The Tender Bar (29 page)

And the worst part, the most galling thing of all, was that I always had twice as much work as my schoolmates, because I’d signed up for Directed Goddamned Studies.

I must have been lost in these thoughts for quite a while, because Uncle Charlie was snapping his fingers in front of my face. I blinked and remembered he’d asked me a question. What’s the problem? I wanted to tell him, but couldn’t, not because I was embarrassed, but because I was drunk. Righteously, irredeemably drunk, and yet fully aware of the wonderful redundancy of being young and drunk. Though it was one of the drunkest moments of my life, I would always remember it vividly, that complete absence of fear and worry. I was talking about my problems, but I had no problems. Except one. I couldn’t form words. Uncle Charlie was still staring at me—
What’s the problem?
—so I said something about Aquinas, which came out, “Equine asses is hard.” Uncle Charlie grunted, I grunted, and each of us pretended, or honestly believed, we’d had a real man-to-man. “Closing time,” he said.

I scooped up my money, retrieved my suitcase and made for the door. I was leaving with pockets full of notes about Cager and others, plus ninety-seven dollars more than when I’d arrived, and I’d been declared a man by the men of the bar, including Steve. A birthday to remember. Someone shadowboxed me toward the door. It might have been Cager. It might have been Cager’s shadow. As I walked out into the rosy-fingered dawn everyone said, “Come back soon, kid.” They didn’t hear—or didn’t understand—my answer.

“Owl ill,” I said. “Owl ill.”

twenty-three
| TROUBLE

S
OPHOMORE YEAR WILL BE EASIER, MY MOTHER PROMISED. BEAR
down, she said. Keep trying. Try, try again. With Directed Studies and Professor Lucifer behind me, she predicted, I’d surely bring up my grades.

I didn’t have the heart to tell my mother that trying was futile, because my brain was broken. Trying only emphasized and exacerbated the problem, like pumping the gas pedal when the engine is flooded. I couldn’t tell my mother that I was probably going to fail out of Yale, that I would soon bungle this golden opportunity for which she’d have given her atrophied right arm.

The classroom, I’d concluded, was not my arena. The barroom was. After turning eighteen I decided that barrooms were the only places I was as clever as my classmates, and my classmates thought so too. When we went out drinking I could feel myself rise in their estimation. Though I’d been admitted to Yale,
acceptance
was something more elusive, and it seemed to happen only while my new friends and I were having cocktails.

Unlike Publicans, however, New Haven bars charged for drinks. I needed a source of income, fast, or I’d lose my new friends as quickly as I’d made them, an idea that frightened me more than the prospect of failing out. I considered taking a job in one of the dining halls, but the pay wasn’t good and I didn’t want to wear what one friend called the Paper Hat of Poverty. I applied to the libraries, but those jobs were the most coveted and the first to be filled. Then, a bolt of inspiration. I would start my own laundry service. (I still remembered what Grandma had taught me about handling a steam iron.) I would let it be known that a new entrepreneurial venture was opening on campus, offering same-day service and charging just fifty cents per shirt. I nearly called my business Moehringer ’Round the Collar, but a friend wisely dissuaded me.

Response was overwhelming. Boys dropped off Santa Claus sacks bulging with shirts, and soon I was ironing several hours a day, a great deal of work for a little bit of money, but the alternative was to lose my friends, stay home while they were trotting off to nightclubs and bars, and this I couldn’t do.

My best customer was Bayard, a fellow sophomore whose superiority to me in every way was expressed in his melodically Waspy name. I’d heard of only one other Bayard—Bayard Swope, whose estate had been the model for the Buchanan mansion in
The Great Gatsby
. Tall, blond, unflappable, the Yale Bayard played polo and owned his own tuxedo and was said to trace his roots back to the Huguenots. He’d come to Yale from one of those famous prep schools, and he dressed as if he’d leaped off the drawing boards of Ralph Lauren. He owned a shocking collection of shirts—paisley, broadcloth, candy-striped, button-down, spread-collared, silk—and seemed to own exactly two of every style, as though he were preparing to ship off on some Noah’s Ark of Garments. He also owned several custom-made white dress shirts with British collars and paper-thin French cuffs, each a work of art. Dropping them off at my room he fanned them across my bed and we stood before them in mutual admiration. “It makes me sad,” I said, “because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.” I assumed he’d recognize the quotation from
Gatsby
. He didn’t.

