Joe College

by Tom Perrotta

  “Right now? I’m kind of busy.”

  “I strongly suggest you get yourself over to my office as soon as possible.”

  I was more put off than alarmed by his brusque tone. He wasn’t my teacher anymore and had no right to order me around, especially now that he and Polly were a couple again. I’d passed them the day before on High Street, in the midst of a sudden downpour. They were sharing an umbrella, leaning into one another and laughing. They either didn’t recognize me or pretended not to as I rushed past them, soaked to the skin, vainly trying to shield my head with a waterlogged paperback of Daniel Deronda.

  “Is this about Polly?”

  It was an obvious question, but for some reason it threw him off-balance. He didn’t hesitate for long, but when he spoke again he sounded a lot more courteous.

  “Listen, Danny. You know I wouldn’t be bothering you if it wasn’t important.”

  I frowned at the jumble inside my cracked laundry basket. Some of my socks had two stripes, some had three, some had stripes of two different colors. Once you started a job like that, it was a drag to leave it unfinished.

  “Okay,” I said. “Give me fifteen minutes.”

  Preston’s office hadn’t changed much in the year since I’d taken his class. It still seemed more like the work space of an undergraduate than a member of the faculty, the desk strewn with papers and anchored at all four corners with slapdash towers of books and academic quarterlies, the walls plastered with unframed, crookedly hung posters of rock stars and movie idols, many of them curling at the edges.

  What had changed was Preston himself. He looked tired and beleaguered and his hair seemed thinner on top than it had the day before. You got the feeling that the clock had just run out a few seconds ago on the Boy Wonder phase of his life, an impression thrown into sharper relief by the presence of the fresh-faced graduate student in his office, a hipster TA with engineer boots and rockabilly sideburns.

  “Do you know Lyman Cooper?” Preston demanded, before I’d even had a chance to sit down.

  “Lyman? I don’t know anyone named Lyman.”

  “Matt,” the TA broke in. “He goes by Matt.”

  “Matt’s name is Lyman?”

  “Lyman Cooper III,” the TA explained with the slightest hint of a smirk. He was leaning back in his chair, his head resting just below the ecstatic poster of Hendrix at Woodstock. “I’d go by Matt too.”

  “So,” Preston inquired, “is Mr. Cooper a friend of yours?”

  “I guess you could say that. We work together in the dining hall. He stayed at my house a few days over break. Why?”

  Preston watched me carefully.

  “I figured you’d have to be pretty close friends,” he said.

  Despite the presence of the TA, I still couldn’t quite separate myself from the idea that this was all somehow connected to Polly. I tried to remember if I’d told Matt anything about Preston that I wouldn’t want repeated.

  “Did he say something?”

  Preston and the TA traded glances. Sheepishly, the TA let the front legs of his chair drop back to the floor.

  “You mean, did he implicate you?” Preston asked.

  “Implicate me? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You tell me,” Preston suggested, pulling open one of his desk drawers and peering inside.

  “I’m stumped. You’re going to have to help me out.”

  With a Perry Mason flourish, Preston removed a graded student essay from the drawer and waved it half-heartedly in the air.

  “How do you explain this?” he inquired, sliding the paper to me across the desktop.

  One look at the cover explained everything. “Legitimacy and Subterfuge. Bastard Authority in William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, by Lyman Cooper III.” Across the bottom, in red block letters, someone had scrawled, “MATT—WE NEED TO TALK—MARCO.” A hot blush spread across my face, as though I were a criminal instead of a victim. Just to be sure, I flipped the page and began reading:

  Shakespeare’s comedies frequently end with the celebration of one or more marriages, and Measure for Measure is no exception. So why, then, does the final scene of this so-called “problem play” ring so hollowly in comparison to a more “conventional” comedy, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Has the “Bard of Avon” simply failed to write a satisfying ending, or has he succeeded in doing something far more subversive and interesting—namely, calling into question the very genre of comedy itself?

  My first reaction to this familiar opening wasn’t anger, but embarrassment. It seemed so lumbering and obvious, not nearly as good as I remembered.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said, louder than I meant to.

  “It was an incredibly stupid move,” Preston informed me. “We used your paper as part of a grading exercise in one of our staff meetings. All the section leaders read it.”

  The TA laughed. “He barely bothered to change the title.”

  “Were you in on it?” Preston asked.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Did you give him your permission?”

  The question seemed so absurd I couldn’t help laughing.

  “How dumb do I look?”

  There was a knock on the door before anyone could answer. Matt poked his head into the room—he was smiling jauntily, wearing the yellow hard hat that had become his new trademark on campus—and took in the scene with a look of slowly dawning comprehension.

  “Oh shit,” he said.

  “Just give us a minute,” Preston instructed him. “We’re almost finished.”

  Matt nodded, looking shaken as he withdrew to the hallway. Preston turned to the TA.

  “Why don’t you keep him company, Marco. I’d like a word with Danny in private.”

  Marco left, but Preston gave no sign of actually wanting a word with me. He seemed much more interested in the paper clip he’d found on his desk and had begun twisting into some sort of abstract sculpture. I cleared my throat to make sure he hadn’t forgotten me.

