He and Rachel still wrote, and they still talked, but he thought that not only had the sorority sucked up most of her time but it had encouraged her worst impulses, turned her into a girl who cared too much about manicures and formal gowns and hardly had time to listen to him or any interest in the future beyond the next rush or the next dance.
Andy shifted from foot to foot. The night was cool and crisp, the air smelled like apples and the smoke from all those fireplaces, and there was a towpath that ran in a two-mile loop around the man-made lake that some wealthy Beaumont alum had had dredged so the crew team would have a place to practice. He could run a quick lap, maybe two. Rachel was looking at him, waiting for him to finish. He forced himself to hold still, drumming his fingers on the desk, next to the stupid hat. “You wanted me to rent a tux, so I rented a tux. Which, by the way, was not cheap. I came because I wanted to see you. I know you’re busy and I don’t want to be in your way, but I’m not your dress-up doll.”
She stepped close to him with her hair down and her face gleaming and her breath smelling like toothpaste. In spite of himself, he felt his body react. His hands slipped around her waist, cupping her bottom, pulling her close. “There’s a prize for best-dressed couple,” she whispered, rolling her hips against him, then pulling back, then coming in again until he grabbed her, holding her still. She looked up at him, her eyes big, lashes fluttering. “My sorority gets points.”
Jesus. He let his hands drop. “Okay, okay,” she said, and laughed, and nuzzled against him, grabbing his hands and putting them back on her bottom. “Not that you wouldn’t have looked adorable in the fez, but I get it. You’re a man, not a Ken doll. Free will. Learned about it in philosophy class.” She walked to the door, stuck her head into the hallway, then grabbed a towel and grabbed his hand and pulled him back to the bathroom. “I already took a shower,” he said.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness.” There were three stalls, all in a row, with only curtains separating them. Rachel turned on all three showers and pulled the curtains aside, and then pulled him in with her, with all that hot water drumming down. For twenty minutes, as the room filled with steam, he whispered to her, making her laugh, before she filled her palm with bath gel, then took him in her hand, sliding with delicious slowness up to the tip and back down again. “Honey,” she said, with the water washing her face clean, slicking her hair back so that he could see her face without its frame of curls. “I love you.”
The next morning, he woke up ready to go again, but Rachel was out of bed before he could reach for her, giving him the kind of kiss he imagined long-married wives gave their husbands when they left for work. Andy made the bed, did his workout, showered and changed, and got one of Rachel’s friends to wave him into the dining hall, which had a vaulted ceiling, marble floors, and long, heavy wooden tables where the students ate, or didn’t eat (he’d once dined with some of Rachel’s sisters and had spent thirty minutes watching them shift salad around their plates).
Andy had pancakes and turkey bacon, then sneaked into the library, which was lovely, like an old mansion full of books, all carved dark wood, gleaming brass lamps, and rows and rows of carrels. Andy found himself a nook with a big chair that overlooked the quad, and did his homework: Sociology of the Family, Abnormal Psychology, and a grueling plod through twenty pages of Aristotle for his philosophy seminar. Most of his teammates were educational foundation majors—gym teachers in training, in other words. A few of the even less academically inclined studied geology, commonly known as Rocks for Jocks, where the professors would pass you as long as you didn’t fall asleep and snore too disruptively in their classrooms. Andy hadn’t decided yet between comp lit and political science. He liked reading about how the world worked, about why people did what they did.
Homework took him until one in the afternoon. Beaumont had a two-block downtown with a cheese shop that sold sandwiches, a Chinese restaurant, and a fancy French place, where parents took their kids when they came for graduation. Counting his pocket change to pay for two bagels with cream cheese, Andy saw some smooth-looking, wide-bodied guy in a leather jacket smirking at him before paying for his own lunch with a credit card—probably, Andy thought, one where parents got the bills. He stood at a narrow counter, munching his bagel, as the wide boy climbed into a BMW with a Beaumont sticker on the back window.
