The floor meeting, which was a double-entendre of sorts, was short and to the point. The R.A., whose name I have forgotten, was to be a ghost so long as we avoided excessive noise and public drunkenness. The floor had only recently been designated as non-smoking, she said. Extra towels were recommended. The phrase “try to keep it by the window” was uttered more than once. The more rebellious were told of a handy contraption that consists of a drier sheet and a paper towel or toilet paper roll. It is called by a variety of names, depending on your region (sploof is popular in Albany, bafunga is popular in Northern Long Island, groove tube is popular on Phish tour). There were stories of her second year, flavored with her thick Boston accent and gratuitous profanity. She smiled constantly, spoke quickly, and proposed no ultimatums.
Her sincerity and respect took just about everyone by surprise. She was to be one of us so long as we didn't give her or get her into shit. She stood above us only when she announced that she was going to her room. It was a wonderful little antimony: By relinquishing the majority of her power, we all instantly revered her. One could almost equate her with Cincinnatus.
Unlike the R.A., or most aspects of my self-restraint for that matter, Ilkay was to be a prominent figure in my life that year. We had seen each other throughout the second semester of our first year, as we had taken an ancient philosophy course together. As it was an introductory course, the setting was far from intimate. Our interactions came via momentary glances and faint looks of recognition on the street or in one of the dining halls. I may have recognized the sound of his voice. What I did remember, however, was that he sat next to the same girl during virtually every class, a girl whom one could not help but notice, a girl whom the professor initially thought was Salman Rushdie’s wife, whatever her name happens to be. She wasn’t, isn’t, probably won’t be. Nor was she related to the very beautiful wife of the very talented author, who, for the sake of referencing two favorite books, I’ll call Neela Swift.
Suffice to say, I had ulterior motives when I initially befriended him. In time, however, I learned that the two of us had far more in common than most of the acquaintances I had made at school. Of course, one of the major obstacles I had to initially overcome was convincing him that I wasn't attempting to seduce him. I had never had a gay friend (revise that; I had never befriended a guy secure enough with himself to tell people that he is gay). He had never had a straight guy go out of his way to call him a friend since his less-than-shocking departure from the closet.
I learned that the girl who resembled Neela had a name all her own, one that wasn’t provided by the oglers who came up with very inventive sobriquets by which to call her when she was beyond earshot, the most common of which was Coco-butters (a friend was fond of calling any pair of tits larger than a C cup “butters” or “butteries,” and, in this case, the coco- prefix came about for obvious reasons). This name was Vinati. And as beautiful as she was, she proved to be a short-lived infatuation. It's not that she was frigid or snobbish; in fact, she was far more outgoing than I had initially assumed. It was just that I realized very quickly that she could do better than me; furthermore, I was busy doing somebody else by the time we were formally introduced. I guess this means things failed to materialize for reasons beyond presumed futility.
Vinati and I continued to see one another probably once or twice a month. When B.A.C.s ran high we would talk, flirt, and lament over the general disinterest we shared for the other in more sober settings. A repartee was cultivated, but a genuine friendship was never established.
I came to love her presence for more than the obvious reason. Like mass and power, beauty tends to lump together. This simple fact proved to be beneficial whenever we managed to get a spot in her entourage for the night. She got us invited to parties with free booze, free food, and fashionable people by whom we were silently ostracized. If we went out to a bar, Wall Street types would sometimes buy the entire table several rounds to prove not only their wealth or amour propre, but also their strict obedience to propriety. She and her friends exploited them all ruthlessly, not that these men seemed to notice or particularly care. One could think it somewhat unethical or shameful, but the men continued to put the drinks on their tab even after they realized that they were banging their heads against a proverbial brick wall. Some of them ended up being fairly nice. All of them ended up being revelatory drunks, and most of the revelations concerned the fact that everything they do is an act, and that they don't even know who they are anymore. If we listened either in earnest or with the pretense of sincerity, they would exchange numbers not only with Vinati and her friends, but with all of the guys at the table, too.
We never called them. They never called any of us so far as I know. Vinati and I had a similar relationship. We didn't call one another or even embrace during hellos. Goodbyes were sometimes less reserved. I accepted that we sat at opposite ends of the spectrum that was comprised of the various social groups with whom Ilkay associated. Her friends were predominately female, rich, of noble families from the Indian sub-continent, beautiful, dull, and arrogant. Their bodies had few curves and fewer blemishes except for yellowed teeth and, sometimes, bad breath, which was usually covered up by an Altoid or a Parliament. Many came from the West Coast, and they talked like it, too (pronouncing “yeah” as the Scandinavian yä, and littering their narratives with words like “like” and “rad” and “hella-” and “totally” (sometimes even using all of them in a single sentence — i.e. “Yä, it was, like, totally hella-rad”)). My friends, on the other hand, were mostly contentious drunkards on the weekend, academics more or less confined to the catacombs of the library on the weekdays. We were disdained by the serious students and those who thought themselves too intellectually endowed to socialize unless at a poetry reading or a screening of a Lynch film or one of those art shows where everyone walks around with a glass of red wine and a smug grin because they know only they “really get it” (whatever this elusive “it” happens to be); we were considered too brainy for those who were at the university to piss away a fraction of their parents' fortunes on gambling, covers, liquor, and, after only six short years, an overpriced general studies degree. In other words, we were alienated from the majority of the student body because we sat in the middle of a polarized continuum. One could run a parallel to tragic irony, but the situation was not tragic, and ironic only if one misunderstands the word ‘ironic’, which happens more often than people would like to admit.
Ilkay never did understand the relationship I had with Vinati. It was his belief that the two of us had a silent infatuation for the other. He habitually floated sly remarks in our direction without being entirely clandestine or even contextually relevant, especially when drunk. These sharp (what he would call) quips would send him into small sessions of hysterics that appeared somewhat feigned, though, knowing Ilkay, this was far from the case. And while these comments rarely aroused pink or, in her case, mahogany cheeks, they did prove insidious enough to unite the two of us in momentary hatred. Maybe he sought to unite the two of us via shared scorn, though I certainly have my doubts about this — not because he had a penchant for trying to embarrass his friends, or because he happened to be that one friend who thinks the best way to appear on a pedestal is to bury everyone else; he just seemed to enjoy creating awkward tension between to the two of us.