Loner

by Teddy Wayne

  She left for the bathroom, carrying her toiletries kit, a pair of gray athletic shorts, and an oversized shirt that said RAISE OHIO’S MINIMUM WAGE NOW! I stayed put, alone in the room, desperately waiting for your entrance.

  A few minutes later I heard a key in the door. Too nervous to look up, I kept my eyes on the book, pretending to read, but then the door opened and Sara’s voice was muttering, “People waste so much water here.” I waited for her to extinguish the light before removing my jeans. My shirt I kept on; if she was going to remain clothed, so was I. My physique, I knew, wasn’t much to look at, but as a purely tactile experience in the dark, it would be unobjectionable.

  I climbed in under the pink flannel sheets, a reprieve from my own scratchy, cotton/poly-blend bedding (which, if I ever got you into it, I would claim was my backup, and then blow my entire semester’s petty cash on a high-thread-count upgrade). Sara turned on a white-noise machine. “You mind?” she asked. “It’s kind of loud, but I need it to fall asleep.”

  We lay on our backs on the narrow mattress, our shoulders but nothing else touching, her body an environmentally friendly space heater. The white-noise machine was, indeed, loud; I would never hear anything in your room over it. As it thrummed, our stomachs produced gurgly video game sounds. Neither of us was making a move, two disoriented and jet-lagged travelers stepping off a plane in a foreign country, unsure if we had to go first to customs or the baggage claim.

  Then, imagining the warmth next to me was radiating from you, I grew hard and found myself, almost without any conscious self-­direction, turning to kiss Sara. We continued for several minutes in an uncomfortable, torqued position until I rotated on top of her, hoping you’d come in, inconsiderately flip the switch, and view me in a newly sexual light.

  I reached for the hem of her shirt. (Oh, Ohio’s minimum-wage movement, if only you knew how your lofty ideals would someday be corrupted.) We were in college, far from watchful parents. It might actually happen. I could reply to Daniel Hallman’s stupid message.

  Her fingers interlaced with mine with a cheerful squeeze, as if hand-holding were what I was really after. I brought my other hand down and was likewise rejected. Now all four were clasped as I bodysurfed on top of her with our legs braided together, a two-headed octopus in coitus interceptus.

  I took the double hint and lifted our tentacles out of harm’s way. Without any demarcating biological event, it was up to one of us to call a ceasefire. I let my kissing subside and parallel parked myself on the wall side of the bed. We spoke only about practical matters: if I wanted water, what time to set the alarm on her phone.

  “Is your roommate going to wake us up?” I asked.

  “No,” Sara said. “If she comes home, she knows not to turn on the lights anymore.”

  “If she comes home? Where would she be?”

  “You do the math,” she said.

  We spooned amateurishly, my body acclimating to the alien sensation of sustained contact with someone else’s, my forearm losing circulation under her upper back, my other arm unsure what to do with itself, until I retracted both and flipped over. Sara’s breathing slowed to sleeping pace as I listened for any sound of the door opening, pondering your whereabouts, sorting through the male regulars at your Annenberg table: the one with landscaped stubble (Andy Tweedy), the black guy who favored scarves (Christopher Banks), the rumored Italian baron (Marco Lazzarini).

  I stayed awake until dawn pressed through the window shade, and woke up when Sara’s phone tinkled at eight and she took a birth control pill. “To regulate my period,” she explained awkwardly. No signs of your wee-hours entrance, if there’d been one.

  A few nights later, after a documentary about migrant laborers in the Southwest, we went back to her room again. Sara talked about how she wanted to see more documentaries, how easy it was to get into an academic bubble here and forget how unjust the world was.

  “Well,” I said, “in the long run we’re all dead.”

  She squinted at me. “So it’s all right if there are inequalities now, because eventually we’re all dead anyway?”

  I smoothed out her comforter with my hand.

  “That’s a pretty cynical sentiment,” she said. “There are a lot of people whose lives are almost exclusively hardship. Just because we all die at the end doesn’t make it even.”

