T
he night Shelly had come across the accident, she had been on her way home from the gym. It was the Ides of March. All day, a watery sun had been trying to creep out from behind the same sloppy, gray, and borderless cloud until finally, giving up, it just sank into the horizon. Of course, then it cleared, and hard little stars blinked on one by one as the sky grew darker, and a huge round moon rose over everything, tremendously bright, as if it had somehow managed to finally push the sun out of the sky.
Et tu, Brute
?
It had seemed unfair that it had been such a cloudy dark day, only to be such a crystal clear night. By mid-March, Shelly was always weary of winter and its continuing, small injustices. She wanted spring.
Her arms and back ached. She’d overdone it again. Every night before she stepped foot in the gym, she told herself she wouldn’t overdo it, and then she’d start hauling the heaviest weights she could lift off the rack and over to the bench.
Why?
She wasn’t trying to impress the men, and there were almost never any women in the free weights corner of the gym.
She was, she supposed, trying to impress her own reflection in the mirror.
Often, she did.
Shelly was five feet, five inches tall and weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds, but when she yanked those forty-pound dumbbells off the floor, you could have counted the sinews in her biceps and triceps. You could have sketched the grainy fibers. She was a forty-eight-year-old woman
made
of muscle. “Whoa,” some guy would almost always say from the other side of the weight rack. “You a bodybuilder, or trying to scare somebody?”
Usually, Shelly said nothing in response, but once she said, trying to make it sound like a joke, “I have a past.”
She had sounded serious. The guy who’d been joking with her looked away, but a leering teenager on her other side said, “I bet you do.”
Shelly knew she looked her age, but that she also looked good. Her stomach was flat. Her legs were lean. Her skin was smooth and pale. Her hair was long and strawberry blonde. Boys like this one—chiseled body, face full of acne—had been staring at her body her whole life, although, these days, the older men left her alone. More experienced, probably they smelled it on her.
Lesbian.
She didn’t do men.
She wished she never had. She still had a scar that ran straight from her collarbone down to her hipbone, left over from the great heterosexual mistake of her life, and the last one of
those
she’d ever make.
Not that she was doing very well with women, either. The last woman she’d dated for more than a few weeks had moved to Arizona with the life partner she’d never bothered to tell Shelly she had.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Rosemary had said. But Rosemary had three teenage sons and a dashing brain-surgeon husband. It was easy for her to cast people out of Shelly’s life without a backward glance. Except to go to work, Shelly herself had hardly left the house for a month after the break-up.
And now, to top off a whole lifetime of sexual misadventures, it seemed that early menopause had arrived. A few weeks earlier, she had found herself stripping off her jacket and sweater in the checkout line of the grocery store. Dripping, panting. What the hell? Had they turned the heat up to three hundred degrees? Was the place on fire? She had a sudden nauseating memory of being placed by some beautician under a steaming plastic hood in a sweltering hair salon as a child, and being told to sit still as it poured stinking air from a hundred little holes onto her hair and the chemicals burned their way into the skin on her scalp.
“Jesus,” Shelly said in the grocery store, and the woman at the cash register said in a cigarette-husky Midwestern drawl, “Yer havin’ a hot flash darlin’. Ain’t ya ever had a hot flash before?”
No. She most certainly had not. But now she had one every other day. “Oh,” her doctor had said, “this is a little early, but might as well get it over with, right?” Shelly wondered if he’d say this to her someday when she came to him with a terminal illness.
U
p ahead, someone seemed to be swerving around. Shelly rubbed her left bicep with her right hand, holding the steering wheel with her left, and then changed biceps and hands.
She was solid. She was aching, but her arms were hard as rock. She was singing along with the radio. A country song about staying loyal to the U.S. of A. If you didn’t like it here, you could leave, the lyrics twanged—and Shelly’s brother’s black-and-white high school yearbook picture floated up out of the ten billion images in her unconscious.
He was smiling, getting ready to die in Vietnam.
Ahead, the red brake lights of the meandering vehicle seemed to be making elliptical dashes across the centerline, into the shoulder, back into the right lane, back over the yellow line. Kids, screwing around. Or a defensive driver avoiding something in the road. Too far ahead to worry too much about. Shelly was still singing along to the radio as she still rubbed her aching muscles. She was thinking of how tired she was of pretending to be everything she was not, and then wondering who she might be if she stopped pretending not to be what she was, when the car in front of her (fifty yards? Forty?) seemed to be plucked out of the moonlit darkness by a gigantic hand.
