Penelope

by Rebecca Harrington

  “Why don’t we have dinner at my usual spot? The Charles Hotel, 8 o’clock. Terribly sorry to inconvenience you.”

  Penelope could not believe it. She was going to go out with Gustav, on a date, to dinner. She gathered up all her belongings quickly. She had to go home and change.

  Penelope did not know where the Charles Hotel was, so she was late when she finally got there. Wikipedia was so helpful in some matters and so unhelpful in others. She spotted Gustav right away because he was wearing a red silk ascot and also because there was no one else in the restaurant under the age of sixty.

  “Hello, Penelope,” he said, and motioned her to his table, where he promptly stood up and tried to kiss her on both cheeks. Penelope had never had anyone do this to her before. She almost kissed Gustav on the nose because she was so confused.

  “Did you have any problems getting here?” said Gustav after he sat back down. He took out his phone and put it on the table. It was an iPhone of the newest stripe.

  “I was a little confused,” said Penelope.

  “Did you come from the library? I myself have never been in any of the libraries here. I find murals extremely vulgar and all of them seem to have murals. Who cares about people carrying things? I’ve always been partial to paintings of Roman heads.”

  “It’s not so bad, really. People have started to sleep in the library and that gives it an atmosphere of fun.”

  “People sleep in the library? I am sure you are making that up,” said Gustav. He seemed genuinely incredulous. It was not a humorous exaggeration to say he had never been to the library.

  “It’s true. People are sleeping in the library. They always do. Everyone brings a toothbrush.”

  “A victory for oral hygiene, I’m sure. Which is, I imagine, a battle with many small victories and very few won wars.” Penelope nodded.

  The waiter appeared as if out of nowhere. Gustav looked at Penelope expectantly.

  “Do you know which wine you want?” he asked her.

  “No,” said Penelope. “I don’t even know what wine is, really.”

  “It’s grapes, dear,” said Gustav. “Do you know what food is? Do you have any preferences?”

  “No,” said Penelope. “Or, actually, anything without beets.”

  “Fair enough,” said Gustav. Gustav then turned to the waiter and started ordering very rapidly in French, apparently for Penelope as well. The waiter did not understand French. The waiter kept asking Gustav to point to the items he was referring to and Gustav refused to do so. After about fifteen minutes of this, the waiter wrote something down on a notepad and trudged sadly away.

  “I hope he got our order. I don’t really understand waiters in America. Why don’t they speak French? How can they be waiters?” said Gustav.

  “I don’t know,” said Penelope, who took a robust swig of her water. “Do waiters speak French in Argentina?”

  “Of course,” said Gustav. “Anywhere the water isn’t bad. Though to be fair, I rarely go back.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” said Gustav. “Parents sent me away quite early, you know. I think I was four when I first went away to school.”

  “Four? Really?” said Penelope. She felt a pang. Penelope had always wished desperately for boarding school.

  “No, probably not,” said Gustav. “Probably seven. That seems more normal.”

  “Did you like it?” asked Penelope.

  “Well, of course, it was rather fun to beat the younger boys with sticks. And, you know, there is nothing like playing some odd sport on the grounds. I suppose I did like it. Well, I didn’t like it very much when I was younger, but it is easier to say you liked it the whole time.”

  “I agree,” said Penelope. “Taking a definite stance is an important thing to do. My mother always says that.”

  “What a wise woman,” said Gustav.

  “But why didn’t you like it when you were younger?” asked Penelope.

  “Well, children are really the worst when they are young. And I didn’t have this accent or anything then, so I was always having to repeat everything. Once I got the hang of it, it was smashing though.”

  “Children are the worst when they are young,” said Penelope. “That is really true.”

  “But, of course, my life has really been quite standard. What is it like growing up in Connecticut? Did you go to the prom? Were you always getting into sordid intrigues with local football heroes? Did you go to the prom pregnant by a football hero?”

  “Only someone cool could do something like that,” said Penelope.

