by Teddy Wayne
And yet there was something attractive about it, a yesteryear femininity to the way you handled the cigarette. I held up my phone, zoomed in with the camera, and snapped. It caught you with a plume of smoke escaping your mouth, your lips in a perfect O. After you stamped out the butts, Jen parted with an air kiss and you continued on to Sever Hall.
Our next class was an intimate seminar. I entered the room a few students after you, and not a moment too soon, as the professor asked if I would shut the door behind me. There was only one (clearly gay) male at the oval table. Everyone looked at me as if my presence were unwelcome, a grotesque insect crawling over their lovely picnic spread.
The professor, a thirtyish woman with cat’s-eye glasses and the edge of a tattoo peeking out of her jacket sleeve, reminded the class that if they were here it meant they had already signed up for the freshman seminar Gender and the Consumerist Impulse. Enrollment in the seminars was restricted to twelve. I counted thirteen students in the room.
I was sitting halfway between you and the professor, which meant I couldn’t look at you—this time I was in your line of vision. As the professor lectured during a slideshow on print ads of the 1970s, I devoted all my energy to appearing attentive, knowledgeable, and passionate, nodding along after brief pauses as if I were mulling each comment and giving it my carefully considered imprimatur.
She opened the seminar up to discussion. A girl to my right raised her hand.
“The magnification of feminine mouths in many of the ads seems to be about isolating the one non-taboo main orifice,” she said. “The female mouth takes in edible objects that substitute for the phallus.”
“Absolutely,” the professor said. “Male mouths are rarely eroticized. They typically function as a tool to imply speech or some other form of power.”
Here was my opening, a place where I felt slightly more comfortable speaking than in an orientation session or dorm entryway. I came up with a line to simultaneously flaunt my intellect and cleverness. Crisp, I reminded myself. Crisp.
“But then you might say that the Marlboro Man ads are an example of pathetic fallacy,” I said, referring to the campaign that had just been on-screen.
I leaned back in my chair and folded my arms, waiting for approving laughter. The silence was disconcerting.
“How so?” the professor asked.
No wonder—if she hadn’t even understood the terms of the joke, there was little chance the students could.
“Pathetic fallacy is the attribution of human emotion to nature,” I explained. At least her ignorance gave me another opportunity to demonstrate my knowledge, perhaps secure my spot in the seminar.
“Right,” she said. “And how does that relate to the Marlboro Man?”
The room suddenly felt very warm. “Well, he’s in nature, and he has a small cigarette in his mouth.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” she said. “Unless you were just making a pun on ‘pathetic fallacy’ and ‘pathetic phallus’?”
I nodded and swallowed. The professor, stony-faced, called on another student. A disaster, worse than if I’d made an earnestly inane observation. I clammed up for the rest of the class. You didn’t talk, either.
When the seminar ended I didn’t follow you to your next destination. Though I was loath to let you out of my sight, I needed to speak to the professor.
“Excuse me,” I said as she gathered her notes. “I didn’t sign up for this seminar and I know you’re at the size limit, but I’m very passionate about the subject and would be happy to write my application essay now.”
I felt pinned by her glare, which seemed to convey her presumption that I, as a male whose signifiers (to borrow a word she used repeatedly) pointed to heterosexuality, was not here out of academic integrity but for some nefarious agenda.
“There’s a wait list,” she said, zipping up her bag. “If you don’t get in, I’ll also be teaching this next semester.”
One more student would hardly upset the equilibrium; how bureaucratically compliant for someone with a tattoo and a professed interest in “nonnormative modes of intersectionality.” I could only hope that one of the students would be scared off by the daunting syllabus, which culminated in a lengthy “anthropological study requiring local fieldwork.”
You didn’t eat lunch in Annenberg the rest of the week, foiling my designs to duplicate your course load. In addition to the English lecture, I ended up registering for the art history class I’d shopped; the massive introductory economics course; and a philosophy/psychology class, Ethical Reasoning 22: The Self and the Other.
I didn’t get off the wait list for Gender and the Consumerist Impulse. The good news was that you showed up to the next lecture for Ahab to Prufrock, though we weren’t slotted into the same discussion section. Our time in a shared space would be confined to Tuesday afternoons from 1:05 to 2:30 in Harvard Hall, which was just as impersonal as Annenberg. I would have to find another point of “intersectionality.”
Chapter 5
I skimmed the campus events listings, found a viable candidate, and copied the link in a jaunty e-mail to Sara:
Subject: salsa? (not the condiment)
Hey, future concentrator in Latin American history, want to go to this thing tomorrow night? I warn you: I’m really good at salsa dancing. (Not really.) If you’re game, I can meet you in your room and we can head over together.
A few hours later she wrote back, “I’m even better! I’ll be coming from the library, so I’ll meet you at the place.”
Sara wasn’t there when I arrived at the salsa event, hosted by a Latino students’ organization in a building on Mt. Auburn Street. I dawdled by the door as the undergrads filed in and warmly greeted one another. They began to pair up and I went to the bathroom to kill time. I returned to find Sara watching from the sidelines.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said. “A friend from high school called on the way here. She wouldn’t stop talking.”
