6.

³³ Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived. For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me. Oh sure, Vic Spector hadn’t fired him. Of course—not yet, nothing that simple, no. But could he be in any doubt what was to come next?

Matt leaned his head on a parking meter, holding it tenderly in both arms like a tether in a spaceship without gravity; if he let go he would float, all the way down Fifth Avenue. Touched his lips and chin: still there. A nausea set up a brisk tattoo, a little drummer boy in the tum; the ice was breaking, breaking audibly, in a moment he should fall through.

He let go the meter, fell down the avenue like a pinball jounced from lamppost to lamppost. And to think he had actually believed his life was changing! Well, and haven’t we learned this lesson before? Face facts, old sport! You are the perennial also-ran, the eternal joke.

Matt dipped into a diner on Sixth Avenue, ordered peppermint tea and toast. Come, now. Sir! What kind of brattish fit is this? The miasma of hysteria has distorted your vision. Let us recall, the man said you were doing a good job. It’s merely that he wants college children from you. Simply draw up a plan. They would probably be coming back long before the official end of vacation on the twelfth of January; even Sophie was planning just two weeks in Chicago, and all the tristaters would probably zip down to New York for New Year’s Eve; he might have thought of that before, no doubt would have if he’d ever been invited out to celebrate the night himself. Thank God Vic had told him now, with still enough time: last classes were this Wednesday, the thirteenth, and exams all next week; he would need to get his war machine on pronto. Today even. Tonight. He would simply have to find out what was going on around campus. Get the school newspapers, check all listings. There were plays about to go up, he’d vaguely seen posters, rock shows, whatnot. Figure out where the likelies would be. Draw upon reinforcements, perhaps; Sophie and Jason, if they were willing soldiers.

It could be done. It was even a bit exciting. Vic was forcing his hand, making him bring the club game to school—a thing about which he had been far too diffident, under the name of prudence, far too.

The waitress deposited a plate of toast, browned and buttered beautifully. And what could be better on this earth than bread and butter? How wonderfully the world rushed to his aid, filling his vacant places with material goodness. He nibbled the two toasts in grateful bites. Then he brushed off the crumbs and walked back to a payphone by the bathrooms, where he dialed Sophie and Jason. Agreed: rendezvous, his treat, seven-thirty at Belges Frites.

On this one he was not going down without a fight. After picking up paraphernalia at the stationer’s next door, he marched purposefully down Sixth through the ash-smudged evening toward campus: when a familiar figure crossed his path.

That newspaper-boy cap—“Adrian?” Matt blurted.

Adrian stopped. Under a streetlight, the olive-colored cap showed covered with tiny LVs. “Hey, baby,” Adrian drawled. Dark half-moons under eyes that flickered absently over Matt. “Running to hit CC before it closes.” Snuffling, he ticked his head back toward a glass-plated office where fluorescent-lit men stood moored in line: CHECK CASHING blared in red neon above the door.

“Oh,” murmured Matt, “me too.”

Inside of ten minutes Matt was out on the street again, his check metamorphosed to three hundred in crisp twenties, pressing in a breast pocket against the heart where a new idea was beating. Adrian’s cap: that was what had produced instant recognition. Some distinctive dash of outré sartorial je ne sais quoi brands one, bestows an image. Wasn’t that what Adorno and Horkheimer had said in their old essay? Today, a Hollywood actress…a simple cowlick…illusion of uniqueness… something thereabouts. So with a trademark visual gesture, a signature This Is Me, when he strolled into class, or thudded down the steps in the crowd outside Meyer Hall, he might educe an automatic response in all lookers-on: oh, that kid, I’ve seen him before; yes, he always wears that… That what? What could be his cowlick, cap?

For almost an hour an uninspired Matt worked Mercer to Wooster: until it appeared, dangling mildly at the edge of a clothing rack, like a demure lady waiting to be asked to dance. And it was the first thing they seized on when he stood smiling above their booth at Belges Frites, Sophie snatching an end of the white scarf—blinding, cashmere, and obscenely lengthy: if Matt draped it about the neck, it brushed below-knees, turning him into Charles Lindbergh, a dashing aviator type with vaguely aristocratic bearing—to rub it at her cheek, while Jason, grabbing a ketchup bottle, began huffing as if to prepare for a giant squeeze.

