Joe College Read online

  Matt and I nodded sympathetically, then turned to watch her negotiate the sharp turn into the courtyard, the short pleated skirt riding high on her well-muscled thighs.

  “I’d sign her cast,” Matt mumbled under his breath.

  “That Women’s Studies seminar did wonders for you,” I observed.

  She was barely out of sight when Nick and Brad burst through the doors behind us, engaged in a heated conversation. Nick was smoking a cigarette and wearing the leather jacket that made him look like a small-time mafia guy. Brad wore an old tweed sportcoat over a flannel shirt; his hair was wet and newly combed, as though he were heading out for the night. I wondered what it had felt like for him, singing with the Whiffenpoofs, then returning to the kitchen to plunge his arms back into that sink full of greasy pots and pans.

  “Well, well,” Nick grumbled as they brushed past. “If it isn’t the two dipsticks.”

  “Have a good break,” Matt called after them.

  Despite his hurry, Nick pulled up short, whirling so abruptly you might have thought Matt had insulted his mother. With a fierce squint, he took a last long drag off his cigarette, then flicked it over the fence, into the garden of the master’s house.

  “Have a good what?”

  “Break,” Matt repeated.

  Nick looked at Brad, then back at us.

  “Is this your native fucking planet?”

  “Are you referring to Earth?” said Matt.

  “Only Yalies get spring break,” Nick explained helpfully. “The rest of us get up in the morning and go to our shitty jobs.”

  “We’re on painting crew,” Brad informed us.

  “But thanks for thinking of us,” Nick added. “We’ll be sure to wear lots of sunscreen.”

  “Excuuuse me,” Matt said à la Steve Martin, raising his hands as if to fend off blows. “Forget I even mentioned it.”

  Neither one of us moved or spoke until they’d slipped through the gate and out of sight. Then we looked at each other, shrugged, and drifted down the steps to the path, where our ways parted. Matt took a sidelong step in the direction of the gate, then thought better of it.

  “Hey Danny,” he said. “You wouldn’t have that paper you wrote for Preston last year, would you? The one on Measure for Measure?”

  “Sorry. It’s back home in my closet.”

  “Too bad,” he said. “I think it might help me out to take a look at it.”

  “Maybe you should just read the play,” I suggested.

  “I’ve tried about six times. It would help if the guy could write in plain English.”

  Visiting on Parents’ Weekend the previous October, my mother noticed that many students kept erasable message boards on their doors. In an effort to be helpful, she sent me one a couple of weeks later that featured a large picture of Garfield, along with the ridiculous exhortation, “Hey cool cat, leave me a message!” (For a couple of years, for reasons only she could explain, my mother had been buying me all sorts of Garfield paraphernalia, which I had no choice but to immediately consign to the nearest trash receptacle.) My suitemates were delighted by my embarrassment—so delighted, in fact, that they insisted on rescuing the message board from the garbage when I wasn’t around and nailing it so firmly to the door that I doubt I could have removed it with a crowbar.

  When I got upstairs that night, two messages were scrawled on the board, both of them directed at me. The first was from Sang, telling me to meet him, Ted, and Nancy at the Anchor at nine o’clock. The second was from Max, telling me that Cindy had called again.

  “WOULD YOU JUST PLEASE CALL HER?” he’d scrawled across the whole bottom half of the board in big pleading letters.

  Inside, Gaucho was spinning on the turntable even though no one was home. I thought about calling Cindy, then decided that it could wait for a couple more days. I was going to be home on Saturday, after all, and would be driving the Roach Coach to her workplace every weekday morning and afternoon for the next two weeks. We’d have more than enough time to talk. Right now what I needed was to get out of my smelly clothes and into a long, scalding shower.

  fourteen thousand dollars for this

  Parental visits were unsettling for the entire suite. We had to tidy up the common room, stash the bong and whatever liquor bottles had been left out in the open, and suppress any evidence of Nancy’s status as fifth roommate that happened to be lying around—the odd tampon, those little white socks with fuzzy pompoms, the elastic bands with two attached marbles that she used to tie back her hair, the dog-eared copy of Gyn/Ecology she always seemed to be puzzling over that semester. These purges were her idea, not ours. Although she’d been living with Ted for half a year, her family back in Pennsylvania was laboring under the impression that she was a virgin without a boyfriend, and she didn’t want any information, to the contrary leaking back to them through some complicated chain of parental gossip.

