These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

  Once he was certain Paul was following, Julian smiled again and looked ahead. “You’re one of those people who worry all the time, aren’t you?” he said, and it was as much an accusation as a joke. “You’ve got that look.”

  Paul hurried to catch up. He turned up his hood as they emerged into the snow, but Julian’s head was bare, so he quickly lowered it again. “I don’t worry,” he protested, and when Julian looked skeptical, he dug in his heels rather than let himself be mocked. “I ruminate. They’re distinct actions.”

  “Are they?” said Julian. “From this angle . . .”

  “Worrying,” said Paul, “means you’re afraid it’s going to happen. Ruminating is when you know it will, if it hasn’t happened already. One is neurotic, the other is fatalistic, and fatalism is supported by evidence. It isn’t the same.”

  Paul didn’t notice his own tension until it receded when Julian laughed.

  “That’s the most goddamn German thing I’ve ever heard,” he said.

  Paul retrieved his bicycle from its berth outside and walked it alongside them, the fresh snow squeaking beneath its wheels.

  “Speaking of German.” There was a note of keen interest in Julian’s voice, muted but unmistakable, and Paul’s chest tightened like a coil. “That thing you were saying, about the infrastructure of ethical oversight. Where did you get it?”

  Paul’s excitement faded. “I don’t have to get it somewhere,” he said defensively. “I can think for myself.”

  “Of course you can. Don’t be so eager to get your feelings hurt, it’s boring and beneath you.”

  Something in the spiteful impatience of the remark put Paul at ease, far more than a more earnest reassurance would have. Julian coughed on a mouthful of cold air and pulled his scarlet scarf a little tighter. Against the dull gray of winter he was the only bright thing.

  “Did you really just make that up?” said Julian after a pause. He didn’t sound disbelieving, though the fascination in his eyes was still remote and clinical in a way Paul didn’t entirely appreciate. “Didn’t they give you any of the world-weary Continentals in Phil 101?”

  “Um—we did the Symposium,” Paul offered in dismay. “And some Descartes, a little bit of Kant.”

  “That’s not philosophy, that’s paleontology.” Julian spoke with a sardonic grandness that couldn’t quite conceal his enthusiasm. “You’re better than that, you need a philosophy that’s equipped to grapple with the moral reckonings of the twentieth century—you’re already most of the way there, you obviously ruminate better than most. Is that your last class of the day?”

  Paul was so dizzy on the compliment that it took him a moment to parse the question that followed. He noticed odd notes of likeness between them—the shape of their hands, their heights within an inch. It made him feel better about how dissimilar they were otherwise, as if he might really be worthy of notice.

  He nodded, belatedly, and Julian grinned.

  “Good,” he said. “Come on. I need to lend you some books.”

  On campus tours, the college always showed off its handful of spotless, intensely modern dormitories with poured-concrete walls and façades pitted with plate-glass windows. The building where Julian Fromme lived was not one of these—it was ancient and drafty, built in the same cheap brick as an elderly elementary school.

  The kitchen was a dank subterranean room with grills on its squat windows. The dim light was a mercy, since it spared Paul from seeing too clearly how filthy every surface was.

  “I’m not seeing any ginger ale,” said Julian, peering into the fridge. “Barbarians. Is Coke okay?”

  “Sure.” Paul glanced over his shoulder toward the group of boys sitting at the kitchen table, who were eating beans on toast in their boxer shorts and sweatshirts. Julian had serenely ignored them, breezing past them as if they were furniture. Paul wasn’t convinced they were returning the favor.

  “Don’t mind them,” Julian said quietly. He handed Paul his soda and glanced dismissively at the strangers. “They don’t deserve your attention.”

  Julian didn’t belong in this place. He was like a dart of clean bright light, alien and vibrant.

  He led Paul back into the hallway and up a staircase through the atrium. Someone had misplaced a volume of Hegel on the landing; Julian paused over it with feline disinterest, then deliberately kicked it the rest of the way down the stairs.

