressibly Christian, skirting even the dorks, because even they had barriers, passwords one couldn’t begin to know, video games and computer-code jokes, till at the end of the gigantic hall, spotting no one who would reliably welcome him, he slipped into the side room, that annex where the other isolatoes sat spaced over twelve picnic benches, facing unpaged textbooks, spooning untasted food into their mouths.

And when he exited into a crisp new autumn day, when, on time again, he zipped through morning New York, febrile with its sick electricity all charged up overnight, then passed by the triumphantly arched park and landed at Meyer Hall: what did he find there?

Droves of kids disappearing behind doors. Thousands of black spiral binders flipping open; thousands of ballpoint pens uncapping, echoing a gunshot ricochet.

Now, let’s not get hasty, he’d said at the conclusion of week one. Not even when he got his federal work-study assignment: assisting in the M&O office, that is, Maintenance & Operations, that is, janitorial labor, in Hayden Hall. Couldn’t it be worse? Like those poor kids backstage at the dining hall—who had to pick your plates off the trays and wipe gloved hands over your leftover food and mush it in the bin; through the open kitchen door you could always see their pale faces straining, bodies obscured by the revolting aprons and buff uniforms. And hadn’t he made friends, even excellent friends, with Jason? Dinnertime that second evening had turned into lunch the next day, which turned into an afternoon of chatter in Jason’s room two flights above Matt’s. Time dissolved with Jason, its littlest nanospheres scattered into the recesses of the day. Slouched at a table, combing fork tines through spuds, or lolled back on his bed, picking at a nappy sock, Jason was a penguin-shaped firecracker, delivering definite opinions on everything from Audrey Hepburn to arm hair, interspersed with scattershot laughter and offhanded quirks that made Matt think. A first chum—even together a team, The Goy and The Gay, as Jason had nicknamed them—isn’t that a solid start?

Yet as “classes began” and “people settled down”—all those famous stages he was purportedly awaiting—no one, not one acquaintance more. What was a boy to do? Sometimes, if Josh was out at the Washington Square News office and Dwight off with his preppy friends, Matt would sit by the door listening to conversations in the hall, just to get an inside track on how the back-and-forth tennis match of banter began. But it was maddening; the vital moments were either blurred or body-language cues like hand slaps, God knows what. He’d thought for a time the key was to expand the range of contact-chances; well, sir, he did that: he remained ruminant and slow in the classroom after lecture, he borrowed pens and grinned, he stood blindly before the corkboards of Meyer Hall overflowing with notices about psych experiments and fantastical summers abroad, he even traipsed out to the water fountain once per class, in case some friendly-seeming kid would be doing something, anything approachable on the benches there.⁹

Not that he hadn’t seen promising friend possibilities. There was that magically cool kid from the eleventh floor of Third North, who always wore ripped Ts under the same pinched black blazer and stepped jauntily in boots like Matt’s own, smirking, alternative, cool. His name was Scott Belfast, and the crew spotted through the window back on the first day had instantly snapped tight about him and his royal consort, that Amazonian, Julie-Christie-faced, six-foot-tall girl, who habitually tucked her jeans into knee-high boots and blond hair into a messy chignon; those two were always moistly, openmouthed smooching—dashing, romantic figures from an Antonioni movie. Matt regularly had the usual daydreams, that he and Scott Belfast would be thrown together somehow, in a classroom, in the bathroom, and Matt would say something scintillatingly witty and Scott Belfast would crack up and by the end of it, Hey (a discerning eye cast now over Matt’s clothes), why not come to our table for lunch? where he would meet Lady Liza Andrewes and the rest of the cool-kid gang, And They Lived Happily Ever After. But such an opportunity, like those antecedents fantasized in high school, never presented itself, though he had gone in search of it. He had roved Eleventh Floor, nonchalant, reading bulletin boards. He had offered the Scott Belfast hanger-on Sheila Meeks, a short girl with a mop of dyed-black hair, a light in the forecourt of Third North; she had clapped a hand about the fluttering lighter flame, grunted Thank you, and turned before he could open his mouth. What anyway could he have said? What’s up?—whatever he may have inscribed in his notes—so far was shaping up to be not much of an icebreaker. In point of fact, the only people who ever offered real openings to Matt were helpless losers themselves: like Jillian Lawrence from Fifth Floor, also a veteran of Math Counts!, the Bergen County interschool league, who once, while her strange fleshy lips foamed saliva at the corners, asked him down for dinner. Jeez! And Carel, the Czech physics genius from his floor, wished perhaps to make a study break? so often that it was becoming somewhat awkward until the advent of Jan, miraculous other Czech physics genius from Third North (what are the chances? Thank you, Lord), put a stop to that.

