Authors: Elizabeth Hand
I nodded reluctantly.
“Well, you should have seen what I had to go through to get accepted here. It was like I was applying to the CIA or something. They know I’m related to Lisa, it wasn’t like it would be hard to find that out. And they didn’t want me here. For all I know they’ve got some kind of file on me or something …”
“But then why’d you come here? I mean, isn’t it dangerous? And why’d they let you in?”
She knotted her hands in her lap. “I don’t know why they let me in. Probably they need a few normal people to round out the campus profile. You know, so it’s not all people like Angie and Oliver. But Lisa was my cousin; she was my best friend. And they murdered her and got away with it. And I don’t want that to happen to Angelica. Or you.”
I swallowed nervously. “So what
do
we do?”
“I don’t know.” Elbows on her knees, chin in hand, she looked more like a bemused kid than ever. “I guess we stay in touch.” She glanced at me sideways and, for the first time, gave me a crooked grin. “I guess we’re all kinda stuck together now, huh?”
I stood and walked to the window. For a last long moment I stared down at the Strand, trying to find Oliver among the tiny figures wandering across the darkening lawns. Finally, “I guess we are,” I said, and left.
I went back to my room and locked myself inside, pushed a chair against the door, and bolted the window shut. Then I prised the wooden curtain rod from the closet and leaned it against my bed, beside every hardcover textbook I could find and my electric typewriter in its heavy melamite case. It crossed my mind that people who slipped Dilaudid to nosy college students and fed archaeologists to gigantic insects might not be too put off by someone beaning them with the third edition of the
Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion,
but I didn’t care. I fell asleep with all the lights on, and slept for thirteen hours.
Next morning I found Angelica at the dining hall. I sat beside her and she said nothing, absolutely
nothing,
about what had happened. I might have dreamed it all—everything except for sleeping with her. Angelica’s knowing smile told me that, at least, had been real. Her smile and the way she said good-bye, kissing me on the cheek and letting her hand surreptitiously brush against my breast for just a moment. Her fingers stroked my nipple until it hardened beneath my shirt, and then she drew away.
“Ciao,
Sweeney. See you at dinner?”
I stammered some reply and nodded. As I watched her leave I noted that she still wore the moon-shaped necklace Magda Kurtz had given her, and like a talisman beneath her arm carried a copy of Magda Kurtz’s book.
And so began my new life. My
real
life, I thought then. Meeting Angelica and Oliver for breakfast at seven-thirty, Annie following her roommate like a grim conscience in cutoff fatigues and worn flannel shirts. Me drinking too much coffee in a feeble effort to kill what had become a near-constant hangover. Angelica picking fastidiously at slices of cantaloupe and grapefruit. Annie wolfing down petrified scrambled eggs with ketchup and ersatz home fries, while Oliver sat across from the three of us, kicking at the table legs, his hands never still as he swept back his hair and scribbled his odd ballpoint sketches on paper napkins.
“Very nice,” Annie would remark thoughtfully, peering at the pile of napkins fluttering in front of him. “That looks just like me. Except for the antennae, of course.”
Then she’d gather her books, give Angelica a soulful look, and leave. Annie never hung around after breakfast. She had an eight o’clock Music Composition class, and I sometimes thought the only reason she joined us was to keep an eye on Angelica.
Though Angelica seemed infinitely able to take care of herself. I knew she wore that crescent-shaped necklace everywhere, although she was careful to keep it hidden. A few days after the reception at Garvey House, I dropped by her room and found her reading by the light of a small banker’s lamp with a green glass shade. On one knee she balanced a steaming mug of tea. The air smelled warmly of vanilla and chamomile.
“Sweeney!” Angelica looked up, smiling. “We missed you at lunch today.”
At her throat nestled the lunula, its bright lines softened to grey in the dim light.
Sans
makeup, with her robe and glasses and white china mug, she looked solemn and a little silly, like a diva costumed to play the student in an operetta. Silly, but still beautiful enough to make my heart start raiding around my chest like a stone.
“Where’s Annie?”
“Library,” replied Angelica without glancing up again. She was painstakingly copying something into a notebook.
“What’re you doing?”
“Stuff.”
