9.

The world began to fill again, like an aquarium after its regularly scheduled wash, as kids settled back from break. A new semester: it’s a fresh start, a New World, a chance to erect a tiny utopia on virgin soil. Matt shaved his schedule expertly as a barber. No classes before noon, four core guts sans response papers, just final exams for a blitzkrieg cram-time at the end of the term. Japanese, it was true, would have to take a backseat until next year; our time, sadly, is short, and there exist such things as duties. In consolation he bought luxe notebooks with metal covers and hundreds of snowy blank pages.³⁷

He quit his work-study position. Some kind of instinctual poor-boy in him had been scared of surrendering it on the chance that Cinema turned out illusory or fleeting. He well remembered filling out those endless financial-aid forms, and the excitement on learning he was going to have the chance, by brawn as by brain, to attend NYU, with a little elbow grease, a little standing on his own two feet. But with the big New Year’s check together with the week after racking up nearly a cool grand, there was no need anymore to push around rolls of TP. And what if someone saw?

For there was a brand name to keep up now, that much was sure. After break, there was a discernible difference in the nature of his relations to peers. First off, the surfeit of glances. Nothing obvious, no, but definite all the same. He had for months stalked the halls and walkways of campus like a specter; could he fail to notice now how their gazes lingered on his face just a moment too long? One day Jason shot breathless from the stairs to announce that Christine from his own ConWest section had asked, wasn’t he friends with that guy Magic Matt? Because they had been spotted together. Spotted. As if he were a celestial body that materialized only in special moments. And Tuesday, didn’t he halt a conversation in mid-flight? At the crook of the stairs, in Meyer? There instantly three girls had begun to preen, discreetly checking hair and nails: all too plain a giveaway for one who has specialized in covert surveillance.

He stopped going to meals in Third North. Too risky: he couldn’t be seen dining alone, like your run of the mill loser, nor sharing in such a prole diet. So the days Sophie and Jason were taken up by class and couldn’t make it out somewhere for lunch, he dawdled in stores, fondling leather shoes or squinting at the cut of pants, then at the last possible instant snarfed down a tray of sushi standing up in one of the Japanese grocers near the park. Funny how like the old days of fourth, fifth grades, squeezed between bookcases to eat lunch while thumbing through those lovely paperbacks of three English children solving mysteries. And wasn’t that odd? As if celebrity were somehow inversely related to sociability, so the more he had of fame, the more solitary his days grew…

Well. Let’s not get mawkish, now. And, anyway, not exaggerate: really speaking, it’s hardly everyone you’re so famous for. Just the artsos, trendies, ravers, speed freaks: fringe groups, in a way. While the whole indistinguishable mass of the common herd remains unmoved—besides: do you suppose the prepsters have heard of you?

Droll as ever was the suite in Third North, with its pure status quo of inattention. Josh, who still ignored Matt thoroughly to cast his pearls before Dwight, appeared to be growing in his mushroomlike fashion toward a group; he even seemed now to have a pale and bespectacled lady friend of his own, though this appeared more sisterly than sexual. Meanwhile, Dwight was thick in some dark business of fraternities. Strange cues in phone calls: rushing? And envelopes with Greek letters pushed under-door. (Well, fine, see if I care. Because I don’t.) The few times Dwight crossed his path, the idiot doled the same condescending smile as ever. “The Sharps have a concert tonight, maybe—oh, you’re going out? Great!” Beaming as if Matt had just taken baby steps or said a remarkably precocious sentence. The only real signal of newness in their relations were the increasingly frequent comments on Matt’s sartorial choices. Once when Matt came in for a quick change, it was: “Wow, that’s a long scarf! I bet it’s really warm. Can I try it on?”

—And, with Josh gazing all gaga at Dwight, what else could Matt say but okay?

