by Michael Cart
In morning class I remain more or less taciturn, like the other straight boys. The gay boys and the girls answer the questions and argue with Tod.
Afternoons. What the course catalog called “labs” are sessions when we get together in pairs to compose in a tiny rehearsal room, one of eight or so cut out of attics in Pierce. We have assigned hours but we can vary them if a cubicle is free.
After a couple of labs I learn a bit about my partner, Francesca Comstock. Originally from Chevy Chase, she’s spent her senior year at the American School in St. John’s Wood in London. She’s all glam-rock and the Smiths, all superior, Brit-itude, trying out some hip-hop with a put-on Rasta accent. We are chalk and cheese, as she says: Mismatched doesn’t begin to cover it. Me, I’m still having Shakespeare withdrawal. Everything I write sounds like a half-baked sonnet. “Can’t we make this weirdness work for us?” I ask.
She quotes a line back at me, something like “November can remember April tremblings.” She says, “And this means, what? Are we talking earthquakes or masturbation?”
“I’m going to be an English major,” I say. “I read Emily Dickinson and stuff.”
“You need some stronger hero if this is what she inspires you to crank out.”
It’s hopeless. We keep at it, though. She has some talent. She just doesn’t like being a team player. “I’m supposed to be learning something from you,” she says. “You’re the language guy, and this isn’t language. This is shit.”
“Colorful,” I say.
“I’ll give you colorful,” she says. “Toodles spends all class creaming over the music of the past, but we’re supposed to be learning something now. Can’t you give me something you know now?”
What do I know now? That Auntie Nurjahan steals time at her insurance desk job doing organizing for the no-nukes movement? That Maman is seeing a doctor for headaches? That Baba has written me a postcard mentioning he has heard more talk about Laurel Finn while he endures another night of bowling with the Knights of Columbus? My Faroukh-jan and LF? he writes. With all those beautiful Persian girls at jamatkhana? Maman says to say you one thing: Firouza Mirshahi.
Where’s the song in any of this? Where’s the song in Laurel Finn? Someone could write it, not me.
“That Blaise knows what he’s doing,” says Francesca.
“How do you know?” Blaise hasn’t said a word in class yet.
“We chatted.” She looks at the piano console dubiously, switches the controls from harpsichord to strings. Noodles a jumpy little motif. “Wish I could be paired up with him.”
“Who doesn’t?” It just slips out, but I’m not sure if she notices. I rush on. “He’s a composer anyway,” I remind her. “Farber matches us up composer and lyricist for the lab partnerships.”
“That’s so retro,” she replies. “It’s so, so dance-cardy. So boy-girl-boy-girl at the school dinner.”
“I never went to a school that gave a dinner,” I say.
“Art is mixing it up,” she drawls. “Art doesn’t happen by committee.”
“You want to mix it up? What if I try to write the music and you do the words?”
“How about you just sign off on the project and let me do it lonesome-cowboy-like?”
The first half of the brief semester passes. The increments by which the class begins to pull together are so slight that we hardly notice them. The trees lose the more luscious aspect of green and begin to go gray in the oppressive heat, which just won’t lift. I sleep at night in my underpants, knowing Auntie Nurjahan will respect my privacy. I have to change them every morning; they’re slightly crusty in the front, or still moist. I am, after all, eighteen.
Tupperneck now? As Faroukh pulls off the highway, the dropping sun on snow blinding him—what has happened to Tupperneck? Last month at the funeral Auntie Nurjahan told him: Old Tupperneck went under a decade ago, bought out for use as a satellite campus of the state university six miles away. You can hardly see where the college begins and ends anymore. Commercial development has nibbled up the last of the asparagus farms and apple orchards.
But here’s the beginning of what was known as Perimeter Road, back when he was eighteen, and the old Episcopal Student Services building—what was it called, how could he have forgotten?—in which the summer had turned memorable.
Pierce. Hmmm. Of course, Pierce.
The heat continues. The Tupperneck River valley traps the muggy weather, and the damp heat makes us dawdle along the baking tarmac and the punished lawns. Heat makes time slow down, I think. The summer is lasting forever and it’s only been three weeks.
