2.

Then it was a gray, sodden four o’clock. Slept through Sex lecture. Matt had a bad moment until from a corner of the room he managed to dig up the pristine, rarely seen syllabus and discovered: Friday, the midterm wasn’t till the eighth. Now he clambered back onto the bed, facedown, with one thought in mind—or it wasn’t thought, just image:

Jason, the other night at a table at Paradise, looking anxiously to see where Marco had gone, nodding Uh-huh along distractedly with one of Matt’s little evening vignettes.

This was cocaine. One could be fairly certain of that now. The itchiness, the flicky gestures, eyes roving like the kids’ last night, lines of tension in the face like fissures in porcelain. Because of the quickness, and the ineluctable draw after; one felt it even on a first try. Jonathan was absolutely on-point not to deal C or H, a bad vibe for the room, the man had said, all sorts of problems. Should he call Jason? Check in with him? Matt stood and made for the shower, undressed, let it pelt him. When was the last time he had spoken to Jason? Well, last Wednesday, for sure, to get Jason’s thumbs-up on the new crop of X; then of course Paradise, though barely talked then, what with that splendid, unexpected stroke of Liza’s childhood friend Natasha showing up with a whole bevy of her comodels from Ford. Perhaps it was time to invite Jason out? Get him away for an evening from Marco and Marco’s wastoid crew—Devin, whomever else it was he had met that night of the party in Marco’s room. Some party: a bunch of kids frenching bongs, sitting cross-legged on the floor in enormous baggy jeans.

See, that is your problem. So willing to criticize them for being tacky, lame. That was why Jason became so defensive at anything you happened to say knocking the “new friends.” Like when you asked if he actually liked that girl Amber after she flounced away in a spasm of moronic laughter—and Jason had merely sneered, Whatever, as if to say What, she isn’t cool enough for you?

Matt zipped his trousers, looking up at the fine ceiling with its scrolled moldings at the rim. What had Amber really said? Simply complimented his shirt, said she was having a great time at Paradise. Nothing out of keeping for, say, a Liza, grateful to get in to Cinema for the first time. But it was the way Amber did it that rankled: her stringy hair falling round her face, teeth manically gnashing at the speed in her E. The way she flopped her body self-consciously among the cocktail tables, trying to be all sex kitten when, let’s face it, she wasn’t even mildly pretty, with that broad-shouldered footballer’s physique. Well, so she was failing, attempting to seem more gifted in looks or charm than what God had allotted—was that all? If so, Jason was right to throw the comment back in his teeth.

But they just seemed so stupid. There: that felt good to say! Matt gave the lace ends of his sneaker a satisfyingly sharp tug. Always Rad this, Rad that, or Right on when you least expected it, not even with any feeling but in a single monotone breath. And what was their talk? Gossip, gossip from the most rancidly banal butt ends of a party’s leavings, and pot-growing tips, and wouldn’t it be cool if + some totally inane scenario, like video games in bathroom stalls.

Okay now. Matt slipped the cell into his gray wool pants, lifted his key loop from the desk. Now you’re just being petty. They’re his friends. Just—give him a ring.

So Matt tried Jason: once on his walk over to and once from the drear puce-colored basement of the library (useless tonight for going out anyway, might as well shake a leg for Friday’s test), he left humble messages on Jason’s machine and even beeped him, but heard no word back. It was all of twenty-four hours later, Thursday afternoon after his interview with a man from Index, that he discovered a sullen message from Jason on the machine: sorry he was so late, the stuff for tomorrow was great.

And why the room phone? Was Jason avoiding him? Matt tried him once, twice (Jason, please call my cell), also beeped him, with emergency digits (911911911), and at last rang up Liza for Marco’s number. But “I don’t think he’s going to be home,” Liza mourned.

Oh no?

“They’re all going to karaoke. It’s Lauren’s birthday. Isn’t she so annoying?” Liza hissed. “I’m so staying in. Unless—did you want to go out somewhere?” Innocently.

“Who’s Lauren?”

