Jennifer Haigh (20 page)

Quality
, his classmates joked.
That girl is quality.
It was the ultimate Pearse word, in that it meant just the opposite of what it said.

Failing a test was quality. Missing an easy shot was quality. A girl with shaggy hair, no tits, and no ass: that was the ultimate in quality.

Ichabod
, the boys called Lauren McGregor.
Your girlfriend, Icha
bod.

At Princeton Billy forgot all about poor Lauren. Forgot about girls in general; between lacrosse and O-chem there was plenty else to fill his time. But buried beneath his busyness was a pulsating anxiety: at nineteen, at twenty, his virginity weighed on him. For that was the way he thought of himself, despite what had transpired in his dorm room his sophomore year at Pearse, with his roommate Matthew Stone. He'd awakened one night to the sound of Matthew's breathing, and had known immediately what his friend was doing in the next bed. Half asleep, and not knowing why, at first, Billy had done the same thing himself.

For a long time they didn't touch each other. They merely touched themselves in each other's presence. They did this a lot. But because this was something Billy did anyway, with or without Matthew, he decided it didn't count. It was only after Matthew climbed into Billy's bed one night, after they fell asleep naked and twisted together, a warm and sticky helix of boy, that Billy spun into a panic.

That spring, without telling Matthew, he entered the housing lottery with a buddy from the lacrosse team.
I'm sick of you anyway
, Matthew joked when he discovered this, but Billy could see the betrayal had hurt him. They remained friendly, but were not friends. They wouldn't be friends again for a long time.

At Pearse, and later at Princeton, girls pursued him. Pretty girls, though not the prettiest; those would have required some effort on his part. His approach was passive: he would wait, and the thing would happen. Opportunities came and went; but for one reason or another he let them pass. And the longer he waited, the more daunting the prospect became.

The problem, he decided, was that girls he met at campus parties meant nothing to him; it wasn't as if he actually
knew
them. He was too fastidious to touch a stranger, or to want to do so. Sex would have to be with someone he knew. And from sports, from school—Pearse had been nominally coed, but the students were mostly male—he knew only boys. Could he ever know a girl as completely as he'd known Matthew Stone?

Such was his predicament his final year at Princeton—which, desperate to escape his parents, he'd chosen over the local options. This decision distressed his mother and confounded his father, who'd expected to steer him through the biology program at MIT. Billy's uncle Roy, freakishly loyal to Harvard, was even more outraged. A few years later, at his daughters' weddings (two for Mimi, one for Charlotte)

Roy greeted Billy coolly, like a stranger he vaguely remembered instead of the nephew he'd sailed with summer after summer.
Princeton?
he mumbled, half in the bag at Mimi's first wedding. It was a circuslike extravaganza at Newport to which half the alumni of Pearse had been invited—including, to Billy's surprise, Lauren McGregor.

He didn't recognize her at first, so completely had she changed.

Her hair was lighter, long, and teased into one of those eighties creations that would later seem embarrassing but at the time, somehow, had looked terrific. She stood at the bar with men on either side, sipping from a short glass. Her slinky dress clung to her long thighs. Until he saw it, Billy would have been unable to imagine her beautiful. The transformation was astonishing.

He'd had a few drinks and was feeling sentimental—for his mother, sitting alone at a table tapping her foot to the music, as though wishing someone would ask her to dance; for Mimi, the romantic heroine of his childhood, who'd made him swear, at age six, that since cousins couldn't, he would never marry. He'd agreed to this readily. If he couldn't marry Mimi, why would he want anyone at all?

It was in this condition that he'd first glimpsed Lauren at the bar. He touched her shoulder and was gratified by the way her face lit at the sight of him. On the dance floor she felt solid and correct in his arms, a discovery that seemed significant. He'd always been uncomfortable with the smallness of girls; but Lauren, in high heels, was exactly his height.

