Joe College Page 9

  “See?” said Mr. Friedlin.

  His wife pretended not to hear. Seconds earlier, the Harkness carillon had clanged into action, the gigantic bells ringing out a slow motion, barely recognizable version of Bob Seger’s “Night Moves.” As if summoned by the music, Mrs. Friedlin stood up and drifted over to the window overlooking the courtyard. She was wearing tailored black pants and an aquamarine silk blouse that interacted with the light in all sorts of strange and shimmery ways. Her body was lithe and girlish from all that tennis; from my angle, at least, you would not have pegged her as the mother of a college-aged son. With exasperation and a certain degree of scorn, Max had once described to me some of her elaborate beauty regimens—the manicures and pedicures, the leg and lip and bikini waxes, the clay masks and diet pills, the massages and hundred-dollar haircuts, the long hours she put in scouring fashion magazines. her brow knitted as though she were working her way through Hegel in the original—but I couldn’t help feeling then that all her hard work had paid off.

  “I envy you,” she said, turning back to the room with a melancholy smile. “Women weren’t allowed here in my day.”

  “Sure they were,” her husband quipped, aiming a sly wink in our direction. “Just not on weekdays.”

  Instead of chuckling, Mrs. Friedlin glanced at her watch. Something went out of her just then; you could see it happen. All at once her face seemed sad and tired in the murky light of the common room, a decade older than her body.

  “Do you think he’s okay?” There was a meekness in her voice that hadn’t been present a moment before. “Should we call the police?”

  Sang, Ted, and I traded quick looks, like liars hoping to keep our stories straight.

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” Sang told her.

  “Is something bothering him?” she asked. “Does he seem depressed?”

  “Not really,” said Ted. “He’s pretty much the same as always.”

  An uncomfortable silence ensued, an interlude that allowed the unthinkable to enter my mind. Every year since I’d come to college, there’d been at least one suicide or serious attempt by an undergraduate, including a particularly grisly wrist-slashing episode that took place in a library bathroom just days after we’d arrived freshman year. I’d worried about our old roommate Seth in this regard—his lethargies had been so deep and prolonged, his anger so sudden and explosive—but never about Max. Max had his moods, but he inhabited them with a fierce dignity, as if he’d made a conscious decision to be unhappy as a protest against a ridiculous and unjust world. If he was depressed—and it would have been pretty hard to deny it—his depression seemed to have an ethical rather than chemical origin. It was chosen, I believed, and therefore worthy of respect, if not admiration. But now I wasn’t so sure. I thought of the paper airplane on my desk, the eerie calm on Max’s cartoon face as we hurtled earthward, and a queasy lump of foreboding took up residence in my stomach.

  “Ten more minutes,” Mr. Friedlin said, slapping the Aurora back down on the coffee table. “Ten more minutes or he’s out of luck.”

  For reasons that were unclear to me, we had decided to place our telephone at the summit of a precarious stack of overdue library books piled on top of a rickety end table that Sang had rescued from a dumpster. Ted was sitting right next to this dubious arrangement when the phone rang, but he didn’t have a chance. Mrs. Friedlin whipped past him in a silky blur, snatching up the receiver before the first ring had completed its cycle. She didn’t even try to disguise the contest between hope and panic in her voice.

  “Hello?”

  Her eyes narrowed as she listened; her shoulders sagged with defeat.

  “Yes,” she said wearily. “He’s right here.”

  She pointed the receiver in my direction, looking as though she might burst into tears at any moment. I shrugged an apology as I took it from her hand.

  “Jeez,” said Polly. “What was that about?”

  I turned my back to the room, thrilled as always by the sound of her voice, stretching the cord as far as it would go.

  “I’ll tell you later,” I whispered. “Things are a little crazy around here.”

  “I won’t keep you,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you something. So we can avoid confusion later on.”

  “Okay.”

  There was a brief, nervous pause.

  “I think I want to sleep with you.”

  For a second, I wasn’t sure if I’d heard her right.

  “You do or you don’t?” I inquired warily.

  “Do,” she said. “A lot.”

