7.

And then it was Jason’s birthday, the last Friday before Thanksgiving break. They were going to celebrate. “I don’t want a party-party,” Jason had yawned, “just drinks with you and Sophie and maybe Stan and Jorge from QU.”

How very Jason! How faux naïf! As if they could possibly muster enough for a party—not in any universe where party meant more than, say, seven.

Matt landed on Jason’s doorstep smack at ten A.M. with a set of streamers and Mylar balloons to rouse him into a Happy Birthday! He skipped Expressive Cultures section for lunch so the birthday boy would be spared the eating-alone today. He actually ran (disguised by his hood; not-running was a Rule) at three to help Jason with his packages. And passed the afternoon in Jason’s room smoking, playing records, opining as Jason concocted an evening outfit—dissuading him from a tight black T-shirt (not mentioning the reason, the prominent gut) in favor of a mustard-yellow red-striped number (excellent for Jason’s washed-out color), thanks to what his lady had learned him. Finally, he choked down an embarrassingly early bowl of Cajun Seafood Gumbo in the dining hall, walked Jason back to Main for his Stats quiz, cheerily bellowed Good luck!, then dashed home, dressed himself, and headed for Sophie’s.

She opened the door smoking, her thin fingers no bigger than the white cigarette, wearing an electric-blue loose silk tunic over black denim—so tight, for a moment it seemed if he reached over and thwanged the waist rim he could rubber-band her off to Russia. “Hmm” was what she said, before she waved him into the kitchen, putting out the cigarette in her orange-and-green spacecraft ashtray.

“What’s wrong with it?” he wailed as she ran her fingers over his clothes, making little adjustments.

“Nothing, I’m just…there,” she decided, stepping back.

He rushed to the bathroom mirror. Quel masterstroke—it did look much better. His collar was lifted over the sweater’s neckband, an extra button undone, the bottom of his shirt untucked from the waist, and the cuffs of his pants folded in so that they cropped neatly against his boots.

“You have a magic touch.” He turned, reaching for her silky blue waist. “It’s like a laying-on of hands…”

She clucked, making a wry face as she slipped a pack of Ultra Lights into her beaded purse. “Huh!” she gasped. “Go, go! It’s eight twenty-six, go!”

As they clicked down the black-and-white tiled flights, Matt ran as always he loved to do his hand along the banister’s serpentine unbroken curve. Outing in style! Not even a dive bar, the real McCoy, thank you, confirmed by a look in his old black book. Swank was penned next to this name, plus three neat asterisks. God, how long ago the summer notetaking was: already that handwriting felt remote as the script of some dead culture, Linear A, Babylonian. So innocent, ignorant then, copying places hardly knowing where Mercer or Greene Street were. The only one they’d tried thus far, Match on Spring, had turned out to be men in suits, blank-faced women, a crass too-old New York devoid of magic. And the big NYU bars seemed to be more suitable for raucous groups of seven, eight, ten—once he had peered through the window of Shea’s on MacDougal, where, in dismal blue fluorescence, baseball-cap guys poured each other plastic cupfuls from beer pitchers.

Sophie squirmed her hand into his jacket pocket and linked. “You’re trembling! What the hell?”

“Well. I just want him to have fun! To look back and say, eighteen. My eighteenth birthday left nothing to be desired.”

“What?” She tsked. “Don’t be stupid. He’ll have fun. You know Jason. He’ll drink himself silly and get all messy and lovey and slurry.” She squeezed his hand.

True. Like the night Jason had force-fed them Malibu till he dragged them into a toxic-breathed hug on Sophie’s white couch. How beautiful Sophie had looked under the lamplight then; with that Asian blushing gene, she went sex-crimson on drink, a gorgeous red dripping throughout her skin. Matt kissed her glossy head.

Down on Sullivan, a dashing man in a slender suit leapt from a taxi, loping away with his tottering date along Prince. Well, we are out too, just like you, and you! Matt patted his pocket for cigarettes. Yes; everything in readiness. Matthew Acciaccatura is on the town! He felt like Frank Sinatra or Fred Astaire, some glamorous man in top hat and tails who would be swinging along the lampposts of the street.