“Don’t you dare!” Matt screamed.

“Oh, get down here,” Sophie squealed, dragging both ends to yoke him down to her lips, light as the touch of snow against his…“Now.” She opened her eyes, let out her impish smile. “What’s this secret meeting all about?”

“Ah…” He began tossing highlighters, index cards, NYU papers from his courier bag onto the table. “So, um, how’s your week looking? Hmm? Pretty, pretty clear?”

         

Check: the suede-pants scene at the photo exhibit of Visual Studies seniors. Check: black-turtlenecked drama buffs after Waiting for Godot at the Experimental Theater. Check: cat’s-eye chicks and horn-rimmed dudes hanging at the animation screening.

Now, here was the truly ridiculous thing. Here was the wonder of wonders. When he bounded, scarf wheeling, through the doors into a reception where the marks stood gathered like barnacles on the cheese-and-wine table, all he had to do was recall: calm, sir, take aim and shoot. When he’d sussed out the leaders-and-minions situation (leaders were taller, though not always; better-looking, though not always; more talkative, though not always: no, it was that lionlike freedom in their eyes as they crossed a room), he merely sallied up to one, uttered, Hey. No follow-up, no What’s up—for he did not wish to be friends, this was not a conversation but an end-directed event, like administering a syringe; he had all the medicine ready at his tongue-tip—just Hey, delivered with a knowing stare of I’m Like You: then stop. Wait, like cars playing chicken…and they’d cave. They’d reply: arching an insecure eyebrow, as if, Should I know you? Those sitting ducks! Then out with the invite, tapping it against your palm as if at any moment it might be whisked back, and ask, What’re you doing for New Year’s? a query so onus-on-them that I don’t know or Hanging out with friends was straight up out of the question.

But Sophie and Jason were appallingly bad at it. On Tuesday she had come along to an Asian Pacific American lecture-reception, but she went up so nicely, and to such nice people, no divas, she seemed to be recruiting for a school-spirit rally rather than granting a key to the coolest club in New York for New Year’s Eve—who could blame when they outright refused or merely accepted the invite with a polite, condescending scan? At the Queer Union dance Thursday night, it turned out Jason got so riled up with Stan and Jorge over someone named Frank’s hoochie new piece of ass that he forgot altogether for a whole hour, and when Matt arrived, dashing from the fashion show in Anderson Hall, his naive little buddy was, by the exit, simply passing out cards to partygoers bundling into the frigid night.

“What’re you doing?” Matt hissed, dragging him into the hall.

“You wanted me to hand them all out, and I had thirty left, so I thought…”

“That’s all right.” Matt gave Jason’s back a kindly pat. “All right. Here. I’ll take the stack.” Useless. Wonderful but useless when it came to that.

Saturday and Sunday, with exam week now begun, the main library was chockablock with kids, every carrel filled with piles of books and tapping laptops, and he, too, holed up, in a tiny annex room on the seventh floor no one ever seemed to enter. Luckily, his only two finals were World Cultures and Moral Reasoning—like taking candy from a baby: could there really be much head-scratching in distinguishing your Lady Murasaki from your Meiji?!—and then just the Expressive Culture paper, another in Freshman Seminar on War and Peace, ten-pagers he could knock out in five hours each, type ’em up later at Sophie’s or Jason’s.

So whenever the restlessness came into his knees, he allowed himself to shake his head clear, lift a quotient of invites, and plummet in the elevator to prowl about the water fountain and phones on the basement level, where exhausted break-takers were pacing, looking about eagerly for some momentary injection from the outside world. Then how like a doctor, how kindly, entering a battlefield infirmary with shots of morphine in his kit bag, Matt walked the hallway, choosing this one and that one from the melee of aimless strollers; he sidled up with an ironic smile to quiz, intrigue, and finally deliver unto their hands exactly what was needed. Exams? Grades? Why, don’t be so terribly blah-bourgeois, my friend, his shrewd smile said. Much more importantly—“What are you doing New Year’s Eve?”

