18

Schwartz sprawled on the couch in his boxer shorts and cracked his second forty of Crazy Horse. He never drank during the season, especially on the eve of a game, but today was a special day. The Day of Not Getting In. His penis slipped through the slit of his boxers into the open air. He flipped it speculatively from side to side a few times, but it felt insensate, like something that belonged to somebody else. Come mid-June he’d be unemployed and homeless, with a degree in history and eighty thousand dollars in student loans coming due. The Crazy Horse, all six dollars and ninety-four cents’ worth, had gone on whichever of his credit cards wasn’t maxed. He couldn’t remember the last time he jerked off.

If he didn’t get out of the house he’d turn to the handle of Smirnoff in the freezer. A pleasant idea, to get thoroughly and mercifully blotto, but the bus was leaving for Opentoe at seven a.m. He flipped open his cell phone out of habit, but he couldn’t call Henry, not after standing him up for dinner. Or rather, he could call Henry, but he didn’t feel like it. He scanned the bookshelves for the campus directory. It seemed unlikely that Affenlight’s home number would be listed, but there it was in black and white. Yet another benefit of the small liberal arts college.

President Affenlight answered. “Good evening, sir,” Schwartz said. “This is Mike Schwartz.”

“Michael. What can I do for you?”

“First of all, I wanted to let you know that Owen is doing much better. It looks like he’ll be coming home this weekend.”

“Marvelous,” President Affenlight said. “Thanks for letting me know.”

“And thank you for all of your help yesterday.” Schwartz could feel himself overenunciating to compensate for the Crazy Horse. “The whole team really appreciated it.”

“You’re welcome. But of course I was just doing my job. Have a good night, Michael.”

“I was also wondering whether I might speak to your daughter for a moment.”

“My daughter? Do you know her?”

“We met this morning.”

“Ah. Well, I believe you’ve come to the right place. Hold on just a moment.”

President Affenlight held the phone away from his mouth. “Pella,” he called. “Telephone.” There came a pause in which Pella yelled something back. “It’s not David,” Affenlight replied. “It’s Mike Schwartz.”

Pella picked up the phone a half beat later. “You didn’t freeze to death.”

“How was your swim?”

“I lasted a lap and a half. Then I had to lie down on the deck. The lifeguard came over to administer CPR, but I waved him off.”

“Sounds rough.”

“I prefer to start slow,” Pella said. “Gives me room for improvement.” She began a new thought, something about the snow. Schwartz slugged down the rest of his forty and cut her off.

“I was wondering whether you were free tonight.”

“Free? Heavens, no. After a cappella practice I’ll be volunteering down at the soup kitchen while I finish my paper on the theme of revenge in Hamlet. Then my sorority has a mixer with the Alpha Beta Omegas, my bulimia support group is getting together for dessert, and after that I have a date with the captain of the football team.”

“I’m the captain of the football team.”

There was a long pause.

“Oh. Well, in that case. What time can you pick me up?”

“YOU’VE GOT SCHOOL SPIRIT,” he remarked as he took her sweatshirt and hung it on a wooden peg in the front hallway of Carapelli’s. “A true Harpooner.”

Pella glanced down at her outfit: a navy Westish polo shirt beneath an off-white Westish sweater, the same jeans she’d worn on the plane. “Sorry,” she said. “There weren’t many choices at the bookstore.”

“No, no,” Mike said. “You look great.”

“Thanks. So can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Do you always have a beard?”

Mike touched his cheek as he slid into the booth. “It’s supposed to be motivational,” he said. “While I finish my thesis. Kind of an I’m-so-busy-writing-I-don’t-have-time-to-shave thing.”

“Does it work?”

“Not lately. I take it you’re not much into beards.”

Pella shrugged. “My ex has one.”

“David.”

“How’d you know that?”

“I heard you mention him to your dad. While we were on the phone.”

A woman waddled over the red carpet toward their table, her arms open in greeting. “I thought you boys weren’t ev—” Seeing Pella, she shrieked and spun toward Mike as if to shield him from harm. “Where’s my Henry?”