New York, in this context, was brutal. Gorgeous white pampered dogs loping territorially along the sidewalk of lower Fifth Avenue exerted more power, more financial, social clout than he did. There were tiny children in gingham, who could probably not say more than a handful of words, who were nevertheless more real than he was, in the eyes of the black nannies they dragged about, imperiously ordering, or in the glittering eyes of doormen encased in their carapaces of wool and brass. SoHo, the West Village, even Chelsea—Bond Street, Grove, the sink of Prince where people in capelets, futuristic sunglasses, and clean shaves spilled out of restaurants and stores, streaming straight ahead without stepping aside: he was gum under shoe; no, he was less than that. The stores were filled with things he couldn’t afford, the groceries massed piles of food he couldn’t eat, and the baseline experience of walking on the streets was blown candy wrappers and the noise of car doors slamming, taxi after taxi gathering its passengers, rich businessmen with briefcases where gold locks glistened, a group of Russian or Swedish tourists lovely and leggy and laughing, dragging their Prada shopping bags in after them, ladies crushing out half-finished cigarettes under pump toes before getting in and slamming their doors, slamming door after door in the hotel of his mind where he wandered each of the carpeted hallways in solitude and midnight.

“Aren’t you worried?” he asked Jason one afternoon. He was lying on his back on Jason’s bed; Jason was on the soiled putty couch, smoking, illegally, by an open window. It had been the usual sort of day. After Moral Reasoning lecture, he had “done errands” (fingering notebooks in the stationery store, lingering by the magazine stand in CVS with a tube of toothpaste), then made his way to Jason’s single, where they had listened to Morrissey and scrutinized the freshman facebook, as they always did. That dark tome, with its thousands of black-and-white squares like pieces in a vast, inscrutable game, could never be exhausted—there was something narcotic about it; drinking in those pictures, hour opened into hour like black flowers. He and Jason had invented categories: there were normalcies, to nab Harding’s word, fresh out of ordinary lives in bland Midwestern states; lost international students, looking blown off-course already in these before-school photos; artsos; politicos; sailors—rich, preppy, good-looking dauphins and dauphines, who lounged moneyed and easy gazing off yachts into their prospects of forever-summer—and their uneasily related subset the brokers, always fresh-washed semi-men who in actual suit jackets paged at lunch through universes of stock stats, their minds wholly trained on that blank shut book, that air-colored fiction called The Future. Almost every day Matt and Jason exchanged some bit of news that bore out the destinies inhering in these two-inch seed crystals. Today it was Jason’s turn: he’d spotted Anna Waters, a textbook sailor if ever there were one, after weeks of uneasily hanging with her normalcy roommates, at last walking icily side by side with Carly Hale.

“Worried?” asked Jason. “What for?”

Matt turned to his side. He propped his head up and gazed at Jason, unwashed on the couch in dirty socks and a graying T-shirt. “Did you even go to class today?”

“Me? Of course I did. I wouldn’t miss Professor Reynolds for anything.” Jason made the “hot” sound, a noise between rolling Spanish rs and a cat purring. “Clark,” he whispered breathily, “as I like to think of him.”

Matt fell back on the bed. “Worried. It’s October, October fifth, for Christ’s sake.”

“So what? For holy Mary’s sake, whom you must know I pray to every day?”

“Sorry. And we don’t have any other friends. When are we going to hook up with our crew?” He scrambled up and flopped forward on his stomach, propping his jaw with both palms. “What are our pictures supposed to mean?”

“Ohh, baby.” Jason’s warm brown eyes sent rays of fellow-feeling into Matt. “I’m sorry. But—and do not take this badly—my picture says Bashful Little Fag. Or at least that’s what I tried to make it say. And I do have, um, Stan and Jorge. From QU.”

“Swell.” Matt dropped his face into the maroon bedspread and linked his fingers on the back of his head. “Thank you” came out muffled.

“Maybe you should join QU. Your boots alone…”

“That joke is so agèd,” replied Matt, hunching up onto his elbows, “it’s decaying. Like your splendid stinking bedspread.”

“Now, now,” said Jason. “Now, now. Here, have a chocolate.” He held out a box of Russell Stover.

