Read Joe College: A Novel Online
Authors: Tom Perrotta
Joe College: A Novel (31 page)
Matt answered
the door in his hard hat and a Boy Scout shirt, a pair of expensive binoculars hanging from a cord around his neck.
the door in his hard hat and a Boy Scout shirt, a pair of expensive binoculars hanging from a cord around his neck.
“Come on in,” he said, leading me up a creaky wooden stairway to his second-floor apartment. “Things are a little slow getting started.”
Technically speaking, he hadn’t been lying when he said that everybody was waiting for me; he’d just neglected to explain that aside from himself, “everybody” meant Nick and Matt’s landlord, Lance, a skinny, wolfish guy I often saw prowling around the library, chatting up lonely undergraduate girls. They were sitting on lawn chairs in a room full of outdoor furniture, not to mention a potted palm and a nonfunctioning barbecue grill, regarding me with a certain amount of disappointment.
“Step inside the Conceptual Patio,” Matt told me, drawing my attention to the keg in one corner of the room and the garbage can in another. “There’s the Michelob and there’s the Apollo Love Juice.”
“Apollo Love Juice?”
He handed me a rinsed-out mayonnaise jar filled with a nasty-looking orange concoction. “Grain alcohol and Tang. One glass and you’re in orbit.”
“Two glasses and you’re on the dark side of the moon,” Lance added, popping a pretzel into his mouth. He had stringy, gray-streaked hair that fell well below his collar, and the haughty demeanor of a flamenco dancer.
“Three and you’re on the edge of the known universe,” Matt continued with a giggle.
“All right.” Nick held up his hand, silencing Lance before he could describe the effects of glass number four. “I’m gettin’ a little tired of this.”
I pulled up a chair to form a circle of sorts with Matt and Lance, who were sipping their Love Juice and bobbing their heads in time with “Cold as Ice,” looking like they were about two seconds away from jumping up and dancing. Nick was sitting off to one side, glancing nervously in our direction.
“There are going to be females at this party, aren’t there?” he asked.
Matt and Lance exchanged amused glances.
“What do you think, Karnak?” Matt asked his landlord. “Will there be females at this party?”
Lance closed his eyes, pressed two fingers to each of his temples, and gave the question his full psychic consideration, struggling unsuccessfully to maintain a straight face.
“Yes,” he said finally, sputtering with suppressed laughter as he carved an hourglass figure into the air. “I foresee a large number of females.”
“Just checking,” Nick told him. “I don’t want to get in over my head here.”
The mood on
the Conceptual Patio darkened as time passed and our number remained steady at four.
the Conceptual Patio darkened as time passed and our number remained steady at four.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” Matt was standing by the window, training his binoculars on the street below. “I figured more people would be here by now.”
“It’s early,” Lance reminded him. “The real party animals haven’t even climbed out of their coffins yet.”
“You sure you invited girls?” Nick asked again, this time more anxiously.
Lance sat up straight in response to this question, crossed his arms on his chest, and treated Nick to an imperious, heavy-lidded
stare. I half expected him to leap up from his lawn chair, snap his fingers, and shout,
“Olé!”
stare. I half expected him to leap up from his lawn chair, snap his fingers, and shout,
“Olé!”
“Do I look like a fool?” he inquired darkly. “I invited only girls.”
“Thirty-seven of them,” Matt added. “We made a list.”
“Fifteen were possible no-shows,” said Lance. “Twelve were likelies, and the rest were probables.”
“What about the band?” Nick asked. “Didn’t you say there was going to be a band?”
“They backed out,” Matt informed him. “There was some confusion about the date.”
“No girls, no band,” Nick grumbled.
“Don’t worry, though,” Matt continued, trying to cheer us up. “I’ve got some live entertainment lined up that’s even better.”
Nick wasn’t reassured.
“You call this an orgy?” he asked, glaring at me like the party was my idea.
“I never said it was an orgy. It’s just—” I paused, searching for the right description. “It’s just a little get-together.”
“Don’t pull this get-together shit on me,” he warned. “You called it a fucking orgy.”
By ten thirty
, Lance and Matt had each consumed enough Apollo Love Juice to have pushed beyond the boundaries of the known universe, though neither one of them seemed particularly drunk to me. Nick was halfway through his second cup, and he had become a lot more cheerful since making the switch. I was the laggard, not even in orbit yet, content to sit on my lawn chair and sink deeper into the melancholy that had taken hold of me since my talk with Cindy. I wondered if she and Max were still in the common room, making awkward stabs at small talk, or if they had migrated to a fancy restaurant, where they were laughing over a bottle of wine, planning their big summer in Colorado. I was jealous, of course, but not in the obvious way—it seemed to me that Cindy was the interloper, not Max,
that she was the one homing in on something that was rightfully mine, though it was hard for me to identify what that something was.