  “I guess you need this back,” I said, tossing the essay onto the small clearing in the middle of his desk.

  He glanced down at it with an expression of distaste.

  “Some friend, huh?”

  He sounded sympathetic, so I figured I’d just get it over with.

  “Am I in trouble?”

  He looked at me in an almost pleading way, as if I’d hurt his feelings just by having to ask. Until that moment, I’d been operating under the assumption that he still thought of me mainly as a guy who’d tried to steal his girlfriend—someone he might enjoy having in his power—but now I saw that it wasn’t that way at all.

  “I hate this disciplinary crap.” He shook his head and let out an exasperated sigh. “This isn’t why I got into academia.”

  I sat silently while he fiddled with the clip, feeling oddly flattered by the lack of attention. In the past he’d been all business when I met him in his office. Now it was as if I’d stopped being his student and had become his peer, someone he could just hang out with while he wrapped a piece of wire around his index finger. I wondered if Polly had had a similar revelation, if one day she looked up and realized that he’d forgotten he was her teacher.

  “I’m sorry this is so awkward,” he told me.

  “That’s okay,” I said, not quite sure what he was apologizing for.

  Preston’s expression turned somber as he unwrapped the wire from his swollen-looking finger.

  “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I’m sorry you got caught up in it.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Things never would’ve worked out between Polly and me. We’re just really different people.”

  Preston’s face tightened with thought. He was listening carefully, chin cradled in his hand, as though I were telling him about a problem I was having with a paper.

  “These past few weeks haven’t been easy for her. She feels pretty bad about the way she treated you.”

  “Coulda fooled me.” />
  He nodded like a friend offering sympathy, like my bitterness was more than justified.

  “You have every right to hate me,” he said.

  “I don’t hate you.”

  “I’m serious,” he insisted. “You have every right.”

  I didn’t say anything, and he seemed to interpret my silence as assent. All I was thinking, though, was that it was no fun to hate people who invited you to hate them.

  “I was a late bloomer,” he explained, with an odd mixture of pride and embarrassment in his voice. “When I was in college, girls like Polly wouldn’t even look at me.”

  Preston was watching me closely, as if my reaction to this meant a great deal to him. We stared at each other until the silence grew uncomfortable.

  “Okay, then.” He smiled sadly, as if we’d reached some sort of understanding. “I guess it’s Mr. Cooper’s turn.”

  I could feel Matt trying to make eye contact with me in the hallway, but I brushed past him like a stranger, my eyes locked straight ahead. I ignored his numerous phone calls over the weekend and didn’t see him again until the dinner shift on Tuesday night. He was manning the dessert station, wearing his hard hat and whistling “Midnight at the Oasis” as he carved a tray of brownies into his signature amorphous chunks. My anger had cooled a little by that point and, aside from simple social discomfort, the main thing I felt upon seeing him was confusion, since he seemed so oddly cheerful for someone who should have been facing the academic equivalent of the death penalty. He stopped whistling when he saw me and tried to look serious.

  “I think something’s wrong with your phone,” he told me.

  “Yeah?”

  “I keep getting disconnected.”

  “That’s not the phone,” I explained. “That’s me telling you to fuck off, Lyman.”

  “Ouch.” He nodded to acknowledge the blow. “I guess I deserve that.”

  “You deserve way more than that.”

  He tugged on his earlobe for an extended period, as though it were a secret signal.

  “Have you considered the possibility that you’re over-reacting?”

  “Over-reacting? You mean to the fact that a person I thought was my friend came to my house and took advantage of my family’s s hospitality to steal something I’d put my heart and soul into, and then tried to pass it off as his own? Over-reacting to the fact that you could have gotten me kicked out of school? Is that what I’m over-reacting to?”

  “Huh.” He looked troubled. “When you put it that way …”

  “Is there another way to put it?”

  “Preston said it was a cry for help.” Matt shrugged, apparently reluctant to endorse this view. “He thinks I need counseling. He made me call Psych Services right there in his office. My first appointment’s tomorrow.”

  “That’s it? That’s your whole punishment?”

  “He gave me an F for the paper. If I write a new one by the end of the week, he says he’ll average the two grades together. If I’m lucky I can still get out of the class with a C.”

  “He didn’t report you?”

  Matt lowered his voice. He seemed a little perplexed by what he was telling me.

  “He gave me this big lecture about Measure for Measure, how it was ultimately a play about mercy, and maybe we all need to show each other a little more mercy, to have a little more understanding of the fact that we’re all human, we all make mistakes, et cetera, et cetera. He was really very nice about it.”

  Just then Nick wandered into the serving area with a big grin on his face. He scooped some ice into his glass and filled it with a fizzy blast of Coke before turning in our direction. If I wasn’t mistaken, he seemed at least moderately pleased to see us.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t the Scrotum Twins.”

  Matt responded with an elaborately servile bow, the kind that Ed McMahon bestowed on Johnny Carson.

  “At your service, Herr Chef.”

