The Three-Day Affair (5 page)

“I guess we could offer her some money.” I was feeling the particular exhaustion that comes from having only bad options.

“That’s right,” Nolan said. “Everyone has a price.”

“That’s a cliché,” I said. “It isn’t even true.”

But Jeffrey seemed to cling to the idea. “How much should we offer?”

“Two hundred and forty-six dollars,” Nolan said. “How the hell should I know? You think I’ve done this before?” He sighed. “Let’s say a thousand.”

“You think that’s enough?” Jeffrey asked. “That probably isn’t enough. You should ask her what she wants.”

“She works at a Milk-n-Bread.”

“Still …”

“Jeffrey, I’m not particularly interested in your judgment right now. A thousand dollars is plenty. Agreed, Will?”

“Might as well give it a try,” I said. Actually, the plan seemed terrible, but it was all we had. And a bribe seemed like small
potatoes compared to robbery and kidnapping. “But who do you think ought to—”

“I’ll talk to her,” Nolan said.

Good. I didn’t want that job. “She told me her name’s Marie.”

“And you believed her?” He shook his head. “Forget it. It doesn’t matter.”

“Maybe I should be the one,” Jeffrey said, “since it was me who, you know …”

“
You?
” Nolan said. “You go in there, you’ll end up accidentally raping her.”

“Fuck you,” Jeffrey said.

When Nolan stood and left the control room, Marie’s eyes widened. She hugged herself tighter.

People assume that to get accepted into a school like Princeton, one needs to be an exceptionally well-rounded student. This is false.

In high school, near the end of my junior year, my guidance counselor called me into her office one afternoon and told me that my grades and test scores gave me a shot at a top college, but that I ought to sign up for more extracurricular activities. Maybe run for class office. Volunteer at a hospital. I decided to do none of those things, because I was more interested in my rock band. We called ourselves Burn, and our logo had flames, and we
practiced
at high decibels every afternoon in Ronnie Martinez’s
unfinished
basement. The way I saw it, Burn was the only extracurricular activity I ever needed.

When I arrived at Princeton, I quickly learned that my
guidance
counselor was wrong. Top schools don’t want
well-rounded
individuals. They want a well-rounded class. For that, they need kids who are especially
un
rounded—ones who are exceptional at physics or the cello or the writing of poems, kids who solve complicated math proofs or pilot airplanes or start up foundations to promote literacy or fight diseases in remote
parts of the globe. Put them all together, there’s your class of Ivy Leaguers.

I hadn’t done anything remotely exceptional even though
others
thought I had. During my senior year, for the annual science fair I designed a lens for our high school’s old telescope that
filtered
out most of the spectral frequencies of light pollution. Later, I’d learn that this type of lens already existed. Still, it was new to me, and apparently to everyone at my school. The
superintendent
got me in touch with a local camera manufacturer, which followed my design and made a prototype. There was an article in the paper with a photo of me on the school’s roof,
looking
through the telescope at the night sky. The local network news covered the story. We made popcorn, and when my face came on the television screen, my mother cried. My father mussed my hair and kept repeating, “Look at that. Just look at that.”

The following spring, I got accepted into Princeton and
Harvard
and every school I applied to. Don’t get me wrong: I was a good student. Plenty of As. High SATs. But thousands of kids with As and high test scores get rejected from the top schools.

No, it was the telescope lens.

Was it a clever school project? Sure. Was it worthy of all the
attention
? Not really. But teachers wait years and years for a student to take the initiative in a scholarly pursuit, and when they see it, it’s as if all of their years in the profession—the meager pay, the
administrative
headaches, all those parents to deal with—finally amount to something. My letters of recommendation must have made me out to be the next Stephen Hawking. Colleges evidently saw me as their budding cosmologist to round out their well-rounded class, when the truth was, all I’d done was invent something that’d
already
been invented. I wasn’t even especially interested in science. But growing up in a city where the night sky is a constant dull
orange
, I just thought it would be nice to see some stars for a change.

At Princeton I was struck by how everyone around me seemed to get on so easily so quickly. I’d left Bayonne, driven an hour or so on Route 1, and arrived at another world, one that I didn’t quite trust. My only prior visit hadn’t prepared me at all. It’d been a cold, rainy day in April. I’d taken an abbreviated campus tour,
returned
home soaking wet, and come down the next day with a head cold. But now, under a rich blue sky, kids loafed on the quad in laughing clusters while others threw Frisbees and footballs and still others sprawled on blankets as if they’d spent their whole lives among centuries-old Gothic buildings and flagstone
walkways
cutting through acres and acres of sweet-smelling grass.