, Lance and Matt had each consumed enough Apollo Love Juice to have pushed beyond the boundaries of the known universe, though neither one of them seemed particularly drunk to me. Nick was halfway through his second cup, and he had become a lot more cheerful since making the switch. I was the laggard, not even in orbit yet, content to sit on my lawn chair and sink deeper into the melancholy that had taken hold of me since my talk with Cindy. I wondered if she and Max were still in the common room, making awkward stabs at small talk, or if they had migrated to a fancy restaurant, where they were laughing over a bottle of wine, planning their big summer in Colorado. I was jealous, of course, but not in the obvious way—it seemed to me that Cindy was the interloper, not Max,
that she was the one homing in on something that was rightfully mine, though it was hard for me to identify what that something was.
“Oh, I could have continued with my graduate work,” Lance declared, drilling Nick with the unnerving gaze he used to plumb the souls of the girls he befriended at the library. “I could have finished my thesis, taken a professorship, and committed slow intellectual suicide. But I chose the road less traveled.”
“Took some guts,” Nick commented. “Professors got a pretty good deal.”
“I respect the life of the mind too much to reduce it to a job,” Lance replied, pausing to shovel a handful of peanuts into his mouth. “I prefer the Greek ideal of leisurely contemplation.”
“That’s Greek?” Nick seemed puzzled. “The Greeks I know work their asses off. A lot of them are in the restaurant business.”
“I’m not talking about modern-day Greeks.” Lance’s expression soured, as if the mere thought of non-ancient Greeks left a taste in his mouth. “I’m working from a classical model.”
Nick swirled the Love Juice in his plastic cup as though it were expensive brandy. “So what do you do for a living?”
“I
live,”
Lance told him, delivering this pronouncement with melodramatic conviction.
live,”
Lance told him, delivering this pronouncement with melodramatic conviction.
“I mean for money,” Nick explained patiently.
“Ah, money.” Lance’s face relaxed. “It always comes down to that, doesn’t it?”
“The almighty dollar,” said Nick.
Lance smiled in rueful agreement. “The monthly pound of flesh.”
“What can you do? Gotta pay the man his money.”
“Render unto Caesar and so forth.”
“Amen,” replied Nick. “You mind passing those peanuts?”
Matt excused himself
to make some phone calls and returned with a somber expression. He shook his head in response to whatever question it was Lance hadn’t yet asked him.
to make some phone calls and returned with a somber expression. He shook his head in response to whatever question it was Lance hadn’t yet asked him.
“Really?” Lance looked baffled. “Not even Caroline?”
“No answer,” Matt told him.
“Maybe she’s on her way,” Lance speculated. “What about Sarah and Mary Beth?”
“Sarah thinks she’s got food poisoning. Mary Beth’s line was busy.”
“At least Amy and Michiko will come,” Lance insisted. “That much I’m certain of.”
“I’m sorry,” Matt told me. “I didn’t expect it to turn out like this.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s a perfectly good party.”
“Don’t forget Allison,” Lance called out. “She said she’d probably be a little late.”
Just then the doorbell rang, the harsh cry of the buzzer slicing through the accumulated gloom. Matt cocked his head at a drastic angle, like a dog hearing a distant whistle. When it rang again, he stumbled backwards, clutching at his chest.
“Oh my God. It’s gonna happen. I can feel it.”
“See?” Lance held out both hands with an air of personal vindication. “What did I tell you?”
Matt took a couple of steps toward the door, then turned back around. He stared at us for a couple of seconds, shaking his head as if we didn’t quite measure up.
“Come on, you guys. At least try to look like you’re having fun.”
In spite of this injunction, we fell into an immediate and embarrassed silence the moment he left the room. Nick whipped a comb out of his back pocket and went to work while Lance sprayed a few blasts of Binaca into his mouth, then made some last-second adjustments to his eyebrows. I untucked my shirt and began polishing my glasses. By the time Matt stepped back into the apartment with the new arrival in tow, all three of us were staring right at the door, unable to conceal first our curiosity, and then our disappointment. Matt’s crestfallen expression mirrored our own.
“Guy’s,” he said. “This is Eric. Eric, this is the guys.”
Eric was a bold statement in his orange flight suit and black velvet cape, his eyes glittering with intellectual challenge. To my amazement,
he only considered me for a fleeting second before turning the full force of his attention on Lance, who had suddenly become very interested in what may or may not have been a spot on his pants.
he only considered me for a fleeting second before turning the full force of his attention on Lance, who had suddenly become very interested in what may or may not have been a spot on his pants.
