He smiled, began to say something, then went for another disc, stacking CDs on the stereo, finger hovering above the Play button. She let him beaver away there with his cueing and reviewing, and kicked off her Converse, sitting cross-legged on his unmade single bed. The space looked so different. Perhaps it was the effect of sitting here, viewing everything from the inside, rather than as she’d met this place, peering in.
He kept starting tracks, promising they’d be amazing, then losing confidence and switching discs. To her, some songs sounded pointy and others round. When Duncan discussed music it was by reeling off band names, singers, guitarists — legends to him, nobody to her.
What occupied Tooly was not the sounds but the sight of his animation. He wobbled his head, mouthing lyrics that he lacked the courage to sing aloud, telling her, “You need to hear it a bunch of times before you get into this. It’s this bit here — listen. Where the drums kick in? Whenever I hear that, it’s …” Anticipation thrilled him: to know what neared, the chorus approaching, almost there, and then — yes! He spun to look at her, eyes warm.
How did this boy see her? For that matter, how was she this time? With any new man, Tooly exhibited a self slightly different from that presented to the previous guy (not that there had been so many). She found herself inhabiting a new character, uncertain whether this edition was more or less true, and whether there was a pure state of Tooly-ness at all. Even when alone, she wasn’t sure what she was like.
Given her lack of musical knowledge, Duncan wanted to burn her a mix CD. However, she had no compact-disc player at home. There was a radio at her apartment, but with a tape recorder?
“I’ll do you a cassette. But you have to tell me what you’re into.”
The only music she knew was from parties, jukeboxes at bars, muzak in stores. She never remembered the name of anything. “I used to like the Ghostbusters song.” He took this as a joke, though it hadn’t been.
Tooly gave a little shiver. “Now I’m getting a bit cold.” She lifted his hooded sweatshirt from the floor. “Would it be okay?”
“No prob. Go for it,” he answered, bashful at the implied intimacy, looking hard at his stereo.
She slipped it on, excused herself to the bathroom, and drew his wallet from the kangaroo pocket — she’d noticed him stowing it there when they were outside. Tooly read his college ID, the Connecticut driver’s license, his credit cards. She wasn’t taking them. Stolen goods were shabby, like walking around with evidence against yourself. But information had worth, held invisibly in your head — provided you could memorize long numbers. To Venn’s chagrin, she wrote things down. “Hey,” she said on her return to Duncan’s room. “You have a pen I could borrow?”
“Got tons.” He opened a box, inadvertently spewing ballpoint pens everywhere. He scrambled around on all fours, collecting them off the floor. “I’m an idiot. Sorry.”
His shame punctured her. She watched a moment, then took off his hoodie and folded it in his closet, the wallet inside.
“Why’d you need a pen?”
“Just to write down the song names.”
“I can do that. If you’re into it, I can put down notes on each band.”
“Actually, I should go.” No point sticking around. Yes, anyone could be mined, but not everyone should be.
He looked up, spurned. “You don’t want your tape?”
She sat on his bed, sipping his roommates’ beers, while Duncan toiled. Making a mixtape took longer than expected, particularly when its creator believed that each track implied something and that the compilation as a whole contained greater meaning still, the entirety of himself distilled onto a ninety-minute Maxell XLII. Tooly grew tipsier and sleepier and chillier, dipping her feet under his duvet, then pulling it up to her knees, her waist, finally drawing the covers to her chin.
She awoke in darkness, a sheet over her nose quivering as she breathed. She recalled a song ending but none replacing it, lights turning off, covers shifting. The two of them remained fully dressed, chastely back-to-back, he compressed into a gentlemanly sliver of mattress against the nightstand. She blew the sheet away, swallowed dryly, and gazed at the ceiling. The room was boiling now, radiator pipe hissing snakishly.
She got out and stood in the apartment corridor. Voices came from the room of the student she hadn’t met yet, Emerson, who was bickering with his girlfriend. All was dark save a thread of light under Xavi’s door, a rustle of textbook pages, the squeak of highlighter pen. Was he worth looking into? Just kids here. Tooly looked through a window at the street — how forbidding her cold walk home. She touched her behind, bruised from the choreographed crash landing on the pavement, and sneaked back under the covers, pulling herself close to him.
The next morning, she found a cavernous hollow under the sheet where Duncan had been. He tiptoed back into the room, hair wet, patting his jean pockets, readying for class. “Time I got up,” she said, pushing off the covers, only to pull them back. “When do you leave?”
“Well, my class is at Vanderbilt,” he said, thinking aloud. “I’ll need to take the one or the nine train down to Christopher Street, so … out of here in nineteen minutes.”
“I’ll be gone in eighteen.”
“I dreamt someone arrested me,” he said.
“It’s about time someone arrested you. Hey, when’s your class start?”
“Ten.”
“You’ve got ages!”
“Do you even know what time it is?”
“No. But I think you’re too late for it anyway — they’re starting without you. You should come back under the covers. It’s cozier than the subway.”
“Can’t.”
“It’s an emergency.”
He hesitated, then pulled off his dress shoes and slipped in beside her, sticking to his side of the bed, one foot touching the floor. She sat up, leaning the point of her elbow into her pillow, and considered Duncan. She reached her hand toward him. He started, embarrassed by his own surprise when she flattened her palm across his cheek.
The strangeness of other people — so solid when near; alive, but objects, too. This close, his features lost detail, absorbed in fuzziness. A sensation rose in her, a surge outward and a crush in, a need to push him away, pull him back, to rush to the window and throw her clothes onto frosty 115th Street, leap naked back into the bed, goosebumped and shivering. Instead, she held still.
This time she left with plans to meet again, and with his number, too, which she’d add to her phone book.
“What’s yours?”
“Don’t know,” she said. “I’m moving and don’t have my new line yet.”
“Moving where?”
“To be decided,” she said, twitching her nose at him.
His lips parted, but he didn’t ask more.
BACK HOME IN Brooklyn, she took a nap, weary after a night in that cramped single bed. When she awoke, a hush had fallen, the storage space trembling as an overloaded truck rumbled down the Gowanus Expressway. Humphrey entered her room with a cup of instant coffee, a trail of brown drops specking the concrete floor all the way back to the kitchen.
She sat up and took the mug with thanks. No need to explain her overnight absence — he covered his ears if she alluded to romances. Humphrey declined to acknowledge her transition from little girl to grown woman, still treating her as he had when she was young: like his comrade and intellectual equal. Anything else was private. Which was fine, since she preferred to keep sexuality to herself, persisting with the neutered fashions — mothball-scented men’s clothing and boyish sneakers — that she’d adopted in early adolescence. By now, these outfits made her comfortable; a dress was unthinkable.