  The food came. Penelope carefully picked the beets out of her salad as Gustav explained to her why some wines are different from other wines.

  “Fascinating,” said Penelope when Gustav finished.

  “That was a very depressing utterance, Penelope. It was so hollow. No woman has ever so roundly rejected my wine talk.”

  “No,” said Penelope, “it was very interesting. Now I really know something about the role nunneries played in all this.”

  “You can’t speak French either! What is this country?”

  “A country that does not speak French,” said Penelope.

  “Shocking. Well, I am duly ashamed and turn the conversation to you. What would you rather talk about?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Penelope. “Have you ever solved any crimes?”

  “Crimes? Hmm. That is an excellent question. Let me think. Well, once all of Mummy’s jewels were stolen off this yacht we chartered in the Aegean. Of course, there were several people who could have taken them, including a very nefarious-looking butler who we hired for just the occasion. None of the regular staff got on with him; he sort of lurked around and all that.”

  “Yes,” said Penelope.

  “Then, of course, the thief was revealed to be poor Uncle Albert, who had stowed away in some sort of unoccupied steamer cabin and was living entirely off of empty potato chip bags. He just stole them because they were shiny. He’s touched, you see. His mother is also his sister or something, before they knew that was bad.”

  “I thought they always knew that was bad,” said Penelope.

  “Maybe they were cousins. But I am pretty sure they were sisters.”

  “So were you instrumental to solving this purported crime?” said Penelope.

  “Well, no,” said Gustav. “I was working on turning entirely orange, as was the style at the time.”

  “To me that sounds as if you were actually doing research,” said Penelope. “Sometimes in detective novels, the detective just lies around all the time, but inwardly he is thinking, and thinking very hard.”

  “Perhaps you are right, you know. This has always been my cross. Although it seems I do not have a thought in my head, I am, in reality, thinking constantly about crimes and how to solve them.”

  “I thought as much,” said Penelope. “Because I too have that burden.”

  Gustav motioned for the check and paid it.

  “Let’s go, shall we?” said Gustav.

  “OK,” said Penelope. They left the restaurant. Penelope realized that she had never met a more like-minded individual in her entire life. She hated ordering her own food. Even the wine portion of the date she could forgive.

  “Oh, look where we are,” said Gustav.

  “This is not my dorm,” said Penelope.

  “No,” said Gustav. “It is my dorm.” They were outside of Adams House, by far the most elaborate dorm on the Harvard campus. The housing at Harvard did not become random until 1994. Before that, all the upper-class houses at Harvard were privately funded and sorted by type. For example, the athletes lived in one dorm, the WASPs in another, and the rattailed Caligulas of the world in quite another. When alumni gave back to Harvard in those olden days, they would often give to their particular house. As a result, some houses with historically rich associations greatly outstripped other houses in amenities. Gustav lived in a house with an entryway guarded by a marble balustrade and a
stone lion. At one point his dorm had had a swimming pool in the basement.

  “I guess I just forgot to pay attention,” said Penelope.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” said Gustav. He put his hand lightly on Penelope’s neck. “I should be more aware of these things.”

  “Oh, that’s OK,” said Penelope.

  “Do you want to go up to my room and watch a movie?” said Gustav, tapping his finger on the top of her spine.

  “Oh, uh, sure,” said Penelope in a faint kind of voice. “Do you have any?”

  “Movies? Well, I remembered how you said I should get more DVDs, which was, I might add, a very reasonable suggestion. So, over Christmas break, I purchased many different DVDs. At this point, I believe I have assembled a full library of every movie every person could ever want to see. At least come up and look. I got a new bookshelf for them.”

  “Well, OK,” said Penelope. She tried to breathe normally. Were they going to have sex? Was that what people did at this juncture? Were they actually going to watch a movie? That was a possibility too.

  Penelope went inside Gustav’s entryway, which was lined entirely in mahogany and featured many cavernous fireplaces set into the walls. Gustav’s rooms were in a wing of their own. They walked down a long hall to get to them.

