Joe College: A Novel

by Tom Perrotta

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Pathetic. You must be George Eliot.”

  Polly smiled politely. “Excuse me?”

  Matt drew back, apparently perplexed. His head was bare, and I realized that the crumpled projectile now resting in my pizza plate was his dining-hall hat. He glanced at me, then back at Polly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I talked to Danny earlier in the evening, and he told me he had a date with George Eliot. So I merely assumed—” He held up both hands as if in apology. “I hope I haven’t embarrassed anyone.”

  “Just yourself,” I assured him.

  “That’s okay,” he said, once again displaying his sign. “I have no shame.”

  “It’s a good thing, too,” Polly told him.

  “Touché,” said Matt. It was one of his highest compliments.

  “Good night,” I said. “See you Thursday.”

  Matt put both hands together as if in prayer and bowed to Polly—“Good night, Mr. Eliot”—and then to me—“Good night, Brutus.” Then he zipped up his coat and strode off without looking back. He didn’t even turn around when I beaned him with his hat from a distance of about ten feet.

  “Friend of yours?” asked Polly.

  “We work together in the dining hall.”

  “Isn’t his father some kind of big shot?”

  “Who, Matt?”

  “Yeah. That was what Ingrid told me.”

  “I don’t think so. His father’s a car salesman.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “I thought she said it was the guy who went around in the paper hat.”

  “Positive.” Matt had told me lots of hilarious stories about his hapless, overweight father, who was always moving from one dealership to another, never quite meeting his sales quotas. In the one I liked best, Matt had snuck into a lot his father had recently been fired from and soaped lots of crazy things on the windows of the used cars, phrases like Complete Piece of Shit, A Real Lemon, and They Tampered with My Odometer!

  “You must be confusing him with someone else.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “Doesn’t matter.”

  We drank a second pitcher, something we had never done before, and stayed until closing time. Polly talked about her family’s summer place in Vermont. She said there was a spring-fed pond there, and a pasture they rented out to a dairy farmer down the road. She said it was possible to really get to know the cows, not only to distinguish one from the other, but to get a pretty good sense of how they were feeling on any given day.

  “How do you do that?”

  “You talk to them. And lock at their faces. Cows have very expressive faces.”

  I knew her well enough at that point not to be surprised by this. The first few months we’d worked together, I’d found her distant and intimidating, not just because she was Professor Preston’s girlfriend, but also because she’d cultivated a very adult reserve that made her seem years older than the rest of us. She was all business at our editorial-board meetings, holding herself conspicuously aloof from the atmosphere of manic jocularity that dominated the proceedings. The more time we spent together, though, the more I’d come to realize that her reserve was rooted as much in shyness as in confidence, and that her quiet sophistication masked a powerful streak of girlish sincerity.

  “You should come visit me,” she said. “We could go for a midnight swim.”

  “Just you and me? Or are the cows included, too?”

  “The more the merrier, I guess. What are you doing this summer anyway?”

  “Probably helping my dad.”

  Just thinking about the lunch truck made my head hurt. I had a pretty strong beer buzz at that point, and for a second or two, the physical reality of the summer washed back over me, almost like a hallucination. I felt the weight of the coin belt around my waist, the dent in my forehead from a too-tight baseball cap, the numbness in my hand from fishing around in the ice bed, trying to locate the last can of orange soda. Spring break was only two weeks away. and instead of traveling to someplace warm like the Whiffenpoofs, I was going to spend it behind the wheel of the Roach Coach, filling in while my father recuperated from a long-delayed hemorrhoid operation.

  “That must be nice,” she said. “Getting to spend time width your dad like that. I was always jealous of my father’s life at the office. He spent so much time there and I could never be part of it.”

  “It’s not nice,” I told her. “It’s boring as hell. I’d love to do something else. But he needs the help.”

  I smiled as though resigned to making the best of a bad situation, thinking, for some reason, of my parents at Camp Leisure-Tyme, playing solitaire at opposite ends of the picnic table. I couldn’t help resenting Polly just then for her spring-fed swimming hole and her expressive cows—the whole Vermont summertime idyll—resenting her despite the fact that she’d been kind enough to offer to share it with me. Her foot touched my ankle under the table, as if she understood my bad thoughts and wanted to forgive me anyway.