Instantly the badge of office was whipped from Matt’s neck and slung on Dwight’s body: buffoonish on the broad form, with its long-sleeved polo, Gappish bland jeans, and boat shoes. “What do you say, Josh? Is it me?” Turning his big chest this way and that, aping a girl before a mirror, while Josh, chuckling, lamented, “I don’t know. It’s kind of long.”

“That’s how it’s supposed to be,” Matt snapped, and “you can wear it a variety of ways,” absently quoting the salesman’s demo before he managed to catch himself.

Yet too late, it turned out. “I guess I’m just not such…a sharp dresser,” remarked Dwight, handing it back with a good-natured smile.

From then on that became the code word, the cursed nickname! Even from the end of the hall, the blasted loon would call out, There goes the sharp dresser, in tune to “Here Comes the Hotstepper,” that dancehall song so popular last year: so that Taylor or Adam Faire would cough to hide their laughs as they descended the stairs.

Clever, this Dwight. A worthy combatant.

“What’s the big deal?” asked Jason the Wednesday after classes started, installed in a booth at Bretagne over a vat of hot mulled wine. “Do you really want to, like, go chill with those frat boys and pound some beer? Please.”

“You fail to discern the point, friend. It’s the principle.” Matt blew on his cup.

“Ri-i-ight.” Jason fished out the ladle from the crock. “What fucking principle?”

“If you have to ask…” Matt shook his head and lit a match. But he leaned in before touching it to cigarette. “First off, should my scarf be grounds for a joke?”

“Maybe he’s trying to be nice. Friendly.” Jason wiped his mouth with a napkin.

“Oh, so that’s it,” Matt scoffed. “Anyway: second,” he took his sweet time to wave out a second match, drag hard, and exhale, “I don’t see why we shouldn’t have been invited to join.”

“You mean you. I don’t think frats are too keen on fairies.”

How did Jason not see? Now how was he supposed to make Dwight cringe with repentance—when the creature had his own busy social universe, a universe that took no notice of the claims of Magic Matt? How could he claim a superior title, so passed over?

“Maybe you should invite him to Cinema. Maybe he’s mad you never did.” Jason folded his arms over his round chest. “Just for strategy, I mean.”

Sophie was back from the bathroom and slid in next to him on the wooden bench. “This place rocks.”³⁸ Her eyes shone. “There are reindeer heads in the women’s room!”

“Mm,” said Matt.

She sighed. “Don’t tell me you two are still on Dwight.”

“What do you think?” Jason smirked.

“Well, he’s always seemed nice enough to me.” She gamely lifted the ladle.

Waigh waigh wauuugh—I ruv you, Rat. He kissed her little cold hand. Never shall you know of what I must avenge.

“Besides, I’m telling you, Matt, those frats are totally not anything. You would never want to go hang out there with those people.” She wrinkled up her nose.

“So!” He pounced on her flimsy clue. “See? Even you’ve been to frat parties, haven’t you? Just as I say: they’re inexorable. And you both still claim they’re not important?”

“Ugh. I was a freshman—I didn’t know any better,” Sophie squealed. “If I had thought I could get into Cinema with the famous Magic Matt…” She threw a napkin ball at him.

“Ugh, God.” He clapped his hands to his head. “My mom. I’ll so never hear the end of it. I barely managed to convince her I don’t want to do a cappella. Did you hear, Dwight got into his favorite frat? Isn’t that nice? Oh—you didn’t want to. Oh sure.”

“He’s hopeless.” Sophie rolled her eyes at Jason across the table.

“Remind me again why we hang out with him?”

She studied Matt and pursed her lips. “Hmm…”

“Oh yes—free drinks.” Jason slurped his goblet. “Of—candied wine.” He cracked up.

“Mulled wine,” said Matt. “It’s something like mead. Surely you’ve heard of mead before. Top off, anyone?” Reaching for the ladle. “If you will humor me, lady and gentleman, I’d like to present for you a little dream of mine called nemesis. You know, the Greeks had this goddess, a kind of avatar of retributive justice?” he began, as Jason, toying wearily with his fork, sent a probing look across the wooden table to Sophie.

