5.

A movie. Black-and-white figures flickering on the sibilant screen. Then a midnight stroll, an arm-in-arm. A glass of Lillet in a tiny dark French bar she pulled you to in the tilted SoHo streets off Sixth, smoking cigarettes, facing out the window onto a sidewalk with hydrant and mailbox, a sidewalk as real as they make them. But then the whole thing teetering to flight…the whole thing a hot-air balloon ripped from the silk of your heart, pistoned by lung-breath—a kiss, groping through silt after silvery fish, then the smoothness of those shoulders, two dazzling live stones in your palms—

She drank not hot chocolates but hot vanillas from the corner store. She danced to Britpop, manically shaking her black hair. She wore a white sleeveless T-shirt to bed. She peeled lemons and popped them in her mouth in sections. She liked to be kissed on the tip of her nose. She carried melon candies in the pocket of her purse. She loved, but was terrible at, crosswords. She smelled like orange blossoms in the crick of her neck. She only wrote in a deep-blue pen. She had tadpole-smooth skin between her small tight fingers. She woke every day at eight A.M. She could never properly say the word eleven. She drew cats in the margins of her notebooks. She kept a miniature tea set in a box under her bed. She was always in the mood for it to snow.

Splendor in the evening when she exited showered, dressed in a blue-and-white-checked robe, clean down to the soles of her straight feet, a turbaned goddess with a wayward smile and darting eyes who hitched up the window to light a cigarette; radiance in the morning who leapt from their yet unsexed bed to make small kettle and stove noises kitchenward—fluffing up a pillow to watch her scampering movements, he suffered actual craving in the arms to catch her nimble body, craving in the lips to ferret out the sleek, delicious crevices of her neck—until, fists on hips, she stomped back grinning to the bed and said, I know you’re awake, you lazy boy!

She hung hats on her walls, felt hats with feathery reachers right out of the ’20s with their half net veils. She had a trunkful of beaded and sequined things, ropes of fake topazes and pearls, embroidered purses and a coin-keep made of metal mesh whose openwork hold tinkled when shook. She had a collection of Venice masks, porcelain-skinned mysterious demi-faces with gouged eyes and jeweled beauty marks nesting in a velvet-topped box in the kitchen closet; she had an aviary of fake birds perching on real branches high to the left above the bed, brilliant pinks, barbarous yellow, emerald green—like a Joseph Cornell box released into air, peering down with their solemn gazes. She listened to Lady Day, Betty Carter, and Arvo Pärt; she knew all of Duran Duran by heart. She had liked Matchbox cars and cap guns as a tomboy; she could still skip stones and showed him so at a pond in Central Park.

They went everywhere. Godard, fruitsellers in Chinatown, crêpes on Hudson, gorgeous autumny exploratory voyages along Bedford, Barrow, and Commerce Streets. Often they went with Jason, who became friends with Sophie so quickly it was imperceptible—a glance, an ionic charge jumping from one to the next. Indeed, after a week of dodging and diffidence, Jason had at last agreed to meet and within the space of ten minutes, would you believe it, was giggling away on Sophie’s white couch. It pleased those two to tease him, tenderly, attentively, in a way actually that bestowed the sensation of being cherished. God knows why they still liked him, when more and more of the rope of him pulled out and was perceptible to the naked eye: his fascination with Napoleon, with Huysmans and the flâneurs of Paris, or “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” as sung by a young Frank Sinatra. Somehow they liked him still, and still; together they even seemed to like him more.

