We had ended up at some awful bar in Midtown where Tallis had dragged us after drinking with his banker friends; it had an Irish theme, with shamrocks scattered around the walls, all reddish wood and brass and fake brown leather.
‘Even you would admit that everyone deserves a defense,’ Cameron said to Brian across the glossy table. ‘Everyone deserves a fair trial. Or do you think they shouldn’t be allowed to have defense attorneys at all? Do you think we should just hang them for being corporations?’ His face had started to redden with anger and the effects of alcohol.
‘They are entitled to lawyers. I admit that. But why do you have to be their lawyer?’ Brian asked, jabbing his finger toward Cameron.
Cameron took a handful of peanuts from the bowl on the table and chewed them, talking through a mouthful. He accused Brian of being unfairly judgmental, and made some disparaging remark about his T-shirt, which had a slogan on it that I couldn’t quite make out, under his black blazer. It seemed to be related to the documentary Brian was pushing, something to do with oil consumption.
Cameron would be defending the most powerful elements in society against the interests of the most powerless, Brian said — the families of people poisoned by unsafe chemical leaks; kids killed by improperly constructed cribs and car seats; people injured by medical malpractice.
It was true that the firm had recently fought a high-profile case on behalf of a manufacturer of children’s products and did some legal work for a big tobacco company.
Cameron blustered furiously. ‘Are you going to ask me how I sleep at night?’
‘Yes. Wait — no. I don’t want to know.’
I went to sit at the bar with Tallis, who had started chatting to some girl, and then I caught sight of Brian’s girlfriend at the time, Bianca, who had been stuck at the table between Brian and Cameron. She smiled at me wearily and took the last sip from her glass, set it on the bar. I bought her another. We could hear them indistinctly, and I knew the argument had turned to Brian’s parents.
They were well off, old Boston money, in antiques and the law. Brian was sensitive about it and, for a while, had refused their help. He spent two years at the end of college being as broke as I was, working at the library, checking people’s bags as they left, and cutting bagels at the all-night sandwich shop near campus. Cameron’s family had struggled to send him to college. In a strange way it had always seemed to me that Brian was envious of Cameron’s background, rather than the other way around. Brian was self-conscious about the way his progressive politics looked from one perspective as if they were simply a reaction to his privileged status, a form of rebellion, less than fully authentic. It looked that way to Cameron, who used to tease him about his involvement in student politics, meetings and rallies and political campaigns.
He and Brian were the only ones among us responsible enough to actually vote in elections once we were old enough, but Cameron would never tell us who he was voting for. This at first enraged Brian, who spent every election day handing out campaign materials for the local Democratic candidate, and then I think Cameron must have confessed to him at some point that he didn’t vote Republican, because Brian stopped harassing him about it and just seemed disappointed in him rather than actively disapproving.
Bianca rolled her eyes in the direction of the argument. She and Brian had been going out for a couple of months, and she’d come with him to New York to hang out and have a vacation, she said. ‘I wanted to meet his friends. That was a great idea.’
I gave her my best smile. ‘Not entirely a bad idea.’
‘Not entirely. It’s Elliot, right?’
Tallis reappeared at my side, towering and blond and smelling strongly of whiskey and smoke. He had an unlit cigarette in his hand.
‘Bianca!’ he shouted, raising his voice more than he needed to over the noise of the crowd around us. ‘Do you have a light? Would you like a cigarette? A drink? Hey!’ He gestured to one of the guys behind the bar. ‘Another for her. And — Elliot, what are you drinking? Stella? A Stella! Two!’
I’m not tall — not short either, about average height — but being around Tallis always makes me feel slightly smaller than I am. He knows how to carry his height, and women seem to be universally impressed with his English accent. Next to him I end up coming across as the bookish, sensitive one, or that’s the way I try to think about it.
Bianca handed him a book of matches from a box on the bar. ‘Are they arguing about the car accident?’ she asked. ‘I mean, do they fight like this because of that?’
‘The car accident?’ I asked. ‘You mean the one in college?’
She nodded. ‘Brian talked about it once or twice,’ she said. ‘He still has a bad neck.’
‘It was an accident,’ I said. ‘And none of us was really hurt. In fact, Cameron was hurt the most. He’s the one who wound up in hospital for days.’
Tallis leaned in. ‘Brian might still carry a grudge about it,’ he said. He looked away, and then back with a sigh. ‘What I think is that Brian probably blames himself in a way for it. I know, I know,’ he said when I started to protest. ‘But it was Brian’s friend’s band we were out seeing that night, you know, it was all his idea, and we stayed so late because he wanted to keep drinking with that stupid fucking singer, or the guitarist, whatever. He said something about it once. If only we’d never gone, et cetera. I think he was more fucked up by it than any of us. You know he’s never owned a car since.’
That was true. Brian had always claimed it was an environmental statement, but now I wondered.
‘That’s crazy,’ I said. ‘It was just an accident.’ But something about what Tallis had said, that weird oscillation of blame and guilt and trauma, made sense.