I promised Bayard I’d have his shirts washed and pressed in two days, but time got away from me. I had papers to write, bars to haunt, and by the end of the week Bayard was miffed. He had nothing to wear. He left four progressively angrier messages with my roommates, and I didn’t dare return his calls. I pledged to wake up at dawn and fill his order. Meanwhile it was Friday night. My friends were getting together at a bar near campus. I put Sinatra on the stereo and stood before my closet. I’d cycled countless times through all my jeans and Bud’s Lacostes.
If only I had something new to wear.
I glanced at Bayard’s laundry bag. I was going to do his shirts in the morning anyway—what was the harm? I ironed a pale pink button-down and slipped it on.

It was autumn. It was always autumn at Yale, as if Yale were the birthplace of autumn, as if autumn had been invented in one of the labs on Science Hill and escaped. The air was heady, bracing, like a slap of aftershave on each cheek, and I told my friends we should drink gin, quoting Uncle Charlie’s theory that each season has its poison. Great idea, my friends said. After two rounds we were drunk. And starved. We ordered steaks, and more martinis, and when the bill came I was heartsick. I’d blown two weeks of laundry profits in three hours.

We headed for a house party off campus. Students were dancing on the lawn and the porch when we arrived. We pushed up to the front door, into the dense swaying crowd inside. I saw Jedd Redux leaning against a wall, smoking. I asked if he had an extra cigarette. From the breast pocket of his ultracool blazer he pulled a pack of Vantages. I admired the bull’s-eye on the wrapper, the hollowed-out filters. Each cigarette looked like a rifle shell. I introduced myself. His name was Dave. He said he needed another drink. I followed him like a puppy toward the kitchen and squeezing through the crowd we bumped smack into Bayard. “There you are,” Bayard said.

“Heyyy,” I said.

“Need my shirts, man.” He was wearing a wrinkled flannel, the kind of shirt I’d normally be wearing.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I had two papers due and fell behind. I’ll get to your shirts first thing in the morning. Promise. Scout’s honor.” I put my hand over my heart. Bayard looked down and noticed the monogram on my cuff. His cuff. His monogram.

“Is that my—shirt?” he said.

“I’ll let you two work this out,” Jedd Redux said, backing away.

I started to explain, but Bayard stopped me. With a half smile of pity on his face, he took a step sideways and walked on past me, delivering a swift and forceful lesson in class.

I went back to my room and stayed up all night, washing and ironing Bayard’s shirts. At dawn, starching the last of his cuffs, I made a string of promises to myself.

I will never drink gin again.

I will learn to smoke Vantages.

I will apologize to Bayard and then avoid him for the rest of my time at Yale.

I will try, try again.

She was with a friend of mine, whom she was dating, and we all reached the door of the lecture hall at the same moment as class let out. She had thick yellow hair, almond-shaped brown eyes, and an exquisite nose—a perfect isosceles triangle in the center of her oval face. There was such geometry about her face, such symmetry, that I did what the art-history professor advised when encountering great portraits. I saw her in sections. First the full lips. Then the white teeth. Then the high cheekbones and exquisite nose. Lastly those brown eyes, soulful and scornful at the same time, as if she could love you or hate you, depending on the very next thing you said.

“Sidney,” she said, offering her hand.

“JR,” I said.

She wasn’t wearing the androgynous Yale uniform of sweatshirt, torn jeans and sneakers. Instead she wore black wool pants, a gray cashmere turtleneck, and a leather driving coat. She had the kind of figure molded by years of competitive ice skating, I could just tell. That high hard bottom, like Dorothy Hamill. She even had a version of the Dorothy Hamill haircut. It was an effort not to stare.