It was Jason who found out Sophie’s talent. Sure, the clothes she wore ought to have been a giveaway, like the cloche hat and pearl-crusted gloves that bordered a minimalist leather jacket, or the high-necked pirate-Parisian blouse nipped at the wasp waist with a metal-studded biker belt, worn over skinny jeans and white go-go boots. Yet Matt hadn’t understood what it all tallied to, not even with dummy Susie staring from the corner, until Jason, with his usual bullheadedness, followed up the trail of a reference Sophie dropped to her handiwork. Then Jason made her, though she picked skittishly at her string of pearls, show the gauzy blouses and dresses she herself had designed and sewn with a desk that now at a touch—huzzah!—opened to reveal a Victorian machine. Taking down a box from the kitchen closet, she brought it to the bed, lifted out crepe-paper snakes and finally streams of multicolored silk and netting, and deposited them on the lap of Jason, where he sat on the couch. “Um, another dress,” she mumbled, veiled in hair, rooting, tossing, “and this—can be worn as a top, I guess…”

“These are amazing,” Jason said quietly, after an awe-filled hush of holding up and examining, his lap still covered with blue and beige-lined rose. “You know you have a gift.”

After that she hung one on the wall, her favorite made frock, an orange sheath dress lined in light-blue tulle. She wanted to be a designer—there, it was out.

And so they shopped. At the baby designers’ in the East Village, at vintage stores in arcane city nooks, at sample sales in faceless warehouses so shushed-up, so word-of-mouth, they seemed like stage sets or underground political meetings thrown up overnight to be taken down secretly the morrow. It was a pleasure to watch her in force. Plunging into a pile of old clothes, she emerged minutes later with a purse, an A-line skirt, like a deep-sea diver returning with pearls. She liked to find him deals, and what with a faux-fur-ruffed parka, two tiny-collared silk shirts that invisibly buttoned, plus a man-bracelet, leather, buckled—nothing over thirty bucks!—soon he was looking better than hitherto suspected possible.¹⁶ What he’d never considered she taught: she pulled at seams to test their strength, showed where a shirt’s shoulders should be, wondered did he know his torso was short? his legs long? that he might go low-waisted, to lengthen up above? Beige turned his skin green, see? While the snapfront cowboy shirts, alas, puckered awfully on his narrow chest, dissembling man-breasts, the guayaberas were far too busy with their frills for his frame, and the flatfront pants went too high: but at least, she conceded, they showed off his cute butt. (Cute? He twisted in the mirror to peek.) Gradually, thanks to her cues, he seemed to be shearing off a suffocant, ill-fitting cocoon.

One breezy afternoon smelling of fresh roasting nuts from the sidewalk vendors, they were window-watching along the steel-girt streets of SoHo, among the elegant dogs, the Italian tourists, and the pine-straight models, when she, without word or pause, opened a door and slipped in.

It was an imposing palace of plate glass and laser-bright space: LOLO ZED, letters against the glass said. Metal rods hovered magically in air, suspending hangers where—azure, watermelon, lemon-yellow, magnolia-pink—numinous wraps and dresses floated vaporous and radiant as Sophie’s, yet hovering here in the dozens they seemed to inhabit their own lifeworld, like the flora and fauna of a fabulous planet.

Sophie’s heels were clicking down to the lower floor; he caught up to her in a circular room: more racks, and at one end a mysterious ground-to-ceiling thing of billowing blue material. With dilated eyes and a little o-mouth, Sophie stepped in to check out the tremulous blue ovum. It was a kind of inflated dressing room, unskeletal, delicate as parachute silk so it kept rippling and shifting, as if in infinite response to an invisible, heavenly sigh.

Abruptly, all of a sudden: “Let’s go,” she breathed, her small fists gripping his wrists.

He followed her up the stairs, past a reptile-eyed manager immobile at a slick desk, past a security guard standing still as a carved jade soldier, past the glass front into November dusk: where under the streetlight of the corner she had stopped, was crying without a sound.

