Joe College Page 28

“I’m having a little trouble getting motivated.”

  Max normally regarded the ringing phone with a pronounced lack of enthusiasm, but that night a different set of assumptions was clearly in effect. He sprang out of the chair, snatching up the phone and pressing it to his ear with a look of dread that quickly turned to relief.

  “It’s for you,” he told me.

  I rose wearily and accepted the receiver, which smelled like it had just been dipped in a vat of Old Spice.

  “Hello?”

  “Do you know what time it is?” Matt demanded, shouting to make himself heard over the loud music in the background.

  “What time is it?” I obediently replied.

  “It’s party time!” he bellowed. “Everybody’s waiting for you!”

  “Who’s everybody?”

  “Don’t waste my time with questions. Just get your ass over here. And bring your damn roommates.”

  He hung up before I could fill him in on the roommate issue, leaving me with an earful of dial tone. Conscious of Max’s scrutiny, I listened to it for a few seconds before setting the phone back in the cradle. I knew he wanted to get rid of me, knew he would have made himself scarce if I were the one wearing the leather tie and too much aftershave. Now that I was up off the couch, walking a few blocks to Matt’s house no longer seemed like such a craven act of surrender. As hard as I’d tried in the past few weeks, I found myself unable to stay mad at him. It was as if I’d discharged all my anger with that punch in the dining hall, and had nothing left to do but forgive him. And besides, it was just a party. Everyone was waiting for me.

  “All right,” I said. “I guess I’ll be heading out.”

  “Have a good time,” he told me. “Stay out as late as you want.”

  Cindy was on my mind a lot those days, way more than she’d been when we were actually going out together. By my calculation, she was about five months pregnant at that point, far enough along to be showing, and I had fabricated an image of her as a lovely and energetic mother-to-be, her face shining with contentment, her body unchanged except for the huge but still graceful swelling of her belly, which I sometimes pictured as being so large that she needed to support it from below with both hands, as though she were lugging a watermelon home from the supermarket. On some level I understood that this was not a realistic vision—I had taken to watching pregnant women on the streets of New Haven and realized pretty quickly that they were just as likely to be cranky and out-of-breath as they were to be radiant and full of vitality—but that didn’t make the image any less necessary or appealing to me.

  Perhaps because the imaginary Cindy was so familiar to me, I almost charged right past the real one on the steps of Entryway C, offering her no more than the obligatory nod I would have given to any passing stranger. But something—some muffled explosion in some remote region of my brain—made me pull up short and look again.

  “Cindy?”

  She stopped on the landing between the first and second floor. Her confusion seemed to mirror my own.

  “Danny?” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I live here.”

  “I know that.” She rolled her eyes. “I thought you were supposed to be at a party.”

  The strangeness of the moment fell on me all at once, and all I could do was stare at her.

  “What?” she said, looking worried in spite of her smile. She was wearing the tight blue dress I remembered fondly from the previous summer. “What’s wrong?”

  So many things were wrong just then it took me another few seconds to break the wrongness into its component parts. She had cut and lightened her hair and was going a lot easier on the makeup. She looked good, better than ever.

  “You aren’t—” I began, then stopped myself. “Where’s the baby?”

  Her smile disappeared. I hadn’t meant it to come out like that, more like an accusation than a question. She looked down, placing one hand on the flat of her stomach, as if she needed to double-check.

  “It’s not … I couldn’t—” Her voice broke and she started over. “I couldn’t go through with it.”

  “Did something happen with Kevin?”

  “It was me,” she said, shaking her head. “I just couldn’t—”

  I looked down, hoping to conceal the surprisingly sharp sense of disappointment that had taken hold of me, a feeling I had no right to and couldn’t fully account for.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I’m sorry you—”

  “It’s done,” she said. “I’m trying not to think about it.”

  I was about to thank her for taking the trouble to come all the way to New Haven to let me know, when my brain finally started functioning at full power.

  “You’re here to see Max, aren’t you?”

  “I thought I should at least meet him face-to-face,” she said. “I mean, we are going to be sharing a house this summer.”

  “You’re what?”

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  “We haven’t been talking too much.”

  “His mother offered me a job,” she said, unable to keep herself from smiling. “They need someone to manage the store.”

  “The store?”

  “Cara Mia. The boutique.”

  It took me a second to call up the fact that Mrs. Friedlin was part owner, along with a couple of friends, of a small clothing store in a fashionable neighborhood in downtown Denver. Max had explained it to me as an expensive hobby, a way for over-educated and under-employed women to convince themselves that they had a purpose in life beyond shopping and tennis and travel.

  “You’re moving to Denver?”

  “That’s the plan,” she said, looking like she couldn’t quite believe it herself. “The Friedlins said I could live in their house until I found a place of my own. They’re going to be in Ireland all summer anyway.”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “I already did. My car’s all packed and everything. I just figured I’d make a quick stop up here and say hi to Max before getting on the highway. Can you believe it? I’m gonna drive all the way to Colorado.”

  “What about your mother?” I said. “What’s going to happen to her?”

  Her face wasn’t happy, but it wasn’t apologetic, either.

