Joe College Page 12

  “What’s the coat got to do with it?”

  “I didn’t want him to notice me if he passed in his car.” She pulled a gray rag watch cap out of a pocket. “I wore this too. I bet my hair’s a mess, right?”

  “You went incognito?” I would have laughed if she hadn’t looked so serious. The guy was a Shakespeare scholar, not someone you needed to hide from in an ugly coat.

  “He has this way of finding me,” she said, casting a nervous glance down the length of the hallway. “And if he finds me I just end up doing what he wants.”

  She covered her face with both hands and began shaking her head back and forth, moaning like someone who realizes she’s making a big mistake, but is going to go through with it anyway. I remembered my own mysterious fit of moaning outside the J.E. gate and wondered if the night was taking me into deeper water than I could handle. But when she pulled her hands away from her face, she smiled like nothing was wrong.

  “Come on,” she said, grabbing hold of my wrist. “Let’s dance.”

  Despite my cavalier promises to the contrary, I had arrived at Manuscript that night with no intention of dancing. If pressed, I expected to do to Polly what I’d done to other girls at other parties. I’d take her aside, put on a thoughtful, sadly resolute expression, and make her understand that I simply didn’t do it, that it wasn’t just a preference, like not smoking or not going to church, but an essential and immutable part of my identity.

  Why don’t you go ahead without me, I might have begun, I’ll just stand here in the doorway and watch …

  I’d keep talking for as long as it took—it didn’t usually take that long—to convince her that I was serious, accepting her momentary irritation and baffled shrug as the price I had to pay for keeping faith with my high school self, the sixteen-year-old who believed that Disco Sucked and that dancing (for guys, anyway) was a violation of the unwritten code of rock ‘n’ roll—maybe not Richie Cunningham sock hop rock ‘n’ roll, which was nearly as pathetic as disco anyway, but the Real Thing, leather-pants guitar-hero sex-with-groupies rock ‘n’ roll—though the code did permit you to bob your head in time with the music and punch your fist in the air. You just weren’t allowed to move your feet unless you were an actual member of the band. It was hard to put all this into words, so I had to smile regretfully and say things I didn’t really mean, like Maybe if I drink a little more, or I’m a little self-conscious, which almost always did the trick. The girls I hung around with at college were very respectful of my feelings of self-consciousness.

  That night, though, the flow of events caught me off guard. Before I could launch into my speech or even compose my expression, Polly had led me into the atrium, tossed her parka on the floor, and begun dancing without the slightest hesitation or transition, as though it were a perfectly natural form of behavior. The room was sweaty and crowded now, the loud, pulsating heart of the party. Eyes half-closed, smiling faintly, she held out her hand like a lifeline as she began drifting away from me, insinuating herself into the throng of moving bodies behind her. I pressed back against the wall, shaking my head no, No, I couldn’t possibly.

  I felt so stupid just then, I could hardly bear it. “Rock the Casbah” was playing, a totally respectable song, and no one was paying any attention to me, no one except a ghost floating above the dancers, a long-haired kid with aviator glasses and a Jethro Tull T-shirt. He was watching me warily, his eyes full of quiet pleading. Remember me? he seemed to say. Remember all the good times we had? I looked at Polly for a few seconds—her eyes were all the way closed now, slender arms aloft, her body in fluid motion—then back at the kid. I would have apologized, but he was already gone, spared the sight of me wading away from the wall and into the crowd of dancers, smiling the way you do down the shore, when the sun is hot but the ocean’s colder than you expected.

  It was strange and awful in the beginning, a bad dream made flesh. I was the Dork-in-chief, the Anti-Dancer, the Fred Astaire of Spaz. My arms moved and my legs moved, but these movements had little to do with the music, and even less to do with fun. They were abrupt and jerky, the flailings of a defective marionette. I needed oil. The beat was a distant rumor. If I’d been in water I would have drowned. To make matters worse, everyone else on the dance floor suddenly seemed improbably fluid and limber, full of tricky spins and Soul Train swivels. I mean, they were Yalies. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry majors. People who petitioned to take seven courses in one semester so they wouldn’t have to choose between Introductory Sanskrit, Medieval Architecture, and that senior seminar on Finnegans Wake. Where had they learned to dance like this? Groton? Choate? Some special summer camp my parents hadn’t heard about?

