Joe College: A Novel (12 page)

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Authors: Tom Perrotta

BOOK: Joe College: A Novel
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“You didn’t answer my question,” he said.
“You had a question?”
“Yes. Wouldn’t you say that all literature is ultimately in the
service of some social or political system? What’s wrong with making that explicit?”
“Nothing, I guess.” I felt the quicksand sucking at my ankles. There was nothing to do but sink. “The problem comes when you use that as an excuse to lock people up or kill them.”
“Stop right there,” he said, thrusting out one hand like a traffic cop. “I’m just talking theory here. I’m not trying to defend the practice.”
I remembered this tactic from our previous argument. Eric was like a kid at the playground, making up the rules as he went along, always after the fact and to his own advantage.
“All right,” I said. “Have it your way. The problem with Socialist Realism as a concept is that it erases the distinction between literature and propaganda.”
“Aha.” He smiled like I’d played right into his hands. “But literature is propaganda. Any fool can see that.”
“Not this fool.”
“No?” He drew back a little, as though he feared my ignorance might be contagious. “You like Tolstoy, as I recall. So let’s just take
Anna Karenina,
for example. Isn’t that propaganda in favor of adultery and divorce?”
“Maybe. But adultery and divorce were frowned upon when Tolstoy wrote the book. He was working against the grain of his own society. That’s exactly what you’re not allowed to do under Socialist Realism.”
Eric frowned. His way of responding to countervailing arguments was simply to repeat his original point in different language.
“I’d say governments have the right to determine what sort of propaganda gets disseminated in their countries, don’t you?”
Somebody turned up the music. I had to raise my voice so he could hear me over “Rock Lobster.”
“Eric,” I said. “You wrote a story about a priest who burns down an altar boy’s house on Christmas Eve. What government would be in favor of that?”
“Are you kidding?” He reached behind him and flipped back his cape. It was a reflexive gesture, like a girl pushing hair out of her face. “Priests are class enemies. Stalin would have loved my story.”
I took a deep breath and glanced down the hallway, trying to fend off a sudden wave of anxiety. If Polly were here, surely she would have found me by now.
“Listen, Eric. It’s not the writer’s job to kiss the asses of the people in power. It’s the writer’s job to go against the grain.”
“Like who, for instance?”
“What do you mean, like who?”
“Name me a writer who went against the grain. Besides Tolstoy. Not Shakespeare. Certainly not your precious Hemingway.”
There were lots of writers I might have named, writers who’d been murderer, jailed, exiled, or censored—Babel, Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, Joyce, Nabokov, Allen Ginsberg, But for some reason, my mind at that moment was a vast empty space with only a single name rattling around in it.
“George Eliot,” I said.
“George Eliot?” He laughed. “Is that the best you can do? Chickenshit George Eliot?”
“Chickenshit?” I said in disbelief. “George Eliot?”
“If I’m not mistaken,” he observed, “Mr. Eliot’s real name was Maryann Evans.”
“So? She had to change her name to publish her books. Women weren’t allowed to be serious writers back then.”
“Changing your name isn’t bucking the system. It’s going along to get along. She should have stood up for her rights instead of hiding behind a pseudonym.”
“Hiding? George Eliot wasn’t hiding from anyone. It’s not fair of you to impose twentieth-century values on a nineteenth-century writer”
He waved me away as though I were some kind of intellectual mosquito.
“George Eliot doesn’t cut it, Danny. Give me a better example.”
I wanted to walk away, but I was already in too deep, just like last time. The guy was a black hole. I felt him absorbing me molecule by molecule. If Polly hadn’t grabbed my arm just then I might have vanished from the face of the earth.
“There you are,” she said. There was the slightest hint of accusation in her voice. “I’ve been looking all over.”
Not hard enough, I wanted to tell her, but I held my tongue at the last second. She looked rattled, not quite herself. Even Eric noticed. He took one look at her tense, unhappy expression and realized his time was up.
