Dark Rooms (22 page)

“Whew! Now don't go getting all gung-ho on me.”

He's smiling widely and I give him a small one back, a small one that gets bigger, then turns into a laugh. And maybe it's because I've finally figured him out, solved the mystery of his appeal for Nica and the rest, and so have the luxury of feeling sorry for him, but, for the first time I can remember, I feel genuine liking for him, too. “I'll think about,” I say again.

“Beautiful. That's all I ask.”

The chapel bell tolls and the two of us say our good-byes. Instead of continuing on my way to Burroughs, though, I reverse directions, head to the dorms. The Asian Culture Appreciation Society will have to wait till next week to watch its movie. As Shep and I were talking it had hit me: the option I've avoided so much as thinking about is, in fact, my only one. Maddie. After all, she was Nica's closest friend, and if Nica had told anybody the reason for the breakup with Jamie, it would have been her. The trick will be in getting her to tell me. She'll make me beg, really grovel, and once I've degraded myself will probably still withhold. But I have to try.

Field hockey practice begins almost immediately after school. Maddie, though, I know, doesn't like to change with the team in the locker, prefers the privacy of her dorm room. That gives me a twenty-minute window.

Archibald House is set back from the street by a circular driveway and a cluster of yellow birch trees, and is grand-gracious in the manner of a southern plantation: white and sprawling with tall columns and windows, fluted pilasters, carved pediments, a portico you have to climb three steps to reach. I climb them and pull open the heavy mahogany doors, pausing on the threshold as my eyes adjust to the interior. It's dim. Shabby, too, this building, like most of the others on campus, far more impressive on the outside.

I cross the foyer to the common room, smelling it before I'm in it: Murphy Oil Soap and burnt popcorn and the beeswax used in lip gloss, all mixed with the musky, hothouse scent of girls ripening into women in close quarters. It's empty. A Ouija board has been left out on the coffee table along with a York Peppermint Pattie wrapper, a leaky pen, a pack of tarot cards. I turn to the corkboard. In between a sign announcing the disappearance of a graphing calculator (“Whoever took it, please give it back. My financial aid package does not include help with supplies. Beth Gustowski”) and another announcing the launch of a David Foster Wallace fan club (“We're calling ourselves The Mad Storks. If you need to ask, don't bother showing up, you poseur”) is the room assignments sheet. Maddie's in 107. A double.

I start walking, eyes down in the unlikely event that I run into somebody I know. I don't see a soul, though, until I turn onto Maddie's hall. At the far end of it is Ruben. He's sitting on the floor across from her door, twisting the knobs on a pocket-sized Etch-A-Sketch. Guess the two of them didn't break up when he moved on to college after all. So much for her being interested in Jamie.

Ruben's eyes are glued to the screen of his toy, and I think I can escape without being spotted. I've just turned, taken my first tiptoey step, when his voice booms out, “Gracie!”

I turn back. “Hey, Ruben,” I say, trying not to sound sheepish, like I've been busted.

He lets the Etch-A-Sketch fall to his lap. “You got to pee or something?”

“No.”

“You sure?” Crossing his legs at the ankles, having fun, “Because you were moving like you had to pee, like you were going potty.”

“Nope. Not going anywhere.”

He pats the floor beside him. “Then take a load off. I could use the company.”

After a moment's hesitation, I drop down, though across from him rather than next to. He's in the middle of a meal, I see. Chicken wings, the kind that sit under a heat lamp in the Hot Foods section of a convenience store, a bottle of chocolate Yoo-hoo propped against his thigh. Over the summer he's grown himself a set of sideburns. Also, a potbelly, which hangs over the waistband of his sweatpants, as white and dimply as cottage cheese.

“I heard you were back in town,” he says, picking up a wing dripping in buffalo sauce, inserting it in his mouth. When he takes it out again, it's glistening bone. “You here to see Maddie?”

My impulse is to lie, say it's someone else I'm here to see, but I know he'll ask who and at the moment I can't think of a single person other than Maddie living in Archibald. “I am,” I say.

He leers at me. “I bet you are. Want to get her all to yourself, huh?”

“I guess.”

