Joe College: A Novel (5 page)

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Authors: Tom Perrotta

BOOK: Joe College: A Novel
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“What did he do now?” I asked, trying to strike a tone that balanced interest and fatigue. I wasn’t thrilled width my role as sounding board for her boyfriend troubles, but I didn’t want to jeopardize it, either. If her relationship with Peter—I couldn’t help thinking of him as Professor Preston—really did go south, I figured the hours I’d put in as sympathetic listener would give me a leg up in the competition to replace him.
“He’s got some woman staying in his apartment for the next two weeks, this professor from Vassar doing research at Beinecke Library. He claims she’s just ‘a friend and colleague,’ but maybe it would be better if we didn’t see each other while she’s around. I bet he’s in bed with her right now.”
“Not necessarily,” I said, secretly rooting for this possibility. “Maybe they really are just friends.”
“He’s such a hypocrite,” she said, shaking her head like a dog to get that beautiful hair out of her pale, almost ashen face. Her eyelids looked pink and irritated. “When we first started going out, he said he didn’t care who knew. We used to go to the moves at York Square and hold hands. He’d pick me up in front of Silliman in his car. Now it’s all hush-hush, like he’s married or something.”
Peter Preston was a rising star in the English Department, a thirty-two-year-old assistant professor who’d arrived from Berkeley the year before and made an immediate name for himself with his lecture class on Shakespeare’s problem plays, which drew close to three hundred students, myself included. He was boyishly handsome, with a shock of blond hair that kept falling over his left eye no matter how many times he pushed it back on top of his head.
We loved him—most of us, anyway—for his dry wit, his skinny neckties, and his familiarity with our pop culture universe. For the past several months, his relationship with Polly had been an open secret, at least in certain circles. Sexual harassment hadn’t quite come into its own as a concept at the time, and most of us were at best mildly scandalized by the idea of a young professor sleeping with an undergraduate who wasn’t currently enrolled in one of his classes, though I must say that on a purely personal level, I had found it confusing and painful to make the transition from worshipping him as a teacher to resenting him as a rival.
“What’s taking so long with the slices?” Polly cast an impatient glance at the pizza counter, where a crowd had begun to gather. “I’m starving. I haven’t eaten all day.”
“All day? You’re kidding, right?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes I forget.”
“That’s amazing. I don’t think I’ve forgotten a meal my entire life. It doesn’t even seem possible.”
“Maybe I should sleep with someone else,” she said, unwilling to be sidetracked into a discussion of my fanatically regular eating habits. “Maybe that would wake him up.”
“Hmmm,” I said, making an effort to look like my interest in the subject were purely theoretical. “That’s a pretty drastic step.”
“But who?” She exhaled so forcefully I felt the breeze all the way across the table. “Can you think of anyone?”
“Don’t ask me,” I said, wondering if it would be out-of-line to float my own candidacy. “This is something you’ll have to figure out on your own.”
“My history TA’s pretty cute. But he’s got that awful beard.”
I rubbed my clean-shaven chin and clucked my tongue.
“Too bad.”
“There’s got to be someone,” she said, squinting into the distance.
From where I sat, I had a clear view of the counter, so I knew what was coming when the pizza guy bent down and put his lips to the silver microphone they kept by the register.
“Slices are ready.”
His mumbled announcement crackled through the staticky PA system, silencing the pizzeria like the Voice of God. I jumped up and joined the mad rush for the counter, jockeying for position among the mob of ex-National Merit Scholars and former student council presidents, many of whom were waving plastic plates in the air like extras in a movie about the Depression. I had jostled my way almost to the front of the line when someone shoved me from behind with a force that could only have been deliberate.
“Hey,” I said, whirling angrily. “Take it easy.”
Matt fixed his paper hat on his head and eyed me with cool disdain.
“
Et tu,
Danny?”
I shrugged an insincere apology, lowering my voice to a conspiratorial level. “I’m with a girl. Good things are happening.”
Any of my other male friends would have accepted this excuse without a protest, but Matt’s expression didn’t change. He raised his hands up to his head like a hold-up victim, and turned slowly, until I was facing his back.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Go ahead,” he said, glancing mournfully over his shoulder. “Stab me in the liver. Give it a couple of twists while you’re at it.”
“Yoo-hoo,” said the guy behind the counter. “You boys want slices, or you wanna play games?”
 
 
“So, what about
you?” Polly asked, shaking a storm of red pepper flakes onto her slice. “What’s going on with you and your secretary?”
I always felt bad when people at school referred to Cindy as my secretary, not only because it was unfair to her, but also because of what it said about my own sad vanity. At some point I’d realized that my association with her struck certain of my college friends as vaguely exotic, and I’d played up the working-class angle for all it was worth.
“Nothing much.”
“You going to visit her this weekend?”
“Nope.”
“She coming here?”
“Nope.”
“I guess spring break’s only a couple of weeks away. You must be looking forward to that.”
I usually thought of myself as having a quick mind, but I was often slow on the uptake with Polly. For weeks I’d been pretending to her that Cindy and I were still a couple, figuring that this somehow equalized things between us, saving me from looking like what I really was—the second banana, the would-be boyfriend waiting in the wings, the one who kept her company when the other one had better things to do. But all at once it struck me that Polly wasn’t just making conversation, that she might actually have a personal interest in my weekend plans, that there might be some hope for me after all.
“It’s over,” I said.
Her self-possession faltered for a second. She leaned forward, the eagerness in her voice betraying the careful blankness of her face.
“What?”
“It’s over with me and Cindy. It’s been over since Christmas.”
She sat back and contemplated me for a couple of seconds. She couldn’t seem to decide if she was angry or amused or simply puzzled.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked away, momentarily distracted by a commotion across the room. One nerdy guy in a Yale sweatshirt was leaning across a table, beating another nerdy guy in a Yale sweatshirt over the head with a Yale baseball cap. The guy being hit wasn’t trying to defend himself. He just sat there with this feeble smile on his face, as if he wanted onlookers like us to think it was all in fun.
“I wish you would’ve told me,” she said.
“Why?” I said, relishing the power that had come from surprising her. “What’s the difference?”
“What’s the difference?” She seemed offended by the question.
“Yeah. What would be different if you’d known?”
Before she could answer, a hard ball of paper hit me in the forehead. I looked up and saw Matt standing at the edge of our table, holding open his winter coat to reveal a rectangle of pizza box cardboard taped to his shirt. The words “I’m Pathetic” were printed on it in bold capital letters. He smiled at Polly and held out his hand.
“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.”

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