“It’s so disturbing, lyrical,” this girl with a serious problem says.
“Very potent. Undefinable,” her friend, some dyke from Duke who’s visiting, who looks like she’s had way too much MDA, agrees.
“It’s Nimoy. Pure Nimoy,” Getch says.
My attention drifts. Somebody else walks in, somebody who if I remember correctly gave me a totally unprovoked kiss on the lips at the last Friday night party. Peter Gabriel still plays on the jukebox.
“But it’s Diane Arbus with none of the conviction,” one of the girls says and she’s serious.
Denton gives me a steely look from across the table. He probably agreed with that.
“But the revisionist theory on her seems completely unmotivated,” someone else gleefully replies. There’s a pause, then someone asks, “What about Wee Gee. What do you think about Wee Gee, for Christ sakes?”
Vaguely horny I order another pitcher and a pack of Bar-B-Que potato chips, which give me indigestion. Peter Gabriel turns into more Peter Gabriel. The girl who kissed me on the lips last Friday leaves after buying a pack of cigarettes and in some warped way I’m disappointed. She’s not that pretty (slightly Asian, Dance major?) but I’d probably fuck her anyway. Back to the conversation.
“Spielberg has gone too far on this one,” the angry mulatto intellectual with the neo-Beatnik casual but hip look plus beret who has joined the table hisses.
Where has he gone? Does he just hang out in the Canfield apartment and drink like a maniac and split on parents weekend and have a whole bunch of friends visiting him every term from boarding school? What the fuck does he do with his life? Little Freshman girls confiding in him and long walks around the dorms after dinner?
“Simply too far,” Denton agrees. He’s serious, not joking.
“Simply too far,” I say, nodding.
The table behind ours, Juniors arguing about Vietnam, some guy scratching his head, joking but not really, says, “Shit, when was that?” someone else saying, “Who gives a shit?” and this fat, earnest-looking girl who’s on the verge of tears, bellows, “I do!” Social-Science-Major-Breakdown. I turn back to our table, with the Art Fucks because they seem less boring.
The dyke from Duke asks, “But don’t you think his whole secular humanism stems from the warped pop culture of the Sixties and not from a rigorous, modernist vantage point?” I turn back to the other table but they’ve dispersed. She asks the question again, rephrasing it for the intense mulatto. Who in the hell is she asking? Who? Me? Denton just keeps nodding his head like she’s saying something incredibly deep.
Who is this girl? Why is she alive? Wonder if I should leave right now. Get up and say, “Goodnight fuck-ups, it’s been a sheer sensation and I hope I never see any of you again,” and leave? But if I do that they’ll end up talking about me and that seems worse and I’m seriously drunk. Hard to keep my eyes open. The only pretty girl at our table gets up, smiles and leaves. Someone says, whispers loudly, “She fucked … are you ready?” The table leans inward, even me. “Lauren!”
The table gasps collectively. Who’s Laurent? That French guy who lives in Sawtell? Or is it the alcoholic girl from Wisconsin who works in the library? It can’t be my Lauren? It can’t be that one. There’s no way she’s a lesbian. Even if she is, it turns me on a little. But … maybe she’s been putting the notes in the wrong box. Maybe she meant to put them in Jane Gorfinkle’s box, the box above mine? I don’t want to ask which Lauren they mean even though I want to know. I look over at the bar, try to get my mind off it, but there are at least four girls I have slept with standing there. None of them are looking over at me. Businesslike and impersonal they sip beers, smoke cigarettes
oh, what the fuck. I finally snap, get out of there, leave. As simple as that. I’m out the door. Fels is close by. I have some friends who live there, don’t I? But thinking about it bores the fuck out of me so I just walk around the dorm for a while and then split. Sawtell is next? Nah. But that girl, that girl who kissed me … I think she lives in Noyes, a single, room 9. I go to her door and knock.
I think I hear some laughter, then a high-pitched voice. Whose? I feel like a fool but I’m a drunk, so it’s cool. The door opens and it’s the girl who left the table, not the girl who kissed me, and she’s wearing a robe and behind her I can see some hairy, pale guy in bed, lighting up a big purple bong on a futon. Jesus, this really sucks, I’m thinking.
“Um, doesn’t Susan live here?” I ask, turning red, trying to keep it cool.
The girl looks back at the guy in bed. “Does Susan live around here, Loren?”
The guy sucks in on the bong. “No,” he says, offering it to me. “Leigh 9.”
I leave, fast. I walk out, fast. I’m outside, it’s cold. What am I going to do? I think. What is this night unless I do something? Is this just going to be nothing? Like every other fucking night? Something goes through my head. I decide to go to Leigh 9, where Susan lives. I knock on the door. I can’t hear much but Springsteen’s “Nebraska” album. Great music to fuck by, I’m thinking. It takes a while but Susan opens the door, finally an answer.
“What’s going on, Susan? Hi. Sorry to be bothering you at this hour.”
She looks at me strangely, then smiles and says, “No problem, come in.”
I walk in, hands in my jacket pockets. There are two Xeroxed maps of Vermont … actually it’s New Hampshire, or maybe Maryland, up on the wall, above the computer and the bottle of Stoli. I’m too drunk to do this I realize as I stagger in, take a deep breath. Susan closes the door and says, “Glad you stopped by” and locks the door and her locking the door just depresses me; it makes me realize that she wants to fuck too and that that’s what’s expected of me and it’s my own fault and it’s really Lauren Hynde I want and I think I’m going to pass out and she looks really desperate, really young.
“Where have you been?” she asks.
“Movie. Wild Italian movie. But it’s all in Italian so you can’t watch it stoned,” I say, trying to be rude, turn her off. “Subtitles, you know.”
“Yeah,” she smiles kindly, still in love with me.
“What I mean, like, um, why are those maps, um … Yeah, like what are those maps doing up there?” I ask. What a dwid.
“Maryland’s cool,” Susan says.
“I want to go to bed with you, Susan,” I say.
“What?” She pretends she didn’t hear me.
“You didn’t hear me?”
“Yeah. I did,” she says. “You didn’t feel that way the other night.”
“So, how do you feel about it?” I ask, letting that comment fly right over my head.
“I think it’s kind of ridiculous,” she says.
“How? I mean, why do you think so?”
“Because I have a boyfriend,” she says. “Remember?”
Actually, I don’t, but I blurt out, “That doesn’t matter. You don’t have to not screw because of that.”
“Really?” she asks skeptically, but smiling. “Explain.”
“Well, you see, it’s like this.” I sit on the bed. “It’s like this…”
“You’re drunk,” Susan says. God, the name Susan is so ugly. It reminds me of the word sinus. She’s daring me. I can almost smell how wet she is. She wants it.
“Where have you been all my life?” I ask.
“Did you know I was born in a Holiday Inn,” I think she says.