Joe College

by Tom Perrotta

  And where the hell was Manuscript anyway? I wandered halfheartedly down to the end of the block, on the off chance that I’d overlooked an enormous mansion on the first pass, then returned to my skeptical vigil in front of the wall. I’m not sure how long I would have remained paralyzed there, letting my big chance with Polly drain away, second by agonizing second, if I hadn’t been jumped from behind. The sudden impact staggered me, and I cried out in alarm as two arms wrapped themselves around my neck. I might have been even more terrified if my assailant hadn’t also wrapped his legs around my waist and begun shouting, “Giddyap! Giddyap, horsey!” in a lame cowpoke accent, while a pretty girl in a red baseball jacket stood by, laughing a sweetly musical laugh that just then struck me as one more piece in the puzzle of this particular bad dream.

  Once I’d convinced him to dismount, Matt was more than happy to inform me that the wall I’d been communing with was indeed part of Manuscript.

  “What are you, stoned?” he demanded. He was wearing a beat-up fishing hat, every square inch of which was plastered over with metal lures, fuzzy flies, and campaign buttons touting candidates I’d never heard of. It had the odd effect of making you appreciate the sober dignity of his usual headgear by comparison.

  “Unfortunately not.”

  “Then you must be a moron.”

  “I prefer to think of myself as an imbecile.”

  The girl laughed again, but Matt maintained a straight face, directing my attention to the dark alley between the wall and the tall wooden fence bordering the property next door.

  “Didn’t you see the path?”

  “That’s a path?”

  “Duh? What did you think it was?”

  “It looks like a place you go to be mugged and left for dead.”

  “Danny, Danny, Danny.” Matt shook his head with affectionate tolerance, like he made a habit of rescuing me from jams like this. “You theoretical physicists are all alike. You can unlock the secrets of the universe, but you can’t remember where you left your own keys.”

  “Speaking as a theoretical physicist,” I said, “did I mention that I like your hat?”

  “We went to a thrift store,” the girl said excitedly. “We got tons of great stuff.”

  “Jess, Danny.” Matt performed elaborate curlicues with his hands to facilitate the introduction. “Danny, Jess.”

  I reached out to shake her hand, but ended up grabbing the limp sleeve of her jacket, which was too long by about six inches. It hit me with the force of a minor revelation that it was okay to wear oversized clothes, just as long as you made people think it was a statement rather than an error in judgment, though it also occurred to me that girls who looked like Jessica might be granted a little more slack in these matters than the rest of us.

  “It’s a little big,” she admitted, flapping her sleeves like wings, “but I couldn’t resist.”

  She pivoted to show me the back of the jacket, the hem of which hung down almost to the level of her knees. It featured a sewn-on decal of a sneering, eyepatch-wearing pirate, along with peeling felt letters spelling out the words, “St. Mary’s Buccaneers.”

  “Isn’t that great?” she said, turning back around. “St. Mary’s Buccaneers? I mean, who do they play? The Mother Seton Maulers?”

  “The St. Francis Sharks?” Matt suggested.

  “The Holy Cross Gamecocks?” I laughed, happy to play along. My outlook had brightened considerably now that I knew I was in striking distance of the party.

  “The Holy Cross Gamecocks?” Matt repeated scornfully. “Why is that funny?”

  “Sleep on it,” I told him. “It’ll all make sense in the morning.”

  Jess held up one foot so I could admire her new shoes. They were the kind of clownish bowling shoes you could only rent at the alley, red and green with the size scrawled over the toe in Magic Marker. Matt did a little soft shoe so I could see that he had acquired a pair as well.

  “Matching rentals,” I said. “How romantic.”

  “Aren’t they cool?” Jess asked proudly. She had Cleopatra hair, flawless features, and skin that was luminous even at night. Although Matt had frequently boasted of her beauty, I hadn’t really expected her to live up to—let alone exceed—his extravagant description. That was one of the confusing things about being friends with him. Just when you got used to factoring a certain amount of exaggeration and wishful thinking into whatever he said, it turned out he was telling nothing but the truth.

