Van Dorn returned, limping because he’d used his shoe as a doorstop. “Whatever you say about frats,” he announced, unaware that the topic had changed, “they get girls to their parties.”
Robert wondered if Van Dorn had even so much as talked to a girl. Pascal repeated that Cates was lucky; his sister was at Smith and could invite him to weekends and introduce him to women. Then he went into further raptures about Cates’s sister, something he probably wouldn’t have done if Cates were not in the john. Tracey had just broken off an engagement with a girl named Annabeth. Engaged at eighteen? Tracey? The idea seemed ludicrous. Had the girl been knocked up? Robert asked. Tracey smiled. “No, it was just, we knew each other since we were five and we were either going to get married or, well —” His voice trailed off.
“I think you made a mistake breaking with her,” Pascal said. Van Dorn mumbled something about a bird in the hand, and Tracey told them to shut up. The table went immediately silent. The waitress brought over the check and Tracey picked it up, then took out his wallet and threw a handful of bills on the table. Robert did a quick calculation—at least fifty dollars, maybe more. How could four boys eat and drink that much in an evening?
“You sure I can’t give you a few dollars for my share?” Robert asked.
“We take turns,” Tracey said, as Cates returned from the john and he and Van Dorn walked toward the door. “It’s a tradition. So we don’t bicker over a dollar here or a dollar there, like a bunch of schoolteachers.”
Robert thanked him and they walked out into the hot, muggy August night. He would make about seventy dollars a month working in the kitchen. He wasn’t sure he’d had a good time with them, but he hated to think that he didn’t have the option to figure it out. Well, in this and all things at college, he’d reserve judgment and decide, along the way, what was worth paying a price for.
CHAPTER FOUR
Robert learns a few things
Fall came early that year, New England fall with its pallet of red and salmon, pale yellow, and burnt orange. Robert walked the footpaths, feeling the brisk autumn air on his face, staring up at the enormous trees, first so lush and then, suddenly, so bare. He loved the morning frost on the windows and the distant smells of burning leaves, loved the fact that it was his option not to go to class, and so he never missed a lecture, for having been raised under his mother’s strictures, he had a habit of trying to do the opposite of what was enforced. He liked Introduction to Psychology and Biology respectively, ran hot and cold with Economics, but his favorite was European History. He read about nihilism, and felt that as a way of looking at the world it was somehow familiar, originating in Russia, his family seat of origin, but no, he’d been raised by believers —his grandfather had trained as a very young man to be a rabbi—whose belief in God had been inverted in America by capitalism and the demands of making a living, but no, he was being solipsistic. Or was this about inbreeding? Had the marriages of so many cousins weakened the gene pool? On and on it went, new words, new viewpoints and philosophies ricocheting around his head until he felt like his brain might explode.
Meanwhile, his family sent only scant letters—his mother preferred penny postcards on which she wrote him instructions about laundry or saving money. She used envelopes only when enclosing coupons, which she did about twice a month. Barry did not have the patience to write. Only his father surprised him with words, letters about the politics at the PO, details about Robert’s many Vishniak uncles. He asked Robert endless questions about what the place looked like, and how a college classroom functioned, questions that Robert did not answer, hardly writing home at all. For the first time ever, Vishniak told Robert that he loved him, words he could only write on paper but never say, words that brought Robert to tears, yet he replied only a few lines. Something held him back. He was having enough trouble adjusting to this completely new life—bringing his father along, even in letters, felt too exhausting to even attempt, like trying to haul a very heavy sack up a steep hill.
The challenge of that year was, among other things, learning to live in a small space with a boy who took three showers a day and had a habit of scrutinizing Robert when he least expected it. The first time this happened was just after the first week of classes. Robert had been sitting at his desk reading a course syllabus; pausing for a minute, he felt Tracey’s eyes on him. “Something wrong?” Robert asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?” He had not forgotten their first meeting, when Tracey announced that Robert stank. Tracey was right—Robert had stunk that day—but Robert did not want such moments repeated.
