Knife Music

by David Carnoy

  “I don’t know. Maybe five minutes. And then I started to get concerned.”

  “And you knocked on the door?”

  “Yeah, I knocked a few times. And like I said, I called to her.”

  “Pretty loud, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Loud enough so that anybody would hear you?”

  “Yeah, I mean, I wasn’t shouting. But it was loud.”

  “So, why didn’t you just go in? It isn’t a hard door to open. It swings out. I tried it. Why didn’t you just go in?”

  Jim shrugs, glances at the microcassette recorder sitting on the table between them, and says, “I don’t know. Like I told the detective, it just didn’t seem right, going into the occupied bathroom. And then this girl I knew—Gwen Dayton—was coming up the stairs and I just asked her whether she could check.”

  The woman doesn’t respond. Instead, with her perfectly manicured fingers, she tears off a small piece of bread from her half-eaten sandwich and tosses the crumbs to a blackbird that’s looking up at her beseechingly from the ground, his head cocked to one side. For an older woman, she’s definitely hot, he thinks. When he first saw her, thin with dark hair and olive skin, a well put-together woman who was wearing a navy blue pantsuit, he thought she could be a TV lawyer. Usually, he’s nervous around good-looking women, but the idea of her being an actress puts him at ease, for it makes the interview seem less real. That, plus the four bong hits he’d done with his friend Dan Fleischman before he headed over to the meeting.

  A brilliant, sunny day, they’re sitting in the plaza at the back of Tressider Student Union, which serves, among other functions, as the home for a cafeteria, café, convenience store, arcade, barber shop, and a row of Wells Fargo ATM machines. Just past two-thirty, many of the black, wire-mesh weather-resistant tables and chairs, once filled with students during the lunch hours, now sit empty. But that hasn’t deterred the scavengers—a couple dozen blackbirds and a handful of pigeons, which seem out of place among their suburban cousins—from making the rounds.

  “At one point I left to find Carrie,” he volunteers. “She was dancing with some guy. And I pulled her off the dance floor and told her that Kristen had passed out in the bathroom upstairs and that we had to get her out of there.”

  When they got up to the bathroom, he says, Kristen had been revived. Well, revived might be too strong a word. But she wasn’t totally passed out. Her eyes would flutter open for a moment and she would mumble something.

  “Did you hear what she said?” the lawyer asks.

  “I know she said ‘Leave me alone’ a couple of times. And I think she said, ‘I’ll be all right in a minute.’”

  “That’s it?”

  “It was hard to understand her. I mean, she was slurring her words and then she would nod off and Gwen was slapping her in the face. Not hard or anything. But, you know, just trying to keep her awake.”

  The woman breaks off another piece of bread and tosses it to the ground.

  “Did you like Kristen, Jim?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Did you like her?”

  Another shrug. How come they always ask the same questions?

  “Like like her?” His tone isn’t defensive; he’s not affronted. Rather, it sounds as if he’s questioning himself and is genuinely curious to know the answer. “I mean she was nice,” he continues, his voice steady. “I enjoyed talking to her. But she was my sister’s friend. I’d known her for a long time. Since she was, like, ten. I felt responsible for her.”

  Looking down at the table, he shakes his head solemnly. “I mean, sometimes I think I’m to blame for everything that happened. If I’d just watched what she was drinking or made sure she ate more. I don’t know.”

  “And you never thought of her in a sexual manner? You never looked over and said to yourself, ‘Gee, she’s kind of cute, I wouldn’t mind fooling around with her’?”

  “She may have been attractive, but I didn’t think of her in a sexual way,” he explains, shifting his by-now-familiar introspective gear up a notch. “You just get to thinking about someone in a certain way. I mean, to me she was little Kristen, my sister’s friend.”

  The lawyer looks away, silent a moment. Then, leaning forward, staring him down, she speaks in a low voice, as if letting him in on a secret. “A couple of witnesses have said they didn’t see you for half an hour, Jim. How do you account for that?”

