I’d never done this before. But a group had planned to meet up at midnight and head over to the fifth-reunion tent, the largest on campus. It had started to drizzle earlier, the first time in days, and we hoped the water would add an element of speed to the descent.
At nine thirty, Sara phoned my room and asked if I’d seen Jeffrey. I told her not since dinner.
“That’s weird,” she said. “He was hanging out in my room, but when I came back from taking a shower he was gone.”
She didn’t sound overly concerned, though. They were the rare couple, I’d noticed, that hadn’t become strained as graduation neared. It seemed that graduation was rarely a time of unity. More often it caused outright breakups or, for the warmer of heart, vague promises of long-distance relationships. We were an ambitious bunch, eleven hundred Jack-in-the-boxes full of potential energy, just waiting to be sprung upon the world. This was no time for diversions, no time for compromise. All we had to do was to follow the path that our education had cleared for us. Even a good campus romance, even love, had little force to deflect the pull of an acceptance to a top medical school or a plum job at a New York consulting firm.
Jeffrey and Sara were an exception. On Tuesday they would be shipping all their belongings, except for a suitcase or two, to their respective parents’ homes, and then casting off together in Jeffrey’s boat of a car, his 1982 Ford Taurus station wagon with 150,000+ miles, bound for San Francisco. There he would program computers—though he really didn’t know very much about programming computers—for a company so new and underfunded that the CEO, a twenty-six-year-old UCLA dropout, carried his coffeemaker from home to work every day so the company wouldn’t have to spend twenty dollars on another one. (Jeffrey had told me this detail, one of many that he found charming rather than alarming, upon his return from interviewing there. He interviewed at several other companies, too, but had liked this one best. They think big, he’d explained.) Sara wanted to spend the next year or two working on a novel. Once she and Jeffrey settled somewhere, she’d take part-time work—as a barista or maybe a bartender—for extra money.
That was their plan. Compared to the plans of many of our peers, it seemed like a recipe for starvation. But they’d be starving together.
I had started seeing a political science major named Wendy just a few weeks earlier, and unlike Jeffrey and Sara, we would be starving separately. Or rather, I would be starving alone. She’d made it clear on our first date that she wasn’t going to get involved in anything complicated right now, not with Michigan law only three months away. When I told her that I was heading for New York after graduation to play the drums, and that a long-distance relationship probably wasn’t in the cards, she seemed pleased, and our springtime romance was on.
I’d spent much of the day with Wendy, and now she was having some sort of last-hurrah dinner with her suite mates and would catch up with us at midnight by the fifth-reunion tent. At eleven o’clock I was in my room, just sitting with the bay window open, looking out into the dark courtyard and killing time before we all met up in an hour. There was a pounding on my door. I got up and opened it.
Jeffrey stood in the doorway looking wet from the rain, bloodshot eyes, hair a mess. Definitely drunk. He came in and sat down on the floor. The night was warm and humid, but he was shivering.
I asked him what was wrong.
“Can I borrow a T-shirt?” he asked. “This one got wet.”
All my things were in boxes. I dug around until I found a T-shirt and tossed it to him. He pulled off the wet one and put on mine.
“Thanks.”
He was breathing heavily, and when he looked up at me, it wasn’t the rain making his eyes wet.
“Jeffrey, what is it?”
Outside, the most determined of us were still in full party mode, despite the hangovers and the rain. A drunk student was announcing to the whole courtyard how fucking drunk he was, and in response a second guy yelled at him from inside one of the dorms to shut the fuck up, and in response to that the first guy reminded the second guy that it was a free country, and then his belch echoed across the quad.
“It’s Sara,” Jeffrey said.
“What? What about her?” The way he looked, my first thought was that she’d just broken up with him.
“I can’t believe it.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“She cheated on me.”
At that precise moment, another partyer outside began singing a loud, off-key version of the “Love Boat” theme. Love, exciting and new . . .
“What are you talking about?” I said. “How do you know?”
Come aboard, we’re expecting you . . .
“I . . . that guy really needs to shut up.” Jeffrey got up and slammed my window closed. He sat down again. “I need a cigarette,” he said. “I really need one and I’m completely out.”
“All right,” I said, except that I didn’t have any. I left him in my room and banged on a couple of doors, returning a minute later with the last of a pack, borrowed from a guy at the end of the hallway I’d been trying to avoid all semester, an aerospace engineer named Gilbert who apparently played the bass and was always asking me to “rock out” with him.
Jeffrey struggled to breathe normally—he was still crying a little—and lit his cigarette. Took a long drag. Then he told me what’d happened. How the information had come out in the worst possible way. In one of Sara’s short stories.
She’d been taking the advanced fiction writing class that semester with Tanya Mahoney. Since freshman year she’d been trying to get into that class.
“She said she didn’t want me reading her work this semester, that she was ‘getting close.’ To a breakthrough or whatever. I wasn’t suspicious,” he said, “only curious. I mean, for four years I’d read every word she ever wrote.”