  “I think I’m going to take painting lessons,” she said. “I want to learn to look at things. So I can see what’s really there instead of what’s just supposed to be.”

  The busboy came to clear away our mess. He couldn’t speak English and had to communicate by pointing. Polly said something in Spanish that made him smile, and he began gathering our plates and glasses. Trying to be helpful, I flicked a dirty napkin in his direction, and suddenly felt like a jerk. To him I must have looked like a prince of privilege, drinking beer at midnight with a pretty girl, attending a school that cost more a semester than he probably made in a year. He muttered, “Gracias,” and dropped the napkin into the empty pitcher.

  “You know the real reason I want to paint this summer?” Polly’s foot touched mine under the table again. This time she kept it there.

  “What?”

  She smiled. “I want to look like an artist. I love those paint-splattered jeans they wear. It makes them look so serious.”

  “Don’t do it,” I said.

  “Don’t do what?”

  “The paint-splattered jeans.”

  “Why not?”

  “It wouldn’t be fair.” My foot felt huge against hers, like someone had inflated it with a pump. “You’re too cool already.”

  Both of us needed to use the bathroom before we left. The women’s room was upstairs, not far from the pizza counter, but men had to descend a steep stairway and follow a narrow hallway to a cramped, doorless stall lit by a naked bulb. I unzipped and cursed myself for not wearing a decent pair of underpants or packing one of my lambskins just in case, but these recriminations were beside the point. The night had veered wildly off course, heading toward a destination that hadn’t even been on the map when I’d gotten dressed after my shower. I briefly considered ditching my shabby briefs in the garbage can, presenting myself to Polly as more of a devil-may-care sort of guy than I really was, but quickly realized that removing my underwear in the present circumstances was out of the question. If we really did end up in a pants-off situation, she was just going to have to accept me for the slob I was.

  This was the thought foremost in my mind when I stepped out of the bathroom and into her arms. I hadn’t expected her to be there, and let out an involuntary cry of alarm that she stifled with a kiss. It was an abrupt, determined kiss, almost like someone had dared her to do it, and it was over before I really had a chance to process what was happening. She stepped away from me in the murky hallway, tilting her head to study me from a different angle.

  “Walk me home?” she asked. There was an anxious tremor in her voice, as if she’d somehow gotten the idea that there was the slightest chance in hell I might say no.

  She lived right around the corner, so we didn’t have far to go. It was too bad, in a way, because everything seemed perfect just then. The night was clear and cool, the moon bright; Polly’s hand was warm. I would’ve been happy to walk with her for hours down the quiet streets, traversing the entire campus, past the
darkened libraries and lit-up residential colleges, the closed stores and the blank fronts of secret societies, past stone walls and ivy-covered moats and iron gates, never out of earshot of tapping typewriters or the sound of laughter seeping through a closed window.

  As it was, the walk lasted maybe a minute. Even so, I remember feeling like Wordsworth on the verge of a sublime experience, one of his “spots of time.” I was alert and deeply connected to my surroundings, the familiar world seemed to vibrate with unexpected significance. The revelation it brought me wasn’t grand or romantic, though—it was just a simple sense of belonging. I’m here, I thought. I’m happy.

  “Oh, shit,” said Polly. Her hand slipped out of mine.

  Peter Preston was waiting out in front of the Silliman gate in a leather bomber jacket, leaning against the hood of his Volkswagen Rabbit. Polly looked at him. He looked at me. I looked at her, then back at him, feeling instantly diminished by his presence—shorter, younger, more badly dressed than I’d been a second ago. He made me think of all the books I hadn’t read, and all the ones I’d read but hadn’t fully understood.

  “Hi, Danny,” he said, as if it were a chance meeting in the street, involving just the two of us. He knew me from class the previous year—my final paper on Measure for Measure had been nominated for one of the sophomore English prizes—and had taken me to lunch to congratulate me on a job well done.

