The Other (11 page)

They went for a walk. A fall night, with all the silvery edges trees have on a fall night because of moonlight and dry air, all the little campus bushes looking lit and still, and (Cindy, at Starbucks, thinking screenplay) no dialogue. Cindy couldn’t tell if she was headed toward the college-library roof or going out for ice cream. She was aware that October moonlight showed her face to good effect; she was also aware that October moonlight was a romantic cliché associated with the heartland of America, from which she’d sprung. They walked without saying anything, leaving campus, and as their silence deepened she began to wonder, with burgeoning alarm, what it meant, this intense atmosphere of no words between people who’d just met. “Where are we going?” she finally asked.

“Please,” he answered. It sounded like pleading.

They were standing in front of a well-maintained Craftsman house where a golden retriever watched them from the porch. Or that’s the gist of it—what Cindy called “the ultimate statistically correct family domicile.” She remembered it because it was what she was looking at when John William kissed her. His eyes were shut, but hers were open. He was a tender kisser, interposing his lips between hers without insistence or pressure. When he came up for air—“Well, this is always an awkward moment, isn’t it, when you’ve just shared a kiss with a person for the first time and there’s the question next of what to do with your eyes. But most of the time you work that out, right? Kiss again, or act casual about it? John William, when he got done kissing, he turned around and
split.
Like that. The guy turned around and walked away.”

Cindy Houghton slid her hands into her jeans pockets and watched this strange boy retreat. “Hey,” she called. “What’s your name?”

At Starbucks: “He gives me all three names. Like I was asking for his middle name, too. I mean, this is what I’m talking about. He kissed me and told me his weird, scary name, and then he just walked away.”

H
E WROTE HER
a letter in an intense, slanted script, dutifully cursive but inelegant. “I found out your name,” it began. “I got your dorm room number.” That same day, when she emerged from her last class at three-twenty, there he was, falling into step beside her out of nowhere. “I wrote to you,” he said. “Did you get the letter I sent?” He was wearing hiking boots recently treated with a waterproofing wax and, despite the cold, he had no coat, just a gray flannel union shirt with its buttons open, its flaps revealing a V-shaped swatch of hairless chest. His sleeves were pulled to the elbows, and the cold emphasized the blood vessels in his forearms. She kept asking herself whom he looked like until she remembered a painting she’d seen in a Chicago museum of the death of Robespierre, which was mostly about Robespierre’s unbridled hair and blousy, unlaced
chemise d’homme,
and the fact that he’d shot himself ineptly in the jaw in a stab at suicide before his date with the guillotine. “Yes,” she said. “I got your letter.”

“You didn’t write back.”

“Not yet I didn’t.”

“What does that mean?”

“I didn’t have time.”

John William put a hand to his forehead. “Please don’t say that,” he pleaded.

What? He was nimble and tense, an overanxious strider, but she wanted to keep up with him, because she felt his adoration, and to be adored was the point of her life, the state of things she’d yearned for dating boys in Aurora and still yearned for at the moment, as a college student on the West Coast mulling majoring in botany; now all of this intensity aimed in her direction made her feel a lot at once. “Your name means ‘woman of Kynthos,’” he’d written, “the mountain on Delos where Artemis and Apollo were born. Cynthia, another name for Artemis, goddess of the moon, of the wilderness, the hunt, wild animals, and fertility. A virgin goddess, armed with a bow, guardian of children, patron of women in childbirth…” The notes she’d gotten from other boys, in high school, had said things like “kegger on Fri. at Tommy’s” and “let’s do a doobee after 3rd.” So she held her books to her chest and made no effort to widen the space, which John William had made intimate, between their shoulders. (“Of course, back then one of the givens in life was that you were aware of feminism,” Cindy mentioned at Starbucks. “But I still wanted adoration.”)