Flush with gin, he flirted, a thing he had never done. That it was Lauren in his arms, not a stranger, made this possible; Lauren's shoulder and back, her hip and ass beneath his hand. Exhilaration filled him, and with it a sense of accomplishment. It was as though he'd solved a differential equation that had once mystified him, a complex problem that had bedeviled him for years.

The McGregors had booked a block of rooms at a hotel in Newport. Lauren, the last unmarried sister, had the room next to her parents'. Billy was mindful of this fact as he turned the key in the lock.

He'd sent his own mother back to Concord with his aunt Martine, ignoring her stunned look, the reproach in her eyes.
A bunch of Pearse kids are staying overnight
, he told her.
I'll be home in time for breakfast.

His mother had glanced pointedly at Lauren, who was waiting for Billy at the bar.
Is she staying?
his mother asked, but Billy only shrugged. He'd sensed her disapproval when he brought Lauren over to the table.
For her?
his mother's eyes said.
You're leaving me for her?

What happened in that hotel room—if you considered the whole universe of sex, the dizzying variety of acts people performed on each other's bodies—was utterly usual; but to Billy it was rife with small discoveries. That a girl's body, despite its odd softness, was not so different from a boy's. Both had weight and warmth and texture, mouths that breathed and murmured and tasted. That the chain of sensations, the heat and pressure and friction, was remarkably similar.

That in the end—could it really be so simple?—plain contact was the thing that mattered, skin on skin, mouth on mouth, the brief suspension of aloneness. The other heart beating in the room.

And just that easily Lauren became his girlfriend. She phoned him nightly from her dorm room at Yale, spent every other weekend curled around him in bed. She appeared and was beautiful at his fraternity formal; she impressed his friends with her intellect and wit. At those moments Billy was weirdly proud of her, like a parent who'd watched an awkward child blossom. He remembered Lauren at fourteen—awkward Ichabod, peering at the world from behind her curtain of hair—and found himself
rooting for her.
It was not the way other guys loved their girlfriends, but it was a kind of love nonetheless.

At Thanksgiving he took Lauren home to Concord. He would wonder, later, what had possessed him, but at the time it seemed a reasonable idea. Lauren's parents had invited them both to Paris—her father ran the European branch of a company that made office equipment—but Thanksgiving break was only five days long, too brief for a trip overseas. His buddy Topher Craig spent holidays with his girlfriend's family, so Billy assumed this was normal behavior. Having finally secured a girlfriend, he took pleasure in doing things correctly.

He was proud of Lauren, of himself for loving her. And because they'd always been, he assumed his family would be proud of him too.

His parents still tried, in those days, to spend holidays together, mainly for the benefit of Scott, who was still in high school. In retrospect, it seemed laughable. Considering how obviously Frank and Paulette hated each other, the benefits of this arrangement, to Scott or anybody, were questionable. (Were nonexistent, probably, considering the way his brother had turned out.)

Even before Billy and Lauren arrived, the day was humming with tension. When they landed at the house Thanksgiving morning, his mother was in a fit of preparation. "Oh, there you are," she said, barely looking up from whatever she was chopping. This was in sharp contrast to the way she usually greeted Billy, with a clingy effusiveness that made him squirm.

"Your room is ready," she said, like a surly innkeeper. "You can put her in the guest room."As though Lauren were an extra cot, some out-of-season item that required storage. Billy stared at his mother in amazement. He'd seen her weep in grief or loneliness or frustration—outbursts caused, invariably, by his father. But never had the Drew manners failed her. He had never in his life seen her be rude.

They ate dinner at midday, the Drew Thanksgiving tradition.

Paulette seated Lauren at the far end of the table and never once met her eyes. Scott, uncombed and sullen, stared at Lauren hungrily; for a seventeen-year-old punk he had a surprisingly heavy beard. Gwen picked silently at her dinner. Frank, ever genial, rushed in to fill the gap, asking Lauren a million questions. He seemed delighted that she was applying to medical school. Did she plan to specialize? Had she any field in mind?

