Loner

by Teddy Wayne

  My eyes fell on Anti-Imperialist Marxism in Latin America on her bookshelf. I hadn’t gotten to finish it and never learned the outcome of various proletariat revolutions.

  “I’m doing this because I care about you,” I said softly, recognizing that they weren’t the words of a dangerous asshole so much as a generically noncommittal male.

  “No,” she said stoically. “You don’t care about me. I don’t think you’re capable of caring about anyone besides yourself.”

  “I’m not sure where you’re getting that.”

  “You’re missing whatever it is that makes you feel things for other people,” Sara said.

  She was wrong. My feelings were stronger for you than for anything else in my life, though I couldn’t refer to that in my defense.

  “Sometimes I have no idea who you really are,” she went on. “I feel like I projected all these qualities I wanted onto you.”

  Prohibited from using platitudes, I had nothing. She buried her face in her pillow. “Would you please leave,” she said meekly. “I don’t want to see you right now.”

  “Sara,” I pleaded halfheartedly.

  “‘Like I can’t breathe,’” she said, freeing her mouth from the pillow. “Really nice.”

  “Well, I’m sorry I’m not the nice boyfriend you thought I was!” I shouted so that you had to hear it.

  I let myself out and waited on the other side of the door until I heard her sobs, instigating the familiar movement in my boxers. Back in my room, I lay on my bed as rollicking bands of revelers streamed below my window on their way to Saturday-night destinations, off to share scorpion bowls at the Hong Kong on Mass Ave., to clink shot glasses in the River Houses, to trade bon mots during punch season at the final clubs.

  No matter. You had heard me reject Sara, and you had heard her cry. I was someone who had the power to wound another person.

  Chapter 12

  For the next several days I kept a low profile, skulking into the dining hall at odd hours and sitting alone at an outpost with my books. I managed to duck Sara in Matthews, too, and studied in out-of-sight carrels in Widener.

  One night, tired of eating by myself, I knocked on Steven’s door.

  “I’m getting sick of Annenberg food,” I said when he opened it. “You want to go to Noch’s? It’s on me.”

  “Um.” He bent his spindly arms and massaged his knobby elbows. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but because Sara’s the one who got dumped, we felt we should support her right now.”

  I hadn’t considered this consequence of our breakup, assuming that, after a few days, Sara and I would broker a détente and the unity of the Matthews Marauders would be, as ever, preserved.

  “But the two of us getting pizza doesn’t involve Sara.”

  “Well, there’s also . . .” He reached around himself and scratched his upper back. “I don’t know how to say this exactly, but there was some stuff about you? Stuff that was said, I mean?”

  “What sort of stuff?”

  His face scrunched up in a rare expression of social discomfort. “That, with Sara, before you broke up . . .”

  I’d never seen Steven hem and haw like this; he was incapable of embarrassment for himself, but it seemed that he was embarrassed for me. Had Sara said I wasn’t good in bed? That I’d clearly lied about not being a virgin? I’d wanted to be the kind of person people gossiped about, but not like this, with who knew what grinding through the freshman rumor mill.

  “What did she say?”

  “That you crossed a line,” Steven said.

  “Crossed a line? What line?”

  “Apparently”—he examined his fingernails—“she didn’t really say yes.”

  Though he swallowed the final word, it sounded louder than the rest. I thought back to our latest encounters and replayed their limited dialogue.

  “She didn’t explicitly say no, either,” I told him. “And, not to get too graphic, but she took out her tampon.”

  Steven put up his hands. “I don’t want to get in the middle of anything.”

  “She took out her tampon!” I repeated. “Explain to me how that’s not saying yes!”

  He didn’t respond.

  It wasn’t like Sara to confide such personal details to the Marauders. “She told all of you this?” I asked.

  “Just Carla,” he said. “Then Carla told the rest of us.”

  I imagined Carla sharing the misinformation at the next BGLTQ meeting, all her “allies” shaking their heads at my purported wrongdoing, but isn’t this what we’ve come to expect?

  “I could meet you at Noch’s after dinner,” Steven offered. “I’ll have eaten already, but I can sit there with you for a little bit.” The pitiableness his charity ascribed to me made me feel worse than if he’d said he never wanted to talk to me again.

  “That’s okay, I’ll be fine,” I said abruptly, and told him I had to study during dinner anyway. I did just that, choosing Annenberg over Noch’s to prove I didn’t have to cower from calumny, taking visual sips across the room of Sara to gauge if she was further slandering me. Once in a while she nodded solemnly, as if confirming that, yes, I had done terrible things to her, even more horrific than she’d previously let on.

  But I was being paranoid. No real line had been crossed. This was college. People had sex. They didn’t just hold hands and masturbate.

  You cut the next Prufrock. The following week featured Tom’s guest lecture on The Sound and the Fury, an intellectually posturing performance full of verbal pyrotechnics, signifying nothing. You sat in the front row with the rest of your section, laughing along at his pandering pop-culture references.

  When it was over I waited for you outside Harvard Hall. “How’s it going?” I asked, falling in step with you over to Sever.

  “All right.”

