“
Tes
tify?”
“If they take me in front of this panel. You're the only person who can say something like I came to you on such and such a day,
after
I handed that paper in and
before
Quat started breaking myâgiving me a hard time.”
“You think they'll believe you? You went to a
freshman
for advice?”
“That's the way it happened! Will you do it? Will you testify for me?”
Charlotte didn't know what to say. Jojoâa trialâtestify?âquestions?âwhose?âsomething told her it was a mess well worth avoiding. But she was already experiencing the guilt she would feel if she refused.
“Yes.” Flatly, in a put-upon voice.
Jojo lurched still farther across the table and grasped both her small hands with his big hands and held them as if he were making a snowball. He squeezed them.
“Thank you! I owe you one! Good girl! Good stuff!”
His big smile was not so much a smile of happiness and relief as happiness and victory, as if he had talked her into something. That made her uneasy. She didn't much like this “good girl, good stuff.” It was patronizing. Did he think he had put one over on her?
On the other hand ⦠the way it must have looked to everybody in the room ⦠Jojo has a real
thing
for this girl. She looks so young! Who is she?
“Did anybody ever tell you you're beautiful? And different? You're not like the other girls on this campus.”
Â
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It being Monday night, Hoyt and eight or nine other Saint Rays had gravitated to the library couches and easy chairs, cracked leather upholstery and all, to chill, i.e., drift through the evening in as aimless and effortless a manner as possible, bolstered by the presence of others like themselves. Naturally ESPN SportsCenter was on the big plasma TV screen. Hot colors and orangey slices of postadolescent flesh flared in a Gatorade commercial ⦠and now four poorly postured middle-aged white sportswriters sat slouched in little low-backed, smack-red fiberglass swivel chairs panel-discussing the “sensitive” matter of the way black players dominated basketball.
“Look,” the well-known columnist Maury Fieldtree was saying, his chin resting on a pasha's cushion of jowls, “just think about it a second. Race, ethnicity, all thatâthat's just a symptom of something else. There's been whole cycles, every generation, whole cycles of different minorities using sports as a way out of the ghetto. Am I right? I mean, like boxing. A hundred years ago or whatever it was, you had the Irish, John L. Sullivan, Gentleman Jim Corbett, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney. Then here came the Italians: the RockysâMarciano, and Grazianoâand Jake LaMotta and so on. Or take football. Way back, you had the Germans, like Sammy Baugh. So now you get to basketball. In the 1930s and 1940s, you know who dominated professional basketball long before the African Americans? Jewish players. Yeah! Jewish players from the Jewish ghettos of New York! Oh, there wasâ”
“You notice that?” said Julian. His voice rose up from out of a canyon of leather, he had sunk so far down into the couch. The question was for the room, but he looked first at Hoyt, who had settled into the easy chair that was, by silent consensus,
his
, as Saint Ray's heroic fighting man. His assault, even though unsuccessful, on a huge all-American lacrosse player, coming on top of the Night of the Skull Fuck, had dramatically increased the awe factor.
“Notice what?” Hoyt saidâidly, as befitted his status. He immediately turned and tilted his head back on the leather to take another swallow of his fourthâfifth?âcan of beer. He was losing count again.
“The way they always say âJewish players' or whatever it is,” said Julian.
“They don't say âJews,' they say âJewish players.' They call Irishmen, âIrishmen'; they call Italians âItalians,' Germans âGermans,' Swedes âSwedes,' Poles âPoles,' but they don't call Jews âJews.' They say âJewish players.' It's like saying âJew,' even if the guy is a Jew, is like aâaâan insult. It's like automatically anti-Semitic.”
“Anti-Semitic?” said Boo McGuire, who was sitting on the arm of a couch with his roly-poly legs hanging down either side, as if he were riding a horse. “Maybe, but the fucking Canadians themselves won't say âJew,' either.”
General laughter.
“Whattya mean?” said Julian. “I don't get it.”