  “Here’s one,” Nick told us, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “What does Joan Collins put behind her ears to attract men?”

  He barely managed to wait for the two of us to exchange blank looks.

  “Her ankles!” he cried, pressing both forearms against his head in a misguided attempt to illustrate his punch line. “Get it?”

  “I guess that’ll do it,” Matt agreed.

  Nick turned and headed back out to the worker’s table, still chuckling to himself.

  “Oh yeah,” Matt told me. “There’s one more thing. I’m supposed to write you a letter of apology.”

  “I haven’t received that yet.”

  “I’m working on it,” he assured me, reaching for his trowel.

  “Matt?” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Your father’s not really a car salesman, is he?”

  He hesitated for a second before answering. It was the first time I’d ever seen him blush.

  “Only in the broadest sense,” he conceded, addressing his answer to the wall behind my head. “He’s a big executive at GM. The number two or three guy, depending on how you look at it.”

  I’m not sure why this upset me so much. The plagiarism I’d written off as an act of desperation, but this seemed more personal somehow, more like an insult. I remembered all the stories he’d told me about his dad, a chubby guy in a plaid coat who’d tell any kind of lie imaginable to make a sale, and how we’d laughed at poor Mr. Cooper’s incompetence and sweaty desperation. Before I was even conscious of my intention, my hand had curled into a fist. I drew back my arm and smacked him in the jaw, a sucker punch of Barnhouse proportions.

  He was still flat on his back when Lorelei stepped into the serving area from the kitchen, her mouth opening for a question she couldn’t seem to ask. Her expression wavered between uncertainty and delight as she watched Matt struggle into sitting position, the hard hat still miraculously attached to his head.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” he explained, blinking his eyes and wiggling his chin around to make sure nothing was broken. “I just wanted you to like me.”

  something you said

  Matt had scheduled his end-of-the-year bash for the Friday before reading period, the busiest party night of the semester, and all my suitemates had other plans. Ted and Nancy were going to the Pierson formal, the social highlight of their year. They buzzed around the common room like high school kids on prom night, practicing their dance steps, pinning flowers on one another, posing for pictures in front of the fireplace. Sang was looking sharp as well. Katie Kim was coming down from Middletown for the first time, and he’d made reservations at the only decent Korean restaurant in town, to be followed by dancing at the New Wave Study Break/Sock Hop at the Asian-American Students’ Association. Even Max seemed to be preparing for a special occasion of some sort, though, as usual, he wasn’t too forthcoming about the nature of the occasion.

  Ted and Nancy left around eight, and Katie Kim showed up a few minutes later, looking sweetly self-conscious in her black cocktail dress and high heels. Sang had said she was beautiful, but I didn’t agree with this assessment, at least not at first. She was more accurately described as cute, I thought, or even sisterly. Still, their faces lit up the moment they saw each other, and you had no choice but to envy them. They were in love; Max and I were just bystanders.

  Katie was easily amused. She had a pretty smile and an explosive, slightly horsey laugh that she tried to apologize for by placing her hand over her mouth and looking mortified. It was a charming gesture—for some reason it came off as ironic rather than self-effacing—and it wasn’t her only one. She just had that thing that some people have, that mysterious quality that makes you not want them to leave the room or turn their attention to someone else. Sang had tried several times to explain the giddy sensation that had come over him about an hour after meeting her, and after only ten minutes in her company I understood the feeling all too well, though in my case it was more dispiriting than giddy, because she was already heading
out the door, leaving me alone with Max in the suddenly desolate common room.

  “Damn,” I said, nodding sadly at the empty space she’d left in the air.

  Max was lounging in the legless armchair, looking suspiciously presentable in one of Ted’s oxford shirts and Hank Yamashita’s skinny leather tie, which by now had attained the status of community property. An hour or so earlier, I’d stepped out of the shower and found him standing shirtless in front of the mirror, shaking a dangerous quantity of Old Spice into his palm and massaging it into his chest and stomach as though it were suntan lotion, and now I was catching powerful whiffs of manly fragrance whenever he shifted position.

  “You think?” He gave an I-could-take-her-or-leave-her shrug. “Not my type, I guess.”

  I wanted to ask him to define his type for me—I was curious to know more about the intended beneficiary of the aftershave and thought this might be a good way to broach the subject—but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Max and I had had a bitter argument about Cindy a few days after I got back from vacation, and our friendship still hadn’t fully recovered. He’d kept in close touch with her over the break and knew all about her “engagement” with Kevin, which he considered a disaster and blamed on me. He’d launched into a complicated indictment of my behavior, claiming it was tantamount to a violation of Cindy’s human rights, as if she were Steven Biko and I were the apartheid government of South Africa. Things had improved a little in the weeks since then, but there was still a palpable tension in the air whenever we were alone together.

  He grew more visibly agitated as it approached nine o’clock, glancing at his watch every few seconds and working through the whole repertoire of body language meant to convey impatience, but I still couldn’t bring myself to get off the couch. My party spirit, never too strong to begin with, was fading by the minute.

  “Shouldn’t you be going?” he asked.