Oh. Dear.

Matt pushed up, jeaned and smoky, in the swaying sheets at Sophie’s as the black clock by the bed flared the alarming time of close on noon. How? A note from her lay on the kitchen table—Don’t forget: the Chan at 4:00—rather brusque, in sum: hopefully he hadn’t annoyed too much last night? All that Dwight business; please, no one’s interested in your resentments, sir. Well, now—a little present? Flowers? He could hang around after class and find her some treasure; try that junk store on West 3rd?

In the one o’clock ConWest lecture he managed to limp to, Simonson droned on about the Black Death, and the buboes, and the rats scuttling across the galleys of seagoing ships, until Matt felt it rise in his throat, a little ocean of his own from mulled wine, general bile…. Leaning a hand against the seatbacks, he teetered last out of the classroom.

And there across the corridor: Liza Andrewes, huddled with two unfamiliar guys.

He was still reaching for his game face and a scrap of clear head when she pushed off from the wall with one easeful kick and strode up on her stilt legs to him. “Heyyy.” A flash of smile above her red quilted jacket, ruffed with white at the neck and cuffs. Her face was cream and rose, flushed with cold, wisps of blond curling over the smooth wide brow. Her topaz eyes were obscenely open, clear of the veils of common social modesty.

“Hey, Liza.” He caught himself, added a bored glance. “It is Liza, right?”

“It is!” She grinned at him as if he’d referenced the memory of an intimate something just between them. Such an American grin: perfect white teeth, so simple with entitlement. “Which way are you going?”

“Um.” Vague gesture to the exit doors. Now what? “Sullivan,” he snapped.

“I’ll walk with you.” She fell in step with an impetuous skip. “So.” They ambled down the stairs outside into a cruelly brilliant January blue sky. “Are you gonna have another party this week?”

“It’s every week. Every Friday.”

“Can I come?” She turned on him eagerly. Can I have a pony? Huh, Dad, can I?

He gave her an appraising look: she stared back boldly. Gorgeous, and knows it. “All right.” He twisted back to face the pavement clouded with kids hoisting book bags, unlocking bikes. Were his legs really working? Oh, NYU—do you see? I’m walking with Liza Andrewes!

“Yay.” Holding them flat, she clapped her fine long hands, a tiny replication of his bloody heart’s hard pounding.

“I don’t have any more invites.” At least, not with him. “But, even better.” He slipped out a business card, held it crisply toward her between two almost-trembling fingers. “Just leave a message, you plus whomever.”

They were already at the corner of Sullivan and 3rd, among Italian cafés and garish T-shirt displays. “This is you.” She softly kicked a bottle top with her big Adidas.

And if he hadn’t done it so often with the randoms at Cinema, how could he have ever held himself steady while kissing both live cheeks of that radiant thing?

“Ciao, bella. See you tomorrow,” he called, breaking into a lope away south.

What an unexpected turn for this hung-over afternoon. At least he hadn’t said anything awry. Back at Sophie’s he undressed, eased into her bed for a recuperative nap, but lay a long time awake—reviewing Liza’s silty lashes practically brushing the tent poles of her cheekbones, feeling his way again over the strange jerks of her mood, now instantly manic-thrilled, now soft-voiced, now bold-eyed, unpredictable—and it seemed had barely drifted off to sleep…when the door opened.

The lady of the pad marched in to drop her tote bag with a crash on the kitchen table. “Forget something? It’s four-thirty.” Sophie stomped over to the bed, wearing an ugly pink pomponed hat, hands pinioned grimly to her waist. “I waited outside the Chan for half an hour! What do you have to say for yourself?”

Panicked, unthinking—“Oh no. I must have: slept through it. Slept till now.”

She harrumphed, then sat down on the bed and gave him a grudging kiss, by the instant getting less affronted in inverse proportion to his own growing terror.