“Jeremy, Matt’s asking me who Lauren is,” she lowed off the phone. A muffled masculine expostulation, then Liza’s heu-heu laugh. “God. She’s this girl…” Liza trailed. “She’s this girl…” she repeated, clearly having difficulty: her hard drive overheating…

“That’s okay,” inserted Matt smoothly. “Do you think—Jason will be there?”

“Probably!” Liza blurted. “Hey baby, do you want to come over? Jeremy and I are cooking dinner.” And when Matt confessed he had a test, “Good luck!” she sang with dramatized revulsion, as if what he’d admitted was a case of herpes instead.

Not until Matt clicked shut his phone did Liza’s Probably resolve itself into what it was: a burp of disdain, a sort of Ugh. About his own little bud? But he’s not like them, one wanted to say. And yet all evidence would flatly contradict this. These days, to an impartial eye, Jason was glum-guy, sulky, or nattering about nonsense while “X-ing his balls off.” Or again recovering, like, say, a slug fallen off some low perch—dazed, self-involved, feebly resuming its oily crawl. Or trying too hard, wearing billowy silken shirts like an overdressed burgher, breathlessly asking What? What? and grinning along inanely after jokes that weren’t meant for him. Poor Jason. But why wasn’t he calling?

Finally, at eleven on Friday, just as Matt was racing up the steps of Meyer Hall, mind swirling with tattered worded scraps like asexual reproduction and gametes: “Did you need something?” Jason inquired over the line, almost sarcastic.

Well, now. And no apology?

At this point, given the nature of human frailty—in other words, the dreadful inflammability of all this emotional brush with which Matt was stuffed—there was nothing else to do but studiously freeze the boy out! Mention as if in passing that he hoped Jason would make it to Cinema tonight, a marvel of iciness, and goodbye. No slouch, Jason responded by flouncing in at Paradise with Marco, Amber, Devin, Julian, a probable Lauren, and two guys it didn’t even seem like Jason knew: having, as it turned out, prevailed upon Lacey in Magic Matt’s name to give them all (eight!) comps. Acting as if he owned the place, in a gauche black blazer like some garmento. Now it was Matt’s move. And he responded by—yes, the slightest bit pathetic, but still it was a crafty stratagem, in its way—having Sandi inform Jason that these tables are bottle service only, a rule normally forgone for Matt’s number two. But Jason had a counter-coup: ordering a bottle of Stoli. And was he really going to use his parents’ credit card at a nightclub? For a two-hundred-dollar charge? “I think that’s just sick,” Matt bitched to Sophie.

“I think you should talk to him.”

“Ho! He should talk to me. Who’s the one not returning calls?”

“You’re making such a big deal out of it. Probably just some sort of misunderstanding,” Sophie sighed, digging in her silver cocktail purse.

Matt rolled his eyes. Did Sophie always have to be so goody-goody? So do the right thing? There was a small leopard in the room of his heart’s core, pawing, turning tight circles. And what were you going to say to that creature: let’s put the matter aside, let’s make up nice-nice with Jason?

Ostentatiously, Jason danced with his crew; ostentatiously, he lolled at his table, smoking, flip-lighting his Zippo, and grinning possessively around like a rap star with his entourage. Luckily the photographer from Index, who required Matt’s acumen in framing a few crowd shots, succeeded in distracting him awhile from that revolting pageant.

“I think I’m going to leave,” snapped Sophie, when it was barely one o’clock.

“What? Sophie. What a pretty dress you have on—did you make this?” Naively fingering the tiny pistachio sleeves. “You did, I remember it!”

“Nice try.” She smirked. “But I’m not getting in the middle of this. I’m out of here. Hey—how about don’t wake me up tonight, okay? I think I really need some sleep. Maybe you could go sleep at your place?”

Fine. When Sophie ditched, Matt stood round the bar with Liza and Jeremy, who, unless he was mistaken, were suffering a rift of their own, in re: Marco. “Oh, look,” Liza said once, cranking up that blanched cedilla of an eyebrow toward the dance floor, as she lowered her mouth to a martini glass. That was all she needed to say. Out there was Amber working hard at the slippery beats, arms doing odd Aztec moves, face set grim.

