Chapter 9

Spring 1997

Jason and Angela dated for a little over a year before he started cheating on her. We didn’t talk about it, not at first. It started with calls from girls I knew weren’t in any of his classes. Girls who hung around with basketball players and football players and sometimes lacrosse players. Girls who, when called by a basketball player or a football player or sometimes a lacrosse player, would appear as if by magic, dressed in short skirts or tight pants and tank tops, even in winter. Girls who were available at two o’clock in the afternoon or two o’clock in the morning. Girls who were not Angela.

It was somewhat unusual that these girls called Jason, since he wasn’t a basketball player or a football player or even a lacrosse player. I supposed that being the wealthy son of an NBA coach was good enough.

It started with calls, but it wasn’t long before some of the girls started hanging around the apartment we rented near campus. Jason paid his share of the rent with his allowance. I paid my share by working in biology labs and as a research assistant. This kept me out of the apartment most of the time, but when I was there, I watched the girls fawn over Jason. They laughed at everything he said, even when he was being serious. They cooked him dinner and brought it over on nights when he had to study or write a big paper. And they slept in his bed on nights when Angela wasn’t around.

They usually traveled in twos, for reasons I could not understand. After a while, they lost their anonymity and I began to recognize distinct pairs. It seemed that every girl had a wingman. I imagined them roaming the campus looking for basketball players and football players and sometimes lacrosse players, one standing guard while the other one cooked or laughed or had sex. Did they trade off? How did they determine which one was lookout for the night? Were they all blonde? Didn’t they have studying to do like the rest of us?

I considering asking these questions one night when I ended up sitting in our living room with a girl named Sandra. She was tall and lanky, with a head full of curly blonde hair and a pouty expression. She wore wire-rimmed glasses that she spent a lot of time adjusting for emphasis when she talked. I suspected they were decorative rather than prescription lenses. She wore a white and blue Duke T-shirt and denim shorts even though it was after eight o’clock at night and fifty degrees outside.

It was a rare night that I didn’t have homework, so I sat on the couch, flipping channels. Jason had disappeared into his bedroom with her friend just moments before.

“So, what are you watching?” She flopped down next to me and peered over her glasses at the screen. I changed channels even faster and refused to look at her.

“Nothing.”

“I’m Sandra.”

I looked over at her. She had crossed her long, smooth legs and was kicking the top leg back and forth.

“I’m Ellison.”

She beamed at me for no reason, and I looked back at the television. She expected me to make conversation with her, to want to talk to her. I didn’t.

“Cynthia really likes Jason.” She said this with an air of confidentiality. Now we were best girlfriends sharing a secret.

“Who’s Cynthia?”

She threw her head back and laughed. I noticed that all of her reactions were calculated and extreme. It was almost like she thought she was being filmed and wanted her emotions to play big for the audience.

“My friend, silly.” She pushed me lightly on the arm. An excuse to touch me. “You’re so funny,” she giggled.

Maybe the wingman’s job included hitting on the roommate. I frowned.

“Are you always like this?”

“Like what?” Eyes wide. Textbook innocence.

“Pretending to be a ditz.” Now she frowned.

“You got into Duke, so you can’t be that stupid. Why are you hanging around here while Cynthia fucks Jason?”

I wasn’t just trying to provoke her. I really wanted to know. At that moment, it seemed important for me to understand this antifeminist phenomenon of perfectly intelligent young women acting like groupies, not just for athletes, but for anyone with a perceived edge. Growing up, my mother had drilled into me the idea that women could be anything they wanted, whether that was a housewife or an astrophysicist. It was all a matter of choice, she always said. Mostly, she told me this in her own defense when I was mad because she refused to play June Cleaver to my Beaver. But the lessons had stuck. I expected women my age to be ambitious and interested in ideas that went beyond makeup and short skirts. I expected any woman who got into Duke to be a cut above, to challenge the world, to challenge me. I expected more than this artifice.

So what was the point? To find a husband? Surely these girls were smart enough to know that men don’t marry women who give themselves this easily. Men liked the chase, the challenge, the idea that their woman was special, not available to anyone with a bank account or a jump shot. But then, that was an old-fashioned notion, too. I prided myself on being right-minded about women and gender and sex, but I had to acknowledge that most men wanted to spend their college years having wanton sex and then graduate and marry the girl who said no.

