Loner (9 page)

The one way to guarantee I sat by you in Prufrock would be to wait for you to enter the room first, tricky to engineer, since you were consistently late to class. The next Tuesday I stood outside the door in Harvard Hall, pecking at my phone. As the students trickled in and you still hadn't shown, I grew anxious; I'd yet to be tardy for any classes, and though they didn't take attendance at the lectures, I didn't want to blemish my self-monitored perfect record.

When I heard, through the door, Samuelson begin his lecture, I gave myself a deadline: three more minutes.

Five minutes later I was about to go in, when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I stole a look down the hallway to confirm it was you, pocketed my phone with the certitude of someone finished with his important business, and looked up.

“Hey,” I said.

You nodded. There was now, at least, instant facial identification.

I opened the door for you. You went to the nearest empty seat. It didn't look strange when I sat in the one next to it; we'd entered the room together and these were the easiest-to-reach places.

I would be sitting within a foot of you for eighty minutes. There was no chance I could follow Samuelson's winding disquisition on
The Portrait of a Lady
and
Daisy Miller
.

My peripheral vision was limited to your left hand, its blue rivers of veins faintly flowing under smooth skin, its piano-player fingers, its pale pink nails and their small white suns cresting over the
curved horizon. I could absorb more comprehensively your scent, whose intimations that I'd nosed before now blanketed me: an amalgam of your shampoo and lavender perfume, a hint of cigarettes and whatever natural aroma you exuded. If I could inhale it continuously, eternally, without ever breathing out, I would.

Samuelson riffled through papers on his lectern as he prattled on. “One of you wrote an essay this week that nicely dovetails with that point. Let me just find it . . .”

We overestimate destiny's role in our lives, selectively applying it to favorable outcomes; think of all the times when you
didn't
run into your long-lost friend in the street, when you
didn't
just catch a bus, when you
didn't
get placed in a dorm with Veronica Morgan Wells. Or, more starkly, of all the good things that never happened to you because you weren't born as someone else with a better life. But the law of averages—which, when advantageous to us, we prefer to call fate, when disadvantageous we decry as bad luck, and when neutral we ignore—will occasionally smile upon us when we most need it.

Samuelson located the correct paper. “David Federman argued that, quote, ‘perhaps the peg-leg-as-primal-wound is intended to throw the reader off the scent with a facile psychological misreading, and Melville's underlying point is that Ahab is simply a susceptible participant in an economic system designed for manic, unslakable ambition. The real primal wound is not his missing leg; it is America.' ”

I hadn't even known Samuelson
read
the student essays; my section leader must have been so taken with my writing that she'd pressed it on him. It was thrilling to hear those sentences preached to the entire room, especially the final clause, intoned with the halting majesty of a presidential peroration or the voice-over in a domestic car commercial. Rendering the experience even more exhilarating: you, in an orchestra seat to witness my glory.

“David, are you here?” Samuelson asked, peering out into the crowd, since he didn't know who I was.

Everyone looked around for the mystery writer. I raised my hand slowly, as if reluctant to take credit.

I savored your surprise next to me: you didn't know who David Federman was, either; might not have even remembered my first name and certainly didn't know my last. You wouldn't forget it now.

“It's a compelling idea—I'd love to discuss it further,” Samuelson said to me. “Sign up for office hours.”

He dismissed us. My body, to others, remained earthbound, but I was in a crow's nest high above them. And good luck, let alone destiny, had nothing to do with it. No; years of solitude, hours spent reading when others were going to birthday parties and sleepovers and keggers, had all built up to Professor Samuelson's public acclamation for an essay I'd tossed off in a single sitting. I imagined him inviting me to guest lecture an upcoming class, whatever topic I liked; he just wanted the other students to be inspired by my example, and you would sit in the front row, transcribing every word, marveling at my harpoon-sharp mind.

I stood up poker-faced, the star running back who no longer needs to spike the football in the end zone to celebrate his victories.

“Nice work,” you said as we filed out.

“Oh, thanks,” I said. “What did you write about?”

“I got an extension till tomorrow. I haven't started yet.”

We stepped out into the honeyed light of a New England autumn afternoon. Students were starting to wear scarves. The air was spiced with the first fallen leaves. A breeze trembled a nearby oak, showering the pavement with acorns.

I walked with purpose in the direction of Sever, knowing you were heading there for Gender and the Consumerist Impulse.

“Which book are you writing about?” I asked.

“No idea,” you said. “I'm fucked.”

You didn't mind cursing with me, cursing with a sexual term, with a sexual term that, as a sentence, could also suggest an explicit action.

“What about
Moby-Dick
?”