  “Sara and I broke up,” I said. “That’s why I haven’t been in the room for a while.”

  “That’s too bad,” you said in your usual affectless tone.

  “Yeah. She took it pretty hard.” I inhaled deeply through my nostrils, as if I were reeling with guilt over the pain I had inflicted on your devastated roommate. “Anyway, do you want to meet up sometime to work on next week’s essay?”

  Before you could answer, someone called your name across the Yard. Liam took his time walking over to us. I scuttled away a few feet as he parked his hands on your hips, pulling you against his midsection. Your head came up to his chest. After whispering in your ear he smiled and leaned down to kiss you. Your lips closed instinctively as he forced his against them. It reminded me of when Sara tongued me, the instinctive desire to shield an orifice from a probing foreign object.

  “I gotta run,” he said, lacing his fingers in yours as he took a reluctant step back. “But I’ll see you at the thing tonight. Come anytime after nine.”

  “I don’t think I can make it tonight,” you told him. “I’m ­sorry—I’m totally behind in my work.”

  You appeared less contrite than apprehensive. He nodded slightly and pursed his lips as if he’d anticipated this excuse.

  “Babe, I can’t help it if everyone’s assigning essays before Thanksgiving,” you said.

  “Why don’t I stay in with you, then. I’ve got some reading.”

  “Okay.” Your voice was a little unsure. You turned your head and looked over at me. “David’ll be there, too,” you said cheerfully. “He’s helping me with my paper. You remember David, right? He came to the club a few weeks ago?”

  Liam looked my way. I lifted my forearm, my parka’s sleeve making a waxy sound, and flashed a palm in his direction.

  “What class is this for?” he asked, alternating his gaze between the two of us.

  “From Ahab to Prufrock,” I spoke up. “Tragically Flawed Hero(in)es in American Literature, 1850–1929.”

  “My Engl
ish class,” you translated.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll leave you two to your study date.”

  “Tomorrow night I’ll come over, I promise,” you said, stroking the back of his neck and rising to your tiptoes for a parting kiss.

  My breakup with Sara had paid off. Maybe she’d even told you about the line I’d “crossed,” thinking it would cast me in a negative light—except with your predilections it would have the reverse effect. Liam still had you, still groped your figure as though it belonged to him, but you’d picked me for the night. Your inconsistency was just the result of working through complicated feelings. You were beginning to unshackle yourself from him.

  We finalized our plans for the evening and you went off to Gender and the Consumerist Impulse. On my way back to my room I realized we hadn’t discussed what you wanted to write about; I would need to prepare. I rushed over to Sever to catch you, but the class had already begun. The door to the room was open a crack, and I could hear your professor speaking.

  It was dicey to loiter outside any classroom for you, especially for a feminism course, where my being caught might itself be fodder for an entire conversation about the male gaze. But there I waited, ears keenly tuned for anything resembling your voice, copy of Emily Dickinson out for pretense and defense. (How could I, a lover of the Amherst recluse, evince any sort of untoward signifiers?)

  “Cixous’s écriture feminine is a rebellion against the repressive forces that would silence woman,” you said fifteen minutes into class. I leaned in closer to the door. “The verb ‘swallowed,’ in that passage, is . . . you know.” You laughed slightly, and your classmates joined in, in that tepid, tennis-applause way students do when subject matter verges on the bawdy. “It underscores the male’s anxiety over his loss of power when woman is allowed to write in her own voice and not in a phallogocentric register.”

  You contributed two more times with similar eloquence and poise. I’d never heard you speak like this before (had never even heard woman used in the singular to represent the plural like that). Our time working on the Henry James paper hadn’t revealed anything near this caliber of discourse. Maybe you simply didn’t want to do the work for English class and had identified me as a willing and proficient accomplice. Most students didn’t have the time to do all the reading for every course.

  Or perhaps you were looking for an excuse to spend time with me.

  Whatever your reasons, I wasn’t upset. I was exultant. You didn’t merely appreciate intellect in others; you yourself possessed more brainpower than I’d thought, probably even more than Sara, who had to grind for her grades. You could coast at Harvard on sheer native aptitude. Just like me.

  On my walk over to the library I resolved to make this a more intimate meeting than our last study session. I wouldn’t let you get away with evasive parries; tonight we would have a real conversation.

  When I arrived at our same nook on the second floor, you were already there, punctual for a change, your laptop ready. That boded well.

  “Missing a party to work on your essay,” I said. “You’re turning into a perfect little Harvard student.”

  “Not missing much,” you said.

  “I guess there are always plenty of parties to go to, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “I feel like I heard about a big one next weekend in Kirkland.”

  You didn’t say anything. Maybe you’d warm up once we started working.

  “Do you know what you want to write on?” I asked.

  You reached into your bag, pulled out the course pack for Prufrock, and flipped to “The Yellow Wallpaper.” A short story—no wonder you’d read it.

  “And what interests you about ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’?”

  You took a deep breath. “Don’t know.”

  “So you haven’t come up with a thesis yet?”

  A cute grin. “Maybe you could help me come up with a topic again?”

  “I could do that,” I said.