They were the ideal couple that way. Sara loved to write, and Jeffrey loved to read. She wouldn’t show her work to anybody besides him, but he was always bragging about her talent, saying it was only a matter of time before she began to publish her stories.
After dinner that night, he’d been alone in her dorm room while she went to take a shower. While she was out of the room, he’d noticed in one of the open boxes a pile of her stories.
“What do you mean, you ‘noticed’ a pile of stories?”
“Okay, I dug a little. I was curious. I hadn’t read anything of hers for months.” He pulled a bundle from the back pocket of his jeans. “Maybe I was a little suspicious. It’s possible. I don’t know. Anyway, here. Read it.”
“You stole her story?”
“Yeah, I took it and left. I couldn’t stand to be there when she came back. Go on—read it.”
I unfolded the pages he’d given me. Sara was always telling us that her stories went long—twenty, thirty pages. This one was short, though, just eight pages. It was dated from the middle of the semester and titled “The Three-Day Affair.”
In the late afternoon of the third day, they lie in bed, the food between them in white cardboard cartons. The chow mein, perfect. The Szechuan shrimp, too spicy. Insanely spicy. She asks if he is perhaps trying to kill her. Just the opposite, he says. He is trying to save her. Save her from going to California.
He’s my boyfriend, she says. He needs me.
If there is a hell, she thinks, I’m surely going there. And then she adds “overly dramatic” to her list of faults.
I’m not talking about your boyfriend, he says. I’m talking about earthquakes. I’d hate to see you caught in one.
You can’t expect me to change my whole entire life based on three days, she says. It isn’t fair.
She blames her yellow curtains, through which the soft afternoon light is making this young man who is not her boyfriend look beautiful. She searches his face for a scar, a pimple. Some blemish to find distasteful so that she can focus on it when she r
emembers him. She hunts for a mole.
I hear there are wildfires, he says. You could get trapped. Your house could burn to the ground.
Please, don’t joke, she says. I don’t want any jokes right now. She sets the box of shrimp on the bedside table. I don’t want to think about anything, she says, and kisses him below his eye. His eyes are pale blue, like the Midwestern sky of her imagination, nothing at all like the cold dark waters off California’s rocky coast.
Then I’ll tell you something that isn’t a joke, he says, and kisses her, beginning at her mouth and working his way to her throat, the hollow of her collar bone, down her body lower and lower. Soon, she is clenching her teeth. She begins to moan softly as their third afternoon together slides slowly toward . . .
I turned the page and kept reading. The boyfriend has taken a trip to California to interview for jobs as a computer programmer. He is made out to be a decent person but a bore and an unsatisfying lover. The man with whom she has the affair is handsome and ambitious and bound for success in Washington, DC. He has always pined for her, and she for him, but neither one ever acted on their desires until now. He wants the story’s narrator to break up with her boyfriend and come with him to DC.
The story ends ambiguously, as if the character, or perhaps the author, hasn’t decided. Her boyfriend calls on the phone from Newark Airport, having returned from his trip. He says the interviews went well, and he can’t wait to see her.
I love you, he says.
She grips the receiver and squeezes her eyes shut, imagining.
I love you, she says.
He was looking at me, waiting for my verdict.
I shrugged. “It’s a short story. It’s fiction.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “It happened. I went to California to look for a job. She stayed here and had an affair. My God, Will, it’s so . . . detailed.”
He was right about that. The story, despite its lyricism, was overtly sexual. Its climax was not solely literary.
“You shouldn’t have gone through her things,” I said.
“That’s not the point.”
“It sort of is. I don’t see how you can confront her about this now without coming across—”
“She cheated on me, Will! And the way she describes me . . . my God, she thinks I’m a total loser. And bad in bed. She should just tell me, if that’s what she thinks. I can take it. But she shouldn’t cheat on me.” He was up now, pacing my small room. “And all the stuff about the other guy, the things he did with her . . . I’ll never get that out of my head. Not ever.” He went over to the bay window and cracked it open. He crushed his cigarette on the stone wall outside and dropped the butt out the window.
“She’s still planning to move with you to California, though,” I said.
“Yeah. That’s the plan.”
“And is that what you want, too?”
He was looking out the window. It was still drizzling. A few guys had come outside and were throwing a football around in the dimly lit courtyard.
“More than anything,” he said.
“Then you need to get rid of that story and hope she doesn’t notice it missing. Forget any of it ever happened. Leave it alone.”
“How can I? I mean, you read it.”
I shrugged. “Tell yourself she made the whole thing up. I mean, that’s a possibility, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, right. And I’m sure you figured out who the guy is. The guy in the story.” When I didn’t answer right away he said, “Come on, Will. Nolan’s moving to DC. And the physical descriptions . . . It’s him. You can’t pretend it isn’t.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”
Three woman had joined the football group. They seemed to be taking on the guys in a game. One of the girls kicked the ball, and the guy ran it back for a touchdown. Whooping and high-fives ensued.
