One day, Annie spots her beloved teacher going into a movie theater with a girl from her school, a senior. They’re holding hands. Annie is upset, telling herself that they must have been on a field trip, yet not really believing it. Her father, sensing that something is bothering her, suggests she turn her ticket stub collection into a kind of oracle. “Ask it a question, pull out a stub, and see if it gives you an answer,” he advises. Annie asks her shoebox why the teacher and the senior went to the movies together. She pulls out a ticket for The Love Bug. At first she finds this answer confusing, since The Love Bug is about Herbie, a Volkswagen Beetle with a mind of its own, which has nothing to do with her question. But she decides to take the title at face value and concludes that her teacher and the senior are in love. She lost a little bit of her innocence that day.
I left the stage to polite applause, overcome with embarrassment, my face hot and my heart pounding in my ears so loudly I barely heard the next few readers.
Then the final reader stepped onstage: the wine-for-all-my-friends girl. She wore a flowered dress under an army surplus jacket with MITCH stitched over one breast pocket in pink thread. Her name was not Mitch but Carmen Dietz, and like so many of the kids I admired at school, she was from New York City. She read a story about a girl named Caledonia and her boyfriend, Attila. They lived in the East Village, young bohemians in love. They shoplifted, they drank beer on their tenement roof, they wore eccentric hats, they got high in an abandoned van they found near the East River. They were sad and wounded in their different ways, but they’d never admit it, hiding their pain with outlaw bravado.
Carmen finished reading and was greeted with rowdy cheers as she stepped off the stage. I crumpled up my story, vowing to throw it away when I got home. It was childish compared to Carmen’s. Her story wasn’t about a crush—it was about a love affair. But I didn’t know how to write about that kind of love, because I hadn’t experienced it yet. As far as I was concerned, I hadn’t experienced anything at all, and I was determined to change that deficiency.
* * *
That October, a junior who’d sold me his mini-fridge invited me to a party at his off-campus apartment. Upperclassman, off-campus: catnip to me and Tara, both of us hoping for an entree into the golden world that swirled around us yet seemed to find us invisible. Tara was an earnest brunette from Yardley, Pennsylvania, where she’d been star of the field hockey team, president and valedictorian of her large public high school, as well as a smash as Nancy in Oliver! It was not too late—yet—to avoid getting stuck with the people who were just like the people we’d grown up with. We already knew that crowd. We were looking to shake off our pasts and re-create ourselves, to test our charms and see how far they’d carry us.
We arrived at the party too early and sat around the apartment drinking beer and feeling awkward. Christian, the host, offered us a joint. We smoked it. A little while later I realized the room had somehow become very dark and noisy and crowded while I wasn’t looking. Tara was dancing with Christian. Lacey Risch sat on a windowsill talking to a guy with a popped collar and blow-dried blond hair. She’d been fairly friendly in the dorm, so I went over to say hello. She didn’t seem to recognize me. I apologized for interrupting their conversation. The blow-dried guy said, “Hey,” without taking his eyes off Lacey. I reddened and skulked away in shame. For something to do, I stood in the bathroom line. The girl ahead of me in line was Carmen. She was wearing her Mitch jacket over a Betsey Johnson dress. I’d noticed she wore that jacket a lot.
“You know about her and the movie star, right?” Carmen said. She indicated Lacey, who was leaning out the window, blowing a stream of cigarette smoke out of the side of her mouth.
“Do you know who it was?”
“Uh-huh.” She named an actor famous for portraying sensitive antiheroes. “She claims he came in one day while she was working at Cake Masters last summer. Ordered a black-and-white cookie, stared at her while she fumbled with the wax paper and the little white bag, tried to pay for it with a hundred-dollar bill, then, when she said she didn’t have change for that, emptied all the change in his pockets on the counter and paid her in nickels, dimes, and lint.”
“He did that?”
“Finally he asked her out. He’s, what, forty-two? And married. I think. She said no. He came in every day after that. Always a black-and-white cookie. Asked her out once a week, begging her to say yes before he got fat from all the cookies, until she finally left for college.”