“We’ll finish this later,” he muttered darkly, pushing me aside and making his way downstairs to inflict himself on the painters.
Polly squinted after him. Her hair was wild and she was wearing a coat I’d never seen before, an ugly orange ski parka zipped, Sang-style, all the way up to her chin. A wrinkled lift ticket dangled from the zipper pull.
“Who was that caped crusader?” she asked.
“Argument Man,” I told her. “He had me cornered. I thought you’d never show up.”
Instead of smiling, she considered me for a long time.
“Listen,” she said, “you’re lucky I’m here at all.”
Polly maneuvered me away from the stairs to a less-congested sector of the hallway. Maybe because we didn’t know each other very well and had such an ill-defined relationship, she had this quality of moving in and out of focus for me. There were times when I was sure I was in love with her and found her beauty obvious and riveting. And then there were times like this—usually when days or weeks had gone by since I’d last seen her—when I was obscurely disappointed by her and couldn’t quite remember what all the fuss was about.
“Peter called,” she informed me in an unconvincingly matter-of-fact voice. “We had a big argument.”
Maybe it’s the coat
, I thought. She was wearing gray tights and sexy ankle-high lace-up shoes; her skinny legs protruded like sticks from the bulky parka. The contrast gave her a jarring, almost composite
appearance, as if the upper and lower portions of her belonged to different people. Normally she wore a secondhand suede coat with frayed cuffs, a missing button, and a prominent coffee stain on one lapel. Its absence disturbed me enough that I couldn’t help wondering for a moment if it was Polly I had the crush on or that funky coat of hers.
“I thought you two were taking a break from each other.”
“I thought so too. But he kind of lost it when I told him I was seeing you tonight.”
“Jesus.” It was disturbing enough to imagine Professor Preston “losing it” under any circumstances, let alone circumstances that involved me personally. It seemed somehow beneath his dignity. “Did you have to tell him?”
“Why should I lie? He didn’t lie to me about his
colleague
from Vassar.” She pronounced the word “colleague” as if it had a different definition from the one that appeared in the dictionary. “If he’s not really my boyfriend, then I guess I can do what I want.”
She took hold of the lift ticket and unzipped her parka in distracted slow motion. It parted to reveal an apple green cotton dress, the fabric of which was printed with a design that alternated pink clocks and gray lollipops. She laughed as if surprised at herself.
“He’s probably standing by the Silliman gate right now, wondering where I am.”
“I thought you told him you were going out with me.”
Her cheeks ballooned, then collapsed.
“He sort of talked me out of it.”
“Sort of?”
“He kept me on the phone for like two hours,” she explained, her voice vehement and pleading at the same time. “Peter’s a really hard person to argue with. He just wears you down until you can’t even think straight.”
“So why are you here?”
“It’s not fair,” she continued, addressing a spot on the wall somewhere above my head. “He thinks he can just bend me to his will. I hung up the phone and thought, No
way
,
tonight I’m doing
what I want
. I didn’t even call him back. I just borrowed this coat from a guy across the hall and headed over here.”
“What’s the coat got to do with it?”
“I didn’t want him to notice me if he passed in his car.” She pulled a gray rag watch cap out of a pocket. “I wore this too. I bet my hair’s a mess, right?”
“You went incognito?” I would have laughed if she hadn’t looked so serious. The guy was a Shakespeare scholar, not someone you needed to hide from in an ugly coat.
“He has this way of finding me,” she said, casting a nervous glance down the length of the hallway. “And if he finds me I just end up doing what he wants.”
She covered her face with both hands and began shaking her head back and forth, moaning like someone who realizes she’s making a big mistake, but is going to go through with it anyway. I remembered my own mysterious fit of moaning outside the J.E. gate and wondered if the night was taking me into deeper water than I could handle. But when she pulled her hands away from her face, she smiled like nothing was wrong.
“Come on,” she said, grabbing hold of my wrist. “Let’s dance.”
 