Cameron and Brian were on their own at the table now, and we could still overhear scraps of the argument as it continued. It had moved on to the subject of Cameron’s hypocrisy; his family were Catholics, and he’d been married in an extravagant Catholic ceremony, although he didn’t go to church apart from Christmas and sometimes Easter. Brian had things to say about all of this.
After an hour or so I decided to leave and went over to the table to say goodbye. Brian’s face softened for a moment when he saw me. ‘Hey, man. You have to leave? Now? Sorry we didn’t get to catch up … Tomorrow night …’
‘Call me,’ I said. ‘Bianca’s great.’
Cameron nodded and said goodnight but his face remained dark and serious.
Tallis called me the next day. ‘I’m flying back this afternoon, just wanted to say goodbye. I was so fucking wasted last night I can’t remember you going.’
I asked how long he had stayed. A while, he said. Cameron had left at some point without saying goodbye — I got the impression he’d had enough of the fight and had stormed out in some fashion — and Brian had been completely drunk by the end of the night.
‘He was a mess,’ Tallis said. ‘It was a waste sending Bianca home with him.’
We talked for a while about how much we liked her. Brian wasn’t the best-looking of the five of us but he managed to go out with girls that we all envied him for — not the beautiful ones that Tallis picked up all over the place, or the neurotic poetess types that I found myself with, but girls who seemed to have it all: looks, brains, sense of humor, passion. His relationships with them never seemed to last long, which was mollifying to the jealous part of me.
Tallis thought the argument had turned so poisonous this time because of Cameron’s own feelings of reluctance about taking the job, which he’d mentioned to Tallis before Brian had arrived. He’d had other offers, apparently, including ones from less evil but worse-paying firms. Marie had pressured him, he claimed, although Tallis thought it was equally likely that Cameron wanted the money and status himself, although he’d never admit it.
‘He’s playing golf now, you know,’ Tallis said. ‘Anyway, he couldn’t say any of that to Brian.’
‘Why not?’ I wanted to know. ‘It would have been better if he did.�
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‘No way,’ Tallis said with a laugh, ‘it would have been worse.’
I decided he was probably right, and gave in to a sense of anger at them both. The feeling dissipated so rapidly it took me by surprise, leaving only something apathetic and resigned in its wake.
Brian was an earnest guy, in a way that managed to be attractive rather than off-putting. He wanted to do some good in the world. He played guitar badly, with feeling. His secret vice in college had been hard-core pornography, though in public he said that pornography exploited women and went through a phase of calling himself a feminist.
I discovered the pornography by accident, the year we lived across the hall from each other in Derwent. I went into his room to retrieve a notebook he’d borrowed from me — I knew he was in class, and noticed that the door was unlocked, and we were close enough that it wasn’t so unusual to let myself in. Anyway, there was the magazine on the bed, and some poking out from under the mattress. I sat down at his desk to look through them. They were curiously unexciting to me, a lot of close-ups of shaved body parts and various instruments of pleasure, or torture, it wasn’t always clear. The baldness of the women’s genitals destroyed some of the more important distinctions between inside and outside, sex and not-sex, so that there were only endless folds and expanses of skin, flash-lit and garishly colored. The few faces in the pictures were blurred or cropped, at the very edges of the frame or half-glimpsed behind other parts of the body — breasts, a taut back, a grasping hand. They looked shocked, eyes wide open and thickly lashed, or glazed.
The picture with the taut, arching back was the only one I wanted to look at again. It was too brightly lit, but the woman’s hair made a beautiful mess of asymmetrical curls against her skin. Her thighs were spread wide open by another woman’s hands, red-painted nails with the polish chipped. It could have been a preparation for some kind of penetration — another of the pictures seemed to be from the same series and seemed to show exactly that, the red-nailed hands again manipulating body parts to show a particular angle — but it was more compelling as sheer display, a preparation for nothing but the photograph itself. The pressure of the woman’s hands on the other woman’s body was the most erotic thing about it to me; that and the coiling, dark hair, a compensation for the lack of hair down below. I was looking at it when Brian appeared at the door.
‘Oh my God,’ he said, mortified, his whole body deflating in front of me.
‘Brian,’ I said to him. ‘Under your mattress? What are you so worried about?’
He sat on the bed, elbows resting on his knees, and shook his head. Then one of us started laughing — him, I think, from pure awkwardness — and it was OK.
‘Can I borrow this?’ I asked, half joking.
‘Take it — it’s yours — don’t give it back.’
‘No, it’s OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll just come in and browse when I feel like it.’
He gave me a pleading stare and made me promise not to tell the others about it.
‘It’s at odds with your antisexist image, isn’t it,’ I teased him.
‘Yeah,’ he said and rolled his eyes. ‘There was one girl — do you remember Diane? She found it — she was really into it, in fact. But it freaked me out.’ He shrugged.
Diane was a hippie-ish girl Brian had met in a film studies class, with wispy light brown hair that came down past her waist. I was surprised to hear that about her; she seemed more like the type to be hanging out in the Women’s Room in the Student Center.
Being friends for as long as we were, I imagined that we all knew secrets about one another — some that were shared with and known only to the group, like the fact that Cameron had crashed the car, not Dylan, and some known only by one or two of us.
