As Lie Is to Grin

by Simeon Marsalis

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Photographs on pages 12, 28, and 39 by Thomas Visser. Photographs on pages 142 and 146 from Special Collections, University of Vermont Libraries.

  Published by Catapult

  catapult.co

  Copyright © 2017 by Simeon Marsalis

  All rights reserved

  eISBN: 978-1-936787-60-9

  Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

  Phone: 866-400-5351

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016952068

  Printed in the United States of America

  987654321

  RED HERRING:

  1. A smoked herring, which is turned red by the smoke.

  2. Something unimportant that is used to stop people from noticing or thinking about something important.

  Prologue

  The path wound upward and to the left, so I climbed. The institution then appeared from behind a row of trees. As I passed the driveway, two security guards sitting in a white booth were visible in the near distance. My heartbeat quickened. “I should not be here.” My fingers fidgeted with the sheet of paper in my pocket, which was creased from being folded over and over. I felt ashamed. I began to slip from the present to the day we met, and at that moment there was a call from the sky. I searched the space beneath the falling sun. My eyes gleaned a solitary crow. It had separated from its murder. As I smiled and lowered my head, you were emerging from the school’s main entrance. Melody. I took the letter from my pocket and walked forward.

  august 27, 2010

  I was up late into the evening, researching the University of Vermont, where I was enrolled for the fall semester. I feared that my college decision had been made under false pretenses. This belief was causing me a great deal of discomfort, so I had gone on the school’s website to convince myself it was not true, when I stumbled on a page entitled “Student Dissent.” It began with an introduction—“1969, to the delight of many students and chagrin of many alumnae, Kake Walk was interred”—that reminded me of a novel I had tried to compose (and was now attempting to forget). I opened my notebook to the prologue and six subsequent chapters. They were all incomplete. Each semiautobiographical sketch muddled the line between my life and my fiction. I could not find meaning in the one or the other—did not divine a reason to resolve my real issues by way of text. I closed the notebook and looked back to the phone, as I had interpreted this connection as a sign to continue reading. The bulk of the article consisted of three alumni biographies. Crystal joined a sorority in 1947 and was made a dissenting student when the national organization decided to disband the chapter for granting a black woman the right to pledge. Bonnie attended from 1969 to 1973 and helped to oust the Army’s ROTC program from campus. Carmen graduated in 1992 and feared that the push for multiculturalism she initiated with her fellow students had not amounted to any change at all. As the record became increasingly futile, I was distracted by a sound from the road. The lights of a car flashed into my window. Everything went temporarily white. I pulled the blinds closed. The front gate opened. Footsteps descended the staircase. There was a knock at my bedroom door, but I did not answer. My sleep patterns were interrupted by cloudy dreams. I left in the morning, without rousing my mother.

  september 1, 2010

  There was a copy of the school newspaper at the end of a long table in the student center, dated August 31, 2010. I flipped the paper open and spilled some coffee on the page 1 article. It gave information about my class—fourteen countries, forty states, 10 percent ALANA (Asian American, Latino, African American, Native American, and Multiracial)—and made me feel part of some experiment that was in its beginning stages. I passed the article about the ROTC fitness test result and realized that Bonnie’s efforts to ban the Army program had been temporarily effective. On the next page there was an article entitled “SGA President Pushes for Transparent Registration: Book Prices and Syllabuses to Be Made Available Earlier.”

  The president was looking above his head to the left, typing at a computer screen. His mouth was slightly open and his skin stood out against the white walls around him. Just inside a room on the other side of the building I was now sitting in, our Student Government Association’s president had had his picture taken. I could not avoid feeling there was something important about this article that I was missing. I left the cafeteria in a haze and continued down College Street to South Willard Street, which became North, and stopped at number 42; two brown-haired men were smoking a joint on the porch.

  “Is Mark here?”

  “He’s in the living room.”

