by Teddy Wayne
You were marching down Mt. Auburn Street, cigarette in one hand and phone in the other. Maybe it was best to leave you alone, judging by your brusque exit and speedy gait.
“Hey!” I called when you missed the turnoff to our dorm.
Spinning around, you looked taken aback, though I’m sure you would’ve been upset to see anyone at that point.
“Matthews is this way!” I pointed to the Yard.
“Shitty sense of direction,” you muttered, walking back toward me.
Even with your drunkenness I struggled to match your steps for the remainder of the walk to our dorm, and my conversational gambits were met with grunts or silence. The night that had held the most excitement for me, ever, had meant absolutely nothing to you, and why should it have? You’d had hundreds of these evenings in the past, you’d have thousands more in the future, and you had no interest in a romantic present with me; you had Liam, a beautiful specimen and species unto himself. That you’d allowed Suzanne to invite me to the club without much of a fight probably wasn’t indifference, I conjectured with cocaine-fueled reasoning. It was fear: you were afraid that I’d rat you out for plagiarism, though doing so would be incriminating myself. But mine was the lesser transgression, and therefore you’d offered me narcotics to even the score. Now you had something on me, too; if you went down, so would I.
As we headed upstairs in Matthews, your phone chimed, and in the scramble to fish it out of your bag, you stumbled and fell forward.
“Fuck,” you said.
“You okay?” I asked, bounding up behind you.
Trying to stand, you clutched your knee and moaned. You accepted my arm and gingerly rose to your feet, wincing with pain. I led you up the rest of the way, safeguarding you from another fall. First it was the accidentally-on-purpose elbow contact in lecture; already we had graduated to this.
When we reached the fifth floor, you listed in my direction and leaned slightly against me, your shoulders grazing mine.
“Are you okay?” I repeated. “Do you need to go to the emergency room?”
You shook your head no and whimpered. I became aroused.
“What is it, then?” I asked, my lips skimming your hair. You choked back a sob and I grew more erect.
“You wouldn’t understand,” you said, shaking free from my grip and limping down the hall to your room.
You’d allowed yourself to be vulnerable, for a few seconds, against my body. You weren’t totally indiscriminate—not anymore, at least; you’d picked me for the role out of all available suitors. And even if you were, I would find a way to show you that I was much more than some guy who walked in the building—that you could tell me things, and I would understand.
In my room, under the covers, I revived my erection and cocooned it inside your bathrobe belt with an opening at the top. But I didn’t want to bring myself to orgasm with it, as I usually did; no, this time I would use a light touch, just enough to sustain the engorging bloodstream, delighting in the tactile sensation and the memory of you on the stairs, extending my priapic ecstasy for hours.
But after a few minutes I was overtaken with eagerness and consummated my lust with the banal satisfaction that comes after getting what you so fervently want too easily.
Chapter 10
I was awoken the next morning by Steven passing through my room on the way back from the shower. Dripping wet with a Doctor Who towel around his waist, he stooped to pick something up.
“This Sara’s?” he asked.
Your bathrobe belt. I’d carelessly left it beside me in bed as I fell asleep. It had slipped onto the floor overnight and was now dangling from Steven’s hands.
“No,” I said through a phlegm-clearing cough. As I reached out to take the belt, he retreated a step and examined it more closely.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just found it.”
“Where?”
If I named a Harvard building, upstanding-citizen Steven would recommend I bring it to a lost and found. “Au Bon Pain.”
“Mind if I take it?” He balled it up in his palm. “I’m learning this trick for my magic show in the common room Sunday night. I want to pull a long strip of material out of my mouth, and I haven’t found anything that can fit inside.”
He brought it up to his open maw.
“Don’t!” I said. “Your braces will tear it!”
“What do you need it for?”
“A sweatband,” I told him.
“You don’t even exercise,” he grumbled, dropping it on the floor as he proceeded to his room. I got out of bed and returned the belt to its proper place in the dresser.
That night at dinner, as I ferried my tray out of the food area, I considered ditching the Matthews Marauders and sitting down at your table with manufactured self-assurance. But that would raise understandable questions from Sara. Furthermore, the previous evening had been a bust with the others; I needed to focus on only you before trying to ingratiate myself with your group again.
And you seemed disenchanted with them anyway. As my tablemates debated whether they’d rather time travel to Renaissance Italy or Ancient Rome, you aimlessly twirled your fork in your pasta while resting your face on your fist, the graceful sweep of your jawbone meeting the sine wave of your knuckles. The distracted pose of someone wishing she were elsewhere, the same look you’d had that very first night at Annenberg, when I knew you wanted someone to rescue you, even if you weren’t yet aware of it. Now you had a better idea.
“Speaking of Pompeii, anyone else worry that this place is a fire hazard?” Steven canvassed the table, where silently amused grins anticipated his answer to his own rhetorical question. “Its legal seating capacity is six hundred and seventeen students, and there are approximately sixteen hundred freshmen, not including staff. Granted, dinner stretches two hours and forty-five minutes, so the population density ebbs and flows, but there’s still a high probability of exceeding carrying capacity at any given point—assuming, of course, that everyone’s body mass averages out to predicted levels.”