Why? Did he lie? To her? “I’m so sorry,” he gushed, rubbing her back, trying to press her at his chest, oh, to pillow, block it all out. So much for buying her a present! Here comes Liza Andrewes, and instantly—hypnotized, brainwashed.

“It’s okay.” She was laughing, squeezing out of his grasp. “You were pretty drunk last night.” She gazed at him gravely. “You were…you were really psycho, you know? Really obsessive. We could not fucking shut you up!” She laughed once again, but thin.

“Oh God.” And now this perjury, inexplicable, hideous…“I’m so sorry.” Reaching for her.

“Don’t be sorry.” She edged away, staring. “Only—maybe you should try not to drink that much. Okay?” She pushed up from the bed, gave him a glance over her shoulder as she passed, sighing, into the bathroom.

He ran to the bathroom door. “No, please: let me make it up.”

“Just forget it.” She giggled uncomfortably.

“What about this. Can you—Saturday night. Dinner? You’ve never really tasted my cuisine?”

“Don’t you have to ‘promote’?”

Was there a new coldness in her voice on that word? “Promote, schmomote!”

“If you really want to. But it’s fine.”

“It’s not fine,” he muttered, pacing in the bedroom, hands to his forehead. In no way fine. Stinking, cankered liar—all to hide how bewitched you were by that ditzerama, how you let that painted Jezebel turn your head? Even the blue and white circles on the wall accused him, the fake birds on the branches above the bed eyed him with a new, predatory stare. Look at me, world, I’m walking with Liza Andrewes: was that what you said to yourself? He released a dry laugh, covered by the toilet’s whirlpooling flush.

That Saturday night, it was A Romantic Evening at home, à deux: “I can’t believe you know how to cook this.” Sophie’s fork trailed in the delicate risotto al squid ink. “Where did you learn?” she asked, taking a timorous bite. “Your mom?”

Matt snorted. “My mom taught me how to use a can opener. Her notion of this is mac and cheese from the box.”

“You’re so mean.” She bit her lip. “I bet your mom is actually super nice. Why haven’t I met her?”

“Excellent question.” He shot out a voilà hand. “What I can say is that it’s through no fault of mine.”

“Really?” Sophie’s eyes widened. “So what does she say when you ask her?”

Ask? He was supposed to ask her? He coughed. “Hmmm?”

“You never asked her? You never thought of that?”

“Sssh.” He raised a finger to smiling lips. “What you have to do is pretend I’m an alien. Pretend I don’t know anything, and you just tell me what I’m supposed to do.” He leapt up and skidded over, plopping on the chair beside her tiny ass. “Okay?” Wrapping arms about her middle, looking seriously in her face. And what if she could: tell, teach him? Tame him—yes, you wanted to give yourself up to that, like some mute beast walking timidly from the forest, who knows nothing of the ways of humankind. Only to approach; to feel her soft yoke thrown about the neck. Even sharing details about his mother just now with Sophie: it was a step, his hooves clomping awkwardly on the path toward her, toward the one human girl with sympathy for such an ugly thing.

“Okay,” her plum-mouth whispered. “Know what we do now?”

“Do I carry you to the bed?” His voice cracking, hoarse. Nipped at her smooth earlobe.

“No,” she corrected, with a laugh and a knee pat. Which pained him: why, was that silly, that idea of his? “Put on your jacket. We’re going out.” She stood up from their chair. “Not out like that.” She frowned. “Don’t worry about clothes.”

By the door, he turned back to see her bundled in the new vintage white-fur coat that turned her into a Siberian princess. “Hey.” Touched the hood. Along the cheeks and brow, Asian Blushing Syndrome blotches were breaking out, rosy stripes around the flashing black eyes.

“What is it?” She gave the hood a couple of bashful touches. “Crooked?”

“Nothing.” He squeezed her hand. There was something, though, in his throat. “You’re beautiful,” he said quickly, leaning in for a closed-mouth kiss.