“Actually, I was looking past you, out the window,” he said, “or trying to. You think they’ll ever wash it?”
But it happened a few more times. He’d be searching in his drawer for a pair of matching socks, or just sitting and reading a book, and there would be Tracey, looking him over. Robert would immediately check his shirt for stains. Or was he humming and didn’t realize it? The two of them occasionally ate a meal together—always, they either went out or ate in the student center, because Tracey didn’t like the cafeteria. During these times, Tracey would raise his eyes from his plate and look at Robert’s face, and then at his own plate, and then back to Robert’s face. This time, Robert knew exactly what Tracey was staring at; he had grown up eating like a pig.
It wasn’t their fault. The men came home hungry after working long shifts; the women were good cooks. And the object, at the family table, became shoving as much food into your mouth with as little effort as possible. The fork was not so much an instrument for spearing food as it was a shovel, or a forklift. But now, he saw how his roommate cut his meat with a remarkable delicacy. Tracey kept his elbows close to his body and pointed his fork tongs down, always gathering the vegetables close, using the knife to organize the food and cut it, but no more—no licking the knife or scraping it against the plate. And then there was how Tracey coordinated eating and talking—remarkable! Nothing spewed from his mouth or rolled around on his tongue. He seemed hardly to be eating at all, as if it were all a sleight of hand.
Realizing all this, Robert felt as if someone had raised a window shade in a dark room. This was something he could correct about himself, but his fingers rebelled against the new way of moving and gripping. He wanted always to put the knife into a different hand, to move the fork in another direction, so for a while his habits were a hodgepodge and he felt muddled even in the simple act of eating.
Often when Robert came back to the dorm he found Tracey lying on his bed still in his pajamas, his cheeks pink from a slow, pleasant inebriation. Had he even gone to class? Under his bed he kept several different kinds of liquor and a large bottle of Wild Turkey, which he poured into a shot glass that he washed each night before bed, no matter what state he was in. In the beginning he always offered Robert a shot but soon gave up. More than the drinks themselves, Robert liked the accoutrements of alcohol, liked the martini shaker and triangular glasses that Tracey kept on his bookshelf. Or the silver flask he sometimes carried, given to him by his grandfather.
Tracey spent much of his time reading, but not for classes. Robert found Tracey’s tastes both varied and puzzling—what exactly united them? The first half of the first semester, Tracey was slowly making his way through Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, which he translated for Robert as In Search of Lost Time. Robert was interested in any book with a section called “Sodom and Gomorrah,” but when Robert asked Tracey to tell him what the book was about, he replied that Robert would have to read it for himself.
“I’ll never get through a book that thick in a language I don’t understand,” he said. “Is it at least dirty?”
“The part I’m on now,” Tracey said, “there’s some stuff about your man Dreyfus.”
“He’s not my man,” Robert snapped, surprised Tracey knew who Alfred Dreyfus was—surprised, too, that Tracey knew Robert was Jewish. Though of course he would, from Robert’s last name, and his face. All his life, variations
of that face had stared back at him from Cece’s photo albums, the pictures sent decades ago from faraway relatives—boys playing violins, frowning women wearing kerchiefs—people frozen in time. He’d been taught to expect that any comment from an outsider would be hostile, but there was nothing unkind in Tracey’s remark; only a statement of fact. “Sorry,” Robert said. “I just mean that he died before I was born.”
“I’m merely listing what’s in the book,” Tracey said, “no need to get your feathers in an uproar. The narrator is a clever little man who hides behind pillars and listens through walls, spying on people.”
“Doesn’t sound like my kind of thing,” Robert said. “What happened to Ayn Rand and how man struggles alone—what happened to Howard Roark?”
“I gave the book to Pascal—I think I’ve already outgrown Rand. She was timelier in the nineteen forties. I have an agile mind, Vishniak. That’s why I shouldn’t be in college at all. College is the death of an agile mind.”
