The City of Mirrors (22 page)

About the remainder of that first year, there is not much else to say. My grades were good—better than good. Though I knew I had done well, I was still astonished to see my first-semester report with its barricade of A’s, each emphatically embossed into the paper by the old-fashioned dot matrix printer. I did not use this as an opportunity to slack off but redoubled my efforts. I also, for a brief time, acquired a girlfriend, the daughter of the South American dictator. (He was actually the Argentine minister of finance.) What she saw in me I have no idea, but I wasn’t going to interrogate the point. Carmen possessed a good deal more sexual experience than I did—a
great
deal. She was the kind of woman who used the word “lover,” as in “I have taken you as my,” and she applied herself to pleasure’s project with greedy abandon. She was blessed with a single room, rare for a freshman, and in that hallowed precinct of draped scarves and female aromas she introduced me to what might have passed for actual, grown-up eroticism, working her way through the full menu of bodily delights, appetizers to dessert. We did not love each other—that sainted emotion still eluded me, and Carmen had little use for it—nor was she what I would call conventionally attractive. (I can say this because I wasn’t, either.) She was a little heavy, and her face possessed a slightly masculine bulk around the jawline, which looked like a boxer’s. But unclothed, and in the heat of passion, crying out naughty things in her Argentine-inflected Spanish, she was the most sensual creature who ever walked the earth, a fact magnified a hundred-fold by her own awareness of it.

Between these carnal escapades—Carmen and I would often race back to her room between classes for an hour of furious copulation—and my voluminous classwork and, of course, my hours at the library—time well spent replenishing myself for our next encounter—I saw less and less of Lucessi. He’d always kept odd hours, studying through the night and living on naps, but as the semester wore on, his comings and goings became more erratic. When I slept over at Carmen’s, I might not see him for several days in a row. By this time I had widened my society beyond the walls of Wigglesworth to include a number of Carmen’s friends, all of them far more cosmopolitan than I was. Lucessi obviously resented this, but any effort to pull him into the circle was sternly rebuffed. His hygiene took another dip; our room stank of socks and the trays of moldy food he brought back from the cafeteria and never removed. Many times I entered to find him sitting on his bed, barely dressed, muttering to himself and making odd, twitchy hand gestures, as if involved in earnest conversation with some unseen party. At bedtime—whenever he decided that was, even if it was the middle of the day—he would smear his face with a layer of acne cream as thick as a mime’s makeup; he began to sleep with a scuba diver’s knife in a rubber sheath strapped to his leg. (This should have disturbed me more than it did.)

I worried about him, but not very much; I was simply too busy. Despite my new, more interesting circle of friends, I had always assumed that the two of us would continue to room together. At the end of the year, all freshmen entered a lottery to determine which of the Harvard houses they would live in for the next three years. This was regarded as a rite of passage as socially determinant as whom one married, and it possessed two aspects. The first was which house one sought to live in. There were twelve, each with its own reputation: the preppy house, the artsy house, the jock house, and so forth. The most desirable were the ones located along the Charles River—extremely fancy real estate for the price of an undergraduate tuition. The least were the ones in the old Radcliffe Quad, far up Garden Street. To be “quadded” was tantamount to exile, one’s life forever chained to a schedule of shuttle buses that, inconveniently, stopped running long before the party had ended.

The second aspect was, of course, who would room with whom. This made for an uncomfortable few weeks as people sorted out their allegiances and prioritized their friendships. Rejecting one’s freshman roommate in favor of other parties was common but no less awkward than a divorce. I considered having this very conversation with Lucessi, then found that I didn’t have the heart. Who else would be willing to room with him? Who else would tolerate his quirks, his doleful personality, his unhealthful aromas? On top of which, come to think of it, nobody else had asked me. Lucessi, it seemed, was mine.

