Loner (10 page)

“We were fine,” I said.

We drew up to Matthews at two minutes to nine. If you were leaving from there at an appropriate time, you might see us and, thinking it was no big deal, tell Sara what we were up to.

“Feel better,” I said. “I'll talk to you tomorrow.”

“I'll walk you over. Lamont, right?”

Widener closed in an hour, which she knew, so I couldn't
reasonably pretend I was going there and then wait until she left. “You don't need to walk me.”

“I don't mind.”

“You really shouldn't be out in the cold if you're sick.”

The entryway door opened and my throat closed. But it was just a student from China I'd seen around the dorm.

“You know that's a myth,” said Sara. “It's because people are inside more during cold weather that germs spread. So, really, I should
avoid
the indoors.”

“Look, I don't want to catch your cold,” I said, more brusquely than I'd intended. “Sorry, I didn't mean to snap. But I'm afraid of getting sick when I have a big night ahead of me.”

“No, I get it,” she said.

“Get some sleep,” I told her, and leaned down to give her a peck on the top of her head. Her hair felt like crunchy grass on my lips.

You were neither outside nor in the lobby when I arrived at the library at 9:05. I sat on the front steps, afraid you'd impatiently left, forgotten, or blown it off.

With each passing minute I grew more convinced you'd shown up and departed when I was ensnared at CVS. Your paper was due tomorrow; I wouldn't get another opportunity to work with you like this. I should never have agreed to go with Sara.

You showed up nearly half past the hour.

“Sorry,” you greeted me, not looking all that apologetic. I suppose this was one of the privileges of being who you were: you didn't have to care, because you knew I, or whoever was waiting, would be overjoyed simply to have an audience with you. Your cheeks were flushed from the cold and your hair was in slight disarray, like you'd recently woken up.

“No problem, I just got here.” I scrambled to my feet and opened the door for you.

I proposed we go to the less crowded second floor. In the event
of a surprise visit from Sara we would be harder to find. If she did somehow see us, I would later tell her you and I ran into each other and decided to work together. The counterintuitive benefit of your preternatural beauty was that our meeting would prompt no suspicion, as it might have with someone closer to my weight class.

We located an empty table in a secluded nook. You opened your laptop. My heart was thumping too fast. I tried to think of our meeting as a casual tutoring session and nothing more.

“So,” I said, taking out my copy of the James, “
Daisy Miller
. What appeals to you about it?”

“What Samuelson was talking about today was sort of interesting,” you answered. “The use of the male gaze.”

“The Mulvey essay,” I said encouragingly, and ventured a joke. “It's great how much social progress the male gays have made lately. Pun
in
tended.”

It took you a moment to separate the homophones. Then you let out a puff of air by way of laughter. It wasn't the gag of the century, but it had done the trick.

“Which part of Mulvey's argument resonated with you?”

“To be honest,” you said, “I read it, but I didn't really understand it.”

“So, in film, the camera assumes the role of the scopophilic male eye,” I explained. “It objectifies the passive female characters, leering at their physicality, and the audience internalizes that viewpoint.”

“Scopo-what?”

“Scopo
philic
. It means deriving pleasure from looking, especially at erotic objects, sometimes to substitute for participation.”

“Okay,” you said. “I think I have an idea for the paper. Do you mind sticking around while I write the beginning, to see if I'm on the right track?”

“Of course.”

Ten minutes later you proudly showed me what you had produced on the screen.

In the novel “Daisy Miller” by Henry James the character Winterbourne is scopafilic when he looks at Daisy. He derives pleasure from looking at her beauty to substitute for participating in talking to her.

It wasn't just seven-hundred-page novels by dead white men; literary criticism didn't seem to be your bag, either. But you were clever in other ways, I could tell (
veritas
), which must have been reflected in your Harvard application.

“Hmm,” I said. “You've got some good ideas here. I think you might be able to dig a little deeper, though.”

You closed your eyes, rolled your neck back, and let out an audible sigh in anticipation of the hours of exertion ahead.

“I don't know how I'm going to do this in one night.” Your eyes opened and targeted me expectantly, hopefully. “Do you have anywhere to be? Would you be able to hang out and help me with the rest?”

I could have told you then that it was a great start and wished you well, sat away from you in class, broken up with Sara to decapitate temptation, and quit while I was ahead. It's what high school David, who considered it a daredevil maneuver to eject a USB connection before the computer informed me it was safe, would have levelheadedly advised.

“I could give you a hand,” I said.

“Thank you,” you said. “That's really nice of you.”

“Not at all.” This was the occasion to prove my intellectual value to you, to make myself indispensable. And, really, this wasn't any different from one person helping another with a math problem set.

I turned the laptop back to you.

“So, quick tip, titles of books are italicized, not put in quotes,” I said. “And it's actually a novella, not a novel.”

You keyed in the changes. “I wish I wasn't such a slow typer. This is going to take forever.”

“Here, want me to type?” I asked.

“That'd be great,” you said, rotating the screen around again.

“Sometimes I like to begin by citing a single piece of evidence from the text to support my thesis,” I said. “Is there anything we can bring up here, a plot event or a line?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, how about the fact that the original title is
Daisy Miller: A Study
. What do you think of when you hear the words ‘a study'?”

“A painting?”

“Good. So how might that connect to your thesis?”

You shrugged.

“Maybe something to do with scopophilia?” I asked.

“I should get us some coffee,” you said. “It sounds like we're going to be here awhile. I'll be right back—you can keep working.”

Typing your essay with you across the table was one thing; ventriloquizing you in your absence was another. Every alarm in my suburban soul was clanging, warning of violations of the honor code, academic execution at the hands of the Administrative Board, my irreversible migration into an ethical wasteland. What would Mrs. Rice say? What if Professor Samuelson found out that his best student was helping someone
cheat
?