She nodded absently, a look of trepidation on her face. “I can tell I’m going to be really bad at this,” she said, eyes on the dance floor, where the couples synchronized back-and-forth steps, the more expert dancers adding spins and flourishes the execution of which were as beyond my purview as dunking a basketball.
“I didn’t realize what we were getting into,” I admitted. “I’m pretty sure no one would care if we sat out. Or even notice if we left.”
“Maybe it’s a good thing for us to experience being unseen at a Latino event,” she whispered. “You know—when Latinos have to deal with being unseen more systematically every day in the U.S.”
I gave her a sidelong glance to see if she was joking, but she wasn’t.
To my horror, we weren’t unseen. “Join us!” called out a girl who seemed to be the leader. Sara and I looked at each other self-consciously, the sixth graders jammed together by a well-meaning teacher at the school dance. With a resigned shrug she dropped her backpack to the floor and we tentatively shuffled to the outer ring of the action. I aped the stance of the men, holding my left hand up to the side. Sara took it in hers. My right hand hovered by her back without making contact, respecting an inch-wide force field. Her loose-fitting clothes—amorphous jeans, a long-sleeved shirt—stymied lecherous inspection of her figure, but from what I could tell, it carried little excess fat without being toned. A peeled potato, solid and compact. No one would ever become irritated with her in a crowd; she took up modest space.
We watched the eight-beat footsteps of the dancers subsisting on the fundamental moves. Mimicry proved challenging. Sara and I both lacked the coordination to follow the kinetic algorithm independently and were even more hopeless collaborators.
Ashamed of our ungainliness and cultural trespassing, the bovine American tourists immobilized by bulging fanny packs, I looked down at the floor, focusing on my feet. As we stepped forward at the same time, Sara’s
forehead struck my nose.
“Shit,” I said, rubbing the spot to assess the damage.
She clapped a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry! Are you all right?”
“Does it look broken?” I asked. “It feels broken.”
“It looks okay to me.” She grimaced with remorse. “I’m so sorry.”
“I guess I’ll just put some ice on it,” I said. “You mind if we go home, though?”
After wrapping a few ice cubes inside a napkin at the refreshments table and holding it to my nose, we walked back to Matthews, chatting about our class schedules.
“We’re doing it again,” she said.
“What?”
“Small talk.” She shook her head with faux sadness. “Which neither of us excels at.”
“At which neither of us excels,” I tsk-tsked. “So, have you bonded with your roommate yet?”
“Nope,” she said. “You and Steven having some deep discussions?”
“Nothing beyond what you’ve seen in the dining hall,” I said. “To be honest, you’re the only one here I’ve really talked to in any depth.”
Sara tilted her jaw down to her sternum, fighting a smile. “You, too.” She looked back up. “That’s what college is supposed to be for, right? Those life-changing conversations you won’t have again afterward?”
“Right,” I said. “So if I don’t have any here, it means my life will never change. I’ll always be the same person.”
“Well, let’s change that up,” she said.
“You mean ‘Let’s up that change,’ ” I corrected her.
As we approached Matthews, a small branch fell on the path not far in front of us.
“If I hadn’t stopped to get the ice cubes, we might’ve been under it when it fell,” I said, looking up at the tree from which it had fallen. “They really should cut that down. It’s a negligence lawsuit waiting to happen.”
“Are your parents pressuring you to become a lawyer?”
“No,” I answered. “But it’s the obvious option.”
“That shouldn’t be why you choose something so important,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “This is America, after all—I can be whatever I want. I can be a world-famous salsa dancer.”
She smiled at my weak joke but didn’t laugh. When we reached the fourth floor, she asked what my room number was. “There’s something I want to bring you,” she said.
“Is it in your room?” I asked. “I’ll come get it.”
We arrived at her door. You could be inside.
“Wait here—my room’s a mess,” Sara said, and slipped in, shutting the door before I could sneak a glimpse. She stepped out a moment later and handed me a book: 101 Idealistic Jobs That Actually Exist.
“Hold on to it as long as you want,” she told me.
I thanked her, peeked down the hall in case you were returning, and said I should get going.
“By the way,” she said, “I realize that comment about Latinos’ being unseen sounded pretty sanctimonious. I didn’t mean to imply that you’re someone who doesn’t recognize his privilege.”
“Not at all,” I reassured her.
Sara nodded, but her face remained anxious, and she showed no indication of signing off for the night. She was waiting for something. I’d worried this might happen; I had, after all, asked a girl to go dancing, an invitation that could be interpreted as romantic. I’d hoped she wouldn’t regard it as anything more than an overture of friendship, the kind that evolved into hanging out in her room and, inevitably, meeting her roommate.
I had already run a cost-benefit analysis of a sexual relationship with Sara. Not only would it take me off the market, but my association with her could diminish my standing in your eyes. Yet it also meant I’d be around you much more than I would if we were Platonic; as I was now learning, she wasn’t even letting me see her room. And it was college. These things didn’t last forever.
