The voice from the other side said, “Are you really
brushing your teeth
in there?”
That did it. Charlotte snapped. “Shut up!” she cried. “Leave me alone! Stop sniffing at the door!”
Silence ⦠prolonged silence ⦠It was hard to believe, but the voice had shut up. Nevertheless, Charlotte hurried. The whole thing was too much. How long could she use a powder room as her bathroom? Maybe if she got up really early every day and brought a washcloth â¦
She emerged from the powder room carrying a toilet kit and a wet towel. Standing back four or five feet was a small angry girl, arms crossed over her chest. She stared sullenly at the towel and the toilet kit. She had a wide face, olive skin, a grim visage, and a mane of very long, very thick dark hair parted down the middle. As Charlotte rushed past her, the girl muttered, “Why don't you, like,
move in
?”
Â
Â
At long last, Charlotte sat propped up against the pillow on her bed, at peace, reading a paperback of a novel Miss Pennington had recommended,
Ethan Frome
by Edith Wharton. As the pages went by, Ethan and Mattie's unrequited passion became more and more poignant. Involuntarily, Charlotte found herself pulling her knees up closer to her chest and wanting to close her bathrobe more protectively about her pajamas. Poor Ethan! Poor Mattie! You just wanted to
help
them,
tell
them what they could do. It's
all right
for you to embraceâto declare your loveâto leave that frigid little New England town where you're trapped!
So absorbed was she that she was only faintly aware of how the noise
level was rising out in the hall. Even though the door was closed, every now and then she could hear a girl shriek, and sometimes two or more girls shriek, and these were not the shrieks of girls happy to see each other after a long time, but girls expressing their hilarity, genuine or otherwise, over something stupid and juvenile some boy was doing. But these were considerations merely drifting along the margins of
Ethan Frome.
Soon she felt terribly tired, however, overwhelmingly tired. She got up, pulled the shades down, turned the lights off, took off her bathrobe, and slipped under the covers. She thought she would go to sleep immediately, but the noiseâthe activityâin the hallway kept intensifying. Well ⦠everybody was no doubt as wound up and excited as she was, and not everybody bottled it up the way she did. She thought she heard a boy cry out, “Not herâyou'll get awfuck's disease!” But it couldn't have been that, because it wasn't followed by any shrieks or juvenile laughs. Then things quieted down a bit. She heard a little scampering, some sort of scraping on a wall somewhere, but by and by, as she lay there with her eyes shut, the sounds began to float beyond the reach of analysis. For a moment she could see Beverly's peach fingernails framed by the tan of her fingers, but it meant ⦠nothing. It dissolved into an eyelid movie, and she fell asleep.
She woke up with a start. A shaft of light shot across the counterpane on her bed. Heavy, syncopated thumps on a bass drum, a grunting voiceâ
rap?
What time was it? She propped herself up on one elbow and looked toward the door. As soon as she didâ
“Whaaazzup, dude?”
Silhouetted in the doorway was the gangling frame of a boy in a floppy T-shirt and baggy pants. He had a long neck and a mass of curly hair that popped out above his ears. In his hand, up near his head, was the unmistakable silhouette of a bottle of beer.
“Wake you up?”
“Yesâ” She was so shocked and disoriented that it came out like a dying sigh.
“Courtesy call, dude. Time to chill.” He tilted the bottle up and took a long swallow. “Ah, ah, ah.”
Groggily, “I'mâtrying to sleep.”
“'S all right,” said the boy. “Needn'pologize. Zits happen.” He smiled goofily and said, “Oohoooo, oohoooo.”
Charlotte remained on one elbow, staring.
What's he doing
! The heavy
bass thudsâit
was
rap. Someone down the hall was playing a CD, very loudly. She could barely find her voice. Imploringly, “Whatâ
time
is it?”
The boy lifted his other wrist up near his face. It was all so eerie, because he was in silhouette, with just a highlight here and there. “It says here ⦠lemme see ⦠it says ⦠time to chill.”
Down the hall, a tremendous crash, followed by a boy yelling, “Well, you sure fucked
that
, dawg!” Raucous laughs. The rap music pounded on.
The boy's curly head turned to look, then turned back. “Barbarians,” he said. “Exterminate the brutes. Lookâuhhhh, needn't stand on ceremonyâ”
With a burst of anger Charlotte pushed herself upward in bed with both arms. “I
told
you! I'm trying to
sleep
!”
