by Greg Fields
During the final verse the maitre d’ had approached the table, the same plastic smile set on his face. He stood at the corner of the booth while the group sang. His smile did not change even as the song rose in spirit and volume. He continued to stand there, smiling, as the singers ended their song and joyously reached across the table to shake each other’s hands, proudly, warmly, laughing buoyantly. They had ignored him. No one noticed him there, but he did not seem to mind. He had seen all this many times before.
“Gentlemen,” at last he said in his sharp little accent. The six looked at him, wide-eyed and a bit surprised. “You must keep your voices down. Sing, yes, but quietly, please. We have other guests.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. We’re sorry,” replied Finnegan, genuinely contrite. “We musta got carried away. No hard feelings, okay?” He rose and shook the maitre d’s hand.
“None, sir. Continue to enjoy your evening.”
“The guys in the other booth liked it,” O’Hanlon called after him as he walked away.
“Mus’ be a Princeton grad,” mumbled Murdoch. “Shows what an Ivy League degree’ll do for ya. He could be a waiter in any restaurant in the city. Degree like that opens doors.”
Finnegan felt warm, at first in his extremities then creeping centrally along his arms and legs to some undefined destination in his interior. His limbs became elastic. As a result, his beer mug had become quite heavy. He lifted it carefully with both hands, not so much to avoid spilling as to avoid dropping it altogether. For a long while he said nothing. The room itself, close now around them, began to rotate. In a few minutes it was spinning faster, its colors, dim to begin with, blended increasingly together. The faces of his friends, too, grew fuzzier and fuzzier. Across from him McIlweath’s head moved onto Reg Coleman’s body, then hopped to Rick Murdoch’s, whose own head hovered in midair across the table. McIlweath, before Finnegan’s very eyes, grew another nose.
From time to time, each of the six had to make his way to the restroom. As the evening passed the trips grew more frequent. For Finnegan they also grew more difficult. By his fourth or fifth trip he had memorized the route, fortunately, for he could no longer see well enough through the dim light to breach new territory. On his seventh trip he knocked against a table on his left, jostling the diners there and spilling a bit of their beer. He did not think to apologize. His mind, able now to absorb only one task at a time, was programmed to move his body to a place for urination. If he had stopped to apologize, he might well have relieved himself right there in a water glass. To compensate for his error, on the next trip Finnegan stayed to the extreme right. He lurched too far and his shoulder slammed into a wall. The wall provided stability. He kept his right side pressed against it all the way to the rest room.
The evening continued, and, despite their stupor, the six kept calling for more beer. The servers took only slight notice, for this was not uncommon. The place’s management was currently reevaluating its all-you-can-drink policy. Although it had attracted some reputable customers, the youth of America was making it more costly than they had anticipated. The servers, though, could only continue to do their jobs.
Finnegan knew that conversation at the table was continuous, and he knew that he was taking part in it. But he could not remember what they were talking about from one moment to the next. Once a topic passed on, it was gone forever, vanished into an obliterated past. Nor could he distinguish his own comments from those of his friends. There were voices, six of them, all whirling together. His own sounded foreign to him, coming from outside his head. He knew that they all were talking as rapidly as their benumbed lips permitted. Finnegan offered opinions and anecdotes, that much he knew, riding the full crest of conversation merely for the present joy of being part of it. Yet he did not know what he was saying. His mind was in no condition to formulate precise or logical thoughts. As did all the others, he spurted out reactions, interrupted boisterously, responded immediately when the soft, bulbous fetus of an idea, hatched from their collective efforts at profundity, made its way into his liquefied consciousness.
All real sense of time had, of course, been distorted. They might have been at the table an hour, or three, or six. No one bothered to look. Again, it did not matter. And still they drank, yielding to the occasion, enormous amounts passing down their gullets. The beer started to taste tinny. The carbonation mixed resentfully, belligerently now with their stomach acids and echoed back to their mouths. Somewhere in the evening the beer had lost its smooth good humor. It had even lost its measure as a means to an end, for that end had long ago been passed. It was now just a process, a habit before them in glass and gold. They drank mindlessly, and as automatically they urinated it away.
