The Brown Reader

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  I arrived in Providence in 1987 and have enjoyed several roles in seven years at Brown, from undergraduate, to faculty in English and Creative Writing, to teaching the hypertext fiction workshops I designed with Robert Coover as a grad student. My days are spent in an interdisciplinary orbit of Modern Culture and Media, the Center for Information Technology, and Louis, where Johnny and Albert know my usual. They know all the regulars, including faculty and staff from Creative Writing, Music, MCM, Art, and the Scholarly Technology Group, who, beneath Louis’s lighted menu, are creating a vision for Brown’s future as a digital-media leader. The Multimedia Lab is nourished on the blood of spinach pies with extra sauce.

  I should be happy, and I am. I’m a happy guy. But in the summer of 1994 I go into a tailspin, precipitated by a breakup with a girlfriend. From the moment I wake to the time I finally get wearily back to sleep, I can think of nothing but the ex, the ruined relationship, and how badly I fucked up. I can barely manage to make a sandwich, much less cook a decent meal. Food has lost its flavor. I might stop eating altogether if not for Louis.

  I check every book on mood disorders out of the SciLi and begin to accept that I have caught the family curse: depression. My mind roils with toxic thought. Some nights it’s palpable in the brainpan, a physical sizzle, and the anxiety becomes so intolerable that I have to go on long walks to be able to breathe: past the baseball fields on Gano to the deserted tracks and the trestle jutting out over the Seekonk River, where an abandoned drawbridge rises two hundred feet above the water in an enormous underscore-slash.

  My Providence is a hilly behemoth bound by the Seekonk and the Woonasquatucket, and by the hurricane barrier and Swan Point Cemetery. At the top of Hope Street, the Ladd Observatory is a cycloptic eye; running under Waterman from Thayer to South Main, the bus tunnel is a huffing snout; and at the end of the abandoned train tunnel, mouth gaping beneath Benefit and running for two miles under College Hill to the old drawbridge rising two hundred feet above the Seekonk, I scale the Beast’s rigid tail. It is the summer of 1994, I have been in Providence for seven years, I am twenty-four years old, and I believe I may be capable of hurting myself.

  My psychotherapist gets me to admit my potential. The question is couched just carefully enough to make me lower my guard: “Have you ever thought about causing yourself harm in any way?” No. But the question echoes in my head: In any way? When the brainstorm becomes unmanageable, no remedy is off the table. There is no way to stop this thought. And so I walk, ruminate, contemplate, until I can get back to my apartment too exhausted not to sleep. For weeks on end, the vicious cycle doesn’t let up. How many months does it take to get to the bottom of a tailspin?

  On a hot September afternoon on Benefit Street, I am biking over to teach at the MML when I stop to quench my thirst at the fountain in front of the Athenaeum. Carved in granite: COME HERE EVERYONE THAT THIRSTETH. When I get to the Grad Center a student from my hypertext workshop tells me, “You know the supposed curse about that fountain? They say you drink from it, you’ll never leave Providence.” I ask poet and Brown professor Keith Waldrop about it, and he’s heard that in the 1800s Sarah Helen Whitman, a lifelong Providence resident, dumped Edgar Allan Poe at the Athenaeum, and he is rumored to have made this pronouncement. At least, the legend goes, you’ll never leave alive.

  Finally, one fall morning my therapist asks me whether I remember the last time I tried looking up, and I am surprised to hear myself say no. For months I’ve been looking down. “Try keeping your eyes at eye level or higher for the rest of the day,” she tells me.

  I am sitting in front of the Burnside statue in Kennedy Plaza when the light makes it through. The sun shines in my eyes and I cry. After months of steady depression, I begin to pull out of the tailspin.

  By the spring of 1997, students in my hypertext fiction workshops are pioneering the emerging field of electronic literature, and over the years I have worked with my colleagues in Creative Writing to organize several prominent literary events, including major African, Cuban, and vanguard writers’ conferences. Since I climbed out of the last tailspin in ’94, things have gone all right. I now have a gorgeous girlfriend on Governor, a new relationship I can’t live without. My place on Ives and Williams is on the fourth floor above Fox Point Video. A block north at Power, it’s left to Brown or right to the Seekonk. On good nights I write until two or three o’clock in the morning, my Mac set up at a window with an unobstructed view of the drawbridge.