“Why are you here?” Robert asked. “If you feel that way?”
“Because being here keeps my parents at bay,” he said. “Anyway, I can think of worse places than here—there’s a good library, and I can do as I please.”
Robert admired Tracey’s sophistication, his fluency in French, the outward sheen on even his smallest actions, but when Tracey talked about the world Robert sometimes felt as if his roommate were trying to spoil the ending on a story that Robert still wanted to read for himself.
“Sure wish I could write like this,” Tracey said, having put down Proust and taken up Zola’s Germinal. “Amazing how real he makes these people’s suffering, the coal miners, I mean.”
Robert looked up from his note taking—he had a paper due on the French and Indian War. “You sure read a lot,” Robert said, though he wondered if it counted that Tracey never quite finished the books. “Maybe you’ll be a novelist.”
“Never happen,” Tracey replied.
“Why on earth not?”
“I’ve never been very good at wanting things for more than a day or two. I can conjure up the desire, say, for a sailboat, or an ice cream. But then I get it and move on.”
Oh, that’s one I could teach you, Robert thought, how to want.
“I think I’m scared of being a certain kind of person,” Tracey said.
“What kind?”
“The kind who spends his whole life trying to do something very meaningful and important, but never quite does, and becomes miserable, always reaching for what he can’t grasp. Or he strives for years and years, and finally achieves that wonderful thing, cures that disease, writes that symphony, then looks around and says—‘Is this all there is?’”
“There has to be a third option, right?” Robert asked. “I mean, come on. What about doing something just because you love it?”
“Like what, exactly?” Tracey asked.
“I don’t know, I haven’t found it yet,” Robert said. “We’re only in the first semester.” There was sex, of course, but he couldn’t exactly do that for a living.
“Think about it,” Tracey said, picking up his book again. “Someday you’ll see I’m right.”
The only class Tracey went to consistently was French Literature; the only paper Robert saw him writing during that first semester was on Sartre’s Nausea. The whole time he typed, with two fingers on a brand-new electric typewriter, he complained to Robert that the problem with writing papers was that they sucked all the life out of books and ruined the whole experience. “A waste of my time,” Tracey said after he’d handed in the paper and received a B+. Robert wondered exactly what Tracey would be doing with his time, in lieu of writing papers.
After that, Tracey found a guy willing to type his essays for seventy-five cents a page and write the whole thing for twenty dollars. That guy, Robert found out later, was Goldfarb, who occasionally farmed his business out to his compatriots in the kitchen. Robert could have used the money, but he always declined, not out of a sense of honesty but more because the chain of command made him uncomfortable. When Goldfarb delivered one such paper to their room, he nodded at Robert, looking as ashamed to be seen as Robert was to see him. Only Tracey was genial and welcoming, unruffled as he reached for his wallet.
As the weather grew cold, Tracey announced that no matter what his parents said about it, he had no intention of washing his own laundry. Robert offered to show him how to use the machines in the basement, where you could do a load for a quarter but had to keep your coat on, as the heat never seemed to work.
“It’s a waste of my time, washing shirts like a charwoman,” Tracey said, and Robert wondered, yet again, exactly what Tracey did with his time. Several nights a week he went out with his friends, but mostly he was in the room. He made no reply to Tracey’s laundry declaration, fearing that Tracey would then offer to employ him and he would have a dilemma; again, he could use the money, but his pride would not allow it.
Tracey’s solution was to wear a shirt a few times, until it was no longer clean enough for him, and then throw it down the garbage chute and buy a new one. Robert paid attention to these intervals and was sure to go to the chute himself, late at night when the hall was empty, or early in the morning before Tracey got up. Garbage often stuck there for days, and he could reach down and retrieve the shirt, wash it, and wear it as his own. At first he was secretive about this, and he hid the shirts in a box under the bed, wearing them only when he knew Tracey would be gone. As the collection grew larger, Robert noticed that when he wore Tracey’s shirts he felt different, more confident. Then he wanted to wear them all the time. It was inevitable that he’d get caught, but when Tracey finally saw him in one of his own discarded shirts, his face registered no recognition. “New shirt?” he asked, and Robert mumbled a faint yes. How had Tracey, normally so observant, not noticed? Some of the shirts even had Tracey’s initials on them, but they were so soft and so beautifully cut that Robert could not let them go to waste.