“Steven Zenger, everyone,” said Kevin. “Steven Zenger.”
The pronouncement of the full name; Steven Zenger was such a character, the type of guy who often said things just like this, that’s so Steven Zenger, they’d grown to love him for his habitual expressions and quirks. None of my so-called friends, including Sara, had ever even said my surname. When they spoke my first name, they floated it charily, as if still unsure of it. What would precede a “David Federman, everyone, David Federman”? My lurking mutely in the hinterland of a conversation?
“What?” Steven smiled goofily, relishing the attention. “You don’t think we all together have average-massed bodies?”
“Your mom has an averaged-massed body,” Kevin said to more laughter.
“That’s not even an insult,” Steven said. “It’s a compliment. You’re saying my mom has a normal body weight.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you guys this idea I had,” said Justin. “All my mom’s e-mails were going into my spam folder, and I was going to fix it, and then I was, like, this should be an app.”
Hilarity ensued.
“Mom-Spam,” Kevin said in a smooth commercial announcer’s voice. “For when you don’t want to deal with your mom.”
The hooting escalated.
“The spam folder is the collective id of late capitalism,” I said.
Silence.
“Okay,” Ivana said. “Now that’s random.”
After dinner I went back to my room, having told Sara I had to work more on my essay. I needed to let the air clear for a day or two. Raising the possibility of exposure so soon after the final club outing could shatter both relationships: Sara would want nothing to do with me, and you might independently decide you were better off without the complications I was adding t
o your dorm life.
But alone in my room I grew restless. You weren’t allowed to be the one who called all the shots. I shouldn’t have to be afraid of seeing you.
I knocked on Sara’s door. “I realize I can just work here,” I said. “And I’ll sleep over, too.”
You weren’t home, it appeared. We spent two hours intermittently speaking, Sara at her desk, me on her bed reading for my art history class about staffage, the secondary, ornamental figures in a landscape.
“Oh, my God.” She turned from her laptop. “Tiffany Gersh just friended me on Facebook!”
“Who’s Tiffany Gersh?”
“We were best friends in elementary school, and then she grew breasts in seventh grade and became popular and dumped me. I hold her responsible for my low self-esteem.”
“Huh,” I said. “Kids are cruel.”
“Especially middle school girls. And she didn’t just dump me. She got all these other girls to pretend to befriend me one by one, then drop me and tell me I was a loser who’d never have a boyfriend or any friends.”
“Sucks.” I flipped the page of my book.
“You know who reminds me of her, a little?” She jerked her thumb toward your uninhabited room.
“Hmm.”
“Did you ever have someone like that?”
“Fortunately not,” I said. “Are you going to accept her friend request?”
“Yeah, right.” Sara clicked her touch pad angrily. “I’m an extremely forgiving person, but screw her. She had all of high school to make amends.”
A key jiggled in the lock outside, setting off contortions in my stomach. You entered without saying anything and vanished into your room, no signs of a limp. I was needlessly concerned to think my presence might be a problem. Of course you’d keep last night under wraps.
I finished my art history reading and took out my laptop to begin working on the Ethical Reasoning paper. I hadn’t gotten very far when the lights in the room cut off and the hum of electronics ceased.
“What happened?” asked Sara. I quickly backed up my paper on my keychain flash drive. She opened the door to the hallway, where other perplexed residents fumbled in the dark. No lights out the window, either; the entire Yard had suffered a blackout. Within minutes the Harvard police were outside, urging us via bullhorns to stay indoors while they resolved the problem.
Sara had a candle in a jar and a matchbook on her bookcase. After lighting the candle, I held the match, letting it burn down just before the flame licked my skin. Then I struck another match and did the same.
“Don’t waste them,” Sara said when I went for a third match. “We may need more.”
Your door opened and you poked your head out. “Hey, my phone died,” you said. “Can you check if this is just Harvard or all of Cambridge?”
The Internet indicated that the blackout had hit a substantial portion of Cambridge. Hearing this, you stepped out with a bottle of vodka and another of club soda.
“Well, then, who wants a drink?”
I was shocked by the invitation, though I suppose no one wants to be alone during a blackout, and you didn’t hang out with anyone else in Matthews.
“I should probably keep working while my laptop has a charge,” said Sara.
“Oh, c’mon,” you said. “It’s a blackout. You’re supposed to get drunk. David? You’ll have a drink with me, won’t you?”
“I could go for some vodka.”
Sara’s face turned to me with surprise in the flickering candlelight.
“What the heck,” she said. “One drink.”
Even with Sara’s presence, this was a chance to socialize outside of the library and a final club, with none of your friends or Liam around. Unexpected events could happen during a blackout, particularly if you mixed in alcohol. Dynamics could radically change.
You dipped into your room and returned with three Annenberg glasses. Sitting between us, cross-legged on the floor, you bartended. “That’s good,” Sara said, making a stop signal as you sloshed vodka into her glass. You passed us our drinks as we remained at our stations.