  “I was only trying to lighten the mood,” I said.

  “I know.” She reached for her copy of Anti-Imperialist Marxism in Latin America and handed it to me. “But check this out when you get a chance.” She left for ablutions in the bathroom.

  What I wanted was impossible; even this starter relationship was in danger of collapse. How foolishly optimistic to think it might somehow lead to you. When Sara came back I’d tell her that we’d made a mistake and should go back to being friends before anyone got hurt.

  As if you’d heard my doubts and were telling me not to surrender, that nothing worthwhile was ever acquired without a struggle, the door was unlocked from the hallway. You looked at me with the vague recognition one has for a stranger on the same daily bus commute and walked toward your room.

  “Aren’t you in Prufrock?” I asked, hoping to salvage the moment.

  “Yeah.”

  “Me, too. I’m David.”

  “Nice to meet you,” you said as you opened your door, acknowledging there was no need to add your name—I’d have seen it on the sign outside, but I’d have known it anyway, much as I imagine celebrities don’t have to introduce themselves. And we’d met before, of course, but your error comforted me: our doorway encounter had been so undistinguished that I preferred it be stricken from the ­record.

  Sara returned. “Your roommate’s back,” I said softly while fake reading her book about the unjustness of the world.

  She lowered her voice. “Aren’t we lucky.”

  I grinned in bogus conspiracy. She had some e-mails to respond to and asked if I minded if she took care of them before bed. “Happy to wait,” I said.

  I didn’t have to wait long. You emerged from your room in a white silk bathrobe and flip-flops, a towel over your shoulder and a toiletries basket by your side. My eyes flew a brief reconnaissance mission over the terrain of your calves: still bronzed, the elevated plateaus of muscle sloping down defined cliffs to the lower planes of your Achilles tendons. Elegant, lean feet, callused heels; it looked like you’d spent a lot of time barefoot in the summer. Other guys, the philistines who chugged domestic light beer, might have salivated over the body parts your robe concealed, but I was a connoisseur of your peripheral qualities, an oenophile who sussed out your fruity bouquets and spicy notes.

  “Hey,” you said to Sara on your way out.

  “Hey,” Sara said, eyes on her laptop screen.

  The next twenty minutes felt like days, my imagination rioting with you in the shower. You came back enrobed and glistening, your hair wrapped in the towel. The robe was monogrammed with a stitched, proud wound of VMW over your heart. As you opened the door to your room, an air current caught the tip of the lightweight belt, which fluttered up as if of its own accord.

  A hair dryer rumbled in your room. Going out to parts unknown. Worse, you knew precisely what I was doing: tragically staring at a Marxist tome with your bookish roommate. I’d given myself more opportunity for surveillance of you, but it meant you were now privy to my own humdrum existence.

  “Night,” you said as you left.

  Sara nodded in your direction. “See ya,” I called to your back.

  Sara asked if I was ready for bed. I put down the book, waited for her to turn off the lights, and stripped to my boxers and T-shirt.

  Once again we lay side by side until, eventually, I kissed and mounted her. It looked like it was going to be the same restrained tussle as before, but tonight I was more driven. I thought of you—in your robe, in the shower—as I rammed against S
ara’s dreary gray shorts. This time I succeeded in lifting the RAISE OHIO’S MINIMUM WAGE NOW! shirt. Her breasts were, to my untrained cupping, perfectly adequate. I pulled off my shirt, hoping my own nudity would induce her to shed additional layers. It didn’t.

  “Hold on,” Sara said. She fumbled over her bedside table and her hand came back with a plastic pump dispenser she pressed into mine. “You can use this.”

  In the dark, I didn’t know what it was or what its utility would be.

  “It’s lotion,” she clarified. “Don’t guys do that? On themselves?”

  I took off my boxers and applied the lotion to my erection as I straddled her lower body. With my left hand on her breast, my right took care of myself. I’d never done this in the presence of anyone, but it felt oddly natural.

