Little Failure (44 page)

I have a girlfriend. I do not fully know how to kiss her, but I have a girlfriend. Thank you, Oberlin College. Without your extended welcome to the weird, without your acceptance of the not yet fully baked, without the fathomless angst you impose on all those who walk under your Memorial Arch, the angst that leads to the hapless intercourse your students have been waiting for throughout their miserable teenage existences, without these things it is conceivable that I would not have ravaged a woman with my Pentagon-shaped Soviet tusks until my thirties. It is also conceivable that without you I could have gone to Fordham Law School. But more on that later.

I am twenty years old. It is spring of sophomore year. I should be nineteen, but because I didn’t know English when I came to America, I am always one year behind. Jennifer lies in my arms, the soft and nonangular bulk of her, the fact of her and the fact of me. We are floating through space. That is true of everyone on the planet, but it is most true of people who are holding each other for the first time, with their eyes closed at night, half asleep. Next to us, just as a point of reference, her roommate, another Jennifer, whom we will soon nickname the Aryan (she is from North Dakota and has transparent
eyes), is snoring with difficulty and occasionally calling out terrible things in her sleep. Every time I drift off into slumber Jennifer’s roommate’s grief awakens me, reminds me of what I’ve been most of my existence—an unhappy person getting by.

But then how to explain the Jennifer in my arms, the warm tattoo her head is making against my neck. How to explain the presence of another in my life, the thing I can only describe as not-aloneness?

And one more thing I want to tell you. Morning as I walk out of Keep. I’m winding my way through a large chunk of the Oberlin campus, past the cement constructions of the diarrheal new dining hall, past the thousands of bicycles old and new that Oberlin students tend to see as an extension of themselves, one of the few objects they may fully possess without ideological heartache, and into the green collegiate expanse of my own North Quad, where my New England–style dormitory with my two roommates and our shared three-foot bong awaits my announcement of love.

Rewind my journey seven-eighths of the way; hold it on the path between Keep Cottage and the dining hall. In slow motion, with the tips of my fingers still to my nose, I turn back and look at the array of Keep’s bay windows staring back at me. Is she there looking at me, too? What does it mean if she isn’t?

It is spring, real spring, which in Ohio must mean the end of April, not March. Where I am standing is a parking lot with a sprinkling of passed-down Subarus and Volvos. And as I look back at Jennifer’s window, the ecstasy of our joining is itself joined to the future moment of our parting—because we
must
part eventually, no? And somewhere amid the midwestern spring happiness, among the rebirth and the Easter around me, I can already suss out the death of us, the death of something to which I know I am not yet entitled. My teeth are really hurting her. Can we try something different? Yes, we can try. But will it help?

We meet during one of those legendary Scary Gary moments of which I myself have no perfect recall. I am being carried through North Quad by a bunch of fellow drunk and stoned revelers, of which I am the drunkest, the stonedest, and, naturally, the scariest. There are three versions of this incident I have heard. In one, I am being carried
out
of my dormitory, because I have thrown a raucous party, angering my roommate, the Beaver, and the Beaver has thrown me out to party elsewhere. In another version, I am being carried
into
the dormitory,
into
the path of the angry Beaver, whose redheaded studies or redheaded sleep I am about to interrupt with my intruding horde. In the third version, which holds to its own kind of recycled Oberlin logic, I am first carried into the dormitory and then carried out of it.

“Party at my room!” I am shouting. “Everybody come! Burton 203!” I have my first growth of goatee at this point, I have my Peruvian poncho with a hemp pin attached to the heart. As I am being tossed up and down by the many weak Oberlin arms, am I thinking of the book I have just read—Nabokov’s
Speak, Memory—
in which Vladimir Vladimirovich’s nobleman father is being ceremonially tossed in the air by the peasants of his country estate after he has adjudicated one of their peasant disputes? Yes, that is precisely what should be on my mind. Because literature is slowly seeping into my goatee along with the Milwaukee’s Best and the vile coat of fried buttery fat surrounding the Tater Tots served in the cafeteria. Inside the dorm room, the Beaver, who, if I take a step back from my growing snobbism, is actually a kind, smart boy named Greg, is trapped behind his economics textbook, as my silver pot pipe is produced, as thirty lungs are readied, as the cans of beer are popped with so many skinny index fingers, as my sophomore next-door neighbor, my Beatles Studies professor, opens the CD tray—remember how it used to sound, the mechanical
woooosh
of a CD player?—and puts in
Rubber Soul
.