  Oddly, ecstasy was not my first reaction. Some deep, permanently frightened part of me could only interpret her offer as some sort of cruel practical joke, something that would be taped and played back for my humiliation at an unspecified later date. Ecstasy was my second reaction. When it hit I found myself transformed into a spacewalker, suddenly liberated from gravity.

  “Okay,” I told her, with a jauntiness I hadn’t known I possessed. “I’ll pencil you in for bedtime.”

  “Great,” she laughed. “I’ll see you at the party.”

  “See you then.”

  When I turned around, my roommates had perked up considerably. For a couple of seconds there, I’d forgotten all about them.

  “Pencil you in for bedtime?” Sang repeated incredulously.

  “Your girlfriend?” Gail Friedlin asked. I couldn’t tell if she was really interested, or was just trying to be polite.

  “I hope so.”

  “And he does mean pencil,” Ted chimed in with a smirk.

  Only Howard Friedlin seemed oblivious to the now-public drama of my love life. He was too busy glowering at the copy of Reality he’d unearthed from the bottom of the coffee-table pile.

  “What about Max?” Mrs. Friedlin asked. “Does he have a girlfriend too?”

  Before I could answer, Mr. Friedlin raised the magazine like a kindergartner at show-and-tell. He tapped his index finger against the cover photo of the mangy constipated dog, hunched and grimacing.

  “What the hell is this?” he demanded.

  “A literary magazine,” Sang replied cheerfully. “Danny here is one of the editors.”

  Mr. Friedlin gave me a look of incomprehension worthy of my own father.

  “Did you intend it as some kind of statement?” He pronounced this last word with genuine distaste, as if we all knew about statements.

  “It is what it is,” I informed him, grinning like an idiot. I felt positively giddy. Polly wanted to sleep with me. She’d said so over the phone. “It’s just reality.”

  “Why don’t you just photograph some dog shit?” he asked. “That’s part of reality, too.”

  “They’re saving that for the spring issue,” Ted explained helpfully.

  a feelings comes over me

  Seven o’clock came and went. Mrs. Friedlin refused to leave until she heard from Max, while Mr. Friedlin insisted on forging ahead without him, partly on principle, but mainly as a courtesy to Ted, Sang, and me. He scoffed at our assurances that we’d be just as happy ordering a couple of pizzas.

  “Forget pizza,” he said. “You can have pizza anytime you want. Tonight we’re going to eat some real food.”

  “Maybe we should wait a few more minutes,” Sang suggested, glancing at Mrs. Friedlin for support.

  “Go ahead,” she told us, breaking the stalemate with a wan smile of encouragement. I got the feeling she’d be just as happy to do her worrying in private. “There’s no sense ruining everyone’s night. When Max gets back, we’ll catch up with you at the restaurant.”

  It was a little weird to just leave her there and head out into the night, but it was also a relief to finally get moving. Mr. Friedlin must have felt it too. As soon as we stepped outside, he closed his eyes and inhaled the New Haven damp like a man who had just been released from prison.

  I had to tap him on the shoulder to get him to make way for Trip, who was transporting a half keg of beer up the slate path on a ha
nd truck and grinning with badly concealed smugness, the way people often did when in possession of large quantities of alcohol. Ted held open the door for him.

  “Party tonight,” Trip announced, executing a smooth half turn and easing the wheels of the hand truck over the rise and into the Entryway. The keg was scuffed and dented, almost like someone had gone after it width a hammer. “After the jamboree.”

  “Where’s the jamboree?” Mr. Friedlin inquired.

  Trip didn’t even glance behind him as he began his nimble backwards ascent, jolting the hand truck over each successive step with an efficiency that verged on grace. If not for the tuxedo, you might have mistaken him for a professional deliveryman.

  “Stiles,” he said, pausing on the landing to adjust his grip. “It’s the Spring Jailbreak. Us, the B.D.’s, and the S.O.B.’s.” He shook his head, paying silent tribute to the firepower of the groups in question. A distant, almost wistful look passed across his good-natured mannequin face, and I couldn’t quite suppress a stitch of jealousy, a resentful suspicion that, for all of his shortcomings, Trip was a lucky guy, one of those people who’d found his place in the world. As if to confirm this hypothesis, he smiled with peculiar intensity, like a kid who’d eaten too much cake.

  “It’s gonna be so great,” he told us.