  Then she did something that surprised me: she rubbed under her shorts, her eyes shut, her breaths quickening. As she continued to worry her clitoris, I stayed silent until my denouement, when I startled myself with a squelched grunt. The seed that had been buried in innumerable shrouds of Kleenex now, for once, ended up on another human being.

  Sara kept going until her own climax, a small affair that seized up her core muscles before releasing them like a bout of pleasurable indigestion. She reached on top of her bedside table for the white T-shirt she’d worn that day and mopped up her stomach and rib cage. Dropping it on the floor, she put her RAISE OHIO’S MINIMUM WAGE NOW! shirt back on, then curled her back against my chest. I slung an arm around her.

  “Confession,” she said. “I’ve never done that before.”

  I didn’t say anything, just breathed on her neck.

  “Have you?” she asked.

  “Mmhuh,” I said.

  Her heartbeat was palpable to my cradling arm. “Well,” she said, “I hope you’re not intimidated by my extensive erotic record.”

  A humble, self-deprecating remark that, a couple of weeks earlier, would have made me banter back with wordplay, maybe compel me to recant my statement and tell her the truth. But now, after I’d captured you pre- and post-shower, Sara’s inexperience only reminded me that we were two virgins and that you were adventuring elsewhere on campus. People like you didn’t mutually masturbate—you had sex. No, even that was putting too chaste a spin on it. You fucked.

  Citore drocer, I thought.

  “That’s all right,” I said, offering neither any real assurance nor a lighthearted follow-up to put her at ease. My arm remained around her, but it suddenly felt like it wasn’t mine anymore, a prosthetic limb.

  Another silence as her wheels turned for the phrasing of her next question. “Did you have a girlfriend in high school?”

  “Heidi,” I answered.

  “When were you together?”

  “Tenth grade on.”

  “When’d you break up?”

  “This summer,” I said. “She wanted to stay together for college. I didn’t.”

  Sara processed that revelation for some time. “What was she like?”

  “She was nice.”

  “Was she pretty?”

  “Well, she was the lead in most plays. I guess that says something.”

  “Who’s prettier, me or her?” Sara asked, then quickly laughed. “Just kidding.”

  I yawned loudly. “I’m actually kind of tired. Mind if we go to sleep?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  As I dozed off to the white-noise machine, I stroked Sara’s arm, mentally elongating it until it reached your lithe proportions.

  The one way to guarantee I sat by you in Prufrock would be to wait for you to enter the room first, tricky to engineer, since you were consistently late to class. The next Tuesday I stood outside the door in Harvard Hall, pecking at my phone. As the students trickled in and you still hadn’t shown, I grew anxious; I’d yet to be tardy for any classes, and though they didn’t take attendance at the lectures, I didn’t want to blemish my self-monitored perfect record.

  When I heard, through the door, Samuelson begin his lecture, I gave myself a deadline: three more minutes.

  Five minutes later I was about to go in, when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I stole a look down the hallway to confirm it was you, pocketed my phone with the certitude of someone finished with his important business, and looked up.

  “Hey,” I said.

  You nodded. There was now, at least, instant facial identification.

  I opened the door for you. You went to the nearest empty seat. It didn’t look strange when I sat in the one next to it; we’d entered the room together and these were the easiest-to-reach places.

  I would be sitting within a foot of you for eighty minutes. There was no chance I could follow Samuelson’s winding disquisition on The Portrait of a Lady and Daisy Miller.

  My peripheral vision was limited to your left hand, its blue rivers of veins faintly flowing under smooth skin, its piano-player fingers, its pale pink nails and their small white suns cresting over the curved horizon. I could absorb more comprehensively your scent, whose intimations that I’d nosed before now blanketed me: an amalgam of your shampoo and lavender perfume, a hint of cigarettes and whatever natural aroma you exuded. If I could inhale it continuously, eternally, without ever breathing out, I would.

  Samuelson riffled through papers on his lectern as he prattled on. “One of you wrote an essay this week that nicely dovetails with that point. Let me just find it . . .”

