Read Joe College: A Novel Online

Authors: Tom Perrotta

Joe College: A Novel (7 page)

“Cindy called again. She sounded pretty upset.”
“I’ll call her tomorrow.”
He nodded and slipped past me on his way out, stopping short just as he reached the doorway. He glanced over his shoulder, forcing a quick smile.
“Hey,” he said. “That’s great about the kimchi.”
 
 
I’d only gotten
through a couple of paragraphs when my eyes strayed to the pink envelope resting under the chipped hockey puck I used as a paperweight. The envelope contained Cindy’s most recent letter, the only one I’d received from her since we’d parted on bad terms over Christmas vacation.
I put down the book and picked up the letter, though the actual document was something of a formality, since I had it pretty much memorized. Even now, a good three weeks after I’d fished it out of my mailbox at Yale Station, I still felt the urge to reread it once or twice a day.
Dear Danny,
 
I’ve been thinking a lot about Bruce lately, I’m not sure why. I think the song the River is about the saddest thing I ever heard my whole life. I love Hungry Heart though. That’s sad too if you think about it. the guy just gets in his car and ditches his wife and kid. He doesn’t think twice. It’s just who he is. Maybe the guy in the River should do that too. He seems so depressed as it is …
I always had this idea that if Bruce got to know me—to REALLY know me! then we would fall in love and be together. (I know this sounds kind of stupid, believe me!!! I never told anyone but you) Yeah, I know he’s this big rock star he can have any girl he wants. I’m not Cheryl Tiegs or anything but it’s like he says on Thunder Road, she’s not a beauty but that’s all right with him. Hey—he’s the one who said it NOT me!
This wasn’t some crazy fantasy. It was what I believed. I believe there’s one person in the world your meant for no matter what, and that he was the one for me (You know that song For You? I LOVE that song) I’ve felt this way for a long time, even before Born to Run. But then this afternoon I realized it was all just a big stupid joke. Joke on me. Even if he met me he’d just think so what? What’s so special about her?
I cried a little and then I was okay.
 
