Loner

by Teddy Wayne

Defiant: my nominal adjective. I tried to remember hers—short? sensitive? shy!—but her phone rang. “Sorry,” she said before picking it up and leaving the room. “My parents.”

  On the floor by my feet, poking out under a men’s magazine promising its reader guns for biceps, was Harvard’s Freshman Register, known as the Facebook, onetime inspiration for the digital Goliath. I hadn’t picked up my copy yet. I flipped through the Fs.

  There he was: David Alan Federman, wearing a white dress shirt, tie, and yearbook-photographer-mandated smile—a ­rectangular vacuum of charisma. My hair the drabbest of browns, destined to desaturate without distinction, parted like a small-market weatherman’s. My complexion was barely contrastable from the shirt and white space bordering the frame. ­Features that neither enticed nor repelled. A body sixty-eight and three-quarters inches long and 146 pounds at my last checkup, outwardly average in all respects.

  The museum card next to the artwork: Garret Hobart High School, 152 Midvale Ln., my hometown, the humiliating two letters of NJ.

  Turning to the first-name index in the back, I found two Veronicas. The first wasn’t you. The second was in the middle of the W’s, above a spare Park Avenue address and The Chapin School, a faceted blue sapphire among the round gray pebbles:

  Veronica Morgan Wells.

  Careless sunglasses half hidden in windswept hair, a collared shirt with just enough pearl-snap buttons unfastened to make your décolletage inviting but not tawdry. Behind you, an indeterminate bifurcation of sea and sky, your serenely unimpressed smile implying the background was a perennial vacation spot rather than a one-off outing. You had wrapped up a day of lounging in a secluded cove on a private beach, reading a Russian novel from a clothbound volume, wondering how you could feel so lonely in such a beautiful place—you’d always worried there was something defective about you, were scared people wouldn’t like you when they got to know the real you, maybe you’d meet someone at Harvard who would accept you for who you were, and next summer you could take him back here.

  (I’d spent July and August interning at my father’s law office in a squat brick building that shared a lobby with Dr. Irving Jomsky, chiropractor.)

  Sara came back and I casually tossed the Register on the floor. Carla joined us and talked about Freshman Week activities, but all I could think about, running in a loop, was Veronica Morgan Wells, Veronica Morgan Wells, Veronica Morgan Wells. The quadrisyllable that halves its beats at the middle name, dividing again at its pluralized terminus of subterranean depths. The percussively alert c drowsily succumbing to the dozing s. Perfectly symmetrical initials, the V found twice upside-down in the M, inverted once more in the W, and, if spoken, easily confused with a German luxury automaker.

  Sara talked about participating in the First-Year Urban Program for preorientation, whose main project had been “reconstructing furniture for low-income families in Boston.”

  “I was pretty bad at it,” she admitted. “I think I ended up deconstructing the furniture, to be honest. I was like the team’s Derrida.” She waited for us to laugh at the reference that neither of us yet knew. “You guys do any programs?”

  “The Fall Clean-Up with Dorm Crew,” Carla said.

  “I didn’t know about that option,” said Sara. “That sounds fun. What did you guys clean up?”

  “Mostly bathrooms in the dorms. The pay was good, though.”

  “Oh,” Sara said, clearly discomfited by the socioeconomic schism. “David, how about you?” she asked, her eyes meeting mine pleadingly.

  “I stayed home,” I said.

  I returned to my room shortly thereafter. In my bed, I sleuthed around the warrens of the free! Internet for your name, adding information from the Register (high school, address), modifying it with new data that cropped up (on the track team, with three-­thousand-meter race times recorded in a few places; supporting cast in some plays and then, senior year, Lady Macbeth in your girls’ school’s production; a quote in a news item on Chapin’s website about your participation in Model UN: “ ‘It’s a wonderful opportunity for students to think about the world outside themselves,’ said junior Veronica Wells, representing Hungary.”). Progenitors: Lawrence, member of the senior brass at a household-name financial services firm and a Harvard Business School graduate, and Margaret, who, according to the New York Times, “sits on the board of various philanthropic organizations,” and whose willowy figure was photographed on a host of society websites. No siblings I could find.

