Loner (11 page)

You told me. “Acinorev sllew,” I said after I'd transcribed it.

“What?”

“That's your name backward,” I said. “Only, if you wanted to make it readable in a mirror, it'd be ‘sllew acinorev.' And you'd have to print the words in reverse.”

You weren't like those baseball players; I expected you to probe, then I'd explain its origins and my unique and rather intriguing college essay, you'd tell me you, too, felt like you had always seen the world differently from everyone else, though you couldn't conceive of being able to flip words around in your mind fluently, how exactly do you do that?

But “Ah” was all you said.

The library was nearly deserted by the time I finished the paper. We walked through the Yard in the silence of the small hours, under a black canvas perforated by a few dim pinholes, a diorama with us as the only figurines.

When you discovered that Matthews was also my destination, you asked, “You're seeing Sara now?”

“No, I live here, too.”

“Oh,” you said with a small note of surprise.

“This is me,” I said when we reached the fourth floor.

You continued on up. “Thanks for your help.”

“Anytime,” I called out. “I'm always available to rescue a damsel in distress.”

You paused midflight and looked down at me, a weird grin on your face.

“Good night, Divad,” you said, and kept walking.

For a moment I thought you'd somehow gotten my name, my easiest of names, wrong, but then I realized you were saying it backward. My paranoia was unwarranted—you'd been impressed with my idiosyncratic talent, after all.

I climbed into bed, though I wasn't remotely tired; your “Divad” had revived my endorphins. Lying under the sheets, I tried reading in preparation for my meeting with Samuelson but couldn't concentrate. This
was
going to be the best year of my life, a Technicolor romp after so many dunnish slogs. I pulled up my window shade and watched the stars fade into the lightening sky, imagining us speaking whole sentences to each other in my reversed preadolescent tongue, an exclusive mode of communication.
Veronica and David,
people would say,
those two have their own language—they're the only ones who understand each other.

Chapter 8

M
y finger hovered over my laptop's touch pad with the grave deliberation associated with launching a nuclear strike. It had been thirty-six hours since our evening at Lamont—more than enough time for a friend request on Facebook to seem an afterthought. We were both at Harvard, we lived in the same dorm, we'd “studied” together; this was a perfectly ordinary next step. After you accepted, I'd be able to view your trove of photos and status updates, maybe learn something that would help me win you over—similar tactics had panned out in a number of romantic comedies I'd seen—or at least discover where you were spending your nights.

I clicked.

I didn't use the site myself except for voyeurism. I was friends with my high school and Matthews confederacies, a smattering of relatives, and the people who sluttishly befriend everyone on it. To avoid advertising the paucity of my social connections, I had hidden my list of friends and prohibited anyone from posting on my wall.
Before arriving at Harvard, I'd hoped I would acquire such a bounty of comrades here that I could make my social media presence more transparent, perhaps even add the popular kids from Hobart High to show them how far I'd come. Yet for now I wasn't eager to be seen in pictures with the Matthews Marauders nor to affirm my relationship with Sara, whose profile photo was of her at her high school graduation, flanked by her deliriously proud parents, off-kilter mortarboard dwarfing her head.

That night I studied with Sara after dinner at the Starbucks located in the Garage, the mini-mall in Harvard Square that seemed to cater to high school potheads. You hadn't accepted my request yet. That was fine; maybe you were busy or took pleasure in leaving me in suspense. I tried to distract myself by reading even further ahead in the syllabus for my meeting with Samuelson.

“Why are you checking your phone every two minutes?” Sara asked. “What's so important?”

“I'm just nervous about this meeting tomorrow with Samuelson,” I said.

She looked unimpressed.

“He's probably the most important English professor here, which basically means the most important one in the country,” I added, and suggested we go home.

“You always sniff your jacket before you put it on,” she observed as we packed up.

“Do I?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Every single time. Does it smell or something?”

“Just routine, I suppose.”

“I guess we're both creatures of routine,” she said. “Or obses­sive-compulsion.”

I shuddered to think of the routinized trajectory we were on. If the two of us continued carrying on the habits that constituted our relationship, who's to say we wouldn't end up getting married, moving to Cleveland to be closer to her parents, and siring three
children to replicate our family structures as I sentenced myself to a lifetime of buying CVS-brand zinc and date nights in mini-mall Starbucks.

While waiting to cross Mass Ave., cars whizzing past us, I had a sudden, unbidden image of pushing Sara into oncoming traffic.

You weren't home when we went to sleep, and you still hadn't responded on Facebook by the next morning when I knocked on Samuelson's office door in the Barker Center.

“Hello?” he said, apparently having forgotten who I was.

“David Federman,” I reminded him. “Thank you for reading my essay on Ahab's primal wound.”

That sparked some recognition in his eyes. He picked through a stack of papers on the desk.

“Yes, here it is,” he said, adjusting his glasses and nodding. “That was wonderfully
cogent. The peg leg as readerly misdirection in Ahab's pursuit of the white whale. A red herring, so to speak.” Samuelson let out a scholarly chortle. He spoke in the same cadences in conversation as he did behind a lectern. “The analysis of the leg as a figure of castration is very nuanced; usually these things become somewhat over-the-top, especially from male critics. I'm teaching a seminar on Hawthorne next semester. Mostly graduate students, but I think it might interest you.”