  “Hi, Professor Preston.”

  He gave a weird laugh.

  “Might as well call me Peter.”

  “Okay.”

  He combed his fingers through his hair and gave a big sigh. He seemed stricken, like he’d just received terrible news but for some reason felt obligated to smile about it. Out of the blue, I remembered this girl in my section remarking on his uncanny resemblance to Andy Gibb.

  “Mind if I talk to Polly?” he asked.

  I checked with her, already knowing the answer. She bit her lip, dismissing me with a nod.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

  My face felt hot, like I was standing too close to a fireplace. I gave a shrug of what was supposed to be mature resignation and headed off down College Street as though it were all the same to me, as though I’d expected the night to end like this all along. It seemed important not to look back or give too much thought to what they might be doing or saying, so I tried to distract myself by whispering the word “fuck” over and over again, in unison with my footsteps, and thinking about how cool I would be in the leather bomber jacket I was sure I would someday own.

  kimchi virgins

  By the time I got within striking distance of J. E.—Jonathan Edwards, my residential college—I had cheered up considerably. My initial sense of defeat had subsided, and I was beginning to see the night as a major step forward. Polly had kissed me; I had told her the truth about Cindy. I was off the sidelines and into the game, and the score wasn’t nearly as lopsided in Peter Preston’s favor as I’d imagined.

  Fumbling for my keys by the main gate, I grew uneasy, as though I were being watched. Casting a furtive glance down Library Walk, the elegant bluestone path that separated J. E. from Branford College, I spotted a shadowy figure on the grass between the walkway and the Branford moat, maybe thirty yards away. He had his back to me and was partially obscured by a tree, but something—his distinctive slouch, or maybe just the drape of his coat—told me right away that it was Nick. I was amazed to see him still hanging around campus at this hour.

  I wasn’t sure if he’d seen me, and could just as easily have slipped through the gate and left him to his business, but I didn’t. Part of my hesitation came from a fear of looking like I was snubbing him—grouchy and foul-mouthed as he was, Nick could be surprisingly touchy—but mainly I was just curious. Nick had gotten under my skin over the past couple of months. I’d met a lot of guys like him back home, factory workers and manual laborers who seemed too smart for the jobs they’d ended up with and only knew how to fight back with muttered curses and bitter jokes, guys who played the lottery every week just to remind themselves that you couldn’t win. Like them, Nick made me wonder if I was a fool for thinking I had some kind of God-given right to satisfying work and personal happiness, for believing that what separated me from him was anything more than a few points on a standardized test and a little bit of luck that was bound to run out long before I reached the finish line.

  I didn’t walk any more softly than usual, but for some reason he didn’t hear me approach. He just stood there, lost in thought, gazing into a lighted window on the ground floor of Branford, on the far side of the moat. Kristin Willard was framed in the window, her profile angelic in the pale glow of her reading lamp. She seemed to be concentrating hard, as if something in the book didn’t make sense to her. Another girl appeared in the doorway behind her, but Kristin read on, oblivious to the intrusion. Our conversation in the dining hall came back to me, Nick and Matt joking about inviting her to our orgy, but it seemed wrong now, creepy instead of funny.

  I cleared my throat.

  Nick couldn’t have reacted more violently to a gunshot. He spun on his heels, emitting a strangled yelp of distress, and flung his arms into an awkward karate stance that couldn’t conceal the flinch of pure terror on his face. I jumped backward, raising my own hands in a reflexive gesture of self-defense. We froze in these half-assed Bruce Lee poses for a few seconds, until Nick finally realized who I was.

  “You got a good dentist?” he asked me.

  “What?”

  “If you ever do that to me again,” he whispered, “you’re gonna be missing a whole bunch of fucking teeth.”

  He brushed off the front of his coat as if he’d gotten crumbs on it, and walked off without another word. When I checked on Kristin again, she was gone. All I could see through the window was the lamplight falling on her empty desk.