  The only thing that amazed me more than their collective grace was their collective lack of interest in the spectacle I was making of myself. I half-expected them to gather in a circle to point and snicker, but whether out of politeness or self-absorption, they moved past me as if I didn’t exist. Polly opened her eyes for a second, smiled at me, then closed them again. I couldn’t believe I was getting away with it. I felt relieved and bewildered at the same time, like a stoned hippie in a tie-dyed shirt breezing through customs with ten pounds of pot hidden in his guitar case.

  Joe Strummer made way for David Bowie. “Young Americans” was a longer song than I’d realized; it just kept going on and on, the sheer tedium of it offering a kind of release. I stopped trying to dance, surrendering my body to auto pilot and reflecting instead on my argument with Eric, the way he managed to get me to take the bait. Chickenshit George Eliot, I thought, and the unlikeliness of the phrase made me laugh out loud. Polly looked up. She was waiting out the saxophone solo, shuffling in place, letting her head loll lazily from side to side. Her face was damp, flushed with exhilaration. She stuck her tongue out and panted like a dog.

  “God,” she said. “We should do this more often.”

  I broke a sweat on “Pump It Up” and began to unclench a little. I had been dancing for maybe fifteen minutes at that point, and my anxiety had ebbed to a manageable level. I’m invisible, I kept reminding myself, No one knows I’m here. I wasn’t having fun exactly, but I did register the first rumblings of self-congratulation, the secret pride that comes when you face up to fears that other people don’t even know you possess.

  “Super Freak” was my breakthrough. As soon as I heard those familiar bass notes, I began to move differently. My legs felt bouncy and strong, like I’d just removed a pair of ankle weights. The beat was obvious and I let it take me where it wanted. When I get to her room, she’s got incense, wine, and can-dles … Polly swung her hair back and forth as she sang along; there was a startled look of illicit pleasure on her face, as if she’d achieved a state of mystical union with Rick James. It’s such a freaky scene … Yow!

  In fact, the whole room seemed to have undergone some sort of transformation, like water come to a boil. People collided and spun, careening through the crowd, changing partners and moving on in some kind of manic, free-form square dance. A sweaty football player banged into me, almost knocking me down. When my balance returned I found myself moving at a higher frequency, my arms and legs churning effortlessly, as though my body were a machine powered by the song.

  “Woo!” I shouted, punching the air like John Travolta.

  Once, back in high school, I’d gotten stoned and watched a Popeye cartoon. In this particular episode, at the low point of the pre-spinach narrative, Popeye had been turned into a punching bag, his feet rooted to the ground, his arms pressed uselessly to his sides. Bluto pummelled him without mercy, his fists a blurry windmill of punishment. Popeye’s clothes fell off first, followed by a host of strange objects they’d apparently been concealing—a lantern, a spy glass, a ship’s wheel, a life preserver, an anchor—the tools and debris of a lifetime spent at sea. I wondered if something similar wasn’t happening to me as I danced, if burdens I hadn’t even known I was carrying were falling away from my body. High school dropped away. The 1970s. New Jer
sey. The years I’d spent sitting on the bench, waiting for my shot at gridiron glory. The guitars I’d never quite learned to play. The girls who wouldn’t look at me. The friends I’d lost. The people I’d hurt. My crummy summer jobs. The whole accumulated weight of the past. I felt lighter and lighter, pumped full of fresh air, and though my feet remained rooted to the ground, I experienced an odd sensation of rising, a slow inexorable ascent, as though I were moving upward on an invisible escalator, dancing my way into a brighter and easier future.

