by Peter Seth
One night we spent a half hour listening to “A Hard Days’ Night,” a song we had each heard about a million times, over and over again until we finally figured out together that John was saying, “So why on Earth should I moan / ‘Cause when I get you alone / You know I feel all right . . .” That became a kind of motto for me later on.
“She keeps after me to do these college applications,” Rachel said. “And I have no intention of going.”
“Maybe you should fill out a couple,” I said. “Just in the New York area. So we can be close. Go to NYU; you’ll just be down in the Village.”
“I have an appointment next week with this lawyer,” she said. “So I’ll find out then about my grandma’s will.”
“Good,” I said. “Whatever you want to do is fine with me.”
That seemed to satisfy her. I was happy to satisfy her – that was my job. But as we embraced, I couldn’t help but see the pile of books on my desk, all the work I’d brought home for the weekend, work that never seemed to be finished. All this stuff hanging over my head, shadowing every moment of pleasure with real assignments and absolute deadlines. I naively thought that college was supposed to be fun. I’d be free of the rigid schedule, small minds, and constricting atmosphere of high school. College was supposed to be about deep discussions with learned professors, the free exchange of ideas and all that. What I actually was doing was processing homework, one assignment after another. It was work. In fact, it was easier being a counselor at the Moon-shak. Which brought up a perplexing thought: What did I really want to do? But in Rachel’s arms, all these worries disappeared, if only for a while.
I got her to her father’s condominium well before 12:30. I wasn’t stupid; there was no way that I was going to cross Manny Price, especially on the first date under her father’s jurisdiction.
“What about tomorrow?” I asked, whispering in Manny’s echoing marble foyer.
“We’ll see,” she said. “Maybe I can slip away from him. But he’s promised to take me Mustang-shopping.”
“Well,” I snickered. “I can’t top that.”
“When I get my car,” she said. “Nothing will keep us apart.”
“I always like how you think. Why is that?”
“Sssh!” she whispered. “I think I hear him!”
I knew it was time to go, again. I was always leaving her. There was never enough time together. Ever.
“Call me if you can,” I said as she closed the door on me. “I’ll be waiting.”
≁
I wound up waiting most of the next day for a call that never came. Maybe Manny took her to several Mustang dealers, to comparison-shop. Somehow, though, I think that when the time came to buy, Manny Prince would just flip open his checkbook and write a check. Or maybe pay cash. Did I mention what Manny Prince did for a living? He owned two lumberyards: one in Nassau County, one in Suffolk.
So I sat at the dining room table most of the day, grinding through my homework, just as I did in high school. “This is my college experience?” I asked myself more than once, sitting right where I always had, where I had longed to escape from, not so long ago. I briefly flashed on my high school friends who really went away to school, my buddies who went to Williams and Lehigh, who right now were probably frolicking on the quad among the fallen autumn leaves, on the way to a football game with some giggly co-eds from Mount Holyoke or Bryn Mawr.
It was better to be lost, daydreaming about Rachel (both remembering the past and projecting the future), than do what I actually had to do. Sometimes (and maybe I promised not to talk about this) I couldn’t keep thoughts of our physical life out of my head. It was indeed unprofitable thinking when she was out of touch and out of reach, but I couldn’t help what my brain kept circling back to: our love making. Both the little things and the other. It was fitting that I thought about these things while I was sitting quietly at the dining room table because over time we had learned to make love quietly: in my upstairs bedroom, in the backseat of cars, on blankets and beach towels, and in some frankly uncomfortable places – places which I would revisit in a heartbeat. I learned to listen to her when she said that it wasn’t the right time of the month for us to do certain things, no problem. I was a very considerate boyfriend. In fact, we were perfect lovers, so thinking about it somehow made the absence worse.
Finally, I gave up and went out to a 10:00 movie (Night of the Living Dead, perfect for my mood) and over to The Lexington afterwards, to see if anybody I knew was there. When I walked in, it was like Death Valley. A couple of railroad workers, an old drunk talking to the waitress at the counter, and that was it. What the heck? I sat down and had a big Linzer cookie and a big glass of milk. No caffeine: I wanted to be able to go to sleep.
As I ate, I thought about driving over to Garden City, to Manny’s condominium. Not that there was any chance of seeing Rachel; she was probably all locked up in that fake chateau. It was probably best to go home, I told myself, go home and get some good sleep, considering I still had lots more work to do tomorrow: two papers, studying for midterms, and the Freshman Comp paper for Professor Brilliant that was due every Monday (it wasn’t the same paper every week; it just felt like it was). If I couldn’t be with Rachel, I told myself, I would make the best use of all that other time. The work at Columbia was tough, and there was a lot of it. To tell the absolute truth, in high school, I was always one of the smartest kids in the class. At Columbia, all the kids were “the smartest kid in the class” from their home schools, and I couldn’t coast. So if I had to be away from Rachel, perhaps it was a secret blessing to make me study harder. I should make peace with the amount of time Rachel and I had together. Separation would only make us stronger in the long run.
