She used to live next door to him and he irritated the shit out of her playing these John Philip Sousa marching records all the time.'
She meant Bunny. I set the bottle down.
But Judy, thank God, was busy with the eyebrow pencil. 'You know,' she said, 'I think Laura has an eating disorder, not anorexia, but that Karen Carpenter thing where you make yourself puke.
Last night I went with her and Trace to the Brasserie, and, I'm totally serious, she stuffed herself until she could not breathe. Then she went in the men's room to barf and Tracy and I were looking at each other, like, is this normal? Then Trace told me, well, you remember that time Laura was supposedly in the hospital for mono? Well. The story is that actually…'
She rattled on. I stared at her, lost in my own awful thoughts.
Suddenly I realized she'd stopped talking. She was looking at me expectantly, waiting for a reply.
'What?' I said.
'I said, isn't that the most retarded thing you ever heard?'
'Ummmm.'
'Her parents just must not give a shit.' She closed the makeup drawer and turned to face me. 'Anyway. You want to come to this party?'
'Whose is it?'
'Jack Teitelbaum's, you airhead. Durbinstall basement. Sid's band is supposed to play, and Moffat's back on the drums. And somebody said something about a go-go dancer in a cage. Come on.'
For some reason I was unable to answer her. Unconditional refusal to Judy's invitations was a reflex so deeply ingrained that it was hard to force myself to say yes. Then I thought of my room. Bed, bureau, desk. Books lying open where I'd left them.
'Come on, she said coquettishly. 'You never go out with me.'
'All right,' I said at last. 'Let me get my coat.'
Only much later did I find out what Judy had given me: Demerol.
By the time we got to the party it had started to kick in. Angles, colors, the riot of snowflakes, the din of Sid's band – everything was soft and kind and infinitely forgiving. I noted a strange beauty in the faces of people previously repulsive to me. I smiled at everyone and everyone smiled back.
Judy (Judy! God bless her!) left me with her friend Jack Teitelbaum and a fellow named Lars and went off to get us a drink.
Everything was bathed in a celestial light. I listened to Jack and Lars talk about pinball, motorcycles, female kick-boxing, and was heartwarmed at their attempts to include me in the conversation.
Lars offered me a bong hit. The gesture was, to me, tremendously touching and all of a sudden I realized I had been wrong about these people. These were good people, common people; the salt of the earth; people whom I should count myself fortunate to know.
I was trying to think of some way to vocalize this epiphany when Judy came back with the drinks. I drank mine, wandered off to get another, found myself roaming in a fluid, pleasant daze.
Someone gave me a cigarette. Jud and Frank were there, Jud with a cardboard crown from Burger King on his head. This crown was oddly flattering to him. Head thrown back and howling with laughter, brandishing a tremendous mug of beer, he looked like Cuchulain, Brian Boru, some mythic Irish king.
Cloke Rayburn was shooting pool in the back room. Just outside his line of vision, I watched him chalk the cue, unsmiling, and bend over the table so his hair fell in his face. Click. The colored balls spun out in all directions. Flecks of light swam in my eyes.
I thought of atoms, molecules, things so small you couldn't even see them.
Then I remember feeling dizzy, pushing through the crowd 32,0 to try to get some air. I could see the door propped invitingly with a cinder block, could feel a cold draft on my face. Then – I don't know, I must've blacked out, because the next thing I knew my back was against a wall, in an entirely different place, and a strange girl was talking to me.
Gradually I understood that I must have been standing there with her for some time. I blinked, and struggled gamely to bring her into focus. Very pretty, in a snub-nosed, good-natured way; dark hair, freckles, light blue eyes. I had seen her earlier, somewhere, in line at the bar maybe, had seen her without paying her much attention. And now here she was again, like an apparition, drinking red wine from a plastic cup and calling me by name.
I couldn't make out what she was saying, though the timbre of her voice was clear even over the noise: cheerful, raucous, oddly pleasant. I leaned forward – she was a small girl, barely five feet – and cupped a hand to my ear. 'What?' I said.
