by Tom Perrotta
Two changes were responsible for my new sense of excitement and belonging. I got hooked up with Reality and went to work in the dining hall. Reality was a new undergraduate literary magazine founded by Liz Marin, whom I’d met the previous spring in a class on the epic tradition. Liz was the kind of person I’d never met before coming to Yale. She’d grown up in New York and Paris and had taken a year off after high school to go backpacking through Latin America. She was tall and beautiful and multilingual and fiercely opinionated. One of her opinions held that the rags that passed for literary magazines on campus were so smug and tame and insular that it was hopeless to even try to reform them; they simply needed to be replaced. Her idea was to create a magazine devoted to everything but college, one that focused on exploited workers, violent crime, urban poverty, and moral squalor—the whole wide hardscrabble world spread out like a dirty rug at the foot of our ivory tower—in a word, Reality.
“No more sonnets about menstruation!” she proclaimed at our organizational meeting, with what seemed like genuine anguish. “No more wacky stories about summer jobs!”
Our first issue, published that December—the cover photo featured a stray dog with some sort of skin condition straining really hard to take a shit—made a surprisingly big splash on campus. The articles included profiles of a prison guard and a heroin-addicted prostitute, and the poems explored difficult subjects like incest and drug addiction and prison life. There were two short stories—one about a pyromaniac priest, the other about a thirteen-year-old nymphomaniac who poisons her family’s dog for reasons the author chose to leave deliberately vague. Liz herself was a talented photographer, and her unflinching portraits of the homeless, the retarded, the weird-looking, and the unlucky were scattered throughout our pages. Despite the grittiness of the content, production values were high; a supposedly anonymous alum—everyone knew he was actually Liz’s Uncle George—had donated a substantial sum to insure that we didn’t have to cut corners on things like paper stock and high-quality photo reproduction. Just about everyone who mattered agreed that Reality was troubling and deeply relevant, a refreshing departure from the usual circle jerk of undergraduate publishing. As deputy assistant literary editor for fiction, I got to bask in some of the reflected glory. Strangers introduced themselves to me at parties; people who’d ignored me for two years suddenly wanted to know me better.
Despite its comparative lack of glamour, though, my job in the dining hall probably had more to do with my improved mood than my association with the magazine. Hot and dirty and hectic as it could be, the work was strangely consuming, sometimes even exhilarating. Three-hour shifts would fly by in a blur of frantic activity and cheerful banter and an unspoken sense of camaraderie I hadn’t experienced anywhere else in college.
In my ugly blue shirt and paper hat, I was part of a team, the first one I’d belonged to for a long time. My teammates weren’t just fellow students like Matt or Kristin or Sarah, a shy girl I later found out was a world-class oboist as well as a member of the Yale Slavic Chorus, or Eddie Zimmer, who was always trying to recruit people for the Ultimate Frisbee Club, or Djembe, who was supposedly some sort of African prince whose family had fallen on hard times. They were the surly cooks with their unpredictable rages and muttered quips; the black and Puerto Rican women working the serving line, whose private thoughts remained hidden behind masks of polite friendliness; the dishwashers, one of whom weighed three hundred pounds and another who lived in the YMCA and had such a horrible hacking cough I regularly expected to see him start spitting up blood; and Lorelei, this sexy high school girl from New Haven whose job seemed to consist of sitting at the front desk in a pose of provocative languor and pressing a clicker every time someone entered; and Albert, the manager, who enjoyed teaching us restaurant jargon, like “eighty-six” and “sneeze guard.” Sometimes I’d get so caught up in the work I’d forget who I was and mutter under my breath about the “fuckin’ Yalies,” the privileged brats who seemed to think the rest of us had been put on earth to serve their every need and whim.
In late October, at the height of that unexpectedly busy and happy semester, I got a letter from Cindy. It was four pages long, written in red ink on pink stationery in this fat, meticulous, gracefully looping script. “Dear Danny,” she wrote:
Guess what? I did it! I broke down and bought a car! A brand new Honda Civic. Silver. It’s really cute. You wouldn’t believe how good it smells. I woke up in the middle of the night last night and snuck outside of the house in my pajamas just so I could sit in it for a while. Isn’t that ridiculous! I’m still learning the stick. I’m all right with everything except starting on a hill. Yesterday I rolled backwards into a cop car at that light by the Hess station! but luckily there was no damage. The cop was nice about it—he just told me to take it easy on the clutch. It was easier once I got myself to calm down a little.
Are you surprised to hear from me?! My heart’s pounding like crazy. I don’t know why. It’s just a letter, right? I’m sure your busy with your friends and all your homework and everything, but I’m curious. Do you think about me sometimes? I’m only asking because I think about you all the time. I mean ALL THE TIME! I’ve written you like 37 letters I’ve been too scared to put in the mail, but this one I think I really might send so I’m trying to be EXTRA careful about spelling since I know it is one of your strong points (NOT one of mine!)
You know when I think of you most? Coffee break. When I step outside and see your father’s truck waiting in the road. I expect you to be there again, wearing that doofy coin belt (No offense!) or else I remember us kissing in the front seat. Remember that?