“You can’t accuse him,” I said. “There’s no way.”
“How can you defend him?”
“I’m not defending anybody. I’m saying you’re getting your facts from a piece of fiction.”
“So you don’t think it happened?”
“I’m saying you can’t know for sure.” I handed him back the story. “Not without asking her, and you can’t ask her. Look, maybe it’s just her imagination, completely made up, but she knew you’d get upset if you ever read it. Isn’t that a possibility?”
“So being with Nolan is her fantasy—is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m saying it’s a short story. It’s a class assignment. It’s fiction.”
He sighed and said nothing.
“All I know is,” I said, “she told you she wants to move to California. With you. So accept that. Move to California, get married, have twenty kids, and live happily ever after.”
“And that’s it? Never mention any of this to Nolan.”
I nodded. “Exactly. Never mention it.”
“You know he’s talking about us all getting together next winter someplace for a weekend of golf. I couldn’t do that, Will. I couldn’t play golf with the guy.”
“Then don’t,” I said. “You never have to see him again if you don’t want to. But can I make a prediction? I’ll bet that by next winter, this will all be behind you. All of this will seem like it never happened.”
“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Is that what you’re saying?”
“No,” I said, “that isn’t at all what I’m saying.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know if I can just forgive and forget.”
He could, though. Or if he couldn’t, then he must have come to terms with the part of himself that resented ambiguity and learned to live with not knowing. Some would call this growing up.
The next winter, we all met up in Sedona for a weekend of golf, just like Nolan had talked about. Every year after, we’d pick a different spot. And not once did Jeffrey bring up the three-day affair that he had read about.
“You know,” he said, “I’m no writer. But if I were to describe Sara in a story, even if it were fiction, I’d never demean her. Never.”
“I know you wouldn’t,” I said.
The rain lightened up suddenly, like someone turning off a faucet. Moments later, the phone rang. It was Evan. “It’s time,” he said. He and Nolan had finished the bottle of tequila in his room and were ready to slide down some tents.
“We’ll meet you downstairs,” I told him, and hung up the phone. “You still up for this?” I asked Jeffrey.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Sure, why not.”
I saw this as the first sign of his willingness to let the mystery die. I was glad. I didn’t want high drama. These were our last days together for a long time. They were hard on us all.
A few minutes later, Evan, Nolan, Jeffrey, and I were participating in one of our last-ever Princeton rites. When Sara caught up with us, she said, “Jeff, where’ve you been?” and he shrugged and said, “Just shooting the shit with Will,” and she punched me on the arm and said thanks a lot for letting her know, and that was that. To Jeffrey’s credit, he didn’t brood or ruin anyone else’s fun. It helped that Sara was acting affectionately toward him. They held hands and slid down the tent together.
Wendy showed up at midnight with several of her suite mates, and she kissed me with sweet alcohol breath, and everything about the night made me sad. The moon shone through a light layer of clouds, which then drifted away, and a light breeze rustled the leaves of the elm trees that bordered the courtyard. At first I was afraid the tent wouldn’t hold us, but I was wrong. It was a sturdy structure. I sat at the very top of it, underneath the stars, and looked out across campus: Blair Arch in the distance, the bookstore, the smaller library where I used to study during my perplexing freshman year. Graduation wasn’t for another two days, but I was already feeling nostalgic for the place.
We climbed and slid and got muddy and behaved exactly like alumni desperate to relive their youth.
CHAPTER 19
I took a breath, and when I couldn’t hold it any longer I got out of the car and went inside the studio with my first-aid kit. Nolan was seated at my chair in the control room, a wad of paper towels pressed to his ear but otherwise looking fully alive.
“I thought you’d fled to Mexico,” he said.
“Don’t think I didn’t consider it.” I set the kit on the couch and began to peel the tape off the box. Through the window I could see Jeffrey sitting in the recording room, leaning against one of the walls and looking down at his shoes. “How is he?” I asked.
“How’s he? What the fuck do I care how he is?”
I had the kit open and was dumping its contents onto the sofa. “I don’t see a needle or thread in here. But there are some good strong bandages. I think that’s our best bet until a professional can sew you up. I’ll tape it up real well. That should keep the wound closed.”
Nolan shrugged. “I’m in your hands.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Like a bitch.”
I handed him a packet of Advil. He tore it open and ate the pills without water. Miracle of miracles, there was also a bottle of antacids in the kit, and I quickly ate a handful. My stomach gurgled in thanks.
“Not feeling so hot yourself?” Nolan asked.
“You could say that,” I said, and asked him if he wanted more whiskey.
“Desperately,” he said, “but I’m going to pass. I need a clear head right now.”
I pushed his hair out of the way and stuck a big bandage to his head, pinning the ear in place. I began to wrap a big white length of gauze around his head at an angle so that his good ear would remain uncovered.
“That feel any better?” I asked.
“Doesn’t feel any worse.” With the gauze around his head he looked like a soldier whose brains and good sense had been blasted out across some rice paddy.
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