She laughed, stretched up on tiptoe, brought her face close to mine. Perfume. Hot thunder of whisper against my cheek.
I grabbed her by the wrist. 'It's too noisy,' I said in her ear; my lips brushed against her hair. 'Let's go outside.'
She laughed again. 'But we just came in,' she said. 'You said you were freezing.'
Hmmn, I thought. Her eyes were pale, bored, regarding me with a kind of intimate amusement in the jaded light.
'Somewhere quiet, I mean,' I said.
She turned up her glass and looked at me through the bottom of it. 'Your room or mine?'
'Yours,' I said, without a moment's hesitation.
She was a good girl, a good sport. Sweet chuckles in the dark and her hair falling across my face, funny little catches in her breath like the girls back in high school. The warm feel of a body in my arms was something I'd almost forgotten. How long since I'd kissed anyone that way? Months, and more months.
Strange to think how simple things could be. A party, some «drinks, a pretty stranger. That was the way most of my classmates ' lived – talking rather self-consciously at breakfast about their liaisons of the previous night, as if this harmless, homey little vice, which fell somewhere below drink and above gluttony in the catalogue of sins, was somehow the abyss of depravity and dissipation.
Posters; dried flowers in a beer mug; the luminous glow of her stereo in the dark. It was all too familiar from my suburban youth, yet now seemed unbelievably remote and innocent, a memory from some lost Junior Prom. Her lip gloss tasted like bubble gum. I buried my face in the soft, slightly acrid-smelling flesh of her neck and rocked her back and forth – babbling, mumbling, feeling myself fall down and down, into a dark, half-forgotten life. J| I woke at two-thirty – according to the flashing, demonic red of a digital clockface – in an absolute panic. I'd had a dream, nothing scary really, in which Charles and I were on a train, trying to evade a mysterious third passenger.
The cars were packed with people from the parry – Judy, Jack Teitelbaum, Jud in his cardboard crown – as we lurched through the aisles. Throughout the dream, however, I'd had a feeling that it was all unimportant, that I actually had a far more pressing worry if only I could remember it. Then I did remember, and the shock of it woke me up.
It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare. I sat up, heart pounding, slapping at the blank wall for the light switch until the terrible realization dawned on me that I was not in my own room. Strange shapes, unfamiliar shadows, crowded horribly around me; nothing offered any clue to my whereabouts, and for a few delirious moments I wondered if I was dead. Then I felt the sleeping body next to mine. Instinctively I recoiled, and then I prodded it gently with my elbow. It didn't move. I lay in bed for a minute or two, trying to collect my thoughts; then I got up, found my clothes, dressed as best as I could in the dark, and left.
Stepping outside, I slipped on an icy step and pitched, face forward, into more than a foot of snow. I lay still for a moment, then raised myself to my knees and looked about in disbelief. A few snowflakes were one thing, but I had not thought it possible for weather to change as suddenly and violently as this. The flowers were buried, and the lawn; everything had disappeared.
An expanse of clean, unbroken snow stretched blue and twinkling as far as I could see.
My hands were raw and my elbow felt bruised. With some effort, I got to my feet. When I turned to see where I'd come from, I was horrified to realize I'd just walked out of Bunny's own dorm. His window, on the ground floor, stared back at me black and silent. I thought of his spare glasses lying on the desk; the empty bed; the family photographs smiling in the dark.
When I got back to my room – by a confused, circular route -1 fell on my bed without taking off my coat or shoes. The lights were on, and I felt weirdly exposed and vulnerable but I didn't want to turn them off. The bed was rocking a little, like a raft, and I kept a foot on the floor to steady it.
Then I fell asleep, and slept very soundly for a couple of hours until I was awakened by a knock at the door. Seized by fresh panic, I fought to sit up in the tangle of my coat, which had somehow got twisted around my knees and seemed to be attacking me with the force of a living creature.
