Joe College: A Novel (30 page)
Read Joe College: A Novel Online
Authors: Tom Perrotta
“That’s it? That’s your whole punishment?”
“He gave me an F for the paper. If I write a new one by the end of the week, he says he’ll average the two grades together. If I’m lucky I can still get out of the class with a C.”
“He didn’t report you?”
Matt lowered his voice. He seemed a little perplexed by what he was telling me.
“He gave me this big lecture about
Measure for Measure,
how it was ultimately a play about mercy, and maybe we all need to show each other a little more mercy, to have a little more understanding of the fact that we’re all human, we all make mistakes, et cetera, et cetera. He was really very nice about it.”
Measure for Measure,
how it was ultimately a play about mercy, and maybe we all need to show each other a little more mercy, to have a little more understanding of the fact that we’re all human, we all make mistakes, et cetera, et cetera. He was really very nice about it.”
Just then Nick wandered into the serving area with a big grin on his face. He scooped some ice into his glass and filled it with a fizzy blast of Coke before turning in our direction. If I wasn’t mistaken, he seemed at least moderately pleased to see us.
“Well, well, if it isn’t the Scrotum Twins.”
Matt responded with an elaborately servile bow, the kind that Ed McMahon bestowed on Johnny Carson.
“At your service, Herr Chef.”
“Here’s one,” Nick told us, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “What does Joan Collins put behind her ears to attract men?”
He barely managed to wait for the two of us to exchange blank looks.
“Her ankles!” he cried, pressing both forearms against his head in a misguided attempt to illustrate his punch line. “Get it?”
“I guess that’ll do it,” Matt agreed.
Nick turned and headed back out to the worker’s table, still chuckling to himself.
“Oh yeah,” Matt told me. “There’s one more thing. I’m supposed to write you a letter of apology.”
“I haven’t received that yet.”
“I’m working on it,” he assured me, reaching for his trowel.
“Matt?” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Your father’s not really a car salesman, is he?”
He hesitated for a second before answering. It was the first time I’d ever seen him blush.
“Only in the broadest sense,” he conceded, addressing his answer to the wall behind my head. “He’s a big executive at GM. The number two or three guy, depending on how you look at it.”
I’m not sure why this upset me so much. The plagiarism I’d written off as an act of desperation, but this seemed more personal somehow, more like an insult. I remembered all the stories he’d told me about his dad, a chubby guy in a plaid coat who’d tell any kind of lie imaginable to make a sale, and how we’d laughed at poor Mr. Cooper’s incompetence and sweaty desperation. Before I was even conscious of my intention, my hand had curled into a fist. I drew back my arm and smacked him in the jaw, a sucker punch of Barnhouse proportions.
He was still flat on his back when Lorelei stepped into the serving area from the kitchen, her mouth opening for a question she couldn’t seem to ask. Her expression wavered between uncertainty and delight as she watched Matt struggle into sitting position, the hard hat still miraculously attached to his head.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he explained, blinking his eyes and wiggling his chin around to make sure nothing was broken. “I just wanted you to like me.”
Matt had scheduled
his end-of-the-year bash for the Friday before reading period, the busiest party night of the semester, and all my suitemates had other plans. Ted and Nancy were going to the Pierson formal, the social highlight of their year. They buzzed around the common room like high school kids on prom night, practicing their dance steps, pinning flowers on one another, posing for pictures in front of the fireplace. Sang was looking sharp as well. Katie Kim was coming down from Middletown for the first time, and he’d made reservations at the only decent Korean restaurant in town, to be followed by dancing at the New Wave Study Break/Sock Hop at the Asian-American Students’ Association. Even Max seemed to be preparing for a special occasion of some sort, though, as usual, he wasn’t too forthcoming about the nature of the occasion.
his end-of-the-year bash for the Friday before reading period, the busiest party night of the semester, and all my suitemates had other plans. Ted and Nancy were going to the Pierson formal, the social highlight of their year. They buzzed around the common room like high school kids on prom night, practicing their dance steps, pinning flowers on one another, posing for pictures in front of the fireplace. Sang was looking sharp as well. Katie Kim was coming down from Middletown for the first time, and he’d made reservations at the only decent Korean restaurant in town, to be followed by dancing at the New Wave Study Break/Sock Hop at the Asian-American Students’ Association. Even Max seemed to be preparing for a special occasion of some sort, though, as usual, he wasn’t too forthcoming about the nature of the occasion.
Ted and Nancy left around eight, and Katie Kim showed up a few minutes later, looking sweetly self-conscious in her black cocktail dress and high heels. Sang had said she was beautiful, but I didn’t agree with this assessment, at least not at first. She was more accurately described as cute, I thought, or even sisterly. Still, their faces lit up the moment they saw each other, and you had no choice but to envy them. They were in love; Max and I were just bystanders.
