Loner (20 page)

“Cixous's
écriture feminine
is a rebellion against the repressive forces that would silence woman,” you said fifteen minutes into class. I leaned in closer to the door. “The verb ‘swallowed,' in that passage, is . . . you know.” You laughed slightly, and your classmates joined in, in that tepid, tennis-applause way students do when subject matter verges on the bawdy. “It underscores the male's anxiety over his loss of power when woman is allowed to write in her own voice and not in a phallogocentric register.”

You contributed two more times with similar eloquence and poise. I'd never heard you speak like this before (had never even heard
woman
used in the singular to represent the plural like that). Our time working on the Henry James paper hadn't revealed anything near this caliber of discourse. Maybe you simply didn't want to do the work for English class and had identified me as a willing and proficient accomplice. Most students didn't have the time to do all the reading for every course.

Or perhaps you were looking for an excuse to spend time with me.

Whatever your reasons, I wasn't upset. I was exultant. You didn't merely appreciate intellect in others; you yourself possessed more brainpower than I'd thought, probably even more than Sara, who
had to grind for her grades. You could coast at Harvard on sheer native aptitude. Just like me.

On my walk over to the library I resolved to make this a more intimate meeting than our last study session. I wouldn't let you get away with evasive parries; tonight we would have a real conversation.

When I arrived at our same nook on the second floor, you were already there, punctual for a change, your laptop ready. That boded well.

“Missing a party to work on your essay,” I said. “You're turning into a perfect little Harvard student.”

“Not missing much,” you said.

“I guess there are always plenty of parties to go to, right?”

“I guess.”

“I feel like I heard about a big one next weekend in Kirkland.”

You didn't say anything. Maybe you'd warm up once we started working.

“Do you know what you want to write on?” I asked.

You reached into your bag, pulled out the course pack for Prufrock, and flipped to “The Yellow Wallpaper.” A short story—no wonder you'd read it.

“And what interests you about ‘The Yellow Wallpaper'?”

You took a deep breath. “Don't know.”

“So you haven't come up with a thesis yet?”

A cute grin. “Maybe you could help me come up with a topic again?”

“I could do that,” I said.

You turned the laptop around and pushed it toward me. “How about we connect the narrator's insanity to her desire to write?” I proposed. You nodded, but as soon as I began typing, you pulled back the laptop.

“This is a bad idea,” you said, your forehead creasing with worry.

“We can change the thesis if you want. I just came up with that off the top of my head. I didn't really have a chance to prepare.”

“No—this.” You gesticulated back and forth across the table.

“Why do you say that?”

“I shouldn't be doing this to you.” You shut the laptop and pulled it closer. “It's not right.”

“You're not doing anything
to
me,” I said. “It's
with
me. A big prepositional difference. People work with tutors all the time.”

You drummed your fingers on the table. “Not in college.”

“Sure they do,” I said. “Just think of me like your TF.”

“But you're not my TF.”

“Technically, no—though Samuelson asked me to take his seminar on Hawthorne next semester, which is mostly grad ­students,” I said. “Not to toot my own horn, but I'm pretty good at this. And there's nothing wrong in asking for help when you need it.”

I awaited your response, my calves tensing, the soles of my feet rising as if in high heels.

A sigh of resignation—you knew I was right—and you turned the laptop back to me.

In spite of your ethical reservations, however, once again you didn't contribute at all toward the paper's thesis:

The story implies—perhaps in a manner the author herself was not aware of—that the narrator's desire to write is wedded to her “temporary nervous depression.” The hysterical female's creative expression comes at a steep cost: her own mental stability.

“How's that?” I asked after reading it aloud.

“Oops,” you said, looking up from your phone. “I was taking care of a text. Can you read it again?”

I repeated myself. “That's really good,” you said. “And didn't Samuelson say that Gilman went crazy once she had a kid? So that
makes sense that she'd write about a hysterical woman, since she was one herself.”

The gulf between how you spoke now and hours earlier in your gender class was remarkable—like a preteen girl here, a seasoned ­academic there—but I reminded myself that this was a lower-­priority course for you. You fielded messages from your buzzing phone while I typed on, feeling as though I'd rescued you from a leaky dinghy and was captaining you to shore in my sturdy vessel.

You listened to a voice mail then made a call, hiding the phone and speaking in a library whisper.

“Mom,” you said. “The pharmacy here is out of Ambien. I need you to have Sharon FedEx me a bottle tomorrow.” You waited. “
Yes
, I need it tomorrow, you know it's the only way I can fall asleep.”

As you talked to her, a shirtless boy ran through the library screaming, “Yale sucks!”

“You going to the Game?” I asked when you were off the phone.

That Saturday was the (football) Game between Harvard and Yale, in all its capitalized and singular hubris (like “the Yard,” somewhat like “the city”). I wasn't planning to attend, especially now that I'd been excommunicated by the Matthews Marauders, but it occurred to me that you would likely be there.

“Yeah.” You blew your nose on a tissue, and when you set it down a fleck of dried snot protruded from your right nostril like an icicle, shivering in the breeze of your exhalations. I didn't say anything, not only because it's hard to summon the tact to tell anyone, least of all you, she has snot in her nose, but because it was so human, so imperfect.

(See? I didn't just idealize you. I wanted it all: the beauty and the ugliness, the lush hair and the encrusted mucus. Show me someone else who accepted your totality like I did.)

“Cool,” I said. “Maybe I'll see you there.”