“This is it.” Sophie had gripped a door handle in both tiny fists and flung it open.

Thunderous house music burst out. Matt cloaked his features in Indifferent as the bouncer ran a flashlight over their fake IDs, but even this flimsy laminate thing, bought preparatory over the summer from one of those 42nd Street joints near Port Authority, did the trick. Then he entered after Sophie, already threading the throng. He mimicked her, exaggerating the pliancy of his body as it wound around people without giving them so much as a look, aloof. Glances strayed over him like searchlights as he pushed and strained, while Sophie’s small form kept going into the crowd, vanishing among those who scissored across her path, then reappearing for a second; gone. At last he caught up to her under a dangling rooster sac of glowing red lanterns: where Jason was seated at a table crowded with faces and a haze of blue smoke.

“Hey!” Jason jumped up to dole hugs and moist kisses. “Sophie, Matt, this is Stan, Jorge, Tom…Sophie, you—look—fabulous. I love this.” Jason plucked at her ripply tunic. “Didn’t I tell you?” He winked at the guys. “Did you make this too?”

Sophie’s eyes went wide with alarm. “Um, no.” She recovered enough to murmur Hello nicely at the three of them, who chorused back, Tom raising his hand. “Pay no attention to him. He’s full of lies.”

Jason began to cackle. “Oh, Sophie, ever modest. Fine. Have it your way. Sit down, sit down you two.” He flapped his hands and fell giggling backward into a chair. “Omigod! You see how moved I am by your presence? Ha! Sit down!”

“Are you Jason’s roommate?” Jorge yelled over a robotic techno beat.

“Ugh, no!” Jason shrieked from down the table, where he was busy spilling Stan’s drink. “I told you, I have a single. I did the whole”—he twirled his finger next to his head—“loco thing on the housing form.” Jason’s face beamed red and sweaty. “But practically we are, right, Matt?”

The waitress had materialized at his elbow. Waitress? Demigod with turquoise china-doll eyes. Every part of her white skin shone, as if the sculptor who had made her had loved rubbing his hands over that exquisite marble, its fluted tendons and smooth continents of breast. “What would you like,” she drawled, heavy-lidded, monotone. Her eye zones glittered, covered with a gouache of dark sparkle.

“Can I have a cosmo?” Sophie expelled a puff of smoke.

Matt coughed. “Uh, I’ll have—the same.”

“Yes!” Jason pounded the table. “More cosmos—they make great cosmos here. I’ll have another too.” Jason sagely nodded his head.

“Ja-son,” chided Sophie. “Don’t you want to make it to nineteen?”

Jason laughed so hard small tears appeared in the corners of his eyes. “Oh dear.”

“That’s Jason for you.” Stan offered a convivial smirk to the group and patted the birthday boy on his arm.

“Right,” said Matt, pointing at Stan with his cigarette, just to say something. What did these people know about Jason? Strange to think that Jason had been living a parallel life with them, going to QU dances, to a couple of clubs on Sunday, gay night. Jason was putting his head down on Stan’s shoulder. Don’t be a Gary, he was saying, slurring. Stan snorted. How dare you? he kidded back. Some kind of in-joke.

The waitress glided back with their drinks and Matt drew out a wad of cash, forfending Stan, who made a move to treat Jason—“I’ve got it,” Matt declared importantly, dealing out a twenty for all three. My best friend, thank you!

“It’s nineteen.” The waitress stared down at the twenty. “His is Stoli.” Pointing accusingly at Jason.

“Ahm,” said Sophie, “hang on a sec…” She opened her purse and handed a couple of singles to the waitress, who sighed and slid off.

“You tip them a buck on each?” hissed Matt into Sophie’s ear. “Up front?”

“Yup.” She smiled and squeezed his hand.