“You,” Eric said, as if picking the landlord out of a lineup. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Lance looked up and nodded sadly, a condemned man accepting his fate.
“Hello, Eric,” he said. “It’s nice to see you again.”
Eric pounced on the empty chair next to Lance and immediately launched into a diatribe against Carl Jung.
“Don’t tell me you fell for that archetype bullshit,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe that such a terrible thing could happen to such a nice person.
“I think there’s some validity to it,” Lance countered. “I think all of us are born with a certain set of images and beliefs buried deep in our unconscious minds.”
“That’s garbage,” Eric shot back. “If there really was a collective unconscious, we wouldn’t all feel so alone.”
I glanced at Nick, curious to see what he was making of this face-off, which looked like it might go on for a while. After a few seconds, he turned to meet my gaze, then got up and walked across the room. He sat down in the chair to my right, scooting it closer so he could whisper in my ear.
“Am I confused, or is that guy wearing a cape?”
“Either that or a really big handkerchief.”
I thought it was a pretty good line, but Nick didn’t crack a smile. He just grunted quietly, as if in confirmation of his own thoughts.
“Live and learn,” he said. “Live and learn.”
By midnight it
was a whole different scene, not a blowout but at least a halfway respectable party. Kristin, Djembe, and Sarah had
arrived around eleven, along with half a dozen of Sarah’s friends, from the Slavic Chorus. They were followed a short time later by a contingent of dining-hall workers that included Lorelei, Brad Foxworthy, Milton, and Dallas Little, the three-hundred-pound dishwasher, and now Matt’s apartment was humming with activity. Lance had escaped from Eric’s clutches and had installed himself by the garbage can, where he was ladling out the Love Juice and happily explaining its supernatural powers to anyone who cared to listen. In the meantime, Eric had glommed onto Djembe, who was nodding without enthusiasm and glancing around anxiously for assistance as he bobbed and weaved to avoid Argument Man’s jabbing index finger. Kristin couldn’t rescue him, though; she was too busy dancing with Brad and Lorelei, and Dallas in the big empty room that separated the Conceptual Patio from the actual kitchen. I was watching all this from my lawn chair, while carrying on a conversation with Nick and a member of the Slavic Chorus who’d introduced herself as Katrinka, though I’d known her freshman year as Michele.
was a whole different scene, not a blowout but at least a halfway respectable party. Kristin, Djembe, and Sarah had
arrived around eleven, along with half a dozen of Sarah’s friends, from the Slavic Chorus. They were followed a short time later by a contingent of dining-hall workers that included Lorelei, Brad Foxworthy, Milton, and Dallas Little, the three-hundred-pound dishwasher, and now Matt’s apartment was humming with activity. Lance had escaped from Eric’s clutches and had installed himself by the garbage can, where he was ladling out the Love Juice and happily explaining its supernatural powers to anyone who cared to listen. In the meantime, Eric had glommed onto Djembe, who was nodding without enthusiasm and glancing around anxiously for assistance as he bobbed and weaved to avoid Argument Man’s jabbing index finger. Kristin couldn’t rescue him, though; she was too busy dancing with Brad and Lorelei, and Dallas in the big empty room that separated the Conceptual Patio from the actual kitchen. I was watching all this from my lawn chair, while carrying on a conversation with Nick and a member of the Slavic Chorus who’d introduced herself as Katrinka, though I’d known her freshman year as Michele.
“Have either of you been to Russia?” she asked, fixing us with her urgent green eyes. Her thick eyebrows formed a single emphatic bar across her forehead.
“Russia?” Nick snorted. “Why would I want to go to Russia?”
“Me neither,” I said, leaning forward to get a better look at Lorelei, whom I’d never seen dance before. Her jeans were tight and her eyes were closed. Her leotard top looked like it was made for a much smaller girl, and all the sexual energy in the house seemed to have gathered around her like a halo. “I’ve never even been on an airplane.”
“You’re kidding,” said Katrinka. “I’m going to Moscow this summer.”
“Why would you want to go there?” Nick asked.
“I’m in love with Russia.” She said this with real emotion in her voice, as if Russia were a person. “The music, the language, the history.”
Nick looked offended. “What are you, some kind of Communist?”
“Not at all,” Katrinka explained. “I’m a Russophile.”
I had to lean forward at an extreme angle to see around Dallas, whose enormous body was blocking my view of Lorelei. He barely moved at all when he danced, yet he had a way of standing not quite still that was oddly graceful, as if he were completely at one with the music, as if dancing were less an activity than an attitude toward the world.
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