“Okay!” said the boy, pulling his head back and holding his palms out in front of his chest in a gesture of mock defensiveness. “Whoa! Skooz!” He walked backward with a mock stagger. “I wasn't even here! That wasn't me!” He disappeared down the hall, going, “Oohoooo ⦠oohoooo ⦔
Charlotte got up and shut the door. Her heart was pounding away inside her rib cage. Could she lock the door some way? But even if she could, Beverly hadn't come in yet. She turned on the light. It was ten minutes after one. She got back into bed and lay on her back with her heart still pounding, listening to the noise.
No alcohol in Little Yard.
That boy was absolutely drunk! The third drunk boy she had seen with her own eyes since the R.A.'s solemn pronouncement, and it sounded like there were many more. She had the terrible fear that she wasn't going to be able to get to sleep at all.
An hour or more must have gone by. The ruckus finally began to subside. Where on earth was Beverly? Charlotte stared at the ceiling, she stared at the windows, she lay on this side, she lay on that side.
Dupont.
She thought of Miss Pennington. She thought of Channing and Regina ⦠Channing and his strong, even features. Regina was Channing's girlfriend. Laurie said they had gone all the way. Oh, Channing, Channing, Channing. How much more time passed, she didn't know, because she fell asleep at last, thinking of Channing Reeves's strong, even features.
M
ost of them hadn't seen each other all summer, and classes had just begun this morning, but by evening the boys at the Saint Ray house had already sunk into a state of aimless lassitude. First day or not, it was still that nadir in the weekly cycle of Dupont social life, Monday night.
From the front parlor came the sound of “quarters,” a drinking game in which the boys gathered around a table in a circle, more or less, each with a jumbo translucent plastic cup of beer before him. They bounced quarters on their edges and tried to make them hop into the other players' cups. If you were successful, your opponent had to tilt his head back and the container up and chugalug all twenty ounces. There was also a cup out in the middle. If you bounced a quarter into that one, all your opponents had to drink up. Much manly whooping when a quarter bounced home or just missed. Needless to say, the tables, magnificent old pieces that had been here ever since this huge Palladian mansion was built before the First World War, were by now riddled with dents. It was hard to believe there were once Saint Rays rich enough and religious enough about the great fraternal chain of being to build such a place and buy such furniture, not merely for themselvesâafter all, their own Dupont days would be fewâbut for generations of Saint Rays to come.
From the terrace room came the music of a Swarm CD banging out of a pair of speakers that were fixed in place for parties. Everybody was beginning to get tired of Swarm's so-called bang beat; nevertheless, Swarm was banging away tonight in the terrace room. Terrace room, front parlor, back parlor, dining room, entry gallery (cavernous), billiard room (ancient pool table, felt chewed up and stained because one evil night a bunch of blitzed brothers used it to play quarters), card bay, barâthe variety of rooms for entertaining on this one floor would probably never be built in a house again.
Here in the library a dozen or so of the boys were sprawled back on couches, easy chairs, armchairs, side chairs, window seatsâmost of them wearing khaki shorts and flip-flops, watching ESPN SportsCenter on a forty-inch flat-screen television set, drinking beer, needling each other, making wisecracks, and occasionally directing sentiments of awe or admiration toward the screen. About ten years ago a flood from a bathroom up above had ruined the library's aged and random accumulation of books, and the once-elegant walnut shelves, which had the remains of fine Victorian moldings along all the edges, now held dead beer cans and empty pizza delivery boxes funky with the odor of cheese. The library's one trove of mankind's accumulated knowledge at this moment in history was the TV set.
“Ungghh!” went two or three boys simultaneously. Up on the screen a huge football linebacker named Bobo Bolker had just sacked a quarterback so hard that his body crumpled on the ground beneath Bobo like a football uniform full of bones. Bobo got up and pumped his enormous arms and shimmied his hips in a dance of domination.
“You know how much that fucking guy weighs?” said a boy with tousled blond hair, Vance by name, who was sitting back in an armchair on the base of his spine, holding a can of beer. “Three hundred and ten fucking pounds. And he can fucking
move
.”
“Those guys are half human and half fucking creatine,” said another boy, Julian, a real mesomorphâhis short, thick arms and long, ponderous gut made him look like a wrestlerâwho had sunk so far back into a couch, he was able to balance a can of beer on his upper abdomen.