As the day of the lottery approached, I sought him out to see what he wanted to do. I told him I thought we might go in for Winthrop House, or else Lowell. Quincy, maybe, as a backup. They were river houses but without the distinct social slant of some of the others. This conversation occurred in the middle of the afternoon of a warm spring day that Lucessi had apparently slept through. He was sitting at his desk, wearing only briefs and an undershirt, fussing with a calculator as I spoke, punching in meaningless digits with the eraser end of a pencil. A white crust of dried toothpaste ringed his mouth.

“So what do you think?”

Lucessi shrugged. “I already entered.”

His words made no sense. “What are you talking about?”

“I asked for a single in the quad.”

Psycho singles
, they were called. Housing for the maladjusted; rooms for people who couldn’t handle roommates.

“It’s pretty nice up there, actually,” Lucessi went on. “Quieter. You know. Anyway, it’s done.”

I was dumbfounded. “Lucessi, what the hell? The lottery’s next week. I thought we were going to go together.”

“I just kind of assumed you didn’t want to. You have lots of friends. I thought you’d be happy.”

“
You’re
supposed to be my friend.” I strode furiously around the room. “Is that what this is about? I can’t believe you’re doing this. Look at this place. Look at
you.
Who else do you have? And you’re doing this to
me
?”

These awful, unrecallable words: Lucessi’s face crumpled like a wad of paper.

“Christ, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

He didn’t let me finish. “No, you’re right. I really am pretty pathetic. Believe me, it’s nothing I haven’t heard before.”

“Don’t talk about yourself like that.” My guilt was excruciating. I sat on his bed, trying to get him to look at me. “I shouldn’t have said what I did. I was just upset.”

“That’s okay. Forget it.” A moment went by, Lucessi frowning at the calculator. “Did I ever tell you I was adopted? I’m not even related to her. Not technically, anyway.”

The comment came from so far out of left field it took me a moment to realize that he was talking about Arianna.

“Everybody always thinks it’s the other way around,” he continued. “I mean, God, just look at her. But no. My parents got me out of some orphanage. They didn’t think they could have kids. Eleven months later, wouldn’t you know, along comes Miss Perfect.”

I had never heard a confession of such absolute misery. What was there to say? And why was he telling me this now?

“She really hates me, you know. I mean
hates.
You should hear the things she calls me.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

Lucessi shrugged hopelessly. “They all do it. They think I don’t know, but I do. Okay, I’m king of the dorks. It’s not like I haven’t figured that out. But Arianna. You’ve seen her—you know what I’m talking about. Jesus, it just kills me.”

“Your sister is a total bitch. She probably treats everybody like that. Just forget about her.”

“Yeah, well. That’s not really the issue.” He lifted his gaze from the calculator and looked me dead in the eye. “You’ve been really nice to me, Tim, and I appreciate it. I mean that. Promise me we’ll stay friends, okay?”

I realized what Lucessi was doing. What I’d thought was jealousy or self-pity was actually a kind of backhanded generosity. Just as my father had done, Lucessi was severing his ties to me because he thought I’d be better off. The worst part was, I knew he was right.

“Sure,” I said. “Of course we will.”

He held out his hand. “Shake on it? So I know you’re not too mad.”

We shook, neither of us believing it meant a thing.

“So that’s it?” I said.

“I guess so, yeah.”

He was in love with her, of course. Though he’d told me as much, this was the part of the story that took me a long time—too long—to figure out. He loved the thing he also hated, and it was destroying him. The other thing Lucessi had told me, without actually saying it, was that he was in the process of flunking all his courses. His living arrangements were moot, because he wouldn’t be returning.

In the meantime, this left me with the problem of finding a place to live. I felt betrayed, and angry with myself for having so badly misunderstood the situation, but also resigned to my fate, which seemed somehow deserved. It was as if I’d lost some cosmic game of musical chairs; the song had stopped, I was left standing, and there was simply nothing to be done about it. I called around to see if anybody I knew was looking for a third or a fourth to round out a suite, but no one was, and rather than dig deeper into my list of acquaintances and embarrass myself further, I stopped asking. There were no singles in any of the River Houses, but it was still possible to enter the lottery as a “floater”; I’d be placed on a waiting list for each of the three houses I chose, and if a student dropped out over the summer, the university would give me his slot. I put in for Lowell, Winthrop, and Quincy, no longer caring which one I got, and waited to hear.

