War of the Encyclopaedists (15 page)

He didn't own a single pair of boxer shorts. Why would he want his junk flopping around? Briefs angled it upward, so when an unexpected boner occurred, it was the shaft that created a slight bulge in the jeans. But in boxers—and he'd experienced this at the mall once when he ran into Jessica Wilson, the hottest ninth-grader in school, whose jeans were as tight around her ass as industrial shrink wrap on a pair of maracas—in boxers, it was hanging free, angled down, and when it got excited, it was not the shaft but the head that appeared under the denim near the upper thigh. The maneuver required to rectify this was extremely conspicuous. And what was the downside of briefs? There was the supposed drop in sperm count from having your
testes snug and cotton-cupped all day long, but was that even a detriment? He didn't plan on impregnating anyone anytime soon. Perhaps not ever. No, it was definitely a positive—briefs came with a built-in prophylactic.

And yet here he was, on his way to the store to purchase a pair of boxer shorts for the possibility of cuddling (sex?) with a nineteen-year-old girl whom he'd never met—not in person—and who apparently had cystic fibrosis. And Crohn's disease. He would have to be gentle.

They had arranged to meet the following Friday—the same day his essay was due—at the Lotus Yoga studio in Brighton. She would be getting out of her class at five, all limber and sweaty. It was nearly a week away. And the anticipation fueled him in every aspect of his life. He went running, he cleaned up his room, and he dove back into
Ulysses,
rereading chapters, researching past critical commentary by Derrida and others, sketching out essay ideas of his own.

It was Thursday evening when he opened up a blank document on his laptop and began to write. In the last week, he had slowly regained that sense of expansiveness he'd felt at the end of the novel. But it was changed now; he didn't so much feel it as know it, and the fact that it wasn't joy, or anger, or release, or self-deception, that it was somehow none of these and all of these, the fact that it was a force without a direction became glaringly obvious. He hit upon the topic for his essay: he would go through the final chapter, Molly Bloom's famous stream-of-consciousness monologue, and he would track all the sign-valued language—all the
yes
es,
no
s,
every
s,
all
s,
didn't
s, and
not
s—he would quantify the tone to see how positive the language actually was. He would take his data and make a graph.

He began laboriously scanning the pages and looking for
yes
es and
no
s, circling them, counting them, but when he'd made it through only five pages in an hour, he turned to the Internet. A quick Google search turned up a text-file version of
Ulysses
. He identified a list of words and auto-searched for them in the document. By midnight, he'd finished the data collection; a quick analysis confirmed his suspicion and validated the strange directionless sense of magnitude the final
chapter had given him. Though the book ended with a string of
yes
es, and though the total
yes
es outnumbered the total
no
s in Molly Bloom's monologue, the total negatives, including
not
s,
didn't
s, and so forth, skewed the tone highly toward the negative. Joyce had given Molly Bloom an accumulative moment, a big moment, but it wasn't a
positive
moment; it was much more complex than that. Molly Bloom's connection with her husband—the subject of much of her thoughts in the final pages—was deep and important, but far from simple or purely loving. That final
yes,
if anything, was an acceptance of the complexity of love, that it always contained strands and flecks of its opposite.

Corderoy had been so wrapped up with this discovery, so thrilled that his crazy data collection was turning out to be worth it, so relieved that it would, if he kept at it all night, yield an essay with some actual insight, that he hadn't eaten since lunch. The hunger hit him abruptly, and he made a quick phone call.

Thirty minutes later, Tricia knocked on his door. “You order a pizza?”

He ran down, paid the Domino's guy, and walked back up the stairs with his medium cheese, set it on the coffee table, and took out an oozing slice. He noticed Tricia eyeing the steaming pie. “Help yourself.”

“You know Domino's is owned by a right-wing, anti-abortion nut job.”
I

“Does that make it undelicious?” Corderoy said.

“Lots of things are delicious.”

“Yeah, but this is right here in front of you.” Corderoy took a big bite, cheese stretching off the pizza and dripping onto the cardboard below him.

“Not that hungry,” Tricia said.

“I gotta get back to writing,” Corderoy said. He took another slice with a napkin. “I'll leave this out here, in case you change your mind.” He nodded toward the pizza. “Know your enemy?”

Corderoy shut his door and Tricia was left in the living room, breathing in that unparalleled pizza smell. She tapped her foot, glanced
at Hal's door, then took a slice and retreated to her own room. Wasn't she allowed one small slip from an otherwise cautious and moral set of consumer habits? It was warm, salty, and luxuriant in carbohydrates. She ate it quickly. When she'd finished, she lit a cigarette without holding it to her mouth—it took at least five seconds of direct flame to get the tip embering without drawing air through it—and after it was lit, she took a long and indifferent drag.

16

After a shower, Corderoy did twenty push-ups, dressed, and went out to buy some Funfetti cupcake batter, a can of Funfetti frosting, a jar of sprinkles, and—he almost forgot—a cupcake tin. By three p.m., he'd carefully frosted each of the twelve cupcakes, meticulously sprinkled them to ensure an artful and even distribution, and sealed them in a rectangular Tupperware.

He did more push-ups, showered again, shampooing his pubes this time, then put on his brand-new pair of boxers. He walked into the living room, smiling like an idiot. Tricia came out of her room and cocked her hip to one side, surveying him. “Got a date or something?”

“How'd you know?” Corderoy said.

“You're grinning like an idiot. And you haven't showered twice in the last week. Who is she?”