“Don’t you love this class?” she asked. “Isn’t it so fascinating?”

“Not really,” I said, laughing.

“Then why are you taking it?”

“I’m thinking about law school.”

“Uck. I wouldn’t be a lawyer for all the money in the world.”

I thought, That’s because you already have all the money in the world.

My friend put a proprietary arm around Sidney and pulled her away. I went back to my room and listened to Sinatra and tried not to see her face in sections, floating before me, while I read the decision in Dred Scott.

We bumped into each other days later. A chance meeting on the street. I made a motion to hurry away, not wanting to waste the time of the campus goddess, but she forced me to stop, asking me questions, touching my arm lightly, tossing her hair. I didn’t flirt back, because she was dating my friend, and my reticence seemed to confuse and arouse her. She touched my arm more.

“Are you ready for the final in Con Law?” she asked.

“Oh right,” I said sarcastically. “When is that? Tomorrow?”

“Would you like to study together?”

“Together?” I said. “Tonight?”

“Yes.” She smiled. Flawless teeth. “Together. Tonight.”

She lived in an apartment off campus. When I arrived she had a bottle of red wine opened, so we spent ten minutes studying the Supreme Court before we set the books aside and studied each other. I wanted to give her the Sheryl Treatment, ask her lots of questions, but she beat me to the punch, barraging me with questions, and I found myself telling her about my mother, my father, Publicans, everything. I felt the wine and her brown eyes cracking me open. I told her the truth. I made my father sound more like a rogue than a villain, and built up the men of the bar into gods, but these exaggerations weren’t false. They were what I believed, just as I believed myself authentic when imitating the men of the bar, using their language and gestures. The impression fooled me as much as it did Sidney.

Opening a second bottle of wine, she told me about herself. The youngest of four, she grew up in southern Connecticut, on the water, directly across the sound from Manhasset. She was two years older than I, a junior, and hoped to become a film director or an architect. The next Frank Capra or the next Frank Lloyd Wright, I said. She liked that. Her parents were powerful, brilliant, thoroughly involved in the lives of their children. They owned a construction company and lived in a large house her father had built with his own hands. She admired her mother but idolized her father, a real Hemingway type, she said, down to the white beard and fisherman’s sweater. Her naturally husky voice dropped an octave when she mentioned a brother who had died and how her parents had never been the same since. She had a way of talking intimately that felt as if she were drawing a curtain around us.

Just after midnight it started to snow. “Look,” she said, pointing to the window. “Let’s go for a walk.”

Swaddled in hats and mufflers, we roved around campus, holding our faces to the sky, catching snowflakes on our tongues.

“Do you realize we’ve been talking for hours?” she asked.

“We haven’t done any studying,” I said.

“I know.”

We looked at each other uncertainly.

“So what does JR stand for?” she said.

“I’ll tell you when I know you better.”

It was a reflex—I didn’t want to tell her my standard lie, and yet I didn’t want to divulge the truth—but somehow it sounded flirtatious. Before I could retract or soften it Sidney pressed against me. We walked on through the snow, hips touching, looking at our footprints side by side.

Back at her apartment we drank hot chocolate and smoked cigarettes and talked about every subject but
Brown v. Board of Education
. At dawn she fixed us eggs and coffee. I left her apartment an hour before the exam, totally unprepared, and totally unconcerned. I pushed the pencil along the pages of the blue exam booklet for four hours, writing nonsense about the Constitution, knowing I’d fail and yet feeling ecstatic, because I also knew I’d see Sidney minutes after the exam ended. I knew she’d come through my door without knocking, and she did. “How’d you do?” she asked.

“Not good. You?”

“Aced it.”

I asked if she’d like to go for a cup of coffee, but she was in a hurry. She was driving home and wanted to get there before the roads were bad.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m leaving for Arizona in the morning.”

“Well. Merry Christmas. Thanks again for a lovely evening.”