But that wasn’t it, not quite. What was this strange feeling that absorbed his body? Outside, neon lights lasered through the crystalline-crisp air as she dragged him down Greene Street. At corners she pivoted eastward and south, pointing, a little army general—he simply clambered over snow-piles beside, on guard against speeding cabs, the red trails of taillights resonant behind like streaks left by some rocket. Ah, trust Sophie: right she was to take them out. Now he could silently give over control of his body, fit feet and mind into a cryptic minuet established by her while the world opened to either side of them, skimming fairy-tale pictures against their skin in gaudy ruby, in emerald, gold…

“Are we in Chinatown?” he whispered, agape beneath a veritable totem pole of signs in Chinese.

She stamped, clapped. “Duh!”

Chinatown: how different it was by night! Pigs swinging red-lit like stars on sticks in a charring rotisserie, the bare wooden rails of a closed-up fruit stand, a snack bar from whose door a gentleman now emerged; he picked his teeth and passed without even a glance at them. Yes, swallowed up and lost, they were blissfully forgotten for a moment in the furrows of nighttime Chinatown, its alley-wormholes that slipped one between worlds. Holding her hand: they were skipping down the Yellow Brick Road or dashing hide-and-seek in a movie set while the cameras went rolling on everyone but them.

“Here we go.” She had halted at a door, above which was a pretty blue-lettered sign touting something called Bubble Tea.

Giddy, he followed her into a large clean room with wooden booths, slid in at the table of her choosing, and unbundled—too giddy even to read the menu, where there were glossy color pictures of drinks in sundae glasses festooned in pastel shades like prom queens on parade. He thumbed through dumbly, shut it with a happy bang. “You pick.” While she scrutinized the photos, “You’re so far away…” he mused, stretching out a hand over the big table, rubbing her freezing hands between his fingers. He wanted to give her something, to rip something out of his breast pocket and show her, as in Here is my handkerchief on a platter, my ladylove, but there was nothing there to give or say. “Oh my,” he murmured when the waitress came and plonked down two tall glasses, sweating slightly, with beige creamy liquid and an enormous pink straw in each. His glass felt cool and lovely to the touch. “I love it already.” He took a thirsty sip. “Oh! There appears to be some sediment at the bottom of mine.”

“Tapioca balls!” she explained. “Yum!”

“Tapioca, no joke.” He fumbled his straw over viscous globules: springy, alien. He could not eat this. Black as tar and squishy as, ugh, a kidney, a bladder. “Wow, don’t they—give that to babies? So you, you eat them?”

“Just suck on your straw,” she counseled. “That’s why it’s so wide.”

“Up—oh, goes right through, hmm?” Disgusting squishy nastiness…Napkin, napkin; there we go, nicely done, sir. “Mmm. Thank you! This is fabulous!”

“I thought you’d like it!” She dragged on her straw with pleasure.

And now, while she told him about real frostbite in the Windy City, about the strange Polish girl in her 20th Century Art, he cleverly secreted twenty-odd balls into his napkin. But every time he looked back up at her tiny shining mouth chattering on: how worth it, how right and worth it, just to keep her like this. So evidently they couldn’t come anytime soon to an agreement about appropriate food texture. Yet even that fact, that the machinery of her brain, the apple-sized muscle of her heart, prompted her to incomprehensible urges—it made you want to keep unwrapping toward her enigmatic nexus. The only other customers in the place were five kids, high school, obviously, maybe fifteen, the two boys haw-hawing on some salacious joke. And without her—wasn’t it all so? How crude and dull was everything compared to her flashing eyes and wry expressions. She who could turn a walk of twenty blocks into fairy-tale adventure.

“Well, shall we go?” he said at last, when her straw hissed air. He motioned to the waitress. “Thank you again! This was wonderful.”

“So you liked it?” Sophie nodded eagerly.

“Definitely!” he agreed, dealing money onto the table. “Really…a treat.”