“Creatine?” said Vance. “They don't take creatine anymore. Creatine's a boutique drug. Now they take like gorilla testosterone and shit like that. Don't give me that look, Julian. I'm not kidding. Fucking gorilla testosterone.”
“The fuck, they take gorilla testosterone,” said Julian. “How do they get it?”
“They buy it. It's out there for sale on the drug market.” Vance had managed to make an entire statement without using the word
fuck
or any of its derivatives. The lull would be brief.
“Okay,” said Julian, “then answer me this. I don't care if you're the greatest fucking drug lord in the history of the world. Who the fuck's gonna go out there in the jungle and harvest the fucking crop?”
Everybody broke up over that, and they immediately turned to a boy sitting in a big easy chair in the corner, as if to say, “But ⦠do
you
think it's funny, Hoyt?”
Hoyt was genuinely amused by Julian, but mainly he was aglow with the realization that this happened all the time now. The boys would crack a joke or make what was meant to be an interesting observation, particularly in the area of what was or wasn't cool, and they'd all turn to him to see what
Hoyt
thought. It was an unconscious thing, which made it even greater proof that what he had hoped for, what he had predicted, had come to pass. Ever since word had spread about how he and Vance had demolished the big thug bodyguard on what boys in the Saint Ray house now referred to as the Night of the Skull Fuck, they had become legends in their own time.
So Hoyt laughed, by way of bestowing his blessing upon Julian, and knocked back another big gulp of beer.
“Holy shit,” said Boo McGuire, a roly-poly boy who had one leg slung over the arm of a couch and one elbow crooked behind his head, “I don't care how big they are. If they're taking gorilla testosterone, then they've all got balls the size of fucking BBs.”
And everybody broke up over that, since it was well known to habitués of SportsCenter that the downside to taking testosterone supplements to build muscle was that the body's own testosterone factory shut down and the testicles atrophied. The room glanced at Hoyt again, to ratify the fact that Boo McGuire had indeed gotten off a funny line.
Just then Ivy Peters, a boy notable for how fat his hips wereâand the way his black eyebrows ran together over his noseâappeared in the doorway and said, “Anybody got porn?” Sticking up in front of his chin was the sort of microphone one wears in order to use a hands-free cell phone.
This was not an unusual request. Many boys spoke openly about how they masturbated at least once every day, as if this were some sort of prudent maintenance of the psychosexual system. On the other hand, among the cooler members, Ivy Peters was regarded as one of the fraternity's “mistakes.” They had been carried away by the fact that his father, Horton Peters, was
CEO of Gordon Hanley, and a majority of Saint Rays with no particular aptitudes assumed they would become investment bankers, Hoyt among them. At first behind his back and now sometimes to his face, they had begun calling him Ivy Poison or Mr. Poison or I.P., which they made sure he knew didn't stand for Ivy Peters. Hoyt's own face went glum all of a sudden, as it often did when he saw I.P. these days ⦠Gordon Hanley ⦠to get hired by an i-bank like that these days you needed a transcript that shined like fucking gold ⦠and his grades ⦠He refused to think about them. That's next June's problem, and this was only September.
Vance was making an insouciant upward gesture for I.P.'s benefit. Barely even looking at him, he said, “Try the third floor. They got some one-hand magazines up there.”
“I've built up a tolerance to magazines,” said the mistake. “I need videos.”
Boo McGuire said, “What's the microphone for, I.P.? So you can call your sister while you jack off?”
I.P ignored that. Julian got up off the couch and left the room.
Hoyt lazily knocked back some more beer and said, “Oh, f'r Chrissake, I.P., it's ten o'clock at night. In another hour the cum dumpsters will start coming over here to spend the night. Right, Vance-man?” He gave Vance a mock leer of a look, then turned back to I.P. “And you're looking for porn videos and a knuckle fuck.”
The mistake shrugged and turned his palms up as if to say, “I want porn. What's the big deal?” He didn't seem to realize that Julian was sneaking up behind him â¦
Bango!
Julian wrapped his arms around I.P.'s chest, pinning the mistake's arms to his sides, and began thrusting his wrestler's gut and pelvis against the mistake's big rear end like a dog in the park.
Everybody broke up again.
“Leggo a me, you grotesque faggot!” screamed I.P., his face contorted with anger as he thrashed his pinioned body about.