“Just someone I met.”

“I want the dirt later,” she said.

“Shit,” Corderoy said. “Forgot to brush.”

He closed himself in the bathroom and brushed his teeth longer than he'd ever brushed his teeth. After five minutes, he took a swirl of Tricia's Listerine, which burned the hell out of his mouth, but that's how you knew it was working. He walked out of the bathroom, tugging at his jeans—the boxers were riding up—and went to his bedroom to get his coat.

What he saw did not augur well for the future of his romantic life.
Tricia's cat, Smokey, was standing on his bed, back arched, tail up, midloaf. Without thinking, Corderoy flung open Tricia's door with the intention of telling her to clean the fucking cat shit off his bed and have his sheets washed, but what he saw in Tricia's room made him turn in horror. He shut her door, picked up his Tupperware, and left the house with an image burned into his visual cortex: Tricia, grabbing for the bedsheet, something purple buzzing between her legs.

He'd mapped out the quickest way to get to the Lotus Yoga and Dance Studio in Brighton, and it took him through the Ringer Playground. But he'd left too early, and it was only four-thirty when he entered the park. He didn't want to wait around too long in the yoga studio, so he found a place on a low cement wall. The sky was overcast, and a slight breeze had picked up. He bent up the corner of his Tupperware and smelled the Funfetti cupcakes. They were almost sickeningly sweet.

The Ringer Playground was bleak, graffitied, and cold. Narrow and litter-filled streets led into the shady and unkempt grounds. Staring through the chain-link fence to the baseball diamond, he thought of that scene in
Terminator 2
when Sarah Connor clutches at the fence and all the children are incinerated by a nuclear explosion. This was a perfect place to get murdered. It was Brighton.

He wandered around, smelled the cupcakes again, and checked his phone. As it neared five, he figured there was no point in waiting in the cold, so he left the park and walked along Allston Street until he hit Brighton Avenue, carrying the Tupperware on his perched fingers like a serving tray with a silver dome concealing carefully broiled game hens or a human head. It started raining, softly at first, and then, as if a switch had been flipped in the sky, it fell like billions of coins on the streets of Brighton. Corderoy ducked under the awning of the Lotus Yoga and Dance Studio, his coat lifted off his back and held above his head. His Northwest pride was deeply ingrained, and he was proud never to have carried an umbrella. But what he was slowly realizing in his first few months in the East was that in Seattle, it only misted. In other parts of the world, it
rained.
This was the second Boston rainstorm in which he'd been caught unawares. Corderoy looked down at his jeans: they were soaked up past his knees.

He entered the yoga studio and walked up to a short, fit girl behind a podium.

“You look lost.” Her eyes had a comfortably vacant look.

“I'm not lost, I don't think,” Corderoy said. “I'm looking for Sylvie.”

“The class gets out in a bit,” she said. “Have a seat.”

Corderoy had never been in a yoga studio and he felt slightly uncomfortable with the ambient spirituality—the purple and yellow walls, the exotically confused Indian/Celtic music, and the overly even cadences of the hostess's speech.

As the yoga class let out, a stream of sweating women (and a few men) parted the beaded curtain to the studio, some walking outside, others entering a door to the locker room.

One of the girls stopped as she walked past him. She was not
Sylvie
. “Someone's birthday?” she asked.

“No,” Corderoy said flatly.

The girl rolled her eyes and left. Corderoy covered up the Tupperware with his coat.

More people filtered in over the next twenty minutes, and during that time, Corderoy checked his phone exactly twenty times: no missed calls, no text messages. Maybe he'd misremembered. Maybe
Sylvie
's class got out at six?

“Do you have a bathroom?” he asked the hostess.

She directed him, and when he came back several minutes later, the lobby had cleared out and the five-thirty class had begun. The girl at the podium was missing as well. He sat down but realized that
Sylvie
could have slipped in and joined the class when he'd been in the bathroom. He parted the beaded curtain and walked through to the studio room to see a dozen or so women and two or three men in strange positions, falling and rotating and swooning and stumbling over one another like drunks. Corderoy tilted his head sideways as he watched one girl place her hand squarely between another's breasts, then pull back, bringing the other girl forward as if her arm were a chain tied to the girl's sternum.

A bearded man in a tight blue turtleneck was crawling on the floor, orangutan-like, in long, uneven arm-strides; another man, taller and skinnier, had his hands on Turtleneck's shoulder blades, trailing him
as if he couldn't figure out whether he wanted to mount him or if his hands were glued there and he was trying to escape.

“You here for Contact Improv? First class is free.”

Corderoy turned to see a slight blond girl standing in front of him. Her face was small, with a broad forehead and a pointed chin; her hair was pulled back in a ponytail; her eyes were the size of apricots and of a similar color. She was stunningly beautiful, and Corderoy felt the same disturbing attraction to her that he sometimes felt toward anime characters.

“Contact Improv?”

“Think of it as distributing your weight in an interesting way. It's all about awareness through movement, weight transfer, counterbalance. C'mon, you'll like it. I'm Tanya, by the way.”

“I don't know.”

“Here. Lean into my palm.”

Tanya stood there with an easy smile, holding her palm out to Corderoy as if directing traffic, swaying back and forth almost imperceptibly. Corderoy scanned the room once more.
Sylvie
wasn't there. Finally, after about fifteen seconds, he caved: he leaned into Tanya's hand. She pulled back and circled, drawing Corderoy's center of mass with her.