by Lev Raphael
“We must go, Leo,” his mother interrupted, and they left in a donning of coats and scarves. “I’ll call you,” Leo promised, and he did later that evening to find out more: “We’ll drive you upstate, of course,” and to give Stefan some advice: “It’s not so much what you tell people as how you do it. If they’re too surprised, they always think it’s worse than it is. But it’s a good idea—you need to be on your own.”
Sasha did not seem to think so, nor did his mother.
“I didn’t want to talk about going and then it not happen,” Stefan began once or twice to his uncle, but he knew this was not completely true and Sasha seemed to sense this, sense Stefan wanted to get away from him.
So planning and packing through December and January were hard on Stefan; he had to try to be less cheerful, try not to laugh when his grades were all B+. He was free, living ahead of himself; he’d never really felt the power of expectation. He counted days, made lists, called his new campus often, listened to upstate weather reports very carefully and even wrote his father.
“It’s hard for her,” Leo said, leaning back in the tufted leather booth, fiddling with a roll he hadn’t sliced open after ten minutes. Stefan had never eaten alone with Leo, and this lunch—Leo’s idea—seemed even at the table, even when they ordered, not quite possible. “It’s hard for us,” Leo corrected himself.
Stefan gulped from his drink, nervous, excited, feeling very young because he felt so grown-up here where everyone wore three-piece suits and the coat racks swelled with camel’s hair.
Leo shrugged. “I’d like you to stay, too, but I know you shouldn’t.”
It was still strange to be championed by a man he hadn’t liked until just recently, and made him think he had no right to let Leo say anything in his favor.
“I’m eighteen,” Stefan said, not sure why.
Leo nodded. “You’ll be fine. Your mother’s worried because she worries; I don’t think she knows how to stop. Things have been very hard for her.”
They were silent for a moment, shadowed by the past. “She’s told me some incredible stories,” Leo said, rubbing his chin. “It just doesn’t seem that was her she was talking about, do you know?”
“It was her.”
“And there’s nothing I can do but listen.”
“That’s a lot,” Stefan brought out. Could Leo listen because he hadn’t been touched by the camps, not his friends, his family, his whole life? Maybe that was something his mother needed—unshared memories—maybe that was helping her?
Their steaks came and for a while they said very little, and then only about the food, which even tasted expensive.
“So it’s just two weeks,” Leo said when they had coffee. Stefan thought to himself, Eleven days, and said: “I hope the roads are good.”
“We’ll get there,” Leo assured him.
Syracuse University was a strange hilly snow-sheeted campus, scattered with awkward-looking concrete and glass buildings mixed in with some elaborate old ones in such different styles that they seemed artificial, like there was nothing inside. His dorm room looked out on a wall and a parking lot so it was almost as if he hadn’t come anywhere.
“This is grim,” Leo joked when they opened the scratched beige door to his room. “It’ll make you study.”
His mother inspected the beige wall unit that combined shelves and drawers and closet space.
“It’s very clean,” she said quietly, as if expecting to be contradicted.
It’s mine, was all Stefan could think as they brought up box after box.
His mother sprayed and dusted the unit anyway, put in shelving paper she had insisted on bringing, and hung away his clothes while Leo unpacked the stereo that had been Stefan’s “going-away gift.” He stopped to watch Leo arrange it on a Parsons table, plug in the speakers, still not believing it was his, this large gleaming machine that gave him music whenever he wanted.
“I wish Sasha could’ve come.” Stefan stacked books on the little desk, pitying Sasha with his flu.
“He will,” Leo said, looking for an outlet.
“You can take pictures and send them,” his mother suggested, leaning out from the unit.
It didn’t take long for the bed to be made, the boxes folded up, everything straightened.
“Not bad,” they all said in different ways, looking around. The other side of the room, with its bare bed, seemed comically empty to Stefan.
“Maybe I won’t get a roommate.”
“No, plan on having one,” Leo advised. “Then it won’t be a surprise.”