  His jaw tightens. He hears C. J. Watkins’s voice. Vigorous defensive, Mr. P. When they come at you, you come right back. Firm, but not angry. Got it?

  “What are you implying?”

  “You’re walking upstairs with a drunk girl. She’s hammered. And you’re pretty sloshed yourself—”

  “It was a party,” he says. “There are lots of people at parties. If someone didn’t see me for thirty minutes, it doesn’t mean I wasn’t at the party. I could have been standing fifteen feet away from them and they might not know. Or I could have been outside with another girl.”

  “Jim, my client has spent nearly his entire adult life either studying to be a doctor or practicing as one.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “So if you’re not telling me about something that happened, or something you may have heard happened, that would be very unfair to Dr. Cogan, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, it would.”

  In a gesture that’s as deliberate as her bread tossing, he props his elbows up on the table and folds his hands in front of his mouth. He doesn’t know whom he hates more, C. J. Watkins or the doctor.

  “But what if nothing happened?” he says. “What if your client was drunk himself—hammered—and took advantage of a young girl’s condition to have his way with her?”

  She smiles and, without missing a beat, says, “What if you tell me about Kathy Jorgenson.”

  “What about her?”

  “You said you were out back with her.”

  “I didn’t say her specifically. I said ‘another’ girl—in the generic sense.”

  “But you were out back with her.”

  “Why, what’d she tell you?”

  “That she went out back with you.”

  “OK, I was out back with Kathy Jorgenson. Yes, I admit it. And I regret it at the same time.”

  “Why don’t you tell me how you ended up out back with Kathy Jorgenson.”

  “Well, it’s kind of a long story.”

  “I’ve got time.”

  “I kind of figured you did.”

  25/ SLOPPY KISSES

  May 1, 2007

  IT GOES LIKE THIS, HE SAYS. A FEW WEEKS BEFORE THE PARTY AT the frat, he’d hooked up with a girl at a small birthday party in his dorm. She’d wanted to get stoned so he dug up a bong and some herb from a guy who lived down the hall, and took her back to his room.

  Her name was Becky Goffman, and she wasn’t bad, a little heavy but cute. Not that he thought that he was so hot, but normally he wouldn’t have gone for her except for the fact that, with all the decent frosh girls being snapped up by upperclassmen, the first semester had been nearly a total bust on the female front—and this one wasn’t shaping up any better.

  In high school, he’d been a respectable athlete, he explains. Not one of the school’s best, but he’d played on the varsity baseball team for two years, starting his senior year at second base. During his senior year, he’d grown almost two inches. But much to his consternation, the trend hadn’t continued, and the only thing that had grown this year—and ironically, the exact inch he longed for—was his waist, he says, patting his stomach. All the drinking during the pledge period, which had seemed to last forever, had crept up on him. He’d seen it in the mirror that afternoon. His face was rounder than he had remembered it. Not bloated, but his jawline had lost some of its cut.

  So he decided to get stoned and see what would happen with Becky Goffman. Soon, they were making out. Their kisses were sloppy at first, but gradually they became tighter and more refined. Then a stra
nge thing happened when he got her pants off. Her body went rigid—a tension enveloped it—and she stopped responding to his kisses.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Are you a virgin or something?”

  He said it half-jokingly, but when he got no answer, an alarm went off in his head.

  “Are you?”

  Again, silence. When she finally spoke, her voice was quiet, practically a whisper. “Would it be bad if I was?”

  My God, he thought. “No, it’s not bad. It’s just something to take into consideration.”

  They lay next to each other, cramped in his single bed, staring up at the ceiling. Then Becky said, “We can do it if you want.”

  “I didn’t do it,” he tells the lawyer. “I didn’t think it was fair because I knew I didn’t want to date her. But here’s the fucked-up thing.”

  About two weeks later he found out Becky Goffman had slept with another guy, an upperclassman, the weekend after he’d fooled around with her. He doesn’t tell the lawyer that guy was none other than C. J. Watkins, but he does say that his friend Stan Chen told him this upperclassman “fucked her and then supposedly called her a fat pig.”