“That sounds up my alley,” I said. “Or up my galley, so to speak.” Samuelson chuckled again at the maritime pun. Wonderfully cogent, very nuanced. Six weeks in and already the star pupil in the Harvard English department. My fancy prose style wasn't going over Samuelson's head. It had finally found its proper audience, a potential mentor. I didn't have to be a lawyer; I could be a professor of literature, wear one of those jackets with patched elbows, stroke my beard in an armchair and apply nuanced close readings without breaking a sweat. You'd stand by my side at stultifying faculty parties and jet around the world with me as I was crowned with laurels at academic conferences, joking with the awestruck attendees
and protégés about how impenetrably dense my books were while shooting me a private look that said you did, of course, understand them (I had taught you so much), these are the self-effacing comments we must make so as not to appear full of ourselves, when can we get out of here and fuck in our hotel room?

Samuelson's phone rang. “Excuse me, I have to take this,” he said, picking it up.

“No problem,” I said, taking out my own phone.

He cradled the receiver by his ear. “Thanks for dropping by.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, a little miffed all my reading prep was in vain, but that was fine—I would have plenty more opportunities in the spring. “I'll be sure to sign up for the Hawthorne seminar.”

On my way out I stopped in the ground-floor Barker Café to order a cup of coffee. This is what a young literary mind did on campus: met with his professor in the morning and caffeinated himself for an afternoon of rigorous reading. I was about to leave when I noticed you in the corner, bowed over a table with your TF, Tom, presumably holding his own office-less office hours, with what had to be your—
my
—essay between you.

Riding high on Samuelson's praise, I approached, though it was a cavalier move. For all I knew, my Melville essay had made the grad-student rounds, and alerting Tom to our friendship could put us in academic jeopardy if he'd identified the writing in your James paper as suspiciously similar to my own.

“Hey,” I said, standing over your table.

You looked up, uneasily, and casually pulled a notebook over the essay, as if to hide the evidence from Tom. Our little secret.

“Hi,” you said.

“David,” I said, addressing Tom. “I'm also in Prufrock. Harriet's section.”

I paused to let him remember who I was.

“You're lucky, you got the best one.” Tom scratched the underside of his beard. His eyes swerved to you. “The others tend to devolve
into prurient discussions about nineteenth-century sexuality. Very juvenile stuff.”

You giggled.

This wasn't how it was meant to go, with inside jokes from your section. You were supposed to ask what I was doing in Barker; I would blushingly admit that, well, I sort of just had my meeting with Professor Samuelson, I guess he wanted to see if I'd take his Hawthorne seminar in the spring; then Tom would say he was also taking it, he thought it was only for grad students, and he'd read my essay, too—well done, man, pull up a chair.

I waited for one of you to say something else.

“Your memory of poetry lines in class is impressive,” I said to Tom. “It seems like you've read just about everything.”

“I'm actually a robot,” he said. “I have no soul.”

Another giggle from you.

I evah on luos
.

“Any chance you're taking Samuelson's Hawthorne seminar next semester?” I asked.

“No,” he said, sipping his coffee.

There was another stretch of dead air.

“Well, I should get going,” I said. “See you guys later.”

“Nice meeting you, Dave,” Tom said as I walked away.

After you had barely acknowledged me at the Barker Café, I wasn't going to make another appearance in your room until you accepted my Facebook friendship. I told Sara I'd been having insomnia and needed to sleep in my own bed for a few days.

By Tuesday my request remained unanswered. If your delay was calculated, it was no longer cute. I wrote an entire essay for you; all you had to do was click a button or press on a screen.

I waited outside Harvard Hall before Prufrock with my copy of
Sister Carrie
. As you approached, I casually looked up and licked my finger to turn the page, my eyes briefly meeting yours before returning to the text, so captivated by my internal dialogue with Dreiser.

“You coming?” you asked at the door.

“Thanks,” I said, stepping in behind you and up the stairs. Samuelson was making his introductory remarks as we entered the room and took adjacent seats in the back row.

I spent the first half of class reacquainting myself with your olfactory presence. Then, as you jotted down Samuelson's points about the amoral universe and deterministic plot twists of naturalism, you lifted a page in your notebook and readjusted your arm. Your left elbow, in the same black sweater as before, grazed the bottom of my triceps. My instinct was to reposition my arm out of politeness, but I resisted and stayed put. You left it there, the knob of your elbow applying faint, uneven pressure on me as you took notes with your right hand.

At first I thought you were unaware of it—and this was even more bewitching than the contact: that your indifference to others could translate into such corporeal obliviousness.

But you had to know. Maybe it was an accident initially, yet once it began, you were enjoying it, the subtle friction of two (clothed) body parts in public as a famous professor lectured. There was no one else in the room with whom you'd done this; I'd been watching, I would've known. You'd chosen me.

For the rest of class we stayed like this. Sometimes your arm would move to take notes farther down the page and create a centimeter of cooling space between us and I'd wonder if that was the end, but it wasn't long before your elbow reunited with my arm. In a way, this was the most satisfying ecstasy I could imagine, suspended in a limbo state of not knowing and partial touching, the morsel on the tongue though not yet down the gullet.

When Samuelson's lecture concluded, so did our dalliance: you abruptly withdrew your seductive joint and stood up to leave. The
label of your sweater had flipped up and was poking out from the neck.
ZIPPER & BUTTON
, it said, upside-down and in reverse.
NOTTUB & REPPIZ
.

“Hey, did I add you on Facebook yet?” I asked as we bounced downstairs.

“I don't know.”

“I feel like I did. Maybe a few days ago?”