Despite my certainty that a kiss would be reciprocated, the prospect of instigating it remained unduly terrifying; like a trust-your-new-summer-camp-buddies fall backward, it went against every instinct of self-preservation. No one was around, but it felt to me as if the whole campus, my high school, even my parents and sisters, were watching. If I didn’t do it, I’d be unmanned in front of them, the boy who, after eighteen years, had finally found a girl willing to kiss him—and he couldn’t even go through with it.
I closed my eyes and, impelled more by fear than desire, made the trust fall forward. Our lips touched and soon yielded to tongues, which grappled like junior-varsity wrestlers trying to impress the coach with their hustle. I was too conscious that I was having a legitimate sexual experience to bask mindlessly in the sensory pleasures. Nonetheless, I achieved an erection that was deftly hidden by 101 Idealistic Jobs That Actually Exist.
Bizarre verb, achieved, as if to remind you of the possibility of failure and all its attendant disgrace.
Chapter 6
And so began a courtship. Since parties weren’t Sara’s thing, we gorged on the menu of on-campus activities: film screenings, plays, world-music concerts, and guest speakers. Afterward she was raring to discuss whatever we’d seen. I tried to engage for her sake, but if I wasn’t being tested on the subject matter, it was hard for me to care. During our study dates in Lamont Library, she read every word assigned to her, meticulously underlined and highlighted and marginalia’d, sought out competing perspectives, researched auxiliary material. An academic mule, if one motivated by genuine curiosity.
All our rendezvous were in public. Whenever I suggested doing something that would get me into Sara’s room, I was frustrated by her goaltender’s knack for deflecting me. “I’m kind of burned out on the library,” I texted one night. “I’d say we could study here but Steven has been popping out to practice magic tricks on me all day. Maybe your room?” (A lie; Steven was a reactor core of interpersonal fuel, joining a raft of clubs, picking up new friends like a lint roller, and entering into a relationship with Ivana that entailed incessant fondling and pet names. Stevie-bean spent most nights in Ivana-suck-your-blood’s room, so I couldn’t really complain, though he indulged in one instance of grating boastfulness, requesting that a picture of himself and his parents reside on my bookcase, not his. “Why?” I asked. “It’s weird to feel like they’re staring at me when Ivana’s in there,” he said with put-on embarrassment. “You know how it is.”)
“Let’s go to Starbucks!” Sara replied.
Our physical contact was restricted to PG make-out sessions by the lawsuit tree near Matthews, an awkward location, since we couldn’t part immediately after kissing. Instead, we had to walk another few dozen paces to our dorm, go upstairs together, and, at the fourth floor, she would wave like a friendly neighbor before continuing her ascent to your castle in the faraway kingdom of 505, where you remained out of my sight—though very much on my mind.
Location was also a problem the next two Prufrock classes, when you snuck in late and chose seats out of my field of vision. You were the whole reason I was taking the class—and dating your roommate—but we might as well have been at different schools.
One evening Sara and I attended a lecture by a visiting economist with the elaborate title “Antisocial Mobility: The Impossible Transcendence of Previously Permeable Socioeconomic Borders.” I daydreamed about you through the whole talk, but snapped to attention when, as we shambled out of the auditorium, Sara at last asked if I wanted to study in her room.
On the way back to Matthews, the excitement leavening my step had little to do with the sexual promise of what lay in store. In fact, while I wasn’t about to reject the leap forward we were about to take—maybe even hurdling over all the preliminary obstacles straight to the final one—I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed that Sara might be my first.
“Those stats he brought up were scary, ab
out how the situation you’re born into more than ever determines your economic fate,” Sara said as we walked back.
“Mmm,” I said.
“I was getting really depressed listening to him, but at the end, in a weird way, I started thinking all his pessimism about America is actually almost optimistic, because he’s also basically saying, ‘If we made this, it means we can unmake it.’ And the real travesty isn’t what’s already happened, but continuing to let it happen and resigning ourselves to it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Good point.”
Your door was closed. Sara’s room was neat, contrary to her previous claims, and modestly appointed. Around her desk were framed photographs of her family: the diffident younger sister who closely resembled her; the gregarious older brother who was a blunt-featured male version; the jolly, ursine father whose genes had been lost in transmission; the graying, bifocaled mother into whom Sara would someday evolve.
Sara sat on her bed, knees propping up Anti-Imperialist Marxism in Latin America. I stationed myself at her desk and began reading The Scarlet Letter.
“You can sit here, you know,” she told me a few minutes later, patting the mattress. I moved over, leaving enough space for a phantom body between the two of us and resting against the cool wall that separated her room from yours.
“At least she’s quiet,” I whispered, pointing toward your door. “Nothing worse than a noisy roommate.”
“I doubt she’s home,” Sara said. As she read, her forehead squinched around a central point and the tip of her tongue explored the corner of her mouth, an expression of concentration I would come to know well. After a while she announced she was tired and asked if I wanted to go to bed.
“Okay,” I said, unsure if this was an invitation or a tactful request to leave.
“I’ll go brush my teeth and change,” she said.