“Looking for a little alone time, are you? A little alone time with Maddie and her field hockey stick, her great big long hard field hockey stick?”

I yawn into my fist, letting him know that his leer, more or less automatic, bores me; his sex trash talk, too, also automatic. And for a while we sit there, the silence broken only by the sound of chewing and swallowing, the occasional belch.

There's a note on the dry erase board on the back of Maddie's door. The handwriting belongs to Maddie.

It takes me a second to figure out that
LB
is Charlotte Bontemps, Lottie to her friends, Maddie's roommate, spent the previous year studying in Barcelona because she couldn't, she said, deal with America anymore. I wonder if Maddie still has that Robert Mapplethorpe photo of Susan Sontag hanging above her bed, the one Nica bought her, or if she trashed it when she moved out of her dorm room last spring.

Ruben interrupts my reverie, saying, “So, Grace, long time no. Why haven't you been by to see me? I'm only at Trinity. Practically just down the street. Don't tell me you kicked that sleeping problem of yours.”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

“Did you try yoga like I suggested?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And it worked?”

“Like a charm.”

“No shit.”

“Who knew, right? And here I thought I'd never—hey, Ruben, would you mind not staring at my breasts?”

He looks up at me, takes the finger he was sucking the grease off out of his mouth. In a hurt tone, “I was just trying to read your T-shirt.”

My shirt's not a T. It's a button-down, plain white.

Wiping his hands on the front of his sweat suit, he says, “Really, I think it's great you overcame your problem. Beat the odds and all that.”

“Lucky for me I did. I was going broke.”

“Sleeplessness is expensive. For future reference, though, cash isn't the only form of payment I accept.”

I shake my head, less in disgust than wonder. “Jesus, you really are a creep.”

“Hey, I'm a stud muffin, baby, take a bite,” he says, singsong. And then in a normal voice a few seconds later, “And for the record, I don't make that offer to just anyone.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I don't. You used to rub me hard the wrong way. Always sneaking looks at people to see what they thought of you. Did they like you? Did they think you were okay? Oh, boo hoo, boo hoo.” He shudders. “You haven't been rubbing me the wrong way lately, though. Not in the last couple months. Want to know the two words I think when I look at you now?
Not
and
bad
. Ever since you started seeming kind of”—he pauses to take a swig of Yoo-hoo, work his tongue thoughtfully around his mouth—“defiled. Yeah, defiled.” Warming to his subject, “These days you slink around, too skinny and too pale, never smiling, like you're hungover or crashing all the time. And you've got this look on your face—tight, but kind of loose, too—that girls get when they're overfucked.”

“Stop,” I say, deadpan. “I can't take all the violin music.”

“I'm not saying you
are
defiled and overfucked. I'm saying you
seem
defiled and overfucked. Anyway, I think it's sweet that you're here, taking care of your sister's unfinished business. A sense of familial responsibility is so sadly lacking in people these days, don't you find?”

I look at him, confused. Why is he bringing up Nica? What unfinished business? A sense of familial responsibility on whose behalf? And then confusion gives way to fear. Could he be referring to her murder, solved but not solved right? Did he know I was investigating it? The thought that he might pushes me to my feet. I'm not ready to explain myself to him. “I've got to go,” I mumble, afraid that he'll try to stop me or say something else upsetting.

“Oh, no. Don't leave.”

“I'll catch Maddie another time.”

“But she'll be back any minute. She has to be. Can't run up and down the field in designer ankle boots. If you don't want to wait, I'll let you go first. Just promise me you won't let her stick a piece of gum over the keyhole. She used to do that when Nica came by.”

I stand there, staring at him, my mind struggling to construct a scenario, other than the obvious one, in which Nica and Maddie would engage in an activity behind closed doors that he would wish to observe but would not be allowed to. My mind fails. Still, I want it spelled out for me: “Are you telling me that Nica and Maddie were—” leaving a blank for him to fill.

“Fucking. Well, not fucking fucking. Probably just using their fingers,” he says, idly sniffing his. “Or their tongues, maybe. No big thing. All women are lesbians. It's true. Studies have been done. Oh, wow.” He turns his face up to the ceiling. “Boy, are we a couple of dodos. A pair of real shit-for-brains.”

