by Ian Caldwell
“His chest looks pretty bad.”
I don’t know what rehab is like for burn victims, but getting used to your own skin again can’t be easy.
“I didn’t think you were going to show up,” I tell him.
Gil hesitates. “I wish I’d been there with you guys.”
“When?”
“All day.”
“Is that a joke?”
He turns to me. “No. What’s that supposed to mean?”
We stop just short of the car. I realize I’m angry at him, angry at how hard it was for him to find anything to say to Charlie, angry at the way he seemed afraid to visit Charlie this afternoon.
“You were where you wanted to be,” I say.
“I came as soon as I heard.”
“You weren’t with us.”
“When?” he asks. “This morning?”
“This whole time.”
“Jesus. Tom . . .”
“You know why he’s in there?” I say.
“Because he made the wrong decision.”
“Because he tried to help. He didn’t want us going into Taft’s office alone. He didn’t want Paul to get hurt in the tunnels.”
“What do you want, Tom? An apology? Mea culpa. I can’t compete with Charlie. That’s the way he is. That’s the way he’s always been.”
“That’s the way you were. You know what Mrs. Freeman said to me in there? The first thing she brought up? Stealing the clapper out of Nassau Hall.”
Gil runs his fingers through his hair.
“She blames me for that. She always has. You know why?”
“Because she thinks Charlie’s a saint.”
“Because she can’t believe you’re the kind of person who ever would’ve done something like that.”
He exhales. “So what?”
“You are the kind of person who would’ve done something like that. You did do that.”
He seems unsure what to say. “Does it occur to you that maybe I’d had half a dozen beers that night before I ran into you guys? Maybe I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“Or maybe you were different then.”
“Yes, Tom. Maybe I was.”
Silence falls. The first dimples of snow are forming on the hood of the Saab. Somehow, the words amount to a confession.
“Look,” he says, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I should’ve gone in to see Charlie the first time. When I saw you and Paul.”
“Forget it.”
“I’m stubborn. I’ve always been stubborn.”
He emphasizes always, as if to say, Look, Tom, some things haven’t changed.
But everything has changed. In a week, a day, an hour. Charlie, then Paul. Now, suddenly, Gil.
“I don’t know,” I tell him.
“You don’t know what?”
“What you’ve been doing all this time. Why everything is different. Jesus, I don’t even know what you’re doing next year.”
From his hip pocket Gil produces his key fob and unlocks the doors.
“Let’s go,” he says. “Before we freeze to death.”
We stand in the snow, alone in the hospital parking lot. The sun has nearly slipped off the edge of the sky, introducing darkness, giving everything the texture of ashes.
“Get in,” he says. “Let’s talk.”
Chapter 25
That night I got to know Gil again for the first time, probably also the last. He was almost as charming as I remembered: funny, interested, smart about the things that mattered, smug about the things that didn’t. We drove back to the room, Sinatra playing, conversation somehow never faltering, and before I could even ask what I was going to wear to the ball, I opened the door to my bedroom and found a tuxedo waiting for me on a hanger, pressed and spotless, with a note clipped to the plastic garment bag. Tom—If this doesn’t fit, you’ve shrunk. —G. In the midst of everything else, he’d found time to bring one of my suits to a rental shop and ask for a tux of matching size.
“My dad thinks I should take some time off,” he says, answering my question from before. “Travel for a while. Europe, South America.”
It’s strange to remember someone you’ve known all along. It isn’t like returning to the home you grew up in and noticing how it left its shape on you, how the walls you’ve raised and the doors you’ve opened since then have all followed the design you saw for the first time there. It’s closer to returning home and seeing your mother or sister, who are old enough not to have grown since you last saw them but young enough not to have aged, and realizing for the first time how they look to everyone else, how beautiful they would be if you didn’t know them, what your father and brother-in-law saw when they judged them most and knew them least.