“And she never said yes?” I didn’t think I’d have the willpower to turn down a movie star every week. Didn’t Lacey want to find out what he’d be like on a date?
“Never.”
Apparently in New York, a summer job behind a bakery counter wasn’t drudgery, it was a chance to meet movie stars and make them fall in love with you. Opportunities abounded on every corner, in every pizza place and grocery store. All you had to do was stand there long enough and a fairy tale would swoop by and make you its star.
“What about John-John? Why won’t she go out with him?”
Carmen shook her head. “Who knows? Maybe she’s scared.”
She didn’t seem scared to me. And anyway, what was there to be scared of?
“He’s going out with a girl in my dorm now,” Carmen said. “Or at least he took her to a play once.”
“Which girl?”
“Celeste Gwynn. Big green eyes, curly hair, outdoorsy type from Vermont?”
“Oh yeah.” Celeste Gwynn also had long legs and freckles and beautiful rosy cheeks.
A guy came out of the bathroom, and we moved forward in the line. “You know, I save all my movie ticket stubs too,” Carmen said to me. “Also theater and concert tickets. But I never thought of telling fortunes with them.”
She remembered my story. I reddened. I didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or pleased.
“I’m serious, that’s a brilliant idea,” she said. “I’m going to do that from now on.”
At last she reached the head of the line. She invited me to come into the bathroom with her. I was afraid saying no would be rude. She peed. I tried to pee but couldn’t.
From then on, we were friends. I looked for her when I stopped in the Blue Room for coffee between classes, and if she was there she’d beckon me to her table whether she was sitting alone or with friends. One day, over cigarettes and Tab, I asked her about Attila. Was he based on a real person?
“He gave me this jacket,” she said, touching the pink MITCH over her heart. “Not only that, Attila Pilkvist is his real name.”
His father, Terry, a Midwesterner, and his Hungarian mother, Borbála, had somehow ended up in Massachusetts. Borbála had insisted on calling their firstborn Attila, a name still popular in Hungary. Terry associated it with brutality and begged Borbála to call their son something less barbaric—Tim, perhaps, or Scott. Borbála would not change her mind. Terry refused to use the name Attila and called the baby Kyle, just to annoy her. Soon after that they got divorced.
Carmen had met him the year before, around Christmas. She and her friend Sarita went to a bar somewhere in the West Village, and Atti played a few of his songs. His straight brown hair shagged over light almond eyes and high, fine cheekbones. The girls in the room pressed closer to listen as he strummed his guitar.
“I live across town on the East Side,” he said. “Most days I sit in my room and stare out the window, writing down what I see. Here’s some things I’ve seen lately. This song is called ‘The Birds Gossip About Me.’ ”
The birds outside my window watch me
Eat chicken
Right in front of them
They call me a monster
They call out to the other birds
Monster
Monster
I’m afraid to go outside
Can’t face the birds.
Carmen bought him a drink. Around two she realized Sarita had left, so she walked with Atti through the bitter cold all the way across town to h
is squat on Avenue C. His room looked down on a garden full of trash, and the moon shining through the metal window gates cast a pattern of diamonds on the floor. He kicked off his boots and stretched out on the mattress and she lay in his arms, staring at those diamonds of moonlight. He had a hole in the toe of his black sock.
That was it. She was lost forever.
At first, when he shot up, she was content to observe the smile melting across his face like butter on toast, and to wonder what sweet scenes he viewed behind his fluttering eyelids. But she hated being left behind, and after a while watching wasn’t enough. Wherever he went, she wanted to go with him. She started by snorting a little, and before long Atti was helping her tie off her arm with two condoms knotted together, saying, “Are you sure? Are you really sure?” until she playfully slapped him and said, “Yes, do it.”
Her parents kept trying to bring her back uptown, to keep her away from him. When they found track marks on her arms, they sent her to Humphrey-Worth to help her kick. She stopped using, but it didn’t matter. Her soul had been sucked through that hole in his sock, and she couldn’t go back.