Finnegan all of a sudden felt exhausted. He could no longer keep his head erect. For a while he tried, but it dipped and bobbed from side to side, adding to the dim, blurring whirl of the room. He told himself to rest, just for a bit. Finnegan leaned his head into Lanny O’Hanlon’s shoulder and closed his eyes.
He woke when O’Hanlon stood to go to the rest room and Finnegan crumbled to the bench where his roommate had been seated. Pulling himself up, Finnegan assured his concerned friends that he had not been hurt. They believed him.
When O’Hanlon returned, they agreed at last that it was time to head back through the streets, to the car, and back to campus. They called for the bill. Being the only one of reasonably sound mind, Tom McIlweath calculated it into six parts and exacted from each of them the right amount, or so they trusted. Later he would tell them that they had consumer thirty-seven pitchers of beer.
Finnegan rose with the greatest effort. His muscles, reluctant before, had become rebellious. The same command for movement had to be issued three or four times, very deliberately, before his body would respond. He found it impossible to focus on anything. Since opening his eyes after his brief nap he could find nothing solid. Nothing stood still. He felt as if he were looking into a kaleidoscope, or, worse, that he himself were trapped inside the tube, turning and tumbling with the colors around him.
As he moved to the doorway, his stomach forced the crisis. Finnegan was too weak to fight it. By the maitre d’s stand next to the entryway, he doubled over and vomited. Some of the debris splashed up on Dan Rosselli’s trousers. Rosselli, oblivious, kept on walking. Late diners stopped in mid-bite. Those with food already in their mouths screwed up their courage and swallowed hard.
Finnegan did not pause for a second. He kept going, as quickly as his insensible legs would move him, out the door and into the light of the street. Behind him he would hear Reg Coleman, who, by virtue of a late restroom trip, was the last to leave, speaking with the maitre d’, whose voice, as ever, remained unruffled.
“Hey, waiter,” said Coleman quite loudly, “Lookathis. Somebody puked in your lobby, for Chris’ sake. Iss a goddamn stinky mess.”
“I know, sir. We will clean it up, But it was one of your friends.”
“Naw, my friends wuddin’ do this. Naw.” Coleman left the restaurant shaking his head and continuing to protest, mostly to himself, that his friends were too good a group to vomit in a restaurant entryway.
But when he emerged he was greeted by the sight of Finnegan, one hand in his pocket and one hand bracing himself against the side of the building, head lowered prayerlike, regurgitating the last contents of his stomach onto the sidewalk. Coleman began jumping up and down, pointing and yelling.
“Yeah, yeah,” he screamed. “God damn, Conor. It was you. Conor, way to go, pal.”
“Leave’m alone,” snapped O’Hanlon. “This is good for him. He needed this.”
For Finnegan’s part, retaining some shred of dignity became essential. He had to counter the impact of what he had just done. Consequently, as he completed his vomiting on the sidewalk, he had tucked one hand into his pocket in a gesture designed to affect a casual air while he scrupulously tried to stand as erect as possible with his other hand propping him up against the wall. He vomited into one spot be
tween the tips of his loafers.
The walk through the streets of New York back to the Port Authority Terminal helped clear all their heads. Although the hour was late, the streets were by no means dead. Within two blocks of the restaurant, two prostitutes spoke to them from the doorway of a tavern. They wafted out, white and glittery, make-up and black stockings providing their masks.
“Hey fellas, you lookin’ for some fun? We’re real fun. We’re fun enough for all of you.”
Finnegan, McIlweath and Rosselli slowed down to look at this. O’Hanlon, still leading the way, charged ahead with Murdoch and Coleman at his shoulders.
“Not tonight, ladies,” replied O’Hanlon without breaking stride. “Maybe some other night when we’re sober.”
“Your three friends seem interested.” One woman walked out of the shadows to slip her arm around Rosselli’s and Finnegan’s shoulders. Finnegan looked at her closely, unable to move.