“Honestly?” Gil says. “I haven’t decided. I’m not sure my dad’s one to give advice. The Saab was his idea, and that was a mistake. He was thinking about what he would’ve wanted at our age. He talks to me like I’m someone else.”
Gil was right. He is no longer the freshman who let pants fly above Nassau Hall. He’s more careful than that, more circumspect. You would see him and think he was world-wise, self-involved. The natural authority in his speech and his body language is more pronounced now, a quality that Ivy has cultivated. The clothes he wears are quieter by a shade, and his hair, which was always just long enough to be noticed, never seems tousled now. There is a science behind it, because you never notice when it’s been cut. He’s put on a touch of weight, which makes him handsome in a different way, a hint more staid, and the little affectations he brought from Exeter—the ring he wore on his pinky finger, the stud he wore in his ear—have quietly disappeared.
“I figure I’ll wait until the last minute. I’ll decide during graduation—something spontaneous, something unexpected. Maybe become an architect. Maybe get back into sailing.”
Here he is, changing into his clothes, taking off his wool pants in front of me, not realizing what a perfect stranger I am, a person this version of himself has never met. I realize I’m probably a stranger to myself, that I’ve never been able to see the person Katie waited for all night last night, the newest model, the up-to-the-minute me. There is a riddle here somewhere, a paradox. Frogs and wells and the curious case of Tom Sullivan, who looked in a mirror and saw the past.
“Man walks into a bar,” Gil says, returning to an old standby. “Completely naked. And there’s a duck sitting on his head. The bartender says, ‘Carl, there’s something different about you today.’ The duck shakes his head and says, ‘Harry, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you.’ ”
I wonder why he chose that joke. Maybe he’s been getting at the same point this entire time. We’ve all been talking to him as if he were someone else. The Saab has been our idea of him, and it was our mistake. Gil himself is something unexpected, something spontaneous. An architect, a sailor, a duck.
“You know what I was listening to on the radio the other day?” he asks. “After Anna and I broke up?”
“Sinatra.” But I know it’s wrong.
“Samba,” he tells me. “I was scanning through the stations and WPRB was playing a Latin set. Something instrumental, no voices. Great rhythm. Amazing rhythm.”
WPRB. The campus radio station that played Handel’s Messiah when women first arrived at Princeton. I remember Gil on the night I first met him, outside the bell tower at Nassau Hall. He came out of the darkness doing a little rumba thrust, saying, “Now shake it, baby. Dance.” There has always been music about him, the jazz he’s been trying to play on the piano since the day we met. Maybe there’s something old about the new after all.
“I don’t miss her,” he says, trying for the first time to let me in. “She would put this stuff in her hair. Pomade. Her stylist gave it to her. You know how it smells after someone vacuums? Sort of hot and clean?”
“Sure.”
“It was like that. She must’ve blow-dried it until it burned. Every time she would lean her head on me,
I would think, you smell like my carpet.”
He is everywhere now, free-associating.
“You know who else smelled like that?” he asks.
“Who?”
“Think back. Freshman year.”
Hot and clean. The fireplace in Rockefeller comes immediately to mind.
“Lana McKnight,” I say.
He nods. “I never knew how you guys stayed together as long as you did. The chemistry was so strange. Charlie and I used to make bets about when you two would break up.”
“He told me he liked Lana.”
“Remember the girl he dated sophomore year?” Gil says, already moving on.
“Charlie?”
“Her name was Sharon, I think?”
“With the different-colored eyes?”
“Now, she had great-smelling hair. I remember, she used to sit in our room waiting for Charlie to get back. The whole room would smell like this lotion my mom used to wear. I’ve never known what it was, but I always loved it.”
It occurs to me that Gil has only mentioned stepmothers to me before, never his real mother. The affection gives him away.
“You know why they broke up?” he says.
“Because she dumped him.”