I’m really sorry if I disappointed you. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with you the way you wanted to be with me. I guess I was just scared or something. Oh well. You probably have a new girlfriend now. I HOPE not! (Is it all right for me to say that?)
You don’t have to write back if you don’t want. I mainly just want to tell you about the car, since you spent so much time helping me look. I at least owe you a ride when you get back home for Thanksgiving. Would that be okay?
Wow! I don’t think I’ve written a letter this long in my whole life. I guess I’m like that once I get going I can’t seem to get myself to shut up. But I guess I don’t have to tell YOU!
Love,
Cynthia
ps—is it all right for me to say love?
Another letter came the next day, and another one the day after that. After her eighth unanswered letter, I finally broke down and wrote her back. I congratulated her on her new car, talked a little about my classes, and told her how much fun I was having working in the dining hall. In passing, I mentioned that I wasn’t seeing anyone new, and that I still thought about her from time to time. Three days later, she called and asked if she could drive up for a visit. (“Just for the day,” she assured me.) By that time, though, it was November already, and the late semester crunch had set in. I had papers to write, and no time for visitors. We made plans to get together over Thanksgiving break.
My first night home she picked me up in her new car, proud and happy and nervous. She had a new haircut too, shorter and less elaborate and a lot more flattering. We went to the movies, then out for a couple of drinks. We laughed a lot, and took a detour to Echo Lake on the way home. In an empty parking lot by the golf course, she showed me how the front seats of her Honda reclined like dentist chairs. With the heater running and Greetings from Asbury Park on the tape player, we kissed till our jaws ached and our tongues were sore, just like the summer had never ended.
At ten thirty the phone rang again. I figured it to be Matt, weighing in with a second round of begging and hectoring, but it turned out to be Polly Wells, the deputy assistant literary editor for poetry at Reality.
“Hey,” she said, chuckling softly to herself as if remembering a good joke. “What are you doing?”
“Abusing my highlighter. It’s an ugly scene.”
“Want to go to Naples?”
“Like when?”
“Like now?”
I glanced down at the brick that was Middlemarch and weighed my alternatives. Polly had a cloud of reddish blond hair and the mouth of a cherub. We’d kissed each other once, experimentally, at the party celebrating the first issue of Reality, and neither one of us had mentioned it since. We were both drunk at the time, but I retained a vivid memory of her whispering, “You’re a very strange person,” and then kissing me on the mouth, as if to congratulate me on my strangeness. I believe I’d been going on about her name before that, telling her how great I thought it was that there were still people in the world named Polly. (The only thing I remembered after that was vomiting into a storm drain while Sang stood by with some guy I didn’t know, waiting patiently for me to finish.)
“Now sounds good,” I told her.
Ten minutes later I was sitting across from her in a scarred-up wooden booth near the jukebox, waiting for my glass of foam to revert to its original liquid condition. Polly was one of the few girls I knew who was always up for splitting a pitcher, but she hadn’t quite perfected her pouring technique.
“I’m pissed at Peter,” she told me, straining to make herself heard over the din of surrounding conversations. Naples at that time on a Tuesday night seemed like the hub of the universe, and one of the few scenes at Yale that actually approximated stereotypical images of “college life”—crowds of more or less rowdy students gathered around dark tables littered with beer glasses and pizza crusts, laughing, arguing, and occasionally bursting into song, though the general aura of medieval revelry was softened by the presence of numerous violin cases stowed under the tables, as well as the healthy population of loners scattered throughout the restaurant, holding folded pizza slices in one hand and open books in the other.
“What did he do now?” I asked, trying to strike a tone that balanced interest and fatigue. I wasn’t thrilled width my role as sounding board for her boyfriend troubles, but I didn’t want to jeopardize it, either. If her relationship with Peter—I couldn’t help thinking of him as Professor Preston—really did go south, I figured the hours I’d put in as sympathetic listener would give me a leg up in the competition to replace him.
“He’s got some woman staying in his apartment for the next two weeks, this professor from Vassar doing research at Beinecke Library. He claims she’s just ‘a friend and colleague,’ but maybe it would be better if we didn’t see each other while she’s around. I bet he’s in bed with her right now.”
“Not necessarily,” I said, secretly rooting for this possibility. “Maybe they really are just friends.”
“He’s such a hypocrite,” she said, shaking her head like a dog to get that beautiful hair out of her pale, almost ashen face. Her eyelids looked pink and irritated. “When we first started going out, he said he didn’t care who knew. We used to go to the moves at York Square and hold hands. He’d pick me up in front of Silliman in his car. Now it’s all hush-hush, like he’s married or something.”