And there was a little extra frisson in bringing the promoting circus to school, inserting, perversely, Magic Matt into the place where before was only lowly Matthew Acciaccatura. Besides, at school the danger level was do-or-die; you had to win over every last one to whom you opened your mouth, otherwise, the rumor could spread you were a loser—then, baby, say good night. Of course, it wasn’t time yet to try his might in certain quarters, such as with the denizens of Third North, who, if they happened to place him as that anonymous nullity from Fourth Floor, would understandably fall prey to a fatal doubt. And certainly not Dwight et al.—no, Matt didn’t want the prepsters even to know something was up; he was biding his time like Napoleon at Austerlitz in Tolstoy, waiting for the sun to emerge from its wrappings of fog, for the whole field to be lit brilliant before him until he may make his decisive move. Though once actually he caught himself automatically ducking beneath the rampart of the stair when he heard Taylor’s pinched murmur and Carly Hale’s pip-squeak draw perilously near: facing a puce wall in the paint-peeling underhang, Matt feigned a wearisome pocket search until the voices disappeared down the corridor.

Could they really get to him now, still now? Shaking, picking off bits of puce clinging stubbornly to his wool jersey, Matt marched into an elevator, jabbed morosely at button seven. Why should he care about that handful of loons? He imagined: Angel’s gravelly laugh decimating the preps at the velvet ropes; she could be cruel, that kitten. “Not the look we’re going for tonight,” she had spat out the other evening to a pair of chunky B&T girls in slut gear, snidely unclipping the side rope so they had to withdraw into the street, tail between their boots. How lovely to unleash Angel on the preps! Welcome to my world, you blazered buffoons. Well, soon enough he would devise some way to put them in their place. Only not to rush: not to ruin.

Yet there was one old face from Third North he would have liked to see, was itching for, in fact—where was Scott Belfast, of the vintage rock Ts and perfect jeans? Neither he nor his lady Liza Andrewes was anywhere to be seen. Once Matt did spot the SB-hanger-on Myra Washington having a smoke outside the library but deferred, saving up his approach for the regal presence. Tuesday, when Sophie was at her kitchen table poring over images for the Ren Art test, Matt finally asked, “Will you—you’ll see that kid tomorrow, Scott Belfast?” Maybe he could meet her at the exit, somehow strike it up…

“Oh. I guess I didn’t tell you.” She scooped up her knee, leaning forward eagerly in her chair. “He got asked to leave. Not kicked out, just for the year. He plagiarized. From his roommate. They, like, both turned in pretty much the same paper for ConWest. Can you believe it?” She rolled her eyes.

“Plagiarized,” Matt echoed dully. “Asked to leave?” They were not to be friends? Not even now, when he had such prime goods to deliver up?

“How stupid. I told you he was stupid,” she muttered, turning back to her book.

Asked to leave. Matt drew their cups to the stove for another round of green tea. So. Could he be king? Was he next in line? A veritable power vacuum. He could step in and lend direction. Who else did they have—James Marks, with his little rock band? Please.

Matt downed the tea and bent to kiss Sophie’s cool neck. “I’ll leave you alone, my fair studiette.” He rubbed her shoulders, shoved invites in his coat pocket, and bounded out—to her protests calling back: A punk show in the student center that I just remembered—then down the stairs into a black night where giant pieces of snow were wheeling solemnly down from the mammoth sky.

Bring ’em on, baby. In this corner, ready for all comers! Skaters with long chains at the punk show, anorexics on the catwalk in Anderson Hall! Hotties at the La Raza dance, hotties at the film club’s masked ball! What had he quailed in the face of, what could he not now accomplish? Like wily Odysseus outwitting the Cyclops—Nobody, my name is Nobody, and I shall ruin you with my gold tongue, by my nous that worketh wonders! NYU, do you hear me? Matt balled up his hands into fists and hit excitedly at his thighs, each stroke yes, yes, yes. NYU, you may call me by my given name, my name of Magic Matt! Flakes brushed his face, clung to the coat and vanished into the midnight-blue wool. Glittering buildings drew back from his nearing pace, their lit windows scanning him suspiciously like the eyes of silent fish through unfolding levels of dark water.