  And no other photos, except perhaps for those cached in your Facebook page, which was off-limits to me. (I couldn’t locate any additional social media accounts in your name.) You’d used the same profile picture as in the Register. I saved it to my computer and zoomed in.

  You had no affiliation with Steven’s modest metric of cute. Cute didn’t fuel Romeo and Dante and Paris, couldn’t galvanize the unerring belief that their inamorata justified any sacrifice, that their quest for Juliet or Beatrice or Helen, successful or not, was itself a peerless achievement reflecting back on their own valor. There’s just one Everest, and only the most heroic can reach the summit.

  You’d elected not to list your dorm room or any contact details in the student directory, so I combed the doors on my floor. I didn’t find your name and went upstairs. It was at the end of the hall, on room 505, a symmetrical number to match your symmetrical ­initials.

  Yours was also a two-person suite. Headlining the sign was SARA COHEN, CLEVELAND, OH. Sara without an h.

  Chapter 3

  I looked around for you on campus over the next few days, a blitz of tours, placement tests, and advisory meetings. With my placeholder friends, I endured a marathon of organized social outings: the Tin Man gyrations of the First Chance Dance; the Freshman Talent Show, dominated by music and juggling performances (Steven put on a well-received magic act); the annual screening of Love Story, interrupted with increasingly tedious commentary from Crimson Key members, the student group that ran much of Freshman Week; the A Cappella Jam, exactly as fun as it sounds. You were a consistent no-show. Sara, too, refrained from most activities.

  To lend my bare walls some color, I bought a van Gogh print of sunflowers. After affixing it with dorm-approved putty, I recognized I was becoming a collegiate cliché and returned to the Harvard Coop, but saw that no matter what I might purchase—Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, Munch’s The Scream, the couple kissing in Times Square, John Belushi in his COLLEGE sweatshirt, a kitten doing its best to hang in there—I’d at best be some potpourri of stereotypes. Hence I decided to transform my room into a self-aware caricature by full-throttling van Gogh, plastering the wall above my bed with a collection of his most famous yellow-hued paintings to complement the original sunflowers: a chair, café exteriors, straw hats, whorled wheat fields. I stood back and admired the results with a chuckle. (If anyone ever noticed my thematic curation, they didn’t say anything.)

  When the opportunity presented itself, I made a few bumbling attempts to strike up conversations with other freshmen. None backfired as badly as with Jake and Phil, but they never led to anything, either. It was still better, I reasoned, to bide my time with my entryway companions than to sit by myself like a leper, and so I stuck with the clique, who had christened themselves the Matthews Marauders.

  “We’re pregaming in our room again at eight o’clock,” Justin announced the fourth night at dinner.

  “Technically speaking, we rarely go to any games,” Steven said. “So we’re stretching the definitional properties by calling it pregaming.”

  “Who cares? The pregaming’s the best part,” said Kevin. “Not gonna lie: the actual game usually sucks.”

  “Yeah,” Justin agreed. “If I spent my whole life just pregaming with you guys and never going to any games, I’d be cool with that.”

  “Once we start going to parties,” Kevin proposed, “we should just think of them as pregaming for some
other game.”

  Justin raised his glass of soda. “To pregaming and never gaming.”

  “Puk-chh,” said Kevin as he jerked his arm in two movements to toast with Justin. He punctuated much of his speech with sound effects of cinematic violence: guns loading and firing or cyborg combatants landing bone-pulverizing punches.

  “You guys crack me up,” Ivana said, shaking her head fondly. “You’re so weird.”

  They weren’t, in the slightest. They were completely ordinary, all of them, having already pledged their fealty to one another halfway through the first week of college, with no aspirations to maraud beyond the claustrophobic perimeter and dirty-sock musk of Justin and Kevin’s room.