  “You don’t live on campus, do you?” he said as he searched for his keys.

  “I live with my mother.” Paul realized the moment he spoke that he couldn’t have phrased it any more like a Hitchcock shut-in. He quickly tried to paper over it. “—and my sisters. I wanted to be in the dorms, but my scholarship doesn’t cover housing, and we only live a couple miles away.”

  “Well, as you can see, you get a lot for your money.” Julian gave his door a shove to free it from the damp-swollen frame. “Come in, make yourself at home.”

  Paul did his best to pretend he did this sort of thing all the time. He tried not to linger too long over the details, lest it become obvious that he was trying to commit them to memory. There were no family photographs—just a picture of Julian himself, several years younger, arms flung around the neck of a large brown dog. There was a small stereo by the window, but no television. Instead the little room was dense with books, which spilled over from the shelves and sat in crooked stacks on the dresser and floor. Many of the spines were titled in French, and a few, with their spiky half-familiar alphabet, looked like they had to be in Russian.

  A portable chessboard lay open on the desk, pieces scattered in full combat. Paul stared at it to see if he could make sense of it, but when Julian looked at him, he turned away and seated himself tentatively in the desk chair.

  “Arendt is mandatory,” said Julian. He tossed his coat over the end of the bed and began gathering books from the case. “She’s brilliant, I Greyhounded up to New York last semester for a talk she gave at the New School. She gets at why behavioral norms can’t function as a conscience—the purpose of social norms is to norm, not to attain moral perfection—oh, let’s get some of old Fritz in here too, why not, the Teutonic bombast will stick to your ribs. Your other friends don’t give you homework, do they, Fleischer?”

  “I wish,” Paul said faintly. It startled him, perhaps more than it should have, for Julian to use the word friend.

  “You’ll regret saying that by the time I’m through with you.” Julian had dropped the books at Paul’s elbow and was rifling through his milk crate full of records. “I was led to believe,” he said, “that college was a haven for the intellectually curious. Turns out that it’s really just about acculturating you to academia—which is fascinating, petri dish of maladaptive behavior that it is, but still.”

  “Is that even true? I thought it was about drugging yourself into a stupor.”

  “I think they prefer to pronounce it ‘seeking enlightenment by way of the chemical expansion of the mind.’ How else are they going to feel self-righteous about it?”

  Julian flung himself onto his bed. Paul felt an odd thrill, not unlike relief, when he saw that Julian was grinning. He was terrified Julian would notice that he spoke too haltingly around the remnants of his childhood stutter—that his thoughts were ugly and incomplete and insufficiently well-read.

  “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Uh—I’ll be seventeen in March.”

  “Ha! I knew it.” Julian retrieved his soda from the windowsill and settled back on his elbows. “I can always spot a fellow runt. I skipped third and seventh—ruined my chances of ever playing varsity sports. My father was furious.”

  He could have resisted the impulse to be honest, but he chose to yield. The surrender made his body feel light and cool.

  “I just had to graduate early, because otherwise they wanted to expel me.”

  “Get out,” said Julian. “What did you do?”

  He had never said it out loud before. It occurred to him, as he was speaking,
that it ought to feel stranger than it did.

  “I hit a guy in the face with my locker door.”

  “The hell you did!”

  “He needed about fifteen stitches.” Paul couldn’t decide if Julian looked enthralled or horrified. “He had it coming,” he added, but Julian waved him off.

  “I can imagine. God, If I’d known that was all it took to get out of high school, I’d’ve done it myself. Did your parents hit the roof?”

  Paul scrambled for an excuse to avoid Julian’s eyes. He busied himself making room in his knapsack for Julian’s books; the diversion felt transparent, but he couldn’t think of anything more sophisticated.

  “My mother doesn’t really . . . she just gets sad,” he said. The truthfulness was beginning to burn like an overextended limb. “That’s all she does anymore, she worries at you and asks ‘Why are you doing this?’ and sits around feeling sorry for herself where she knows you can see her, so you feel like you have to do something about it—which is what she does anyway, she’s a house-widow, all she’s good for is cashing the pension checks and making people feel bad for her. So it was just—more of that. And I guess I got grounded, but I don’t go out much anyway, so I didn’t really notice.”