Katie was easily amused. She had a pretty smile and an explosive, slightly horsey laugh that she tried to apologize for by placing her hand over her mouth and looking mortified. It was a charming gesture—for some reason it came off as ironic rather than self-effacing—and it wasn’t her only one. She just had that thing that
some people have, that mysterious quality that makes you not want them to leave the room or turn their attention to someone else. Sang had tried several times to explain the giddy sensation that had come over him about an hour after meeting her, and after only ten minutes in her company I understood the feeling all too well, though in my case it was more dispiriting than giddy, because she was already heading out the door, leaving me alone with Max in the suddenly desolate common room.
some people have, that mysterious quality that makes you not want them to leave the room or turn their attention to someone else. Sang had tried several times to explain the giddy sensation that had come over him about an hour after meeting her, and after only ten minutes in her company I understood the feeling all too well, though in my case it was more dispiriting than giddy, because she was already heading out the door, leaving me alone with Max in the suddenly desolate common room.
“Damn,” I said, nodding sadly at the empty space she’d left in the air.
Max was lounging in the legless armchair, looking suspiciously presentable in one of Ted’s oxford shirts and Hank Yamashita’s skinny leather tie, which by now had attained the status of community property. An hour or so earlier, I’d stepped out of the shower and found him standing shirtless in front of the mirror, shaking a dangerous quantity of Old Spice into his palm and massaging it into his chest and stomach as though it were suntan lotion, and now I was catching powerful whiffs of manly fragrance whenever he shifted position.
“You think?” He gave an I-could-take-her-or-leave-her shrug. “Not my type, I guess.”
I wanted to ask him to define his type for me—I was curious to know more about the intended beneficiary of the aftershave and thought this might be a good way to broach the subject—but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Max and I had had a bitter argument about Cindy a few days after I got back from vacation, and our friendship still hadn’t fully recovered. He’d kept in close touch with her over the break and knew all about her “engagement” with Kevin, which he considered a disaster and blamed on me. He’d launched into a complicated indictment of my behavior, claiming it was tantamount to a violation of Cindy’s human rights, as if she were Steven Biko and I were the apartheid government of South Africa. Things had improved a little in the weeks since then, but there was still a palpable tension in the air whenever we were alone together.
He grew more visibly agitated as it approached nine o’clock, glancing at his watch every few seconds and working through the whole repertoire of body language meant to convey impatience, but I still couldn’t bring myself to get off the couch. My party spirit, never too strong to begin with, was fading by the minute.
“Shouldn’t you be going?” he asked.
“I’m having a little trouble getting motivated.”
Max normally regarded the ringing phone with a pronounced lack of enthusiasm, but that night a different set of assumptions was clearly in effect. He sprang out of the chair, snatching up the phone and pressing it to his ear with a look of dread that quickly turned to relief.
“It’s for you,” he told me.
I rose wearily and accepted the receiver, which smelled like it had just been dipped in a vat of Old Spice.
“Hello?”
“Do you know what time it is?” Matt demanded, shouting to make himself heard over the loud music in the background.
“What time is it?” I obediently replied.
“It’s party time!” he bellowed. “Everybody’s waiting for you!”
“Who’s everybody?”
“Don’t waste my time with questions. Just get your ass over here. And bring your damn roommates.”
He hung up before I could fill him in on the roommate issue, leaving me with an earful of dial tone. Conscious of Max’s scrutiny, I listened to it for a few seconds before setting the phone back in the cradle. I knew he wanted to get rid of me, knew he would have made himself scarce if I were the one wearing the leather tie and too much aftershave. Now that I was up off the couch, walking a few blocks to Matt’s house no longer seemed like such a craven act of surrender. As hard as I’d tried in the past few weeks, I found myself unable to stay mad at him. It was as if I’d discharged all my anger with that punch in the dining hall, and had nothing left to do but forgive him. And besides, it was just a party. Everyone was waiting for me.
“All right,” I said. “I guess I’ll be heading out.”
“Have a good time,” he told me. “Stay out as late as you want.”
Cindy was on
my mind a lot those days, way more than she’d been when we were actually going out together. By my calculation, she was about five months pregnant at that point, far enough along to be showing, and I had fabricated an image of her as a lovely and energetic mother-to-be, her face shining with contentment, her body unchanged except for the huge but still graceful swelling of her belly, which I sometimes pictured as being so large that she needed to support it from below with both hands, as though she were lugging a watermelon home from the supermarket. On some level I understood that this was not a realistic vision—I had taken to watching pregnant women on the streets of New Haven and realized pretty quickly that they were just as likely to be cranky and out-of-breath as they were to be radiant and full of vitality—but that didn’t make the image any less necessary or appealing to me.
my mind a lot those days, way more than she’d been when we were actually going out together. By my calculation, she was about five months pregnant at that point, far enough along to be showing, and I had fabricated an image of her as a lovely and energetic mother-to-be, her face shining with contentment, her body unchanged except for the huge but still graceful swelling of her belly, which I sometimes pictured as being so large that she needed to support it from below with both hands, as though she were lugging a watermelon home from the supermarket. On some level I understood that this was not a realistic vision—I had taken to watching pregnant women on the streets of New Haven and realized pretty quickly that they were just as likely to be cranky and out-of-breath as they were to be radiant and full of vitality—but that didn’t make the image any less necessary or appealing to me.