  Sara ate meals with us, but sat out the pregame sessions with various excuses: early wakeup for a meeting, scheduled phone call with her grandmother. She hadn’t referred to a long-distance boyfriend or other freshmen she’d befriended, so it appeared that she was just reclusing in her room. Or in her room with you. Perhaps she, too, saw our group as a parochial small town and was scheming to flee it with her roommate as her one-way Greyhound ticket—in which case I needed to guarantee I was also on board.

  My only sightings of you were in the dining hall, where your friends had claimed a table in a far corner yet managed to make themselves the hub of attention and activity, with other social blocs frequently coming by to pay their respects, as if your preeminent coastal provenance had been directly transposed onto the map of Annenberg and the rest of us were flyover country. Over the course of the week I’d seen enough of their faces to locate the core members’ entries in the Freshman Register. Their footprints on the Internet were private or contained no tangential material about you. A few were from Los Angeles or abroad, but most had attended prep schools in New York. That explained your immediate alliance—your social scopes were not limited to your high schools but encompassed small-world networks of the well-heeled: second homes, clubs, family connections. That, or you’d simply identified your kin on sight, and if I ever attempted to breach your city walls, you would instantly peg me as a barbarian.

  Sitting at lunch one day with the Matthews Marauders, I was furtively reading an essay from that morning’s Crimson about the author’s attempts to squelch her inborn competitiveness with her classmates over grades, summer internships, and boyfriends. (“Then I realized,” she wrote in the generously italicized and disingenuous epiphany, “that I didn’t have to be the best. I just had to be the best me.”)

  “Let’s start the pregaming half an hour earlier tonight,” Kevin said. “We may as well maximize our hangout time together before classes start.”

  “Fine by me—I can’t get enough of your guys’ dumb jokes,” Ivana said teasingly.

  “Yeah, right,” Justin said. “You know they’re hilarious.”

  I imagined one of the hulking chandeliers above us breaking free and crashing on our table in a blizzard of glass.

  When I tilted my head back down, I spotted you grabbing two pears from a basket and walking to the exit, none of your private-­school mafia in the vicinity. A chance to stage a seemingly random encounter.

  I abandoned my partially eaten lasagna on the dishwasher track and followed you outside, maintaining a discreet distance as you cut across Harvard Yard. The chiming of the Memorial Church noon bells was drowned out by the sputtering roar of a lawn mower. A monarch butterfly juked flirtatiously in front of me. You were biting into one of the pears and heading toward Matthews. I could enter with you, make you aware that I lived in the same dorm, maybe jokingly remind you of our shared name-first, descriptor-second introductions that night in the common room.

  You got waylaid by something written in chalk on the pavement. I swerved around you and over to Matthews, where I waited by the entrance, pretending to be immersed in my phone. When you approached, I pushed the door open and held it. Up close, your skin appeared like the unperturbed shell of some creamy European confection.

  “Thanks,” I said, flustered, as you stepped in.

  I’d mixed it up; I was the one doing something for you. I would’ve been better off making the bad pun I’d formulated during my chase: Pair of pears?

  Yet the verbal blunder didn’t offset my small chivalrous gesture. You smiled at me. Not the coy smile of your Facebook photo—a genuine one, flashing the full range of your front teeth.

  It was like entering Harvard Yard again on move-in day. Cue the timpani.

  Not wanting to seem as if I were tailgating you upstairs, I loitered in the lobby, browsing the fliers on the bulletin board. “Stressed or sad?” one read. “Anxiety and depression are the two most common mental health diagnoses among college students. Schedule an appointment with university health services today.”

  “Harvard isn’t for everyone,” my guidance counselor had told me in my junior-year advising session, words I ignored as boilerplate dissuasion he dispensed to every Cambridge hopeful in hedging against the school’s stingy acceptance rate. “It’s true that it can open doors for you later, but you might well get a richer college experience elsewhere, in a place you can find yourself more easily. This is often the problem when you go somewhere primarily for its name.”