“Henry sends his love, Mrs. Carapelli,” Mike said. “He had to study tonight.”

“Studying! That doesn’t sound like my Henry.” Mrs. Carapelli gave Pella a sniffy, formal, I-will-be-your-server look as she slid a menu in front of her. The menu itself seemed to be an insult—she didn’t give Mike one. “Would you care for anything to drink, ma’am?”

Pella looked to Mike. “Should we order wine?”

“Uh… sure.”

“We don’t have to.”

“No, no. A bottle of your finest white.” Mike gave Mrs. Carapelli a reassuring pat on the shoulder as she spun on a sturdy heel and stomped away.

“Mrs. Carapelli doesn’t seem eager to attract new business,” Pella said.

“Don’t take it personally. Henry and I have been coming here every Friday for years.”

“But tonight he had to study?”

Mike planted an elbow on the table, ran a big hand over his widow’s peak. “I’m having a hard time talking to Henry right now.”

“Tell me about it,” Pella said. But as Mike began to speak—haltingly at first—her heart sped up in that familiar, terrible way. At the bar a thirtysomething couple was dandling hands, their legs intertwined beneath their stools. The woman wore a red dress that clashed with the huge, ornately framed oil painting that hung above their heads, on which darker reds and golds were slathered in thick, light-catching layers like a bad Van Gogh. Pella felt little beads of sweat forming along her hairline. Not right now, she thought. Her panic attacks had grown less intense in recent months, and she knew how to withstand them, but this would be a less-than-ideal time. She considered excusing herself to go to the bathroom, but that would have been rude, since Mike was midparagraph and picking up steam, and besides, the bathroom seemed impossibly far away, across the dining room and down a corridor and around a corner and through a door, and it was bound to have some sort of terrible citrusy odor, citrus mixed with shit…

Mike had stopped talking, his head cocked at a concerned angle. “Are you okay?”

Pella nodded, squeezing her hands together under the table.

“Are you sure? You seem a little pale.” He looked at her with those light-bearing eyes, laid his hand on her upper arm, just for a moment. Pella tried to remember whether she’d taken her pills this morning, both the birth-control one and the sky-blue one. But actually she’d stopped taking birth control however many months ago. Get yourself together, girl. “I’ll be okay,” she said. “Just keep talking.”

By the time Mike finished his History of Henry, the wine was nearly gone. He looked so upset that it raised Pella’s spirits, as if one corner booth at Carapelli’s could hold only so much distress.

“So,” she said, taking a small square of the extremely large pizza and setting it on her plate. “Let me see if I have this straight. Ever since you met Henry, you’ve been his mentor. Teaching him what to eat, what classes to take, how to hit a speedball, whatever. Henry doesn’t move from point A to point B without thinking, How would Mike want me to do this?”

“We usually call it a fastball.”

“Fastball. And now your work is paying off. You were right about the kid—what you saw in him three years ago, everyone else is seeing now. But it’s not making you happy, the way you thought it would. In fact, you’re starting to resent the ungrateful bastard.”

Mike frowned. “Henry’s grateful.”

“But not grateful enough. Without you he’d be working in a factory right now. And instead he’s about to realize his dream. And make a boatload of money to boot.”

Mike folded his hands beneath his chin. Pella felt relieved to sit across from someone who was willing to act so unreservedly glum in her presence, as if she weren’t there. David never did that—David’s eyes were always right on her, probing, admiring, assessing, enjoying. That was what he called love. “It makes me feel like an asshole,” Mike said.

“What?”

“To not be happy for him.”

“You are happy for him.”

“But to the extent I’m not, it’s irrational. I had a plan for Henry, and it worked. I had a plan for myself, and that one didn’t. I shouldn’t take it out on him.”

“Well, feelings aren’t rational.”

Mike folded two squares of pizza into a kind of sandwich and tossed them in his mouth. His woes didn’t seem to affect his appetite. “You’re talking to a man who’s writing a two-hundred-page paper about Marcus Aurelius.”

“How old are you?” Pella asked.

“Twenty-three.”