Confident that I was thinking maturely and productively, I finished my Linzer cookie and milk, went home, showered, and got into bed. There, I stayed awake until the early, gray dawn, telling myself lies. I missed her everyday and couldn’t go for any extended period of time without returning to thoughts of her.
I will admit that I was feeling a little depressed when I got back to the dorm on that cold, drizzly Sunday night after a delayed train and having to ride with a homeless guy asleep in his own urine-soaked pants on the Broadway local. When I slogged into my room half drenched, Roommate A and a couple of the other freshmen were sitting around, talking and smoking Gauloises. I had to shoo one of them, a heavy guy named Harlan, off my bed. I disliked feeling another person’s warmth on my bed, but what could I do? I had been gone all weekend.
They were talking about this mixer a bunch of them went to at Fordham on Saturday, looking for “easy Catholic girls.”
“Isn’t that redundant?” Roommate A remarked.
“How did you do?” I asked.
“They weren’t so easy.”
We all laughed, guys complaining about girls, something we all had in common.
Roommate A pointed at me with a stab of his thumb and said, “This guy disappears every weekend for home nookie. He has no right to laugh. He willingly crawls back down, down, down into the cultural sewer that is Lawn-Giland!”
“I’m not laughing,” I laughed along with everybody, in spite of myself.
I have to say that I despise that Manhattan hipper-than-thou thing, whether they’re preppies or hipsters, Collegiate or Dalton. On the one hand, I, like all good Long Island boys, couldn’t wait to get the hell off the Island and its unremitting flatness, both physical and spiritual, and escape the stifling boredom of the suburbs to the Glittering City and all its glamour and potential rewards – and here I was, going back to the Island every weekend. Because, on that other hand was Rachel, who gave me a reason, a very good reason, the best possible reason to go back. Didn’t the Beatles plainly say, “All You Need Is Love”? That seems to be what all this great literature I’ve been studying says. And if I avoided engaging in the social challenges of Columbia and competing
with all these other smart guys, well, that was just a side benefit of my greater emotion.
He continued, “Did you ever get one of her calls for him on the hall phone? This tiny princess-y voice – ‘Is he there?’ – I hope she’s worth it, kiddo.”
“Oh, she is . . .” I answered. “Kiddo.”
These poor privileged schnooks, all looking for a girl, any girl. They would die for what I already had.
Record of Events #22 - entered Sunday, 11:42 A.M.
≁
My hope for a positive week, anxiously nurtured through a Monday of dreary classes, vanished Monday night. I called Rachel at 8:00 sharp from one of the phone booths in the mailroom – my “lucky” booth, the one on the right – and could instantly tell that something was wrong.
“Wait a second,” she said, and put the phone down for long time, at least five minutes.
She came back on the line just as I was about to hang up.
“Sorry, baby,” she whispered as she picked up the line.
“What’s the matter?” I asked her.
“Nothing. Everything,” she said softly. “She’s on the warpath. They want me to go to this College Night for Seniors. I’ve already been to a bunch of these stupid things, and I just refuse to go to any more.”
“OK,” I said. “Do what you like.”
“What?” she reproached me. “You agree with them?”
I tried to be calm and said, “I just want you to be happy. But I don’t want you to be constantly fighting with them.”
“Well, you’re not here!” she said, her voice raised in frustration.
I let there be a silence and then muttered, “No, you’re right. I’m not.”
Then there was another silence, for a longer time.
Trying to keep things going, I asked her, “So what have you been doing tonight?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Sitting in my room, not doing my homework. Reading The Group, looking for the dirty parts.”
“How are they?” I snickered.
“We can do better,” she murmured.
“So just hang on until Friday and –” I said.
“I’ll be happy on Friday,” she said firmly. “When we’re together. But until then –”
“Until then,” I interrupted in an affirming voice. “We’re both going to be positive and do what we have to do and make the best of everything. It’s what I try to do.”
“Well, you’re better than me,” she muttered.
“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m the same as you.”
There was a pause. Then I continued, “We have to find ways to be happy when we’re not together.”
“Why?” she asked.
There was another space of silence.
“I haven’t been sleeping much lately,” she said. “I’m going to steal some of Hell-eanor’s sleeping pills. She won’t miss them. Or I could just give her an accidental overdose.”
“Don’t do that,” I said. “Why haven’t you been sleeping?”
“Would you just make the week go faster?” she said in a small voice.
“I’ll do what I can,” I said, trying to sound warm and reassuring. That’s what she needed, and I tried to channel all the comfort I could through the phone. “You’ll see: we’re going to be fine.”
“I know we are,” she said back listlessly.
“No,” I said. “We are! I want to hear some enthusiasm!”
“I have to go,” she sighed.
“Don’t do this,” I said.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said. “I love you.”
And she hung up before I could get out an “I love you” back to her.
≁
The rest of the week was like that: sweet-and-sour phone calls, separated by long bouts of studying and worrying. She told me that she went to the College Night with Eleanor, just as I had asked her to, but it was a disaster. (“I told you I wasn’t interested in all that junk. I don’t know why I listen to anybody.”) She told me that the family lawyer postponed the meeting with her, which I thought sounded strange but didn’t tell her that. Other than that, she said that she tried to stay in her room as much as possible, reading trashy novels (“I was up until after three in the Valley Of The Dolls. Jacqueline Susann is just an OK writer, but I’m learning so much good stuff about pills!”) and not doing her homework.