There was certainly always a game being played between men and women at Duke, but I feared that these girls, Sandra, Cynthia and the others, were playing the wrong game. Or they were playing the right game but had been given the wrong rules. I knew that when Jason looked back at his college years, he wouldn’t even remember their names. Hell, he might not remember their names next week. Looking at Sandra, so deliberate and desperate, I knew that she would regret all of this.

One of my deep disappointments at Duke was the sheer number of girls like this. Some were obvious like Sandra and Cynthia, but others pretended to understand the game yet still made themselves readily available to anyone who was willing to put in a little time and less effort. Sometimes I grew cynical. I believed all the girls were like this. Except Angela.

Sandra reared back at the word “fuck.” “You don’t have to be so nasty about it. They’re just having fun. Jason’s cool.”

“Jason has a girlfriend.”

Sandra shrugged, dropping the act. “So where is she?”

We both turned back to the television. I paused on Channel 4. Friends was on.

Sandra bounced in her seat and clapped her hands together. The act was back. “Ooh, I love Friends!”

I rolled my eyes and changed the channel.

* * *

Later that night, I sat at the kitchen table, flipping through notes for a test I already knew I would ace. I wasn’t cocky, just confident in my ability to learn and regurgitate information. I wished my social life went as smoothly as my classwork did. It was nearly two in the morning, and I knew I should get some rest, but I wasn’t sleepy. I had just gotten up to scoop out a bowl of ice cream for myself when Jason came trudging in the room.

Cynthia was long gone, and I hadn’t seen him since. I assumed he’d fallen asleep in post-coital exhaustion, although even thinking about that made me feel sick. It wasn’t the idea of my best friend having sex. Who cared about that? It was the idea that he was throwing Angela away for trash like Cynthia.

He sat down at the table and grinned at me. I pretended to be engrossed in my ice cream.

“So Sandra was cute, right? She told Cynthia she was into you, so I told her to bring her over.” Jason nodded at me, still smiling, then stood up to get himself some ice cream. “She’s more your type than mine, anyway, so I settled for Cynthia.” He threw this last bit back over his shoulder.

He was pretty pleased with himself for someone who was throwing away the best thing he could possibly have. Plus, he essentially gave me Sandra? Her presence was a gift to me? This was a new wrinkle in the whole tawdry scene. Not only was he cheating, but he was giving me the gift of sex? It smacked of some kind of prostitution. I couldn’t tell who should be more offended, me or Sandra. Although, if I’m being honest, I was bothered more by the fact that he deemed Sandra my type.

He sat down, looking smug, his mouth full of chocolate chip ice cream. I knew I should let it go. I knew it was none of my business. I knew saying something would just cause problems between us. He was my best friend. He was pretty much my only real friend.

I couldn’t let it go.

“What about Angela?”

He shrugged. “What about her?”

“Why are you doing this? I thought you loved her.” I hated the sound of my voice. I was whining. I was nagging. I could hear my own feelings for Angela beneath the words.

This wasn’t about Jason, not exactly. Yes, he was acting weird, and I was starting to think that I didn’t know him as well as I should. But then, our relationship had never been all that deep. He was my entry into Duke’s social life, the way in which I masqueraded as normal. Most people knew me through Jason, and his wealth and personality made it easy for people to accept me even though I was generally quiet. If I was being honest, I had to admit that I mostly liked Jason because of what he provided: friendship, connections, a guide through the maze of college society. Now that he was showing me another side of him, it wasn’t fair of me to complain.

This wasn’t about Jason at all.

He rolled his eyes at me. “I’m only nineteen. I’m not ready to get married.”

“Who’s talking about marriage?”

He snorted. It was derisive and mean. “She is. I mean, not now. But she’s always talking about the future.” He squinted his eyes and spoke in a cruel falsetto.

“ ‘Someday, after we’re married, maybe we’ll go back to Baltimore to live. When can I meet your parents? Shouldn’t they meet their future daughter-in-law? Let’s name our first son Daniel.’ ”

He lowered his voice to normal, now waving his spoon in the air. “She pretends like she’s joking, but I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like a joke.”

I could think of worse things than naming future children with Angela. I liked the name Daniel. But now I knew what was bothering Jason. It wasn’t the idea of being with Angela, specifically. It was the other stuff. Moving back to Baltimore. Meeting his parents. I knew he wouldn’t want her to see what I had seen during that first Christmas break, which Jason said had been pretty low-key for his family. I knew he couldn’t imagine settling down under the nearby gaze of Coach Grant Davis.

So this wasn’t about Angela, either. Not for Jason.

“I know it’s weird when girls talk like that. But Angela, she’s special, you know? I know she’s just joking. And even if she wasn’t, you could do worse than to have someone like her thinking about staying with you for the long haul, you know?”

