Loner (8 page)

On the way back to Matthews, the excitement leavening my step had little to do with the sexual promise of what lay in store. In fact, while I wasn't about to reject the leap forward we were about to take—maybe even hurdling over all the preliminary obstacles straight to the final one—I couldn't help feeling a little disappointed that Sara might be my first.

“Those stats he brought up were scary, about how the situation
you're born into more than ever determines your economic fate,” Sara said as we walked back.

“Mmm,” I said.

“I was getting really depressed listening to him, but at the end, in a weird way, I started thinking all his pessimism about America is actually almost optimistic, because he's also basically saying, ‘If we made this, it means we can unmake it.' And the real travesty isn't what's already happened, but continuing to let it happen and resigning ourselves to it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Good point.”

Your door was closed. Sara's room was neat, contrary to her previous claims, and modestly appointed. Around her desk were framed photographs of her family: the diffident younger sister who closely resembled her; the gregarious older brother who was a blunt-­featured male version; the jolly, ursine father whose genes had been lost in transmission; the graying, bifocaled mother into whom Sara would someday evolve.

Sara sat on her bed, knees propping up
Anti-Imperialist Marxism in Latin America
. I stationed myself at her desk and began reading
The Scarlet Letter
.

“You can sit here, you know,” she told me a few minutes later, patting the mattress. I moved over, leaving enough space for a phantom body between the two of us and resting against the cool wall that separated her room from yours.

“At least she's quiet,” I whispered, pointing toward your door. “Nothing worse than a noisy roommate.”

“I doubt she's home,” Sara said. As she read, her forehead squinched around a central point and the tip of her tongue explored the corner of her mouth, an expression of concentration I would come to know well. After a while she announced she was tired and asked if I wanted to go to bed.

“Okay,” I said, unsure if this was an invitation or a tactful request to leave.

“I'll go brush my teeth and change,” she said.

She left for the bathroom, carrying her toiletries kit, a pair of gray athletic shorts, and an oversized shirt that said
RAISE OHIO'S MINIMUM WAGE
NOW
!
I stayed put, alone in the room, desperately waiting for your entrance.

A few minutes later I heard a key in the door. Too nervous to look up, I kept my eyes on the book, pretending to read, but then the door opened and Sara's voice was muttering, “People waste so much water here.” I waited for her to extinguish the light before removing my jeans. My shirt I kept on; if she was going to remain clothed, so was I. My physique, I knew, wasn't much to look at, but as a purely tactile experience in the dark, it would be unobjectionable.

I climbed in under the pink flannel sheets, a reprieve from my own scratchy, cotton/poly-blend bedding (which, if I ever got you into it, I would claim was my backup, and then blow my entire semester's petty cash on a high-thread-count upgrade). Sara turned on a white-noise machine. “You mind?” she asked. “It's kind of loud, but I need it to fall asleep.”

We lay on our backs on the narrow mattress, our shoulders but nothing else touching, her body an environmentally friendly space heater. The white-noise machine was, indeed, loud; I would never hear anything in your room over it. As it thrummed, our stomachs produced gurgly video game sounds. Neither of us was making a move, two disoriented and jet-lagged travelers stepping off a plane in a foreign country, unsure if we had to go first to customs or the baggage claim.

Then, imagining the warmth next to me was radiating from you, I grew hard and found myself, almost without any conscious self-­direction, turning to kiss Sara. We continued for several minutes in an uncomfortable, torqued position until I rotated on top of her, hoping you'd come in, inconsiderately flip the switch, and view me in a newly sexual light.

I reached for the hem of her shirt. (Oh, Ohio's minimum-wage
movement, if only you knew how your lofty ideals would someday be corrupted.) We were in college, far from watchful parents. It might actually happen. I could reply to Daniel Hallman's stupid message.

Her fingers interlaced with mine with a cheerful squeeze, as if hand-holding were what I was really after. I brought my other hand down and was likewise rejected. Now all four were clasped as I bodysurfed on top of her with our legs braided together, a two-headed octopus in coitus interceptus.