Matt tried his drink. At first it tasted cotton candyish, but then there were sparking threads of lightning so that the afterfeeling was of scorching wires fanned through his tongue. He sipped, took a gulp. Instantly—looseness, swells of joy moving through him. So quickly, like coffee, it massaged the brain, lifted, stretched it…Someone was rubbing his mind clean with a wet eraser. He smiled at Jorge beside him. It was the moment for the book of his tongue to open. Yes, you can. “So, Jorge,” he murmured, making each word punchy, meaningful. “Have you been here before?”

“Mm-hm, once. But she,” Jorge threw his eyes at Stan, “got sick in the men’s room.”

Matt felt the words How dreadful! coming to the fore of his tongue and stomped them out. “Crazy,” he supplied instead. “What happened?”

         

Somehow they were dancing. They were lifting their hands, shaking them in the strobe lights, he was moving his feet and no one was peering through the darkness to see, he was torquing his torso, bending his knees like the dancers on MTV. Now he was walking down the shaking gangplank to the bathroom. A flash of the waitress’s face, grimly slipping him a cosmo. A joint Stan passed to him: this was narcotics, sir, marijuana, at last, like a real boy, drawing on it, counting to hold the smoke in as they told him; two blooming petri dishes for lungs.¹⁹ His pack of cigarettes whitely empty, crumpling in his palm. Pink-haired girl approached him, asked for a light, then as the record changed said, Madonna! and Wanna dance? but he said, I can’t, I can’t, and waved her off joyfully. He was powwowing with Stan and Jason about how filthy Jason’s single was—You don’t even want to know what I found there one time, Matt laughed, shaking his head—when suddenly Sophie, who was dancing with Tom, reached out and grabbed his hand and they were all up together again, on the dance floor, where everyone was covered in war paint that the blue and red lights threw, they were lumbering through the darkness of a foreign jungle, just battling through, it was the last night on earth.

I can’t seem to face up to the facts Was he was moving a mouth I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax Not him, but the other, was the other him I can’t sleep because my bed’s on fire—

“DON’T TOUCH ME I’M A REAL LIVE WIRE!” he shrieked.

“Oh my God!” Jason yelled, “I love this song!”

“I love you guys!” Matt screamed, holding Sophie’s and Jason’s hands.

Psycho killer…better run run runrun run runrun…

         

That acute insistent high-pitched tone was not a garbage truck reversing, but—Matt slammed the alarm and fell back on the bed. Good; Sophie undisturbed. And: Jason? Passed out on the couch; when had they gone to sleep? But, oh. Oh dear, fully dressed.

So this was la vie nocturne… sticky. Smoky—ugh, his throat. Some C-section had butchered the gullet. Jesus Christ, he had smoked an entire pack. Before coming back; then Jason’s Newports. And marijuana—who knew what that did to your throat, scarred lungs. His whole mouth was a roomful of wool, the tongue a burrowing moth…

Ugh: and A Whole Day of shift before him.

Saturday was his day for the M&O office in Hayden Hall, the big dorm on the west side of the park. So far, this had turned out not-awful. Naturally a cushy situation like Sophie’s, reception at the A/P/A Institute and the Chan Library of Fine Arts, would have been preferable. But NYU contracted out their real “custodial” services, the cleaning and vacuuming of hallways and common rooms, leaving him largely paper-pushing in the office, with only the occasional demeaning refill of paper towels in the upstairs bathroom or disbursing of toilet paper to kids who knocked when no one was around. Frankly, it was rather pleasant. The windowless room where nothing that went on in the rest of the world invaded. And: janitors. Hadn’t they always been the nicest of all throughout his years of school? Ernie, who discovered him in the locker junior year. And Julio, who helped pick up the pieces of that ceramic jug he made in fourth grade. Maynard, who would punch his shoulder and say he was going to grow big muscles—what a nice thing to do, out of the blue. Everything about them was likable: their calming navy uniforms, neatly hung up in the office; their gentle camaraderie, men being kind and playful; and the honesty of their work, the real cleanness of everything about them, including the sweat on their white undershirts at the end of a hard-earned day.²⁰

He was going to be incredibly late. He seemed to have set the alarm for 10:07 instead of 7:10, wildly optimistic anyway. No way he was making his eight hours. He put on boots—oh dear, upside down, the room—and kissed Sophie’s blanketed toes goodbye.

