Jake & Mimi (17 page)

Words at last: “God” and “God” and “God,” rising and rising. “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God” now, and beyond her words another sound,
a steady, fast clicking, over and over. The sound of the headboard, of the posts, as they strike the wall. Again and again
they strike it, and then her words dissolve into cries, drawn-out cries, louder and louder. I hug my knees tighter to me,
bury my face in them. If I could just hear Jake Teller, hear anything from him. But no. He is silent. I hear only her cries,
filling the apartment, and the clicking of the posts against the wall, so fast, so impossibly fast. And then, slowing. Slowing
and deepening. I can’t take it. They are slowing because Jake Teller is slowing, slowing himself so that he can drive into
her harder, deeper. She is so small, so very small. I struggle to my feet, the sound of the posts growing louder. Deep thuds
now, and further apart. Three, four seconds apart, and with each thud, sharp cries from Nina Torring, piercing cries, wordless,
soaring, as if something has torn loose inside her.

I rush into the living room and to the door. I slip into my shoes. Still her cries come, and then she is… there is no other
word for it, she is screaming. I leave the apartment and close the door behind me. And still I hear her. I hear her through
the door, hear her even as I cross the foyer, hear her until I step out into the night and close the big mahogany street door
behind me. I rush to the black gate, fumble with the catch, step onto the sidewalk, and hurry away, almost running and now,
yes, running in my dress to the corner of Houston, where I stop, breathing hard, and lean against a newspaper machine. I need
to touch something solid, to feel the cold metal of this machine with my hands. A drop of water falls onto my wrist, and I
realize it is mine, that I am crying. I wipe at the tears with my sweater and I stand, holding on to the machine, until my
breathing slows and I start to come back again, back from the apartment into the night around me, from the cries of Nina Torring
to the rustle of the trees on Sullivan Street and the noise of the traffic on Houston.

A full minute it takes me, and then I look around. Behind me is a corner store. I walk slowly into it, startled by the bell
over the door. Even the ordinary store sounds inside — the
ching
of the register, the voices from the television — sound strange, alien. I walk to the back, slide open the door to the standing
refrigerator, take a cold plastic bottle of water from the shelf and press it to my forehead. I see my reflection in the glass,
see that my hair is damp on my face, see the burning red of my cheeks. As red as hers. I put the bottle to them, then to the
back of my neck. I open it and drink two, three long sips, almost half the bottle, and then I walk with it to the counter.
I can’t look into the face of the man behind it. It is as if he might see, in my eyes, where I’ve been, what I’ve done.

“Are you okay?” he asks. The white of his shirt is dazzling against his dark skin.

“Yes,” I say, paying him and walking out the door into the street. I look up at the sky, the New York City sky with its strange
light, the glow we have instead of stars. I wish I could see just one right now. In the yard in Greenwich I could always see
stars. As a girl, when I couldn’t sleep, Dad would take me out there, hold my hand, point up into the sky, and tell me which
constellation would be guarding me that night. One of the Dippers. Orion’s Belt.

I look up Houston Street and see a taxi a block away, coming fast, its bright indicator light dipping and swerving. I lift
my hand; it rattles to a stop, and I climb inside.

“Where to, miss?”

“Take me home, please. Eighty-third and York.”

I sit back against the leather. I put the bottle on the seat beside me and sit with my hands in my dress. When I get home,
I’ll wash it in the sink. I look out the window, at the city streaming by. In the bathroom sink, in warm water with a little
soap. It will dry by morning. I roll down the window and move closer to it. The air is cold, biting, more winter than spring,
but I close my eyes and turn my face full into it, into the pure, cleansing wind.

W
atch this,” Pardo says, standing and cupping his hands to his mouth as the players come off the floor for a timeout. “Hey!
Hey you, Coach! Hey you, you bastard! Room three thirteen, right?”