The secrets of mine held by the others were mostly ordinary, personal and embarrassing. The more serious thing, the one with potentially devastating consequences, was known only to Dylan.
I’d taken a class on Victorian literature in the first semester of senior year, against my better instincts. My schedule was more complicated than I’d wanted it to be that semester and my choices in English were Victorian literature, a class in Old Norse for which I wasn’t qualified, or a contemporary drama course cross-listed with performance studies that required actual acting in front of other students, a nauseating prospect.
The Victorian lit course had a whole unit on poetry. Poetry has always been hard for me, which I suppose is odd considering that I went on to study early modern drama, which is pretty much all in verse of some sort. I wrote some poetry of my own when I was an angsty teenager (I didn’t read any, so I’m not sure what my models were for the sad, banal expressions of alienation in free verse that I came up with). But poetry as such has a repellent opacity for me, and did even before the Victorian literature class: something about its dependence on metaphor and ambiguity of one kind or another; the idea that there are meanings always beyond my comprehension that I’ll never be quite smart or educated enough to see for myself.
The final assignment in Victorian lit was a paper on one of three topics: Wings of the Dove by Henry James, which I couldn’t choose because I’d written on it for the previous assignment; George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, which I hadn’t read because I’d been too busy reading Wings of the Dove, and Hamlet for another class; or Tennyson’s elegy for his dead friend Arthur Hallam, In Memoriam. After skimming the poem enough to get through the class on it I put off actually reading it until the last possible moment, days before the paper was due, and found it impenetrable. The poet’s tortured reflections on his inability to find words to express his grief only seemed to mirror my own excruciating inability to understand the significance of the whole thing.
It’s a long poem, comprising dozens of smaller poems made of little, maddening, claustrophobic rhyming stanzas. By the time I got around to writing the paper I was worn out with finishing other papers due at the same time; I’d put it off too long and couldn’t find the energy. The professor took pity on me and granted me a week’s extension, but it was no good. I spent the time in a daze, checking dozens of books out of the library on the elegy, on Victorian poetry, Victorian literature, Tennyson, Tennyson’s friends and rivals, fictional biographies of Tennyson, the phenomenon of death at sea, Victorian graveyards … At the end of the week my room smelled like a library stack, its floor crowded with pillars of books, faded towers of red and green and blue cloth covers, but I was no closer to producing any writing.
Dylan dropped over a few days before my official new due date. I could tell from the way he regarded me, his cheery greeting turning quickly to subdued concern, that I wasn’t looking good.
‘We haven’t heard from you for so long,’ he said. ‘Tallis thought you might have been spending the week in bed with Katie, but I didn’t think so.’
‘Katie? Oh, Katie. No. I went out with her that one time. No.’
The idea of spending a week in someone’s bed seemed like heaven to me at that moment, although it wasn’t delirious sex I was thinking about, but simply the prospect of being somewhere else, in someone else’s bed, someone else’s place, any life other than the one I was in. I pictured a large bed with a billowing down comforter, a cocoon from the world.
‘Elliot?’
‘What?’
‘I asked if you were still finishing a paper? Mine are all handed in by now.’
‘Oh, yeah. I got an extension.’
I told him about the paper, stammering. He glanced around and took in the teetering piles of books. He sat at my desk and I sat on the bed and he opened a small bottle of bourbon that he seemed to conjure out of thin air. He poured a glass for each of us, a solid two or three inches of liquor.
‘Drink that,’ he said. ‘Now. Don’t be so stressed out about this. It’s not a problem.’ And he told me how to solve it, and offered to look into it for me. It was easy to find someone to write a paper for you if you needed to, he said. He knew someone really good.
I had never
contemplated the idea of cheating before — unless I count the time in fifth grade when I looked up from an important test in class and found that I had a clear line of sight to the answers of the student sitting ahead of me to my left. She wasn’t the brightest student and I guessed that my own calculations were probably just as likely to be right as hers, and I looked away. I think the week alone with Tennyson and the library books had distorted my perception of reality; I hadn’t been anywhere except the library, my room, and the campus general store the whole time, and hadn’t been answering the phone.
I hated Tennyson by that point, and was overcome with a sense that I didn’t owe him anything. It was a stubborn feeling that my brain put up like a screen in front of my normal way of thinking. It wasn’t logical. Tennyson wasn’t asking me to do anything, after all, and didn’t care what I thought about his poem, but all I could think of was how badly I wanted to not think about him or the poem again, how good it would be to get those hypnotic four-beat lines out of my head, and how much I wanted my room to not smell like the library any more. For years afterward, whenever thoughts of the essay slipped into my mind through all the barriers of repression, they would always be accompanied by that feeling of personal animosity, that deluded sense that all I’d done was refuse an unreasonable request from a man I disliked intensely.
Dylan lit one of the French cigarettes he sometimes smoked — red Gauloises, impossible to buy in town — and passed one to me. I lifted my glass of bourbon, inhaled the sweet, smoky smell of it. By the time I was halfway through my drink I felt as though I had to say yes just to please Dylan, as though he would feel that he’d failed me as a friend if I didn’t accept his assistance. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He made it seem almost like a favor to him that I agreed to let him ‘look into it’.
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