“You’ll do fine,” Liz assured me.
We were standing just beyond the gate. “Do I look worried?” Though, of course, I was.
“All you have to do is act like you belong. That’s really the whole point. Of most things, actually.”
Away from Jonas, she had become somebody slightly different: more philosophical, even a little world-weary. I sensed that this was closer to the truth of her.
“I forgot to mention,” Liz said, “I’ve got somebody I’d like you to meet. She’ll be at the party.”
I wasn’t sure what I thought of this.
“We’re cousins,” she went on. “Well, second cousins. She goes to B.U.”
The offer was disorienting. I had to remind myself that what had transpired upstairs had been an innocent flirtation, nothing more—that she was somebody else’s girlfriend.
“Okay.”
“Try not to sound too excited.”
“What makes you think we’d hit it off?”
The remark came off too blunt, even a little resentful. But if she took offense, she didn’t show it. “Just don’t let her drink too much.”
“Is that a problem?”
She shrugged. “Steph can be a bit of a party girl, if you know what I mean. That’s her name, Stephanie.”
Jonas caught up with us, all grins and apologies. We made our way to the party, which was just three blocks away. Previously, he had pointed out the Spee Club building to me, a brick townhouse with a walled side garden I had passed a thousand times. A college party is usually a loud affair, belching out a wide perimeter of sound, but not this one. There was no evidence that anything was going on inside, and for a second I thought Jonas might have gotten the night wrong. He stepped up to the door and withdrew a single key on a fob from the pocket of his tux. I had seen this key before, lying on his bureau, but had not connected it to anything until now. The fob was in the form of a bear’s head, the symbol of the Spee.
We followed him inside. We were in an empty foyer, the floor painted in alternating black and white squares, like a chessboard. I did not feel as if I were going to a party—parachuting at night into an alien country was more like it. The spaces I could see were dark and masculine and, for a building inhabited by college students, remarkably neat. A clack of ivory: nearby, someone was playing pool. On a pedestal in the corner stood a large stuffed bear—not a teddy bear, an actual bear. It was rearing up on its hind legs, clawed hands reaching forward as it were going to maul some invisible attacker. (That, or play the piano.) From overhead came a swell of liquor-loosened voices.
“Come on,” Jonas said.
He led us back to a flight of stairs. Seen from the street, the building had appeared deceptively modest in its dimensions, but not inside. We ascended toward the noise and heat of the crowd, which had spilled from two large rooms onto the landing.
“Jo-man!”
As we made our entry, Jonas’s neck was clamped in the elbow of a large, red-haired man in a white dinner jacket. He had the florid complexion and thickened waist of an athlete gone to seed.
“Jo-man, Jo-Jo, the big Jo-ster.” Unaccountably, he gave Jonas a big smooch on the cheek. “And Liz, may I say you are looking
especially
tasty tonight.”
She rolled her eyes. “So noted.”
“Does she love me? I’m asking, does this girl just love me?” With his arm still draped around Jonas, he looked at me with an expression of startled concern: “Sweet Jesus, Jonas, tell me this isn’t the guy.”
“Tim, meet Alcott Spence. He’s our president.”
“And roaring drunk, too. So tell me, Tim, you’re not gay, are you? Because, no offense, you look a little gay in that tie.”
I was caught totally off guard. “Um—”
“Kidding!” He roared with laughter. We were being pressed on all sides now, as more partygoers ascended the stairs behind us. “Seriously, I’m just messing with you. Half the guys in here are
huge
fags. I myself am what you call a sexual omnivore. Isn’t that right, Jonas?”
He grinned, playing along. “It’s true.”
“Jonas here is one of my most special friends.
Very
special. So you just go ahead and be as gay as you feel you need to be.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I’m not gay.”
“Which is also totally fine! That’s what I’m saying! Listen to this guy. We’re not the Porcellian, you know. Seriously, those guys can
not
stop fucking each other.”
How much did I want a drink at that moment? Very, very much.
“Well, I’ve enjoyed our little chat,” Alcott merrily continued, “but I must be off. Hot date in the sauna with a certain sophomore from the University of Loose Morals and some
cocaina más excelente
. You kids run along and have fun.”
He faded into the throng. I turned to Jonas. “Is everybody here like that?”