  “She’s just gonna have to manage.”

  “You think she can?”

  “She’ll have to,” she said. There was a hardness in her voice I wasn’t familiar with. “I’ve taken care of her since I was a little girl. Now it’s someone else’s turn.” Almost as an afterthought, she added, “Her sister’s only an hour away.”

  “What about Kevin? How’s he feel about all this?”

  “What do you want from me?” she demanded. “How many chances like this you think I’m gonna get?”

  She wasn’t that far away, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to climb the three steps that separated us, joining her on the landing so I could hug her and tell her that it would be okay, that she was making the right choice, that her mother would be fine and everything would turn out right in Colorado, which is what I wanted to do. Instead I looked up at her and said, “Was it Max? Was this his idea?”

  An odd little smile came onto her face.

  “It was you,” she said.

  “Me?”

  “Something you said.”

  “What did I say?”

  She watched me closely, like she was trying to catch me in a lie.

  “That I deserve to be happy. Didn’t you tell me that?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Probably. I just wonder if you’ve thought this through.”

  She didn’t answer right away, and it struck me, pretty much out of nowhere, how empty the entryway seemed that night, as if the two of us were the only people in the building, and how different it had been during her last visit, this same stairwell packed tight with partying students, everything reeking of beer and echoing with laughter. She seemed a lot more at home this time around, no more out of place than I was
.

  “I couldn’t make up my mind at first,” she told me. “Then I asked myself what you would do.”

  dark side of the moon

  Matt answered the door in his hard hat and a Boy Scout shirt, a pair of expensive binoculars hanging from a cord around his neck.

  “Come on in,” he said, leading me up a creaky wooden stairway to his second-floor apartment. “Things are a little slow getting started.”

  Technically speaking, he hadn’t been lying when he said that everybody was waiting for me; he’d just neglected to explain that aside from himself, “everybody” meant Nick and Matt’s landlord, Lance, a skinny, wolfish guy I often saw prowling around the library, chatting up lonely undergraduate girls. They were sitting on lawn chairs in a room full of outdoor furniture, not to mention a potted palm and a nonfunctioning barbecue grill, regarding me with a certain amount of disappointment.

  “Step inside the Conceptual Patio,” Matt told me, drawing my attention to the keg in one corner of the room and the garbage can in another. “There’s the Michelob and there’s the Apollo Love Juice.”

  “Apollo Love Juice?”

  He handed me a rinsed-out mayonnaise jar filled with a nasty-looking orange concoction. “Grain alcohol and Tang. One glass and you’re in orbit.”

  “Two glasses and you’re on the dark side of the moon,” Lance added, popping a pretzel into his mouth. He had stringy, gray-streaked hair that fell well below his collar, and the haughty demeanor of a flamenco dancer.

  “Three and you’re on the edge of the known universe,” Matt continued with a giggle.

  “All right.” Nick held up his hand, silencing Lance before he could describe the effects of glass number four. “I’m gettin’ a little tired of this.”

  I pulled up a chair to form a circle of sorts with Matt and Lance, who were sipping their Love Juice and bobbing their heads in time with “Cold as Ice,” looking like they were about two seconds away from jumping up and dancing. Nick was sitting off to one side, glancing nervously in our direction.

  “There are going to be females at this party, aren’t there?” he asked.

  Matt and Lance exchanged amused glances.

  “What do you think, Karnak?” Matt asked his landlord. “Will there be females at this party?”

  Lance closed his eyes, pressed two fingers to each of his temples, and gave the question his full psychic consideration, struggling unsuccessfully to maintain a straight face.

  “Yes,” he said finally, sputtering with suppressed laughter as he carved an hourglass figure into the air. “I foresee a large number of females.”

  “Just checking,” Nick told him. “I don’t want to get in over my head here.”

  The mood on the Conceptual Patio darkened as time passed and our number remained steady at four.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong,” Matt was standing by the window, training his binoculars on the street below. “I figured more people would be here by now.”

  “It’s early,” Lance reminded him. “The real party animals haven’t even climbed out of their coffins yet.”

  “You sure you invited girls?” Nick asked again, this time more anxiously.

  Lance sat up straight in response to this question, crossed his arms on his chest, and treated Nick to an imperious, heavy-lidded stare. I half expected him to leap up from his lawn chair, snap his fingers, and shout, “Olé!”

  “Do I look like a fool?” he inquired darkly. “I invited only girls.”

  “Thirty-seven of them,” Matt added. “We made a list.”

  “Fifteen were possible no-shows,” said Lance. “Twelve were likelies, and the rest were probables.”

  “What about the band?” Nick asked. “Didn’t you say there was going to be a band?”

  “They backed out,” Matt informed him. “There was some confusion about the date.”

  “No girls, no band,” Nick grumbled.

  “Don’t worry, though,” Matt continued, trying to cheer us up. “I’ve got some live entertainment lined up that’s even better.”

  Nick wasn’t reassured.

  “You call this an orgy?” he asked, glaring at me like the party was my idea.

  “I never said it was an orgy. It’s just—” I paused, searching for the right description. “It’s just a little get-together.”

