by Michael Cart
“It’s a free country,” says Laurel.
“Whoa, comin’ through,” says the fat boy. He hears the cudgel in her simple words and wants no part of this. Laurel moves aside so he can get past.
I’m thinking, shit, I’m thinking, stalker, I’m thinking, revenge visit. I’m thinking, no way. “Want to get a soda over at the student union?”
She neither nods nor objects but darts a sideways glance at Blaise, who is standing up. “Are you feeling all right?” he says. It’s the first time he’s addressed anyone in three weeks. And he’s talking to Laurel Finn. Is this my life? I feel as if I’m going to pass out.
“I’m a bit peaky,” she says. “I walked from the gas station but I took a wrong turn by the Rexall and had to backtrack.”
“How’d you know how to find me?” I ask. Though who cares: She’s found me.
“Sit down, anyway,” says Blaise, looking at me as if I’m a cretin. We’re the only ones left in the classroom now. The gay boys are twittering as they dance down the stairwell. They’re all agog over Blaise of course, but at least they have one another to whisper with.
I don’t want to talk to Blaise, I don’t want to introduce them, I don’t want any part of this. “This is Laurel Finn,” I say. The phrase a friend of mine comes up, but I can’t say it. I don’t think it’s true anymore.
“Right,” he says, and shoulders his knapsack. “Keep out of the sun.”
This is as close to being alone as Blaise and I have ever been. If he leaves? Laurel will turn cryptic and weird on me. “We’re going to get a soda,” I say. “Want to come?” My desperation is blatant enough to blister the wallpaper and steam the windows.
He pauses. “I was supposed to work with Professor Farber after this session. But I don’t know if he’s left campus or what. I guess I better go to the rehearsal room.” He nods to Laurel. “Nice meeting you,” he says, and to me—the tiniest half glance, as if he’s never noticed me before in the class, and I believe he never has—“Another time, maybe.”
His calves pistoning, his backpack thwacking on those shoulders, his hair sheafing. He disappears down the stairs. Another time. Maybe.
I’m safe because I have a girlfriend. He can talk to me because I have a girlfriend. I’m not a threat like Professor Tod Farber or the gay boys or who knows else. You look like Blaise d’Anjou, you have a name like a celebrity chevalier out of La Chanson de’Roland, and the whole world is hitting on you, wanting to chummy up. Wanting to curry favor. Wanting you to look at them.
I could almost be glad of Laurel Finn, for a moment. When might another time happen?
“I’m pregnant,” says Laurel.
I look her in the eye. I say, “How’s your finger?”
The village of Tupperneck has changed more than the campus. They’ve rerouted the main street and put in a sad little city park. The snow has a charcoal crust. Faroukh negotiates an angled parking spot and locates a fast-food joint.
He changes Jamesy. He orders a coffee and two chocolate milks and then, surrendering to expediency, adds two packets of fries. He knows the boys will eat less than half a packet and spill the rest on the floor. But it buys him a little more time. The event starts in twenty minutes. He doesn’t want to be the first one there. He wants to lurk in the back. In the shadows, as much as he can. As much as Jamesy and Matthias will let him.
He loves them so. With their little clumsy fingers doing sword fights with the French fries. The sweet clammy smell of little boys. The sweet clammy smell of family. “Not in your hair, Jamesy. Matthias, not in your hair either.”
“It’s blood.”
“It’s ketchup and don’t waste it.”
Don’t waste your own breath, he tells himself. When did boys ever listen to their dads?
I walk downstairs with Laurel, back to the porch. Since Blaise has gone, the other students have disappeared too. The campus wilts as if the sun were storming it from every angle at once. I take care not to guide Laurel by the elbow. I hold the door open for her, that’s all. I’d do the same for Auntie Nurjahan. I’d do it for Francesca or for Professor Farber, for that matter. It doesn’t mean anything.
The student union is nearly deserted because it’s a Friday; everyone who can manage it flees for the weekend after morning classes. A woman with some sort of learning disability pushes a broom into the wall and leaves the dirt in a line by the baseboard. There isn’t even a cashier so I drop a dollar fifty on the register and we help ourselves to drinks. I get a Coke, Laurel a glass of milk. Though there are booths to one side, I steer Laurel to a table right in the middle of the room. I have nothing to hide.