“Actually, no. A lot of them can come on pretty strong.”
I looked at Liz. “Don’t you dare leave me.”
She laughed wryly. “Are you kidding?”
We fought our way to the bar. No lukewarm keg beer here: behind a long table, a white-shirted bartender was frantically mixing drinks and passing out bottles of Heineken. As he shoveled ice into my vodka tonic—I’d learned my freshman year to stick to clear liquor when I could—I had the urge to send him some clandestine message of Marxist-inspired fellowship. “I’m actually from Ohio,” I might have told him. “I shelve books at the library. I don’t belong here any more than you do.” (“P.S. Stand ready! The Glorious Workers’ Revolution commences at the stroke of midnight!”)
Yet as he placed the drink in my hand, a new feeling came upon me. Perhaps it was the way he did it—automatically, like a high-speed robot, his attention already focused to the next partygoer in line—but the thought occurred to me that I’d done it. I’d passed. I had successfully snuck into the other world, the hidden world. This was where I had been headed, all along. I gave myself a moment to soak in the sensation. Joining the Spee: what I had believed utterly impossible just moments before suddenly seemed like a fait accompli, a thing of destiny. I would take my place among its membership, because Jonas Lear would pave the way. How else to explain the extraordinary coincidence of our second meeting? Fate had put him in my path for a reason, and here it was, in the rich atmosphere of privilege that radiated from everywhere around me. It was like some new form of oxygen, one I’d been waiting all my life to breathe, and it made me feel weirdly alive.
So caught up was I in this new line of thought that I failed to notice Liz standing right in front of me. With her was a new person, a girl.
“Tim!” she yelled over the music that had erupted in the room behind us. “This is Steph!”
“Pleased to meet you!”
“Likewise!” She was short, hazel-eyed, with a spray of freckles and glossy brown hair. Unremarkable compared to Liz, but pretty in her own way—
cute
would be the word—and smiling at me in a manner that told me Liz had laid the groundwork. She was holding a nearly empty glass of something clear. Mine was empty, too. Was it my first or my second?
“Liz says you go to B.U.!”
“Yeah!” Because the music was so loud, we were standing very close. She smelled like roses and gin.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s okay! You’re a biochem major, right?”
I nodded. The most banal conversation in history, but it had to be done. “What about you?”
“Poli-sci! Hey, do you want to dance?”
I was an awful dancer, but who wasn’t? We made our way to the light-confettied ballroom and began our awkward attempt to perform this intimate act, pretending we hadn’t met each other thirty seconds ago. The dance floor was already full, the music having been strategically withheld until everybody was adequately liquored; I glanced around for Liz but didn’t find her. I supposed she was too cool to make a fool of herself in this way and hoped she didn’t see me. Stephanie, not to my surprise, was an enthusiastic dancer; what I hadn’t banked on was that she’d be so good at it. Whereas my moves were an ungainly mimicry of actual dancing, wholly unrelated to this song or any other, hers possessed a lithe expressiveness that verged on actual grace. She spun, twirled, gyrated. She did things with her hips that elsewise might have looked indecent but under the circumstances seemed ordained by a different, less constricted morality. She also managed to keep her attention on me the whole time, wearing a warmly seductive smile, her eyes focused like lasers. What had Liz called her? A “party girl”? I was beginning to see the advantages.
We broke after the third song for yet another drink, slung them back like sailors on leave, and returned to the floor. I’d eaten no dinner, and the booze was doing its work. The evening dissolved into a haze. At some point I found myself talking to Jonas, who was introducing me to other members of the club, and then playing pool with Alcott, who was not such a bad fellow after all. Everything I did and said seemed charmed. More time passed, and then Stephanie, whom I’d briefly lost track of, was pulling me by the hand back toward the music, which pumped without ceasing like the night’s own heartbeat. I had no idea what time it was and didn’t care. More fast dancing, the song downshifted, and she wrapped her arms around my neck. We’d barely spoken, but now this warm, good-smelling girl was in my arms, her body pressed against mine, the tips of her fingers stroking the hairs at the back of my neck. Never had I received such an undeserved present. What was happening to my anatomy was nothing she could have missed; nor did I want her to. When the song ended, she placed her lips against my ear, her breath a sweet exhalation that made me shudder.