She kicked him. “I’m still mad at you.”

He grabbed her foot. “What?”

“Mad. I’m still very mad at you.” Her black eyes were afire.

“For what?”

Her arms lifted and dropped wide on the bed. “Ugghgggh! For what? Don’t you even remember? Flirting? Dancing with that girl Sarah? That punk chick with the pink hair? And the waitress?”

“I danced with the waitress?”

“Flirted with her. Jesus Christ. Talking to her about acting, her auditions, some Stravinksy shit—”

“Stravinsky?”

“Stanis-somebody, I don’t know.”

“Shut up. Shut up. Shut up,” intoned Jason.

“Jason. My apartment here.”

Jason propelled himself up with one hand. His hair was sticking out everywhere. “Oh. Okay.” He rubbed his eyes. “Hello.”

“Ask Jason. Wasn’t Matt flirting with the waitress?”

Jason nodded and yawned. “Yup. When I came over, you were all going on about some God stuff. You guys were like in the corner for like twenty minutes.”

Matt slumped onto an edge of the bed. “Really? Was she talking back to me?”

Sophie thwacked her pillow and arranged it behind her, sitting up. “She was totally into it. Do you think so? Do you really mean that? I thought she was going to cry at one point. I kept trying to talk to you guys—”

“You even flirted with Tom. Who was supposed to be for me. Hello? My birthday. You don’t even play on my team.”

“I’m sure I wasn’t flirting. I don’t even know how to flirt.” He rubbed the comforter over Sophie’s legs. “Right, my sweetest sweet one? How could I possibly?”

“I really don’t feel well. Oh my God.” Sophie laid both palms on her face. “Um, Maaatt? Do you think you could go make some toast? Burned toast, burn it. And there’s some gelatin in the pantry. Mix some with water. Like a—a spoon with a cup.”

“Poor Sophie,” Jason called. “Should I open the windows for some air?”

The feeling Matt had manning the toaster, watching the copper-brown blacken, go slowly dark like a piece of paper sipped by fire, was certainly evil. His little ladykins was audibly moaning in agony. But he had flirted, convincingly it seemed, with that gorgeous modelly waitress! What on earth had he said? He remembered scraps. The thing about New York, her strangely opaque turquoise eyes tilted down at the floor, city of strangers—something so agonized in her fixed stare, lit intermittently by a strobe, that he: maybe replied back with Vico’s Scienza nuova, modern-city-cum-jungle notion? Ooh. Wouldn’t have guessed that would go over terribly well. Yet there had been a sort of clear-air calm in the darkish vacuum of that back corner, two souls meeting out of any context whatsoever—there you could let go the ropes on your tongue so its sail billowed out. Well! Who would have thunk it. He’d like to try that again. Might need a bit of liquor in his system, of course, or maybe pot, and smokes to allow for distracting hand gestures: keeping the manic rest of the body occupied while a genie crept out of the lamp of your mouth.

He stirred up the gelatin: it hovered, a small gray cloud in a cup. Coming, my damsel in distress!

         

It was quiet at Hayden Hall, eerie-quiet. On the third floor the fluorescent beam flickered as he slipped his key into the office door. He sat down behind the desk, folded his hands behind his head, and leaned back in the chair, which obligingly tilted.

Perhaps the world might not be so bad.

Perhaps there was something heretofore invisible in him that could in the future open again. This morning, over toast, they had looked at him differently, Sophie and Jason. As if he had just won a Nobel Prize, of which they were carefully not speaking. They must have been shocked last night, badly shocked. That waitress was about five thousand degrees cooler than any of the three of them: he had done something impossible, scaled a Mount Everest on tiptoes—only to descend, forgetting just about everything. He gazed at his hands. Small and red-patched from cold, dorkily knuckled, the hands of a meticulous knob. Weren’t they?