She nodded approvingly. “Well, that’s nicely said. I’d say there’s a bit of the poet in you after all. I’m beginning to like you, Tim from Ohio.” She polished off her drink and set it aside. “As for me, I’m really here to form a philosophy of life. An expensive way to do it, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I’ve decided to go with it.”
This luxurious ambition—four years of college at twenty-three grand a pop to amass a personality—struck me as another alien aspect of her that I was hoping to learn more about. I say alien, but what I mean is angelic. By this point, I was utterly convinced that she was a creature of the spheres.
“You don’t approve?”
Something in my face must have said so. I felt my cheeks grow warm. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t say anything. Piece of advice. ‘That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man, if with his tongue he cannot win a woman.’ ”
“I’m sorry?”
“Shakespeare,
Two Gentlemen of Verona.
In plain English, when a woman asks you a question, you better answer.”
“If you want to get her into bed,” Lear added. He looked at me. “You’ll have to excuse her. She’s like the Shakespeare channel. I don’t understand half the things she says.”
I knew almost nothing about Shakespeare. My experience of the bard was limited, like many people’s, to a dutiful slog through
Julius Caesar
(violent, occasionally exciting) and
Romeo and Juliet
(which, until that moment, I’d found patently ridiculous).
“I just meant I’ve never met anybody who thinks that way.”
She laughed. “Well, if you want to hang around with me, bub, better bone up. And with that,” she said, rising from the bed, “and speaking of which, I must be off.”
“But you’re not
half
as drunk as we are,” Lear protested. “I was hoping to have my way with you.”
“Weren’t you just.” At the doorway, she looked back at me. “I forgot to ask. Which are you?”
One more question I had no answer for. “Come again?”
“Fly? Owl? A.D.? Tell me you’re not Porcellian.”
Lear answered in my stead: “Actually, our boy here, though technically a junior, has yet to experience this aspect of Harvard life. It’s a complicated story I’m much too drunk to explain.”
“So, you’re not in a club?” she said to me.
“There are clubs?”
“
Final
clubs. Somebody pinch me. You really don’t know what they are?”
I had heard the term, but that was all. “Are they some kind of fraternity?”
“Um, not exactly,” Lear said.
“What they are,” Liz explained, “are anachronistic dinosaurs, elitist to the core. Which also happen to throw the best parties. Jonas is in the Spee Club. Like his daddy and his daddy’s daddy and all the Lear daddies since fish grew legs. He’s also the whattayacallit. Jonas, what
do
you call it?”
“The punchmaster.”
She rolled her eyes. “And what a title that is. Basically, it means he’s in charge of who gets in. Honeybunch, do something.”
“I only just met the guy. Maybe he’s not interested.”
“Sure I am,” I said, though I wasn’t sure at all. What was I letting myself in for? And what did something like that cost? But if it meant spending more time in Liz’s company, I would have walked through fire. “Absolutely. I’d definitely be interested in something like that.”
“Good.” She smiled victoriously. “Saturday night. Black tie. See, Jonas? It’s settled.”
I had no doubt that it was.
The first problem: I didn’t own a tuxedo.
I had worn one once in my life, a powder-blue rental with velvet navy accents, paired with a ruffled shirt that only a pirate could have loved and a clip-on bow tie fat as a fist. Perfect for the island-themed senior prom at Mercy Regional High School (“A Night in Paradise!”) but not the rarefied chambers of the Spee Club.
I intended to rent one, but Jonas convinced me otherwise. “Your tuxedo life,” he explained, “has only just begun. What you need, my friend, is a
battle tux.
” The shop he took me to was called Keezer’s, which specialized in recycled formal wear cheap enough to vomit on without compunction. A vast room, unfancy as a bus station, with moth-eaten animal heads on the walls and air so choked with naphthalene it made my sinuses sting: from its voluminous racks I selected a plain black tux, a pleated shirt with yellow stains under the arms, a box of cheap studs and cuff links, and patent leather dress shoes that hurt only when I walked or stood. In the days leading up to the party, Jonas had adopted a persona that was somewhere between a wise young uncle and a guide dog for the blind. The selection of the tux was mine, but he insisted on choosing my tie and cummerbund, examining dozens before settling on pink silk with a pattern of tiny green diamonds.