Matt reached for a turtle. One hundred calories, most like. No slice of bread this dinner. “Listen. It’s over. People are already beginning to tidy up, turn the sign to closed. Even dorks have friends now. Do you know Philip, that midget with the dragonfly laugh? I’m serious, it’s like the buzzing of their wings. Anyway—I saw him at breakfast with friends. Literally making Spock fingers. And Dwight—the other day, at the salad bar, he picks up a bowl, meets this kid: right off he’s jawing in that we’re-two-like-minded-guys way he does, and by the end of the line, presto. Invited to a party.”

“Dwight’s good.” Jason took a chocolate from the box and chewed. “He’s very, very smooth. He can do it. What about his friends? Is there even one you might—”

Matt shook his head. He’d met them, mostly, tagging along to a couple of parties. Both times, after an hour of sipping a sweet, terrible drink by a potted plant watching the ballets of hello and chitchat, he had been forced to slip down the stairs toward home. The first night, a guy named Walker and another named Taylor had sidled up, noblesse oblige, and Walker inquired, “So you’re Dwight’s roommate? Where are you from?” He tried putting them off the scent with “just outside of the city,” but next they had to know where he’d gone to school. And after that, Taylor merely folded a cocktail napkin to his thin lips, his eyes picking over the room beyond Matt’s shoulder; a sheepish Walker dug deeper into his khaki pockets as he wondered aloud: “Oh, somehow I thought you were up with Scudder at Groton.” Some illustrious academy—that’s what they’d expected! It was all like something out of The Sun Also Rises: And where did you prep, old chap? “Walker,” Taylor jutted his chin toward a group by the drinks table, “do you see who’s here.” A tall collegial type actually wearing a yellow ascot lifted a tumbler at them; murmuring beautiful excuse mes, the pair hurried off. For the rest of that evening and at the next shindig, if any of that crowd glanced Matt’s way, they might nod, might say “Timothy” or “Andrew” and offer a stolid hand, but mostly they stared through, as if he were some glass panel jerked out and leaned against the wall.

“Welcome to Scarsdale,” agreed Jason. “I know that type. Fully. What about Josh? Could you make nice with him?”

“I would like to. I’ve tried.” Well, he had, asking what classes Josh was choosing or how his day went, but the kid always responded with grunts, tantamount to rudeness. Yet Josh certainly was smart, had a magisterial knowledge of current events and a dry, acerbic wit that came out, in the conversations in the room or hall Matt was party to, as little sniper hits with the kids he knew. Which appeared to be legion. Matt sighed. “You wouldn’t believe how many people he already knows from New York. Besides, he’s never here. He eats his meals in Hillel, and every weekend, starting Friday afternoon—vanished. Home to Brooklyn.” And how could someone intelligent as Josh like Dwight, that fatuous cretin? Of course, if Matt entered, Josh didn’t even tilt his vision from his computer screen to return a handful of pained monosyllables—yet instantly he shot from his chair, was clinging to the single’s door, laughing puppy-ishly when Dwight waltzed in. Don’t fall for it, he wanted to shake Josh and say, you’re better than that. But the blank-eyed stare Josh would give Matt when he passed by eviscerated such altruism.¹⁰

“God, Dwight.” Matt let his hands fall to the bed. “He makes me actually nauseated. You know? Just seeing his big, fat face. Just hearing that voice—all husky, as if he’s so sincere—ugh, it just makes me want to gag. Pass me that box again. Please.” He lifted out a white-chocolate square. Alas, no glass of milk this evening. Maybe he wouldn’t even be hungry. He really did feel stomach-sick.

“You know who he reminds me of? Bill Clinton. The scratchy voice? So earnest; even the way he looks at you…That boy has it down. Mm, I’m kind of nauseous too. Nauseated. Whatev’.” Jason tossed the box to the couch so the chocolates jumped. “Let’s go down to din.”

Matt checked his watch. “It’s only five forty-five! It’s so empty now. It’s kind of sad.”

Jason stared at him. “The dining hall’s open. I’m hungry. Let’s go.”

“Fine,” huffed Matt. And thudded down two flights to change his sweaty shirt.