  You turned the laptop around and pushed it toward me. “How about we connect the narrator’s insanity to her desire to write?” I proposed. You nodded, but as soon as I began typing, you pulled back the laptop.

  “This is a bad idea,” you said, your forehead creasing with worry.

  “We can change the thesis if you want. I just came up with that off the top of my head. I didn’t really have a chance to prepare.”

  “No—this.” You gesticulated back and forth across the table.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I shouldn’t be doing this to you.” You shut the laptop and pulled it closer. “It’s not right.”

  “You’re not doing anything to me,” I said. “It’s with me. A big prepositional difference. People work with tutors all the time.”

  You drummed your fingers on the table. “Not in college.”

  “Sure they do,” I said. “Just think of me like your TF.”

  “But you’re not my TF.”

  “Technically, no—though Samuelson asked me to take his seminar on Hawthorne next semester, which is mostly grad ­students,” I said. “Not to toot my own horn, but I’m pretty good at this. And there’s nothing wrong in asking for help when you need it.”

  I awaited your response, my calves tensing, the soles of my feet rising as if in high heels.

  A sigh of resignation—you knew I was right—and you turned the laptop back to me.

  In spite of your ethical reservations, however, once again you didn’t contribute at all toward the paper’s thesis:

  The story implies—perhaps in a manner the author herself was not aware of—that the narrator’s desire to write is wedded to her “temporary nervous depression.” The hysterical female’s creative expression comes at a steep cost: her own mental stability.

  “How’s that?” I asked after reading it aloud.

  “Oops,” you said, looking up from your phone. “I was taking care of a text. Can you read it again?”

  I repeated myself. “That’s really good,” you said. “And didn’t Samuelson say that Gilman went crazy once she had a kid? So that makes sense that she’d write about a hysterical woman, since she was one herself.”

  The gulf between how you spoke now and hours earlier in your gender class was remarkable—like a preteen girl here, a seasoned ­academic there—but I reminded myself that this was a lower-­priority course for you. You fielded messages from your buzzing phone while I typed on, feeling as though I’d rescued you from a leaky dinghy and was captaining you to shore in my sturdy vessel.

  You listened to a voice mail then made a call, hiding the phone and speaking in a library whisper.

  “Mom,” you said. “The pharmacy here is out of Ambien. I need you to have Sharon FedEx me a bottle tomorrow.” You waited. “Yes, I need it tomorrow, you know it’s the only way I can fall asleep.”

  As you talked to her, a shirtless boy ran through the library screaming, “Yale sucks!”

  “You going to the Game?” I asked when you were off the phone.

  That Saturday was the (football) Game between Harvard and Yale, in all its capitalized and singular hubris (like “the Yard,” somewhat like “the city”). I wasn’t planning to attend, especially now that I’d been excommunicated by the Matthews Marauders, but it occurred to me that you would likely be there.

  “Yeah.” You blew your nose on a tissue, and when you set it down a fleck of dried snot protruded from your right nostril like an icicle, shivering in the breeze of your exhalations. I didn’t say anything, not only because it’s hard to summon the tact to tell anyone, least of all you, she has snot in her nose, but because it was so human, so imperfect.

  (See? I didn’t just idealize you. I wanted it all: the beauty and the ugliness, the lush hair and the encrusted mucus. Show me someone else who accepted your totality like I did.)

  “C
ool,” I said. “Maybe I’ll see you there.”

  You produced an unconvincing cough. You’d done so at increasingly short intervals for the past twenty minutes, but this time you took it further, moaning and rubbing your temples like an actress in a cold-remedy commercial.

  “Fuck,” you said. “I think I’m coming down with something.”

  You sputtered more from your prone position, hacking in a staccato fit but briefly recovering to respond to an incoming text. I’d seen better performances from grade school malingerers.

  “I don’t know,” you said. “I think maybe I better call it a night.”

  “Okay,” I said, snapping your laptop shut.

  “Wait—did you send it to yourself?” you asked.

  “No, it’s your essay. Why would I need to send it to myself?”

  “You’re not going to . . .” You looked crestfallen. “You can’t help me with the rest?”

  It was outrageous, asking me to spend the night in the library cheating for you so you could skip off to Liam’s party—with you thinking I had no idea what you were up to.

  “Yeah, I guess I could.”

  “Great,” you said, smiling with relief. “I’ll e-mail you what we have so far.” You sent me the document and packed up, leaving me alone in our nook.

  Ll’I liam-e uoy tahw ew evah os raf.

  I waited a minute before hurrying out of Lamont to catch you in the act.

  Ahead of me in the Yard, you turned left through a gate and onto Mass Ave. Yet, instead of going south to Liam’s final club (or University Health Services, not that that was ever a consideration), you made a right. You might be meeting him at a bar, in which case I couldn’t enter behind you. I kept trailing you anyway, with a wide enough berth that you wouldn’t see me even if you happened to look over your shoulder.

  After several turns we ended up off campus on Story Street. You stopped at a house and pushed the buzzer. Based on the current information in the student directory, Liam still lived in Adams, and the house didn’t appear to be the site of a party; it was quiet, and the only light came from a single third-floor window.