  Architecturally speaking, Manuscript was an anomaly at Yale. It had no pretensions to medieval grandeur or even garden-variety academic charm—no ivy climbing, weathered stone walls, no moat, turret, or slate roof. It was a low-slung, unapologetically suburban structure—just a ranch house, really—with a restaurant-quality kitchen, off-white wall-to-wall carpeting, and sliding glass doors that communicated onto a small patio. My first thought upon entering was that I’d returned to high school, to one of those blowout keg parties kids used to throw when their parents were away on vacation.

  Matt and Jess plunged into the mob swarming around the beverage table in the main dining room, but I hung back, setting off on a solo search mission for Polly. Nodding and weaving my way down a cramped corridor, I poked my head into a small, atrium-style room where a stereo was blasting “Roxanne.” The flagstone dance floor was empty except for two girls I didn’t know and a guy I recognized from my Japanese Society class. They were getting down with the grim determination of pioneers, trying to get the ball rolling for the rest of us. I waved politely and ducked out of the room when they beckoned me to join them.

  My original sense of high school déjà vu began to dissipate as I explored the remote corners of the building. No one I’d grown up with had lived in a house like this, a rambling, sparsely furnished pleasure palace made up almost entirely of denlike communal spaces. Down in the cozy finished basement, four bisexual painters—three tall slender guys and a striking but extremely short Eurasian girl—had installed themselves in front of the humongous TV, which was tuned to an episode of The Incredible Hulk. Their faces were somber and transfixed, as if Bill Bixby’s imminent transformation into Lou Ferrigno was a spectacle worthy of the gravest consideration.

  At the top of the stairs I was accosted by a stocky guy in a black velvet cape whom I didn’t immediately recognize as Eric Storm. If I had, I might have taken more strenuous evasive action when he planted himself directly in my path, thrusting out his chest like some kind of pasty collegiate superhero.

  “What’s wrong with Socialist Realism?” he inquired in a loud voice, as if issuing a challenge. He didn’t seem angry, exactly, just a bit agitated. Besides the cape, he wore a tight black turtleneck, heavy woolen pinstripe trousers, and those rubber boots from L.L. Bean. The last time I saw him he’d been deep in some kind of mountainman phase, complete with bushy beard and loud poncho.

  “Excuse me,” I said, throwing a head fake to the right as a precursor to my unsuccessful attempt to squeeze past him on the left. “I’m looking for Polly.”

  “What’s wrong with Socialist Realism?” he asked again, this time more plaintively.

  “Is this a riddle? Do I have to answer correctly to pass?”

  “I’m just curious,” he said, calming a little now that he knew he had me cornered. “Everyone acts like it was such a horrible thing.”

  I knew better than to get sucked into this sort of discussion with him. The one and only time Eric and I had had lunch together—it was back in December, shortly after Reality had published his story, “A Match Made in Heaven”—we got into an unrewarding two-hour argument about whether Less really was More. He kept calling me for days afterward, trying to start it up again.

  “You look different without your beard,” I told him.

  He rubbed both hands over his baby-smooth face, compressing his cheeks with a tenderness I found vaguely unsettling.

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah. It’s a younger look. More approachable.”

&nb
sp; He seemed pleased.

  “That’s what I was hoping for. The beard was kind of imposing. No one would talk to me.”

  “The cape’s a nice touch too,” I added, peering around him to see if I could spot Polly in the hallway. Completely by accident, I made eve contact with Jodie Foster instead. She was standing outside the bathroom, dressed in a pair of baggy overalls and a gray T-shirt, nodding emphatically at something someone was telling her. She looked in my direction the same moment I looked in hers; our eyes met for a split second before she turned back to her conversation.