After her first sip, she says, “You ran away.”
“I flunked my AP English final. You probably heard.”
She shrugs, as if I must have schemed to flunk my English final so I could have an excuse to leave town. “Are you coming back?”
“If I pass this course and get my financial aid restored, I’ll be at Colchester in September. Like I planned.”
“I mean are you coming back to Tonawanda between now and September? When this little charade is done?”
A little charade just about covers it, but I don’t want Laurel to know that. “I’m not sure.” And I’m not. I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.
“Milk sometimes makes me throw up,” she says, taking a big sip. “I never can tell.”
“We’ll know soon enough.”
Like a fourth grader, she sips some liquid up into the straw and then moves her finger over onto the top of it. She lifts the straw so its bottom is three inches above the rim of the glass. A white drop forms on the tip, defying the tension of suction, and she lets it fall onto the tabletop.
“I’m pregnant.”
“So you said.”
“I’m sure about it too.”
“Clarity’s useful. Why are you telling me about it? Do you want congratulations?”
“You know why I’m telling you about it.”
“I’m not even going to talk to you about it if you begin to suggest anything.”
“Who’s suggesting anything? Got something on your mind, do you?”
“I think I’m going to throw up. Laurel, I’m not going into this. Glad you came, hope you liked the bus ride, don’t know what you’re doing tonight but I’m busy. This has nothing to do with me. I’m not going to spend one moment letting you pretend to us both that it does.”
“I talked to your father,” she says. “I had to convince him not to come up here. He says it will give your mother a headache so big she will die, so you better not tell her.”
I govern myself. “So how’s old Baba? Keeping well?”
“You didn’t used to be so mean.” Her eyes fill up. “When did all this happen?”
“People use each other all the time,” I say. “I take responsibility for what I did, Laurel. I’m not answering for what I didn’t do. Either you’re faking a pregnancy or you’ve been seeing someone else. You know it wasn’t me. You know it couldn’t be me. And stop doing that thing with the straw, it’s creepy.”
“Is he your boyfriend? That kid in the class you invited to join us?”
I pretend I don’t hear that. “Or putting the best spin on it, you’re simply mistaken. I hear the tests can be wrong, you know. Did you do it twice?”
“Did I ‘do it’? Twice?”
We leave it at that. Leave the milk and the soda. Walk in the heat. She has already arranged to stay at Auntie Nurjahan’s.
“Stay as long as you like,” I say. “Move in. You can take my place in the family, and be Baba’s new ticket to American life. I’ll find digs somewhere around here.”
“Should I worry about, you know?” she says.
“‘You know?’”
“The virus. The gay virus. They say straight people can catch it.”
“You can worry about whatever you want. I don’t think being gay is any more contagious than being straight.”
Which is the most awful thing I
have ever said in my life up to then, because I know what she means. But I won’t give her the dignity of letting her words sound possible. Not a single syllable of them.
“In a song,” says Professor Farber, “every word has to be true. Every note. One false step, it collapses. A song is too brief to get it wrong.” He smiles wryly at the ceiling, as if he wants to add, And so is life. But then we get life wrong all the time, don’t we? And it’s still life.
Left to myself, I head back to Pierce.
The boys are sensationally pleased, sparky and full of themselves. A little starch, a little attention, that’s all it takes. A little staying in one place. It works miracles. The fluorescent lights give Faroukh a headache, but he relaxes here. Nothing like the safe anonymity of a plastic booth cranked out of some factory and shipped the same to all forty-eight contiguous states. The ordinariness of it, the security of it. The color of it. Carmine red, a fake, glazed color, that does nothing for the appetite and less for the ego of the adult, but shows up the beautiful boys who are standing on the bench, leaning against the tabletop, grinning their gummy smiles at their incidental dad, creasing their cinnamon-roll cheeks and chins at him.