  “Do you have all this to yourself?” said Penelope once she was actually inside Gustav’s suite. The main room was an imposing Beaux-Arts parlor with twelve-foot ceilings and elaborate crown molding. Gustav had furnished it with a gigantic leather couch and a large Napoleonic-seeming desk. Yet, despite the hulking pieces of furniture, the room was very spare. The only wall decoration consisted of old maps. Penelope sat down on the couch.

  “Yes,” said Gustav. “My mother called the school and told them that I had never been vaccinated for anything and was probably carrying loads of tropical diseases. I have never had to share a room in my entire life for this very reason. Lovely woman. I’m about as primed for disease as an Indian, but it has its perks.”

  “Wow,” said Penelope. She tried to look at a map on the wall to steady herself. In it, the Netherlands owned quite a bit of the world. “Well, uh, what movies can we watch.”

  “I’m so glad you asked,” said Gustav. He walked over to a short bookcase next to the couch Penelope was sitting on.

  “Well, let me see here,” he said, and got on his knees to read the titles. “We have Marathon Man, Notorious, The Boys from Brazil, of course, Face/Off …”

  “Let’s go with Face/Off,” said Penelope quickly.

  “I don’t know what this indicates about your tastes,” said Gustav, who was getting Face/Off out of its case and putting it in the DVD player. His TV was very large and mounted on the wall like a picture.

  The movie started.

  “I always wished this could happen in real life,” said Gustav, who put his arm around Penelope once he settled himself back on the couch. “It seems so fun.”

  “That you could literally take your face off?” asked Penelope.

  “When you say it like that it sounds like far more of a ridiculous proposition.” Gustav drew her tighter under his arm and lightly kissed the top of her ear. Then he kissed her on her cheek right next to her mouth. And then he kissed her mouth.

  Penelope and Gustav made out through the entirety of Face/Off. Penelope viewed this experience as a tutorial in the Art of Love. The first time she made out with Gustav, she was too shocked to take note of anything he was doing or anything she could be doing back to him. This time, she paid close attention to technical niceties. For example, Gustav knew exactly where her face should go and subtly indicated this.

  During the movie, Gustav successfully removed Penelope’s shirt, both of her shoes, and one of her earrings. He put them neatly on the end table next to the couch. When the movie was over, Gustav threw Penelope over his shoulder and carried her the ten steps to his bedroom, where he then laid her on his bed. Gustav’s bed was much larger than the normal extra-long cot that everybody else slept on. It also had many pillows of various sizes strewn all over it. Penelope became petrifyingly nervous when he laid her on it. Making out on the couch seemed normal, even fun once you got the hang of it. But this required much more in terms of skill level were she not to be found out as a fraud.

  “Is this a feather bed?” asked Penelope from her prone position. Gustav was standing up beside the bed, taking off his shirt. He was not one of those “rip your clothes off” types that Penelope had heard about. He removed clothing in a very orderly manner.

  “I think so,” said Gustav. “It’s very comfortable.”

  “Is it made of real feathers?” said Penelope.

  “I imagine it is,” said Gustav. “Are you OK?”

  “Yes,” said Penelope. She was worried that her arms were paralyzed. She could just have been nervous, but what if she was getting polio? That would be bad, as Gustav probably wasn’t vaccinated for it.

  “Penelope, I must ask you a question,” said Gustav. He lay down next to Penelope on the bed and pulled her into him. Penelope’s arms remained stubbornly at her sides like a penguin’s. Gustav took Penelope’s arms and put them around his neck, and smiled what seemed to be a reassuring smile. At this point, Penelope made a pact with herself: This evening, she wasn’t going to do anything she didn’t yet know how to do, so as not to expose herself to censure or ridicule; but she also wasn’t going to be needlessly reticent in a way that made her stand out from other girls her age. Of course, this was a difficult arc to navigate. Her poverty of experience in the first place was very abysmal. But one can always be taught. That was the lesson of The King and I.