Some of this history was familiar to me from Carmen’s stories. When I think back to it now, to us talking in the Blue Room, the facts she told me get mixed up with the stories she read at the coffeehouse. I can’t remember which parts were true, and which parts she made up. But I do remember how I loved her talk about abandoned blocks and glass-strewn streets and gardens of trash, and how I marveled at her.
I can escape myself, I thought back then. All I had to do was forget the rules and follow her.
4 THE GATSBY PARTY
When our freshman year ended, Carmen and I promised to write to each other over the summer. I hoped she would invite me to visit her in New York, but felt I couldn’t ask. I wrote long, chatty letters about how bored I was in Baltimore, hinting that I was ready to hop on the train to New York at any moment. She answered my first letter with a short note complaining that her old Dalton friends had changed and were no longer fun. After that, I didn’t hear from her until we got back to Providence in September.
She didn’t say much about how she’d spent the summer, and I was afraid of boring her with my tales of life as a pizza counter girl. But soon we were as close as ever. When a break approached, I fervently hoped for an invitation to her parents’ apartment, but it never came. She dropped out of touch whenever she went home, with no explanation. This ritual disappearance kept a distance between us that I began to suspect she wanted. But I refused to let that stop me. I was convinced I could bridge the rift she cultivated if I could hook her interest somehow. I assumed she saw me as conventional and boring, but I knew, based on nothing more than my own conviction, that beneath my wholesome exterior beat the heart of an adventuress. All I had to do was set the adventuress free and let Carmen see that here was her true friend.
We were never roommates; she lived with a girl named Hannelore freshman and sophomore year, until they had a fight that ended their friendship. Carmen moved out of their room and took a single, which she kept for the next two years. I took a single junior year too, and senior year I lived off-campus with Tara and one of her hockey teammates. We lived on Meeting Street, behind RISD, next to a houseful of art students.
In the fall of senior year, a boy in my Religious Themes in Cinema class asked me out to see Fitzcarraldo. He was a poli-sci major with stiff posture named Mark Coughlin, and in spite of our common interest in movies, I found him a little dull. He liked to read books about how stupid people are and quote factoids from them. Like: Let’s say you’re a doctor considering a new cancer treatment. If the drug salesman tells you that after five years ninety out of a hundred patients who had the treatment were still alive, you are likely to prescribe the drug to your patients. If you’re told that five years after the treatment ten out of a hundred patients died, you’re likely to caution your patients against it.
“The two statistics are exactly the same,” Mark crowed. “Even doctors are idiots.” He was always looking for proof that everyone was stupid except for him.
But Carmen encouraged me to give him a chance. I hadn’t had a boyfriend in college yet, just a few unsatisfying frat-party flings. The guys I liked didn’t notice me, and the guys who noticed me I didn’t like. Carmen said I was too picky, so I took her advice and agreed to see Mark again. The date wasn’t a disaster, so I kept seeing him out of romantic apathy.
Mark found everything about my body fascinating. The single black hair that curled off my right nipple; the pouchy shape of my breasts; the birthmark, like a large freckle, centered over my pubic bone; the pale-brown hair there; my plain milky smell… He liked it all. I wasn’t his first girlfriend, but still he seemed amazed and excited that a girl would let him see her naked. He let me explore his body too, very frankly and without embarrassment. His body had a kind of correctness to it, perfect proportions, everything in its place, nothing extreme, except for a worrisome abundance of moles.
After a few weeks of this, early in my last semester and deep in the dull heart of a Providence winter, I came across Carmen and Mark having coffee in the Blue Room. Carmen waved me over and I sat down with them. She leaned toward Mark in a way that suggested intimacy and a secret. Soon I realized, the way you sense these things, that Carmen and Mark had slept together. Not recently, but at some point, and probably more than once. I was tempted to ask her about it, but she hadn’t said anything before, when she was urging me to go out with him, which was strange. I got the message: whatever it was, she didn’t want to tell me about it.
