Joe College: A Novel

by Tom Perrotta

  But as difficult as it was to imagine turning into a hard-luck version of Stew—after all, my parents didn’t have money and weren’t going to be supporting anyone while I finished college—it was no easier to imagine going the route of Larry Messina, this guy who’d graduated Harding High a year ahead of me. Larry was the long time boyfriend of Monica Brady, one of the smartest girls in my class. Monica had received a full scholarship to study engineering at Bucknell, but her plans changed when she got pregnant the night of her senior prom, supposedly the first time the two of them had done the deed. Her father was a bigwig in the Knights of Columbus, and he refused to even consider the possibility of allowing his daughter to get an abortion. Instead a quickie wedding was arranged for late that summer, on what turned out to be a beautiful breezy Sunday afternoon, though the auspicious weather couldn’t quite compensate for the inauspicious absence of the groom, who had allegedly gone to a Grateful Dead concert the night before and disappeared into a two-tone VW van with Oregon plates. Nearly three years later, Larry was still at large in the Deadhead underworld and still spoken about in hushed tones by the people who’d known him, as though he were a draft dodger or fugitive from justice, someone who’d brought nearly unspeakable shame on himself and his family. Meanwhile, Monica had taken a part-time job at Stop & Shop, and whenever I shopped there I tried to avoid getting on line for her register, to spare us both the awkward conversations we always seemed to have about what a great time I must be having in college.

  If someone had put a loaded gun to my head, I thought I’d probably choose Stew’s route over Larry’s, though I wasn’t sure if this was a sign of decency or cowardice on my part. I couldn’t imagine embarrassing my parents the way Larry had. and I couldn’t stand the idea of people I’d grown up with thinking badly about me, especially since a flattering consensus seemed to have developed around town that my life was shaping up pretty well. I’d rather have them feeling sorry for me, like I’d given up the world to pay for one stupid mistake, which was the way everybody felt when they saw Monica Brady biting her lip, trying to remember the price code for eggplant. On the other hand, the last thing I wanted was for Cindy to know that I felt this way, for fear that it would encourage her to actually put me in a position where this hypothetical dilemma would become horrifyingly real, and God only knew what I’d have to do to save myself.

  Oddly enough, Cindy and I hadn’t really managed to discuss the situation on Friday night, despite the fact that she’d driven all the way up to New Haven to bring it to my attention. The words were barely out of her mouth when she rose from the couch and walked calmly out of the common room with a dramatic flair I hadn’t known she possessed, turning sideways to slip between me and Polly on her way to the door. I stood paralyzed in her wake, everyone’s eyes on me in the stunned silence that accompanied her departure.

  “Holy shit,” I exclaimed, grinning the stupid grin I reserved specially for moments of crisis.

  If it had been left up to me, I would have just gone into my room and laid down for a while, but it was clear from the intensely interested gazes of my audience that something a little more dynamic was required of me at the moment. I touched Polly lightly on the wrist.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” I told her. “I’ll be right back.”

  She pulled her hand away as though I were a stranger who’d accosted her in the elevator, rather than the guy she’d just been making a spectacle of herself with on the lawn behind the drama school.

  “What a night,” she muttered, loud enough for everyone to hear.

  It was misery to plunge back into the chattering mob on the stairs, squeezing my way through the press of bodies like a salmon struggling in the wrong direction, away from where I wanted to stay toward a destination I didn’t want to reach. When I finally managed to force my way to the ground floor and fresh air, I walked straight into Max, who was standing outside the entryway in his bare feet and skintight pajama top, squinting skeptically at our third-floor windows.

  “Aha,” he said. “Just the man I wanted to see.”

  “Jesus, Max. Where the hell have you been?”

  “Around.” He gestured vaguely at the wider world. “Killing time.”

  “Your mother’s pretty upset.”

  “They still up there?”

  “Yeah,” I said, wondering where you could go to hide out for nine hours looking like an escaped mental patient, even at Yale. “They’ll probably still be there in the morning.”

  He shook his head. “Bastards can’t take a hint.”

  “They came all the way from Colorado. The least you could do is say hello.”

  “No,” he observed, improvising a little dance to protect his naked feet from the cold slate. “The least I could do is a lot less than that. Where you off to anyway?”

  “Tell you later.”

  I patted his shoulder and looped around him on my way to the York Street entrance, where I found Cindy standing like a prisoner with her face and hands pressed against the bars of the locked gate. I jingled my keys to let her know the cavalry had arrived.

  “Need some help?”

  She turned slowly. From the look on her face, you might have thought she knew dozens of people at Yale, any one of whom would have been preferable to me at that particular moment.

  “What’s it look like to you?”

  She let me walk her to her car, which was parked right in front of WaWa’s. Three homeless guys hit us up for money in the half-block it took for us to get there.

  “It’s not as pretty as I expected around here,” she observed. “You made it sound like heaven or something.”

  “It’s better in the daytime.”

  “Princeton’s a lot nicer,” she said, snapping open her purse and fishing around for her car keys. “I thought this was going to look more like that.”

  “Princeton?” I scoffed. “Princeton’s a country club.”

  “Well, this looks like downtown Elizabeth.”