Gone
.
N
icole Werner was standing outside the library shivering. She had a book pressed to her chest. She was wearing a sleeveless white shirt over a pair of khaki shorts. It was the last week in October, but it had been a weirdly hot, hazy day—the sky purple and fuzzy-looking behind the changed leaves—and although the sun had seemed far away, it had still managed to turn Craig and Perry’s dorm room into a sauna by two o’clock in the afternoon. They had a west-facing window.
Because it had seemed so much like summer, Craig, too, had left Godwin that afternoon in shorts and a T-shirt, but he’d been back to his room since then and gotten his jacket, which he was glad about, because as soon as the sun set, it felt like late autumn again. Obviously, Nicole Werner hadn’t been out of the library since the temperature had dropped.
“Hey, Nicole. What are you doing?” Craig asked when he reached her at the top of the steps. He’d already told Lucas to get lost.
(“Aw, man,” Lucas had said as Craig veered away from him, a clear diagonal cut across the Commons toward the column Nicole was leaning against. “You gonna dump me for that bitch?”)
Nicole looked up, and the light from inside the library fell on her flossy hair, which was pulled back in the usual ponytail but also looked mussed, as if she’d been rolling around in a stack of hay, or studying philosophy all night. Midterms had been over since the week before. Could she already be cramming for something else?
“I was waiting for Josie,” she said.
“Oh,” Craig said, trying not to display any particular reaction to the name Josie, but he couldn’t help taking a quick look over both shoulders to make sure she wasn’t there. “Here,” he said to Nicole. He took off his jean jacket and handed it to her. He would have preferred to step around and drape it over her shoulders (a gesture he felt certain he must have seen made by men in movies, since it wasn’t the kind of thing his father would have done for his mother), but he found himself unable to step into the circle of light in which Nicole Werner stood.
Nicole balanced her book on her hip with one hand, took the jacket from him with the other. “Thanks, Craig,” she said. “Wow!”
“I’m not cold,” he said, and then wished he hadn’t. Instead of sounding chivalrous, now he sounded like he’d been looking around for a coat rack and had happened to run into her.
“Well, I’m freezing,” Nicole said, stuffing her arms into his jacket. “I was so stupid leaving the dorm like this. I guess I thought I’d be back for dinner, but then I got obsessed with this stupid paper, and ended up just eating one of those disgusting sandwiches out of the vending machine. I had no idea how cold it had gotten.”
“Yeah,” Craig said. “When’s your paper due?”
“Couple of weeks,” she said.
He couldn’t help opening his mouth and eyes in astonishment. “And you’re working on it
already
?”
Nicole laughed, rolled her eyes, and then widened them, mimicking him. “
Yeah
,” she said. “College is hard for some of us, Craig. Just because
you’re
one of those guys who just sails through everything with no problems . . .”
Craig considered correcting her, but decided not to. He shrugged.
“Perry says you just sort of open your book, and close it, and you’re done. Believe me, I wish
I
could get away with that.”
Craig was ready to get this part of the conversation over with. He remembered the clammy handshake Dean Fleming had given him in Chez Vin that first night, and the few phony sentences the dean had managed to stammer out about how great it was to have his old friend’s son in the Honors College, pretending it was a coincidence. Since then, on the few occasions Craig had passed Dean Fleming in the administrative hallway, the guy had gone way out of his way to pretend he didn’t know Craig any better than any of the other students, and Craig felt pretty certain he was pissed he’d had to do that favor for his old Dartmouth pal.
“Well, I should probably study more than I do.” He dragged a hand across his eyes. Was he mistaken, or was the light getting brighter the longer it lingered on Nicole Werner’s hair and face? He inhaled, and said, “So, want to walk back to Godwin?”
“Like I said, I’m waiting for Josie. Want to wait with me?”
“No,” Craig said. Too quickly. For a second there he’d forgotten about Josie. “That’s okay.”
He raised a hand in a gesture of farewell and took a step backward, but Nicole said, “What about your coat?”