  We overestimate destiny’s role in our lives, selectively applying it to favorable outcomes; think of all the times when you didn’t run into your long-lost friend in the street, when you didn’t just catch a bus, when you didn’t get placed in a dorm with Veronica Morgan Wells. Or, more starkly, of all the good things that never happened to you because you weren’t born as someone else with a better life. But the law of averages—which, when advantageous to us, we prefer to call fate, when disadvantageous we decry as bad luck, and when neutral we ignore—will occasionally smile upon us when we most need it.

  Samuelson located the correct paper. “David Federman argued that, quote, ‘perhaps the peg-leg-as-primal-wound is intended to throw the reader off the scent with a facile psychological misreading, and Melville’s underlying point is that Ahab is simply a susceptible participant in an economic system designed for manic, unslakable ambition. The real primal wound is not his missing leg; it is America.’ ”

  I hadn’t even known Samuelson read the student essays; my section leader must have been so taken with my writing that she’d pressed it on him. It was thrilling to hear those sentences preached to the entire room, especially the final clause, intoned with the halting majesty of a presidential peroration or the voice-over in a domestic car commercial. Rendering the experience even more exhilarating: you, in an orchestra seat to witness my glory.

  “David, are you here?” Samuelson asked, peering out into the crowd, since he didn’t know who I was.

  Everyone looked around for the mystery writer. I raised my hand slowly, as if reluctant to take credit.

  I savored your surprise next to me: you didn’t know who David Federman was, either; might not have even remembered my first name and certainly didn’t know my last. You wouldn’t forget it now.

  “It’s a compelling idea—I’d love to discuss it further,” Samuelson said to me. “Sign up for office hours.”

  He dismissed us. My body, to others, remained earthbound, but I was in a crow’s nest high above them. And good luck, let alone destiny, had nothing to do with it. No; years of solitude, hours spent reading when others were going to birthday parties and sleepovers and keggers, had all built up to Professor Samuelson’s public acclamation for an essay I’d tossed off in a single sitting. I imagined him inviting me to guest lecture an upcoming class, whatever topic I liked; he just wanted the other students to be inspired by my example, and you would sit in the front row, transcribing e
very word, marveling at my harpoon-sharp mind.

  I stood up poker-faced, the star running back who no longer needs to spike the football in the end zone to celebrate his victories.

  “Nice work,” you said as we filed out.

  “Oh, thanks,” I said. “What did you write about?”

  “I got an extension till tomorrow. I haven’t started yet.”

  We stepped out into the honeyed light of a New England autumn afternoon. Students were starting to wear scarves. The air was spiced with the first fallen leaves. A breeze trembled a nearby oak, showering the pavement with acorns.

  I walked with purpose in the direction of Sever, knowing you were heading there for Gender and the Consumerist Impulse.

  “Which book are you writing about?” I asked.

  “No idea,” you said. “I’m fucked.”

  You didn’t mind cursing with me, cursing with a sexual term, with a sexual term that, as a sentence, could also suggest an explicit action.

  “What about Moby-Dick?”

  “Mm,” you said, unimpressed. “Seven-hundred-page books by dead white men aren’t exactly my bag.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I chuckled. “What’s interested you most so far?”

  “I liked Daisy Miller.”

  We were approaching Sever; I was running out of time, and this wasn’t a dialogue I could easily continue in Sara’s room.

  I stopped walking. “I have to be somewhere,” I said—I had nowhere to be, nothing to do, all I wanted was to continue even this seemingly mundane conversation forever—“but if you’re having trouble, I’d be happy to help you come up with a topic later.”

  Your eyes blinked at me once, as if you were taking my measurements for something. Your irises were three distinct hues: a fine outer ring of grayish blue like an overcast ocean sky that yielded to springtime emerald before melting into a striated core the color of bourbon. I couldn’t meet them for more than a second or two.

  “How about Lamont at nine?” you asked.

  Sara spent half her nights there. But Widener Library closed at ten, and there was no good alternative, other than my room, which I didn’t have the temerity to suggest.