At night, Auntie Nurjahan puts on one fan for the whole house. I lie in my sheets, twitching, caught. No breeze makes it into Auntie’s sewing room, where I’m laid out among the threads and patterns, a dressmaker’s dummy fallen to perdition.
The postcard from Baba has angered me. What has he heard now? What does he think I should do? What right has he got to pester me about Laurel Finn, several hundred miles away? And what need? I’m perfectly capable of pestering myself.
Laurel Finn on a warm spring night. A bottle of schnapps filched from her dad’s cabinet. I like her. I do. She’s quirky and kind, the only girl I know who can do imitations. (Why is it mostly men who do voices? Is it that we’re the sex more used to exploiting the human capacity for facades?) Laurel can do a wicked Reagan, a decent Woody Allen. Laurel’s got shortish hair and a slender figure, and doesn’t dress in what passes for high-school glam. No parachute pants and green eyeliner like a lot of the graduating sexpots.
But that’s what she isn’t, and have I only been drawn to what she’s not? The question occurs to me in the dark. I start to hum to myself to shoo away the returning waves of shame, but I can’t stop myself remembering the fumbling with clothes, the realization that I needed to fake an acceleration of breathing to match her excitement. The approach, the breach, the disaster of it all. I could hardly keep from laughing nervously, trying to disguise it as a spasm of erotic enthusiasm. It was all pathetic, such a mistake, and Laurel stayed encouraging and inventive until at last she turned scornful. “Using me,” she claimed. Using her? For what? “You know for what, you…you…” But even drunk she’s too intact to finish the sentence.
“Are you humming in your sleep, or you want some warm milk with saffron?” calls Auntie Nurjahan through the dark. “I bring you a cup. Wait.”
Warm milk in a fretful oppressive night? “Auntie, no thanks.” But you don’t stop Auntie when it comes to food. I shuck on an oversized T-shirt to hide myself.
Next day, when class is over and Tod is replacing his cassettes in their plastic boxes, Francesca stands and yawns with terrible venom and remarks flatly to one and all, “I just found out there’s a pool beyond the Alumnae House. Most of the day it’s given over to kids for a camp, but it’s open to summer students from four to five. Gate closes at five but if you’re in you can stay an extra half hour while they tidy up. I’m going there today.”
“We have lab,” I say to her.
“For all we get done at the piano, we can as easily work by the pool,” she answers. Tod looks up sharply, eyes shooting from beneath his brows. He doesn’t comment. I’m not sure if I’m deemed guilty by association. I make no comment about whether I’ll be there or not.
I’m realizing slowly that Tupperneck must qualify as some kind of summer camp for college kids. It has turned out that none of my classmates are locals. So none of the other Music and Lyric students have heard about this pool yet. At four o’clock a whole passel of us shows up. It’s a sorry sight. The concrete is crumbling and there’s precious little shade. Still, water is water and it doesn’t take much to cool off.
Francesca looks like an Aphrodite of sorts. Her black skin gleams in the water, set off with cosmopolitan glamour by the white one-piece with a bare back. She swims for a few moments, and then arranges her towel on a ledge. I have plunged in the water and I stay there near her, like an adoring acolyte, though I’m immersed out
of a certain sort of modesty if nothing else. I know I have a pair of swimming trunks in my duffel bag at Auntie’s house, but I haven’t wanted to walk there and back in the worst of the afternoon heat. Instead I’ve bought a pair of Tupperneck boxers from the campus store. They have a slit fly but I keep my briefs on underneath for safety’s sake in case the fly waffles open when I walk.
I’m at chin level, therefore, trying to work the conversation around to our project—trying to be heard over the flamingo squeals of the Gay Boys’ club—something about water and near nudity has released their latent hysteria—when Blaise shows up. I see him coming through the gate, looking left and right, assessing the arrangement of familiar people around the pool, and selecting a chaise lounge as algebraically far away from the greatest number of us as it is possible to be.
“Yo, Blaise,” calls Francesca languidly, not letting him get away with it.