  “Woo!” I shouted again, just in case anyone hadn’t heard me the first time.

  fornicators

  “Oh man,” Matt shook his head, resting a compassionate hand on my shoulder. “Man oh man.”

  “Yes?” I was standing next to him at the beverage table, sipping flat club soda with no ice while Polly waited on line for a turn in the bathroom. A struggle for control of the stereo had resulted in a string of REO Speedwagon and Journey tunes that had cleared the dance floor as effectively as an attack of poison gas. We were biding time, charging our batteries for the inevitable counterstrike.

  “Sweet Lordy,” he replied, administering a gentle squeeze to my trapezius muscle. “Are you the worst dancer in the world or what?”

  “Fuck you,” I said, twisting out of his grasp.

  “I didn’t mean it as an insult,” lie assured me. “It was more of an observation.”

  “Oh well in that case, fuck you.”

  “Just ignore him,” Jessica told me. “You did fine.”

  “You know what?” I said. “No one was even watching me.”

  “I was,” Matt volunteered. “Wanna know what you looked like?”

  He set his plastic beer cup down on the table, twisted his face into a moronic grimace, and lurched into motion, shifting his weight from one leg to the other like a clumsy giant while simultaneously jabbing at the air in every possible direction, as though trying to punch out a swarm of flies.

  “Come on everybody,” he called out, the lures on his fishing cap flapping up and down as he stomped. “Let’s do the Danny.”

  Under normal circumstances, I would have felt exposed and mortified by this sort of personalized public mockery, but that night I had attained a lofty state of detachment. This was about Matt, I realized, not about me. The longer he kept up the joke, the sorrier I felt for him.

  “Help me, Jesus!” he cried out. “I’m a dancing fool!”

  He tucked his chin down into his chest, hunching his shoulders like Frankenstein as he began to run in place, pumping his knees and elbows with jerky exaggeration. There was a startled, almost desperate look on his face.

  “I can’t stop!” he shouted, loud enough that people around us began to take notice. “I’ve got dance fever!”

  I was distracted for a moment by the sight of a girl in equestrian clothes—the weird beige pants, the shiny knee boots, even the little black jockey’s cap—squeezing between Matt and Jess on her way to the table, like a lawn ornament come to life. All she needed was the little lantern. Without the slightest hesitation or change of expression, she plunged her hand into the punch bowl and pulled out a Rolex watch.

  “I’ve been looking all over for this,” she informed me in a sweet Southern accent. “My Daddy would’ve killed me if I’d lost it.”

  Though privately I thought she might have at least used the ladle, I shrugged to indicate my lack of jurisdiction in the matter and turned back to Matt. By this time, his imitation of me seemed to have evolved into some sort of one-man impersonation of the Three Stooges. He’d begun slapping himself in the head with distressing enthusiasm, emitting little whoops of joy in response to each self-inflicted blow. I watched in pained fascination, oddly unsurprised by the spectacle, as if something latent in his everyday behavior had finally found its way to the surface.

  “Take that!” he growled, striking himself in the forehead with the palm of his right hand while his left fist spun threateningly in the air above his head. “Why I oughta—”

  Before he could make good on this threat to clobber himself, Jessica grabbed a cup of beer off the table and flung it in his face. The splash stopped him cold. His shoulders sagged; he dropped his arms to his sides and stood there helplessly, breathing hard and looking vaguely bewildered as the yellow liquid ran down his face and dribbled off the brim of his crooked hat. He glanced at me, then shifted his attention to the floor.

  “Sorry,” he muttered, sticking out his tongue to catch a stray droplet about to detach itself from the tip of his nose.

  “It’s okay,” I told him. “Forget about it.”

  “It’s not okay,” Jess said sharply. “Can’t we go to a party just once without you doing something stupid?”

  “I was trying,” he insisted, his voice contrite and defiant at the same time. He wiped his sleeve across his mouth. “I thought you’d like it.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “I love it when my boyfriend makes an ass of himself in public.”