She sounded alarmed, as if he were about to walk off a plane without a parachute—but maybe she always sounded alarmed. He remembered the way she’d waved Perry over in the cafeteria one night.
Perry!
she’d said.
I forgot to tell you! I went home last weekend, and I saw Mary. She said to say hi!
Perry had just grunted. He hadn’t even looked up from his tray. Whoever Mary was had seemed like a really big deal to Nicole, but when Craig asked Perry about it, he said, “Who cares?”
“Nicole seems to care,” Craig pointed out. “She made this Mary sound like a long-lost cousin, or somebody risen from the dead.”
“Well, Nicole always sounds excited.”
It had occurred then to Craig, again, that Perry was nursing some unrequited love grudge, but he also thought he had a point. Nicole, and girls like her,
did
usually sound excited, or alarmed, or semihysterical, when they weren’t. It was something about the hard vowels and the crisp consonants and the way most of their sentences ended with “you guys!” And sounding like a question: “I’m, like, so hungry, you guys?!” You’d think some girl was starving to death, but she might just mean she wanted to borrow some quarters for a roll of Lifesavers.
“I
t’s not a problem,” Craig said, still backing away. “I’ll get it from you back at the dorm.”
“Wow!” Nicole said. “Thanks so much, Craig. You’re so nice!”
“Sure,” he said, trying to smile like a nice guy but imagining his own mug shot on a sexual predator website.
Josie had not, it seemed, told Nicole about the other night. Maybe, he hoped, she wouldn’t. But why wouldn’t she? Briefly he’d held out some hope that she’d been so drunk she didn’t even remember the incident, but that hope had been dashed when he’d passed her in the courtyard on Sunday morning, and she’d stopped dead in front of him.
“Hi,” he’d said.
“Yeah,” Josie had said. Craig had tried hard not to look her in the eyes, but they just bored straight into his own, and then he couldn’t look away. It was a bright morning, too, and his eyes started to water in the glare. He hadn’t left the dorm since Friday. He’d been pretty much either stoned or sleeping since he’d last seen her. “So, ‘hi’ is all you have to say to me?” she asked.
About a hundred bad jokes flashed through Craig’s brain, like having Eddie Murphy or Lenny Bruce shuffling a deck inside his skull, but he managed to keep his mouth firmly shut. The morning sun was making Josie’s hair look so black and shiny and smooth it scared the hell out of him. He couldn’t have spoken if he wanted to.
“You’re a great guy, Craig,” she’d said. “Really exceptional. I hope you rot in hell.”
And then she was gone so fast he didn’t know in which direction she’d left.
Shit
, he thought. She definitely remembered.
He didn’t see her again for at least a week, but that was mostly because he’d been staying away from anywhere she might be—avoiding the stairwells near her hall, slipping out the side entrance to Godwin instead of going through the courtyard—and when he did see her again, luckily she didn’t see him. She and Nicole were together in the cafeteria, dressed up for some sort of Greek tea or soiree or salon or something equally feminine and mysterious and inane. (Rush Week started as soon as midterms were over, and half the girls in Godwin Honors Hall were joining sororities, appearing suddenly around the dorm every evening in pearls and skirts, while the guys who were rushing stumbled around looking disoriented and hung over.) As soon as he recognized Josie’s black hair, he’d scrambled to the back of the cafeteria as fast as he could.
The next week, he didn’t go looking for the study group on the night he knew they’d be down in the Alice Meyers Memorial Student Study Room
,
although he missed the group. He missed Nicole, and it pained him to think he’d never be in that room with her again, listening to her breathe through her nose as she read her textbook. By then, he assumed she hated him and that Josie had given her some ugly Cliffs Notes version of the events:
The way, in his bed, Josie had asked, “Are you wearing a condom?”
It was the first whole sentence she’d uttered since she’d stripped off her clothes and, standing shiningly naked in front of him, had whispered, “I want you to fuck me. I’ve wanted you to fuck me for a long time.”
“Condom? No,” he’d said, sounding more annoyed than he’d meant to. But when would he have put on a condom? Did she think he’d come out of the shower wearing one?
Her dark eyes, bleary as they were, shot open then, and Josie put her hands on his chest, shoving, and said, “Get off!”
“What?” Craig asked.
“I said
get off of me
!”