The year came to an end. Carmen and I went our separate ways. One of my professors had offered me a job working in his lab. The pay was negligible, but it was an honor to be asked, and it would keep me in Cambridge for the summer. I rented a room in Allston from a woman in her eighties who favored Harvard students; except for her collection of cats, which was voluminous—I was never quite sure how many there were—and the overwhelming stink of the litter boxes, the situation was close to ideal. I left early and returned late, usually taking my meals at one of the many cheap eateries on the fringes of Cambridge, and the two of us rarely saw each other. All my friends were gone for the summer, and I expected to be lonely, but it didn’t turn out that way. The year had left me enervated and overstuffed, as if by a too-rich meal, and I was glad for the quiet. My job, which involved collating reams of data on the structural biology of plasma cells in mice, could be conducted virtually without interaction with another human being. Sometimes I barely spoke for days.

It shames me to say this, but during that silent summer, I forgot all about my parents. I do not mean that I ignored them. I mean that I forgot that they existed at all. I had told them in a letter where I would be staying and why but hadn’t given them the phone number, because I didn’t know it at the time—an omission I never got around to correcting. I did not call them and they could not call me, and as the summer wore on, this casual oversight became a psychological buffer that eradicated them from my thoughts. Doubtless, in some pocket of my mind I knew what I was doing, and I would need to contact them before the fall to file the proper paperwork for my scholarship; but at the level of conscious awareness, they simply ceased to matter.

Then my mother died.

My father informed me of this in a letter. Suddenly, a great deal was made clear to me. A month before I’d left for Harvard, my mother had been diagnosed with uterine cancer. She had delayed surgery—a total abdominal hysterectomy—until after my departure, not wanting to cast a shadow over this occasion. Postoperative biopsies had revealed that the cancer was an aggressive and rare adenosarcoma that left her with no hope of recovery. By winter, she had metastases in her lungs and bones. There was simply nothing to be done. It was, my father said, her dying desire that the son she loved so much should suffer no interruption in his progress toward the fulfillment of all her proud hopes: in other words, that I should go about my life and know nothing. She had died two weeks previously, her ashes buried without funereal pageant, in accordance with her wishes. She had not suffered much, my father wrote, rather coldly, and it was on loving thoughts of me that she had traveled into the life to come.

He wrote in closing,
Probably you’re angry with me, with both of us, for keeping this secret from you. If it’s any consolation, I wanted you to know, but your mother wouldn’t hear of it. When I told you that day at the bus to leave us behind, those were her words, not mine, though she eventually made me see the wisdom of them. Your mother and I were happy together, I believe, but never for a moment did I doubt that you were the great love of her life. She wanted only what was best for you, her Timothy. You may wish to return home, but I encourage you to wait. I am doing reasonably well, under the circumstances, and can see no reason for you to interrupt your studies for what would be, in the end, a painful distraction that would serve no purpose. I love you, son. I hope you know that, and that you can forgive me—forgive us both—and that when we next meet, it will be not to mourn your mother’s passing but to celebrate your triumphs.

I read this letter standing in the front hallway of the house of a woman I barely knew, cats nosing around my feet, at ten o’clock on a warm night in early August when I was nineteen years old. What I experienced is nothing I have words for, and I will not make the attempt. The urge to telephone him was strong; I wanted to scream at him until my throat ripped open, until my words were blood. So was the urge to get on a bus to Ohio, go straight to the house, and strangle him in his bed—the bed he had shared with my mother for nearly thirty years and where, no doubt, I had been conceived. But I did neither. I realized I was hungry. The body wants what it wants—a useful lesson—and I availed myself of the old woman’s larder to make myself a cheese sandwich on stale bread with a glass of the same milk she left in saucers all around the house. The milk had turned, but I drank it anyway, and that is what I remember most vividly of all: the taste of sour milk.

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