A gulp-laugh erupted from Matt. “What’s wrong with them? I mean, actually. This isn’t a rhetorical question.”

They liked that. Jeremy coughed, smiling into his fist; Liza lifted her glass in a cheers with the air, and called, Hear, hear! But it wasn’t humor he intended, or criticism really. What was wrong there? It couldn’t just be animus on his part: Matt had caught Robert, the reporter from Index, from his prime table throwing quizzical glances at the Friends of Jason. There was something hard and desperate, forced, about them, shouting, throwing territorial looks around as they snatched off raver backpacks, playacting their enjoyment. And could Jason really prefer that crew? To hanging out with yours truly?

“Let’s dance!” Liza cooed, when the music erupted into a swirl of sirens and whistles; a triumphant DJ Future rocked the record just finished high over his turntables.

Instead Matt absorbed himself in working the room, ferrying that girl Chen over to Jonathan, greeting some model from the other week and Stefan, her French filmmaker beau, a man with a giant schnoz and an insistent, self-promoting conversational style. Matt had just extracted himself from Stefan when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

Jason.

Close up, Jason looked still worse: the satiny white shirt beneath his blazer shining pornographically, like lingerie, his face a plump pudge above. Dark hollows under his eyes made the overall skin look ashen, even in this dim roseate light. With one hand in a pants pocket, Jason’s padded shoulders slumped so the blazer sagged, warped—too big for him: some boy dressed up in his father’s clothes. Yet the sulky cast of his familiar face was endearing, brought suddenly near, with the always warm brown eyes now grown almost unbearably open and unguarded. Matt was on the verge of reaching out a hand to straighten the blazer when Jason threw his head back, defiant. “I need my sample now,” he whined.

“Well,” said Matt, his would-be friendly hand instead seizing his scotch from the low marbleized table where he’d placed it. “That’s early, isn’t it? You know, perhaps, perhaps we don’t need you this week, after all.” Improvising, his fingers tapping lordly at the glass. “Sophie and I will try them ourselves. For her birthday tomorrow. Thanks, though,” he added, a crowning indignity, before making as if to edge by.

“What?” Jason’s eyes twitched, incredulous. “But—you don’t even like X!” He looked hastily over his shoulder as though afraid of who might have overheard.

“Maybe you were right,” soothed Matt, asinine, “maybe she and I just need to give it another try?” An evil grin. “Please excuse me.”

Jason’s hand caught Matt by the arm. “You’re a fucking asshole, Matt!” he blubbered, spraying a monstrous vodka wind.

“Ssh,” hissed Matt. “You’re making a scene.”

“You guys don’t even like X,” Jason repeated, quieter, as if that were the main point to get across.

“What’s the big whoop?”

“I promised my friends.” Jason blinked. “They’re waiting.” Now they both glanced about fifteen feet off to where the crew sat in state about a circular table. Though Julian was saying something in his ear, Marco had his gaze fixed ahead in their direction.

Bingo. So: they were waiting for Jason to bring them free drugs. The desperation in Jason’s face—didn’t want to disappoint, couldn’t come back empty-handed. “Jonathan…still has some, for sale,” Matt began feebly.

“Matt,” Jason begged, “I can’t. That’ll be, like, two hundred dollars. I just spent,” he looked up gingerly at Matt, “two hundred on that bottle.”

“More with tax,” Matt muttered automatically. They weren’t paying for—anything? And eight—was Jason crazy? A sample of eight?

“And tip,” said Jason, with a sheepish grin.

“Jason. Why are you the one who has to…?” He peered intently, trying to discover the truth hidden somewhere beneath the panels of Jason’s skin.

“Oh, it was my idea,” Jason hurried to explain. “I told them—we could. You know. I just, um, suggested we all come here and X.” His voice cracked slightly. “I mean, I could buy a couple. I know eight’s a lot.”