“Mm,” you said, unimpressed. “Seven-hundred-page books by dead white men aren't exactly my bag.”

“Yeah, I know.” I chuckled. “What's interested you most so far?”

“I liked
Daisy Miller
.”

We were approaching Sever; I was running out of time, and this wasn't a dialogue I could easily continue in Sara's room.

I stopped walking. “I have to be somewhere,” I said—I had nowhere to be, nothing to do, all I wanted was to continue even this seemingly mundane conversation forever—“but if you're having trouble, I'd be happy to help you come up with a topic later.”

Your eyes blinked at me once, as if you were taking my measurements for something. Your irises were three distinct hues: a fine outer ring of grayish blue like an overcast ocean sky that yielded to springtime emerald before melting into a striated core the color of bourbon. I couldn't meet them for more than a second or two.

“How about Lamont at nine?” you asked.

Sara spent half her nights there. But Widener Library closed at ten, and there was no good alternative, other than my room, which I didn't have the temerity to suggest.

“Works for me,” I said.

Chapter 7

A
fter getting a sandwich at Au Bon Pain, I holed up in my room to reread
Daisy Miller
along with the secondary critical texts Samuelson had assigned. I graffitied the pages with notes for once, just like Sara did.

I texted her that I'd be forgoing dinner to work on an essay for my art history class. “Good luck! I'm feeling a cold coming on
,” she wrote back. She was perpetually afflicted with some mild ailment, a sniffle or cough or epidermal reaction. A plastic kit in her room housed a pharmacy of purple syrups, nasal sprays, ­blister-pack tablets. The sight of her blowing her nose or swallowing an anti-diarrheal pill always made me consider how poorly she would fare if she'd been born in another time, weeded out by natural selection. Her sneezes, induced by a plethora of allergens, came in quadrupled, body-quaking blasts that pierced the eardrum and embarrassed me by association. You must have heard them through the door.

“Aww, feel better!
,” I replied.

As I left Matthews at 8:40 to arrive at Lamont early, I heard my name.

“Where are you going?” Sara's voice echoed in the entryway. I looked back as she sped downstairs to catch me, tissue in hand, her nostrils ruddy and chapped.

“To work on my essay. What about you?”

“CVS.” She honked into the tissue, examining the deposit before folding it up. “I ran out of zinc lozenges.”

“That sucks,” I said, pushing the door open.

“Pun
in
tended,” she chirped. “Want to come with me?”

A detour to CVS would set me back ten minutes, maybe more. If there were no delays and I hurried, I would just make it to Lamont by nine.

“I should really get going on this essay,” I said.

“Please?” She pouted. “I'm going out of my mind—I haven't talked to a single person today.”

The demerits for denying her this small courtesy would not be worth it in the long run. This is what chivalrous boyfriends did, and that's what I was becoming: a boyfriend who held doors, who insisted upon paying, who told her she looked nice before she went out—grooming myself for the day I could extend this behavior to you.

“Okay, let's go.” I clucked my tongue sympathetically. “Poor, sick Sara.”

Wandering the fluorescent aisles of CVS in search of zinc, Sara recapped the highlights of her most recent conversation with her grandmother. I pulled my phone a few inches out of my pocket: 8:48. Upon locating the medication, Sara studied the ingredient lists on two different packages, the now-familiar dimple forming on her forehead.

“The question is, should I get the
generic
brand or the real kind?” she asked herself.

I pictured you standing outside Lamont, wondering where that loser from your class could be, who did he think he was.

“They're the same exact ingredients, but I always feel like the real one is better,” she reasoned.

“Get the real one, then.”

She struggled to fit the small hole at the top of the generic bag over its metal peg. “I'll do it,” I said, taking it from her and hanging it up myself.

“Wait.” She shook her head. “This is silly. They're the same, and the generic is cheaper.”

“Fine.” I pulled it back off the peg. “I'll buy it for you,” I offered, to expedite the process, as I headed toward the checkout. An elderly woman monopolized the only cashier, paying with exact change, shakily counting aloud her nickels and pennies.

“Do you want to donate a dollar to pediatric cancer research?” the cashier asked when I paid.

“No,” I said. “And I don't need a receipt.”

“What's the hurry?” Sara asked as I raced outside.

“I'm eager to get back to this essay.”

“A few minutes isn't going to kill your motivation,” she said.

The peremptory orange hand of the pedestrian signal had just lit up and a few cars were approaching from down Mass Ave.

“You're right,” I said, putting my own hand on her lower back, resisting the urge to push her more forcefully. “Let's cross.”

I guided her across the street. We had to break into a trot halfway to avoid being struck. It gave me a small rush.

“David!” Sara said when we made it to the curb. “We almost got hit!”