Craig rolled off of her, although every nerve ending and instinct he had—his brain having been turned into a kind of strobe light—was telling him to stay on top of her and to keep going.
“I’ll get pregnant,” she said. “Or a
disease
!”
“Huh?” Craig said. “Aren’t you on the pill or something?”
“
No,
” Josie said. “Why would I be? I’m not even
sexually active
right now.”
At this, Craig had snorted, and said, “I’d say right now you’re pretty sexually active.” He hadn’t intended to sound so sarcastic, but the whole thing was just so fucking stupid. He’d been minding his own business when she’d come into his room and taken off her clothes and pulled him down onto her in his bed.
But at that point, she was already out of his bed, pulling her little silky panties up over her wildly lush and dark-haired pussy, and then she was looking around for her top, and Craig sighed, too loudly, and flopped down on his back and said, “I’ll go see if somebody on the floor will give me a condom,” before he realized she was crying.
“I can’t believe this,” Josie said, pulling her lacy tank top down over her breasts.
Craig sat up at the edge of the bed then. Luckily, he’d completely deflated, but he pulled his towel up off the floor and put it over his dick anyway. “Can’t believe
what
?” he asked, but by then she was dressed, and she’d unlocked his door, slipped out of it, and slammed it behind her. For just a second, in the space she opened as she left, Craig could hear the party going on in the hallway—all the hardworking students celebrating the harvest. Somehow he pictured them in plaid shirts and gingham dresses—ruddy with good health, living their productive lives, while he searched the dresser for clean boxers, put them on, got back in his messed-up bed, and shoved the buds of his iPod as deeply into his ears as he could.
B
ut now, as he rounded the corner, jacketless, to Godwin Honors Hall—which looked stately and decrepit at the same time under a low, bright moon—he was really hoping that maybe Josie wasn’t so mad at him anymore, or at least had never told Nicole what had happened. Truly, he never really thought he stood a chance with Nicole anyway (because, for one thing, he knew he’d never have enough courage or imagination to figure out how to get together with a girl like that: every girl he’d ever hooked up with had made the moves on him first, and it seemed unlikely that Nicole would be that kind of girl), but it had surprised him how sad he was, after the shit with Josie, to think he’d blown that chance with Nicole without ever even actually
having
it.
When he came up the walk to the dorm, Lucas was smoking a cigarette under an elm tree in the courtyard.
“So!” Lucas called out. “Did you strike out again, young man?”
Craig held out his hand for a cigarette, but Lucas patted his pocket and said, “I’m out,” and then, “She’s not for you anyway, Craig. She’s one of those girls who’s waiting for marriage, and then she wants two kids and an SUV, and wants to stay home and bake cookies all day while you slave away at some shitty job. On the other hand, you’ve got ‘fuck-’em-and-dump-’em’ written all over you.”
“What?” Craig asked, sincerely astonished by this assessment. “Go to hell, Lucas. I do not have ‘fuck-’em-and-dump-’em’ written all over me.”
“Yeah, you do, Craig. You look at girls like you hate ’em.”
“What? I do
not
.”
Lucas shrugged, and tossed his cigarette over the wrought-iron fence and onto the sidewalk.
“Okay,” he said. “Sorry. Whatever. But I just don’t see you taking Little Miss Sunshine there on a walk through the park before you propose to her.”
To this, Craig said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. He watched the shadows of other students pass on the other side of the tiny glittering windows of Godwin Honors Hall.
They
knew what the hell they were doing there. For one thing, they hadn’t gotten into the Honors College just because their father was buddies with the dean.
“Besides,” Lucas asked, “wouldn’t you rather have a really great blow job than a really nice date? I mean, I just don’t picture that little virgin on her knees with her sweet red lips wrapped around your massive man tool.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Craig said.
But there was no animation in it.
No energy.
Lucas was probably right, he knew.
Lucas was often right.
Craig had never, he realized, been on an actual date
.
And the idea of one—asking for one, going on one—seemed like another one of those ten million things that all the normal guys, wearing khaki pants and carrying bouquets of daisies, would know exactly how to do, but which would be about as easy for Craig as building a spaceship and then going for a zip around the earth in it.
“Hey, sorry,” Lucas said to Craig’s silence. “I didn’t mean to—”