  Three couches lined the walls. There were glasses and coffee mugs full of brown liquids on all of the surfaces, along with muddy clothes strewn on the floor. Two stripes, one red and one blue, were painted around the bedroom doorways, wrapped into the kitchen, and ended in a purple blob. I heard footsteps coming down the stairs.

  “David!”

  “What’s up?” As he went to hug me, our cheeks touched, and I felt his smile, unnecessarily wide, against my face. He had been my group leader for orientation in the spring, and we bonded over smoking weed, which Mark assumed I did. He pulled a bong out from behind the couch, calling the two men from the porch, and introduced me to Matt and Luke from Massachusetts and Maryland.

  “Jimmy signed the lease. We call it the Rib Shack.”

  “The house?”

  “Yeah, it’s called Jimmy’s Rib Shack. You have to meet him, dude. He’s fucking crazy. We don’t know if Tom-Tom is coming back.”

  “Who?”

  “Didn’t I tell you about him?” Mark rose as he was speaking and sped through the hallway to the kitchen, returning with four twelve-ounce cans of 4 percent beer decorated with an American flag. “You may be able to crash in his bedroom. There are two upstairs, two more in here, one attached to the kitchen, five in total.” But Jimmy had not returned after two hours, so I finished my beer and excused myself from the Rib Shack, after taking two shots of whiskey from a plastic 1.75-liter container.

  Walking down Pearl Street, past the liquor outlet and tattoo parlor, perspiration gathered on my chest. It had hovered around 80 degrees all day. I passed a salon where women stood braiding hair, heading toward the walking path that wound around Lake Champlain for miles. I looked down at my phone and typed, “Population, Burlington Vermont, jobs,” and found some business “quick facts” from the 2007 census. “Women-owned firms 25%, Black-owned firms 1.3%, American Indian and Native Alaskan–owned firms S”—which, I decided, meant too small a number to count. I turned left, looking south at the glass façade of the ecological center with its two rectangular wings. One of them had a design resembling a giant eyeball from the distance. As my gaze shifted right, I saw that the sky was turning vibrant pink behind the Adirondacks. The town was flanked by two mountain ranges. As I left the walking path and went back up the hill toward the Green Mountains of Vermont, the campus seemed to be encircled by a translucent bubble. I was sure the image was an illusion brought on by the diminishing light and the cones in my eyes, but when I blinked the mirage did not go away.

  september 8, 2010

  I brushed my teeth in the bathroom across from the staircase in the middle of the second floor of Patterson Hall. There were three other young men there, so I handled my affairs quickly, returning to stare at my sleeping roommate, Gary. I dressed and made my way to French.

  Once outside of my dorm, I stared at the collection of buildings called Redstone Campus. They seeme
d to have been built without regard for previous style. I logged into www.uvm.edu/~campus/tour/archhistory.html and browsed a page that revealed the campus buildings’ architectural firms, periods, and dates of erection. Passing Southwick Music Hall, I learned that a firm from New York, McKim, Meade & White, had fashioned it in the Colonial Revival style (1934). Not the extension (1975), that was influenced by Brutalism. I had come across the name of the firm last year, and this seemed some sign to continue searching, but as I scrolled through all of the dates and styles hastily, I was struck with the guilt of living upon land that was stolen and constructed on in the style of other places so far away.

  In class, I stared at the side of a young woman’s face. Every time Madame Paulette called on Delilah she would jump as if unprepared. She sat in the first row by the first aisle. I kept looking, from the third row by the third aisle to the front of the classroom. There was a moment when she craned her neck back as if to stretch; I was so attentive that, as she moved, I did as well. Delilah recognized me, though we had not met before. I tried to catch her as the class was dismissed but didn’t make it around a heavyset Vermonter named Tim, who told Paulette in French that he loved her Québécois accent. As I left Waterman, Delilah was already walking down College Street.

  september 15, 2010

  I found myself in the crosswalk on Main Street. It was unnervingly empty. Clouds did not race by—they hung there, still, against a southern breeze. No cars approached, so I imagined three trucks pressing forward, wrenching my body from my neck.