“That guy, Maury Fieldtree”âBoo gestured toward the TV screenâ“he's a Canadian himself.”
“Aw, come on,” said Julian, “Maury Fieldtree.”
“You didn't know that?” said Boo. “His real name's not Fieldtree. It's Feldbaum. I'll bet you anything. And Mauryâyou know where that comes from? Moishe ⦠They make it Maurice, which is where Maury comes from, or Murray or Mort. So that's old Moishe Feldbaum you're looking at.”
“How do you know all that?” said Heady Mills, who sat on the couch on the base of his spine. “You a fucking Canadian yourself and not telling us?”
Laughter all around.
“No, I'm just naturally smarter than you,” said Boo. “Besides, some of my best friends are Canadians.”
More laughter. Hoyt was automatically laughing along with the rest of them, as befit a cool brother, but in fact he felt irritable and anxious, and the fourâor five?âbeers had not helped any. It was just dawning on him what a catastrophe his college transcript was going to be ⦠Coasting along for three years just assuming that somehow he would drift into investment banking in New York when he finished at Dupont. That's what you did when you graduated from a university like Dupont. You went to work for an investment bank in New York. Nobody had a clue what investment banking actually was. The main thing was, once you got the job, you were making two hundred, three hundred thousand a year by the time you were twenty-five ⦠It was just dawning on him that the guys who had done that had two sides to them, the cool side and the secret side. They had a lot of secret dork in them, these guys. When they went over to the library at midnight, they weren't just going over there to hit on girls, the way he did. They went over there and nerded down for the night, like Vance. It had taken Hoyt a long time to realize that half the time when Vance came back to the room at
three or four in the morning, he'd been over at the library hammering the shit out of econ and statistics. Even if he, Hoyt, hammered the shit out of econ and statistics and everything else for the rest of the year, he'd still have C's and B-minuses that were already on his transcript ⦠and reports coming back from guys who graduated last year said the i-banks went over your transcript with a vengeance. Even B's made you a questionable case, and B minuses and C's might as well be F's. Being cool meant nothing; being handsome with a cleft chin meant nothing; beating the living shit out of buff bodyguards, all-American lacrosse players, and school bullies meant nothing. The whole thing made his head hurt, and this time the beer wasn't giving him a lift or even ordinary numb relief. In fact, this time it had him bloated with self-pity.
Julian was saying, “It's the same thing with fags. Like they don't want to hear the word âhomosexual.' It's like there's something dirty about the word.”
“They got that right,” said Vance. “It's the medical term for buncha brown-dick ass-bangers.”
Laughter laughter laughter.
“Yeah,” said Heady. “If you say homosexual instead of gay, then that makes you a bigot.”
“I love this fucking word âgay,'” said Boo. “You got some fucking faggot weighs ninety pounds and's got AIDS maggots crawling in and out of his asshole, and he's âgay.' Gimme a fucking break.”
Another round of laughter.
“Yeah,” said Julian, “and they got Queer Studies listed in the fucking course catalog. For some fucking reason, âqueer' is okay. But just let some professor call it by its right name, Homosexual Studies, and he'd get fucking canned.”
Hoyt wasn't listening any longer. Lying back on his easy chair, pissing away the time ⦠When he thought of all the evenings he'd diligently pissed away in this broken-down roomâ
Another commercial was on, and more hot, slick colors flared ⦠girls on a beach at spring break, squealing with laughter from being high, or maybe embarrassed by the way they're hanging out of their bikinisâ
Julian was in the middle of saying something when Hoyt stood up, stretched without looking at anybody, and started walking out of the library. The group went silent and watched him, as if wondering if anybody had said anything he didn't like.
Vance spoke up. “Where you going, Hoyto?”
Hoyt stopped and stared at him in a distracted way and finally said in a tired voice, “Come on, dude, I'm going over to the I.M.”
So Vance got up, and they headed over to the I.M.