         

It took some time to unpack that one with her, to understand her feeling about a beauty there that went beyond speech, a beauty absolute and no longer human, which she knew illuminated her life yet would be always out of reach—a paradigm along the lines, it sounded, of Dante’s celestial rose, or Plato’s unbodiable good, so that in the end he revealed to her how at times he had felt something like that too. And they wound up talking till it was light, unpetaling that million-petaled question of what marvelous energy absorbed and circulated through the universe, and when it was light she leaned over from cross-legged on the bed and kissed him. And when she kissed him he put his hands atop her shoulders and she put her hands on his back and when their clothes were off she guided him in for the first time toward a core of all that mystery.¹⁷

That was what they did together, opening, unraveling like mummies. Well, no. She wasn’t a mummy; there was nothing willful about her wrapping or grotesque about what it swathed. Her “embarrassing” stories meant days of squirming over English in eighth grade as a New American or being so tone deaf that she was always assigned the triangle in Orchestra and even Chorus. Big, excuse his French, whoop. But whatever she had, she did tell him. She told him about Japan; about her mother, who studied depression in a lab at U Chicago through mazes and mice and dissecting their pea-sized brains; about her father, a consultant who in the evening made elaborate dollhouses, sitting with a cigar and saw slippered at the kitchen table; about her little brother the Sega game-player; she told him about a speedboat accident, a psychic experience seeing ghosts, her kiddie crush on Johnny Depp from 21 Jump Street. And every story was like a square-inch window into her, where he could see right through blood or muscle to history, fear, irrational passion for certain things—why watermelons, why eight A.M., why Josephine Baker? why turquoise, why Grand Marnier, why the Sienese Annunciations on her refrigerator?—so that the more and more she showed him, she assembled herself as real in his presence: a separate universe like him membraned by the cellophane of skin.

In their violet-lighted pillow talk and lengthy dusktime walks, he took Recent Modern History of Sophie too. He learned how pre-Sophie used to hang around the Art Institute in Chicago and there met a boy who plucked her budding rose (a huge relief, Matt considered, for he certainly could use the teaching). And lucky for Matt, last year after Sophie had formed inseparable friends with a freshman roommate and stayed bound in that girl’s group, her boyfriend began courting Sophie, so that a fall-out shattered all at year-end. Indeed, she had been so lonely so far this year, she had even sent off a transfer application to Berkeley—Withdraw it! he croaked; don’t worry, I’ll never get in out of state—and thank God for that: how would she ever have bothered with him if she’d had an active group of friends? Oh, it was fated and strange for her at just this vulnerable time to find him. They replayed First Day over and over, both as nostalgia and running joke; he’d come up to her by the sink, kiss her cheek, say, “You have broccoli on your cheek,” and she might smack him back and say the same. Once they had a whole pillow fight saying, You have broccoli—here—and here—and here!

And she hailed from a place with a beautiful name: Lake Forest, just right. She was the silver locus of the lake; he would be happy, gratified, to be the forest about her—

But could not. There was a blockage, a granite ocean in his veins.

         

Yes, indeed there was a thing not even Sophie’s fingers could reach.

All by itself, the dorm was sufficient to do him in. Tonight it was worse than usual. A Friday. Sophie was off with a cousin down from Vermont, too family-blabbermouth for his tag-along; Jason in Scarsdale for a bris early tomorrow morning. It was Friday night, after dinner, nine, just the time when the banging began, the doors in the hall, everyone shrieking, half drunk already. You could hear them: there: and there; there must be a party on this floor. He could try to show up? but what if it wasn’t a party-party, what would he do? Thought I heard music, thought I heard noise? Safer to stay here. Yes, stay, and, like a pig in its pen, circle the suite; then, having taken green tea, lie alone here all dressed atop the bedspread in the pose of corpse, arms at his sides. Melodramatic, sir. Think so? Yes, sir. But—

Bang bang bang went the door.

Matt gasped and sat up on the bed.

“Dwight, we know you’re in there!” “Dwight, we can see your fucking light!” “Come on out, dude!”

Jesus motherfucking Christ, my God. They were—

Metal: the door was opening…

He jumped down and crawled under the bed. The trunk was at the foot; he should be hidden.

Booted heavy steps echoed in the suite’s corridor. “Where are ya, man?” They entered his room—Matt held his breath. “’Snot here. It was the Rat’s light.”

“Is he here? Ask him where Dwight—”

“Nah. He’s not here.”