She was not unattractive by any means. Finnegan looked into her face, seemingly level with his, although she must have been several inches shorter. She had a small face, tapering down to a point of a chin. Her eyes were clouded by blue shadow and heavy mascara, but Finnegan could see that they were green, a haunting, remote color. Her thin lips broke into a mischievous smile over teeth that were still white. The girl’s hair was a strawberry blond, parted in the middle and hanging freely to slightly below her shoulders. She had curled it subtly so that gentle waves ran its length. To Finnegan she did not seem cheap. She did not fit the image. She looked fresh, not worn or jaded, and she smelled wonderful. She smelled like orchids. Finnegan felt himself becoming aroused.
“What do you say, lover?” she cooed. “The three of us could have a real good time.” Finnegan smiled at her shyly, and she leaned over to kiss his cheek.
O’Hanlon, noting that he had lost half his squad, stopped at once and looked back. He turned and walked briskly to Finnegan and Rosselli, then grabbed their elbows.
“Come on, you idiots. Don’t waste your time.” He tugged them away forcefully. “Sorry, sweetheart. We come as a group or we don’t come at all.”
“Your loss, fellas. See you soon.”
“We weren’t going to do anything, Mick,” said Rosselli as he was led away. “We just wanted to see what they were like. Seemed like a nice enough girl.”
“Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, Dan, she wasn’t interested in making friends. She’s a working girl. Jesus, you probably caught some kind of disease just talking to her. What am I going to do with you guys?”
“Just love us, Lanny.”
On they marched. The lateness of the hour made restrooms impossible to find. Even though the walk back took no more than forty-five minutes, relief became necessary twice, with some urgency. On the first occasion they ducked down a subway station. Finding no restrooms, they started to go back up the steps when Rosselli spotted a bank of old-style wooden phone booths. He went into one, picked up the receiver and cradled it to his ear. In a few seconds a stream trickled out from under the door. The other five got the idea and made similar calls.
The second occasion struck without a subway station nearby. Rosselli again provided the answer. “Boys, gather round me,” he said as he walked up to the corner of the MetLife Building. They did so, shoulder to shoulder. Rosselli, protected against whatever scrutiny there might be at that hour, relieved himself against that great black tombstone. When he was done, the others took their turns. Even years later, Finnegan could not look at the MetLife Building without wondering if there might be an indelible stain on its 45th Street corner.
He remembered nothing of the drive back to campus save that McIlweath, thankfully, was behind the wheel. Finnegan put his head against Dan Rosselli’s arm, outstretched along the back of the seat, and slept. As he did, the city disappeared behind him. For now, Conor Finnegan’s hunger had been sated. Or rather, it had been numbed into a quiet state of suspended energy.
***
Two weeks later it rained. It had rained occasionally in the intervening days, too, but the rain then had not pierced the skin and crawled into the marrow, spreading there as a sickening damp chill peculiar to November. The wind rose from the east, sweeping across the Atlantic headlands into the towns, villages and suburbs of central New Jersey, blowing the rain horizontally in gusts like so many tiny needles. The welcoming greens of summer and early autumn faded in the growing blear of shorter days until there was no green at all, only browns and grays, covered in the rain by a nighttime blackness so thick as to be suffocating—the bottomless black of a nature gone comatose, consigned to a long and bitter sleep. The only light was what man provided: streaky windows, the coming-coming-gone blare of headlights on roadways, the loneliness of streetlamps. When it rained as hard as this, the only sound the conscious mind absorbed was the staccato pattern, a crescendo as the showers intensified, of rain on pavement, on rooftops, on flesh. Everything else muffled and dimmed until it ceased to exist altogether. On a night such as this, the rain is all.
Finnegan had neither raincoat nor umbrella. He walked along George Street toward his dormitory, soaked to the skin. Upon leaving Van Ness Hall, he had started to sprint through the rain in hope of getting to his room before he got too wet. Within his first few strides, though, he knew it to be futile: the rain was too hard, the dormitory too far away. He would get wet, perhaps wetter than he had ever been before in his life. He slowed at once to a walk.
Cars along George Street sped by at their usual pace. It had rained sporadically during the day, but as daylight ended the clouds had split apart. During early evening it rained continually, and very hard. The gutters had filled. Standing water spread from curbside into the street. As cars drove by they sent up arcing walls of water toward the sidewalk, splashing those who walked too close to the curb. Finnegan was splashed once, and cursed aloud in response. But there was no point to it. He moved to the extreme inside of the sidewalk, but the great fins of water churned by the traffic still reached him. He gave up trying; on this night, he would remain wet. Let both nature and man soak him down.