  * * *

  One night I am looking forward to getting together with my girlfriend when she calls and breaks the date. She tells me she has to stay on at work, a fancy restaurant downtown. “One of the other servers canceled and I have to pull a double.”

  I say, “Can we get together after?”

  “I’m pretty beat already, and by the time I finish the dinner shift I’m just going to want to go to bed.”

  “I could come over and we could just sleep.”

  “Why don’t we just get together tomorrow, okay?”

  “Okay, I love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  Before the phone is back in the cradle, the bleak ruminations begin. I try to tell myself this is just a bad day, not a new tailspin. She only asked for a night alone. It’s not like she’s cheating on me. She said she loves me. I’ll see her tomorrow. I can make it through the night. I write in all caps in my journal: “STOP THIS THOUGHT.”

  Is it coincidence that my walk this night takes me by Governor? Down on the street, I see a light flickering in her upstairs window. Candlelight. It’s still early. There’s no way the restaurant could already be closed. She must have forgotten to put it out when she left for work. I don’t have a key to her place, but ah! Providence, with your fire escape ladders so close to the sidewalks! Maybe she left the window open or at least unlocked. It will make my night go easier to know there’s nothing to worry about. I jump and catch the lowest rung, pushing my sneakers against the side of the apartment building to get myself onto the ladder and up the fire escape.

  * * *

  If you’ve ever caught a lover with another, you know how good it feels that second, perched on the fire escape, peering at them seated beside the open window at a table for two, to shout, “You lied to me!”

  They jump out of their chairs, freaking out, and she lamely rejoinders: “You don’t listen!” The guy says, “Maybe I should go.”

  The rush is once-in-a-lifetime. I climb down the fire escape, high on righteous indignation. He’ll leave and she’ll try to call me at home. Let her fret. There will be messages when I get back. Good friends Rich Schuler and Chris Dunn live around the corner on Williams. I’m not going home right away.

  I tell them the story and Rich opens me a beer. And another. And another. Chris cranks up the Tropicalia music, cheerfully shouting to keep me from spiraling, “Bob! You pooped in the punch bowl!” They stay up with me for hours. They don’t let me leave. Toward dawn they tell me I can crash on the couch. But I live just around the corner. I want to go home.

  It’s four thirty in the cold twilight when I climb the stairs and open the door to my apartment. In the dark kitchen, the little red light on the answering machine is not blinking. There are no new messages. I look out my window to the drawbridge.

  The guy didn’t leave. She prepared him a candlelight dinner, and he stayed all night, and not even my yelling a few feet from them in the window could stop her.

  * * *

  Power: left or right? All my friends are sleeping. And she’s sleeping with him. I feel the sizzling in my brain and I know what it is: another tailspin coming on. It is the summer of 1997 and I have been in Providence for ten years. I am twenty-seven years old.

  When I walk into Louis at five a.m., I think I am doing a pretty good job of hiding it. Growing up in a house full of crazy people has made me a very secretive person. I might just have been writing all night, right? But Johnny barely has to turn from the pile of home fries on the grill to understa
nd that something is wrong. “Albert, I think Bob needs to peel some potatoes.”

  What? What’s happening? I’m a customer, not a cook. I just want a cup of coffee, regular. Wordlessly Albert comes out from behind the counter, taking me, a sightless man, by the elbow. He leads me back through the kitchen down the cramped staircase to Louis’s fluorescent-lit basement, where fifty-pound bags of flour and five-gallon cans of tomato puree vie for shelf space with the gleaming machines of commercial food prep.

  Albert sits me at a bench in front of a contraption with an intake that looks like an old gramophone horn. The chrome lettering reads HOBART. He sets me up with a seventy-five-pound sack of potatoes and an empty plastic barrel. Albert flips on the machine, conjuring a terrible noise. He shows me how to use it. Put a potato in the top, clear away the peeled skin, put the clean potato in the bucket, repeat. There are two manifolds on the side: one pops out the shaved potato; the other discharges the ribbons of peelings. “Don’t put your fingers in the top,” Albert says. “It will make a big mess.” He leaves me to my work.