Convulsive laughter, waves and waves of it.
“What makes you so fucking
grotesque
, Julian?” said Boo McGuire, coming up briefly for air. The repetition of the fancy word threw everybody into a new round of paroxysms.
I.P. broke loose and stood there for a moment glowering at Julian, who put on a sad face and said, “Don't I get one little hump?”
The mistake then turned and glowered at everybody in the room and started shaking his head. Without another word he stormed out into the entry gallery, toward the stairs.
A big, rugged varsity lacrosse player named Harrison Vorheese yelled after him, “Happy hand job, I.P.!”âand everybody cracked up, convulsed, and dissolved all over again.
Julian's rutboar embrace was a form of fraternal gibe known as humping, generally inflicted upon brothers caught doing dorky things such as covertly working on a homework assignment in the library while SportsCenter was on or coming into the library at ten o'clock at night looking for porn videos, especially if you were a mistake in the first place.
“What is all this walking around the house with a fucking microphone in his face?” said Boo. “I.P.'s become some kind of wireless nut. You should see the shit he has up in his room.”
Once they finally got control of themselves, Harrison, invigorated by the success of his “hand job” crack, said to Hoyt, “Speaking of cum dumpsters, did you knowâ”
Boo broke in. “What the fuck's this cum dumpster shit, Hoyt? Didn't I see a little cutie-pie in disco clothes coming out of your room at seven-thirty this morning?”
Everybody went “Wooooooooooo!” in mock dismay.
Harrison said, “Like I was sayingâ”
“I was speaking generically, not specifically,” said Hoyt. “Specifically, I only allow discriminating visitors in my room.”
Horselaughs and groans. “Oh, brother” ⦠“Discriminate
this
, Hoyt” ⦠“Where'd
she
come from?” ⦠“What's her name?”
“Whattaya think I am,” said Hoyt, “a fucking playa? I wouldn't tell you her name even if I knew it.”
Harrison said, “Like I was sayingâ” Laughs and groans directed at Hoyt drowned him out.
“What the fuck
were
you saying, Harrison?” said Vance.
“Thank you,” said Harrison. “It's nice to run into a gentleman in this fucking place once in a while. What I was saying was”âhe looked at Vance and then at Hoytâ“did you know Crawdon McLeod's started hooking up with you guys' favorite ice-cream eater?”
“Craw?” said Hoyt. “You're kidding.”
“I'm not kidding.”
“Does he know who she fucking
is
?”
“I don't know. Maybe he can't fucking resist. After all, she's a fucking documented genius at skull work.”
They all convulsed and disintegrated yet once again. Harrison's beefy square face was beaming. He was on a roll.
Julian said, “Does she know you guys know she was the one going down on the fucking governor?”
“I don't know,” said Hoyt, who now tilted the beer can up almost vertically to get one last swallow. Idly he wondered how many of these things he had drunk tonight. “Probably not. I don't think she ever got a real look at us. We were behind a tree.” He indicated with his arms how big around the tree was.
Then he noticed that Vance was grilling him with a certain stern look he was very familiar with by now. Vance didn't want to be a legend in his own time. He continually beseeched Hoyt to bury the whole incident. They'd been lucky. So far nobody had come looking for them. Or maybe they had. Politicians had their own ways of getting even, and so forth and so on. Hoyt looked at Vance's pained expression for a couple of seconds. A pleasant breeze was beginning to blow inside his head. Nevertheless, he decided to drop the subject.
But Julian said, “You think they're ever gonna come looking for you guys?”
Vance got up and walked to the doorway in exasperation, pausing only long enough to say to Hoyt, without even a suggestion of a smile, “Hey, why don't we talk about it some more?” He pointed toward the TV screen. “Why don't you get SportsCenter to broadcast a replay for you? That way you can let the whole fucking country in on it.” He turned his back and left.
Hoyt hesitated, then said to Julian, but more for Vance's benefit than Julian's, “They ain't coming looking for
no
body. All they're looking to do is
over
look the whole fucking thing. Nothing they could do to anybody at Dupont would be worth the risk. The guy got himself fucking gobbled in the bushes by a little girl. Syrie's nineteen, twenty years old, and he's the fifty-whatever-year-old governor of California. She's a little blond college girl, and he's a big old cottontopâtwo and a half, maybe three times her age. Talk about grotesque.”