Joe College

by Tom Perrotta

  I should have seen that coming. It wasn’t possible for us to have a conversation without Peter Preston popping up at the most inopportune moment. Well, excuse me, I wanted to say. Excuse me for not being a Yale professor with a Ph.D. from Berkeley. Excuse me for not being able to identify the emperor of ice cream.

  “Why don’t you do a Frost poem instead?” I suggested. “I bet ‘The Road Not Taken’ is full of hidden sexual imagery too.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. If she detected the sarcasm in my voice, she kept it to herself. “I’m determined to nail this down. How will I survive in grad school if I can’t even do a five-page explication?”

  “You’ll figure it out. Sometimes you just have to keep banging your head against the wall until something comes loose.”

  “Or you suffer irreversible brain damage.” She laughed in spite of herself. “I may have already reached that point.”

  “So anyway, I was just calling to apologize. For the way things turned out the other night.”

  A moment of uncertainty followed, as if my reference to “the way things turned out” were as inscrutable to her as a line from a Stevens poem. But then it fell into place.

  “So what happened?” she asked. “Is she getting an abortion?”

  “I wish.”

  “She wants to keep it?”

  “I haven’t talked to her about it. But she doesn’t really believe in abortion.”

  “Wow.”

  I didn’t know what to say after that, and a deep silence opened up between us, almost like the line had gone dead.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish this wasn’t all so messed up.”

  “You don’t need to apologize,” she assured me. “The whole thing was hopeless from the start.”

  “Hopeless? What do you mean?”

  “It should have been obvious, Danny. Peter wasn’t going to let it happen.”

  “Peter? What’s Peter got to do with it?”

  “He always gets what he wants. I don’t know why I even bother to fight it.”

  “Peter had nothing to do with the mess between me and Cindy,” I reminded her.

  “I know,” she said, but there was something grudging in her concession, as if she didn’t really believe that on some level Professor Preston hadn’t orchestrated the entire fiasco.

  “Jesus, Polly. He’s not God.”

  “You don’t know him,” she insisted.

  “He’s not even the emperor of ice cream.”

  She waited a couple of seconds before responding. The pause lasted just long enough for me to realize my error.

  “Speaking of which,” she said, “I really need to get back to this paper.”

  “I really miss you,” I blurted out. “I’m going crazy down here.”

  “I know.” There was a kindness in her voice that hadn’t been there before and made me wonder if things weren’t quite as hopeless as she claimed. “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.”

  “Maybe we can go dancing or something,” I suggested. “I really enjoyed that.”

  Polly laughed out loud, as if I’d made some sort of joke.

  “You were a wild man,” she told me. “Where’d you learn to move like that?”

  It poured on Tuesday and Wednesday, and I spent a lot of time thinking about how much it sucked to be driving a lunch truck in the rain. Traffic was heavier than usual, but business was light. No matter how careful I was, I somehow managed to get a load of cold water dumped on my head and down my neck every time I raised or lowered the doors. My clothes were soaked, my fingers achy, my customers grumpy. An average of three people per stop felt compelled to ask if it was wet enough for me, and at least one appeared genuinely interested in receiving an answer.

  I knew it was useless to curse the weather, but I couldn’t help myself. The rain affected me less as a natural phenomenon than as a personal insult, a taunting reminder that I was cut out for finer things than selling soggy sandwiches to grumbling factory workers in a relentless March downpour. When the Lunch Monsters failed to show at the construction site, I saw it more as a sign of good sense than as evidence of a possible surrender.

  Sang called on Wednesday evening to get an update on my negotiations with Cindy. He was usually a mellow guy, an unflappable adherent of the live-and-let-live credo that was California’s contribution to the world, but that night he lost his temper.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said. “I can’t believe you’re being such an asshole.”

  “Give me a break,” I said, realizing even as I uttered it that I’d made the same plea to Max on Friday afternoon.

  “You of all people,” he continued, in a thoroughly disgusted voice. “The Working-Class Hero. Mister Man-of-the-People. You’re as big a snob as Dobb Stoddard.”

  “Dobb Stoddard?” I said, wounded by the comparison. Dobb was a columnist for the Yale Daily News, a tweedy arch-conservative who made William F. Buckley seem like a beer-swilling regular Joe in comparison. In his columns, he expressed frequent and heartfelt nostalgia for the days when Yale was all-male, predominantly WASP, and everyone wore ties to dinner. “That’s a low blow.”

  “Well, you deserve it. You can’t just get a girl pregnant and then pretend she doesn’t exist.”

  “It’s weird,” I explained. “I really do want to call her. But there’s this—this mental block or something that keeps holding me back.”

  “That’s not a mental block. You’re just a wuss.”

  I opened my mouth to protest but no words came out. A hard ball of something was rising in my throat, and it took everything I had to force it back down.

  “I’m scared,” I whispered.

  “Of what?”

  I squeezed my eyelids shut to trap the welling tears, but they oozed out anyway.

  “Of ending up like Seth.” I was mortified by the weepy tremor in my voice. “It was like he dropped off the face of the earth. He was one of us, and then he just … disappeared. It was like he died or something.”