Â
Â
The I.M. was pretty dead. There was no live music on Monday nights. Some melancholy country rock CD was playing over the sound system. It was early on the daily club-and-saloon circadian cycle, the prime hours being 11:30 to 2:00. Without a crowd to animate it, the place looked as gloomy and shoddily constructed as it actually was. The black lengths of splintery rough-cut lumber that covered the walls didn't look so much Collegiate Bohemian as ineptly designed and assembled. Most of the round black tables were empty; and, empty, they looked battered and cheap. It was hard to believe that just two nights ago hundreds of students were vying and lying, trying to pry their way into this place, dying to be where things were happening.
Tonight Hoyt didn't even want a table. He found it a relief to be hunched over the bar in this quiet, decrepit joint with yet another beer in front of him. A gale had begun to kick up inside his skull, and he knew the line had moved up pretty far on the graph, and he knew he could always deal with that, except that he kept losing track of what Vance was saying.
“ ⦠the fucking Inn at Chester?” was the end of the sentence.
“No shit,” said Hoyt, hoping to extract some details that would put him back in the picture. “The Inn at Chester?”
Vance gave him a funny look and said, “Hoytâwhat the fuck, dude, I just
told
you the Inn at Chester is where they'd stay if they came ⦠looking.”
Despite the rising gale and defective information, Hoyt picked up the scent of Vance's usual paranoia. So he said, “They come look for you?” He was vaguely aware that he sounded like a movie Indian. Incipient diction impairment.
“That's the problem,” said Vance. “I don't know.”
No, Hoyt said to himself, the problem is bad drinking. You feel lousy, you can't halfway sleep, and you dread the clarity of morning ⦠or even early afternoon ⦠which in turn made him think of the dreaded Afternoon Hangoverâ
At first he was only vaguely aware ⦠A couple had taken seats at the empty end of the bar, seven or eight seats away. They were young, but they weren't students. The guy had the face of a twenty-year-old, but he was bald
on top, which made him look weak and pathetic. Despite the turtleneck sweater the guy wore, anybody could tell he had a scrawny neck underneath. In short, a nonentity. Hoyt paid no attention to them until he caught the girlâwomanâstaring at him. He turned away for a few seconds, then glanced at her again. She was still staring at him.
He nudged Vance. “Theh girl”âhe motioned toward the end of the bar with his headâ“theh girl staring at me?”
Vance stole a look. “Yeah. Probably at me, though. She's hot.”
The girlâwomanâwas, indeed, hot. She had quite a head of straight dark brown hair, trimmed to just above her shoulders, more
done
than any student's. She had a lean face but a full lower lip, with some dark lipstick smooth enough to create little highlights, and a long, slender neck with a tiny gold necklace that also picked up the light ⦠in such a delicate, defenseless way. She wore a black sweater with a V-neck. She wore a short black jacket on top of the sweater, but mainly there was ⦠the V in the V-neck. The point came down so deep that Hoyt could see ⦠could see â¦
“Def'ny me,” he said to Vance. “Well ⦠fuck.” He got up from the stool.
“Yo, da playa gits up,” said Vance with as close to a ghetto accent as any Phipps was likely to get. “Da playa makes his move. Be cool, Hoyt. What about the guy?”
“The fuck, I'm gon' be nice't motherfucker.” Oh shit, he hadn't even meant to talk ghetto. It just came out that way because Vance had said “playa” ⦠The diction problem â¦
As he walked toward the girl, the gale was ⦠up. He glanced at himself in the big mirror behind the bar ⦠Could see only his head and shoulders, but that was enough. Both hims took a good look at him. With his head turned that way and tilted slightly back so that his cleft chin came to the fore, a small, confident smile playing on his lipsâthe objective him wondered if maybe that smile wasn't too much like a smirk, but both hims agreed he looked awesome and awesomely cool. Also, with his head turned this far, his neck looked a mile wide, like a column rising up from out of the open neck of his polo shirt. The gale was blowing.