  My heart still pounding, I opened the door to my suite and stepped into a pungent cloud of pot smoke spiced with the industrial-strength odor of fermented pickled cabbage. Pretzel Logic was playing on the stereo and the common room was crowded with visitors from the second floor, including the elusive Vernon Davis, the only black guy on our entryway. I had barely registered my surprise at his presence when Ted lifted the red plastic tube off the coffee table and held it out to me. Sang did the same with a glass jar the size of a human head.

  “Bong hit?” asked one.

  “Kimchi?” inquired the other.

  Over the past couple of months, these two items had become the centerpieces of a popular late-night ritual in our suite. Sang had returned from Christmas break in California with three huge containers of his grandfather’s homemade kimchi—it was supposedly aged in the traditional manner, buried in a hole in the backyard—and he invited a couple of his Asian friends over to try some on the night before classes began. Shortly before they arrived, Ted broke open a gigantic Thai stick his prep school lacrosse coach had given him as a Christmas present. Those who partook of these two delicacies in the proper order—I wasn’t one of them—pronounced the combination nothing short of miraculous, and word had gotten around.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “No bong hit?” Ted squinted at me in broken-hearted disbelief. It wounded him when people didn’t want to share in his pleasures.

  “Sorry,” I said, my willpower already starting to erode. “I’ve got five hundred pages of Middlemarch to go before I sleep.”

  “So?” Ted glanced around the room for support. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “You ever try to read George Eliot stoned?” I felt somewhat sheepish advancing this line of argument after splitting two pitchers with Polly, but it was important to my self-image that I at least try to resist. “You can’t get past the epigraphs.”

  “Eat some kimchi,” said Donald Park, a Korean-American straight-arrow who only tolerated our dope smoking out of a deep, almost primal craving for his ancestral staple. “It’s scientifically proven to clear the mind and freshen the breath.
”

  “Danny’s a kimchi virgin,” Sang explained, as though this shameful fact hadn’t already attained the status of common knowledge. He passed the jar across the table to Donald, who unwrapped a pair of restaurant chopsticks he’d removed from his shirt pocket and used them to fish out a radioactive-looking wedge of cabbage, its pale surface speckled with chili powder. He munched it slowly, regarding me with undisguised pity.

  “I’m working up to it,” I assured him. “I’m gonna get there any day now.”

  Among my friends—especially my more or less omnivorous Asian friends—I was widely celebrated for my strange eating habits. I had grown up in a house where spices were frowned upon, and where eating out inevitably meant pizza or McDonald’s. Before college, the only Chinese food I had ever consumed was a mouthful of canned, uncooked La Choy water chestnuts whose unusual texture had left me deeply traumatized. But it wasn’t just the cuisine of other lands that gave me trouble; I had also cultivated a profound, unshakable revulsion for a number of common American foods, including eggs, raw tomatoes, mayonnaise, mushrooms, sea creatures, and every vegetable known to humankind with the exception of iceberg lettuce, canned corn, and overcooked green beans. On the other hand, the few things I did like—hot dogs, BLTs (minus the T), French dip sandwiches, chocolate pudding, pancakes, saltines with peanut butter—I consumed in amounts that had made me a minor legend in the dining hall. I justified myself by saying that I more than made up in volume what I lacked in variety, but the truth was that I was often embarrassed by my cowardice, the way I forced my friends to bend over backward for me when choosing a restaurant or even ordering pizza. I had a number of self-improvement projects in the works in those days, and one of the main ones involved forcing myself to become a more adventurous eater.

  “Tonight’s the night,” sang Hank Yamashita, in a credible imitation of Rod Stewart. Hank was a six-foot-tall Japanese-American from the Upper East Side who read GQ and had taken it upon himself to act as my informal fashion advisor. It was at Hank’s urging that I had replaced my cherished blue suede winter coat with a less eye-catching parka, and had relegated my new Thom McAn cowboy boots to a dusty corner of my closet. (It wasn’t that Hank had anything against cowboy boots per se—he owned several pairs himself—but he did object to the peculiar orange glow mine seemed to give off, especially at twilight or in cloudy weather.) “Vernon’s gonna take the plunge,” he added.