They walked in an ellipse, in an intentional and hard-driving aimlessness, which for her was evidence of something she couldn’t discern; that they were hardly talking must imply something, too, but what? The trees were aflame, as in poetry about October—the sycamore maples in front of Psychology, and the European beeches on the walkway toward Art—and the grotesques staring down from the walls of the library didn’t look threatening or disturbing. Cindy was wearing a blue parka, unzipped; the tips of her ears felt hot pink with cold. The boy beside her, meanwhile, seemed top-heavy in the shoulders. His best feature was his goat-boy’s mane of hair, not washed recently and sexually evocative—as though in his potent urgency about everything there was no spare moment to brush it away: his hair formed a dark scrim across his eyes. Clearly, though, he was a blue-blood. Cindy could tell the boys from good families by the envelope of fundamental neatness that traveled with them, but she also, normally, found them boring in their narcissism. Maybe this is what this “John William” was, but in a new permutation, so advanced in his self-absorption he’d come out the other side, as if his adoration of her was self-absorption inverted. This light he shone on her was—maybe—as much about its source as about its object—like the moon, she was brightly lit by it but still devoid of her own atmosphere. “I don’t understand you,” she said to him.

“I don’t understand you, either.”

“I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“Neither do I.”

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you run off the other night?”

He sighed—a graphic heave from the solar plexus up—as if completely aghast.

They ended up making out while standing in the trees by an amphitheater. He was standoffish from the waist down, explicitly prudish about contact below the belt, and stopped the proceedings at frequent intervals to hug her in a platonic way or to look into her face from an intimate proximity. When she cupped his cheeks in her hands during one of these presbyopic stare-downs, he whispered, “Thank you.”

“See what I mean?” Cindy tapped the plastic lid of her Frappuccino. “Between your hermit stuff and my tale of bizarreness, we’ve got a screenplay.”

“The barista has a screenplay.”

“Not as good as ours.”

“So what exactly do you mean by bizarreness?”

“Listen,” said Cindy. “It’s probably hard to believe this now, but when I was younger I had a super body, and guys would go from a first kiss to unzipping their pants in about half a second, so talk about weird and a big relief, the way John William treated me—I never felt urged, is the way I’d put it, to do something against my will, okay? And for a guy, that’s bizarreness.”

He was, she added, endlessly attentive, punctual to a fault, and an idealist, which she respected. He’d salvaged a broken mimeograph from a Dumpster and was repairing it, which to Cindy seemed novel—he had the idea of mass-producing political broadsides once this hand-cranked machine was in order. From the campus treasurer’s office, John William procured a copy of Reed’s financial report, and while she studied Plato at his side, he marked it up with a highlighter. In the cafeteria, he ate mostly raw vegetables. He had a peculiar sense of what constituted a date—for example, he asked her if she wanted to get up at 4 a.m. on a Saturday and walk until dusk, the idea being to follow the Willamette to its confluence with the Columbia. She agreed and got blisters. When it rained, they huddled in a railroad car inundated by blackberry creepers, and even though this felt dangerous and tawdry, she also felt enamored of the industrial sound of the storm beating on their rusted hideaway, and of the idea of what they were doing. She noted again that John William was conspicuously less horny than other boys she’d known, who surely would have pounced on her in such an opportune setting. No thrusting loins, no poking fingers. He had a lot of ideas, though, and despite his post-dance prologue of tormented silence, he now proved to be an insatiable promulgator, for his audience of one, of heartfelt positions. He had a way of animatedly twisting up the political with the metaphysical that made him impossible to follow, but Cindy didn’t care. She was his fond, confused listener. If Buddhism, existentialism, and anarchism went together, that was all right with Cindy. Instead of pinning her and clawing at her bra, like other boys, John William sat with his knees up and rambled effusively, saying that Pol Pot’s education in Paris subverted the ideal of a liberal-arts education, or questioning the New Deal. Other smart boys had liked her, but this boy’s brain was on fire. Plus, here in the Oregon country the midday light was soft and broad beyond the frame of their boxcar door, and there was wind riffling a field of high weeds and woody Scotch broom. An alluvial fertility could still be felt transpiring in the earth in the week before Halloween. The color of the sky was like a length of white chalk turned on its side and rubbed into asphalt. Sanded—that was how the world looked, worked slowly down to no rough edges. All of this wasn’t sweltering cornfields, and it wasn’t a plate of salty French fries at Big Larry’s Drive-In on the road between Aurora and Sugar Grove, where she used to go with a senior named Ted Lynch when she was a sophomore at East Aurora High School—Ted Lynch, who drove a two-tone Plymouth Duster 340 and played second-string free safety on the football team. Now she and John William walked the Willamette with their arms around each other, and when they came to the Columbia at Kelley Point, in the wet haze of this October afternoon, John William regaled her with stray information: Lewis and Clark had camped here; they’d also employed elk brains to soften hides while wintering at Fort Clatsop; in Montana, the Corps of Discovery had fallen so hungry some members ate their candles. No matter. She preferred his agitated brain—its speed, heat, and recall—to anything she’d come across so far in suitors, and his frenzied chivalry also had an appeal: when she observed offhandedly that it was cold, he splintered discarded apple-crates with his boots and built a fire on the riverbank, inducing high flames until she asked him to stop, whereupon John William desisted immediately, and with the obeisance of a knight. And so she came back to campus that evening happily disheveled, her hair smelling like smoke and rain, mud in her shoes, drawn tight and light-headed from not having eaten (he’d insisted that fasting would enhance the day, and she had to admit there was truth to that, even though, for most of the afternoon, she’d felt preoccupied with the idea of finding a tuna sandwich), and the coppery taste of his mouth in hers, because, by her dorm door, she’d slugged him once in the gut playfully, then pushed him against the foyer wall and, with her forearms against his chest, slid her tongue between his teeth while she had his lips parted. He didn’t flinch, but, as she said, “he had a hard time admitting to his body.” Afterward, he said that the day behind them already wounded him in memory. “You’re weird,” she answered, and slugged him again with the tomboyish coquetry she’d developed for use with her boyfriends in Aurora. This cool and different West Coast guy—it was time to write home to her friends about him, because he was such a trip.