I deleted your tenth-grade paragraph and began writing in Harvard-­level prose.

“How's it coming along?” you asked, setting down a cup of coffee for me. I read aloud the rewritten thesis:

The relationships in
Daisy Miller: A Study
(its original title) are formed by observation—by “study”—and not by conversation. The heroine captivates the scopophilic Winterbourne because he can only surmise as to the mystery of the “ambiguity of Daisy's behavior” beneath her deceptive, problematizing pulchritude.

“ ‘Pulchritude'?” you asked.

“Beauty.”

You nodded. “Nice writing,” you said, as if you were realizing only now that you'd picked the perfect person to help you with your essay.

I raised my eyebrows modestly and plowed through the rest of it, reciting each paragraph for your approval before proceeding. In between typing sprees, my eyes glued to the screen as if lost in lyrical thought, I occasionally asked harmless questions, some of which I already knew the answers to, affecting a tone of absentminded indifference.

“So where are you from?”

“The city.”

“New York?”

Park Avenue. The Chapin School. Veronica Morgan Wells.

“Uh-huh.”

“Where'd you go to high school?”

“Chapin. Why, are you from New York?”

“No, but I know some people from there,” I said.

“How about you?”

After being forced to name my high school and home state, I asked if you had any siblings.

“Nope,” you said, confirming my earlier research, and rerouted the query to me.

We continued in this fashion: I'd ask you a question that you'd answer with a one-word reply before volleying it back. Even if I wasn't learning additional information about you, it was still going better than anything I could have planned; the simple act of sitting together for so long was enabling us to develop something of a rapport. But then around midnight I asked how you were liking Harvard so far.

“Have you ever noticed everyone not here always asks how you like
Harvard
?” you reflected. “Not ‘How do you like college?' or ‘How do you like school?' or ‘How's your freshman year going?' but ‘How do you like
Harvard
?' like it's some kind of celebrity. And then the flip side is that Harvard students are terrified to tell other
people where they go to school, except they actually love it when it comes up.”

“Yeah,” I said, though no one other than my mother had reached out to ask me and I hadn't had a chance to “drop the H-bomb,” as they called it, with anyone besides high school classmates before graduation. “Well, how are you liking your four-year institution of higher learning?”

“I absolutely love every precious moment,” you said with a sarcastic edge. “Don't you?”

I wasn't sure how to answer. You could snarkily lead on that not everything met your standards, but if I said as much, I'd sound like a self-pitying Eeyore; it would be more attractive to make my life here seem like an endless parade of indulgent frivolities so far. Then again, you were opening up to me, intimating that you were disenchanted. You might recognize what we had in common if I took the risk and told the truth about my experience, that I felt out of place even at Harvard, human interactions put an immense strain on me, I was also somewhat of a loner at heart.

“So far so good,” I said.

“Hey, mind if I do some reading?” you asked, taking out the course pack for Gender and the Consumerist Impulse.

Sometimes I wonder if, having the ability to time travel back to certain moments in which our fear or impulsiveness got the best of us and resulted in an unsatisfying outcome, we would actually alter our behavior knowing what we know now, or if we would end up repeating exactly what we did the first time, surrendering to those elemental directives, incapable of deviating from some preordained essence of our character.

“Be my guest,” I said, and typed up a flurry as if I'd just had a brainstorm, worried you might say you were ready to go to bed and I'd forfeit you altogether.

“How about this?” I read from the new paragraph: “ ‘Daisy can also be viewed as a—' ”

“I trust your judgment,” you said. “You don't have to ask my permission.”

A few minutes later you left for the bathroom. I had unsupervised access to your computer. After peeping around the corner to ensure you weren't coming back early, I clicked on your web browser and visited Harvard's webmail page, but you weren't signed in.

I returned to Word, where, I realized, I could read the documents you'd recently opened without much trouble. That was my brand of espionage: rummaging through the academic papers of the object of my desire.

The file menu displayed the names of four documents: the
Daisy Miller
paper we (I) were currently working on; “de beauvoir response” (you'd read
The Second Sex
that week for Gender and the Consumerist Impulse, whose syllabus I had saved and been keeping track of); “darwin - worksheet 4,” apparently for the class on evolution I was kicking myself for not shopping; and one mysteriously labeled “log.”

A code name for your journal? An acronym for a list of guys you were dating? A poem about chopped wood?

I opened it. All it contained was a short list of dates, starting at 10/1 and ending the day before:

10/1: $200 dinner at Menton; $35 cab fare to/from—i

10/2: watched college football; $80 on food/drink—c

10/3: bought tampons at CVS ($4)—f

10/4: N/A

It was a confusing budget; I could see how an expensive dinner would rate a mention, but not why buying tampons would. And the codes of
i
,
c
, and
f
were even more perplexing.

You returned to your seat and startled me.

“Didn't mean to scare you,” you said.

“You didn't,” I said, closing “log” and clicking again on the
Daisy
Miller
essay so it appeared to be the last opened document. “I forgot to put in your TF's name at the top. What is it?”

“Tom,” you said. “Tom Burkhart.” That was the grad student who had supplied the Blake quotation the first class, and since then, whenever Samuelson interrupted his lecture to invite the four teaching fellows to show off their familiarity with an esoteric line of poetry, he routinely spoke it in as offhand a tone as if stating the day of the week, so much so that Samuelson had begun asking Tom directly. (I always felt a prick of transitive rejection when my own TF, a dowdy woman named Harriet, stayed quiet.)

I typed in your first name, too, but before adding “Wells” I asked, “And your last name?”