“Another wild night in Matthews,” you said, holding up your glass in tribute.
“Yep,” I said.
Sara’s phone rang.
“Hi, Dad,” she answered. “How’d you know? You have an alert set up for Cambridge? You’re aware I’m eighteen years old, right, and I can handle a blackout? Oh, hi, Mom, didn’t know you were there. Am I on speaker? Yeah, it’s fine, safe in my room and my phone’s fully charged. David’s here, too. And Veronica.” A pause. “Uh-huh, my roommate,” she said more quietly, turning away from you. “Yes, I’ll stay indoors. Call you tomorrow. Love you, too.”
She made a quick kissing sound, as she always did when getting off the phone with a family member. “Sorry about that,” she said with a sigh. “My parents are a little overprotective.”
“That’s sweet,” you said. “You’re lucky.”
“Lucky?” she asked.
“You’ve got a nice family.”
“You don’t see us when we fight.”
“Every family fights. But I bet your parents have a good marriage.”
“They do,” Sara said shyly. “They still hold hands and have all these little private jokes with each other. I suppose you’re right. I’m lucky to have had that growing up.”
“Not just growing up.” You looked pensive, almost philosophical. “Also moving forward. It means you’ll seek out healthy relationships.”
Now this was encouraging. You were—internally, at least—pathologizing your relationship with Liam, just as I’d hoped. You didn’t want to replicate the dysfunction of your parents’ “progressive” marriage.
“It’s natural for people to be attracted to the familiar,” Sara said. “But it doesn’t mean they’re doomed to repeat their parents’ mistakes. I’m not a psychologist, but I’d say recognizing that tendency in yourself is a sign you won’t. It means you’re aware of a potentially self-destructive situation and you’ll avoid it.”
You stared into your drink. “What if some people just have naturally self-destructive personalities?”
This question looked beyond the reach of Sara, whose closest brush with self-destructive behavior had been getting dessert when she was already full.
“Self-destructiveness is usually the product of low self-esteem,” I said. “It comes when people think they don’t deserve anything better from life, or that improvement is too hard. The important thing is to recognize that and make a change before it’s too late. The real travesty isn’t what’s already happened, but resigning ourselves to it.” I looked at Sara to salute her as my source for the last line.
“So for some people it’s too late?” you asked.
“Well,” I said, “I think there’s a limited window people have to really change. After it closes, you’re pretty much set with what you’ve got, unless you’re the kind of special person who can rise above your circumstances. Most neuroscientific literature I’ve been reading in my Ethical Reasoning class backs this up.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” said Sara. “Don’t listen to David. He’s a total cynic. Everyone has the potential to change. Not just special people.”
How quick she was to stab me in the back and come to the assistance of the roommate who had spurned her all semester. Unprompted, you got on your knees and tipped the vodka bottle into her glass. I waited for her to protest, but she didn’t. If anything, she looked flattered that you were now, whether out of self-pity or the uniting effects of the blackout, warming up to her. My veiled comment about how you should deal with Liam had backfired, inspiring the women to band against the tyrannical male in their sights. Should the two of you become friends, flouting history, it would be only a matter of time until Sara discovered what I’d been up to.
“Hey
,” you said, “we should get a photo of tonight.”
Sara eagerly brought out her phone but frowned. “I don’t have any space left for photos,” she said. “Too many podcasts I haven’t listened to yet. David, can we use yours?”
I consented. You stood next to Sara with the candle.
“You get in it, too,” you instructed. “Sara’s in the middle.”
There was something disconcerting about your eager choreography. But I held the camera outstretched and snapped three photos with flash as you put your arm around Sara’s shoulder, a smile stretching across her face. I could sense she was reconsidering Tiffany Gersh’s request.
“Let’s see,” you said, and you both looked at the last picture. Our faces glowed ghoulishly from the flash and candlelight. After reviewing it you swiped the screen, sending it back to the previous one, and then the one before.
I remembered, with terror, what was in my gallery before this set: the picture of you outside Sever, smoking with Suzanne. In your burgeoning drunkenness, you might have mistakenly thought there was another picture of us all. The skyscraper I’d so carefully constructed would topple with one superfluous flick of your index finger.
“That’s all,” I said, exiting out of the gallery and bringing the phone to my hip. “I’m turning it off now to husband the power.”
“Okay, you ‘husband the power,’ ” you said in a fuddy-duddy voice. “I wouldn’t want to frivolously ‘wife’ it all away.” You turned to Sara. “So, how was the Philharmonic? It was last night, right? I saw your tickets on the corkboard.”
“Yes, it was last night,” she said. “It was really beautiful.”
“Did you like it, David?” you asked.
“Yes,” I said in a hurry. “I mean, no. I didn’t see it. I was going to go, but then I had to work on this paper.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” you said. “So Sara had to go all alone?”
“I went with a friend,” said Sara. “I understood. David’s really disciplined about his work.”