Beaumont kids were assholes. He and Rachel had been fighting about it for a year, and had finally reached a kind of détente, where he agreed to acknowledge, at least privately, that it was impossible for every single kid who went there to be a jerk, and Rachel admitted—again, only in private—that plenty of them, including her beloved sorors, were the kind of blinkered, privileged, entitled assholes who’d go sailing through life, assuming that their hard work, not their privilege, was what ensured them their good jobs, good schools, nice houses, and pricy vacations. Born on third base and think they hit a triple, his mom used to say, and Andy found himself thinking that almost constantly when he walked around Beaumont, where Rachel tried so hard to fit in. He knew, because he’d asked her, that she’d never told anyone at college about her heart condition or all of her hospitalizations. The scar she’d explained away by saying she’d had an operation—operation, singular—to correct a birth defect. She kept her portable oxygen tank in a suitcase in the back of her closet; she kept her nails painted so no one could see her fingertips’ bluish tinge, and the one time he’d heard someone ask her to go running, she’d made an excuse about cramps.
“Isn’t it pretty here?” Rachel would ask . . . and it was; like a postcard, like the picture you’d get in your head when you thought college, the kind of place made to appear on brochures. In the fall, students would gather on the quad for class, sitting underneath oak and maple trees with their leaves glowing gold and scarlet, and in the spring the kids who looked like they’d been selected for their good looks would play Frisbee on the beautifully tended grass.
Twice a week, Rachel and her sorority sisters took a van downtown to tutor kids who went to the public elementary school. Rachel had been working with Keila, a soft-spoken sixth-grader with bright brown eyes who called Rachel Miss Rachel and looked at her like she’d invented MTV. At least once a month, they’d go to the zoo or the park or the movies or to the fancy restaurant in town for tea. “I wish I could do more,” Rachel would say, and would daydream out loud about adopting Keila once she graduated, as if Keila didn’t have a mother already.
“I just don’t get it,” Rachel would say when Keila would casually mention that Mommy’s new boyfriend had borrowed her duffel bag, the pink, monogrammed one that Rachel had bought her for her birthday, and hadn’t ever brought it back. “Why would she let a guy like that anywhere near her children?” Andy wanted to tell her that it was easy to make good choices when you had a web of people supporting you, not to mention money as a safety net when everyone else in your family did the right thing, went to college, held down a job. “She’s doing the best she can,” he’d say, and Rachel would sigh, and repeat, “I just don’t understand.” Andy understood, even if he could never quite make Rachel get it.
Sometimes—more often than not—he thought that Rachel and her classmates were just playing at being caring and open-minded, at noticing that there was a world wider than them, their college, their peers. They’d experience poverty in two-hour chunks twice a month, like it was a movie they were going to see or a TV show they were watching, something they’d click off or walk out of when it was done, something they sat through just so they could talk about it with everyone else who’d seen it and had something to say.
That night, Andy hung around the dining hall, hoping that another one of Rachel’s friends would let him through. No luck, which was a shame. Not only was the dining hall lovely, with its soaring ceilings and stained-glass windows, but the food was incredible. Different flavors of frozen yogurt every night, a once-a-week sundae bar with all the toppings, vegetarian options, an
d cold cereal, if you didn’t like what was for dinner. On his campus, there were choices, but not that many, and the dining hall was modern, all sharp angles and glass; not ugly, but not anything like this. Once a month, there’d be a formal night. The chefs and servers (all African American, Andy had noted) would dress up in tuxes, or black dresses and frilly white aprons, and serve crab Newburg, steamship round of beef, surf and turf with lobster tail and filet mignon. At his first formal dinner, Andy had eaten until his stomach stretched his waistband, and was wondering if he could slip a few filets into his backpack for the trip back home, when one of the servers, a middle-aged woman with a round face, had shyly slipped him a foil-wrapped package filled with steaks. Was it that she hadn’t recognized him and knew he went to a different school . . . or was it that she’d recognized that he was half black (which not everyone did) and wanted to do something nice for him? He’d wondered about it.