  “I like being in the city. It’s not so much like being locked in an ivory tower.”

  She’d gotten too engrossed in her search to answer. She kept pulling things out of her purse—a travel packet of Kleenex, a silver whistle, a squeeze tube of Vaseline—and shoving them back in with small sighs of exasperation.

  “Damn,” she said. “I hope I didn’t leave them in your room.”

  She pried the purse open as far as it would go and pressed her face into the aperture, like an animal trainer peering into a lion’s mouth. I struck a pose of pensive waiting, rubbing my chin and pondering the night sky. It felt like we were on public display, lit up like movie stars in the fluorescent glow spilling out from the plate-glass windows of the convenience store, which just then seemed to be the dazzling hub of all New Haven. Behind her I could see a pack of local kids gathered in front of Demery’s, shouting at passing cars, and farther down, a big silver tour bus parked in front of Toad’s. Branford was having a Motown party that night, and you could hear the muffled voices of the Jackson Five rising above the hum of Elm Street traffic.

  “I give up,” she said finally, turning the bag upside down and dumping the contents onto the hood of her car.

  Her purse was normal size, but it disgorged a bewildering torrent of stuff, including about forty sticks of Juicyfruit gum, a battered issue of TV Guide with Peter Falk on the cover, an unopened deck of cards, maybe half a dozen film cannisters, a few stray jujubes, the obligatory container of Tic Tacs, and the two letters I’d written her the previous fall. It was odd to see the envelopes tumble out with the rest of the junk, my familiar scrawl staring back at me like an old friend. I had to suppress an urge to reach down and claim them as my own.

  “I’m such an idiot,” she said, straightening up and laughing. She reached into a slash pocket on the side of her jacket and produced the keys with a bashful flourish. “I can’t believe I’m so stupid.”

  She handed them to me for safe-keeping—like my own, they were dangling from one of my fathe
r’s souvenir sneakers—and began jamming the mess back into her purse, muttering all the while about what an unbelievable ditz she was. I was taking a moment to admire the contours of her ass in the snug jeans, drawing encouragement from the fact that she didn’t look the slightest bit pregnant, when a car pulled up alongside hers and honked twice. The sound itself was high-pitched, almost toylike, but there was something urgent and imperious in the delivery, and I snapped to attention as if my name had been called. The driver’s side window descended in jerks, revealing Peter Preston’s agitated face.

  “Where is she?” he demanded.

  My instinct was to play dumb, until I realized I didn’t have to.

  “How should I know?”

  He scrutinized Cindy for a few seconds, apparently trying to determine if she was Polly in disguise, then resumed glaring at me. His voice was more tentative now, though still aggrieved.

  “They said she was with you.”

  “I guess they were wrong.”

  He closed his eyes and nodded slowly, trying to get hold of himself. It struck me then with surprising force—saddened me, almost—that Cindy’s Civic was a lot nicer than the professor’s dirty yellow Rabbit. I wondered if he was making some sort of statement about materialism, or if he simply couldn’t afford a better car. The least he could have done was wash the one he had.

  “Okay,” he said, more to himself than to me. “All right, then.”

  By the time he drove off, Cindy. had finished repacking her purse. She unwrapped a stick of gum and carefully folded it in half before tucking it in her mouth.

  “Who was that?”

  “Polly’s old boyfriend.”

  “Is Polly—?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s pretty,” Cindy said, with the tone of melancholy objectivity girls often struck when pronouncing verdicts on their rivals.

  I nodded without enthusiasm. Cindy risked a smile.

  “Sorry to mess up your night.”

  “That’s okay. I guess I deserve it.”

  She extended her hand to me, open palm up. There was a shy, expectant look on her face, almost as if she were asking me to dance.

  “It’s really nice to see you again,” she told me. “I’ve been missing you a lot.”

  I opened my mouth to say something similar but couldn’t bring myself to mouth even the blandest pleasantry. You were a mistake, I wanted to tell her. Is that so hard to understand? In mv embarrassment I looked away, pretending to be distracted by the bright interior of WaWa’s, full of Yalies loading up on bags of Doritos and pints of Häagen-Dazs. Completely by chance, I found myself locked in goofy eye contact with my dishwashing partner, Eddie Zimmer, who was standing on line with three rolls of toilet paper balanced on top of his head like a smokestack. Lorelei, was standing next to him, shaking her head in mock disapproval of his wacky antics. I took a deep breath and turned back to Cindy.

  “Your car looks nice,” I told her, dropping the keys into her palm. “Do you still wash it every week?”

  She hesitated, as if she hadn’t heard me correctly.

  “I worked hard for this car.” There was an edge to her voice, as if she were trying to suggest that I’d been handed things on a silver platter. “It’ll be a long time before I can afford another one.”

  “I’m so far from being able to afford a new car, you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “but when you do it’ll be a lot nicer than this.”

  “I’ll keep you posted.”

  “You do that,” she snapped, whirling away from me with startling abruptness, as if she’d just realized she was late for an appointment. She had trouble with the lock, jabbing the key at the target three or four times before hitting the bull’s-eye. The button popped with a solid thunk.