Even in the raucous crowd here at the Garden, Pardo’s voice stands out, and the Minnesota coach shoots a look toward its source
before squatting in the middle of his sweating players and pulling out his clipboard to diagram a play.

“That’s right, you bastard. The Penta Hotel — room three thirteen. Lock your door, champ!”

Coach Saunders turns again and looks hard into the crowd. We aren’t more than twenty feet away, thanks to the firm, but Pardo
is back in his seat now and just one in a sea of hostile faces, all of whom saw, in today’s
Post
, Saunders’s quote that he’d never cared for New York, and many of whom came early to let him know the feeling was mutual.
“What are you looking at, prick?” yells a guy just behind us. “Don’t you got a game to lose, asshole?” comes from our left.
Saunders turns back to his team, and Pardo drinks his beer, smiling. Thirty seconds later, when the scorekeeper’s horn sends
the players back onto the court, he puts his hands to his mouth again.

“Room three thirteen, you bastard! Wait’ll you see what room service has for you!”

Saunders looks back again, and then he motions an assistant off the bench and whispers to him, and the assistant walks to
the end of the bench and calls over a plainclothes security guard from the first row. Pardo looks triumphantly at Jeremy and
me.

“That’s really his room,” he says.

I look at him.

“No bull, Jake. I’m banging the desk clerk at the Penta.”

“Jesus,” says Jeremy.

“Am I in this guy’s head, or what?” says Pardo.

The security guy wades into our section, a wire running from his ear down into his dark blue suit. His eyes are on the three
of us. “Who’s yelling out room numbers?” he asks. Pardo looks at him defiantly and taps his chest with his beer cup. The guard
looks him over. “Good for you,” he says. “The prick’s too good for New York, let him take care of himself.”

We watch the guard walk back to the bench and shrug at the nonplussed assistant coach.

“Jesus,” says Jeremy again, his eyes widening in the look of wonder that Pardo is forever bringing to them.

“Go, Spree!” says Pardo, as Sprewell knocks the ball away off the coach’s ill-designed in-bounds play and streaks the other
way for a dunk, bringing us and the sellout crowd to our feet. “Nice play call, asshole!” Pardo calls out.

Pardo and Jeremy are an unlikely pair. Pardo was a classmate and fellow pledge up at Ham Tech. An athlete, like me, admitted
into the ’93 freshman class because our football team had managed a school-record five wins the year before and our trustees,
harboring visions of a winning season and grateful alumni, decided the heavens would hold if we relaxed our standards enough
to let in a few guys who scored a lot better in the weight room than they did on their SATs. Or in Pardo’s case, a guy who
proudly claimed “a year abroad” on his college application without mentioning that it would have been four years, courtesy
of the U.S. Navy, had his stint not ended suddenly and dishonorably when Pardo invented a new salute for the MPs who tracked
him down in the back of a bar after a three-day Bangkok bender.

Still, he was all Ham Tech could have asked for and then some, a bruising six-foot-two, 230-pound fullback who could run a
4.7 forty and would’ve rewritten our meager record book if he hadn’t blown out his knee on the first play from scrimmage.
Blew it out all the way — anterior, posterior, and medial collateral ligaments — and thus there he was, two weeks into another
four-year hitch, marooned in a full-leg cast at a rainy liberal-arts school in upstate New York, a hundred miles from a good
time in every direction.

Pardo grabbed at the only lifeline he could see — the fraternity system. He fell in with the good-natured guys of Theta Delta
Ki and gained sixty-five pounds his freshman year, earning a spot on the Wall of Fame at the local brewery. The next fall,
on the strength of his party credentials, he ran unopposed for social chairman, vowing to make TDX “the beer and trim center
of Ham Tech.”