“Same here. And not only am I not going to law school this fall, I haven’t even graduated high school. I quit when I met David.”

“Love at first sight, huh?”

Pella shrugged. “I thought so then. Now I just think I was intent on doing something big. Something nobody else my age was doing. David came to my prep school to lecture. He wasn’t an academic, but he read Ancient Greek better than my instructor. He also had a wife, but I didn’t know that at the time.” She looked up to see how Mike would react to the revelation of the wife.

Mike’s eyes were wide. “He knew Greek?”

She nodded.

“And you know Greek?”

“Sort of.”

He touched his beard. “Wow.”

“It was senior year,” Pella said. “I’d just been accepted to Yale—my dad taught at Harvard when I was a kid, so I wanted to be just like him while pretending to be the opposite. Beforehand I was worried I wouldn’t get in. But after I did get in, it started to seem so boring, you know? Half my class was going to Yale. But a bad starter marriage—that was at least five years ahead of the curve.”

Was she rambling? She’d talked so little lately that it was hard to tell. “David lived in San Francisco,” she said, skipping ahead a bit. “I flew back with him and we moved into this loft he was renovating. I didn’t find out about the wife for a while—the two of them were separated. By that time I was pretty much committed to staying.”

Mike grunted in an impressed-sounding way. “How’d that go over with the president?”

“About like you’d expect. First he’d call and lecture me, tell me I was ruining my life. Then came the silent treatment, which lasted about a year, although it was hard to tell who was administering it to whom. Since then he sends me a Westish application once a month.”

“And now here you are.”

“And now here I am.” She looked at Mike, who was looking at her. “I might be here for a while.”

“Good,” he said. “For me anyway.”

Pella, embarrassed, pinged her thumbnail against her empty wineglass. She’d had three little squares of pizza at most. It was the biggest pizza she’d ever seen, and even with Mike’s valiant eating they hadn’t finished it. “Is it fun?” she asked shyly.

“Huh?”

“College, I mean.”

He shrugged. “I’m not much for fun.”

Both of the young waitresses looked like Carapelli offspring, dark and voluptuous where their mom was dark and fat. One of them slid the check onto the table as she moved down the row of booths, collecting glass shakers of parmesan cheese and red-pepper flakes. Mike dug in his wallet, pulled out a blue credit card, and laid it on top of the check. Then, after squinting at the blue card quizzically for a while, he pulled out his wallet again and traded it for a gray one.

He smiled bravely, but the gray card didn’t appease him either. As they talked he kept stealing glances at it. “Wait here,” he finally said, sliding out of the booth and scooping up card and check.

“Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s perfect,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

Pella wanted to crawl under the table—here she didn’t have a dime to her name, and she’d thoughtlessly ordered a bottle of wine, and to top it off she’d barely touched the pizza. Talk about independent. She slunk down in her chair, pulled the collar of her polo shirt—purchased, of course, with her father’s Visa card, which was sitting on the dresser in the guest room right now and which she easily could have brought with her—tight around her throat.

“I’ll pay next time,” she said as Mike approached, carrying his jacket and her sweatshirt. “I, um, forgot my wallet.”

Mike smiled. “Don’t be silly. I invited you.”

“Still,” Pella said. Mike wasn’t pink-cheeked, not like the rest of these Westish kids. He seemed simultaneously old and young—sort of like she felt. “This might sound strange,” she said, “but it’s been forever since I hung out with someone my own age.”

“How does it feel?”

“Not bad.” She nodded, slipping her arms into her sweatshirt as Mike held it for her. “It feels not bad.”

They’d driven to the restaurant, though it was only ten or so blocks from campus—a chivalrous gesture on Mike’s part, to keep her out of the cold, or else he just wanted to show off his beastly boat of a car. On the way back they took a different, longer route along the lakefront, past the lighthouse. Waves crashed on the breakers, sending up curtains of surf. The black of the water, which stretched as far north and south as the eye could see, graded imperceptibly into the black of the starless sky. “I forgot how much it looks like the ocean,” Pella said, cracking open her window to see how it smelled.

“Everything but salt.”