I made a face. As usual, she was poring over stacks of old books and anthropological journals from the Colum Library. She flashed me an earnest look. “This is fascinating, Sweeney. Really—you should check it out.”
I leaned over to pick up a volume slightly smaller than my hand, bound in calfskin faded to the color of old ivory.
Lucian Samosata: De Sea Syria
One of the texts listed in the handout that Balthazar Warnick had given us the first day of class, along with
The Golden Ass
and “The Bacchae” and “The Hymn to Demeter”—
DE SEA SYRIA/THE SYRIAN GODDESS: Evocative contemporaneous account of the ancient rites associated with the worship of Aphrodite/Astarte and the cult of Adonis in Phoenicia …
Gingerly I turned the pages. They seemed to be printed in Latin. When I reached the end of the book, a slip of loose-leaf fluttered out, covered front and back with Angelica’s fine cursive hand. I caught it and held it up to the light.
“There is another great sanctuary in Phoenicia, which the Sidonians possess,”
I read.
According to them it belongs to Astarte, but I think that Astarte is Selene. One of the priests, however, told me that it is a sanctuary of Europe … Zeus desired her since she was beautiful, he assumed the form of a bull, seized her, and carried the girl off with him to Crete …
I turned over the scrap of paper.
There is another form of sacrifice here. After putting a garland on the sacrificial animals, they hurl them down alive from the gateway and the animals die from the fall. Some even throw their children off the place, but not in the same manner as the animals …
“Gee, Angelica, that’s really nice.”
“Be careful!” Angelica picked up the volume, cradling it as though it had been a puppy. “It’s really old, and it doesn’t belong to me.”
“You can read Latin?” I asked sarcastically.
“Yes, Sweeney, I can read Latin. And Italian, and French.” She settled back on the bed. “Why haven’t you been to Warnick’s class all week?”
I felt like shouting,
You know damn well why I haven’t been to class
! Instead I just shrugged. “Listen, me and Oliver and Baby Joe are going down to the Cellar Door to see Patti Smith. You want to come?”
“I can’t. Professor Warnick lent me his own copy of that—”
She inclined her head toward the small leather-bound book. “—and I promised I’d give it back after class tomorrow.”
“Angelica!
What
are you—”
“Sweeney.
Please.”
“Fine. Forget it.” I waited to see if she’d say anything else, if she’d bother looking up; but I had been dismissed. “Well, I guess I’ll see you later.”
She flipped through the pages of a monograph and nodded absently. “Tell Oliver to drop by after the show.”
“Sure. Whatever.”
I stalked outside, angry and embarrassed. To be commanded to carry a message to Oliver, as though I was nothing but her go-between! Still, I gave him the message. I’d do anything for Oliver, and almost anything for Angelica.
Each morning at a few minutes before nine, Oliver and I would escort her to Magic, Witchcraft and Religion. We’d walk to the foot of the Mound and watch Angelica stride up its path alone, her long legs flashing between the gauzy folds of a flowered skirt. Then we would turn away, and the real business of the day would begin.
We would go to the Shrine to drink more coffee and then wander around the gaudy chapels, occasionally pilfering the collection boxes for bus change. Sometime before noon we’d catch an 80 bus downtown. We’d get off at Dupont Circle, find a bench, and watch the boy hustlers at work. Oliver knew a lot of them from the bars; they’d wander over to bum cigarettes and tell us where to find the party that night, before sauntering off to lean on the hoods of big cars with diplomatic license tags and dark windows. As the afternoon wore on we’d head over to Meridian Hill Park. There Oliver would score marijuana or some very dubious acid from one of the starved-looking rastas—
blottah barrels hemp two bucks too bucks
—and then it would be time to head back to the Divine and figure out our evening agenda.
I would
never
have dared to do any of this on my own. But with Oliver I felt invulnerable. His beauty, his air of
noblesse décharge,
even his very obvious lack of judgment, seemed to protect us from the stunningly real dangers of the city. He’d lope through the city’s worst—and best—neighborhoods, his long hair streaming behind him, wearing his standard uniform of white button-down shirt and faded chinos and black wing tips with no socks, mad blue eyes agleam, arms waving as he told me some hair-raising story. And somehow we never got mugged, or arrested, or even lost. This despite the fact that much of the time Oliver was flying high and loose and pretty as a grinning dragon kite, tripping on acid or mushrooms or god knows what.