  The polo player—or whatever she was—stood nearby, licking the punch off her Rolex as she eavesdropped on this discussion. She kept this up for longer than could have been necessary, almost as if she’d come to think of the watch as a lollipop. I got so engrossed in watching her that I failed to notice right away that Polly had returned from the bathroom. Her presence didn’t really register on me until she’d dug her fingers into my wrist and yanked so hard on my arm that both of us almost ended up on the floor.

  “Come on,” she said, addressing me in a no-nonsense voice I hadn’t heard from her before. In her borrowed coat and hat, she seemed no more familiar to me than the jockey. “We’re outta here.”

  Polly wasn’t running exactly, but she was walking so fast that it was hard to keep up with her, let alone carry on a conversation. We had already turned the corner onto Park Street and were rushing past the sub shop before she managed to explain that we were fleeing from Peter Preston, who had apparently crashed the party a few minutes earlier.

  “You didn’t see him?” she asked breathlessly.

  I shook my head. “There was all this weird stuff going on by the punch bowl. Did you have a scene?”

  “No, thank God.” She glanced quickly over her shoulder. “I was in the bathroom when he went by. Ingrid saw him go downstairs. She said he looked furious.”

  “Maybe he ran into Eric,” I speculated. “That should give us a couple hours’ head start.”

  I thought that might get a chuckle out of her, but the next thing I knew she had dropped to her knees right there on the sidewalk, gesturing feverishly for me to do the same. We waited like that, crouching in the shadow of a parked car, until three sets of headlights had passed, then jumped up and hustled across the street, darting into the labyrinth of footpaths behind the drama school. Once we were safely hidden from the street, Polly leaned back against a skinny tree and pulled off her watch cap. I felt a huge surge of relief as her hair spilled out, softening the angles of her face, making her look like herself again.

  “God,” she said, wiping one hand across her brow and sighing like an actress. “That was close.”

  The pause that followed was so awkward and romantic, I had no choice but to kiss her. Her lips parted and her arms tightened around my back, and I understood right away that her plans for us to sleep together remained unshaken. This was a relief to me, of course, but not as much as it should have been. For reasons I couldn’t quite identify, I felt disturbingly insulated from the moment and from Polly herself. I’d spent months waiting to kiss her like this, and now that it was happening all I could think about was the party we’d just left—the thrill of dancing, the sound the beer made slapping into Matt’s face, the blank expression on the face of the girl licking her wristwatch—and what a good teacher Professor Preston had been, how much he’d taught me about Shakespeare.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, my voice trailing off. “I just …”

  She looked at me for a few seconds, he
r lips thoughtfully puckered, then reached up to unzip her jacket. She did it slowly, like a stripper, watching me the whole time.

  “Try it this way,” she said, wriggling out of the sleeves and letting the coat drop to the ground. “I’ll be more like kissing a girl.”

  We crossed York Street and slipped like thieves into Jonathan Edwards. We needed to be somewhere with a bed, and her room had been declared off-limits, due to the fact that Professor Preston supposedly had a key and no compunction about using it.

  “I just hope my roommates are out,” I said, giving her hand a little squeeze. “It’ll be hard for us to fornicate with them right in the next room.”

  “Not for me,” she laughed. “I’ll copulate right in the common room if I have to.”

  These words weren’t our own; they’d been given to us by the strangers who’d stumbled upon us only moments before. Polly’s decision to remove the coat had done wonders for my concentration, and by that point we were dry humping on the grass, using the borrowed parka as a kind of makeshift blanket. As a rule, dry humping was not a favorite activity of mine, but Polly’s dress had crept up around her hips and I could see the white of her panties glowing dimly through the stretchy opaque fabric of her tights as she pushed herself against me, and I felt as gratified and excited by this sight as an astronomer who discovers a new galaxy after a lifetime of pondering the emptiness of space. I was so transported, in fact, that my reaction to the sound of approaching footsteps was simply to ignore them, in the hope that the people attached to the feet would just mind their own business and go away.

  “Mark it, uncle,” a cheerful male voice called out. “Behold the beast with two backs.”