“Impossible.” That was Taylor’s voice, Matt knew it by its acid-tinged high pitch. “The Rat doesn’t have a life.”

“He’s probably whacking off in the bathroom.”

“‘I ruv you, Rat, I ruv you.’”

“Shut up, faggot. ’Sget out of here.”

Waigh waigh wauuugh, sang out Taylor, a faux-Chinesey jingle. There was pounding on the walls of the corridor, the noise of the hall door swinging shut behind, then the ringing of their heels on the rubber floor outside, and, diminishing, away.

Matt crawled out from under the bed. He was trembling; he could hardly manage to pick a dustbunny from his tongue. What was that all about? The Rat? I ruv you, Rat—and that tune—what on God’s green earth? Sophie? So this was what he got for introducing her to Dwight outside Meyer? When she had sweetly shaken, shaken so sweetly Dwight’s overweening paw, and even granted him afterward: Well, he seems nice. Mocking her—for being Asian? Those WASP giblets of racist garbage!

Matt punched the air, sharp jabs through an endlessly giving atmosphere. Those fucking prepsters! All these weeks those lords and ladies had gone luxuriating about campus as if it were their own pleasure garden, conferred on them as part of God’s feudal, hierarchic law. Oh sure, they weren’t anything but the same old preps as at Tenafly, not special or cool per se. Yet the rest of us just till away their fields and, Dominus, Domina, look up to and worship them; O grant me an audience; invite me to your party; grace with kind eye my imitative attire. And he himself had done this too: like a startled hare he had fled beneath the bed. Alone on a Friday night? That would not have gone down without a sneer from them. So it was still riding his veins, his fear, curled up in the body like a sleeping disease. How did they manage it? And why Dwight? Who wasn’t from some posh boarding school—no, nothing but a hick from bumblefuck! Why had they taken a shine to that slab of mediocrity?

Somewhere out there, in some bar, in someone’s dorm room, perhaps on this very hall, perhaps next door, perhaps in the room directly above his head right now, Dwight was laughing. Dwight was crinkling his brows together and Being Serious while he listened to someone like God. He was spinning his solid bulk around to introduce two people with that air of refined, good-natured politeness he affected. Dwight was meeting new people, he was going further and further and further in.

Matt walked down the corridor into the common room. The floor seemed to be tilting slightly, a sea deck, the ceiling to be lowering. Dizzy. But let him lay eyes on the Dwightness, the bizarre black magic that had caught such hordes in its enchantment. He crossed the threshold into Dwight’s single.

Wow. How it mesmerized: a scene of naive normality. Regard the way the calendar is tacked to a corkboard, with actual dates marked on it, acknowledged, owned. And a pennant; unselfconsciously flagged against the wall! Mustn’t that feel liberating? To say, hey, I care about such and such, nail it up there in plain sight. He shivered just thinking of the knowingness into his life his mother would have had if he’d done that at home. Ha, hardly; he was not so simple or unkind as to expose, say, his cherished Nietzsche to her critical eye—rather easier anyway when what you had to stick up was Boston Red Sox; Me & Rich at Yellowstone. And look at that proper laundry basket! Exactly the thing—where did people learn this stuff? With those normal white athletic socks, as if laid there by casual accident. And a leather-bound appointment book—right on the desk, for anyone to see. Totally brazen, unashamed. Game. Concert. Some illegible Dinner.

Dwight was the Real Deal. It almost brought tears.

Matt shook his head to clear it and fumbled out into the common room. He leaned his elbows on his desk. There was no place to steady his body, thwanging like a rubber band, plucked. Why? Why could he not simply be happy? He had the best girl in the world, the slimmest lissome orchid, liking him, unbelievably. He had a best friend with whom he could be sane and honest, and even have fun to boot. He had escaped Tenafly and Teaneck, and, really, if you thought of it, NYU was puppet-show compared with the daily, physical grinding down of high school. Yes, that danger was past: he had driven away from the street, gone sailing off like Ulysses; now nothing would trick him back.