So I asked Mark. He told me that he’d dated Carmen’s roommate, Hannelore, sophomore year, until Carmen seduced him.
“Seduced you?” I said. “What does that mean?”
“You don’t know what seduced means?”
“I know what it means, but how did she do it?”
He shrugged. “You know, things happen.”
“Did you feel bad about it? About Hannelore?”
“She was upset,” Mark said. “But she had no right to be. She didn’t own me.” He swallowed, and I watched, with the faintest hint of disgust, the rise and fall of his Adam’s apple. “She was madder at Carmen than at me. They had a huge fight.”
Carmen was my friend, yet she withheld basic facts of her life from me. I thought the problem was with me, that in some way I was unworthy of her confidence. What was I doing wrong? I looked around at the behavior of my fellow students and came to the conclusion that Carmen sensed how much I wanted her to like me, and that repelled her. I opened my eyes and received the message blaring all over campus: vulnerability equals weakness, and weakness arouses contempt. I had only to hide my longing and my desire, and they would be fulfilled. Or at least they’d have a chance.
But hiding my feelings wasn’t easy for me. My face gave everything away and my curiosity tormented me. At last I couldn’t stop myself from confronting her.
“Why didn’t you tell me you slept with Mark sophomore year?”
“Does it matter?”
“Not really, I guess, but you could have told me. He said you stole him from your roommate.”
“Stole him. Ha. As if he had nothing to do with it. It wasn’t exactly hard.”
She was refusing to see my point. “But… if you were dating an ex of mine, I’d tell you. I’d tell you anything you wanted to know. We could compare notes.”
“He’s not my ex,” she said. “It was just a fling. I felt like messing with Hannelore, that’s all. She’s so fucking frail. She’s a vegetarian, but plants are her friends, so she can hardly eat anything, not even vegetables! She always has a headache, or an earache, or a stomachache, or this weird thing she calls a ‘hair-ache.’ Sometimes I just wanted to punch her. Plus, that name. Hannelore. Like a Nazi princess.”
“But you lived with her for two years.”
“God, I know.” She offered me a Marlboro, which I took. “Don’t you think Mark is kind of boring?” She couldn’t remember wha
t she’d ever seen in him.
* * *
That spring I started hearing about the Gatsby Party. A consortium of Beautiful People—the shah’s niece, the jazz singer’s daughter, a von Bülow, and other fancy rich kids—had rented Rosecliff, a historic Newport mansion overlooking the ocean, and were inviting all their friends. The theme was The Great Gatsby, and everyone had to wear twenties clothes. There would be a caterer and champagne and a Dixieland band and dancing and Japanese lanterns. It was rumored that Gang of Four was going to play a private concert, because the shah’s niece was somehow friends with them from when she lived in London. She wouldn’t confirm it. The party would be just like the ones Jay Gatsby threw in the novel, only better, because no vulgar hangers-on would be invited, only cool people. I desperately wanted to go. At the very least, I would get to see what they did on the other side of the golden gate they locked behind them.
The blond boy with the popped collar, who had stopped blow-drying his hair by then and whose name was Spence, had invited Carmen to the party with the understanding that she’d bring enough coke for him and his friends. Everyone knew she had drug connections, through Atti. Carmen didn’t have the power to bring me along. You had to be officially invited by the host consortium, or asked as a date by someone who’d been officially invited.
One warm Saturday afternoon Carmen stopped by my apartment on her way to the library. I was sitting at the little desk in my room—chained to it, really, since I had two papers due Monday—with a two-liter bottle of Tab and a blank sheet of onionskin rolled into my typewriter, staring out the window. The RISD students who lived next door were cutting one another’s hair in the little yard outside their building, accompanied by side two of Abbey Road. They’d been doing this all spring, whenever the weather was nice. Always cutting their hair—sometimes dyeing it—always Abbey Road, always side two, the side that starts with “Here Comes the Sun.” Carmen came in and stood by my desk, watching them with me. “Oh, that magic feeling,” the Beatles sang, “nowhere to go.”
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