Dear God: no, not now. Dwight was home; through the open single door Matt could hear that smooth operator rapping on the cordless from all the way down in the double, where he rummaged through the wardrobe for something clean. “You’re too kind,” Dwight was saying. A gentle thunk-thunk indicated he was playing catch with his ridiculous springy ball against the wall. “That’s very nice of you to say. And listen, hey, I had no idea you lived so close. No, no, I didn’t. You should come in sometime, have lunch around here, see the place. Yeah, whenever you can. Don’t be silly—that would be great. We would totally love that. All right. Don’t believe me! All right, well, if you get a free day sometime. All right. And you know what? Matt just came in, I just heard him. Okay, we’ll talk again. Have a great evening…” Dwight’s sprightly steps crossed the common room—one of Dwight’s friends wanted to talk to him? Matt felt a caffeine rush shoot up and illuminate his brain, incandescent electric hot—then Dwight was in the doorway extending the cordless and a toothy smile. “Your mother.”

Matt grabbed the phone. “Mom?!” He smiled grimly at Dwight and shut the double’s door.

Her nasal voice came over the line. “What a nice boy that roommate of yours is. He’s so polite. Dwight, it’s Dwight, right?”¹¹

Matt coughed and turned away from the door, squeezing himself to the far end by the window in case Dwight could still hear. “Yes, it’s Dwight.” Infallible. Her instinct for needling was unerring. In the five-odd weeks since school’s start, her interest in all things NYU had been tepid, to say the least. Having gamely accepted being left behind (when he’d called the day after, she noted only that the move must have been “real hot”), she contented herself on his biweekly calls with the passing of tidbits about Hollywood movies or what Tenafly High moms had lately picked up a jug of milk at the market (luckily rare, as Food Emporium in Fort Lee was where their schmancier groceries habitually hailed from). But in moments on the phone with Dwight—bingo! She knew!

“I thought so. So polite. He just invited me to lunch.”

“What did you say?” Please God let her not have said anything about the A&P!

“I said I couldn’t, I said I was busy!” Her voice went shrilly high. She laughed; something distasteful in that laugh, a girlish flutter he didn’t recognize. It was almost: flirtatious. Jesus. Imagine her showing up—Dwight would dismiss her 180 pounds on sight as a frowzy-headed grocery bag blown to his doorstep from white-trash land.

“…political science.” She was polishing off something he’d missed. “What’s your major?”

“Um, I don’t know yet, Mom. We—we don’t have to decide until the end of sophomore year.”

“Huh,” she said. Satisfied; confirmed. I thought so. Failure. “Well, could you do political science?”

“Of course I could,” he snapped. “But I won’t.”

“Why not? It sounds very—”

“Because I hate it.”

“—very intaresting. Okay, Matt, what’s the matter? You hungry? You always get so cranky when you get hungry.”

“I’m sorry, Mom. Actually: uh, that is it. See, I was just going down to dinner.”

“Oh! You shoulda just said so. Go, go! Make sure to get plenty of good meat. All I wanted to tell you anyway is that I saw on TV there’s a humungous sale going on at Macy’s and I know you don’t have any pajamas. I know you think those little shorts are enough—”

“Ma!” He slept in boxers and a T-shirt. “Mom, I’m fine!”

“You could at least get a robe…”

“Mom, I have a robe. Don’t worry about it! But thank you. I’m fine. Okay? I better go. I’m meeting a guy for dinner. A friend.”

A silence on the line. His mother knew his friend situation. Though the topic had never crossed her lips. “Okay,” she said, her voice strangely indeterminate of feeling, “you better hurry up then. G’bye.”

He felt himself flush. A little Rubicon had been crossed here. After all these years of wondering why she didn’t try to help, or console, or at least admit it: what sort of freak he was. At worst she had been deliberately turning a blind eye, at best it was embarrassment. Why had he avoided telling her about Jason—except to forestall a vulnerable, open moment? Well, here. There had been no congratulations. In fact, she had practically raced off the line. A lightness was in his brain, a feeling of blood rushing everywhere unobstructed in his body. He was loosed from something, some long, rotting almost umbilical line. Here at school, out of her reach, he was a new sort of person; she didn’t know him anymore, didn’t even have that on him. He skipped out, dropped the phone on its cradle, and zoomed into the hallway, down the flights of stairs to the lobby.

“There you are.” Jason sprang up from the wooden bench. “Oh, much cleaner.”

“Sorry,” he said, grinning contentedly down at the shirt he’d neglected to change. “My mother called and wouldn’t let me get off the phone.”