I took the double hint and lifted our tentacles out of harm's way. Without any demarcating biological event, it was up to one of us to call a ceasefire. I let my kissing subside and parallel parked myself on the wall side of the bed. We spoke only about practical matters: if I wanted water, what time to set the alarm on her phone.

“Is your roommate going to wake us up?” I asked.

“No,” Sara said. “If she comes home, she knows not to turn on the lights anymore.”

“
If
she comes home? Where would she be?”

“You do the math,” she said.

We spooned amateurishly, my body acclimating to the alien sensation of sustained contact with someone else's, my forearm losing circulation under her upper back, my other arm unsure what to do with itself, until I retracted both and flipped over. Sara's breathing slowed to sleeping pace as I listened for any sound of the door opening, pondering your whereabouts, sorting through the male regulars at your Annenberg table: the one with landscaped stubble (Andy Tweedy), the black guy who favored scarves (Christopher Banks), the rumored Italian baron (Marco Lazzarini).

I stayed awake until dawn pressed through the window shade, and woke up when Sara's phone tinkled at eight and she took a birth control pill. “To regulate my period,” she explained awkwardly. No signs of your wee-hours entrance, if there'd been one.

A few nights later, after a documentary about migrant laborers in the Southwest, we went back to her room again. Sara talked about how she wanted to see more documentaries, how easy it was to get into an academic bubble here and forget how unjust the world was.

“Well,” I said, “in the long run we're all dead.”

She squinted at me. “So it's all right if there are inequalities now, because eventually we're all dead anyway?”

I smoothed out her comforter with my hand.

“That's a pretty cynical sentiment,” she said. “There are a lot of people whose lives are almost exclusively hardship. Just because we all
die
at the end doesn't make it even.”

“I was only trying to lighten the mood,” I said.

“I know.” She reached for her copy of
Anti-Imperialist Marxism in Latin America
and handed it to me. “But check this out when you get a chance.” She left for ablutions in the bathroom.

What I wanted was impossible; even this starter relationship was in danger of collapse. How foolishly optimistic to think it might somehow lead to you. When Sara came back I'd tell her that we'd made a mistake and should go back to being friends before anyone got hurt.

As if you'd heard my doubts and were telling me not to surrender, that nothing worthwhile was ever acquired without a struggle, the door was unlocked from the hallway. You looked at me with the vague recognition one has for a stranger on the same daily bus commute and walked toward your room.

“Aren't you in Prufrock?” I asked, hoping to salvage the moment.

“Yeah.”

“Me, too. I'm David.”

“Nice to meet you,” you said as you opened your door, acknowledging there was no need to add your name—I'd have seen it on the sign outside, but I'd have known it anyway, much as I imagine celebrities don't have to introduce themselves. And we'd met before, of course, but your error comforted me: our doorway encounter
had been so undistinguished that I preferred it be stricken from the ­record.

Sara returned. “Your roommate's back,” I said softly while fake reading her book about the unjustness of the world.

She lowered her voice. “Aren't we lucky.”

I grinned in bogus conspiracy. She had some e-mails to respond to and asked if I minded if she took care of them before bed. “Happy to wait,” I said.

I didn't have to wait long. You emerged from your room in a white silk bathrobe and flip-flops, a towel over your shoulder and a toiletries basket by your side. My eyes flew a brief reconnaissance mission over the terrain of your calves: still bronzed, the elevated plateaus of muscle sloping down defined cliffs to the lower planes of your Achilles tendons. Elegant, lean feet, callused heels; it looked like you'd spent a lot of time barefoot in the summer. Other guys, the philistines who chugged domestic light beer, might have salivated over the body parts your robe concealed, but I was a connoisseur of your peripheral qualities, an oenophile who sussed out your fruity bouquets and spicy notes.

“Hey,” you said to Sara on your way out.

“Hey,” Sara said, eyes on her laptop screen.