“Pink?” Needless to say, it wasn’t anything that would have flown in Mercy, Ohio. A powder-blue tux, yes. A pink tie, no. “Are you sure about this?”
“Trust me,” he said. “It’s the kind of thing we do.”
The party, as I understood it, would be a sort of elaborate first date. Members would have the chance to look over fresh prospects, called “punchees.” I was worried that I didn’t have anyone to bring, but Jonas assured me that I was better off alone. That way, he explained, I would have the opportunity to impress the flotilla of unescorted women imported for the occasion from other colleges.
“Get two of them into bed, and you’re definitely in.”
I laughed at the absurdity. “Why only two?”
“I mean at the same time,” he said.
I had not seen Liz since my first day in Winthrop House. This did not seem strange to me, as she lived in Mather, far down the river, and moved in an artsier crowd. I had, however, through discreet, well-spaced questioning, managed to learn more about her connection to Jonas. They were not, in fact, a strictly Harvard couple but had known each other since childhood. Their fathers had been prep school roommates, and the two families had vacationed together for years. This made sense to me; in hindsight, their verbal jousting had sounded as much like an exchange between two precocious siblings as a romantic twosome’s. Jonas claimed that for many years, they actually couldn’t stand each other; it wasn’t until they were fifteen, and forced to endure two foggy weeks with their parents on a remote island off the coast of Maine, that their mutual antipathy had boiled over into what it really was. They’d kept this from their families—even Jonas confessed that there was something vaguely incestuous about the whole thing—confining their passions to secret, summertime trysts in barns and boathouses while their parents got drunk on the patio, not really thinking of themselves as boyfriend-girlfriend until they’d both wound up at Harvard and discovered that they actually liked each other after all.
This account also explained, at least partly, the oddness of their relationship. What else but shared history could bond two people who possessed such fundamentally incompatible temperaments, such divergent visions of life? The more I grew to know them both, the more I came to understand how truly different they were. That they had traveled in the same social circles as children, attended virtually interchangeable country day and boarding schools, and been able to navigate the New York subway system, the Paris Métro, and the London tube by the time they were twelve said nothing about who they really were as people. It is possible for the same circumstances that draw two souls together to keep them forever at arm’s length. Herein lies the truth of love, and the essence of all tragedy. I was not yet wise enough to understand this, nor would I be, until many years had passed. Yet I believe that from the start I sensed this, and that it was the source of my affinity, the force that pulled me to her.
The day of the party arrived. The daylight hours were all desultory preamble; I got nothing done. Was I nervous? How does the bull feel when he is marched into the ring and notices the cheering crowds and the man with his cape and sword? Jonas had gone off for the day—I didn’t know where—and as the clock neared eight, the appointed hour, he had yet to show himself. The midwesterner in me was forever disturbed by the regional differences in what was and was not considered late, and by nine-thirty, when I decided to dress (I had entertained the girlish fantasy that Lear and I would do this together), my anxiety was such that it verged on anger. It seemed likely that his promise had been forgotten and I would spend the evening like a jilted groom, watching TV in a tuxedo.
The other difficulty lay in the fact that I did not know how to tie a bow tie. Probably I couldn’t have accomplished this in any event; my hands were actually shaking. Managing the studs and cuff links felt like trying to thread a needle with a hammer. It took me ten full minutes of cursing like a longshoreman to lodge them in their proper holes, and by the time I was done, my face was damp with sweat. I mopped it away with a bad-smelling towel and examined myself in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, hoping for some encouragement. I was an unremarkable-looking sort of boy, neither one thing nor the other; although naturally slender, and without significant blemishes, I had always felt my nose was too big for my face, my arms too long for my body, my hair too bulky for the head it sat atop. Yet the face and figure I beheld in the mirror did not look so unpromising to me. The sleek black suit and shiny shoes and starch-hardened shirt—even, against my expectations, the pink cummerbund—did not appear unnatural on me. Instantly I regretted the powder-blue getup I’d worn to prom; who knew that something as simple as a black suit could gentrify one’s appearance so thoroughly? For the first time, I dared to think that I, this plain boy from the provinces, might pass through the doors of the Spee Club without an alarm going off.