Jeremy is Pardo’s polar opposite. He first came to the Hill in December of ’94, a seventeen-year-old high-school senior and
125-pound bag of nerves up for one night — his first ever away from home — to see the school he’d set his mind on applying
to early-decision. Awed by the library tour, blown away by the math center, he emerged into the main quad at 9:00, fingering
the packets of Ovaltine in his coat pocket and wondering if it could really be true that the reading room stayed open all
night. He would’ve headed straight across campus to the room of the nerd who was hosting him if he hadn’t promised his father,
a TDX from the class of 1970, that he’d stop in on the fraternity and bring back a picture of Dad’s old room.

Pardo’s current one, as it turned out.

Figuring Jeremy was a “prospective,” as we called potential brothers, Pardo told him he could have his photo, but not until
he’d had a “sip of the duck.” And then he led an uneasy Jeremy down into the basement.

The “duck” was the beer bong that about twenty of us were passing around as we plotted our strategy for House Party Weekend.
Jeremy had never seen one before, and it must have looked harmless enough. At one end, a plastic funnel with Donald Duck’s
head painted on it, and running from that a couple feet of rubber tubing. Pardo pitched it as a lesson in physics and told
him it would only take a few seconds, then handed him the rubber tubing and told him to put his thumb over the opening and
have a seat. Jeremy did so, and someone promptly handed him a
Playboy
. Apparently he’d never seen one of those before, either, and while he paged slowly through the twelve-page spread of Miss
December, his eyes widening under his glasses, Pardo poured two and a half beers into the funnel I was holding up in the air.

“Okay,” Pardo said, “put the tube in your mouth, and when I say, ‘Go,’ take your thumb off the tube and open your throat.
It’s that simple. Ready?”

Jeremy nodded.

“Go!”

Turns out the kid could open his throat. Gravity did the rest, and ten seconds later Jeremy had thirty ounces of beer in him.
He leaped from the chair, staggered in circles for a few seconds, then started to hiccup, then giggle, then got control of
himself and decided, as the head rush of all head rushes hit him, that he was in no hurry to head back across campus and hit
the hay, but rather he’d just hang with his new brothers for a while, if that was all right with us. It was, and when someone
suggested he try a beer the regular way, in a can, Jeremy giggled and took it, and when someone else gave him back his
Playboy
and asked him what he thought of Miss December, he giggled again, turned to the centerfold, and, at our prodding, read to
us her turn-ons and turnoffs. Just like that, he was one of the guys, and he was still with us an hour later, when Pardo pointed
out that it was the ten-year anniversary of the change in the drinking law, the rise of the legal age from eighteen to twenty-one.
This realization, mixed with the beer, aroused the latent political consciousness in all of us, and soon we’d decided there
was nothing for it but to round up some freshmen girls and road-trip to Albany, an hour away, where we’d drink with them on
the steps of the state capitol in protest of the heartless law that had doomed so many of our brothers to celibacy.

We couldn’t come up with the girls, but Pardo pulled his 1985 Ford Granada (TDX spelled out along the doors in black electrical
tape) around to the front of the frat, and seven of us piled in, including little Jeremy, who sat in the middle, clutching
a beer ball between his legs and singing, in full voice, the rugby song we taught him as we headed for the highway.

God made pretty white ankles

And God made big golden beers

God made pretty white ankles

To hoist up over pretty white ears

We handed Jeremy a penknife and told him to carve his initials into the ceiling, an honor usually reserved for the brothers,
and he was doing just that when Pardo hit a patch of Thruway ice and the car started to fishtail. We clipped a pickup coming
the other way, and the jolt brought the penknife, clutched in both of Jeremy’s hands, down hard into the beer ball, which
exploded like a balloon. Jeremy pissed himself as we spun out of control across the meridian, and he shat himself when we
broke through the guardrail and rocketed down the steep embankment.

In most other cars we would have been finished, but the Granada was a boat, built for balance, and she kept her feet even
as we plunged two hundred feet down the hill, narrowly missing three different trees, any one of which would have killed us.
We slowed, finally, as the hill leveled off, and then slammed to a stop, fender first, against a tree stump, the four doors
crushed shut, the grille of the Ford into the ground at a thirty-degree angle.