Sincerely,
Cynthia
On New Year’s Eve, Cindy and I had slept together for the first and only time. Her mother was out of town visiting relatives, and she invited me over for a quiet evening of champagne and Dick Clark. Around eleven thirty, we started making out on the couch. It was her idea to relocate to the bedroom, and the suggestion caught me totally off guard. By that point I’d pretty much given up on the prospect of ever actually having sex with her, a mental adjustment that had made our time together a lot less stressful for both of us. I hadn’t even packed a lambskin.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I have something else.”
Already naked, she broke open a package she’d produced from one of her dresser drawers and turned away from me, squatting in a froglike stance. I heard an odd noise, something like the sound of shaving cream foaming out of the can. When it stopped, she turned around and approached the bed, wiping her hands across her thighs.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Birth control.”
I wanted to ask her what kind, but she’d already climbed into bed with me. There was no sign of the nervousness she’d exhibited at my house; she was in charge of the situation, utterly at peace with her decision. She looked up at me, and her face was pure invitation.
“Happy New Year,” she said, pulling me on top of her.
Her eyes widened as I slipped inside her, and she gasped, as if something profound and transforming had just happened, as though this were more pleasure than she deserved or could bear. I was startled by the urgency with which she met me, the frantic rhythm of our coupling. The noises that came out of her were heartfelt and unpredictable. Sitting at my desk two months later, I could still feel the tension of her legs around my waist as I came, the groan of desolation she gave when we slipped apart.
What I wanted to forget—for her sake as well as mine—was the feeling of wild emptiness that had come upon me the moment I entered her, the awful physical knowledge that she’d been right all along: this really was all I’d wanted, and now that I had it, I knew I’d never want it again. Her passion was embarrassing, not because of what it said about her, but because of what it revealed about me, the person who’d been willing to humor her and string her along for half a year just so I could fuck her and not feel a thing, except maybe that I deserved it for putting up with all those visits to the car lots, all the annoying chitchat, all those letters on pink stationery.
She must have realized it too, because as soon as we were finished she burst into tears and told me to please get out of her house. Five weeks later she mailed me the letter I was now slipping back into its envelope. Why such a shameful memory gave me an erection every time I replayed it, I had no idea, but that was how it always happened. I already had my pants open and the zipper down when my eyes strayed to the face-down copy of
Middlemarch
, the words “George Eliot” thundering off the cover like an accusation. Three hundred ninety-two pages to go.
Fuck
it,
I thought.
I’ll just have to skim the
rest
over breakfast.
The Return of the Repressed
Between 4:30 and
4:59 the long table by the salad bar was colonized by dining-hall workers—students and full-timers alike—wolfing down last-minute dinners before the early birds started banging on the doors at 5:00 on the dot. I breezed in at twenty of, grabbed a tray and some silverware off the serving cart, and wandered over to the deserted beverage station. One of the perks of dining hall employment was that you didn’t get stuck in traffic so often at the height of the dinner rush, trying to appear unruffled as you waited for some weirdo to finish filling a dozen glasses with a precisely calibrated mixture of pink and orange bug juice, or for a chin-scratching professor emeritus of comparative religion to finally take the plunge and choose between the day-old tuna lasagna and tonight’s meat loaf with brown gravy.
I had just topped off my third glass of Coke when Matt emerged from the kitchen, already punched in and hard at work. A gigantic sheet cake balanced in his arms, he whistled the theme song from
The Andy Griffith Show,
with a chipper virtuosity he had successfully concealed from the world—or at least from me—until that very minute. He stopped as soon as he spotted me, but it was too late. We both knew he’d been caught in a moment of extreme uncoolness.
“Damn,” I said. “That’s some mighty fancy whistling. Did you pick that up in Mayberry?”
Matt set the cake down on the stainless-steel countertop and tried to look unruffled.
“And how are you today, Brutus?”
“Seriously,” I said, “where does a fellow like you learn to whistle like that?”
He stalled for time, bending to retrieve a trowel-like serving implement from the shelf below the counter.
“Prison,” he finally replied, straightening up and gazing at some point above my head with a vaguely troubled expression. “Gotta do something to fill those long hours in the hole.”
“I’m sure the other inmates found it very attractive.”
“Some of us juggled,” he said with a shrug, “and some of us whistled. Some of us fashioned deadly weapons out of small pieces of rusty metal.” He shook his head wistfully. “I miss those guys.”
He turned his attention to the cake, slashing it up and down with a series of what I assumed were meant to be perpendicular lines. I grabbed my plate and looped around to the other side of the steam table, hesitating between one uninspiring entree and another.
“Go with the bourguignon,” he advised.
“You think?”
“No contest. The manicotti’s a little gamey.”
I plopped a pasty tangle of egg noodles onto my plate, then smothered them with a ladle’s worth of beef and gravy. After a moment’s reflection, I added half a spoonful of succotash to the mix, plus a single tube of the questionable manicotti. I was always hungry, and appreciated the mix-and-match, all-you-can-eat spirit of the dining hall.
Matt lifted a small slab of cake out of the grid and deposited it on a dessert plate. Pivoting gracefully, he slid the plate onto the second shelf of the display rack, which was already half-filled with parfait glasses containing butterscotch and chocolate pudding. The top shelf was reserved for desserts provided by the Green Jell-O Fund, a substantial endowment dedicated to the purchase, in perpetuity, of this once-popular foodstuff. As usual, many servings of Green Jell-O had gone uneaten for several days running, and had been poignantly adorned with a last-chance dollop of whipped cream.
“Sorry about the other night,” I told him. “Polly called me out of the blue.”
“I’m over it.”
“You sure?”
He gave me a look.
“I called the crisis hot line. They talked me down from the ledge.”
Upon further reflection, I speared another unit of manicotti. My plate was starting to get a little crowded.
“I warned you about that crap,” Matt reminded me.
“But I like it gamey,” I insisted.
Albert, the dining-hall manager, chose that very moment to burst into the serving area. Ninety percent of the time, Albert was a mellow, easygoing guy who liked to kid around with his employees. The rest of the time he looked like a man being chased by a team of trained assassins.
“Gamey?” He fixed me with a look of wild panic. “What’s gamey?”
“The manicotti,” said Matt. “Did you fill it with possum or squirrel?”
Albert glanced quickly over his shoulder.
“Don’t even joke like that. That’s how rumors get started.”
“You’re right,” said Matt. “Our customers can be picky about their roadkill.”
Albert let out a deep breath and reached up to massage his tired eyes. He couldn’t have been much older than thirty, but the strain of running the dining hall was starting to take a toll on him. Sometimes he reminded me of my father.
“You guys seen Lorelei?” he asked.
Matt and I shook our heads, but that didn’t stop him from peering over the top of the steam table, as if he expected to see Lorelei crouched on the floor by the short-order grill, dreamily filing her nails.
“Excuse me,” he said, his focus shifting suddenly to Matt. “What the hell is that?”
“What the hell is what?” Matt inquired.
“That thing you just cut. Give it here.”
Matt handed the dessert plate to me, and I passed it along to Albert, who squinted for a few seconds at the peculiar wedge of cake resting on top of it.
“I’m curious,” he said. “What would you call this?”
“Angel food?” Matt guessed.
“No, shapewise.” Albert tilted the plate so we could get a better look. The cake stuck there as if it had been glued on. “Is there a name for this shape?”
“It’s almost like a rhombus,” I ventured. “Except for that curved part.”
“Why does everything have to have a label?” Matt asked. “Why do you think that’s so important to you?”
Albert looked like he was about to say something nasty, but then thought better of it. He banged the plate down on top of the steam table and turned to Matt with a plaintive expression.
“Just cut it straight, okay? Is that too much to ask?”
 