But Waigh waigh wauuugh—I ruv you, Rat—with a singsong, at a whim, nonetheless, They could still barge right in….

Dear God, how to get out of this maudlin mess? His mind, powerless in the brain cage, harbored thoughts that scrabbled around like birds trying to find their way out of a glass house.

Well, it was Friday night. A night for smashing.

He strode across the common room, pocketed his smokes, smoothed his hair, and sallied out the main door. Downstairs was vacant for a change; everyone must already be where they had meant to go; he skimmed along the hall’s surface, a diamond gliding along incomparable featureless glass. Outside it was black-eyed November, bottomless as only New York. He fired up a cigarette: the smoke bit like the icy air into his nose. In a hurry; why was he in a hurry? Ah yes: as always, speeding to some terrible conclusion.

Now it was the opera of the cosmopolis! A delivery boy shot past on a bicycle. On Second Avenue a great alien street-cleaning apparatus ponderously coasted alongside glistening puddles of green. Mimes, pall-bearers, a gaggle of gelled, statuesque men in black tie waited to disappear inside the mouth of a limousine. At Lafayette he fought through a clutch of punks, running cleanly across the long intersection where shattered glass stained the island and crunched underfoot, glass, glass, gorgeous shattered glass! The sounds of skateboards died out in the darkness toward Astor Place. He walked faster, though calmer now. The air somehow sweetened near Fifth, where he loped past the watchful eyes of doormen, potted plants in windows and ridiculous permed dogs pissing in the manicured beeches. How almost-fun this was! New York, New York! It’s a wonderful town! The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down! He swung north on Seventh, skirting four ambulances clinging softly to the curb like dirigibles. New York, New York! He was a tuning fork at play in the forces humming beneath the crossroads of the city. On 13th Street a streetlight buzzed off-on, off-on, maddeningly; on 14th, a man silhouetted in a high window stood with hands propped flat at the glass as if under some celestial arrest.

Now the broad cobblestoned spaces of the Meatpacking District fanned out before him, a stream of stones with gullies and tricky eddies. In incandescent halls, wax-faced men shifted dials on machines whose fingers lifted bricks of red cellophaned flesh. He shivered. It was quieter, colder here by the Hudson. He didn’t know these streets, blundered along the cobblestones until the tangle resolved into the West Side Highway.

Cars shooting by like luminous bullets.

He raced dangerously to the median, waited, and raced to the far side. Nobody was watching behind; he headed north, slipped through a gate in the wire-mesh fence.

The river spread itself. Crenellated with light, a moving army. What was there to do now but watch, watch this liquid black hole draining slowly into the future. And it was from that bank, from that far side, that he had stood and stared, from the Englewood Boat Basin by his battered car, out bus windows along the snaking circuit of Boulevard East, and imagined—that it would be different? Here: right where I’m standing!

He turned to face the whole illuminated swathe of the city, the turbid water lapping at his back. Strangely clearheaded and sane, as if here by the river he had siphoned out all the rillets of bile through his mind’s eye. He strode north a ways before hustling over the highway toward a fresh cross street. Even before attaining the block’s edge he could make out some commotion farther on—odd: in this boondocks neighborhood of shuttered warehouses?—bodies, dark-dressed, silver, gold, packed tightly together, beneath a raised platform before two silver doors.

It was a nightclub, evidently. It was dozens and dozens of people decked out in feather boas, flashing cufflinks, fur giving off a wild static, their teeth shining as they plied with encouraging grins and nods their mates in this line hemmed by red velvet ropes. Like an inspector, Matt clasped hands behind his back, lollygagging as he slipped along the far side of the street. How they hoisted their purses, ran hands through hair already faultless, how they flicked peremptory ash onto the concrete! Such polished and clicking shoes: so much confidence to be heard in their tattoo! And what was it like to be merry like that, to have the inner wherewithal to freely join this grand urban orchestra?

You might as well ask what it was to be Dwight: to be normal. Oh, who needed the lot of this blasted race!