She slipped her arm in his as they walked out the door. “And the tapioca balls?”

“Oh—ah, very nice. I’ll bet it’s beneficial for you too. I mean, if babies eat it. Why else.”

“Oh, Matt.” She fell against a building wall postered up in red and black and white, laughing. Then she looked up at him, dabbing her eyes. “Wow. You didn’t honestly think you were hiding it? You’re a hysterical liar. And you were making the wildest faces.” She squinched up her mouth and twisted it to the side, bugged her eyes.

“Ah-ha.” He edged up and planted his arm to one side of her, like a jock by lockers in the movies. Her laughter scattered sparks in the alley. “So,” he murmured, hoarse. “You like to torture me?”

“Of course!” She grinned, impish, clearing the hair from her face. “That was the best part.”

She was beautiful. There under the streetlight. Everything was quiet but the bird in the breast which beat. He closed his eyes and leaned in over the precipice.

And kissed. You could take everything else away. It was enough. This. Point. Lips. Enough to have lived this. Kiss.

He pulled away and opened his eyes. She was grinning wider now, lopsided. “I love you. Oh!” That was it: what he’d had on his tongue, all night—but, God, why? Why force the issue? Ruined. He buried his head into wet mildewy posters covering the wall.

“Matt?” She tried to nuzzle her face into the space between his and the wall. “What’s wrong? What did you say?”

Saved. By some stray city noise, a miraculous horn? She hadn’t heard!

—Yet was that the way? And what will you do now, lie? Again? Make up some bullshit, what-you-said? When tonight, how you were feeling, wanting to come up to her like a wild animal out of the forest, eager for her light yoke: you’ll go backward instead of forward, here at this critical juncture? And maybe it was obvious anyway; true, he hadn’t exactly been shielding that ahh, that delight when she walked into a room, lavishing her very finger joints with kisses, not letting her sleep till he’d extracted his due of embraces. “I said,” he began, turning from the wall to take two freezing hands in his. He gazed into her grave face, his heart clenched too-tight in his chest: but only to finish it. “I said, I love you.”

“Oh, Matt.” Her face looked shaken and flushed even by streetlight. Her eyes half-closed, weary. “I thought…I don’t know. That we’ve been loving each other for a long time.”

Did he hear right? We? “Can you just clarify what you mean by that, ahm, pronoun?”

“Oh my God.” Shaking her head sternly, she clasped both his cheeks in her hands, drawing him down. “I mean, I Love You Too. I guess I should have said it to you before. Maybe. But I didn’t want to push, Matt, I know how hard it is for you to trust and, you know, believe that other people are like you too. Sometimes I think you get scared, or suspicious, like you can’t believe what’s between me and you, or you and anyone for that matter. It’s like it’s all new for you. I mean, it is, isn’t it? Like,” she scanned his face, reflective, “sometimes I’ve wondered: when was the last time someone said I love you to you?”

Last time. I mean, there must have been some time. “Oh sure,” he recalled. “My grandmother used to say it on the phone, birthdays, that sort of thing.”

“That was the last time?”

“And then she died,” he continued eagerly.

Now they had to laugh. The sound of that, in the alleyway, so forthright and cheery. “It’s fatal!” he murmured (thinking: how did she know so much? how could she both know and love him?) into the crisp wind beyond her head. Murder, she seemed to purr (or maybe just Mmrr?) into his neck. “But you’re not going to die from it, now, are you?” he exclaimed, hugging her harder, hugging a whole furred universe in his arms.

“Not if you stop squeezing me,” she squeaked out. “I can’t breathe.”

And when he let her go, their mouths came together so they shared one breath. For a whole white instant. Then: “I love you,” he said, and grinned his hot mouth. “Again.” Well, now. While she wiped the lashes fringing her sleek lids, he looped an arm about her, dragged her gawky and half tripping along the slim pavement into fathoms of clear night air. Much easier said than one would have guessed, this I love you, in the end.³⁹