The door sailed open; Jonas charged into the outer room. “Fuck, what time is it?” He marched straight past me to the bathroom and turned on the shower. I followed him to the door.
“Where have you been?” I said, realizing too late how peevish this sounded. “No big deal, but it’s almost ten.”
“I had a lab due.” He was peeling off his shirt. “This thing doesn’t really get going until eleven. Didn’t I tell you?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, sorry.”
“How do you tie a bow tie?”
He had stripped to his boxers. “Hell if I know. Mine’s a clip-on.”
I retreated to the outer room. Jonas called out over the water, “Has Liz been here?”
“Nobody’s been here.”
“She was supposed to meet us.”
My anxiety had now focused entirely on the matter of my tie. I returned to the mirror and withdrew it from my pocket. The gist, I’d heard, was to tie it like a pair of shoes. How much harder could it be? I’d been tying my own shoes since I was two.
The answer was: a lot harder. Nothing I did made the ends come out even close to the same length. It was as if the silk were possessed.
“Now, don’t you look spiffy.”
Liz had come in through the open door. Or, rather, a woman who
resembled
Liz; in her place stood a creature of pure understated glamour. She was wearing a slender black cocktail dress scooped low at the neck and high-heeled shoes of shiny red leather; she had added something to her hair, making it full and rich, and exchanged her glasses for contacts. A long string of pearls, no doubt real, dangled deep into her décolletage.
“Wow,” I said.
“And
that,
” she said tossing her clutch on the sofa, “is the very syllable that every woman longs to hear.” A cloud of complex scent had followed her into the room. “Having some troubles with your neckwear, I see?”
I held out the villainous article. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“Let’s have a look.” She stepped toward me and took it from my hand. “Ah,” she said, examining it, “here’s the problem.”
“What?”
“It’s a bow tie!” She laughed. “As it so happens, you’ve come to the right person. I do this for my father all the time. Hold still.”
She draped the tie around my neck and positioned it under the collar. In her heels, she was nearly as tall as I was; our faces were inches apart. With her eyes intently focused on the base of my throat, she engaged in her mysterious business. I had never been so close to a woman I was not about to kiss. My gaze instinctively went to her lips, which looked soft and warm, then downward, following the path of the pearls. The effect was like a low-voltage current passing through each cell of my body.
“Eyes up here, buster.”
I knew I was blushing. I looked away. “Sorry.”
“You’re a man, what can you do? You’re like pull toys. It must be awful.” A final adjustment; then she stepped back. That heat in her cheeks: was she blushing, too? “There you go. Have a look.”
She retrieved a compact from her clutch and gave it to me. It was made of a material that was smooth to the touch, like polished bone; it felt warm in my hand, as if it were radiating a pure, womanly energy. I opened it, revealing its bay of flesh-toned powder and small round mirror, in which my face looked back at me, floating above the flawlessly knotted pink bow tie.
“Perfect,” I said.
The shower shut off with a groan, widening my awareness. I had forgotten all about my roommate.
“Jonas,” Liz called, “we’re late!”
He bounded into the room, clutching a towel around his waist. I had the feeling of being caught doing something I shouldn’t have.
“So, are you two going to stand around and watch me dress? Unless—” Looking at Liz, he gave his towel a suggestive jostle, like an exotic dancer teasing an audience.
“Ça te donne du plaisir, mademoiselle?”
“Just hurry it up. We’re late.”
“But I asked in French!”
“You’ll want to work on your accent. We’ll meet you outside, thank you very much.” She gripped me by the arm, steering me toward the door. “Come on, Tim.”
We took the stairs to the courtyard. A college campus on a Saturday night follows principles of its own: it awakens just as the rest of the world is readying for slumber. Music came from everywhere, pouring out of the windows; laughing figures moved through the darkness; voices lit the night from all directions. As we stepped through the breezeway, a girl hurried past, holding the hem of her dress with one hand, a bottle of champagne in the other.