  There was a copy of The Cynic from last week, dated September 7, 2010, on a chair in the Dining Hall of the student center. I read the front page, “LGBTQ Awesome,” staring at the three pictures: the bronze statue of a mountain lion draped in a rainbow flag, students sitting around a table with two rainbow flags draped over it, and another of the same students jumping, with a rainbow flag above their heads, directly in front of Lafayette Hall. An article on page 3, “Debate Sparks over SGA President’s Summer Stipend,” featured one of the students from the pictures. It read, “(President) receives a stipend of $175 per week during the summer and some SGA Senators do not believe he earned it. Though he was not convicted of wrong-doing, the Chair of the Public Relations Committee had this to say, ‘I think collectively the majority of us can say we are disappointed with what you did this summer . . . I think our expectations were poorly conveyed. You did do something wrong because, in our eyes, you didn’t do what we wanted.’” It was our SGA president. He was standing next to a podium, defending his actions against the dubious criticism of his white colleagues. As I stared at the photo, I began to feel attacked. This was an irrational reaction, I thought, based on the similarities between our skin tones, so I closed the newspaper and left the Davis Center (Postmodern), traversing the green behind the Physical Science building (International) toward the Annex (Postmodern), which was attached to the Old Mill (Federal), which had been reconstructed (High Victorian Gothic) with funds from John P. Howard, before crossing the green to Waterman (Colonial Revival), where I now thought the buildings that first appeared to mock one another were definitely part of some interminable chain that the website had not recorded.

  I entered Delilah’s name into the Internet browser on my phone. It returned “Sampson and Delilah,” the biblical story about a woman colluding to cut a man’s hair and drain him of his powers. The story stayed with me through French class, after which I made a joke about her name that she did not find funny. “Can I have your number?” I asked. “I might need some help with the French . . .”

  “Sure, sure.” She wrote the numbers, the same way Melody had, before walking down the hallway, looking back once, and exiting up the stairwell. I took a drink from the water fountain, which was tan and shaped like the number 8, then stared at the grate covering the drain. The fire bell went off, interrupting my daydream.

  The sun was beginning to set, so I walked to Williams Hall before it did. Fifteen students sat on the fire escape, watching clouds turn purple, the sky above the horizon divided into orange and yellow stripes. It was a cool evening. The summer was becoming fall. In the Rib Shack, Mark took a framed poster of a man staring at a frame of himself—staring at a frame of himself, ad infinitum—off of the wall. That was the sign Adderall, cocaine, or ketamine were being snorted. A few upperclassmen visited the house, all still bronzed from the summer; some of them talked about jumping into waterfalls at the Bolton Potholes. I thought of the pressure of falling liquid, an undercurrent, which made me think of my mother, Doris, and her fear of water. I sat across from James, Luke, Mark, and Matthew and began to drink whiskey with them, not paying attention to any other activity in the house. Luke and Matthew tried to consume as much as Mark, but none could hold alcohol like James. As the night wore on, though, and James continued to drink, he regressed to infantile outbursts. Within a few hours, he had chewed the center out of a piece of bread and was sticking his penis through it. I had never seen a white man’s penis. There was something artistic in the way he was thrusting into the bread, how the ridge of the head pushed against the little cinnamon raisins.

  september 17, 2010

  I had decided to get something to eat before spending Friday afternoon in the library. I walked to the cafeteria between Harris and Millis that students had taken to calling the Grundle, which was slang for perineum. The cafeteria on Redstone Campus would be closed all fall, so students who purchased the same meal plan and lived in twenty-three residential halls crammed into this dining room for each meal. The line stretched out the door to the parking lot, and I was forced into conversation with the student in front of me, who was from Long Island as well. We spoke about bloated class sizes. I tried to excuse myself, but he followed me to a table and said that we should exchange numbers because our hometowns were so close together. I chose to leave when he excused himself to go to the bathroom, and walked across campus to the library.