  I put a potato in the top and bits of peel and water droplets spray my face. The potato comes out so clean! I feed the machine potatoes. I drop in another, and another.

  Alone in Louis’s basement, I am aware of my regret, of all that I’ve done wrong. I know that I have to stop using girlfriends as Band-Aids. The gash goes down too deep. Down to the kitchen where my father, a refugee from Cuba who “lost everything” when the family left Havana, stumbled in drunk too many times to count. Down to the nursery where I cried for hours while in the next room, drapes shut against the midday sun, my mother could not be roused from bed.

  Albert returns in half an hour. My hands are wet and pruny from the work, and I am proud of my barrel full of bare potatoes. Albert does not conceal his irritation when he says, “Jeez, Bob, I didn’t say peel the whole bag.”

  Back up in the restaurant, there at my place on the counter, is the coffee: cold. Swiftly Johnny serves my regular, piping hot. Two topographies are my Providence: the jagged scar of the distended train bridge silhouetted against the East Providence skyline, and the rolling hills of a Louis Number One. Those home fries taste better than anything I’ve ever eaten in my life.

  That October

  CHRISTINA HAAG

  That October there was a spike of heat in the Northeast, a brilliant backlash of summer. Providence, a city that would soon be bundled and galoshed—held captive by snow and rain for the next five months—was drinking in whatever warmth it could get. At Brown, on one of the highest of the seven hills that overlook the city, coats and sweaters were abandoned, classes were cut, and stereo speakers, perched high in open windows, blared the Allman Brothers and Grateful Dead, the drum solos drifting down through the air like a wild pagan call. Banners—sheets spray-painted NO NUKES/END APARTHEID NOW in black and red—were draped over dorm walls of brick and limestone.

  On the Green, the patch of calm surrounded by the oldest buildings on campus, dogs chased after tennis balls and Frisbees or lounged in the still-bright grass. On the Faunce House steps, theater majors bummed cigarettes, and aspiring novelists and semioticians sparred over Derrida. Rich foreign students congregated in the middle of the terrace: the men, with Lacostes tucked tight into jeans and collars flipped high, the women, impossibly sleek, their tousled heads thrown back in charmed laughter.

  I was a junior in the fall of 1980. I had just gotten back from a trip to Ireland, but for most of the summer I’d stayed in Providence to act in three plays. In New York, I’d done commercials, but this was the first time in my life I’d cashed a paycheck for a play. And Oscar Wilde, no less. I was incredibly proud.

  Sophomore year, I’d moved out of the dorms to a rambling house on Waterman Street, five blocks east of campus, one of three student-run co-ops. There was a couch on the porch, a caricature of Nixon in one of the windows, and a king-size water bed with a sign-up sheet in the living room. My parents refused to set foot inside, proclaiming it “filthy,” but I loved it. It had a measure of expressiveness and rebellion that I craved. In the basement, a mute computer science major slept, worked, and tended to large vats of sprouts, his sole source of nutrition. For the rest of us, jobs rotated and dinners were a festive event. That night, I was in charge of cooking a vegetarian casserole for twenty.

  * * *

  As I crossed the Green, a knapsack slung over one shoulder, my mind was racing. The coffee from the Blue Room hadn’t helped. A paper due. Lines to learn. Cooking at the co-op that night. And the dark-haired French Canadian hockey player I’d met, who took art classes at RISD and spoke of training as if it were poetry. He slipped notes under my door that read like haiku. I, who had previously had zero interest in collegiate sports, now shivered in the stands of Meehan Auditorium and watched as he, outfitted like a gladiator, knocked equally well-padded men into the walls of the rink. Terrified and thrilled, I looked up at the bright banners and the fans cheering and the clean white ice below and thought, this is performance. On a cool night, when the embers were dying in his fireplace and there was no more wood to burn, he broke a table apart—wrenched the legs off, then the top, plank by plank—to please me, to keep the flames going. But the beginnings of love were distracting, and I kept forgetting things.