They had lunch at a restaurant right at the edge of campus which seemed full of students with their parents. Lunch was very long; Stefan didn’t want to go back by himself.
“Let’s see Syracuse,” Leo said when their check came, and they drove to a lot near the center of what Stefan knew was a city, but compared to New York looked very much like one of those little towns at the side of toy railroads.
“It’s so small,” he kept thinking, but the thick ranks of bare hedges and trees promised a beautiful spring.
“It will be lovely for you,” his mother smiled, stepping to look over a gate at a large stone house with a plaque near its door they couldn’t read. “Such a change.”
“It’s a good thing?” Leo wondered, taking her arm.
She laughed and they walked on ahead. Stefan felt surprisingly proud of them; his mother in her brown boots and thick purple cape and hat, Leo in the heavy salt-and-pepper coat that seemed carved out of warmth. They were old, he supposed, but happy with each other. He saw that so clearly today, away from home, saw it and for the first time didn’t feel annoyed or resentful, but hoped he would find someone to make him as complete as they were.
He trailed behind them back to the car.
At the dorm they took a last quick look.
“I’ll get some posters at that place in town,” Stefan said, noticing how bare the walls were.
Leo shook his hand, clapped him on the shoulder, and his mother held him briefly, the first time in years. He kissed her.
And they were gone. At his window he watched them step through the snow to Leo’s Lincoln and drive off.
He sat at his desk with the door open, unwilling to be completely alone; he could hear someone moving in down the hall. Now would be the perfect time to write some long cheerful letters about the ride up and the dorm, but he didn’t really have anyone to write to. He’d called Sasha already to say he was in. Jenny wouldn’t care to hear from him, and she seemed more distant than ever.
“Gimme a hand,” someone ordered in the doorway, staggering under the weight of a large brown box. Stefan leapt up and they brought it over to the empty bed.
“Let it go.”
The box dropped with a miscellaneous clatter.
“What’s in it?” Stefan wondered.
“All kinds of shit. I’m Gray.” A large hand was thrust at him.
“Stefan.” They shook; his roommate was very big and broad and flushed.
“It’s short for Graham,” Gray explained, pulling open the box and digging inside, coming out with a toaster in one hand and a purple water pipe in the other. “Like the cracker,” Gray added, beginning to toss the box’s contents onto the bed. “Where you from? Noo Yawk? I hear everyone here’s from there.”
Stefan sat at his desk, warming to this large vague guy who with bowl-cut hair, thick mustache and meaty face looked like a sleepy Viking.
“Where’re you from?” Stefan asked, bringing Gray from consideration of a book that’d lost its cover.
“What’d I bring this for?” Gray muttered, heaving it over to the desk. “From Northampton. In Massachusetts.”
Stefan nodded. “I thought you had an accent.”
Gray stared at him blankly. “Accent?” Deadpan, he turned to see if someone else was in the room, glanced back at Stefan. “I got stuff in the car,” he threw off and Stefan, grinning, followed him downstairs, not forgetting to lock the door behind t
hem.
On Gray’s side of the room the lines of everything seemed blurred; Gray had hung and draped and swathed his bed, the wall, his closet with thin Indian print covers that rustled when the door opened. In this nest Gray sprawled reading with headphones on, sometimes humming—Gray was sometimes very quiet and withdrawn for all his overpowering size.
“Your folks?” Gray asked that first week, picking up the gold-framed portrait photo of Leo and his mother that Stefan had asked for.
Stefan nodded.
“You don’t look like your dad.” Gray settled back onto his bed to write a letter—he was always writing letters when he wasn’t gettting high or considering how much work he had to do. The letters gave him much less pleasure than the grass, which Stefan hadn’t liked much in high school and still didn’t enjoy.
“I have a big family,” Gray explained. “I mean big, like me, and big, like the Senate.”
They’d registered together, ate meals together in the noisy dining commons, wandered around campus and into town, talking mostly of what they saw, when they did talk. Stefan felt Gray had also come here to get away.