  On the second floor, I sat at a public computer and followed the link from the school’s website to the site of a company that managed all of the university’s virtual classrooms. In each tab, you could find select readings and videos from topics related to your class syllabus. I clicked on English 023 and scrolled down to September 20, 2010. The week’s heading was “American Modernism: Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald.” I read excerpts from Melanctha, A Farewell to Arms, and This Side of Paradise. In the Extra Readings tab, I could see that the teacher had suggested Jean Toomer’s 1920s masterpiece Cane, placing it under the subheading “Harlem Renaissance.” Instead of reading, I logged on to the registrar’s page and withdrew from the class, before gathering my things for Delilah’s.

  I touched her back, gently.

  “Why are you moving your fingers so slow?”

  “Relax.”

  “Stop trying so hard.”

  We laid the mattress on the floor and threw a collection of blankets next to it so we could roll around on a homemade queen. I ran my fingers down her spine, this time even more slowly. With my other hand I reached for the smartphone Melody’s father was still paying for and shut off the volume. There was nothing I liked about the songs left on the phone. Rick was into black music from the late 1970s and the mid-1980s: Michael Jackson hits, pop tunes whose soul was stamped out for digital reproduction. I put my left hand on Delilah’s hip, and she stroked the ribs beneath my armpit. I listened to her breathing. She asked me to put on a condom, and I did, as she balanced her elbows on the pillows. Her heart rose toward me. Her right hand beckoned me forward. She grabbed my penis, placing it inside her, bringing that same right hand to the back of my neck. As she felt me become tense, she whispered into my ear, “Come,” pulling at what was inside me. After she had gone to sleep, I stared at the back of her hair, which was cut and straightened into a bob. A dream catcher hung from a nail above the center of her light blue duvet. I fell asleep. In the middle of the night, something hit me on the back of the head. She asked, “Did you
piss the bed?”

  “I sweat sometimes when I sleep.”

  I asked her where the towels were.

  “You should just shower at your house.”

  “I was going to put them on top of the sheets.”

  “It’s all right. Please shower at your house.” I looked at her again, and she began to smile. “I’m joking, the towels are in the closet.” I smiled, too, and climbed on top of her, swelling; her moan was singing.

  september 20, 2010

  I was trying to make the maintenance of my teeth a ritual again. My mind began to wander back to the writer’s workshop I took in high school, then to Melody, so I was repeating the phrase “pearly whites” to myself as toothpaste fell into the sink. While the hot water ran, I thought about my roommate and my concerns became more present. Gary and I had spoken on only one occasion. He inquired: “Where is my ramen?” “Are you good at basketball?” “Do you want to join my intramural team?” I answered “I don’t know” to these few questions. He looked at me and then trudged down the hallway. This morning he was lying next to the radiator, and something about the calmness of his sleep upset me. I left the dorm room and circled the periphery of campus to get to class and bypassed the other students, whose expressions would remind me of Gary’s.

  Victorian fraternity houses dotted South Prospect Avenue. I stopped for a moment at number 282. The oak front doors stood around twelve feet tall with golden handles. American flags covered the windows on the first floor, and the sky behind the fraternity house was gray. I could see the outline of one horse-headed cloud, but none of the others was well defined. In the single window at the top of the house, the vision of a young man dressed in a gray three-piece suit appeared. He bent over what seemed to be a bed, made it, and then sat, before placing a pen in the side of his mouth. The sighting of this vaguely familiar man so upset me that I cast my eyes down all the way to the green between Waterman and Old Mill. The sudden feeling that this year was unfolding in the same way as last year overtook me. So I rose and walked east until I entered Jeffords Hall, where the empty glass atrium calmed me. I could see the Stafford Greenhouse from where I was standing, so I walked in that direction to see the flora that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to manicure. It reminded me of the garage at my mother’s house. As I tried to open the front door, a line from Cane came to me: “The dead house is stuffed. The stuffing is alive. It is sinful to draw one’s head out of live stuffing in a dead house.”