He raises his hand to signal he’s heard her, but keeps walking. He wears an oversized white T-shirt, and as he turns into the wind—a lovely, useful wind, the first and maybe only wind of the season—his shirt luffs up for a moment, revealing a glimpse of turquoise Speedos. No one notices that I’m staring, because everyone else’s eyes are also trained on that spot of color, a concentrated essence of Mediterranean sun on a blue-green sea. It startles me, I admit—not just the look of him, so attractive, so possessed, but that he who is so retiring would come to the pool in a suit so revealing.
Then he sits down and pulls his oversized shirt down to his upper thighs, and hauls out a book. I plunge underwater to be alone for an instant, alone with the picture in my mind of one curve of flesh sheathed in emerald blue.
We wait, we talk, we chatter, we pretend to work. Some swim. The gate is closed; other students who have raced in the sweltering heat from classes let out at 4:50 are turned away. “Fifteen minutes,” calls the lifeguard. I bet she too is hoping for a glimpse of our very own Greg Louganis in his peacock briefs. “Last chance for a swim.”
“Hey, Blaise,” calls Francesca, rising from her towel in her white-and-black glory, “ain’t you hot over there? You look hot. Come on in for some laps.”
He puts his hand to his eyes as if he hasn’t noticed anyone else at the pool. “Sure,” he says, and tosses his book aside. It feels as if the whole town is holding its breath. Abby Desroches begins to sing the chorus from Hall and Oates’s “Maneater.” For a second I think the gay boys, who burst into song at the slightest provocation, are going to chime in, but they’re too busy holding their own abs tight while Blaise passes. He reaches the pool’s edge and dives in. All any of us get is the merest glimpse of his iridescent behind, because he hasn’t shucked off his T-shirt. He swims in a T-shirt the size of a canvas sail. Figures.
Francesca dives after him with a flick of her own pink insteps, dismissing me good and proper. Well, if she can get Blaise’s attention she’s welcome to it. I don’t want to appear a voyeur. I leave the pool. No need to call my good-byes to anyone. No one is paying attention. I head for the locker room.
I’m half into my clothes when it occurs to me: I could have had a shower. I could be in the showers right now. Maybe he’s the kind of guy who likes to shower after a swim. If I’m there first it won’t look like I’m tracking him. Actually I shirk from showering in public, and in the high-school gym class I avoided it. The coach beat up on me until I told him it was against my religion. He couldn’t verify this one way or the other and he let it go with “Furriners.”
I’m shy about my body, even shyer about other people’s bodies, and I’m not easy being naked, but I grab a towel and hit the shower. I spend twenty lonely minutes getting myself as clean as I’ve ever been in my life. By the time I give up and turn the water off, the lifeguard in the hall is reaching her hand in the men’s locker room door, switching the lights on and off to hurry me up. “You’re the last one,” she brays. “What do you need a shower for after a swim?”
“Get the chlorine out of my hair,” I call back. She turns the lights out for good. I’m in a darkening, mildewy, empty locker room. Polar opposite of erotic. I kick the metal door closed so hard it bounces back and catches me in the knee. A small bite of blood. I deserve that, I think. And walk home.
Faroukh finds a parking lot on the campus, but it’s not half full. He must be early yet. The boys stir softly as the car slows.
He guides the car around the campus road. Some trees are gone. Some lawns have been filled in as parking lots. But in winter everything looks sparer. In the summer the big old maple behind Pierce made a green screen against anyone looking over from the third floor of Cabot next door. You could be next to naked in the back rehearsal room and no one would know. Unless someone had climbed up into the tree, of course.
He’s come all this way, and now Faroukh doesn’t think he can look up at that particular window. But he makes himself glance as the car turns, catches a portion of eave and roofline. There it is. No air-conditioning unit in it now. A shade. Pulled down. Is it still a rehearsal room? But Tupperneck is gone, the Episcopal Student Center is gone. What does the sign hammered onto the front porch say? He swivels his head. student archives. Pierce is probably a warehouse, its attic a place where old transcripts are stored. Entrance essays. Copies of senior theses. Year-books, maybe. One year shoved on top of the other, pressing themselves flat. The spice of a thousand lives, their reek, their innocent hopes, their unspoken dreads, reduced to paper and dust.