By seven o’clock he was back in Rachel’s room, showered and shaved and in his rented tuxedo, watching Rachel do her makeup again. The Smiths played on her stereo—Andy had thought it was a blessing when she’d finally moved on from Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, except Morrissey’s moaning was even worse. The house smelled like perfume and sweet, fruity drinks, like cigarette smoke and a little bit like vomit when he passed an open bathroom door. The Gammas hadn’t been able to come up with an Arabian cocktail, so they were serving Zombies, made with pineapple juice and maraschino cherries and three different kinds of booze. Because he was bored, Andy started flipping through the Gamma handbook, which was on Rachel’s bedside table. He read from the text out loud. “‘For recruitment, your hair has to be curly or straight. No waves.’ Why no waves?” he asked, and Rachel said, “Looks sloppy.”
Andy kept reading. “ ‘You will either need to have a curling iron (for our curly gals) or a flat iron (or a blow-dryer if you have pin-straight, flat hair and you’re super good with hair so you can blow your hair out). Don’t count on other girls letting you borrow theirs or doing your hair for you because then your friend won’t have time for herself. Note: if you have straight hair and you want to wear it curly, don’t. Your hair needs to be able to hold for fifteen-hour days and hair-spray-crunchy or limp hair is not acceptable. Also, get some heat protectant and shine spray.’ ”
At her vanity, Rachel lifted a bottle of each of the substances in question and waved them triumphantly. Her breasts shivered with the motion. Andy wondered if they’d have time for a quickie before the dance, then resigned himself, knowing that Rachel would refuse, on the grounds that it would ruin her makeup.
“This is crazy,” said Andy. “You know that, right?”
“Keep reading,” said Rachel.
“ ‘If you have bangs, they need to be styled correctly. If they’re long and you’re afraid they’re going to be in your face the whole time, get some bobby pins that match your hair color . . . ’ Can I ask you a question?”
“You just did,” Rachel said, through a mouth filled with bobby pins.
“My mom could make a fortune here,” Andy said. “I mean, do the girls really need someone to explain to them how to use hair spray?”
Rachel sighed. “I know that you don’t see it this way, but we’re helping them. Because, whether you want to admit it or not, looks matter. What if you were applying for a job, and no one told you that your hair looked bad, or that your lipstick was all wrong?”
“They’d hire you anyway, if you were the most qualified?” Andy ventured. In an ideal world, anyhow. In the real world he wasn’t so sure. How would he be treated at Oregon, for example, if he weren’t a runner, if he didn’t have a ready-made group of friends, built-in status?
Rachel had given her head a shake, half in anger, half in sorrow. “It’s not like that for girls.”
He wanted to ask more questions—like what straight versus curly versus wavy hair had to do with job interviews or with giving back to the community; whether Keila cared if Rachel had red or pale pink polish on her nails—when someone knocked on Rachel’s door. “Hey there, Andrew Landis,” said Pamela Boudreaux, who was Rachel’s co-vice-president, a legacy whose mom had attended Beaumont, an Atlanta native with a syrupy drawl and a wry sense of humor. In her room once, Andy had picked up a framed photograph of Pamela in a white dress. “Were you in a wedding?” he’d asked, and she’d chuckled and said, “Honey, that was my debut.”
“We’ve got a situation,” Pamela said, pulling Rachel over to the window seat. Andy listened closely enough to learn that the situation involved a sister whose dress was “inappropriately revealing.”
“I see London, I see France, I see Stacey Saperstein’s underpants. Or I would, if she was wearing any.”
“Oh, dear,” Rachel murmured.
“She said it’s Dolce & Gabbana, thank you very much, and she’s not changing.”
Andy closed his eyes, listening to the two of them try to solve the problem of Stacey Saperstein’s ass crack, and imagined the next day’s run around Beaumont’s track: ten minutes at an easy jog; hundred-yard sprints times four, each followed by a thirty-second recovery, then four two-hundred-yards, two four-hundred-yards, and two race-pace miles with a five-minute break in between. He imagined kneeling, setting his feet in the blocks, fingers tented on the pebbled surface of the track, crouched and waiting, imagining the starter’s pistol . . . Then Rachel was shaking his shoulder, saying, “Hey, Prince Charming, it’s time for the ball.”