It was coming to the surface, but not quite there yet. Who started this? Jason, seeking to impress? Or did all these loons ask for it, using him—and he couldn’t say no? Look at the steely way Marco was staring. But how to broach the matter with Jason? How to do it so it wasn’t too paternalistic, know-it-all? Especially after our track record.

“Where’s Liza?” Jason asked politely, looking about, just trying to placate.

“Okay,” said Matt. Exhaling heavily. It would be cruelty to go further with this now. We can pick it up another time, when he’s not so on the line.

“Okay?” Jason’s face began to light up, in sections—first the eyes, then the cheeks, the mouth opening in a tentative, delighted smile. “Really?”

“Come on.” Matt patted Jason’s shoulder. “Let’s go over to Jonathan.”

“Oh, Matt. This is so great: thank you!” Jason’s relief was becoming glee. “I’m really sorry about tonight. I was just, you know, pissed, from the phone today, and then you were ignoring me; I guess I was being a little passive-aggressive. Just silly, I guess, I mean, I know I was being silly. Hey Matt,” he gushed from behind, clawing at Matt’s arm after they crossed through a clot of bodies by an ivory divan, “guess what?”

“What’s that?” said Matt, inclining his head back.

“I came up with a club name! Finally. You know how I’ve been trying? Or maybe you don’t know. But, anyway, what do you think—of J-Force?”

It was lucky that Matt was facing forward, so that in the instant before he turned he was able to wipe clear the slate of his skin. Jason was evidently not kidding: under the rose and blue spots his face shone eagerly, manic. As if he had come finally upon some magic key that would solve all, at last throw open a closed door on happiness. He was standing ramrod straight, like a statue beneath which the word J-FORCE should be graven.

—What else could Matt say? “Really nice! I like it!”

When Matt left Paradise close on four, Jason and posse were still drinking water in long tugs from bottles, dancing, patting one another where they sat, and generally having themselves a good old X party. Matt watched how Jason balanced Amber on his lap, how he grinned ecstatically into Marco’s face while jabbering on and on about something evidently of marvelous import. Well, he looked all right. Happy. Didn’t he? It didn’t quite seem bad, when you saw them all together—Amber dragging Jason up with both hands to the dance floor, for example. And yet: it was somehow like the time Jason had described his friends from high school, the double life of his closeted days in Scarsdale, even faking it with a girlfriend, Wish I’d never done it, or words to that effect. Why had he, then? Simply to have friends? Well, you couldn’t knock that as a legitimate objective. I’d probably have become friends with a chair leg if it had let me.

J-Force, though. Really? Did he have to go that far, to please them?

         

There wasn’t time to properly mull the question. For in less than twenty-four hours, mostly spent in preparation, he was lying supine on the luxurious sheets of a suite in the Plaza Hotel, having made a dreadful botch of Sophie’s twentieth birthday. She was lying to his right, had finally stopped crying, had finally stopped withholding the cause in silence and finished discussing, in a tear-made-husky voice, what he had done wrong. A suite at the Plaza Hotel? That wasn’t her, not her at all; and if she had wanted not to have a party, wanted only to spend some simple time with him, what gave him the notion that the Plaza Hotel was the place to do it in? She wasn’t some mistress, some gold digger to be impressed by all this disgusting luxury, so impersonal—“It’s like you don’t know me at all! You might as well give me a mink coat,” she had snarled moistly at him, “’cause obviously that’s what you think of me.” Then she had gathered herself, pressed up from the bed on trembling fists, her face a wet red mess, and announced that she was taking a bath. During which time he had occasion to draw himself over to the bathroom door, collapse on the soft clean carpet, and talk, and agree, and interminably apologize.