  “What is your question?” asked Penelope in a more confident voice.

  “Are you going to be contrary about your pants all evening?” asked Gustav.

  Penelope woke up the next morning, still in Gustav’s bed. It was 11:00 a.m. according to the wooden duck-shaped clock on the wall. She wondered if her breath smelled. That would be awful if it did. She tried to get up and soundlessly go to the bathroom to look for toothpaste when Gustav woke up.

  “Oh, hello, you,” said Gustav. He tried to kiss Penelope. She was able to avert this by shoving her forehead in his face.

  “Hello,” said Penelope.

  “How are your trousers?”

  “They are good,” said Penelope.

  “I was worried they would wrinkle.”

  “Oh, I don’t think you needed to worry about that. They have spandex in them,” said Penelope.

  “Weren’t you hot?”

  “A little,” said Penelope. “They sort of itched me.”

  “They really itched me,” said Gustav. “I don’t think any woman has ever slept in pants before in this bed.”

  “Really,” said Penelope. “That is fascinating.” This was something she needed to take note of. She thought keeping her pants on was a convenient and concrete nonnegotiable that allowed certain things but kept other things firmly out of the picture. Apparently, however, it was a weird thing to do.

  “What do you have to do today?” asked Gustav. He raised himself up on one arm. Penelope was struck again by how abundant his chest hair was. She could barely look at it.

  “I guess I am going to study,” said Penelope, blinking. “I have to go to a study group later.”

  “Do you have an exam?”

  “Yeah,” said Penelope. “Tomorrow.”

  “I know this sounds horribly ignorant, but what is a study group?” asked Gustav. “I have never even heard of that.”

  “It’s a group of people who get together and study for an exam. Usually everybody has a section of the curriculum that they are in charge of.”

  “That sounds awful,” said Gustav. “I am going to immediately forget that I have this important knowledge.” He succeeded in kissing Penelope this time, although she kept her mouth closed. His breath did not smell, weirdly.

  Gustav pulled Penelope extremely close to his chest and started kissing her neck very softly. Wh
ile he did this, he also inserted his index finger under the waistband of her pants. Just then, his cell phone started vibrating on his bedside table.

  “Oh, shit,” said Gustav. “Hold on.” He reached for his cell phone. Penelope immediately disentangled herself from Gustav’s grasp and sat up.

  “Yes, hello,” said Gustav into the phone. A woman was on the other end; Penelope could hear her. “No, darling, I didn’t forget.” At this, Gustav jumped off the bed and started to rapidly pull shoes out of his capacious closet. “I will be there in ten minutes. So sorry to keep you waiting. See you soon.”

  During this conversation, Penelope got off Gustav’s bed and tried to find her shirt. When Gustav hung up with the mystery woman, he ascertained what Penelope was doing and said:

  “I think it’s in the common room still. Hold on, let me get it,” and sprinted out in that direction.

  Penelope stood in the middle of Gustav’s bedroom with her arms folded across her chest. She was wearing only pants and a bra. She was pretty cold. It looked very cold outside too. The sky was gray in a way that promised precipitation but would probably not deliver on it. Penelope could not decide how bad it was that Gustav was leaving her to have brunch with another woman. This was the hard thing about modern life and friendships. How bad were things anymore if everyone was friends all the time? Also, which one was the friend, the mystery woman or Penelope? Or were they both friends?

  Gustav came back to the room with Penelope’s shirt, earring, and shoes. He handed them to her.

  “Terribly sorry about all this.”

  “Oh, that’s OK,” said Penelope. She put on her shirt as quickly as possible. Gustav tried to explain things while she got dressed.

  “That was Bitty on the phone, you see. We used to have brunch together every Sunday, and I have been blowing her off terribly for the past three Sundays. This Friday, she made me promise to go to brunch with her or she would disown me.”

  “Oh,” said Penelope, putting on her earring. “Well, that’s OK.”

  “I am so sorry,” said Gustav apologetically. “When can I see you again?”