Though the truth was, I could never really tell if he was stoned or sober. With Oliver everything seemed strange. I think that in some bizarre way he could
make
strange things appear. A bald eagle landing in Lafayette Park to prey on feeding pigeons; a red fox skulking outside the entrance to a K Street law firm. Blind nuns, transsexual punks. An armless legless man on a skateboard who sang the Irish national anthem in a bone-freezing tenor, and then rolled a cigarette with his tongue and greeted us by name. It got so that if something peculiar
didn’t
happen on one of our outings, I’d feel disappointed and a little wary.
Nights we would take a Yellow Cab to Southeast and go dancing inside a warehouse where I was the only girl among hundreds, maybe thousands, of boys and men. When everyone spilled back outside at dawn, the same Yellow Cab would be waiting for us on the narrow dark street beneath the dusty trees of heaven. Cab Number 393, with its driver Handsome Brown, a former prizefighter who by that hour was as drunk as we were.
“Where to, children?” he’d rumble, his face filling the rearview mirror. Usually we’d go back to the Divine, to stagger off to bed. But some mornings Oliver would have him drive us to the Tidal Basin to watch the sun rise, or to some all-night place where we could sober up over bad coffee and greasy sausage sandwiches.
Some of these places weren’t safe, according to Handsome Brown; but “I’ll take care of things, my man.” And leaning over with one hand on the wheel, he’d pop open his glove compartment, to show us the gun in there—to show me, actually, Oliver usually choosing these cab rides to nap—and occasionally remove it and brandish it as he drove.
Through it all Oliver walked with me like my demon familiar. I got a weird buzz from going with him to the discos, where no one seemed to know I was a girl. Oliver usually seemed happy enough to forget. He knew I was in love with him. I told him, many times, when I was sloppy drunk, but he only grinned that crooked canine grin and threw his arm around me.
“Oh Sweeney. Why ask for the moon when we have the bars?” And he’d drag me to another club.
Angelica was in love with him too, of course. I knew that from the beginning. It seemed that there could be no way they wouldn’t end up together. Sometimes after dinner the two of them would rise from the dining hall table and go off alone. Or else Oliver and I might return from our evening’s debauch and he would walk me to my door, then continue, singing softly to himself, up the stairs to Angelica’s room. I would throw myself on my bed, feverish with jealousy and yearning and something else, something worse: the fear of having been befriended by mistake, of being found out as an impostor. I tried to console myself by thinking that, even if Angelica slept with Oliver,
I
understood him.
But now I know better. No one understood Oliver although Annie, perhaps, came closest.
“Forget him. He’s a nutjob,” she pronounced one night in a vain effort to comfort me. “Really, Sweeney. Haven’t you ever read
Brideshead Revisited?”
I sniffed. “No.”
“Well, it turns out
very badly
for boys like Oliver.”
I didn’t care. Hanging out with Oliver was like being attached to some dense yet glittering, rapidly spinning object. By virtue of his speed and beauty he attracted all sorts of things—middle-aged professors, exotic cigarettes, postcards from Tunisia, psychotropic drugs—and now by association many of those things were becoming attached to
me,
chief among them Angelica di Rienzi and Oliver’s habit of increasingly sporadic class attendance and casual narcotics use.
So the semester passed. October’s acid glory burned into November ash; and one day the Xeroxed flyers appeared across the campus.
AUTUMN RETREAT
AT
AGASTRONGA RIVER ORPHIC LODGE
Friday, Saturday, return Sunday night
For Details See Balthazar Warnick, Provost, Thaddeus College
At dawn I woke to someone calling my name from outside my window. No angels, no creatures from the other side of the Door; only Oliver. His long hair was dirty and when I let him in the front door I could tell he hadn’t showered since we’d last met: he had a not-unpleasant musty smell of Tide-scented clothes, cigarette smoke, and boyish sweat.
“Oliver,” I croaked as I let him in.
Outside dew sparkled on the grass. The Divine’s domed and turreted buildings and dusty oaks seemed to float untethered above us, like the city’s dream of itself.