For this Billy was truly grateful. For the first time in years, he was glad for his father's presence. But Frank's attention to Lauren only made Paulette angrier. Billy, so attuned to his mother's emotions, noticed her deliberate chewing, the slow, deep breaths she took, as though exercising heroic patience.

After dinner Billy suggested a walk. Normally he'd have helped clear the table, but subjecting Lauren to any more of his mother's company seemed cruel to them both. He and Lauren bundled into scarves and sweaters; they hiked across town to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, their breath visible in the creeping dusk.
I'm sorry
, he said.
I don't know why she was like that.

It's okay
, Lauren said.
I didn't mind.

A light snow was falling as they followed the path to Author's Ridge. Billy showed Lauren the Thoreau and Alcott plots, the two families buried twenty feet apart. He pointed to a rectangular stone no bigger than a dictionary, simply marked
Henry.
Small offerings decorated the grave site: a miniature pumpkin, a heap of colorful gourds.

They hiked the path to the higher ground where, chained off from the surrounding graves, the Emerson clan was buried. The plot was studded with modest headstones. At the center, a jagged boulder marked the spot where Ralph Waldo lay.

I love this
, Lauren said, a little breathless.
This is how I want to be buried, next to my husband and kids. The whole family together. Don't you?

I want a big rock
, Billy said.
Like Ralph
.

Fine
, Lauren said.
We'll put you in the middle. Between me and your mother.

Standing at Emerson's grave, they had both laughed until they ached, the tense misery of the day evaporated. It was a moment Billy would remember for the rest of his life, himself and Lauren McGregor breathless in the snowy graveyard, laughing like fools.

Only later did an anxious truth strike him: Lauren had imagined them married.

When they returned to the house he shunted her quickly upstairs, shamed by the argument unfolding in the kitchen.
The way you flirted with that girl was disgraceful. Are you proud of yourself?
Those words stayed with Billy a long time. His father hadn't flirted with Lauren; he'd simply shown polite interest. For years Billy had listened to his mother's litany of grievances against Frank, and taken her side unquestioningly. Now he wondered whether any of it were true; whether his mother could be trusted or, when it came to his father, had simply lost her mind.

Back at Princeton, Billy couldn't forget what Lauren had said in the cemetery. With exams looming, he found himself inventing excuses to avoid trips to New Haven.
Don't you miss me?
she sometimes asked, her voice husky with hurt.
Of course I do
, he insisted, though it wasn't exactly true. How could he miss her when he already had her? Lauren thinking of him, caring what happened to him, his lacrosse practice, his biochem exam, the boring details of his undergraduate life.

What he didn't miss, in fact, was sex. He couldn't seem to conjure up the desire, the plain animal lust that made normal college couples wild to see each other, the real reason Topher Craig put five hundred miles on his car each weekend to visit his girlfriend at Cornell.
I don't know how you do it, man
, Topher sometimes said, as he packed his duffel on a Thursday night.
After a week I'm ready to explode.

To this Billy had no answer. The real answer—that he did explode, nightly, alone in his room—was unspeakable and pathetic. Unspeakable too what he thought of as he pumped himself. He was not thinking of Lauren.

When she visited Princeton they saw movies, ate diner breakfasts, watched basketball games. Saturday afternoons they ran. Lauren was on the cross-country team at Yale—a dedicated runner, ambitious in her training, a perfect match for Billy's long stride. In the evening, tired but high on endorphins (and dehydrated; Billy would shudder later to think of it), they drank. At parties on campus, or at bars with Topher and his girlfriend, they pounded beer and cocktails—so many, often, that sex later was out of the question. Was that, in fact, Billy's intention? At the time he wasn't sure.

They might have gone on like this forever if he hadn't traveled, that February, to Maryland, for a lacrosse scrimmage against Towson.