“When we lived in Cambridge, my dad was always driving us down to the ocean. Even in the middle of winter, he’d find some excuse.” A spritz of mist came through the open window, along with an odor of rotting fish.

“I should have warned you,” Mike said. “That window’s impossible to roll up. Here.” He blasted the heat and angled the vents toward Pella. They had already wrapped around the lighthouse and were headed, very slowly, back toward the campus, the lake now on the Mike-ward side of the car. Pella felt that flicker of sad foreclosure she always felt at the end of an outward voyage.

“We have three options,” Mike said. “We can go to Bartleby’s, which is a bar. We can go to my house, which is a mess. Or we can drive around until my car breaks down, which will be soon.”

Would it seem forward, not to say slutty, to go to his house? Pella wasn’t sure what the college dating norms were like these days—whether accepting three squares of pizza and half a bottle of syrupy chardonnay amounted to a sexual bargain. In any case, it seemed like Mike had a set of dating norms all his own. She didn’t want to seem slutty or forward, but, just as on the steps of the VAC this morning, she felt reluctant to leave his company.

“I vote for your house,” she said.

“Consider yourself forewarned.”

The house was appointed in classic collegiate squalor: garbage cans on the porch, busted spindles in the railing. A storm door hanging from a single hinge, a peeling slab of tape on the mailbox lid that read: SCHWARTZ/ARSCH.

“I’d turn on the lights,” he said as he reached back to lead her by hand through the dark living room, “but that would be embarrassing.”

Pella could smell dried beer and another sickly odor, like spoiled milk. The sticky floorboards clung to the soles of her shoes. “How do you ever pick up any girls,” she whispered, “living in a place like this?”

“I don’t.”

She let the lie slide. They passed through a low archway into a second room, perhaps a dining room, though the table beneath the chandelier appeared to be a Ping-Pong table. Even stronger than the smell of beer in here was the burnt dusty odor of a used bookstore’s basement, where paperback copies of The Catcher in the Rye and Rabbit, Run and Leon Uris novels cost a quarter. “Books,” Pella said.

“Too many.”

“What’s that noise?”

“My roommate.”

Pella felt, again, both older and younger than the situation required. She’d skipped this whole era of roommates and beer pong and Salvation Army furniture—it wasn’t necessarily something you wanted to go back to once you’d lived in a clean decorated place of your own. And yet being here, with Mike’s huge hand wrapped around hers, she sensed a certain long-felt pressure lifting from her sternum. She imagined hiding out for a year or two, pacing her way through the brittle paperbacks, and finally emerging, rested and fine. Though someone would have to wash the floors. “Do you think he’s okay?” she asked, meaning the roommate.

“He’s a bit of a snorer. You’ll get used to it.”

“When?”

“A few weeks, at the most. Do you want anything to drink?”

“No.”

Old. Young. Old. Young. They entered a room that was mostly consumed by a low bed, and Mike let go of her hand to shut the door. Pella sat down on the bed’s edge. A fat stack of books slid off the mattress and crashed to the floor. “Sorry,” she whispered.

“Don’t be.”

She took off her shoes, lay down with her head on the pillow, and closed her eyes. She hadn’t had sex with anyone but David in four years, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had sex with David. A year ago, at least. If she’d once been a precocious, a promiscuous girl, she wasn’t anymore. The world had caught up to her and passed her by. Every sorority girl who lay down in this bed probably had more “experience,” arithmetically speaking, than she. She heard Mike fumbling in the dark, then the snap of a match. The blackness behind her eyelids grew slightly green. “A candle,” she said, her eyes still closed. “Very suave.”

“Thanks.” Another stack of books was removed from the bed, and then she felt Mike lie down beside her. The heaviness of his body depressed the mattress, rolling her toward him. He whispered her name, which struck her, for some reason, as amazingly strange. Maybe he was just making sure he remembered it. She could feel the softness of his beard—denser, softer than David’s—against her forehead. The candle flickered and waved, the snoring came faintly through the wall. She nestled into the line of his body, smelled the sweet sweaty odor of his neck, and fell asleep.