  The presence of responsible adults altered our behavior in both subtle and obvious ways. We became less sarcastic than usual, more affectionate, more serious about our studies. On Parents’ Weekend in particular, we transformed ourselves into a suiteful of Eddie Haskells, flattering each others’ mothers with a shamelessness that seemed to please them enormously. Only Sang’s mom refused to play along. She was a high-powered research biologist who stared at us like we were a bunch of idiots when we tried to comment on her new hairdo or handbag. We’d quickly learned to divert our attention to his father, a garrulous anesthesiologist who had memorized a number of Robert Frost poems shortly after immigrating to the U.S. in the late 1950s and was happy to recite some or all of them on request.

  Though taxing for everyone, these encounters were most stressful for the person whose parents had come to visit. How could it have been otherwise? There was something so nakedly revealing about being seen in the presence of the people who had made and raised you. It was the Return of the Repressed, the pasts we had tried to conceal upon arrival at college suddenly taking human form and walking through the door with care packages in their arms and faces a lot like our own. Ted’s father wearing those green pants. His mother enunciating as though her teeth had been clamped together with Krazy Glue. One Dr. Lee talking incessantly, the other seeming to have taken a vow of silence. My own father looking around and shaking his head. “Fourteen thousand dollars for this?” he’d mutter over and over again, as if Yale were the biggest scam ever perpetrated in the history of humankind. My mother just wanting to clean the bathroom and do everyone’s laundry.

  Max’s torment in this regard, as in all things, was of a different order entirely. His parents didn’t just embarrass him, they infuriated him. Their politics appalled him; their friends made his skin crawl. His mother was a Denver socialite, part owner of a store that—according to Max, anyway—sold hideous and outrageously overpriced clothing, and a highly ranked competitor in the Colorado forty-and-over amateur tennis circuit. His father was a lawyer turned real-estate developer/venture capitalist whose money made money every time he tied his shoes or wiped his ass. They drove matching BMWs and had recently purchased a monstrous vacation home in Vail, two facts that Max frequently cited as evidence of their profound moral and spiritual corruption.

  At the same time, Max was closer to his parents than the rest of us, though this closeness took a peculiar form. He was their only child, and if Mr. and Mrs. Friedlin weren’t traveling, they called him every evening, the conversations sometimes lasting for hours. They began cordially enough, with small talk about classes and current events, then grew increasingly testy, ending more often than not with Max slamming down the phone and barging out of the suite without stopping to grab a coat. He would return an hour or so later, calmer but still wired, grinding his teeth at the latest outrage: his father was pressuring him to take Econ; his mother was trying to fix him up with a sophomore in Davenport, the niece of one of her tennis buddies. In recent weeks, both of them had encouraged him to stop thinking so much about Arthur Bremer and John Hinckley and get
in touch with a therapist.

  “They don’t think I’m normal,” he reported one night, sounding somewhat offended by this verdict.

  “Do you?” I asked.

  “I reject the category,” he replied haughtily. “Especially when it’s invoked by people who had electric buttwarmers installed in their cars.”

  “Buttwarmers?”

  “The seats heat up,” he explained. “There’s some kind of coil hidden under the leather.”

  “Must feel pretty good on a cold day.”

  “Actually,” he said, “if you leave it on long enough, it feels like you shit in your pants.”

  The Friedlins were on their way to Paris for the month of April and had arranged their itinerary so they could stop in New Haven on Friday night and take our whole suite out to dinner at Robert Henry’s, the fanciest restaurant on Chapel Street. That afternoon, a few hours before they were due to arrive, Max poked his head into my room.