Some of them had. In my incoming class there was a Purdue and a Chrysler and the children of national politicians. And while not everyone was from a rich or famous family (plenty of others, like myself, worked food services to help pay for their education), it was hard to ignore the fact that the guy down the hall had the same last name as one of the new buildings on campus, and that in the dormitory adjacent to mine lived an actual Middle Eastern princess.

In those first baffling days of my freshman year, everyone seemed to be forming fast friendships. They seemed to know
instinctively
which organizations to join, which to avoid, which of the “eating clubs” had the best parties on tap for the weekend, and how to get passes to those parties.

Even my roommate had slid easily into Princeton life. The day he moved in, he taped inspiring quotations to the wall over his desk. “The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.—Ralph Waldo Emerson.” And: “Anything in life worth having is worth working for.—Andrew Carnegie.” Lying in our extralong cots late that night, we gave each other our brief histories, and then I asked him if he’d like me to set my alarm.

“I already have mine set for four thirty,” he said.

I asked if he was serious. Classes were still a week away.

“If I wanted to sleep,” he said, “I would have stayed in Missouri.”

He had worked hard and traveled far to arrive, finally,
someplace
worthy of his ambitions. And he was going to make the most of it. During our weeklong orientation, he bought a new computer and began to read ahead for his classes. Once the
semester
began, he awoke for crew practice at dawn, and was
showered
and off to the library before I was out of bed. Within two weeks, he’d already decided to major in political science, joined the debating society, and begun to spend time with a pretty
sophomore
, the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Chile.

Had he prepared for this life at some exclusive high school, an Exeter or Andover? No. He’d come straight off a midwestern farm, where he got up before dawn each morning for several hours of chores before school, which, from the sound of it—leaky ceiling, shared textbooks—was barely a school at all. Yet here he was, succeeding.

That seemed to be the common trait among the people here. They succeeded. They had succeeded in order to be invited here. And now that they’d arrived, they would prove themselves all over again.

Impressive? Damn right—but I didn’t care for any of it.
Everything
about the place intimidated me, and I longed for those
simple
afternoons of music, marijuana, and local girls who didn’t care if I was ambitious or lazy, a Rockefeller or a Buttafuoco. I would have taken solace in my coursework, but that was another problem. I’d always sailed through school without much effort. But now, my calculus class was quickly losing me. My natural ear for music took me only so far in a music theory class where half the students had studied classical piano since the age of three.
And what I’d assumed would be the gut course—the required freshman writing class—ended up being an intensive study of modern European authors: Malraux and Mann and Pirandello and Beckett and Sartre and Camus.

Two weeks into the semester and I was swamped. I hadn’t even done a load of laundry yet.

Sunday afternoon, I returned to my dormitory from brunch to hear, coming from a nearby window, the whiny jangle of a badly played electric guitar. I followed the sounds of the guitar down the hallway and knocked on the door.

The guy opened the door wearing pajama bottoms and no shirt. He was pale and stick skinny with longish hair and an
unsuccessful
blond beard. Smoke curled in front of his face from a cigarette, which he plucked from his mouth.

“Gotcha,” he said. “I’ll turn it down.”

“Oh, I don’t care about that,” I said. “Do you mind if I bum a cigarette?”

In the time it took to smoke one of his cigarettes, I learned that Jeffrey Hocks, from Los Angeles, California, was having as hard a time adjusting to Princeton as I was.

“I really wonder,” I told him, “if I’m meant to be here at all.” It was a relief, saying this aloud. Having somebody to say it to.

He motioned toward his desk chair and told me to grab a seat. He sat on the bed. “I
know
I’m meant to be here,” he said, “but that doesn’t help any.” And then he went on to reveal his exceptional talent, which was even less exceptional than my own. He was a legacy. His father, two uncles, and grandfather had all gone to Princeton. He was simply keeping the tradition alive. “I had no choice,” he said. “My baby clothes had tigers stitched onto them.”

Both of Jeffrey’s parents were microbiologists at UCLA. They hoped that their son might decide to become a groundbreaking
researcher, too. But if not, they’d be satisfied if he became a
surgeon
, or a partner in an international law firm, or really anything at all as long as it was incredibly impressive.