You produced an unconvincing cough. You'd done so at increasingly short intervals for the past twenty minutes, but this time you
took it further, moaning and rubbing your temples like an actress in a cold-remedy commercial.

“Fuck,” you said. “I think I'm coming down with something.”

You sputtered more from your prone position, hacking in a staccato fit but briefly recovering to respond to an incoming text. I'd seen better performances from grade school malingerers.

“I don't know,” you said. “I think maybe I better call it a night.”

“Okay,” I said, snapping your laptop shut.

“Wait—did you send it to yourself?” you asked.

“No, it's your essay. Why would I need to send it to myself?”

“You're not going to . . .” You looked crestfallen. “You can't help me with the rest?”

It was outrageous, asking me to spend the night in the library cheating for you so you could skip off to Liam's party—with you thinking I had no idea what you were up to.

“Yeah, I guess I could.”

“Great,” you said, smiling with relief. “I'll e-mail you what we have so far.” You sent me the document and packed up, leaving me alone in our nook.

Ll'I liam
-e uoy tahw ew evah os raf.

I waited a minute before hurrying out of Lamont to catch you in the act.

Ahead of me in the Yard, you turned left through a gate and onto Mass Ave. Yet, instead of going south to Liam's final club (or University Health Services, not that that was ever a consideration), you made a right. You might be meeting him at a bar, in which case I couldn't enter behind you. I kept trailing you anyway, with a wide enough berth that you wouldn't see me even if you happened to look over your shoulder.

After several turns we ended up off campus on Story Street. You stopped at a house and pushed the buzzer. Based on the current information in the student directory, Liam still lived in Adams, and the house didn't appear to be the site of a party; it was quiet, and the only light came from a single third-floor window.

Moments later the front door opened and you stepped inside. I couldn't see who let you in. I prowled closer to see the name under the buzzer to the third floor:
MEYERS/BUR
, it read, before the cramped handwriting ran out of space.

I walked away, googling “Meyers and Cambridge” but coming up with nothing specific no matter how many Harvard- and ­address-based modifiers I added. My phone purred with a Facebook notification. You'd posted a photo of me in the library (I hadn't noticed you take it) with the comment “Long night studying at Lamont with
David Federman
.” My privacy settings continued to prevent anyone from adding to my own spotless wall. Yet now you were advertising the fact that we were hanging out alone for the whole night. You were even presenting evidence to the world of my writing your essay for you, not that the picture alone could prove it, but you trusted me not to spill our secret. I fiddled with my settings and allowed the picture on my wall, its solitary graphic. Sara had unfriended me and wasn't connected to you—not that I needed to worry about what she thought anymore.

I shouldn't have doubted you. I'd misread the half-written
BUR
in my haste; it was actually
BAR
, for “Barrows”—the student directory was erroneous—and Meyers was Liam's roommate. You were sicker than I'd thought and were sleeping it off at his place.

It was odd, though, that you'd posted the photo just now, after we were no longer together.

And suddenly I remembered another surname that began with
BUR
. I googled “Lucy Meyers.” The first hit was the faculty page for a professor of comparative literature at Colby.

Each time Tom Burkhart had been nearby or discussed you seemed so coltish. Those tears, the rapidly responded-to texts, the phone call in the hallway—they had nothing to do with Liam.

And that was why you'd gleefully tagged me on Facebook, to make it appear that you and I hung out (or were “studying”) more often than we actually did so that Liam would think you were with
innocuous David Federman, not Tom—both now and during the blackout. Maybe you'd used me as an alibi other times, too. I felt cuckolded, strangely, on dim Liam's behalf; you were cheating on both of us. Of all people, Tom—grandstanding, philandering, ­bearded-and-bespectacled-cliché Tom—shouldn't have been the one who got you.

It made sense, too, why you'd enlisted me to write your essays. Tom was grading them; you wanted to impress him and earn your As, should his postgraduate integrity ever be questioned.

You wouldn't understand,
you'd told me, but now I did. I'd make sure you understood, too.

Chapter 13

I
completed your essay by Friday afternoon, neglecting my own; it was more important to craft something awe-inspiring to hand in to Tom, that charlatan, who, in heaping hosannas on the paper, would be unwittingly steering you toward the genuinely brilliant scholar in your life. If there's a
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quarterly
journal out there, I invite its editors to track down those ten and a half pages and publish them. I e-mailed it to you and wrote:

Here you go, ahead of schedule. Hope you're well.

A few hours later you replied:

Thank so much!

No sign-off; not even proper pluralization.

Saturday morning was sunny. Fall had peaked and denuded the trees. My breath fogging in the November chill, I set out for
the Game after breakfast, passing over the Charles River on the Anderson Memorial Bridge, from which Quentin Compson leaps to his death in
The Sound and the Fury
, and arrived at the parking lots surrounding Harvard Stadium two hours before the contest kicked off.

I walked through the first passel of tailgates, among the striped tents, the picnic tables decked with buns and condiments, the sibilant grills, the dappled gallery of crimson Harvard and blue Yale sweatshirts, women in stoles lapping up mimosas next to their lock-jawed husbands in coarse black overcoats and wool scarves, students priming kegs and recent graduates nipping from flasks, classic rock guitar solos and hip-hop beats clashing in the air like opposing armies. Two schools equally elite, with imperceptible differences save location, feeding off their insatiable hunger to outrank the other as the Mozart to their Salieri, whose students would have happily attended the rival college had their acceptances and rejections been reversed, which might well have happened had an admissions officer had or not had a sore throat—a headache, eight hours of sleep, horrible commute—the morning their applications were reviewed.