  He was angry with Becky Goffman. If she’d given him the choice that night, he’d have slept with her. If she’d just said, “If you don’t fuck me, I’m going to go out and fuck fill-in-the-blank dude.” He might have blown her off afterward, but at least he would have been nice about it.

  The lawyer flashes an impatient look.

  “I’m sorry, am I making you uncomfortable?” he asks. “Am I being too personal?”

  “Not at all,” she says. “I’d just like to know what this has to do with you and Kathy Jorgenson?”

  “I’m getting there. I just need you to know where I was at—what my mind-set was, Ms. Dupuy. That’s how you say your name, right? Doo-pwee?”

  The real party was a few days later, on Saturday, February 17. Like he said, Carrie and Kristen came around 4:30, just as the North Carolina game was about to tip off. At one point during the game, Kristen asked to use the bathroom, and he showed her where it was. And it was there, in a little alcove on the second floor, after she came out of the bathroom (not the bathroom she ended up passing out in, he stops to point out), that they had their one serious conversation of the night. He remembered them looking at some old photos of fraternity brothers that were framed on the wall. There were pictures all around the house. There, in the alcove, they were from the mid-1970s.

  She looked at the set from 1976 and said, “Someday you’ll be on one of these walls, Jim. And in the middle of a party in like 2030 a couple of girls will walk up to your picture and say, ‘Gee, that guy was pretty cute, I wonder what he’s doing now. I wonder if he’s bald and fat.’ Do you ever think about that?”

  He laughed. “Not really.”

  “I think about that stuff all the time. I’m always trying to guess what people will look like in twenty or thirty years. It’d be cool if you could just press a button and see for just a second what people looked like when they were a lot older. You know, your whole perspective of that person might change.”

  He wanted to ask her what she thought he might look like in twenty years, but then he thought of his father and got worried he wouldn’t like her answer. His father wasn’t fat, but he was definitely overweight and his hair was definitely receding.

  “Carrie told me about your accident,” he said, changing the subject. “She said you almost died.”

  “I could have died,” she corrected him, enunciating her words carefully. “I didn’t almost die. You know how dramatic Carrie can be.”

  “Even so, did it change the way you look at things at all?”

  She shrugged. “Like am I more cautious? Like do I live every day like it’s my last?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “No,” she said, before pausing to think about it harder—or at least she seemed to be thinking about it harder. “I guess it just made me realize how boring things are around here. It was kind of exciting in a way. You want to see my scar?”

  “OK.”

  The next thing he knew she’d hiked her shirt up a little and peeled back the top of her skirt. The whole thing caught him off guard and he wasn’t quite sure how to react. He didn’t want to stare, so he tried to avert his eyes at first, but then he realized he was supposed to look, so he did.

  Jim says, “I didn’t know whether she was showing me the scar because she saw me as an old friend or whether it was her way of flirting. But I think she was just comfortable. We were having a nice friendly conversation.”

  “Yeah, can you believe they got my whole spleen out through there?”

  “It’s pretty small,” he said.

  Just down the hall there was an open window, and he could hear girls’ voices outside. He went to the window and looked down. Some girls from a nearby sorority, PiFis, had showed up for the pre-party barbecue. There, in the middle of the group, was Gwen Dayton.

  Kristen came up behind him and looked over his shoulder.

  “Who’re those girls?” she asked.

  “Them?” For a brief instant, he pictured Gwen twenty years older. He pushed the button and there she was coming out of the Macy’s at Stanford Shopping Center, two children in tow, a boy and a girl, dark-haired and perfect. She was still beautiful but there was something completely average about her, and she knew it and hated it. He could see it in her eyes, that little shade of self-loathing.

  “They’re the bane of my existence,” he said.