  “You busy?”

  “Just packing a little. I want to catch an early train tomorrow.”

  He took that as permission to step inside, though he didn’t go so far as to sit down in his usual spot at the foot of my unmade bed. Instead he hovered just inside the doorway, dressed, as he often was at that time of day, in baggy fatigue pants and his favorite too-small pajama top that had recently developed a plunging neckline after all but the two bottom-most buttons had popped off. He had a paper airplane in his hand and a grim expression on his face.

  “What’s up?” I asked, ramming more dirty clothes into my already tumescent duffel bag.

  “Not much. Boning up on Oswald.”

  “Guess you’ll have a lot of reading time in the next few weeks.”

  “I hope so. I’m usually pretty bad about getting work done during vacations.”

  Max was one of only a handful of students in Jonathan Edwards who had received permission to stay on campus for the duration of the two-week break. The others were foreign students marooned in New Haven for financial reasons; Max was just staying to be perverse. His parents would gladly have taken him to Paris if he’d wanted to join them, and they certainly would have paid for him to fly home to Colorado. I’d invited him to my house as well, but he’d declined after I’d explained that I’d be driving the lunch truck full-time while my father recuperated from his “procedure.” I couldn’t say I blamed him. The idea of him and my convalescent dad sharing a house for several days sounded like a scenario for a sitcom that was too weird even for Max.

  He closed one eye and launched his paper airplane, clearly aiming for my head. The aircraft performed a single loop-de-loop, then promptly crashed on the floor near my laundry basket, its flimsy nose crumpling like an accordion.

  “Did you call her?” he asked.

  The question caught me off guard. The only “her” on my mind at that point was Polly, and I understood from the careful neutrality in his voice that he wasn’t referring to her. In the split second it took me to get up to speed, I’d already spoken.

  “Call who?”

  His face changed, the spacy blankness giving way to a kind of amazement.

  “Wow,” he said. “I can’t believe you’re being such an asshole about this.”

  “Gimme a break,” I said lamely.

  “Why don’t you give her a break? You had sex with the girl. The least you could do is return her phone calls.”

  His logic was airtight, but I felt betrayed anyway. The unwritten rule said you gave your roommates the benefit of the doubt. I’d certainly given it to him a few times.

  “You know what?” I told him. “It’s really none of your business.”

  “Yeah, right. She calls in tears every night, and I’m the one who has to comfort her, and it’s none of my business.”

  “You don’t have to comfort her, Max. All you have to do is take a message, okay?”

  He looked away, as if it were beneath him to contemplate my face at that moment. I took a deep breath and tried to strike a less defensive tone.

  “Look. It’s over between me and Cindy. Talking about it isn’t going to help. She’s just going to have to get used to it.”

  “I just don’t think she deserves this.”

  “Nobody deserves it,” I informed him. “But it happens anyway. I’ve been on the receiving end once or twice myself.”

  “So that makes it all right?”

  “It doesn’t make it anything. It’s just the way it goes.”

  He ran his hand partway through his tangled hair and left it there.

  “I guess I expected better of you.”

  “Then you overestimated me.”

  He shrugged and left the room, his hand still resting on top of his head. It wasn’t until he’d gone that I realized I’d been clutching a pair of dirty underwear throughout the entire conversation, the same dingy briefs I’d been wearing the night I almost slept with Polly. I shoved them into the duffel bag, then bent to retrieve Max’s wreck of a paper airplane from the floor.

  I was about to drop it into the official NFL wastebasket I’d brought from home as a souvenir of my misspent youth when I noticed the drawings. With a blue ballpoint pen, Max had inked four porthole windows on the fuselage. Each window contained a crude but easily recognizable caricature of one of our suitemates, Nancy not included. The plane was apparently headed for a crash, because Sang, Ted, and I all had looks of pure terror on our faces. Cartoon bubbles floating overhead detailed our reactions to the impending disaster.

  “Rats,” thought Ted. “Guess I’m not getting laid tonight.”