“H
E TOOK ME
to Seattle on the Union Pacific in a boxcar. I remember waiting under the Forty-second Street bridge and making our jump when they changed engine crews. You have to understand, I’d grown up getting excited about cotton candy at the county fair and rolling my dolls up and down the street in a baby carriage, so hopping a train out here on the West Coast and doing reefer, hanging out with this intense, strange guy…Talk about sudden—I went from being Daddy’s little girl to dodging bulls and riding a freight north, all in about fifteen minutes—well, okay, with an interlude of Schlitz and back-seat car sex in between.” She laughed. “Cold,” she said. “It’s freezing in a boxcar. We finally hopped off around midnight on a Friday. I remember being really impressed by the shopwindows in Seattle—like at Jay Jacobs, where there was a Roman fleece robe in shocking pink for sale, and thinking how nice it would be to flounce around in one of those while drinking—I don’t know—Taittinger? John William wanted to put a rock through that window. Oh yeah, we went into a Steve’s Broiler on Fourth Avenue. I doubt it’s there anymore. Are there still places in Seattle where people smoke? I noticed something,” said Cindy. “When he was stoned he was definitely more amorous and sensual. It would be so unlike him to volunteer a kiss, but when he got a little weed in him, that changed. So we were sitting in this Steve’s, stuffing food into each other’s mouths and kissing in between. And talking about school. Or he was talking about school. Whatever he was reading. I don’t know. He’d go from Francis Bacon to Euripides in half a sentence. Then he’d kiss me. Then we’d eat some more. It was incredibly sexy. And it was so romantic. I felt like I was dating Byron. I was really a sucker for the Romantic poets when I was nineteen. Later, we hung out at the Greyhound station. You know, like in Simon and Garfunkel—I’ve got my head in his lap, and he’s reading a paperback with his hair in his eyes and with this sexy stubble on his jawline. I remember. This is the kind of thing you remember. I had my nose sort of up against his belly, which smelled like, I don’t know, you’ll have to supply your own simile—it smelled like a guy, is all I can say. I admit it, I was sort of in love. But—we were just sitting around in the Greyhound station, and he says to me, ‘What do you think of
Romeo and Juliet
?’ What? Was this a Shakespeare question? I think I made a joke like ‘Too much doo-wop,’ and then hummed a few bars of…” She hummed the refrain from “Just Like Romeo and Juliet,” by the Reflections. “John William said, ‘No—I mean killing yourself.’ He’s like ‘Could you do that? Because I’m looking for somebody who can do that.’