Perhaps because the imaginary Cindy was so familiar to me, I almost charged right past the real one on the steps of Entryway C, offering her no more than the obligatory nod I would have given to any passing stranger. But something—some muffled explosion in some remote region of my brain—made me pull up short and look again.
“Cindy?”
She stopped on the landing between the first and second floor. Her confusion seemed to mirror my own.
“Danny?” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here.”
“I know that.” She rolled her eyes. “I thought you were supposed to be at a party.”
The strangeness of the moment fell on me all at once, and all I could do was stare at her.
“What?” she said, looking worried in spite of her smile. She was
wearing the tight blue dress I remembered fondly from the previous summer. “What’s wrong?”
wearing the tight blue dress I remembered fondly from the previous summer. “What’s wrong?”
So many things were wrong just then it took me another few seconds to break the wrongness into its component parts. She had cut and lightened her hair and was going a lot easier on the makeup. She looked good, better than ever.
“You aren’t—” I began, then stopped myself. “Where’s the baby?”
Her smile disappeared. I hadn’t meant it to come out like that, more like an accusation than a question. She looked down, placing one hand on the flat of her stomach, as if she needed to double-check.
“It’s not … I couldn’t—” Her voice broke and she started over. “I couldn’t go through with it.”
“Did something happen with Kevin?”
“It was me,” she said, shaking her head. “I just couldn’t—”
I looked down, hoping to conceal the surprisingly sharp sense of disappointment that had taken hold of me, a feeling I had no right to and couldn’t fully account for.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I’m sorry you—”
“It’s done,” she said. “I’m trying not to think about it.”
I was about to thank her for taking the trouble to come all the way to New Haven to let me know, when my brain finally started functioning at full power.
“You’re here to see Max, aren’t you?”
“I thought I should at least meet him face-to-face,” she said. “I mean, we are going to be sharing a house this summer.”
“You’re what?”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“We haven’t been talking too much.”
“His mother offered me a job,” she said, unable to keep herself from smiling. “They need someone to manage the store.”
“The store?”
“Cara Mia. The boutique.”
It took me a second to call up the fact that Mrs. Friedlin was part owner, along with a couple of friends, of a small clothing store in a fashionable neighborhood in downtown Denver. Max had explained it to me as an expensive hobby, a way for over-educated and under-employed women to convince themselves that they had a purpose in life beyond shopping and tennis and travel.
“You’re moving to Denver?”
“That’s the plan,” she said, looking like she couldn’t quite believe it herself. “The Friedlins said I could live in their house until I found a place of my own. They’re going to be in Ireland all summer anyway.”
“When are you leaving?”
“I already did. My car’s all packed and everything. I just figured I’d make a quick stop up here and say hi to Max before getting on the highway. Can you believe it? I’m gonna drive all the way to Colorado.”
“What about your mother?” I said. “What’s going to happen to her?”
Her face wasn’t happy, but it wasn’t apologetic, either.
“She’s just gonna have to manage.”
“You think she can?”
“She’ll have to,” she said. There was a hardness in her voice I wasn’t familiar with. “I’ve taken care of her since I was a little girl. Now it’s someone else’s turn.” Almost as an afterthought, she added, “Her sister’s only an hour away.”
“What about Kevin? How’s he feel about all this?”
“What do you want from me?” she demanded. “How many chances like this you think I’m gonna get?”
She wasn’t that far away, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to climb the three steps that separated us, joining her on the landing so I could hug her and tell her that it would be okay, that she was making the right choice, that her mother would be fine and everything would turn out right in Colorado, which is what I wanted to do. Instead I looked up at her and said, “Was it Max? Was this his idea?”
An odd little smile came onto her face.
“It was you,” she said.
“Me?”
“Something you said.”
“What did I say?”
She watched me closely, like she was trying to catch me in a lie.
“That I deserve to be happy. Didn’t you tell me that?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Probably. I just wonder if you’ve thought this through.”
She didn’t answer right away, and it struck me, pretty much out of nowhere, how empty the entryway seemed that night, as if the two of us were the only people in the building, and how different it had been during her last visit, this same stairwell packed tight with partying students, everything reeking of beer and echoing with laughter. She seemed a lot more at home this time around, no more out of place than I was.
“I couldn’t make up my mind at first,” she told me. “Then I asked myself what you would do.”
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