“What? Why?”

“It's Wednesday. Game day. Maddie's not coming back to her room to change. She's probably on a bus, halfway to some hayseed town in New Hampshire where . . .”

As he continues to talk, I feel my eyes blink, my ears close off, my brain tunnel back six months to tennis preseason.

Mr. Schaeffer was giving us a demonstration in Houghton Gymnasium on proper bicep curl technique when Nica and Maddie showed up late for the third day in a row, hips bumping, faces flushed from running. He dropped his barbell to the floor, ordered the two them into his office, sent the rest of us out to the courts to do groundstroke drills. I stayed behind, though, lingering over an untied sneaker, and watched through the door, which he'd left open. Nica and Maddie were standing in front of his desk, gazes lowered penitently, while he ranted and raved. And then his phone rang. He turned around to get it, and as he did I saw Nica lean over, reach up under Maddie's shirt,
place her index finger squarely on Maddie's sternum. As Mr. Schaeffer barked single-word answers into the receiver, she dragged the finger slowly down, circling Maddie's belly button not once but twice before slipping inside. He hung up, and she smoothly took back her hand. He resumed his harangue.

I didn't know then that Nica and Maddie were lovers. The possibility never even occurred to me. Why should it have? Maddie had been with Ruben since her sophomore year, and Nica was so boy crazy. And, besides, Nica's gesture—touching Maddie's stomach—was hardly sexual. Except, of course, that it was. There was intimacy in it, possession, too. There was also Maddie's pleasured shiver in response to it. And I must have noticed these things, registered their implications, if only unconsciously, otherwise why would this nonevent have lodged itself in my memory?

Ruben, I realize, is no longer speaking. I look at him.

“So you have nothing to say back?” he says. “Deafening silence? That's all I'm going to get for my juicy revelation?” He laughs. “Same old kooky Grace.”

“Same old kooky Grace,” I echo shakily.

He takes a final messy sip of Yoo-hoo, screws the cap back on the empty bottle. “Okay, I'm out of here. Unless, of course, you want to give it another shot?”

I shake my head, not knowing what he's talking about, but knowing I don't want to give him another anything.

“Sigh,” he says, “oh well.” And then he rolls to his feet, takes a pen from behind his ear. “You got a piece of paper on you?”

“Sorry.”

“A napkin? A tissue? A Kotex pad?”

When I say sorry again, he looks a little exasperated. After scratching thoughtfully at a sideburn, he tears off a swatch of the brown paper bag his food came in. Scribbling on it, he says, “My address at
Trinity. In case, you know, the insomnia comes back. My office hours are the same.”

He tries to hand the scrap to me but I won't take it, so he balls it up, drops it in my bag. “Smell you later, Gracie,” he says, starting off down the hall, leaving the chicken bones and Yoo-hoo bottle behind. His miniature Etch-A-Sketch falls out of his sweatshirt pocket. He bends over, cat-quick, to retrieve it, his wide-hipped body weirdly limber and graceful. And then, without so much as a look back, he disappears around the corner.

A minute later I'm walking out of Archibald House. My cell rings. Damon. Too excited now to be self-conscious, I answer right away. “I'm sorry I'm missing work again, and I know I should've called, but—”

“Grace?” he says. Something's wrong. I can hear it in his voice.

My stomach plunges. “What happened? Are you okay?”

“It's Max. He just had a heart attack.”

I'm nervous. It's Friday, early evening. I'm on my way to pick up Damon. It'll be the first time I've laid eyes on him in three days. The first time I've spoken to him, other than through text or e-mail, in nearly as many. Fargas Bonds has been closed until further notice. Not closed as in shut down. Max has almost half a million dollars' worth of paper out there. No new paper is being written, though. And Damon and a colleague of Max's, an older guy named Carmichael, are handling the outstanding cases. Otherwise, Damon's spending every waking moment at Max's side. I'd offered to swing by the hospital, pick him up there, but he'd told me, no, that he wanted to go to his grandmother's first. Understandable, I think, as I turn onto his street. He's probably seen about as much of her lately as he has of me, is eager to check in, make sure she's okay.