CHAPTER FIVE
Robert takes a road trip
In 1965 Tufts was considered coed, with the Jackson College girls living on campus but in dorms guarded by housemothers who took their job seriously. Boys visited officially on Sunday afternoons; they sat in the living room and talked to their dates, drinking nonalcoholic punch and eating cookies while a chaperone looked on. The girls had to sign in and out at night—at the end of a Saturday night date, boys were permitted only up to the dorm entrance, known as the fishbowl, where they said good-bye amid a flurry of public scrutiny.
The first year of college provided even less privacy and freedom than his parents’ house, at least in terms of girls. The only sex he was having that first semester was with himself. And he was not alone. The halls of his dorm were filled with the sexually frustrated; in the morning they rushed to the toilets and showers, barely meeting each other’s glances. Grade stress did not make things any easier, nor did having a roommate. Robert could not fall asleep anymore without jerking off, but he had to wait until he heard the low snoring on the other side of the room. Sometimes he was certain Tracey was sleeping, and suddenly the snoring would stop. Had Tracey woken up? He was a restless sleeper. Once he thought he heard Tracey whisper his name. Was it in his sleep? Or was he annoyed with the rustling of sheets? The slight squeaking of the bed?
He had only begun to ponder the implications of this problem when the opportunity came for him to visit a campus filled with nothing but girls. Just after Thanksgiving, Tracey invited Robert to go to Smith College for winter fling. They drove in two cars: Robert and Tracey went in Tracey’s MG, and Van Dorn and Cates followed in Cates’s Citroën, with Pascal sandwiched in the back. Tracey’s crowd liked small, fast, and somewhat uncomfortable sports cars. The MG was dark green and the Citroën pale yellow with a black-and-white racing stripe down the middle. Both boys had gotten the cars as hand-me-downs from their fathers, so Tracey’s MG had a small dent on the door and Cates’s car had several long scratches across the hood. Because they saw th
eir cars as castoffs, the owners were careless. Robert had seen Tracey double-park and run into shops, leaving the key in the ignition, or he would drive up on the campus lawn and coat the tires with mud, or miss the ashtray with his cigarette, leaving it to burn a hole in the carpet. That night Tracey sped through rain and salt and stop signs, his foot heavy on the gas, uncaring about the notorious speed traps on I-91, until just outside Springfield, when the rain turned to snow and the cars around them slowed to a crawl.
Over two hours after leaving Boston, they drove into the town of Northampton, down Main Street with its narrow storefront shops aglow in Christmas lights, then up a hill and through the tall iron gates to the campus. Robert looked out the window at the odd mix of architectural styles: the slope-roofed wooden and brick houses with big front porches; then the library with its dignified sandstone pillars; and then a group of modern, boxy buildings. Ancient oaks lined the streets, their bare branches frosted with a thin layer of white. The car rounded a curving road beside a frozen pond slick as a layer of glass; two skaters, arms clasped, spun round and round as if in a snow globe.
Tracey parked in a large lot—the others were already there, waiting—and they all got out of their cars, their breath clouding in front of them as they walked into a vast quadrangle, the kind of square Robert imagined in cities in Europe, and then they trudged up the high stairway toward the neo-Grecian entrance to Gardner House. Inside an elderly housemother checked their names off a list and told them to remove their wet shoes. She pointed to a fire going in the sitting room where, she said, they could warm their feet. Beyond the French doors, a group gathered around the grand piano singing “White Christmas,” though the holiday was three weeks away. In front of an enormous Christmas tree two couples posed for photos.
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