  Gwen Dayton was a junior, one of those unpretentious, tall, thin girls with long dark hair who reminded him a little of the actress Liv Tyler. Gwen had seen him during some of his difficult drunken moments and would always stop by at parties and say hello and ask how he was doing and how the guys were treating him. She was the only really attractive girl who was nice to him. No, not nice. Gwen was kind, and her kindness was genuine. When she asked him how it was going, she really wanted to know, and would listen attentively as he told her.

  She dated Mark Weiss, the frat president. And maybe it was because she was unattainable that he felt so comfortable around her. She knew he had a crush on her, but she hadn’t ever given him the cold shoulder or tried to pawn him off on someone else—until that night, anyway, with Kathy Jorgenson. At first, he thought it was just by chance that they’d come over together. But then he realized there was a purpose to the visit. Gwen was trying to set him up.

  The thing was, he really didn’t like Kathy Jorgenson. She was a thin, mousey girl who wore her hair short and had slightly masculine features. He could’ve written her off as unattractive, but it was more complicated than that. He and his dorm-mate, a rail of a guy named Dan Fleischman who wore an earring and a buzz cut that made you think heroin-chic (though he’d tried nothing harder than ecstasy), had a name for her precarious place in the looks hierarchy. She was residually attractive—a rezi. What that meant was that if you saw her alone you wouldn’t give her a second glance. But since she managed to hang out with a group of good-looking girls, she appeared to be moreattractive—their looks rubbed off on her.

  She knew it, too. He and Fleischman had once scoped her out at a party, and they both made the same observation: The more “babe rays” she absorbed the more confident she became. They were her social Viagra. And she seemed to be getting a good dose of it standing next to Gwen.

  “They still got you working, Jimmy?” Gwen asked.

  “They don’t have me working,” he said, looking up from the job he was doing—pouring a bag of ice over a tub of beer. The girls weren’t exactly twins, but they were both wearing jeans and T-shirts and had light sweaters wrapped around their waists. “Your boyfriend’s got me working. It’s a singular thing.”

  Weiss, the frat president, was a senior and would graduate this year. With any luck he’d go live someplace far, far away.

  “We just came by to say hello,” said Gwen. “Do you know Kathy?”

  “Yeah.” He
half-extended a hand, which was wet. “I’d shake your hand, but I don’t think you’d want to shake mine.”

  Kathy didn’t say anything. She just flashed him a demure smile, which he felt under his skin. My God, he thought, she is trying to set me up, and in a moment of panic, he announced unexpectedly: “I’ll have you know I’ve temporarily sworn off women, all forms of them.”

  “Going gay, are we?” Kathy said. “Don’t think you’re the first.”

  “I’m not going gay. I’m just taking a break.”

  Kathy made a face. “What’s the matter, can’t hack us?”

  His usual urge was to go on the defensive. But today he felt some potential in continuing on a self-deprecating tack.

  “I’m just no good at it.”

  Gwen smiled. “Why don’t I believe you?”

  “Don’t be fooled by the positive attitude.”

  That got a laugh out of Kathy, which, as much as he didn’t like her, made him gush with pride. He was on a roll. The only thing to do now was to get out before he stalled.

  “I’m going to check on the punch situation,” he said. “Do you guys want any?”

  “I’ll take one,” said Gwen.

  Jim pointed at Kathy. “You?”

  “Nothing right now, thanks. But maybe later.”

  He looked at his watch. It was seven-thirty. “Just be aware that my indentured servitude contract runs out in an hour.”

  “Right about when you stop giving up on women,” said Kathy.

  “You watch.”

  “I’m watching,” she said.

  So was C. J. Watkins. But Jim doesn’t tell the lawyer that. He skips that part. This part.

  “That’s not for you, is it?” Watkins said.

  Jim turned around from getting a cup of punch and there he was, standing there with a beer. Watkins wasn’t looking at him, though. He had his back to him and was facing the small group who’d gathered around the barbecue, where Mark Garland, the resident chef, was cooking chicken and burgers. Jim glanced to his left, then his right—maybe Watkins had intended his comments for someone else. But there was nobody nearby.