“And you make the laws?”
“Yes,” she said, kissing him. “I am the legislative body.”
She had slept with young men like him before, and they tended to fall into two categories: boys who concealed their astonishment at being allowed to touch female parts; and boys who sought to demonstrate their virility, as if Olympic judges awaited in the closet with scorecards. Often, young men sought reviews, wanting (not wanting) to hear how they rated and ranked — though not how many others that ranking might include. “Tell me. No, wait — don’t tell me. No, do … Why did you tell me?” Their self-absorption was not infrequently followed by professions of love. When quitting such types, she was surprised how they argued the matter, as if affections were up for negotiation. In Duncan’s case, he had such a low opinion of himself that all he expected was for her to withdraw.
But he had ample cause to esteem himself. Aside from his growing legal expertise, he had an exhaustive knowledge of music, played the piano decently (though he loathed practicing), and could draw effortlessly, able to reproduce in two dimensions anything that confronted him in three. On a sheet of inkjet paper, she sketched a nose. Within seconds, he had elaborated it into the nuanced face of a man with a pencil between his lips. He placed the pencil between his own lips and looked at her, trying not to smile.
“I’m so envious,” she said.
“It’s a useless skill.” Growing up, he had expected to apply this talent to becoming an architect like his father. But Keith McGrory had discouraged it, and Duncan conceded. “Anyway, architecture in New York is just for developers nowadays,” he told Tooly. “There’s almost an anti-design aesthetic — like they have to make buildings look cheap to demonstrate that they’re being efficient. This city is built for the market, not for beauty.” He began to gain momentum, then halted. “These aren’t even really my views. Just stuff my dad says. But I do sort of believe it.”
Even after a couple of weeks, he remained timid, preferring to have sex half clothed. She was struck by how many guys were ashamed of their bodies, when that was supposed to be an exclusively female preoccupation. Men were not only shy but shy about being shy. His self-consciousness had been exacerbated by the comments of his first girlfriend, who’d seen him in boxer shorts and remarked that a woman would kill for legs like his.
Tooly suspected a further cause for his awkwardness: he suffered from a conviction that women had for centuries lain miserably beneath hairy copulating oafs, with their liberation arriving sometime around 1968, after which every dignified man was obliged to compensate for the preceding millennia of orgasmic self-interest. This made sex a matter of due diligence. But she liked to giggle during — the act was so near silliness, in addition to being so near ecstasy. He remained powerfully embarrassed anytime he gained pleasure, as if he’d revealed himself as a shill for the patriarchy.
One time, it was different. He failed to put on a condom. Both noticed but neither interrupted the act. On the contrary, they continued more intensely, his self-consciousness gone for those minutes. The omission was ridiculous. For her to lose control of the situation — to risk tying herself to him — spooked Tooly. It aroused her, too.
Legs around him, both of them sitting up, she necked with him at length — not as a prelude to further activities but as an end in itself. No other animals did this, did they? Lips and tongues, eyelids fluttering, the disappearance from place and time. His eyes were swimming when she opened hers.
“Hello, you abomination,” she said.
“Hello, you beast.”
“You are a blotch on the soul of humanity.”
“Thank you, cannibal.”
“You’re welcome, evolution-defying organism.”
He hesitated, thinking up another endearment.
“Are you stuck, you botched cubist experiment?” she asked.
“I’m not stuck, you absurdist painting.”
“You’re copying me on the art front, you moral vacuum.”
“I’m not, you monstrosity.”
“You are, horrifying blobfish from the deepest depths of the abyss.”
That won — he laughed, kissed her chin.
In the background of this new affair, a civil war raged in that apartment between Emerson and Xavi, centering around the refrigerator. Emerson — in Billabong shorts and Reef sandals, plucking his chin beard indignantly — claimed someone was stealing his food, and applied raging Post-its (“Theft Is Wrong”) to his tofu burgers, Ben & Jerry’s frozen yogurt (“Not Yours”), even the Brita jug (“EMERSON water”). This played into the hands of Xavi, who took giddy pleasure in needling his roommate. Emerson resented Xavi’s and Duncan’s very presence, considering them interlopers in Columbia housing. He believed this justified his treating the common areas as his own, riding his mountain bike into the apartment, dumping it in the living room, mud-caked wheels spinning.
Of the three roommates, Xavi studied hardest yet also managed to be the most sociable, constantly off to parties, always dressed astonishingly: purple ascot, red jeans, paisley pocket square. He had moved to the United States at age seventeen, sponsored to attend high school in Connecticut and in possession of one battered suitcase, two silver suits, three black-and-white photos of his fiancée, a favorite Parker pen, and a toothbrush. Duncan — hardly a social success at that high school — befriended the new African kid, ate lunch with him, drove him around on weekends. By graduation, Xavi had become cultishly popular. He won a scholarship to Rutgers, and persuaded Duncan to enroll, too. In the dorms, Xavi proved a further success and always told his fans what an awesome kid Duncan was, insisting there was way more to the guy than it seemed.
There was more to Xavi, too, though he hid it. His family belonged to the Tutsi tribe, a group mistrusted across the African Great Lakes region as an intellectual elite. In the summer of 1994, when he started at Rutgers, extremists from a rival tribe, the Hutu, were seeking to exterminate every Tutsi in Rwanda. Most of his boyhood friends joined a rebel force to fight the Hutu supremacists. Perhaps he should have gone back to fight. But he had not, submerging himself in American college debauchery instead, learning the rules of beer pong, promiscuity, and the backward baseball cap. After the genocide — eight hundred thousand of his people and their allies slaughtered within weeks — Xavi still failed to return. Indeed, he stopped writing letters to his fiancée, then to his family. Yet all his college cavorting ended. Five years later, any party he attended was for networking, a word he’d learned in B-school. Xavi willed himself to success, which alone could rationalize what he had and had not done.
Her other pal there was Emerson’s girlfriend, Noeline, often found marking essays in the living room. A recently appointed assistant professor in the English department at Columbia, she was about thirty, with multiple earrings, a discreet nose stud, platform sandals, and toe rings. She and Tooly shared cigarettes on the fire escape, taking them from a soggy pack of Camel Lights, although Emerson — a health freak — made it known that the stench of smoke on Noeline disgusted him. Born to a Dutch mother and an American father, she’d grown up shutting between The Hague and Houston. Her parents were biologists who had conceived her while at Harvard, only to find university positions on opposite sides of the Atlantic. As an undergrad at Smith College, Noeline had engaged in a three-year affair with a female professor. For grad school, she attended Columbia for comparative literature, embarking on her first romances with men there, with a mixture of misgivings and enthusiasm. She’d met Emerson at a graduate seminar, and maintained that it was just a fling, their relationship a feminist irony: with all the clichés about the older male prof seducing the co-ed student, she had reversed roles. (Though, as her ex-lover at Smith observed, in that cliché the professor spirals into disgrace and ruination.)