  “Don’t pull this get-together shit on me,” he warned. “You called it a fucking orgy.”

  By ten thirty, Lance and Matt had each consumed enough Apollo Love Juice to have pushed beyond the boundaries of the known universe, though neither one of them seemed particularly drunk to me. Nick was halfway through his second cup, and he had become a lot more cheerful since making the switch. I was the laggard, not even in orbit yet, content to sit on my lawn chair and sink deeper into the melancholy that had taken hold of me since my talk with Cindy. I wondered if she and Max were still in the common room, making awkward stabs at small talk, or if they had migrated to a fancy restaurant, where they were laughing over a bottle of wine, planning their big summer in Colorado. I was jealous, of course, but not in the obvious way—it seemed to me that Cindy was the interloper, not Max, that she was the one homing in on something that was rightfully mine, though it was hard for me to identify what that something was.

  “Oh, I could have continued with my graduate work,” Lance declared, drilling Nick with the unnerving gaze he used to plumb the souls of the girls he befriended at the library. “I could have finished my thesis, taken a professorship, and committed slow intellectual suicide. But I chose the road less traveled.”

  “Took some guts,” Nick commented. “Professors got a pretty good deal.”

  “I respect the life of the mind too much to reduce it to a job,” Lance replied, pausing to shovel a handful of peanuts into his mouth. “I prefer the Greek ideal of leisurely contemplation.”

  “That’s Greek?” Nick seemed puzzled. “The Greeks I know work their asses off. A lot of them are in the restaurant business.”

  “I’m not talking about modern-day Greeks.” Lance’s expression soured, as if the mere thought of non-ancient Greeks left a taste in his mouth. “I’m working from a classical model.”

  Nick swirled the Love Juice in his plastic cup as though it were expensive brandy. “So what do you do for a living?”

  “I live,” Lance told him, delivering this pronouncement with melodramatic conviction.

  “I mean for money,” Nick explained patiently.

  “Ah, money.” Lance’s face relaxed. “It always comes down to that, doesn’t it?”

  “The almighty dollar,” said Nick.

  Lance smiled in rueful agreement. “The monthly pound of flesh.”

  “What can you do? Gotta pay the man his money.”

  “Render unto Caesar and so forth.”

  “Amen,” replied Nick. “You mind passing those peanuts?”

  Matt excused himself to make some phone calls and returned with a somber expression. He shook his head in response to whatever question it was Lance hadn’t yet asked him.

  “Really?” Lance looked baffled. “Not even Caroline?”

  “No answer,” Matt told him.

  “Maybe she’s on her way,” Lance speculated. “What about Sarah and Mary Beth?”

  “Sarah thinks she’s got food poisoning. Mary Beth’s line was busy.”

  “At least Amy and Michiko will come,” Lance insisted. “That much I’m certain of.”

  “I’m sorry,” Matt told me. “I didn’t expect it to turn out like this.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s a perfectly good party.”

  “Don’t forget Allison,” Lance called out. “She said she’d probably be a little late.”

  Just then the doorbell rang, the harsh cry of the buzzer slicing through the accumulated gloom. Matt cocked his head at a drastic angle, like a dog hearing a distant whistle. When it rang again, he stumbled backwards, clutching at his chest.

  “Oh my God. It’s gonna happen. I
can feel it.”

  “See?” Lance held out both hands with an air of personal vindication. “What did I tell you?”

  Matt took a couple of steps toward the door, then turned back around. He stared at us for a couple of seconds, shaking his head as if we didn’t quite measure up.

  “Come on, you guys. At least try to look like you’re having fun.”

  In spite of this injunction, we fell into an immediate and embarrassed silence the moment he left the room. Nick whipped a comb out of his back pocket and went to work while Lance sprayed a few blasts of Binaca into his mouth, then made some last-second adjustments to his eyebrows. I untucked my shirt and began polishing my glasses. By the time Matt stepped back into the apartment with the new arrival in tow, all three of us were staring right at the door, unable to conceal first our curiosity, and then our disappointment. Matt’s crestfallen expression mirrored our own.

  “Guy’s,” he said. “This is Eric. Eric, this is the guys.”

  Eric was a bold statement in his orange flight suit and black velvet cape, his eyes glittering with intellectual challenge. To my amazement, he only considered me for a fleeting second before turning the full force of his attention on Lance, who had suddenly become very interested in what may or may not have been a spot on his pants.

  “You,” Eric said, as if picking the landlord out of a lineup. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  Lance looked up and nodded sadly, a condemned man accepting his fate.

  “Hello, Eric,” he said. “It’s nice to see you again.”

  Eric pounced on the empty chair next to Lance and immediately launched into a diatribe against Carl Jung.

  “Don’t tell me you fell for that archetype bullshit,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe that such a terrible thing could happen to such a nice person.

  “I think there’s some validity to it,” Lance countered. “I think all of us are born with a certain set of images and beliefs buried deep in our unconscious minds.”

  “That’s garbage,” Eric shot back. “If there really was a collective unconscious, we wouldn’t all feel so alone.”