Even he had to admit that the room was lovely. Rachel and her sisters had strung up tiny, twinkling white lights, and stapled billowing clouds of white tulle across the ceiling to look like clouds. Yards of fabric with tiny mirrors sewn on draped the walls, making it look like the guests were dancing inside a tent. Two bands took turns onstage, playing three fast songs for every slow one (Rachel had explained, very seriously, how they’d come up with that ratio). In his tuxedo, among a throng of similarly dressed guys, Andy didn’t feel awkward. Maybe, indeed probably, those guys, all of whom were white, owned their tuxes, didn’t have to rent them, especially didn’t have to rent them using a coupon their girlfriend had sent—but it didn’t matter. He took Rachel in his arms, holding her close, as the second band’s lead singer crooned, “I knew I loved you before I met you, I think I dreamed you into life.”
“You did a good job,” he whispered, and her face lit up, so pretty, even though part of him wanted to soak a napkin in water and wipe off all the foundation and blush and concealer and eyeliner (“ladies, please, ONLY black or brown!”) and eye shadow (“neutrals, blended very well, and do I even have to say no pastels or vivid colors?”) that the checklist mandated, until she looked like the girl he’d met in the hospital again. “Tell me a story,” he’d say, and she’d smile and take his hand, and for a minute they’d both marvel at how long they’d known each other, and talk about how they would be together forever.
“Hey, watch it!” A red-faced guy holding two red plastic Solo cups bumped into Andy. Beer surged over the edge of a cup and slopped onto Rachel’s gown.
“Oh!” Rachel stared at the stain in horror, then dashed away, leaving Andy and Beer Guy looking at each other. Beer Guy was a beefy fellow who looked like he’d been force-fed into his tuxedo. His gut swelled against his buttons; his neck bulged over his collar.
“Jesus, didn’t you see me?” Beer Guy whined. Andy held his hands up, quickly recognizing that this guy was drunk, drunk enough to not care about anything.
“Sorry.”
“You’re goddamn right you’re sorry. Sorry piece of shit.” The guy’s tiny, mean eyes, shoved deep in the glistening, sweaty flesh of his face, did a fast flick up and down, taking in Andy’s face, his tux, his feet. A predatory grin stretched his fat, drunk face, showing off the kind of straight teeth you got only after a few years of expensive orthodontia. “Nice shoes, ass-face.”
Andy felt himself blush. The guy at the tuxedo store had wanted
to rent him formal shoes, for an extra eight bucks. Andy didn’t have an extra eight bucks, due to the expense of the bus tickets and the new undershirts he’d had to buy (Rachel had run her finger over the frayed collar of the one he’d worn on his last visit, and she hadn’t said anything but he’d known what she was thinking). He had worn his blue Nikes, thinking it was ultimately kind of a cool look, an I’m-too-hip-to-be-bothered-to-match look. But maybe not.
“Lookin’ good, Duckie,” Beer Guy sneered.
“You too, my man,” said Andy, turning away. That would have been the end of it; should have been the end of it, except Beer Guy said, “What, no dress shoes in the church donation box?”
If he’d accused Andy of stealing his tuxedo, Andy would have ignored him. If he’d gone racist, Andy would have simply walked away, or gone out, in his sneakers, and run until the urge to hit the asshole went away. But those three words, church donation box, made Andy remember just that. At his church it hadn’t been a box, it was a table, a folding table with a scarred plastic top where the donations would be arrayed by size and by gender. The boys’ stuff was always in the middle. He remembered his mom angling for a seat on the aisle so that as soon as the priest started to say Peace be with you she could be the first one there, picking over the donations, grabbing fistfuls of stuff that wouldn’t even fit him, giving a triumphant shriek when she spied something good, something quality, with a name brand she recognized, like Ryan Peterman’s old winter coat.
Who Do You Love Page 17