Eleanor and Manny were also fighting over where Rachel would spend Thanksgiving.
“They don’t even like me when I’m around,” she fretted. “But they keep fighting over me just so they have something to fight over.”
“Forget about them,” I said. “Think about us.”
“I do!” she said. “All the time! That’s what keeps me going. My love for you.”
When she said things like that, why on Earth should I moan? It made it easier to get through the week until Friday.
≁
I was late getting out to the Island on Friday afternoon. I hated getting out late, having to fight the crowds on the subway, fight the crowds in Penn Station, and fight my way to a seat on the Long Island Railroad, all the while carrying my small suitcase, which made everything clumsier and annoying for me and everyone around me. The problem was that I’d had to see Professor Brilliant, and he had office hours only on Friday afternoons, from 2:00 to 4:00. How considerate. He said it was to build character. I think it just built resentment. I don’t want to get into too much detail about my relationship with Professor Brilliant because he testified at my trial, but later I may have to, if I’m going to tell the absolute truth (which, by the way, I have been doing all along).
Sitting in the moving train, nodding as I gazed out the window at the grayness of the landscape, the bleakness of Queens, I realized that this was like Gatsby’s “Valley of Ashes.” That’s really where I lived, in a grungy netherworld, suspended between the intimidating glamour of Manhattan and the promise of a perfect love on Long Island. No, I lived in my mind, wrestling forever with my problems as the LIRR conductor waddled through the car, droning out the stations: “Wantagh . . . Seaford . . . Massapequa . . . Massapequa Paaarrkk.” Nothing was ever resolved, no matter how many times I was forced to “change at Jamaica.”
My Mom was nice enough to pick me up at the station, and I rushed home to grab some food, shower, change, and get to Rachel’s by 8:00. I simply rejected the idea of being late. All week long, I was subject to other people’s demands and timetables. This, tonight, being on time was something I could control. A couple of nights, Rachel and I missed our phone call. Twice she called me back on the hall phone in the dorm the next day, but I wasn’t there. Roommate A took the messages. (“Girl called.” “Girl called X 2.”) Overall, it had been a frustrating week. I had not done well on a big geology lab test, and I was not used to getting bad grades. I admit it; it hurt my ego. That’s why I was especially looking forward to seeing Rachel: we were very good for each other’s egos.
I had to make a quick stop for peppermint Life Savers to counteract my mother’s radioactive meat loaf, but I still got to the Princes’ house before eight. I was hoping that Rachel would just be able to come right out when I knocked on the front door – no little tap dance, no insincere small talk with Eleanor and/or Herb. They seemed to want to make me pay a price in humiliation, every time that we went out. But no matter: they were not important – only Rachel was.
Zipping up my leather jacket because it was getting really cold at night now, I fast-walked up the Princes’ long path, ready to ring the bell at eight on the dot, collect my girl, and get out of there
Bing-bong! Even the sound of their doorbell was pompous, but I didn’t care. I loved Rachel, not her family. Nor her doorbell.
The door opened suddenly, but it was Eleanor who was standing there. Her face was taut with animosity.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But Ra
chel’s grounded tonight.”
And she closed the door in my face.
I stood there for a moment, my mind at first blank, then flooded with a white rage. Grounded? What? She couldn’t do that! I don’t know if my eyes were open or closed, or how long I actually stood there. My thoughts and feelings all jumbled together. It sounded like there was a jet from JFK flying overhead, but I don’t think anything was there in the sky. There was just the big, silent brick mansion and me, standing outside, alone.
I was about to knock on the door and demand at least an explanation, but I realized there was nothing to explain. Eleanor had decided to escalate her war against Rachel and me, and things were now going to be different. Very different. It was one thing to hassle us a little, the way incompetent parents sometimes do in the name of “discipline,” but this was outright obstruction. Hostile action.
The question was: What exactly to do? I slowly backed off the porch, looking up the wide façade of the house, the wall of brick punctuated by black shutters and draped windows. I knew that Rachel’s bedroom was on the second floor because of all the times that she’d say that she had to go upstairs to get away from “them.” I figured it must be in the back of the house.
Carefully and without making too much noise, I stepped over the little hedge that lined the flagstone path up to the front door and started to cross the broad lawn, to circle around to the back of the house. The grass crunched under my feet as I kept my eyes on the house to see if Eleanor – or worse, Herb – was watching me. But I didn’t see any of the drapes inside the big windows move, so I kept walking. As I curved around to the side of the house, I thought that if I could see where Rachel’s bedroom window was, maybe she’d be looking out of her window, looking for me. In fact, I was certain that she’d be wanting, even expecting me to be looking for her. She would know that I wouldn’t just walk away, grounding or no grounding. I flashed on the cigarette burn on her arm and hoped that she was all right physically. No, I couldn’t just abandon her; couldn’t just walk away. That would be just what Eleanor would want.