At the food stations, he drizzled full-fat dressing over his salad in celebration and at the last minute snatched a peanut-butter cream pie. Over dinner he found himself uncommonly gregarious—on, as if skate-boarding through universes of words, snazzy. And when near the end Jason waved to Stan just entering the conveyor-belt line, Matt wondered aloud, “You know, you might be onto something. With QU.” Wasn’t that Jason’s gold mine for new friends? How could we have underestimated this avenue?

“You wanna join QU?” Jason lifted out a green Jell-O cube.

Matt happily banged the cool Formica table. “I mean, activities. I mean, duh! That’s the way to do it!”

Activities. When he got back from dinner—the suite becalmed, empty of Dwight and Josh—he crept into the common room. Trembling, he flipped through the student handbook, the buzz of the fluorescent light like the noise of his own lasery excitement. There were, oh my God, dozens and dozens of clubs. And all this time he’d thought of joining a club as mainly ornamental, a kind of extra, what one did after firmly settling into a social position. Here he was taking laborious water-fountain trips in Meyer Hall, smoking hopefully outside the dorm: when how much more abundant, how much more prolonged were the contact opportunities these offered. He leaned back on a chair and raked his eyes over the list. Plum Blossom Wushu Society—whatever is that? such a beautiful name! Ah, tomorrow he could winnow this tremendous register down to two or three suitables. Quite true; he shook his head in disbelief he had failed to consider it all properly until just now.

         

That night, capitulating to the precipitous tail-off of his pie’s sugar rush, Matt went to bed shamefully early. And thus, having rested already, after Josh roused him at four—when Josh’s sleep cycle reverberated the double with its loudest, battering-ram snores—Matt was wakeful enough, even once the room quieted, to hear another noise.

A girl was crying. Through the fire door, its light wood letting through the sound.

There were five girls living next door. Obviously it was not Carly Hale, who had probably not lost a tear from the glacier of herself in all of her eighteen years; there was Sara Carter, who Matt knew for a fact lived on the far side of the suite by that window shade she had painted orange, visible from the street; Marcia Brandton was definitely out, as Matt had witnessed her leaving Third North with an overnight bag and a mantle of impenetrable hauteur; then Jennifer Liu—but, so happy, such the decent nice-nice type, plus, with her shrill pipsqueak? it just didn’t sound right.

Mary: the Egyptian girl, with the floating dark hair, Mary, who always looked as if she’d just eaten a poisonous mushroom. What a quiet girl! Had he ever heard her speak? Only the eyes, behind pearly-rose-rimmed glasses, were expressive: calm, implacable, but somehow definitely sensitive, soft and rich in their deep velvety blackness. What did he know about her? Her mother was an architect, he had heard someone say. She was middle height, with an innocuous slender figure; she wore long cotton collarless shirts over shapeless tan pants, no-brand sneakers; she had a very erect posture and moved gracefully, placing one foot in front of the other quite straight. Had he ever even seen her eating in the dining hall? Maybe not with anyone and not alone, not at all. Now and then, though, she could be spotted in the common lounge, with furred slippers and sheaves of crisp blue airmail paper on which she transcribed line after line in a steady hand.

She was still weeping. A water clock, self-enclosed, neither speeding nor slowing.

He understood. He recognized this kind of desolation, the pure blackviolet bloom opening to enclose you with its Venus flytrap mouth. You’re not alone, he could get up and whisper, it will get better—but these cheerful platitudes, they never would have helped him; he could not just unload them on her. Still, he felt linked with her, invisibly, firmly: as if the two of them were two green shoots tied together through the fire door.

Forty-eight hours later it happened again. He woke up, heard her. And often from that night on, he listened. Ever a light sleeper, he hardly needed to try: some hollowed-out time, he would flash awake, fold his arms behind-head, and, sure enough, if Josh stopped snoring, the noise would float in, ghostlike, unbodied. There might come a few small coughs, or little breath-catch gasps, but otherwise Mary kept up an uninterrupted weeping. Eventually the sound would diminish, not as if she’d stopped, exactly, simply grown quieter or faced away from the door. Then he’d shut his eyes and without trouble plummet into slumber.

In the days, he watched her. He watched her padding gravely along the hall to the bathroom with her toiletries in a wicker basket. He watched her methodically chewing corn chips while she read the contents of the bulletin board. He watched her bending to take a drink from the fountain—first she took off her big glasses and then, with the same hand, cupped the curly fringe away from her forehead in a way that made her round olive face almost beautiful. What else could he do? Everything that happened between them at night happened without her knowledge. And in the hallway, under the fluorescence of day, it all seemed as distant as something in another country, another life.