And here is Tod Farber, barreling up the steps of Pierce at 7 P.M. on a Friday evening. He’s sporting a waist-length dark charcoal jacket, cut snug at the hip and becomingly broad in the padded shoulders. So trendy that I become suspicious. “Why, it’s none other than our young Faroukh Rahmani,” he says. “I haven’t seen you burning the midnight oil here before. Are you working overtime with Miss Comstock on that little ditty I assigned?”
“Francesca’s remark had nothing to do with me,” I say. “I don’t know why I should get saddled with a punishment assignment.”
“Roll with the punches, my boy. Being in the business means doing the work that’s thrown your way. Call it the cost of collaboration.” His cheer is unctuous. “She’s talented, you know, behind that posturing. And she knows it. She might be the one among you to make it. There’s always got to be someone.”
“And I’m chopped liver?” I can’t help myself. Through no fault of his own, Professor Farber is getting the backlash of my irritation at Laurel.
“You,” he replies, “as I remember, are a Shakespeare sonneteer gone south. Not that I mind. You’ll find something to contribute here, or something to remember later. Everything is useful if you figure out how. Where’s Francesca, then?”
“I haven’t seen her since class. We made no plans to get together tonight.”
“Is that so.” He is carefully working a set of keys out of his tight trousers so as not to stretch the fabric. “You’re doing some wordsmith business here alone, then? Why not at the dorm? Too noisy?”
“I don’t have a dorm room. I don’t have a place tonight. I’m sort of exiled from my aunt’s house.”
“I see.” I have caught him in midstride, though I haven’t meant to, really. “Footloose and fancy free, are we?”
“Not that free.”
At least he laughs. “Surely you don’t charge?”
But this is too glib; I’m being whirled out of my depth by this grown-up game of double entendre. I can’t compete; I’m too lost, too earnest: I know that about myself. It’s what pulled the wool over Laurel’s eyes about my friendship with her. Over my own eyes too.
“I don’t have a place to stay,” I say at last. “I was hanging out here hoping someone would show up.”
“Someone,” he says lightly. “Which someone?”
I don’t have the answer on my tongue. Not for him.
“I’ll give a ring to one of your chums in the class, if you like,” he says. “When I get to my office. Anyone special?”
He’s wanting me to say it and I won’t. I can’t. I shrug.
“Come up?” he asks. I shake my head. “I’ll call down then if I rouse someone for you.”
Ten minutes later he trills, “Herbie says you can flatten out on his floor. He has a sleeping bag. He’s in Coolidge 317. The door will be propped open with a bike pump.”
“Thanks.” I mean it as much as I can. Herbie is the fat guy. Nice enough. Clearly a good soul. Not Blaise.
And I’m halfway across campus before I think: So what is Professor Farber doing in Pierce at that hour? All dolled up like that? He’s still collaborating with Blaise d’Anjou. Maybe they’re working together in one of the rehearsal rooms.
I remember the maple tree. How hard could it be to scale?
Not hard at all, it turns out. And even though the windows are black, I climb the branches slowly, hoping campus security doesn’t train spotlights on me. How would I explain this to Tod Farber? To anyone?
I get up to a good height and peer in all the windows I can. I don’t know what I want to see. The professor attacking the student with lust. The student beating the professor back. The student succumbing with eagerness. I don’t know.
I want to see myself in that room, that’s what I want. But the rectangle above the air-conditioner is black. If Blaise is in there, I can’t see him. I can’t see anything except a faint reflection of myself among maple leaves, like a ghost from the future, peering back at my feeble unorganized life during the summer between high school and college.
And now it’s time to go.
The kids allow themselves to be slung back in the car. They giggle at the curves, rolling into each other as best they can given the seat belts. They don’t swipe at each other, or taunt. Perfect children, these few moments when no one is watching them.
This time, coming from the other direction, Faroukh sees the sign at the edge of the satellite state university campus. Now the place is called the Tupperneck Arts Division. Plastic letters on a portable sidewalk marquee announce tonight’s event.
Herbie’s cool. I tell him more about Laurel than I expect to. The misunderstood cues, the sudden lunges, the feints toward normalcy, the aborted seduction. The shame, the misery on both sides, the loss of face. And then Laurel’s impossible accusation. Impossible. On top of her broken finger.