Though he half-felt: what was the problem here? Yes, if he hadn’t been so frazzled with the reporters and his midterm this week, he might have spent longer pondering what to do. But everything had been necessary, except I guess going with Liza to Peter Kent’s. Besides, what did she want from him, an opera composed in her name? Listen: the Plaza Hotel. Who couldn’t like the idea of a suite here? Who couldn’t like champagne and chocolate and orchids? It’s the fucking Plaza Hotel—wasn’t it a trip even to walk into the lobby, stride right up to the massive concierge station, and, just as they might begin to examine you with suspicion, demand the key? to your suite? “You, you liked Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” he had allowed himself to suggest timidly, after she’d accepted his apologies and subsided into an exhausted rancor. (And didn’t she like Eloise? But not to mention, in case he was wrong about that.) “Oh God, Matt, that’s different!” An angry splash from inside.

Now they were lying one beside the other, wide awake, in silence. Matt strained his ears toward the not quite inaudible heat system: a kind of tstssshh, breath on the curtains. The champagne in its handled silver bucket by the bed’s foot must be utterly warm now, floating in a bath of ice-flecked water. And maybe it would indeed be better to be far away from here: Matt saw himself being drawn, backward, like a filmstrip set in reverse, down the magnificent stairs, out the revolving doors, at that corner of Central Park so favored by pigeons and scented of the horses standing yoked there in immobile carriages. Then drawn farther, downtown to Sophie’s, beyond, right to the tip of Manhattan—and off it, into the sleek waters reflecting in rills the city lights, then lifted up high, by his back, like a kitten being carried by the scruff of its neck, toward the moon. So all of New York City would disappear in the dark like a flashing coin being thrown into the sea.

“Sophie,” his dry tongue pushed out into the motionless, oneiric space. For wouldn’t this please her, at least faintly? “I talked to Jason last night. After you left.”

“That’s good,” she approved. “You made up?”

“Sort of. Yes. Tell me—do you like his new friends?”

“Why not?” Tinged with a little malice.

“Do you not want to talk about it now?” He flipped over to face the curved back of her body, naked but for a tank top and panties.

“No, it’s fine.” She rubbed her nose. “What’s wrong with them?”

So Matt began, starting with the most recent, the hullabaloo over the X, then working his way toward the remoter past, giving an account of the party at Marco’s and his interpretations of that whole posse, and finally forward again to: “He came up with a club name. J-Force. Isn’t that strange?”

“Ohh.” This one struck home. “Poor Jason.”

“W-why poor?” A nervous laugh. “He doesn’t need all these, these idiots. He’d be perfectly fine—better off—without impressing them. Or trying to.”

Now she sat up cross-legged on the bed. Her face looking calm and sage and definite: how he loved that expression, two lines suddenly graven between the eyebrows. “I can’t believe I have to tell this to you,” she declared airily. “Jason’s trying to imitate you. He’s jealous. He’s like a little brother. Looking up to you.”

“That is ridiculous,” he swore. Sort of.

She blew hair out of her eyes. “J-Force? Who else has a club name? Come on.”

“But I need a club name.”

“You’re not getting it, Matt.” She shook her head. “That’s the point. He feels excluded. You have a role: at the club. But what about him? You get to be Magic Matt. But who’s he? And now that you’re so busy…”

As much as he loved it when she looked wise and wide-knowing of sundry matters—prescribing bananas for his upset stomach, interpreting the pink couch in a dream as a symbol of his mother—there came a point when you had to take such sagacity with a megalithic crystal of salt. I mean, it just all fit together too neatly—like a complex straight out of a Psych 1 textbook. Club Promoter Envy. “Hmm,” he said, unfortunately at the same time letting slip a bemused smile.

“Fine, if you don’t believe me, why do you bother asking me to explain!” She hurled herself down on the bed and peremptorily flopped away from him. But it wasn’t anger anger; you could see it even in the way her eyes went looking for him to come and surround her in a flurry of kisses, hugs.

“I do believe you, I do,” he whispered into her left ear, wrapping his arms around her body and digging his lips into her neck. Well, even if her hypothesis wasn’t correct, it might not hurt to include Jason a bit round the old farm. Give him a couple of chores to do.

The old farm. His small and perfect Eden!