  It’s convenient, in hindsight, to blame Harvard. But it wasn’t the guilty party.

  Chapter 4

  The eve of Harvard’s weeklong shopping period, in which students sample classes before selecting them, I was on my bed, laptop scalding my thighs, meandering the Internet of you, looking at the photo and cycling through the same information. (“ ‘It’s a wonderful opportunity for students to think about the world outside themselves,’ said junior Veronica Wells, representing Hungary.”)

  The September breeze carried boisterous shrieks and distant music up to my open window. The Matthews Marauders were in the Yard, attending the Ice Cream Bash. (As with the A Cappella Jam, a number of social happenings attached an overblown noun that leached them of any allure: the Foreign Students Fete, the Hillel Gala.) I didn’t have it in me to go to yet another cornpone event, especially when you were unlikely to be present.

  An e-mail pipped into my in-box among the deluge of university mass mailings. It was from Daniel Hallman, a charter member of my high school cafeteria table. He was reporting on his first week at the University of Wisconsin, where, he claimed, he’d gotten “wasted or high” every night and had received “blow jobs from three girls, though not at the same time . . . yet.”

  His tone was unrecognizable, nothing like the Daniel of the previous four years, who once in a while threw in a sly remark at lunch, who had never, to my knowledge, had a real conversation with a girl outside of class. Though he was evidently a new man now, flush with alcohol in his bloodstream and treatable venereal diseases, to engage with him, albeit electronically, would be to return to that cafeteria table, an even more desperate seat than my current one in Annenberg.

  Yet he was the one having the quintessential college experience, drunkenly bed-hopping, while I had locked myself up in sober solitary confinement. I thought of my childhood bedroom, the years in which no one other than family members and cleaning ladies had set foot inside it. It occurred to me that, had I not been assigned a roommate, I could die on my twin mattress and it might take weeks until someone investigated.

  My phone buzzed.

  “So he does know how to use that expensive device we bought him,” my mother said after I picked up.

  “Sorry for not calling back.” I could hear NPR in the background. “You’re in the car?”

  “We’re going out for Chinese. I didn’t feel like cooking.” She lowered the radio. “So? How are you? How’s Harvard?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Classes haven’t started yet.”

  “And your roommate? What’s he like?”

  “He’s fine. I don’t think we’re going to be best friends or anything.”

  “No?” She sounded disappoi
nted. To my father: “Green light.” Back to me: “Well, it takes time to get to know some people. I’m sure once classes begin you’ll make a few friends.”

  “I have friends already,” I said. “There’s a bunch of us in the dorm that eat together every meal and hang out. The Matthews Marauders.”

  “Really?” she asked. “That’s great. What about that nice girl we met moving in?”

  “Sara,” I said. “She’s in the group, too. We talked awhile the other night.”

  “Oh, good. I liked her.”

  We both waited for the other to say something.

  “But things are okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” My voice cracked. I took a drink of water from a stolen Annenberg cup. “Really good, actually. I even have a nickname everyone calls me. David Defiant.”

  “Anna, put your phone on silent,” she chided. “Sorry, what did you say? They call you David Definite? Why’s that?”

  “Defi—it’s a long story.”

  “You’ll have to tell it to me sometime,” she said. “Listen, we just got to the restaurant, but I’m glad to hear you’re enjoying yourself.”

  “I should go, too.”

  “Oh? What’re you doing tonight?”

  The bass from the Ice Cream Bash turned up. “I’m going to this ice cream party.”

  “Sounds fun,” she said. “Remember to take your Lactaid.”

  Hordes of students ate ice cream from paper cups, gabbing amiably as sanitized pop music played on speakers. While no one was looking, I swallowed one of the two lactose-intolerance pills I stored at all times in the small fifth pocket of my jeans, entered the fray, and got in line. It seemed like I was the only untethered attendee, as if everyone else knew the secret that ensured they were never alone at a party.

  “Hello?” The Crimson Key member wielding the scooper was looking at me with hostile impatience under his perky mask. “What can I get you?”