 
Despite my cavalier
promises to the contrary, I had arrived at Manuscript that night with no intention of dancing. If pressed, I expected to do to Polly what I’d done to other girls at other parties. I’d take her aside, put on a thoughtful, sadly resolute expression, and make her understand that I simply didn’t do it, that it wasn’t just a preference, like not smoking or not going to church, but an essential and immutable part of my identity.
Why don’t you go ahead without me
, I might have begun,
I’ll just stand here in the doorway and watch …
I’d keep talking for as long as it took—it didn’t usually take that long—to convince her that I was serious, accepting her momentary irritation and baffled shrug as the price I had to pay
for keeping faith with my high school self, the sixteen-year-old who believed that Disco Sucked and that dancing (for guys, anyway) was a violation of the unwritten code of rock ‘n’ roll—maybe not Richie Cunningham sock hop rock ‘n’ roll, which was nearly as pathetic as disco anyway, but the Real Thing, leather-pants guitar-hero sex-with-groupies rock ‘n’ roll—though the code did permit you to bob your head in time with the music and punch your fist in the air. You just weren’t allowed to move your feet unless you were an actual member of the band. It was hard to put all this into words, so I had to smile regretfully and say things I didn’t really mean, like
Maybe if I drink a little more,
or
I’m a little self-conscious,
which almost always did the trick. The girls I hung around with at college were very respectful of my feelings of self-consciousness.
That night, though, the flow of events caught me off guard. Before I could launch into my speech or even compose my expression, Polly had led me into the atrium, tossed her parka on the floor, and begun dancing without the slightest hesitation or transition, as though it were a perfectly natural form of behavior. The room was sweaty and crowded now, the loud, pulsating heart of the party. Eyes half-closed, smiling faintly, she held out her hand like a lifeline as she began drifting away from me, insinuating herself into the throng of moving bodies behind her. I pressed back against the wall, shaking my head no,
No, I couldn’t possibly.
I felt so stupid just then, I could hardly bear it. “Rock the Casbah” was playing, a totally respectable song, and no one was paying any attention to me, no one except a ghost floating above the dancers, a long-haired kid with aviator glasses and a Jethro Tull T-shirt. He was watching me warily, his eyes full of quiet pleading.
Remember me?
he seemed to say.
Remember all the good times we had?
I looked at Polly for a few seconds—her eyes were all the way closed now, slender arms aloft, her body in fluid motion—then back at the kid. I would have apologized, but he was already gone, spared the sight of me wading away from the wall and into the crowd of dancers, smiling
the way you do down the shore, when the sun is hot but the ocean’s colder than you expected.
 
 
It was strange
and awful in the beginning, a bad dream made flesh. I was the Dork-in-chief, the Anti-Dancer, the Fred Astaire of Spaz. My arms moved and my legs moved, but these movements had little to do with the music, and even less to do with fun. They were abrupt and jerky, the flailings of a defective marionette. I needed oil. The beat was a distant rumor. If I’d been in water I would have drowned. To make matters worse, everyone else on the dance floor suddenly seemed improbably fluid and limber, full of tricky spins and Soul Train swivels. I mean, they were Yalies. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry majors. People who petitioned to take seven courses in one semester so they wouldn’t have to choose between Introductory Sanskrit, Medieval Architecture, and that senior seminar on
Finnegans Wake.
Where had they learned to dance like this? Groton? Choate? Some special summer camp my parents hadn’t heard about?
The only thing that amazed me more than their collective grace was their collective lack of interest in the spectacle I was making of myself. I half-expected them to gather in a circle to point and snicker, but whether out of politeness or self-absorption, they moved past me as if I didn’t exist. Polly opened her eyes for a second, smiled at me, then closed them again. I couldn’t believe I was getting away with it. I felt relieved and bewildered at the same time, like a stoned hippie in a tie-dyed shirt breezing through customs with ten pounds of pot hidden in his guitar case.

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