The next twenty minutes felt like days, my imagination rioting with you in the shower. You came back enrobed and glistening, your hair wrapped in the towel. The robe was monogrammed with a stitched, proud wound of
VMW
over your heart. As you opened the door to your room, an air current caught the tip of the lightweight belt, which fluttered up as if of its own accord.

A hair dryer rumbled in your room. Going out to parts unknown. Worse, you knew precisely what I
was doing: tragically staring at a Marxist tome with your bookish roommate. I'd given myself more opportunity for surveillance of you, but it meant you were now privy to my own humdrum existence.

“Night,” you said as you left.

Sara nodded in your direction. “See ya,” I called to your back.

Sara asked if I was ready for bed. I put down the book, waited for her to turn off the lights, and stripped to my boxers and T-shirt.

Once again we lay side by side until, eventually, I kissed and mounted her. It looked like it was going to be the same restrained tussle as before, but tonight I was more driven. I thought of you—in your robe, in the shower—as I rammed against Sara's dreary gray shorts. This time I succeeded in lifting the
RAISE OHIO'S MINIMUM WAGE
NOW
!
shirt. Her breasts were, to my untrained cupping, perfectly adequate. I pulled off my shirt, hoping my own nudity would induce her to shed additional layers. It didn't.

“Hold on,” Sara said. She fumbled over her bedside table and her hand came back with a plastic pump dispenser she pressed into mine. “You can use this.”

In the dark, I didn't know what it was or what its utility would be.

“It's lotion,” she clarified. “Don't guys do that? On themselves?”

I took off my boxers and applied the lotion to my erection as I straddled her lower body. With my left hand on her breast, my right took care of myself. I'd never done this in the presence of anyone, but it felt oddly natural.

Then she did something that surprised me: she rubbed under her shorts, her eyes shut, her breaths quickening. As she continued to worry her clitoris, I stayed silent until my denouement, when I startled myself with a squelched grunt. The seed that had been buried in innumerable shrouds of Kleenex now, for once, ended up on another human being.

Sara kept going until her own climax, a small affair that seized up her core muscles before releasing them like a bout of pleasurable indigestion. She reached on top of her bedside table for the white T-shirt she'd worn that day and mopped up her stomach and rib cage. Dropping it on the floor, she put her
RAISE OHIO'S
MINIMUM WAGE
NOW
!
shirt back on, then curled her back against my chest. I slung an arm around her.

“Confession,” she said. “I've never done that before.”

I didn't say anything, just breathed on her neck.

“Have you?” she asked.

“Mmhuh,” I said.

Her heartbeat was palpable to my cradling arm. “Well,” she said, “I hope you're not intimidated by my extensive erotic record.”

A humble, self-deprecating remark that, a couple of weeks earlier, would have made me banter back with wordplay, maybe compel me to recant my statement and tell her the truth. But now, after I'd captured you pre- and post-shower, Sara's inexperience only reminded me that we were two virgins and that you were adventuring elsewhere on campus. People like
you
didn't mutually masturbate—you had sex. No, even that was putting too chaste a spin on it. You fucked.

Citore drocer,
I thought.

“That's all right,” I said, offering neither any real assurance nor a lighthearted follow-up to put her at ease. My arm remained around her, but it suddenly felt like it wasn't mine anymore, a prosthetic limb.

Another silence as her wheels turned for the phrasing of her next question. “Did you have a girlfriend in high school?”

“Heidi,” I answered.

“When were you together?”

“Tenth grade on.”

“When'd you break up?”

“This summer,” I said. “She wanted to stay together for college. I didn't.”

Sara processed that revelation for some time. “What was she like?”

“She was nice.”

“Was she pretty?”

“Well, she was the lead in most plays. I guess that says something.”

“Who's prettier, me or her?” Sara asked, then quickly laughed. “Just kidding.”

I yawned loudly. “I'm actually kind of tired. Mind if we go to sleep?”

“Of course,” she said.

As I dozed off to the white-noise machine, I stroked Sara's arm, mentally elongating it until it reached your lithe proportions.