Peter Preston was a rising star in the English Department, a thirty-two-year-old assistant professor who’d arrived from Berkeley the year before and made an immediate name for himself with his lecture class on Shakespeare’s problem plays, which drew close to three hundred students, myself included. He was boyishly handsome, with a shock of blond hair that kept falling over his left eye no matter how many times he pushed it back on top of his head. We loved him—most of us, anyway—for his dry wit, his skinny neckties, and his familiarity with our pop culture universe. For the past several months, his relationship with Polly had been an open secret, at least in certain circles. Sexual harassment hadn’t quite come into its own as a concept at the time, and most of us were at best mildly scandalized by the idea of a young professor sleeping with an undergraduate who wasn’t currently enrolled in one of his classes, though I must say that on a purely personal level, I had found it confusing and painful to make the transition from worshipping him as a teacher to resenting him as a rival.
“What’s taking so long with the slices?” Polly cast an impatient glance at the pizza counter, where a crowd had begun to gather. “I’m starving. I haven’t eaten all day.”
“All day? You’re kidding, right?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes I forget.”
“That’s amazing. I don’t think I’ve forgotten a meal my entire life. It doesn’t even seem possible.”
“Maybe I should sleep with someone else,” she said, unwilling to be sidetracked into a discussion of my fanatically regular eating habits. “Maybe that would wake him up.”
“Hmmm,” I said, making an effort to look like my interest in the subject were purely theoretical. “That’s a pretty drastic step.”
“But who?” She exhaled so forcefully I felt the breeze all the way across the table. “Can you think of anyone?”
“Don’t ask me,” I said, wondering if it would be out-of-line to float my own candidacy. “This is something you’ll have to figure out on your own.”
“My history TA’s pretty cute. But he’s got that awful beard.”
I rubbed my clean-shaven chin and clucked my tongue.
“Too bad.”
“There’s got to be someone,” she said, squinting into the distance.
From where I sat, I had a clear view of the counter, so I knew what was coming when the pizza guy bent down and put his lips to the silver microphone they kept by the register.
“Slices are ready.”
His mumbled announcement crackled through the staticky PA system, silencing the pizzeria like the Voice of God. I jumped up and joined the mad rush for the counter, jockeying for position among the mob of ex-National Merit Scholars and former student council presidents, many of whom were waving plastic plates in the air like extras in a movie about the Depression. I had jostled my way almost to the front of the line when someone shoved me from behind with a force that could only have been deliberate.
“Hey,” I said, whirling angrily. “Take it easy.”
Matt fixed his paper hat on his head and eyed me with cool disdain.
“Et tu, Danny?”
I shrugged an insincere apology, lowering my voice to a conspiratorial level. “I’m with a girl. Good things are happening.”
Any of my other male friends would have accepted this excuse without a protest, but Matt’s expression didn’t change. He raised his hands up to his head like a hold-up victim, and turned slowly, until I was facing his back.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Go ahead,” he said, glancing mournfully over his shoulder. “Stab me in the liver. Give it a couple of twists while you’re at it.”
“Yoo-hoo,” said the guy behind the counter. “You boys want slices, or you wanna play games?”
“So, what about you?” Polly asked, shaking a storm of red pepper flakes onto her slice. “What’s going on with you and your secretary?”
I always felt bad when people at school referred to Cindy as my secretary, not only because it was unfair to her, but also because of what it said about my own sad vanity. At some point I’d realized that my association with her struck certain of my college friends as vaguely exotic, and I’d played up the working-class angle for all it was worth.
“Nothing much.”
“You going to visit her this weekend?”
“Nope.”
“She coming here?”
“Nope.”
“I guess spring break’s only a couple of weeks away. You must be looking forward to that.”
I usually thought of myself as having a quick mind, but I was often slow on the uptake with Polly. For weeks I’d been pretending to her that Cindy and I were still a couple, figuring that this somehow equalized things between us, saving me from looking like what I really was—the second banana, the would-be boyfriend waiting in the wings, the one who kept her company when the other one had better things to do. But all at once it struck me that Polly wasn’t just making conversation, that she mi
ght actually have a personal interest in my weekend plans, that there might be some hope for me after all.
“It’s over,” I said.
Her self-possession faltered for a second. She leaned forward, the eagerness in her voice betraying the careful blankness of her face.
“What?”
“It’s over with me and Cindy. It’s been over since Christmas.”
She sat back and contemplated me for a couple of seconds. She couldn’t seem to decide if she was angry or amused or simply puzzled.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked away, momentarily distracted by a commotion across the room. One nerdy guy in a Yale sweatshirt was leaning across a table, beating another nerdy guy in a Yale sweatshirt over the head with a Yale baseball cap. The guy being hit wasn’t trying to defend himself. He just sat there with this feeble smile on his face, as if he wanted onlookers like us to think it was all in fun.
“I wish you would’ve told me,” she said.
“Why?” I said, relishing the power that had come from surprising her. “What’s the difference?”
“What’s the difference?” She seemed offended by the question.
“Yeah. What would be different if you’d known?”
Before she could answer, a hard ball of paper hit me in the forehead. I looked up and saw Matt standing at the edge of our table, holding open his winter coat to reveal a rectangle of pizza box cardboard taped to his shirt. The words “I’m Pathetic” were printed on it in bold capital letters. He smiled at Polly and held out his hand.