Finnegan had had a late class, the last class period of the day, beginning at 5:00 and ending at 6:15. Class at that hour became more than just a learning experience: it took on dimensions of punishment. By the time he got out of class his friends would be at dinner. Some would, in fact, already have finished their meal and be returning to the dorm. On these nights he went to the massive dining hall, invariably seeing no one he knew, and ate alone. It was late autumn now, and well dark when he emerged from the old classroom building. Queen’s Mall would be deserted except for the scattered other students heading back to their own rooms. Few people willingly took courses in this time slot. Not even the graduate students were around. The emptiness of Queen’s Mall in early evening contrasted with its boisterous quality during the day and intensified Finnegan’s loneliness. On rainy nights such as this, the atmosphere smothered him. The timelessness of the old buildings no longer seemed stately. Instead they were barren, devoid of any human presence, mausoleums preserving stale, fetid air.
Into the dark, wet, cold, impersonal night Finnegan stepped out from the high-ceilinged echoes of Van Ness. This late class was his economics course. Finnegan did not like economics. The countless graphs and curves confused him. He considered them divorced from real human reactions and so could put together causes and effects only with the greatest difficulty. He would spend hours trying to relate the Law of Diminishing Returns with shifting interest rates. Finnegan did not react well to things outside his immediate grasp. He resented them deeply, taking their evasiveness as a personal insult. In his room at night he would rail against economics, complaining to O’Hanlon that too much was expected of him, that the textbook was not clear, that the instructor, with his thick German accent, was purposefully vague. He would approach assignments with a physical dread, his stomach tightening, his palms clammy, his head throbbing as he pondered what it was he had to do. He would wrestle with his assignments
as Jacob wrestled with his angel. Desperately, wringingly, he would try to squeeze every drop of comprehension from his text before finally, weakened and sweaty, he would put it aside in wavering belief that he had learned all he had to know. Finnegan hated economics, but he had heretofore done fairly well at it, thanks to this tenacity. It had always been a matter of pride.
Lately, though, the concepts had grown even more elusive, the problems more esoteric. The early semester war of understanding had taken its toll. Over the past two weeks, Finnegan had put his books aside without even the unconvincing rationalizations he had previously employed. Rather, he quit because he had had enough. He would leave it up to his rudimentary understanding and native quickness to do well.
As a result, on this coldest and wettest of nights, Finnegan trod back to his dormitory with his economics midterm, graded only slightly better than a complete failure, in his notebook. He had had no idea when he took the damnable test that he would do so poorly. He had not been prepared for the stark letter that leapt to his eyes in exclusion of everything else on the front page. When the graded test was returned, handed to him by a disinterested teaching assistant, he blushed deeply.
Finnegan walked up the sidewalk that rose the slope to his building. Lights burned in a few of the windows, but Finnegan noticed at once that only two or three were lit on the second floor, and none in familiar rooms. No one was in the lobby, no one in the elevator, and, as the doors opened on his floor, no one in the lounge or down either hallway. Finnegan, still dripping, went to his room, unlocked the deadbolt and flicked on the light.
Finnegan’s room overlooked the Raritan River, a grayish brown ribbon of sludge that moved slowly from left to right. Across the river spread Johnson Park, a sprawling expanse of green. In front of it, riverside, ran River Road. Slightly to the right, through a break in the trees, a horse track was usually visible, its white railings set off from the surrounding green. The track was a small one with no bleachers. On Saturdays and Sundays owners would take their horses to the park to work them leisurely around the track. Beyond the park, the tops of the large, stately homes of that section of Piscataway stood above the trees. In the far distance smokestacks, usually belching off-white, created an odd contrast with the well-ordered foreground. On clear nights the spire of the Empire State Building, surrounded by New York’s lesser towers, would shine like a beacon, an urban lighthouse, signifying the boundless power, energy and glamor of the city. Finnegan found the view from his window calming. He could look out on a part of the world he did not yet know, one well divorced from the pace and drive of his studies, his friends, his life in general.