  After a cursory glance at the leather-bound list, Mr. Friedlin tossed off the name of a forty-dollar bottle of red wine the way my own father might have ordered a Big Mac, without hesitation, embarrassment, or the slightest trace of self-importance. Our waitress accepted his order with a nod of approval that was somehow both respectful and flirtatious at the same time. She was around the same age as Sang, Ted, and me, and probably a student herself—maybe a part-timer at a state school or community college—but she barely deigned to acknowledge our presence at the table. The way she acted, Howard Friedlin might have been sitting there all by himself, with three empty chairs for company. I didn’t bother to resent her for this because I saw exactly what she did—Mr. Friedlin’s quiet authority, the top-dog aura that seemed to emanate from the fabric of his expensive suit. I wasn’t sure which had come first, his money or his confidence, but I took note of how impressive the combination could be in a setting like this, the solemn, high-ceilinged dining room with its starchy tablecloths and tasteful chandeliers, the soft buzz of conversation hovering in the background like the hum of insects on a summer night. I couldn’t help thinking of my own parents, who insisted on taking me to a Roy Rogers on Whalley Avenue whenever they visited New Haven, their discomfort at being surrounded by black people temporarily offset by their horror at the prices charged by restaurants closer to campus. I wasn’t embarrassed by their preferences—I knew how tight money was for us, what a ridiculous luxury it was for me to be attending a school like Yale, even with the generous financial aid available in those days—but it saddened me to think that they could sip the same wine I was sipping just then and not taste anything but a half day’s work down the drain.

  Mr. Friedlin kept our glasses full and asked a lot of questions. An unforeseeable mellowness had taken hold of him as soon as we entered the restaurant, and I thought I understood why he’d been so adamant about coming here, despite the peculiar circumstances. This was his element. Inside it, his hard edges softened; he seemed to genuinely want to know us better, not because we were his son’s roommates, but simply because we were there, sharing his meal, and meals in restaurants like that meant something to him.

  I’m not sure what it was—the wine, the atmosphere, the fact that Mrs. Friedlin wasn’t there—but we answered as though he were one of us, not a parent but a visitor from another school, someone’s brother or cousin or hometown friend. With no apparent effort, he got Sang talking about Eve, his girlfriend from sophomore year, a topic he generally preferred to avoid. After their unexpected break-up, Sang had spent the whole fall semester in a state of reckless bewilderment and was only now beginning to regain his mental equilibrium.

  “You should have seen the letters she sent me last summer.” He shook his head, a fresh note of grievance entering his voice. He had referred to their correspondence a few times in my presence, but had never gone too far in the way of details. “I mean, we had a perfectly normal sex life together. Maybe calmer than normal, I don’t know. But something happened to her over vacation. She was working as a counselor at this camp for disturbed kids way out in the woods, and I guess she got lonely. At first there’d just be this quick p.s., you know, one line saying that she missed me or whatever, maybe mentioning something we’d done before, the kind of stuff everybody does. And then it started getting more elaborate, even a little kinky. I mean, it wasn’t porno or anything. It was just Eve talking. She was kind of shy about it, almost apologetic.”

  Like the waitress, Sang kept his eyes locked on Mr. Friedlin as he talked, almost as if Ted and I weren’t there, but it was uncomfortable nonetheless. Eve was a friend of mine, one of the smartest, sweetest people I knew. I had introduced her to Sang and still had lunch with her every once in a while. She had lovely red hair and big breasts that she was really self-conscious about and tried to hide under layers of baggy clothing. I didn’t want to find myself across from her in the dining hall, trying to hold up my end of a conversation about Henry James or the Russian anarchists while secretly wondering what she looked like in nothing but galoshes and a firehat.

  “So there I am,” he continued, “working in my mother’s lab at UC Irvine, and I can barely function. All these phrases of hers just keep floating through my head. I want to do this to you. I want you to do that to me. I want so-and-so to join us. You can imagine the state I was in when I got back here in September. And then she goes and breaks up with me before I’ve even unpacked my suitcase.”

  Ted had spent the past few minutes fiddling morosely with the date setting on his wristwatch, but now he snapped out of his funk.

  “Who’d she want to join you?” he asked, making a transparent effort not to seem too interested. “Just tell me if it was a guy or a girl.”