  “Seth was depressed. You’re just being a selfish jerk.”

  By that point it was too late to defend myself; all I could do was sob into the phone. It took a minute or two for me to pull myself together.

  “Sorry,” I sniffled.

  “I’m not the person you need to apologize to.”

  “I’m going to call her,” I promised. “I’m going to hang up right now and call her.”

  “It’s your life, dude. Don’t call her on my account.”

  That night, at least, I was as good as my word. I hung up the phone, wiped my sleeve across my eyes, and dialed Cindy’s number. The line was busy. It was busy when I tried again five minutes later, and still busy a couple of minutes after that. I would have kept trying, but my father knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to play Monopoly. He’d been cooped up in the house all day and was desperate for some diversion besides the TV. I didn’t have the heart to tell him no.

  Thursday was a bitch too, a damp miserable slog beneath a seemingly permanent canopy of gloom and drizzle, and a depressing number of my customers had run out of money in advance of payday. When I wasn’t entering their debts on the water-swollen legal pad I’d discovered in the storage compartment of the Roach Coach, I tormented myself by drawing up a list of all the great places in the world I’d probably never get to visit—New Orleans, San Francisco, the Mekong delta, the Amazon Basin, Reykjavik, Ketchikan, Baja California—because in all likelihood I’d still be right here five, ten, maybe even fifteen years down the road, a Yale dropout slouching in the misty rain of West Buttfuck, New Jersey, keeping detailed accounts of the purchases of men who worked their asses off every day and still couldn’t afford to pay cash for a liverwurst sandwich and a package of Funny Bones.

  In the send. for all my promises to Sang and myself, Cindy was the one who called first. I’d been home for about two hours on Thursday afternoon when my father looked up in the middle of our third game of checkers and broke the news.

&
nbsp; “Oh yeah,” he said, wiggling a little to position himself more comfortably on the donut. “I almost forgot. Cindy called this morning.”

  “Who?” I stared at the board with more concentration than the game demanded.

  “Cindy from Re-Flex. The one you dated last summer.”

  “Oh yeah? How’d she sound?” I asked, trying to approximate the tone of someone just making conversation.

  He didn’t answer right away, and when I looked up he was making a face like I’d just asked him to explain Max Weber’s theory of capitalism.

  “Whaddaya mean, how’d she sound?”

  “I mean, what did she say?”

  “She said she wants to cook you dinner.”

  “Tonight?”

  “What am I, your secretary?”

  No, I thought. That would be someone else.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Your move.”

  I picked up the phone after supper with a sense of grim obligation and impending doom, beneath which ran a barely perceptible current of relief. I was finally doing the thing I dreaded, stepping up to learn my fate and take my medicine. At the very least, I’d be spared the agony of further suspense.

  “Oh, hi,” she said, sounding relaxed and chatty. “You didn’t tell me you were driving the truck.”

  “I didn’t?”

  “No-o-o. It really threw me for a loop when your dad answered the phone.”

  “Yeah, well, he had a kind of a … minor surgical procedure.”

  “I heard.” Her voice was full of amused sympathy. “I never knew hemorrhoids could get so bad you’d need surgery.”

  Listening to her, you would have thought everything was fine between us, that we had nothing more to decide than whether to go car shopping or catch a movie. Her tone had me so off-balance I didn’t even stop to wonder at the fact that my father had confided the intimate details of his affliction to her. For months he had gone to great lengths to avoid using the word “hemorrhoid” in my presence, instead referring vaguely to “a problem” with his “you know.”

  “He was in a bad way.”

  “Poor man. Maybe I should send him flowers or something.”

  “No need. He’s on the road to recovery.”

  Cindy didn’t even pause to signal a change of topic.

  “Are you busy Sunday night?”

  “Me?”

  “Is there anyone else there?”

  She was playing with me. I deserved it, but it was the last thing I expected under the circumstances.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think there’s anyone in the room, or you don’t think you’re busy?”

  “Both, actually.”

  “Good. Then come over to my house for dinner. Six thirty okay?”

  “You don’t have to cook for me, Cindy.”

  “I’m not cooking for you. I’m just inviting you to dinner. I think it’s time we had a talk.”

  “All right,” I said, surrendering to the inevitable. “See you at six thirty.”

  Even after a morning of uninterrupted sunshine, the supermarket construction site was a swamp of mud when I pulled in at Friday lunchtime. I tapped the horn three times to announce my arrival, and set up shop as close as I could to my usual spot near the storage area for welding generators and bottled gas. A spot check for Lunch Monsters turned up no signs of danger, and in a matter of seconds the Roach Coach was besieged by a horde of smiling, muddy-faced men in hard hats, calling out to one another and jockeying for position on line.

  Fridays were different from other days, busier and easier all at once. Lots of guys who’d brown-bagged it all week gave their wives a break and bought lunch off the truck. Sullen, preoccupied men who hadn’t looked at me twice in the previous four days suddenly knew my name, wanted to know how I was doing. Half the customers who reached into the ice bed asked if I had any beer in there, and chuckled appreciatively when I informed them that I’d just chugged the last one on my way over. A sweaty kid in a tipped-up welding mask told me he was going camping in Pennsylvania with his girlfriend over the weekend and couldn’t wait to get away to the woods, away from all the cars, people, and pollution.