But Stefan had pushed something between them by saying Leo was his father. Thankfully Gray didn’t want to know how he was all the time, and why, but left him to himself. The privacy was reinforced by the floorful of jocks who were always talking about games and “getting it wet,” leaving him alone as too “brainy.”
Gray was right about the New Yorkers: Stefan found himself talking to people in his classes about the city, what they liked doing there, where they lived. It was almost as if he’d been away for years and not just weeks, but that wasn’t so bad. He needed to feel comfortable crossing the wind-torn campus on the way to class or a movie in the campus center and felt stranded, torn from the noise and thrill and weight of New York. Sometimes he wondered if starting here at the end of winter had been a good idea—perhaps the change was too sharp.
But classes were classes, his professors like those in New York, studying and hanging out no different, only the note taking, the hours in the library weren’t oppressive because he’d chosen all this: the steamy laundry room downstairs in his dorm, the noisy snack bar a dorm away whose jukebox never seemed to play anything he liked, the lounge on his corridor with its view of a girls’ dorm where Gray sat and stared for hours. Stefan came in there one night to ask Gray if he wanted to go to town for a drink.
“It’s wicked cold,” Gray shook his head as they trudged to a bar in town with a rock night, a Motown night, a free ladies’ night and at least six or seven more kinds of nights Stefan couldn’t keep track of.
This night was a regular one, so they could settle into a corner booth without waiting or shoving.
“There’s a party next Saturday in the main lounge,” Stefan said.
“Beer?”
“Of course.”
“Huh.…” Gray considered that. “You going?”
“Sure.”
“Parties bum me out.” Gray’s eyes went blank, blanker than usual, and he rambled on through three drinks about the ex-girlfriend he’d dated all through high school. “She was part of the family, that was the thing, she liked my folks better than me, liked my brother, my aunts, everybody better than me.”
“She was in love with your family?”
Gray nodded solemnly. “But not me. Not really.”
“Maybe you’ll meet someone at the party.”
“That’s the thing—I keep meeting ‘someone.’” Gray sighed, looked near tears. Back at their room Gray did start crying as soon as he sat on his bed, broad shoulders hunched and shaking. Stefan stood across at his bed, transfixed—he was afraid to move or say anything. But he edged forward.
“Hey—“
Gray gulped and sobbed.
“Hey.” Stefan stood looking down at Gray’s heavy bent head. “It’ll be all right,” he tried, sitting next to Gray. He couldn’t think of anything weightier to say. Gray kept shaking and wheezing and Stefan suddenly thought of Jenny for some reason—he’d never cried about her. He slipped an arm around Gray’s shoulders and went on saying more things to calm him down. Gray soon stopped, lay back on his bed and fell asleep with one foot still on the floor. Stefan took off Gray’s shoes, thinking that he’d seen someone do the same in a movie. He was shocked by the warmth of Gray’s feet, and suddenly imagined taking down Gray’s pants, feeling those large thighs. He went to take a shower and try to forget. But soaping his body made it worse. He had seen Gray nude so often because his roommate seemed very comfortable like that, and never rushed from clothes into a bathrobe or towel or gym shorts, but could stand there humming, scratching his lowhanging balls, as if unaware Stefan was in the room. He was very hairy, and the blond curls on his back, neck, butt both fascinated and repelled Stefan, who imagined stroking them, and shuddered at what they might feel like. Gray was muscular but flabby, with a fat and uncircumcised cock he called Charlie. Showering now, Stefan imagined what it would be like to peel back that wrinkled thick foreskin.
A few days later Gray brought up the usual clutch of mail, but dropped one envelope on his desk.
“For me?”
“Had to happen.” Gray lay down for a long read.
It was from his father. Stefan glanced at Gray, who was already lost in his first letter.
It wasn’t a letter as much as a check with a note attached; they were well, looking for a new house, hoped he liked where he was, hoped he could use the money for “settling in.”
The check was too large—how could he ever spend so much money? It was too serious a sum. He slipped it into his desk drawer face down, and saw a line on the back: “When we get married this summer, come spend as much time as you want.”