One day Francesca explodes at Professor Tod Farber. “Everything for you is, like, a love song,” she says. “‘Baby Beluga’ is a love song. ‘Officer Krupke’ is a love song. ‘America the Beautiful’ is a freakin’ love song. ‘Happy Birthday’ is a love song.”
“Ah-ha,” he says, pointing a too-manicured finger at her. “I never said that. You said it, Miss Comstock. You’re on to something important. So what does that mean?”
“It means you’re not getting enough,” she snaps. The class snorts and Tod Farber pulls himself up. His right hand smoothes the flowery black rayon of his sleek Montreal-style shirt, which is tucked ultraneatly into the top of his black cotton dress shorts. He’s always crisp and cool as a folded napkin on a table set for a formal goth dinner.
The class goes quiet. The heavy boy in the back, the indie-rock bottle blondes with phosphorescent plastic skeletons hanging from their ears, Blaise in the sultry coat of silence he wears like a penance. Abby Desroches, the minimalist from Vassar. The gay boys, all puppyish and fawning in the front row. No one likes Professor Farber. No one wants to see him trashed to his face, though.
“I was about to say, Keep the personal out of it,” he remarks at last. “But that would be against my code of pedagogy. Put the personal in it and you just might get somewhere, Miss Francesca. So why don’t you and your writing partner do me up thirty-two bars on the topic of someone you know ‘not getting enough,’ as you so directly state it. Ballad, anthem, patter, verse and chorus, your call.”
“Fuck you, Mr. Farber,” says Francesca.
“I gather that would solve the romantic problem you ascribe to me,” he replies acidly, though his expression turns sweeter by the moment, “but your remark doesn’t count as completion of the assignment. Leave the lyric to Faroukh Rahmani. Have it on my desk next week.”
He plunges from the room. The class still has twenty minutes to go, so no one is sure what to do next. The gay boys whisper. The big kid raps out a rhythm on the desktop.
“This is just so much bull,” says Francesca. “There must be some local mini-mart where we can buy ourselves better college credits than these?” She slams out of the room. I swivel to watch her go, which allows me legitimately to turn toward Blaise. He is hunched forward over his desktop, abstracted and serene as usual. His winter-wheat hair falls down over his forehead.
I don’t know if he sees me staring at him, or if anyone else does. When he glances up toward the door, his gaze sweeps past me without registering me. I turn, thinking it might be Francesca come back
, or Mr. Farber maybe. Standing at the door is Laurel Finn. A small suitcase on wheels. She looks pale and gluey from hauling it up the steps.
Faroukh keeps the car slowly rolling. He isn’t ready to submit to the necessary moment; but Matthias is stretching, and true to form, he begins to pinch Jamesy to wake him up too. “Don’t, Matthias, please,” says Faroukh.
“Are we there yet?” says Matthias. Jamesy begins to wail.
“Give this to him,” says Faroukh, passing back a sippy cup he’s had at the ready for some time.
“I want to go home,” says Matthias.
“I didn’t say throw it at him. You said you’d be good, Matthias.”
“I was good.” While he was sleeping Matthias was good. Fair enough.
Faroukh doesn’t believe in bribing kids with food, especially not kids from Hispanic backgrounds. He has read too much about juvenile diabetes afflicting Central American kids who scarf down the junk diet prevalent in the States. Still, today is a challenge; first things first. He steers the car back onto Perimeter Road. There’s still a half hour. He’ll go into the center of town, find a place to change Jamesy, freshen them all up. Nothing brings you down to earth like a baby’s diapers.
“Jamesy’s dropping his goldfish in the cigarette thing and there’s cigarette things in there.”
Did 007 ever get married and have kids? How did he keep from slaughtering them with some cunning mechanical device left over from his salad days?
Not for the first time this trip, Faroukh thinks of his own father. He wishes he could say, I get it, Baba. I get it. But it’s too late for that now.
“Jamesy’s eating the cigarette things.”
I can’t bring myself to speak. Instead it is Abby Desroches who says, “You looking for Professor Farber? He left.”
“Faroukh?” says Laurel.
“What are you doing here?”
Do I really bark my greeting so rudely? I’ve apparently given a cue for everyone to pack up their books. Farber’s not coming back and Francesca’s not coming back. The next scene is starting and they’re not in it.