  “Away from this fucking thing,” he said, jerking his thumb at the skeletal supermarket, the tarp-covered girders rising from the enormous pit, the green-and-white cement mixer hypnotically spinning. “Out of fucking Jersey.”

  The line had shrunk down to about half its original size when the bronze Continental turned into the site. I spotted it out of the corner of my eye and tracked its progress through the graded but as yet unpaved parking lot without thinking much about it one way or the other. All sorts of people visited a site like this in the course of a day—architects, developers, inspectors, suppliers, salesmen—and some of them drove fancy cars. I didn’t really start to pay attention until it pulled to a stop about ten feet from the Roach Coach, and the white-haired guy stepped out.

  I was busy tallying orders and making change so I couldn’t study him that closely, but my first impression was that he didn’t look like an architect or developer or anyone else associated with the supermarket project. Dressed in high-waisted gray trousers and a pale blue windbreaker with epaulettes, he reminded me of someone’s prosperous Italian grandfather, a retired guy who spent his winters in Florida and the rest of the year in the old neighborhood, a hunch I based as much on his no-longer-immaculate white shoes as I did on the tan that created an odd affinity between his face and the car. The second thing I realized, after he shut the door and took a few careful steps in my direction, was that he hadn’t come for lunch.

  One foot propped on the Continental’s bumper, he crossed his arms and watched me work. His scrutiny felt benign, but it was unsettling nonetheless. He watched me the way you watch an employee or your own child, someone you have a right to stare at as long and hard as you please, and made it hard for me to concentrate on my work. When I’d finally taken care of the last customer, I turned to face him straight on.

  “You want something?”

  Instead of answering, he took a few more steps in my direction, resorting to some surprisingly nimble footwork to avoid the puddles. Stopping just outside of handshake range, he rubbed a closed eye with two fingers and spoke without introducing himself.

  “You seem like a good kid,” he said. “Why you want to make trouble for yourself?”

  “I don’t want to make trouble.”

  “That’s not what I hear.”

  “I’m just minding my business,” I insisted.

  He nodded for a few seconds, as if to imply that my point was taken. Though there was nothing otherwise clownish about him, he had the kind of hairdo I associated with clowns—bald on top, bushy on the sides—and a vaguely melancholy face. There was something about his watery blue eyes that made me think he might listen to reason.

  “You really go to Yale?” he asked. I detected a note of skepticism in his tone.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I got a niece goes to Dartmouth.” He puckered his lips and made a sucking noise, like there was something caught in his teeth. “She’s got a lot on the ball. Pretty, too. Wants to be a doctor.” I wondered for a second if he was going to try and fix me up with her, but he tapped himself in the forehead with two fingers instead. “My son’s not like that. He doesn’t have a lot going for him upstairs, know what I mean? He’s not gonna have all the opportunities a kid like you has.” He shook his head, as if saddened by the thought of his son’s limited prospects. “Even now, all he wants to do is lift the weights with his buddies. I try to tell him that he’s a businessman, that it’s not all about muscles anymore, but I can’t seem to get through to him. If it was up to him, he’d live in that goddam gym.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’m having a little trouble figuring out what any of this has to do with me.”

  “My guys didn’t like the way you talked to them the other day. I think it would be a good idea if you apologized.”

  “Apolog
ize?” I said. “They started it.”

  He made the sucking noise again, then reached into his jacket pocket for a cellophane-covered toothpick. He stripped off the wrapper and went to work on one of his top molars, cupping his free hand over his mouth to spare me the gory details.

  “For a smart kid, you’re acting pretty stupid,” he told me when he was finished with the excavation.

  “They came after me,” I said indignantly. “I was just minding my own business.”

  He shook his head slowly and sadly, then flicked the toothpick past my ear, in the general direction of the Roach Coach. His voice was soft but firm.

  “You don’t get it, do ya? It’s not your business anymore.”

  won’t that be something

  I arrived at Cindy’s on Sunday evening with a bottle of rose and a heavy heart. My misgivings were hardly put to rest by the wonderful aroma of roast chicken that pervaded the house or the casual way she pressed a Molson into my hand before steering me in the direction of the living room, suggesting as she did so that I might keep her mother company while she mashed the potatoes and tossed the salad. This was an unwelcome twist—she hadn’t mentioned anything about her mother joining us for dinner—and Cindy noticed my dismay.

  “Don’t worry about her. If she says anything crazy, just ignore it.”

  “Does she know—?” Instead of finishing the question with words, I pointed in the general direction of her stomach, struck again by the fact that she looked about as pregnant as I did.

  She placed her hand beneath her rib cage and moved it downward, smoothing the fabric of her velour sweater.

  “Sort of,” she said.

  “Sort of?”

  She made a face that looked like it might be a prelude to an explanation, but the stove timer erupted before she had a chance to continue. The sound was harsh and mocking, like the buzz that follows a wrong answer on a game show.