  In the brief silence that followed, Paul still couldn’t bring himself to meet Julian’s eyes.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I didn’t mean to just . . .”

  “It’s a raw nerve,” said Julian evenly. “You’re allowed them. For what it’s worth, there’s a reason I decided to go to college in a town where my parents don’t know anybody.”

  Paul noticed distantly that he didn’t much care for the record Julian was playing. It was a girl singing in French, nothing he could object to in substance, but the cadence was poppy and simple in a way that he felt Julian oughtn’t to care for. The dislike elated him—it gave him something, however trivial, that he could politely overlook for Julian’s sake.

  “Where are they?” he asked.

  “DC.” Julian paused, then corrected himself. “Near DC. My father works at the State Department, but they live in a little village on the bay that ‘keeps the riff-raff out,’ as he says. Of course, according to the town charter, he’s riff-raff, but we’re pretending to be Episcopalian so that we’ll be allowed into the country club.”

  Paul tried to conceal his fascination. “That’s,” he said carefully, “I mean, it’s very—”

  “Don’t be diplomatic about it, it’s disgusting—I think he only married my mother because he was hoping the kids would turn out blond,” said Julian. “Not that she’s any better than he is, or she’d be chum in the water. She’s from France. Her father owns a bunch of department stores there—money’s so new you can still smell the ink, but they’re swimming in it. She’s on the board at MoMA and owns a gallery in New York, because I guess she needed a hobby.”

  A few details in the room that had struck Paul as strange at first sight now began to make sense. The string of maritime signal flags pinned to the wall above the bed, clashing brightly with the room’s general asceticism; the crisp new wool of Julian’s winter coat and the conservative, prep-school shape of his clothes. These details rang false because they had been chosen by someone else, someone who lacked Julian’s wit and energy and his ability to ignore everything beneath his notice.

  “It’s not tragic, or anything,” Julian was saying. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s just tedious. I hope you won’t hold it against me—being, you know, a half-shiksa trust fund baby who’s never had to work for anything. I usually lie about it.”

  Julian’s vulnerability was more calculated than it pretended to be, but Paul decided not to fight it.

  “I’d never hold it against you,” Paul said. “I’ve actually been thinking this whole time how I can’t really make sense of you. You’re nothing like anyone else, and now I know it’s not because of where you come from. Nothing made you. You just are.”

  He didn’t know before speaking how nakedly earnest the words would sound, but he only regretted it for a moment. One corner of Julian’s mouth went a little higher than the other when he smiled; Paul remembered something he’d read in his art history class last semester, about how the Japanese believed there was something poignant and endearing about asymmetry.

  “Damn you, Fleischer,” said Julian. “Now I’m going to have to try and live up to that.”

  3.

  Paul could only forgive himself for keeping a journal if he told himself he was documenting history. He wrote it for an audience, one who would only read it after the end of a life he’d made significant. He imagined a future biographer poring through his juvenilia for the signs of future greatness, and how that person would perceive the moments of weakness and self-indulgence in between. In hindsight his frustrations and fears would be taken as evidence that he was still human—but in the present, before he’d made anything of himself, they meant he was only human.

  A few weeks after his father’s death, Paul had launched and begun to document a variety of self-improvement projects designed to increase his mental and physical vigor—running times when the weather allowed, swimming times when it didn’t, synopses and excerpts from the enriching books and essays he read between the horror and science fiction he secretly preferred. Every few weeks he took himself up the Mount Washington funicular, resuming alone a ritual his father had led when Paul was little in an attempt to cure him of his fear of heights. When he reached the top, Paul had to stand on the observation deck, close enough to the railing to touch it with his elbows, until he was so shaky and light-headed that he had to retreat. His father had always rewarded this so-called bravery with an ice cream or a packet of baseball cards, no matter how much of a fool Paul had made of himself by running away or crying. Nowadays Paul brought his stopwatch with him, and he recorded the minutes and seconds he lasted before his crashing heartbeat pulled him back from the edge.