Gil shakes his head. “Because he got tired of picking up after her. She would leave things in our room—sweaters, purses, anything—and Charlie would have to bring them back. He didn’t realize it was just a move. She was giving him a reason to visit her at night. Charlie just thought she was a slob.”
I struggle with my tie, trying to knot it between the fangs of the collar. Good old Charlie. Cleanliness next to godliness.
“She didn’t break up with him,” Gil continues. “The girls who fall for Charlie never do. He always breaks up with them.”
There is a slight suggestion in his voice that this is a fact about Charlie worth bearing in mind, an important character trait, this fault-finding. As if it helps to explain the problems Gil has had with him.
“He’s a good guy,” Gil says, catching himself.
He seems content to leave it at that. For a second there is no sound in the room but the friction of fabric against fabric as I pull off the black tie and begin again. Gil sits down on his mattress and runs his fingers through his hair. He got into that habit back when his hair was longer. His hands still haven’t adapted to the change.
At last I manage a knot, a sort of walnut with wings. I look in the mirror and decide it’s good enough. I slip on my jacket. A perfect fit, even better than my own suit.
Gil is still silent, watching himself in the mirror, as if his image were a painting. Here we are, at the end of his presidency. His Ivy farewell. Tomorrow the club will be run by next year’s officers, the members he created at bicker, and Gil will become a ghost in his own house. The best of the Princeton he knew is coming to an end.
“Hey,” I say, walking across the foyer into his bedroom. “Try to have a good time tonight.”
He doesn’t seem to hear me. He places his cell phone on its charger, watching the light pulse. “I wish this wasn’t the way things turned out,” he says.
“Charlie’ll be okay,” I tell him.
But he just eyes his jewelry case, the tiny wooden chest where he keeps his valuables, and runs his palm across the top, brushing off the dust. Everything in Charlie’s half of the room is old but spotless: a pair of athletic shoes from freshman year sits at the edge of the closet, laces tucked in; last year’s pair is still being broken in on weekends. But everything in Gil’s half of the room seems unlived-in, new and dusty at the same time. From inside the box he lifts a silver watch, the one he wears on special occasions. Its hands have stopped moving, so he shakes the casing gently, winding it.
“What time you got?” he says.
I show him the face of my watch, and he sets his to match.
Outside, night has risen. Gil takes his key ring in his hand, then the phone from its charger. “My dad’s favorite day of college was the Ivy ball his senior year,” he says. “He always used to talk about it.”
I think of Richard Curry, of the stories he told Paul about Ivy.
He said it was like living a dream, a perfect dream.
Gil places the watch to his ear. He listens to it as if there is something miraculous about the sound, an ocean trapped in a seashell.
“Ready?” he says, pulling the band around his wrist and fastening the metal.
He focuses on me now, checking the cut of the tux.
“Not bad,” he says. “I think she’ll approve.”
“You okay?” I ask.
Gil adjusts his jacket and nods.
“I don’t think I’ll be telling my kids about tonight. But yeah. I’m fine.”
At the door we both take one last look before locking up. With the lights out, the room comes to shadows. When I look out the window at the moon one last time, I see Paul in the reflection of my mind’s eye, trudging across campus in his worn winter coat, alone.
Gil looks at his watch and says, “We should be just on time.”
Then he and I, in our black suits and black shoes, head out to the Saab in the shoals of the night-colored snow.
A costume ball, Gil had told me. And a costume ball it was. We arrive to find the club magnificent, the center of all attention on Prospect Avenue. Tall berms of snow rise like ramparts along the brick wall that surrounds the club, but the path leading to the front door has been cleared, and the walkway has been covered with a thin layer of black stones. Like rock salt they melt a swath through the ice. Mirroring the effect are four long cloths draped down the front bays of the clubhouse, each one with a vertical stripe of ivy green flanked by thin pillars of gold.