 
Nick didn’t normally
work Thursday nights, so I was surprised to see him sitting at the worker’s table with Kristin, Sarah, Djembe, and Brad Foxworthy, the weekend dishwasher, who was subbing again for Dallas Little. Dallas weighed three hundred pounds and was supposedly having trouble with his feet, though Milton, the usual Thursday-night chef, viewed this complaint with a certain amount of skepticism. “Oh, yes,” he’d mutter, whenever the subject of Dallas’s podiatric ailments surfaced, “the man’s feet hurt. You bet your feet hurt, you spend all day on the corner with a can of malt liquor in your hand. Bet your head hurt too.”
I took the first available seat, next to Brad and across from Nick, who acknowledged my arrival with his customary curt nod. His face was utterly blank, a practiced mask of boredom and reserve. With Kristin just a few seats away, I knew better than to refer, even ellipticallv, to our strange encounter outside her window on Tuesday night.
“Milton sick?” I asked.
Nick shook his head. “Bowling. His team switched to a Thursday-night league.”
“I didn’t know Milton was a bowler.”
Nick took a moment to dab at his perspiration mustache with a paper napkin. When he took the napkin away, the mustache was
still there, but his expression, without changing much at all, suddenly seemed unfriendly.
“What’s it to you what Milton does in his spare time? You keepin’ tabs on the man?”
“Come on.” I chuckled defensively. “I was just making small talk.”
“Hey, Brad,” Nick said, “Better watch yourself around this one. He’s got us under surveillance.”
Brad was usually too preoccupied by his meal to bother with conversation. He hunkered down over his plate with the single-minded concentration of a man who didn’t always get enough to eat, and had to stock up when the opportunity presented itself. That night, though, he made an exception.
“You a Bonesman?” he asked, his eyes widening with curiosity behind his thick glasses, one earpiece of which was held in place by a cocoonlike mass of electrical tape. Brad had dropped out of Yale Law School a couple of years earlier, and had since developed some sort of paranoid obsession with Skull and Bones, the notorious secret society whose tomblike headquarters was located right next to our dining hall.
“I can’t believe this.” My face flashed hot with guilt, as though Nick’s accusation were somehow true. “All I said was that I didn’t know Milton was a bowler.”
“And a damn good one,” Nick added. “One-eighty-seven average.”
“That is good,” I said, my indignation already fading into uncertainty. Maybe I’d misread Nick’s expression; maybe he’d just been kidding around. “I’m lucky if I break one-fifty.”
“The CIA runs this whole place,” Brad continued cheerfully. “‘Light and Truth,’ my ass. ‘Darkness and Skulduggery’ is more like it.”
A moment of silence overtook the table. The only one who didn’t notice it was Kristin, who was caught up in an urgent-sounding conversation with Djembe.
“Suck my cock!” she commanded, in a guttural impersonation of a male speaker. “Kneel down and lick it, you prep school bitch!”
Even before she finished, Kristin realized that her audience had expanded beyond Djembe. Blushing sweetly, she reached up to adjust the paper cap she kept pinned to her hair at a charmingly impossible angle.
“My obscene caller,” she explained. “I changed my number twice but he still keeps tracking me down.”
“Gross,” said Sarah. “My roommate gets those all the time.”
“Outrageous,” Djembe declared in his elegant Nigerian accent. “This should not be tolerated.”
Nick gave a soft, derisive chuckle, just loud enough for Brad and me to hear. Djembe had long gotten on Nick’s nerves, originally for his regal bearing and exotic good looks, but more recently for his close and sexually charged friendship with Kristin.
“Hey, Jimbo,” Nick called out. “You know why they don’t have any obscene phone callers in Africa?”
Djembe turned wearily toward our end of the table. He had long ago given up correcting Nick’s deliberate mispronunciation of his name.
“Please explain,” he said.
“I’ll tell you why.” A slow grin of triumph spread across Nick’s face. “’Cause they don’t have any fucking phones.”
For some reason, he addressed this punch line to me instead of Djembe. Even after the joke met with a deafening lack of response from the rest of the table, he kept his eyes glued to mine, as if daring me to laugh, to join him in an alliance against the humorless stiffs and African princes of the world. The best I could manage for him was a tight little smile, a cowardly smirk of approval.
 