  On bad days, there were no improvements to write down. On worse days he couldn’t even try to make himself better. But he wrote every day, even when all he could do was pick fights with a dead man. He resurrected long-ago arguments about his schoolwork or spats with classmates, things his father would never have remembered. He searched his memory for lies his father had told him, the gentle coddling lies parents always told their children, and none was so small that he couldn’t dissect it down to threads. When the fury burned so bright that he couldn’t bear to look, Paul curled over his desk with his head bowed close to the page, watching the pen move from the corner of his eye. He wrote long, ruthless lists. Reasons to stay alive, however little joy it brought. The same words appeared every time, duty and defiance and refusing to submit to weakness. Paul never let himself consider who he was trying to convince.

  He tried to believe there was no shame in what he wrote, those days when he was too lead-limbed and numb to try to make himself stronger. Paul could be forgiven his unhappiness, even his fear, so long as one day he proved strong enough to overcome it. There was no surpassing himself unless he knew which parts of him deserved to be left behind. Paul imagined the summarizing sentences in his biography—how they would mark his sharpest turns of phrase, and marvel, in retrospect, at the resilience he’d showed.

  The day after he first spoke to Julian Fromme, he took his journal out of the locked paint box he kept under his bed and opened it to a fresh white page. January 17, 1973, he wrote, more neatly than usual because he pictured the biographer making a note of it. Yesterday I met someone I believe will prove very important.

  Paul didn’t know what Julian was destined for, but the promise of greatness marked every part of him. Even Julian didn’t seem to know—throughout the first few weeks Paul watched him breeze between interests and ambitions, and he became an expert on each one so quickly that it was as if he were born knowing everything. But he wasn’t aimless. His curiosity was ravenous, blazing in all directions like the sun. He wanted to write scathing treatises on human nature, empirical data on obedience and self-delusi
on, nocking neatly into Arendt’s bleak promises. He wanted to hone his Russian to a fine enough point to read Nabokov’s early works in the original, or else to become a spy. He had ideas for satirical novels about what he called the haute-bourgeoisie, because god knew his hometown had given him enough material. When he reviewed movies for the college newspaper, he was razor-precise, calling out long takes he liked and choppy editing that he didn’t—after all, if he ever became a film director, he had to know how to do it right.

  He took Paul to strange art galleries in the Strip District, where there were wild nonsensical interpretive dances or fleshy sculptures whose formless sensuality made Paul squirm and look away. Whenever Paul and Julian stood together in front of an artwork—a canvas blank but for a single fleck of blue, a collage of magazine models with their eyes blacked out—Julian would take rapid measure of it and then elbow Paul’s arm. “What do you think?” he would ask, with no hint of what he wanted to hear, and Paul could never think fast enough to say anything at all.

  It was impossible to keep up with him. Paul’s tongue was too clumsy for wit. His thoughts were meticulous and slow, and he could never find words for them until he had milled an idea down to the grist.

  There was something mesmerizing about the way Julian moved—carelessly graceful, as if he weren’t excruciatingly conscious of every atom he displaced. Paul had tried all his life to erase the anxious delicacy in his own gestures, especially the hesitant motions of his hands. For a while he thought he could teach his body to follow Julian’s somehow, if only he practiced long enough. He spent hours in front of his bedroom mirror, trying to relax into that loose-limbed elegance. But Paul was fettered and careful, and even his weak imitation of Julian’s posture looked wrong.

  When they walked together across campus, Paul could all but see the two of them from the outside—a dark-haired Apollo painted in flowing Botticelli lines, and the ungainly stork of a boy beside him, trying to keep in step. He could tell other people were thinking it too, especially the friends of Julian’s who thought themselves more deserving of Paul’s place. They never hid the disbelief in their smiles as they glanced between the two of them, clearly wondering why.