  “Yo, Danny,” a voice called from the doorway. “Heads up.”

  I turned just in time to see a wobbly missile spinning toward my face. Acting with admirable autonomy, my hands flew up and snagged what turned out to be a roll of toilet paper.

  “Nice grab,” said Eddie, who was busy shoving the two remaining rolls up and under his Penn sweatshirt in what my George Eliot professor would have called “an act of gender transgression.” Lorelei seemed to interpret this gesture as some sort of challenge, and promptly pulled open her army jacket like a flasher to exhibit her own breasts straining against the fabric of a too-small Mötley Crüe T-shirt.

  “Mine are still bigger,” she said, giggling with drunken pride. She smiled at me, and I felt a sudden jolt of electricity, as if our bodies were tuned to the same frequency. “Don’t you think?”

  “We’ll have to make a more thorough comparison back at my place,” Eddie told her, thereby earning himself an affectionate punch in the arm. “Hey, you guys wanna party? We still got half a bottle of tequila left.”

  I glanced at Cindy, who was staring at Lorelei as if she knew her from somewhere. For a second, in spite of everything, I felt like saying yes. Maybe that’s what we need, I thought, a night with Eddie and Lorelei, a lesson on how two totally different people can hang out together and simply enjoy one another’s company, free from expectations or recriminations. But then I admitted to myself that what I really wanted was to trade places, to slip off and get drunk with Lorelei while Eddie figured out what to do about Cindy.

  “Maybe some other time,” I told him.

  “No problem. We’ll be over at the Taft if you guys change your mind. Apartment seven-B.” Eddie glanced at Lorelei. “If her brothers don’t kill me first.”

  Lorelei nodded to confirm this possibility. “They want to kick Eddie’s ass.”

  “Really?” I said. “How come?”

  “They’re greasers,” she said, as if this were a term that people still used everyday. “They think it’s funny.”

  “Nick ratted me out.” Eddie shook his head. He was a shaggy-haired Applied Math major who looked like a wiseass even when he was trying to be sincere. “Now Ronny and Tony want to beat the living shit out of me. It’s just so primitive.”

  “So what are you gonna do?” I asked.

  “I dunno,” Eddie admitted, cupping his hands beneath his toilet-paper breasts. “Guess I’m gonna get my ass kicked.”

  Lorelei snickered. “My hero.”

  They headed off down the block, laughing as if the whole thing were a big joke. By the time I turned back to Cindy, she had climbed into her car and shut the door. She cranked the window down a couple of inches, looking up at me with a familiar scrunched-up expression.

  “You okay?” I asked. “You sure you’re all right to drive?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She started the engine and released the brake, staring at me the whole time, waiting for me to say something else. All at once the tears just started dropping out of her eyes and sliding down her face like a special effect, one perfectly formed droplet after the other.

  “I’m sorry,” I finally managed to stammer, but by that point she’d already pulled away, leaving me alone at the curb with a roll of toilet paper in my hand.

  I was still deep in a Kerouac trance when my father knocked on my bedroom door a couple hours later. Dean and Sal were zooming through Nebraska in a borrowed Cadillac limousine, going “a hundred-and-ten miles an hour straight through, an arrow road, sleeping towns, no traffic.” He shuffled into my room in flannel pajamas and an old plaid bathrobe he only wore when he was feeling sick or downhearted.

  “You still up? It’s after eleven.”

  “Reading.” I set the book down next to the legal pad I’d been using to copy out my favorite sentences.

  “Schoolwork?”

  “Pleasure.”

  He gave me a look I was beginning to recognize, the one that often took up residence on his face when the conversation shifted to matters that could broadly be termed intellectual. His eyes narrowed and he leaned forward a little, concentrating harder than usual, as if he hadn’t paid proper attention to me in the previous two decades of our a
cquaintanceship and now had to play catch-up.

  “You even take notes on your pleasure reading?”

  “Not usually. This is a pretty amazing book, though.”

  “Oh yeah? What is it?”

  “On the Road. By Jack Kerouac.”

  “On the Road?” He studied the ceiling while gently ministering to his ass with his left hand. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “You sure? It’s a pretty famous book. Published back in the fifties. This is the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition.”

  “Hmm,” he said, moderately impressed. “What’s it about?”

  I picked up the book and read from the back cover. “‘On the Road is a saga of youth adrift in America, traveling the highways, exploring the midnight streets of the cities, learning the vast expanse of the land, passionately searching for their country and themselves.’” I left out the part about the book being … an explosion of consciousness—a mind-expanding trip into emotíon and sensation, drugs and liquor and sex … and jumped right to the end. “‘It is, quite simply, one of the great novels and major milestones of our time.’”

  “I wasn’t much of a reader back then.” He shook his head, as if saddened by all the major milestones he’d missed out on. “Maybe things would be different now if I was.”

  “You should check it out sometime,” I said, an invitation I would never have extended if I’d thought there was the slightest chance he’d take me up on it. I couldn’t quite imagine him reading sentences like the ones I’d scribbled in my pad—The madness of Dean had bloomed into a weird flower, say, or To Slim Gaillard, the whole world was just one big orooni—and feeling like he was making productive use of his time.