As Gil parks the Saab in his space, club members and the few other invitees are approaching Ivy ark-style, in twos, each entrance staggered from the next in polite intervals, careful not to intrude on one another. Seniors arrive last, because warm receptions are customary for graduating members, Gil tells me as he shuts off the headlights.
We cross the threshold to find the club bustling. The air is heavy with the heat of bodies, the sweet odor of alcohol and cooked food, the slurring conversations that form and re-form across the floor. Gil’s entrance is met with clapping and cheers. Sophomores and juniors stationed across the first floor turn toward the door to welcome him, some crying Gil’s name aloud, and it seems for a second that this could still be the night he hoped for, a night like his father had.
“Well,” he says to me, ignoring the applause when it continues too long, “this is it.”
I look around at the club’s transformation. The work Gil has been doing, the errands and planning and conversations with florists and caterers, is suddenly more than just an excuse to leave our room when things aren’t well. Everything is different. The armchairs and tables that were once here are gone. In their place, the corners of the front hall have been rounded by quarter-circle tables, all hung with silky cloths in regal dark green and decked in china platters trembling with food. Behind each one, as behind the wet bar to our right, stands an attendant in white gloves. Flower arrangements are everywhere, not a speck of color in any of them: just white lilies and black orchids and varieties I have never seen before. In the storm of tuxedoes and black evening gowns, it’s even possible to overlook the brown oak of the walls.
“Sir?” says a waiter dressed in white tie, who has appeared from nowhere bearing a tray of canapés and truffles. “Lamb,” he says, pointing at the first, “and white chocolate,” pointing at the second.
“Have one,” Gil says.
So I do, and all the hunger of the day, the missed meals and hospital food fantasies, all of it instantly returns. When another man circles by with a tray of champagne flutes, I help myself again. The bubbles rise straight to my head, helping to keep my thoughts from drifting back to Paul.
Just then, a musical quartet kicks up from the dining room antechamber, a place where weathered lounge chairs used to stand. A piano and dr
um set have been tucked into the corner, with enough room for a bass and electric guitar in between. For the time being, it’s R&B standards. Later, I know, if Gil has his way, there will be jazz.
“I’ll be right back,” he says, and suddenly he leaves my side, heading up the stairs. At every step, a member stops him to say something kind, to smile and shake his hand, sometimes to hug him. I see Donald Morgan place a careful hand on Gil’s back as he passes, the easy, sincere congratulations of the man who would be king. Junior women already in their drinks look at Gil with foggy eyes, sentimental about the club’s loss, their loss. He is tonight’s hero, I realize, the host and guest of honor both. Everywhere he goes he’ll have company. But somehow, without anyone by his side—Brooks or Anna or one of us—he looks alone already.
“Tom!” comes a voice from behind me.
I turn, and the air converges in a single fragrance, the one Gil’s mother and Charlie’s girlfriend must’ve worn, because it has the same effect on me. If I imagined that I liked Katie best when I saw her with flaws, with her hair up and her shirt untucked, then I was a fool. Because here she is now, tucked into a black gown, hair down, all collarbones and breasts, and I am undone.
“Wow.”
She puts a hand on my lapel and rubs off a flake of dust that turns out to be snow, still lingering in this heat.
“Same to you,” she says.
There is something wonderful in her voice, a welcome ease. “Where’s Gil?” she asks.
“Upstairs.”
She pulls two more flutes of champagne from a passing tray.
“Cheers,” she says, giving me one. “So who are you supposed to be?”
I hesitate, unsure what she means.
“Your costume. Who’d you come as?”
Now Gil reappears.
“Hey,” Katie says. “Long time no see.”
Gil sizes the two of us up, then smiles like a proud father. “You both look beautiful.”
Katie laughs. “So who are you supposed to be?” she asks.
With a flourish, Gil swings back the side of his jacket. Only now do I see what he went upstairs to get. There, hanging between the left flank of his waist and his right hip, is a black leather belt. On the belt is a leather holster, and in the holster is an ivory-handled pistol.