  To my knowledge, it was the first time Jodie and I had ever been present at the same social occasion. The thrill I felt simply upon seeing her doubled when I realized that she was talking to Liz Marin. I could just walk right over and join them! Liz was a friend of mine; I wouldn’t have seemed like just another creep hounding Jodie because she was famous. I imagined breaking the ice with a suave comment about Bill Bixby, an actor she’d worked with on The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. Not everyone remembered that about her. But instead I was trapped here at the top of the stairs, watching Eric pet his cape as though it were a living thing.

  “It was a Christmas present,” he explained. “This is the first opportunity I’ve had to wear it in public.”

  “A Christmas present?” I couldn’t help laughing. “Who from?”

  “My mom.”

  I peered around him again to see if I could renew eye contact with Jodie, but she’d disappeared. I relaxed a little, forcing myself, to pay closer attention to Eric. He wasn’t such a terrible guy, if you could get past the bluster and the affectations.

  “Your mom got you a cape?”

  “I mean, I asked for it,” he said, a bit sheepishly.

  “Wow.” I shook my head. “I don’t think my mom would even know where to look.”

  Distracted as I was by an image of my mother wandering around Bamberger’s Basement, trying to locate the velvet-cape section, I didn’t see it coming when Eric jammed his index finger into my sternum. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” he said.

  “You had a question?”

  “Yes. Wouldn’t you say that all literature is ultimately in the service of some social or political system? What’s wrong with making that explicit?”

  “Nothing, I guess.” I felt the quicksand sucking at my ankles. There was nothing to do but sink. “The problem comes when you use that as an excuse to lock people up or kill them.”

  “Stop right there,” he said, thrusting out one hand like a traffic cop. “I’m just talking theory here. I’m not trying to defend the practice.”

  I remembered this tactic from our previous argument. Eric was like a kid at the playground, making up the rules as he went along, always after the fact and to his own advantage.

  “All right,” I said. “Have it your way. The problem with Socialist Realism as a concept is that it erases the distinction between literature and propaganda.”

  “Aha.” He smiled like I’d played right into his hands. “But literature is propaganda. Any fool can see that.”

  “Not this fool.”

  “No?” He drew back a little, as though he feared my ignorance might be contagious. “You like Tolstoy, as I recall. So let’s just take Anna Karenina, for example. Isn’t that propaganda in favor of adultery and divorce?”

  “Maybe. But adultery and divorce were frowned upon when Tolstoy wrote the book. He was working against the grain of his own society. That’s exactly what you’re not allowed to do under Socialist Realism.”

  Eric frowned. His way of responding to countervailing arguments was simply to repeat his original point in different language.

  “I’d say governments have the right to determine what sort of propaganda gets disseminated in their countries, don’t you?”

  Somebody turned up the music. I had to raise my voice so he could hear me over “Rock Lobster.”

  “Eric,” I said. “You wrote a story about a priest who burns down an altar boy’s house on Christmas Eve. What government would be in favor of that?”

  “Are you kidding?” He reached behind him and flipped back his cape. It was a reflexive gesture, like a girl pushing hair out of her face. “Priests are class enemies. Stalin would have loved my story.”

  I took a deep breath and glanced down the hallway, trying to fend off a sudden wave of anxiety. If Polly were here, surely she would have found me by now.

  “Listen, Eric. It’s not the writer’s job to kiss the asses of the people in power. It’s the writer’s job to go against the grain.”

  “Like who, for instance?”

  “What do you mean, like who?”

  “Name me a writer who went against the grain. Besides Tolstoy. Not Shakespeare. Certainly not your precious Hemingway.”

  There were lots of writers I might have named, writers who’d been murderer, jailed, exiled, or censored—Babel, Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, Joyce, Nabokov, Allen Ginsberg, But for some reason, my mind at that moment was a vast empty space with only a single name rattling around in it.

  “George Eliot,” I said.

  “George Eliot?” He laughed. “Is that the best you can do? Chickenshit George Eliot?”

  “Chickenshit?” I said in disbelief. “George Eliot?”

  “If I’m not mistaken,” he observed, “Mr. Eliot’s real name was Maryann Evans.”

  “So? She had to change her name to publish her books. Women weren’t allowed to be serious writers back then.”