The door creaked open. Then no sound at all. 'What the hell is wrong with you?' said a sharp voice.
Francis was in the doorway. He stood with one black-gloved hand on the knob, looking at me like I was a lunatic.
I stopped struggling and fell back on my pillow. I was so glad to see him I felt like laughing, and I was so doped up I probably did. 'Francois,' I said idiotically.
He shut the door and came over to my bed, where he stood looking down at me. It was really him – snow in his hair, snow on the shoulders of his long black overcoat. 'Are you okay?' he said, after a long, derisive pause.
I rubbed my eyes and tried again. 'Hi,' I said. 'I'm sorry. I'm fine. Really.'
He stood looking at me with no expression and did not answer.
Then he took off his coat and laid it over the back of a chair. 'Do you want some tea?' he said.
'No.'
'Well, I'm going to go make some, if you don't mind.'
By the time he was back I was more or less myself. He put the kettle on the radiator and helped himself to some tea bags from my bureau drawer. 'Here,' he said. 'You can have the good teacup. There wasn't any milk in the kitchen.'
It was a relief to have him there. I sat up and drank my tea and watched him take offhis shoes and socks. Then he put them by the radiator to dry. His feet were long and thin, too long for his slim, bony ankles; he flexed his toes, looked up at me. 'It's an awful night,' he said. 'Have you been outside?'
I told him a little about my night, omitting the part about the girl.
'Gosh,' he said, reaching up to loosen his collar. 'I've just been sitting in my apartment. Giving myself the creeps.'
'Heard from anyone?'
'No. My mother called around nine; I couldn't talk to her.
Told her I was writing a paper.'
For some reason my eyes strayed to his hands, fidgeting unconsciously on the top of my desk. He saw that I saw, forced them down, palms flat. 'Nerves,' he said.
We sat for a while without saying anything. I put my teacup on the windowsill and leaned back. The Demerol had set off some kind of weird Doppler effect in my head, like the whine of car tires speeding past and receding in the distance. I was staring I across the room in a daze – how long, I don't know – when gradually I became aware that Francis was looking at me with an intent, fixed expression on his face. I mumbled something and got up and went to the bureau to get an Alka-Seltzer.
The sudden movement made me feel light-headed. I was standing there dully, wondering where I'd put the box, when all of a sudden I became aware that Francis was immediately behind me, and I turned around.
His face was very close to mine. To my surprise he put his hands on my shoulders and leaned forward and kissed me, right on the mouth.
It was a real kiss – long, slow, deliberate. He'd caught me off balance and I grabbed his arm to keep from falling; sharply, he drew in his breath and his hands went down to my back and before I knew it, more from reflex than anything else, I was kissing him, too. His tongue was sharp. His mouth had a bitter, mannish taste, like tea and cigarettes.
He pulled away, breathing hard, and leaned to kiss my throat.
I looked rather wildly around the room. God, I thought, what a night.
'Look, Francis,' I said, 'cut it out.'
He was undoing the top button of my collar. 'You idiot,' he said, chuckling. 'Did you know your shirt's on inside-out?'
I was so tired and drunk I started to laugh. 'Come on, Francis,'
I said. 'Give me a break.'
'It's fun,' he said. 'I promise you.'
Matters progressed. My jaded nerves began to stir. His eyes were magnified and wicked behind his pince-nez. Presently he took them off and dropped them on my bureau with an absent clatter.
Then, quite unexpectedly, there was another knock at the door. We sprang apart. His eyes were wide. We stared at each other, and then the knock came again.
Francis swore under his breath, bit his lip. I, panic-stricken, gi) ^=«rc«t _.-.^ziitiiji, uut fig made a quick, shushing gesture at me I with his hand.
'But what if it's -?' I whispered. -*
I had been about to say 'What if it's Henry?' But what I was actually thinking was 'What if it's the cops?' Francis, I knew, was thinking the same thing.
More knocking, more insistent this time.
My heart was pounding. Bewildered with fear, I crossed to my bed and sat down.