  Sang ignored him. “The thing that killed me was that she wouldn’t give a reason. I kept demanding an explanation, and she kept insisting that she didn’t have to give one. That became the whole focus of the break-up. Whether she had to give me a reason or not. I still don’t know why she dumped me.”

  “Was it someone we know?” Ted had abandoned his previous pose of casual curiosity and was trying his luck with a more wheedling tone. “You can’t just leave us hanging like that.”

  “It’s none of your business,” Sang told him.

  “Please? Just give me the initials.”

  “Forget it.”

  Ted leaned forward, hands clasped together as if in prayer.

  “Pretty please?”

  Sang stared at him for a few seconds. Then he nodded wearily, as if Ted had worn him down and he saw no choice but to cooperate.

  “Okay,” he sighed. “Y. M.”

  “Y. M.?” Ted’s mouth dropped open and his brow furrowed with concentration. He looked like the poster boy for perplexity. “I don’t know any Y. M.”

  “Sure you do,” said Sang.

  “I do?” Ted checked in with me. “Help me out here, Danny.”

  “Sorry,” I told him. “I’m stumped too.”

  Ted turned back to Sang, shrugging in defeat. The mystery seemed to be taking a toll on him.

  “Come on,” he groaned. “Have a heart.”

  “Y. M.,” Sang repeated, as if the solution were obvious to anyone with a brain. He spoke slowly, as if Ted’s powers of comprehension were impaired. “Your … Mother.”

  Ted accepted the punch line without protest, almost as if he’d been expecting it, squinting doubtfully in an effort to visualize the proposed encounter. I understood the difficulty. His mother was an erstwhile field hockey star at Smith, a large, no-nonsense woman who dressed exclusively in the kind of clothes you saw advertised in the L.L. Bean catalog and couldn’t believe that anyone would actually wear
—ankle-length tartan skirts, knee socks, tassled moccasins, sweaters with busy snowflake patterns or reindeer motifs, white turtlenecks that covered every millimeter of her neck with lots of fabric to spare. She was the kind of woman you could imagine walking through the streets of revolutionary Iran in her usual attire and not upsetting the ayatollahs.

  “You could try,” Ted speculated. “But you’d have to get her pretty drunk.”

  Everyone laughed at that, even Mr. Friedlin, who expressed his amusement by closing his eyes, tilting back his head, and opening his mouth as far as it could go, like a baby bird waiting for a worm. For some reason the sight of his face contorted like that made me flash suddenly on his wife, alone in our common room. Was she crying? Reading a book? Had she taken her shoes off? If I were her son, I thought, I wouldn’t have disappeared on her the way Max had. If I were her husband, I wouldn’t have ditched her in favor of dinner with a bunch of college kids. when his spasm of mirth had passed, Mr. Friedlin shifted his attention to Ted.

  “What about you?” he asked. “How’s your girlfriend treating you?”

  Even Ted surprised me that night. Until then, I’d never heard him discuss his relationship with Nancy in anything but the most contented terms.

  “Girlfriend?” he huffed. “Wife’s more like it.”

  “Is that good or bad?” Mr. Friedlin inquired.

  “It used to be good. But now it feels like the bed’s too small.”

  Mr. Friedlin scratched his chin like a therapist.

  “So why don’t you get a bigger bed?”

  “I meant it metaphorically,” Ted explained.

  “Perhaps a smaller girl, then?” Mr. Friedlin suggested.

  Ted acknowledged the quip with a sad smile.

  “We even use the same toothbrush,” he confessed.

  “Now that’s disgusting.” Sang gave a quick shudder, as if this practice were too distressing even to contemplate.

  When Mr. Friedlin turned to me, I was ready. I wanted to tell him about Polly, how just then—that very night, in fact—I felt poised, for the first time in my life, to have a real relationship: not just sex but friendship, too, maybe even love. I’d had some flings over the past few years, but now I saw that they had all just been practice, something to pass the time until someone like Polly came along, a girl I could share all of myself with, not just carefully selected fragments. I was going to tell him how surprised I was to suddenly find myself standing in the doorway of what felt like adulthood with no qualms whatsoever about finally stepping in, but he had something else on his mind.