Jason looked at me for a long moment. He scraped up his last bit of ice cream before he spoke.

“You sound like she’s your girlfriend, not mine.” He raised his eyebrows at me. I couldn’t tell if he was joking. I knew I’d said too much.

I decided to give a hearty laugh. I was going to treat it like a joke.

“I’m just saying, she’s a good girl. And these skanks like Cynthia aren’t even in her class.”

He stood up and smiled down at me. It was a thin smile that hid more than it revealed.

“Don’t worry about me and my ‘skanks.’ I’ve got it under control.” He walked out of the kitchen, and in a few minutes, I heard the front door slam.

I looked at the clock. Three A.M. I wanted to call someone. I needed to talk to someone. My first thought was Angela. But what could I say to her? I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t get in between her and Jason, no matter what. I wanted her, but not by default. I wanted her to want me, not as a consolation prize. I couldn’t talk to Maren about something like this, and, of course, my father was out of the question.

I grabbed the Duke directory and looked up a name.

She answered on the second ring.

“Sandra? It’s Ellison.”

* * *

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. The pot calling the kettle black. What goes around comes around. Choose a cliché, any cliché. All of them probably explain why I started sleeping with Sandra. And Cynthia. And a few others. But really, I just needed to put some emotional distance between me and Angela. If I was with other girls, I couldn’t spend every moment thinking about Angela. I couldn’t love Angela and have sex with Sandra. That was the lie I told myself. And I needed to put some physical distance between me and Jason. I was still furious about what he was doing to Angela, even if I understood it better than even he did. In betraying Angela, he became someone I didn’t much like. So I stayed out of the apartment as much as possible, and when we were there together, we were in our separate rooms, sometimes alone but mostly not.

This was the first time in my life I did something for the mere feeling of it, without thought or premeditation. And the thing was, I liked the feel of Sandra’s skin under my fingers, the taste of her lips, the smell of her hair. We spent all of our time either naked or preparing to get naked. We had little to say to each other. I don’t know why she was with me, even in the casual way in which we defined our relationship. Maybe she thought I had money because of my clothes and car. I never told anyone much about my family, just Jason, who kept my family secrets the way I kept his. I didn’t really care why she liked me, if she even did like me. I just liked that she was almost always there when I needed her, and when she wasn’t, there was someone else ready to step in and take her place.

The sex was good; it was better than good. But before and after, I loathed myself. Not just for being a hypocrite, not just for what I was doing, but for what I was not doing. Angela deserved to know about Jason, and I was her friend. It was clear that she and I were better friends than Jason and I had ever really been. He and I still went to parties together, we still talked about our fathers every once in a while. But I realized that we didn’t really have anything in common besides fucked-up families. And that wasn’t enough. I should have told her.

But I didn’t.

I hated myself for it.

* * *

Calvin on Arnetta:

Arnetta was a woman I dated during my difficult years living with Momma, trying to get my writing career off the ground, becoming an instant father again after so many years apart from my kids. She was much younger than me, a secretary at the local high school who flirted with every attractive man she saw. She was pretty and vibrant in a way that could not be trusted. Her prettiness depended on makeup and suggestive clothing, on pouted lips and false smiles. Her vibrancy was sometimes manic, as if she was desperately trying to wring every bit of experience out of her life, no matter what the consequences.

She was the type of woman who was fun to be around for short periods of time, especially when I needed someone to remind me that I was still alive, still virile. But after a few intense weeks, I would become exhausted by her energy and she would become suddenly aware of my age. We would then be more off than on until we forgot what we didn’t like about each other and were reminded of the good times.

I wasn’t surprised that she seduced Ellison when he was seventeen. He came to live with me nearly broken by his mother’s death, although he would never admit it. Vulnerable men were Arnetta’s specialty. And he hated me, so it wasn’t a complete surprise that he would have sex with Arnetta. I’m not claiming that I wasn’t angry and hurt by it, especially since there’s nothing more difficult for me as a father than trying not to see my son as a competitor. But enough time has passed that I actually feel bad that Arnetta latched on to him the way she did. They were both trying to get back at me, but the one who may have been affected the most was Ellison.

I don’t love Arnetta, and I never did. This will come as no surprise to her, for I believe she has even less regard for me. But I do love my son. My mistakes and shortcomings as a father may have hidden this simple fact from Ellison, but it is true. I love him more than he could know.

—From Save Me: A Memoir by Calvin Emory