“What if she did it with someone else and is going to name you as the father, though?” says Herbie. “Sheesh.”
“It’s a total non-event,” I reply. “Chill out. She’s not in the club yet.”
“Maybe she is now. Maybe you pushed her toward someone with more, um, oomph.”
“Maybe you should go soak your head, okay?”
Herbie says conversationally, “Maybe. Don’t jump down my throat.”
“No worry about that.”
He laughs. “I’m not worried. I could roll over you and squash you silly. Anyway, you’re not into that and neither am I.”
I say, with a relief I try to disguise, “What’re you into, then?”
Herbie closes his eyes. “Depeche Mode. Depeche Mode and the Deller Consort. The Grosse Fugue. And Laura Nyro, the early stuff. And extra-crispy KFC. And some pot when I can get my hands on it. You?”
Me? I’m into Keats, and Shakespeare when I can understand him, and Emily Dickinson. Them, and Blaise d’Anjou. His shoulders. His waist. His calves. His thighs. His muscled—Well, his style.
Not his eyes, though, for who has seen his eyes? He doesn’t give a glance away for love nor money.
Have I telepathically infected the silence? Out of nowhere, Herbie says, “So what do you think is the big deal with that Blaise guy?”
“Big deal?”
“You know. He’s so—secretive. Aloof. Thinks he’s better than the rest of us?”
I know better than to begin to defend him. “Beats me.”
Herbie rolls over and almost at once starts to snore, as I imagine a manatee might, if manatees snore. I climb into the sleeping bag. In this dorm room I feel arbitrary, overlooked, and welcome, all at once.
Now the parking lot is filling up. A traffic boy waves a red baton to signal Faroukh a space, but Faroukh deviates toward the small lot behind the old library—in case he wants to leave as soon as he gets there. No incoming traffic to deal with.
Is that Abby Desroches getting out of the blue SUV?
Next morning I ring Auntie Nurjahan at her job. “Is she still here?” I ask.
“Your friend, you mean,” says Auntie Nurjahan dryly.
“I’m referring to Laurel Finn, a girl I used to know from high school. Last month.” My formality is meant to be abrasive, and it works.
“She is here,” admits Auntie Nurjahan. “Later today I put her on bus home. One P.M. I hear more than I want to hear. But Faroukh-jan, I still am not believing she has baby inside. No matter what she says.”
“She can be pregnant if she wants. She can be—it doesn’t matter. Whatever she wants. It has nothing to do with me.”
“I believe you.” But I’m offended that Auntie Nurjahan even thinks she has to defend me. I’m her nephew. Laurel Finn is just some troubled girl who has invited herself across state lines hunting for me. Breaking into my life without my invitation.
“She is gone by time I get home from work,” says Auntie. “I make beautiful khoresht last night and still is plenty. Also fresh yogurt from scratch, very very nice.”
“I have to study for the midterm exam.” I’m punishing my aunt for any slight thing she has ever done wrong.
“You can study at home…Faroukh-jan?”
But Auntie Nurjahan’s doesn’t seem like home now.
Around three o’clock I turn up for a change of clothes, and I lift forty bucks from my aunt’s cash stash hidden under the plastic silverware tray in the drawer. I leave an IOU under the tray and a note on the fridge: WORKING HARD. GONNA ACE THIS ONE, INSHALLAH. STAYING ON CAMPUS F. Intentionally vague about my whereabouts. Herbie is being easygoing. I think he imagines me as a kind of liberated parakeet who shows up on his windowsill. He feeds me crumbs and doesn’t scare me away. That’s enough, for the time being.
Wednesday the great heat inversion is cut for a day by a mass of thunderheads moving through the region. They circle about leaving huge wakes of rain. Everyone is drenched by the time they get to Pierce 203. I twist at the door, trying to shake off my curls. Blaise is a few feet away, slicking water off his front, pressing his hands against his Oxford shirt. He doesn’t have a T-shirt on underneath; I can tell by his nipples standing up against the yellow cotton when his hands press against his abs. A different wetness rises on either side of my mouth, bathing either side of my tongue. “Damp outside,” I say, glamorously stupid.