  I couldn’t find my bike for days, then realized I’d left it outside the Rock, the main library on campus. Hoping it would still be there, I walked quickly down the corridor between two of the buildings that bordered the Green. Light and noise began to fade. I kicked the heels of my new cowboy boots along the walkway, and the wine-colored gauze skirt I wore fluttered over the cement. When the path dipped down to the more shaded Quiet Green, I saw the Carrie Tower. Redbrick and granite, it reached high into the bright sky. I loved the tower, loved walking by it, and always went out of my way to do so. The four green-faced clocks, one on each side, were worn by weather. They no longer kept time; the bell had been removed. But the tower had a story. At its chipped base, above an iron door, the words LOVE IS STRONG AS DEATH were carved into the stone, a memorial to a woman from her Italian husband after her untimely passing almost a century before. I stopped for a moment and looked up. I wanted to be loved like that.

  When I passed through the main gates onto Prospect Street, I spotted my bike, an old Peugeot that took me everywhere. Relieved, I bent over the wheel and tugged at the lock. Then I heard my name. A voice I knew. I looked up, squinted.

  “Hey, stranger.” Someone wearing white was smiling at me.

  I raised the back of my hand to shade my eyes. The sun glinted off a railing.

  “I was wondering when I’d run into you,” he said.

  John was sitting on the bottom set of steps outside the Rockefeller Library talking with a large, preppy blond guy. “Catch you later,” the blond guy said when he saw me, and took off in the direction of George Street.

  I sat down on the step next to him, tucking the filmy skirt under my knees. I was happy to see him. He was now in his sophomore year, one behind me. He leaned in to hug me. His shoulders were broader. Around his neck, a shark’s tooth on a string.

  “It’s been a while,” I said, and we began to try and place when we’d last seen each other—a Little Feat concert where he’d teased me mercilessly about the Harvard guy I was with, a party in New York, his performance in Volpone on the Faunce House Stage the previous spring.

  What had I done over the summer, he wanted to know. I didn’t mention the French Canadian. I told him about Ireland, the double rainbow in Donegal, the pubs in Dublin, and a castle I stumbled upon near Galway Bay that turned out to have belonged to my clan hundreds of years back. Before that, six weeks of summer theater at Brown. His face lit up, and he wanted to know more. “That’s cool. You seem into it,” he said, adding that he wouldn’t be doing any plays for a while. Something cryptic about needing to stay focused, as if the words of Shakespeare and Shaw were a sweet drug that he needed to pace himself around. He’d been in Ireland, too. Also Africa,
and helping out on his uncle Teddy’s presidential campaign. And Martha’s Vineyard. “My mother’s building a house there. You should come up sometime.”

  As we spoke, I searched his face. Something about him was different. In a summer, he had changed. Taller, more handsome; I couldn’t put a finger on it. Maybe he was in love. Maybe it was the white garb. But he seemed at ease with himself in a way he hadn’t before.

  “I can’t bear to be inside on a day like this.” He exhaled deeply and cocked his head toward the library, a rectangle of cement and glass whose revolving doors whirred behind us. He leaned back, propping his elbows against a step, and stretched his legs. His linen pants were rumpled. I saw that he was wearing sandals, the woven kind, and that his feet were still brown.

  “Where are you living?” I asked.

  “Phi Psi. I pledged.”

  “Oh.” I tried not to wrinkle my nose.

  “And you?”

  “Waterman Co-op.”

  “Huh. Tofu.”

  The first bell rang, and I moved toward my bike. The lock came off easily.

  “I’ll walk you,” he said, following. “I’ve got time.”

  I crouched down and slipped the U-shaped metal bar neatly in its holder on the bottom bar of the bike. His feet. I’ve never seen them before, I thought, and threw my knapsack in the front basket. They were elegant, and that surprised me.

  I steadied the bike, and we began to walk up the uneven street, past the Van Wickle Gates, past the Carrie Tower, to the rise at the top of Prospect and Waterman.

  The second bell rang, and people began darting around us.

  “Well, stranger, this is where I get off. Thanks for the chivalry.”