Somewhere amidst all this I see a face, a circle of pale within the
darkest hair around, and then a chin descending into a perfect dimple. There are at least a dozen women in the crowded, pot-smoke-filled room, and my love forms halos around each of them, even as I try to edit them down to one. My weekly mission is to develop an unrequited crush and then to smoke and drink my way out of it. Tonight, I keep returning to the circle of pale within the nimbus of dark, and to what’s underneath: ethnically dark brown eyes and thick eyebrows. She has a loud, sparse laugh that goes away quickly and a slightly unsettled manner, like she doesn’t fully belong here. Not in the way that most people really don’t belong at Oberlin but in the same way
I
don’t belong at Oberlin. As I will soon learn, neither of us really understands why a band must dress like a chicken. And our hearts are at least partly with the Bacon Bomber and his sabotage of the hummus and peanut butter supplies of the co-ops. And our hearts are at least partly in Russia and Armenia, where her father’s family is from, and the American South, from whence her mother hails with great difficulty.

I am being a little bit charming. The new kind of charming I’ve developed, drunk within three seconds of passing out, drunk enough to sway to
Rubber Soul
’s “Nowhere Man,” finding a kind of personal beat there, drunk enough to expel large quantities of comical intellectualized thought at anyone caught in my path. Something, something, Max Weber, something, something, Protestant joke, something, something, Brezhnev reference. Those who have come across my first novel will know exactly the song I am singing.

“That is one aspect of you that I especially envy,” she will write to me in a letter shortly, “your ability to get people to listen to you, and hold their attention.”

Yes. The years of being shunted, of observing from behind a language barrier, of listening from a bedroom adjoining my parents’ and trying to figure out a way to douse the flames, have produced a calculating, attention-seeking mammal of few equals.

And from a much-later letter from her: “I felt a kind of desperation in you, a sadness which I saw in Oberlin before we were going out.”

She is with her friend Michael, an upstate Jewish polyglot and easily the smartest person within the Oberlin class of 1995 (from which he will Marshall Scholar his way directly into Oxford). He will become one of my best friends, too. I sit down next to Michael, the thickness of his glasses matched by the saucerlike depth of my own contact lenses, and we begin a back-and-forth in Russian that’s the easiest and most true interaction that I’ve had at Oberlin to date. Something about the Russian bard Vladimir Vysotsky perhaps? The collapse of the Soviet Union just a few months ago? The nostalgia that Nabokov thinks is vulgar
poshlost’
, but that we as boys of nineteen and twenty are not yet ready to dismiss out of hand? And as we spit out the Russian, more revelers pour into the room, the funk of my pot pipe seeping into the floor below and the floor above. But I care for none of them tonight beyond a bullshit “Hey, wha’s up? Beer in the fridge.”

And sometimes she laughs, and sometimes she looks straight ahead with uncertainty, and sometimes she cocks her head back and takes a long, thick dredge of Milwaukee. Soon every detail of her background will be of interest to me, soon every mannerism will be studied with the kind of microeconomic detail that would have impressed my roommate. But right now I am onstage. I am on the stage before my dead grandma Galya singing to her of
Lenin and His Magical Goose
. I don’t have the arrogance to say to the woman in front of me:
You will love me
. But I do have the arrogance to say,
Why don’t you at least
think
about loving me?

It will take her about a year to think about it, the two of us becoming close friends first. But along with my charm I am also learning the art of desperate persuasion. To quote Louise Lasser: “You’re fake and manipulative!” And finally I will leave her no choice.

Her name is Jennifer, and her last name begins with a
Z
and ends in the common Armenian patronymic suffix
-ian
. For most of her life she goes by her initials,
J.Z
. Of the American names I deeply covet,
ecumenical Jennifer is up there with Waspy Jane and Suze, and I’ve also adored the variations of Jenny and even the terse but lovable Jen. But there is something strong and unusual in a woman, even a woman at Oberlin, going by no more than her initials. After it is over between us and I move back to New York, I can hardly look at the subway map because of the prevalence of the J and Z trains as they swing merrily from Manhattan through Brooklyn and Queens, through all the boroughs I know and love.

J.Z. is from the northern suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina. She speaks with traces of a southern accent, her parents are not academics, and she does not have easy access to money. All these many facts combine to ensure that she is different from your typical Obie.