 
The dish line
had its own eccentric rhythm, out of synch with the rest of the operation. It was quiet when the dining hall was packed and noisy, and increasingly hectic as the place began clearing out. You got to lounge when your co-workers were hustling,
and then had to pick up the pace just as everyone else began slacking off.
At its best, the dirty end of the line was simply unsavory. At its worst, the work was filthy and relentless. Tray after tray—some of them stacked into precarious double- and triple-deckers—came streaming down the conveyor belt at a pace that seemed reasonable enough right up to the moment when it suddenly became demonic. In the space of a couple seconds, you had to grab the silverware, rinse the plates, and empty the glasses, sorting each item into separate racks. When a rack got full, you had to shove it into the dishwasher, which resembled an automatic car wash, and then grab a fresh rack from underneath the conveyor belt, all without missing a beat on the next tray. It was just possible to accomplish these tasks without shutting down the line if the diners did as they were told before bussing their trays—i.e., dispose of their paper trash and uneaten food, and place their silverware on the right—but not everyone found it in their hearts to cooperate. You would get coffee cups half-filled with peanut butter, a mound of mashed potatoes studded with cigarette butts, someone’s eyeglasses tucked inside a taco shell. You’d grab for a plate, only to discover that it had been painstakingly coated with mayonnaise, or find yourself staring in confused revulsion at a bowl full of melted chocolate ice cream and green peas. All over the dining hall, it seemed, people were ripping their napkins into confetti, and dropping the confetti piece by piece into nearly empty glasses of water, just to give us the pleasure of reaching in with our bare hands and scooping out clots of saturated paper. By the end of the shift, you were soaking wet and smelled exactly like the webbed rubber floor mat you had to hose down before calling it quits—ripe and meaty and hazardous to the public health.
 
 
Eddie Zimmer was
late that night, but I didn’t mind covering for him. Eddie and I had handled the Thursday-night dish line all year, and had developed a model working relationship. Outside of the
dining hall we barely exchanged two words, but inside we looked out for one another. When things got hairy on my end, he was more than happy to pitch in. I didn’t have to ask, either; he’d just appear at my side and start grabbing for dirty dishes. If one of his Ultimate Frisbee games ran a little late, I’d discreetly punch him in at five and take care of both ends until he made his entrance. It was no big deal—for the first half hour of the shift, the dish line was basically a one-person job anyway.

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