“I have coke.”
I found myself, then, sitting beside her on a deep leather couch in a room that looked like something in a hunting lodge. From her purse she produced a small packet made of notebook paper, sealed by complex folding. She used my Harvard ID to arrange the coke in two fat lines on the coffee table and rolled a dollar bill into a tube. Cocaine was an aspect of college life that I had not experienced but did not see the harm of. She bent to the table, sucked the powder deep into her sinuses with a delicate, girlish snort, and passed me the bill so that I might do the same.
It wasn’t bad at all. It was, in fact, very good. Within seconds of the powder’s purchase, I experienced a Roman-candle rush of well-being that seemed not a departure from reality but a deeper entry into truth. The world was a fine place full of wonderful people, an enchanted existence worthy of the utmost enthusiasm. I looked at Stephanie, who was quite beautiful now that I had eyes to see, and sought the words to explain this revelation on a night of many.
“You’re a really good dancer,” I said.
She leaned forward and took my mouth with hers. It was not a schoolgirl’s kiss; it was a kiss that said there were no rules if I didn’t want there to be. It did not take long before our bodies were a confusion of tongues and hands and skin. Things were being slid aside, unlatched, unzipped. I felt like I had plummeted into a vortex of pure sensuality. It was different than it had been with Carmen. It had no edges, no roughness. It felt like being melted. Stephanie was astride my lap and drawing her panties aside and down she went, enveloping me; she began to move in a wondrous, aquatic fashion, like an anemone undulating on the tides, rocking and rising and plunging, each variation accompanied by the creak of leather upholstery. Mere hours since I’d been pacing my room, consigned to a night of humiliated loneliness, and here I was, fucking a girl in a cocktail dress.
“Whoa. Sorry, bud.”
It was Jonas. Stephanie was off me like a shot. A moment of frantic activity as the pants were yanked upward, the dress downward, various articles of underclothing rammed into adjustment. Standing in the doorway, my roommate was in a state of barely contained hilarity.
“Jesus,” I said. I was pulling up my fly, or trying to. My shirttail was stuck in the zipper. More comedy. “You could have knocked.”
“And you could have locked the door.”
“Jonas, did you find her?” Liz appeared behind him. As she stepped into the room, her eyes widened. “Oh,” she said.
“They were getting better acquainted,” Jonas offered, laughing.
Stephanie was smoothing down her hair; her lips were swollen, her face flushed with blood. I had no doubt mine was the same.
“I can see that,” Liz said. Her mouth was set in a prim line; she didn’t look at me. “Steph, your friends are waiting for you outside. Unless you want me to tell them something else.”
This was clearly impossible; the balloon of passion had been punctured. “No, I guess I should go.” She fetched her shoes from the floor and turned to me. I was, ridiculously, still sitting on the sofa. “Well, thanks,” she said. “It was really nice to meet you.”
Should we kiss? Shake hands? What was I supposed to say? “You’re welcome” didn’t seem like it would cut it. In the end, the gap between us was too wide; we didn’t even touch.
“You, too,” I said.
She followed Liz from the room. I felt miserable—not only because of my painfully blockaded loins, but also because of Liz’s unmistakable disappointment in me. I had revealed myself to be just like every other guy: a pure opportunist. It wasn’t until that moment that I fully realized how important her opinion of me had become.
“Where is everybody?” I asked Jonas. The building was remarkably quiet.
“It’s four o’clock in the morning. Everybody’s gone. Except for Alcott. He’s passed out in the pool room.”
I looked at my watch. So it was. Whether from the adrenaline or the coke counteracting the booze, my thoughts had cleared. Cringe-inducing snippets of the night came back to me: knocking a drink onto a member’s date, attempting a Cossack dance to the B-52’s “Love Shack,” laughing too loudly at a joke that was actually somebody’s sad story about his disabled brother. What had I been thinking, getting so drunk?
“Are you okay? You want us to wait?”
I’d never wanted anything less in my life. I was already calculating which park bench I could sleep on. Did people do that anymore? “You guys go ahead. I’ll be along.”
“Don’t worry about Liz, if that’s what you’re thinking. This was totally her idea.”