  “Changing your name isn’t bucking the system. It’s going along to get along. She should have stood up for her rights instead of hiding behind a pseudonym.”

  “Hiding? George Eliot wasn’t hiding from anyone. It’s not fair of you to impose twentieth-century values on a nineteenth-century writer”

  He waved me away as though I were some kind of intellectual mosquito.

  “George Eliot doesn’t cut it, Danny. Give me a better example.”

  I wanted to walk away, but I was already in too deep, just like last time. The guy was a black hole. I felt him absorbing me molecule by molecule. If Polly hadn’t grabbed my arm just then I might have vanished from the face of the earth.

  “There you are,” she said. There was the slightest hint of accusation in her voice. “I’ve been looking all over.”

  Not hard enough, I wanted to tell her, but I held my tongue at the last second. She looked rattled, not quite herself. Even Eric noticed. He took one look at her tense, unhappy expression and realized his time was up.

  “We’ll finish this later,” he muttered darkly, pushing me aside and making his way downstairs to inflict himself on the painters.

  Polly squinted after him. Her hair was wild and she was wearing a coat I’d never seen before, an ugly orange ski parka zipped, Sang-style, all the way up to her chin. A wrinkled lift ticket dangled from the zipper pull.

  “Who was that caped crusader?” she asked.

  “Argument Man,” I told her. “He had me cornered. I thought you’d never show up.”

  Instead of smiling, she considered me for a long time.

  “Listen,” she said, “you’re lucky I’m here at all.”

  Polly maneuvered me away from the stairs to a less-congested sector of the hallway. Maybe because we didn’t know each other very well and had such an ill-defined relationship, she had this quality of moving in and out of focus for me. There were times when I was sure I was in love with her and found her beauty obvious and riveting. And then there were times like this—usually when days or weeks had gone by since I’d last seen her—when I was obscurely disappointed by her and couldn’t quite remember what all the fuss was about.

  “Peter called,” she informed me in an unconvincingly matter-of-fact voice. “We had a big argument.”

  Maybe it’s the coat, I thought. She was wearing gray tights and sexy ankle-high lace-up shoes; her skinny legs protruded like sticks from the bulky parka. The contrast gave her a jar
ring, almost composite appearance, as if the upper and lower portions of her belonged to different people. Normally she wore a secondhand suede coat with frayed cuffs, a missing button, and a prominent coffee stain on one lapel. Its absence disturbed me enough that I couldn’t help wondering for a moment if it was Polly I had the crush on or that funky coat of hers.

  “I thought you two were taking a break from each other.”

  “I thought so too. But he kind of lost it when I told him I was seeing you tonight.”

  “Jesus.” It was disturbing enough to imagine Professor Preston “losing it” under any circumstances, let alone circumstances that involved me personally. It seemed somehow beneath his dignity. “Did you have to tell him?”

  “Why should I lie? He didn’t lie to me about his colleague from Vassar.” She pronounced the word “colleague” as if it had a different definition from the one that appeared in the dictionary. “If he’s not really my boyfriend, then I guess I can do what I want.”

  She took hold of the lift ticket and unzipped her parka in distracted slow motion. It parted to reveal an apple green cotton dress, the fabric of which was printed with a design that alternated pink clocks and gray lollipops. She laughed as if surprised at herself.

  “He’s probably standing by the Silliman gate right now, wondering where I am.”

  “I thought you told him you were going out with me.”

  Her cheeks ballooned, then collapsed.

  “He sort of talked me out of it.”

  “Sort of?”

  “He kept me on the phone for like two hours,” she explained, her voice vehement and pleading at the same time. “Peter’s a really hard person to argue with. He just wears you down until you can’t even think straight.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “It’s not fair,” she continued, addressing a spot on the wall somewhere above my head. “He thinks he can just bend me to his will. I hung up the phone and thought, No way, tonight I’m doing what I want. I didn’t even call him back. I just borrowed this coat from a guy across the hall and headed over here.”