He took the last drag from a cigarette and dropped it into an empty soda can. “But do you know what I think? I think I’m meant to be a world-class guitarist.”

His playing had been so awful that I looked at him and said nothing. He grinned. “I’m kidding. I just started playing over the summer. How about you? Do you play an instrument?”

We smoked most of the pack and talked for the next couple of hours. I learned that the only thing keeping Jeffrey in school was that modern European authors class. He’d already read “Tonio Kröger” and “Death in Venice,” which had been assigned, as well as all the other stories in Mann’s collection, which hadn’t. Twice a week, our professor spoke in his resonant baritone to several
hundred
of us with great urgency from behind the podium in the McCosh lecture hall, removing and replacing a pair of glasses every few minutes from the bridge of his distinguished, birdlike nose.
Apparently
Professor Rinehart was quite famous, and we freshmen were lucky to be taught by him prior to his retirement at the end of the year. He’d begin to speak the moment the bell rang and seemed to have his lectures perfectly timed so that they ended just as the bell rang again fifty minutes later. I loved the music of his voice, the rhythm of his extemporaneous phrases, but I never knew what to write in my notebook or what to think about as I read for class.

Jeffrey told me that I should be reading for the beauty of Mann’s language and the depth of his sympathy for outsiders and misfits. Hearing this, I felt guilty and sophomoric for my own lack of sympathy in my earlier attempts to read the work. I vowed to give it another try when I returned to my room.

“That’s Mann in a nutshell,” he said. “Read for that and you’ll be fine. You might even come to like it.”

Jeffrey was right. I did come to like it. Or at least I convinced myself that I did.

But Jeffrey’s own interest in the modern European authors class, I learned soon enough, had less to do with modern
European
authors and more to do with the striking young woman who sat in the front row of the lecture hall. I’d noticed her, too, since early in the semester. She was curvy and blonde. She wore heart-stopping skirts and scuffed cowboy boots. Jeffrey and I began to refer to her as Dallas, since in our eyes she could pass for a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader a whole lot easier than a Princeton University freshman. And yet she seemed almost possessed in class, writing nonstop in her notebook, as if her method was to transcribe the professor’s entire lecture and then sort it out later.

One day, Dallas raised her hand during class. This simply wasn’t done. Professor Rinehart would talk for fifty minutes and then the class would applaud. (This always amused me. I suppose that the professor gave good lectures, but also Princeton students liked knowing that they attended a college where the professors’ lectures received applause.)

The day that Dallas raised her hand, Professor Rinehart had been talking to us about Sartre’s play
No Exit
. Her hand went up with just a few minutes remaining in the class. At first he ignored her. Then he stopped speaking and asked, “Is there a problem?”

“Not a problem, Professor. Just a question.”

The accent was all Texas drawl, and Jeffrey punched my leg and whispered, “
See?
”

Students sat up straighter. A few nervous titters. We were all waiting. We were five weeks into the semester, long enough to crave something unusual.

“And what question is that, Ms….?”

“Paige.”

Rinehart nodded. “A literary name.”

Jeffrey and I had started sitting to the side of the lecture hall so that we could steal looks at Dallas. Her face lit up. Even her teeth were pretty. “Well, I guess I never thought of it that way.”

Some more laughter, lots of glancing around.

“Now, what is your question, Ms. Paige?”

“Well,” she said. Two syllables. “You’ve been telling us about Sartre, how he believed in people’s ability”—here she checked her notes—“‘to choose their own essence.’ But I was wondering …” She glanced around, aware now of the crowd watching her, the gaze of six hundred eyes in the faces of three hundred honor
students
and valedictorians, each with an exceptional talent that had led them to this university, this classroom. “I was wondering if you, you know, think it’s a good play.”

For a reason wholly unclear to me, the lecture hall erupted in laughter. The professor let this go for a moment, then began to rap his knuckles on the podium until the room quieted again.

“Would you mind if I turned the question back to you, Ms. Paige?” He removed his glasses and narrowed his gaze. “Do
you
think
No Exit
is a good play?”

“Me? Actually, I loved it.” She smiled again, then cut it short. “But that’s my question. I mean, when Garcin chooses to stay in that room with those awful people, rather than leave hell, his
failure
is in needing their judgment. That’s his big flaw, isn’t it?”