When he looked up he met Leo’s face, his mother’s. He took out paper to write letters home, losing his nervousness after a few pages.
“I wish they’d stop seeing her,” Gray complained later, sweeping the pile of small sheets away from him.
“Your girlfriend?”
“Ex-girlfriend, except to my folks. They’ll probably adopt her and make it legal.”
Stefan almost said something then about his family, but it was time to go out for lunch.
Even on the stairs he could hear that the lounge was packed. “They must’ve put up lots of fliers,” he thought, edgy, uncomfortable going downstairs alone, even though he knew lots of guys in the dorm, at least by name. Gray was still deciding whether to get dressed or not.
The lounge burst with people, perhaps because this was the first party in their dorm area, and there were a lot of girls in groups, surrounded by guys. Stefan found a cup of wine and moved to lean against a wall to settle in to the noise and crush. The room boasted two kegs and someone was setting up a tape deck and speakers. A girl from his psych class waved at him and pushed through to the wall, smiling, a little drunk already, he thought, because she kept blinking and smiling no matter what he said about the class. When the first soul song came on he set down his wine and led Gail to dance. She was too blonde, he thought, as she wriggled her hips at him, pouting, but he was glad to be dancing. Jenny and her group had never played good dance music at their parties, just Melanie, Donovan, James Taylor. They hated Motown, Sly and the Family Stone, hated anything you could really dance to.
“That was neat.” Gail clapped. “Thanks.” And she slipped away.
Stefan found his cup empty when he returned to claim his bit of wall.
“I drank it,” a woman said.
He turned.
“You looked okay,” she laughed. “I’m Marsha.”
“Stefan. You teach here?”
Another laugh. “I’m just a student.”
Marsha was a short plump big-eyed gypsyish woman with masses of glossy black hair that made him think how soft it would probably be; she looked under twenty-five, not over, he revised when they stood closer.
“I saw you dancing, you’re good. You’re from the city? I figured. People up here don’t have
much energy when they’re dancing, it’s like they’re doing it to be polite. No one dances like a New Yorker. You go out dancing lots? No? Why not?”
He shrugged. Her voice and manner were rich, disarming; she was by no means pretty, but he responded to her slightly bucktoothed smile, small precise hands in a way he found unsettling, dangerous.
“Let’s dance.” He and Marsha stayed on the floor for a long time, until he felt too loose to be anxious.
“Where’d you learn to dance like that?” she wondered, sipping a beer. “On TV? You must watch it a lot? No?” She shook her head in amused admiration. They found an uncrowded corner, sat on the floor and talked. Marsha lived in town, worked at the largest record store, Phases, had come back to finish school after living with someone—Frank—in Rochester for four years. She talked about that time so casually he didn’t find their sudden intimacy at all strange. Stefan knew with a thrill that Marsha was someone he would be able to talk to about himself, someone he’d want to talk to.
“He left you after four years?” Stefan asked, incredulous.
“He said we were too close.”
“What did you do?”
She shrugged. “I’m a tough bitch, I said good-bye.”
He laughed and they went to dance some more. He noticed Gray at the edge of the dancing looking very glum, but couldn’t catch his roommate’s eye.
Much later Stefan asked when he’d see her again.
“Right now, if you want,” she grinned. “We could go into town for a drink. I’ll drive you back.”
When he came back down to the lobby with his coat, Marsha took his hand and smiled. He leaned down to kiss her.
“Forget the drink,” she said as they stepped outside.
11
“Not bad for a beginner,” Marsha said later. “Not too bad.”
He lay next to her under a chaos of sheets in a very large bed, a hand stroking her stomach, crossing, recrossing. The street lamp right outside her bedroom window divided the room into sharp shadows, and the steady movement of his hand was the rhythm of the night. He was too tired to be happy, too happy to be tired, lost in the musky-smelling sheets, outside of which he knew it was cold, but he couldn’t quite believe in that cold now.