  “Darn,” reflected Sang. “Looks like I won’t make Phi Beta Kappa after all.”

  “Hmmm,” wondered Danny. “Maybe I should have called her back.”

  Only Max seemed unperturbed. He held one hand on top of his head, just as he had moments before, and gazed out the window with an expression of philosophical calm, maybe even the ghost of a smile.

  “Oh, well,” he considered. “At least I won’t have to suffer through this fucking dinner tonight.”

  I laughed in spite of myself, then wandered out to the common room to compliment him on the likenesses, already forgiving him for taking his anxieties about his parents out on me. He wasn’t around to receive my absolution, though. The common room was empty, and so were the other two bedrooms. I called his name a couple of times just to make sure, but I already knew he was gone. He’d slipped away so quietly, I hadn’t even heard him close the door.

  At six thirty that evening he still hadn’t returned. This was awkward, because Gail and Howard Friedlin had been sitting in our common room for close to an hour at that point, making small talk and trying not to appear too concerned while we humored them by making phone calls to anyone who might have an idea about their son’s whereabouts.

  “It’s just like Max,” his mother said, manufacturing a tense little smile. “Punctuality’s never been one of his strong points.”

  The Friedlins hadn’t visited for a long time—Parents’ Weekend that year had overlapped with their Australian walkabout—and I was still getting over the mild shock of seeing them in person again. Living as I did with Max’s demonized image of his parents, it was easy to forget what attractive people they were—tanned, youthful, athletic-looking—so unlike their son that Max frequently had to insist to people who had just met Gail and Howard that he was not, in fact, adopted. The Friedlins were probably only a couple of years younger than my parents, but they seemed to belong to a different generation. You got the feeling that they would rather be caught dead than listening to Henry Mancini or the Hundred and One Strings on the car stereo, and that, under the right circumstances, they could probably tell you some pretty interesting stories involving hot tubs and controlled substances.

  “Just like Max,” his father echoed in a less affectionate voice, stroking his salt-and-pepper beard and impatiently flipping through a week-old Yale Daily he’d found on the coffee table. He was sporting a stylishly cut silvery blue suit that looked lik
e it might have been pilfered from the set of Miami Vice. Like Don Johnson, Mr. Friedlin wore the suit over an expensive-looking black T-shirt, a casual touch I found quite appealing.

  Ted, Sang, and I nodded in unison, each of us muttering something to the effect that it was indeed just like Max. All three of us had dressed for dinner, Sang and Ted in khakis, blue blazers, and striped ties, with Sang opting to spice up the uniform with a pair of red Converse high-tops. I myself was outfitted in a daringly eclectic ensemble—skinny black leather New Wave tie courtesy of Hank Yamashita, tan corduroy sport coat, blue Dickey work pants, and my radioactive cowboy boots—that I was beginning to suspect added up to less than the sum of its parts. We were sitting next to each other on the couch, one to a cushion in descending order of size—Ted, Sang, me—like brothers posing for a portrait.

  “He better get here soon,” Howard Friedlin muttered. “The reservations are for seven o’clock.”

  “We don’t have to get there exactly at seven,” his wife reminded him. “It’s not like we’re going to lose the table.”

  “That’s not the point.” Mr. Friedlin had tossed aside the Daily and turned his attention to a copy of Aurora that Nancy must have picked up from the freebie table outside the dining hall. Aurora was a feminist journal specializing in impassioned critiques of the patriarchy and celebratory, sometimes astonishingly explicit poems about lesbian sex, not to mention the occasional frank portrait of sullen, short-haired women with no shirts and hairy armpits. I read it avidly, if furtively, with confused feelings of shame and arousal, but Mr. Friedlin seemed unruffled by what he found there. “The point is, we’ve got a roomful of hungry males to feed. Right, guys?”

  Sang and I made noncommittal gestures meant to suggest that we could wait, but Ted nodded in emphatic agreement.

  “I’m starving,” he said, rubbing his stomach tenderly, as though it were the head of a sick dog. “I had to work right through lunch to finish my lab report.”