The Red Book (29 page)

Ludwig, thinking better of his plans, turns to Clay. “You’ve really never been in here?” he says. It had never occurred to him that there were people at Harvard who’d never stepped foot in a Final Club.

“Nope, never,” says Clay.

“Me neither,” says Bennie, and then a few others chime in with similar responses, and within minutes Ludwig is giving his former classmates the nickel tour.

“And here’s President Kennedy,” says Ludwig, pointing to the tiny oval of JFK’s head on the wall of the long crimson hallway hung with a century’s worth of Spee group photos.

“Look at that,” says Clay, reading the fine print. “1939 to 1940. Now that’s awesome.”

Soon they are all making their way up the grand staircase to the enormous expanse of couches and Oriental rugs on the second floor, the site of so many blurry evenings. Mia, who’d spent a couple of evenings in the Spee as a freshman and enough as a sophomore to grow weary, by her junior year, of its ethos of exclusion, even if it meant having no real place to hang out after hours—Harvard having been woefully short of such venues for those not in Final Clubs, meaning all of its women and most of its men—finds herself actually enjoying this unplanned instant of melting pot populism.

Here they all are, no matter where they prepped or summered or not, no matter their lineage or physical attractiveness or the depths of their family’s pockets: Gay Clay from Marietta, Mississippi, the first in his family to go to college, let alone an Ivy League one; Bennie and Katrina, the class of ’89’s first official single-sex married couple, living a nuclear-family fantasy unimaginable, when they were students, in its utter normalcy; and (now more alumni are streaming through the once perennially shut door, having heard via texts from those inside that it had been flung wide open) there’s that dude who grew up in Queens, what’s-his-name, the one who once went streaking down Mount Auburn Street during an ice storm, after a night spent eating acid and smashing plates and dancing on tables in the
Lampoon
’s Great Hall, who now makes top dollar writing for that NBC sitcom about the gravedigger with superpowers; and there’s that classics professor from Indiana, who hasn’t made tenure for lack of published scholarship but is nevertheless beloved by his students and doesn’t really give a shit, and who back in the day wore those Coke bottle glasses and left Lamont Library only to eat; and that woman from Jaipur, who’d grown up without a rupee but now lives with her excruciatingly boring husband in a split-level four-bedroom in McLean, Virginia, purchased with AOL stock options (back when they were worth something), whose five-year-old daughter is apparently quite sick, and who once stood outside Weld Hall during that first snowstorm freshman year and cried, tongue out, from the sheer joy of flakes tasted; and look, that geeky kid from the town near Mia’s in Long Island, whose mother used to visit him in Cambridge every other weekend, who recently left both a partnership position at Davis Polk and a castrating, depressed wife to teach ninth-grade American history at a struggling high school in Oakland; and that blind woman who went off to medical school and then on to testify before Congress on the importance of stem-cell research, who’s apparently now suffering from multiple sclerosis as well, because life’s unfair like that.

There they all are, pushing the couches back at the first notes of the Jackson Five’s “ABC,” which some minor genius decided to blast through the Spee’s sound system and which, unlike the late 1980s drivel the DJ was spinning at the dance, actually hits these revelers in some deep Proustian place: a song that came into being just as they were turning three or some of them four, a sugar-coated-candy anthem of their earliest years, when they were maestros of the alphabet, dutiful counters of dandelions, singers of major key songs; when they asked thousands of questions—“Where does the universe end?”; “Why do people stop growing?”; “Does your brain talk to you, too?”—of their exhausted parents, who were slowly waking up to the realization that learning, for such children, would come easily, while other things (social acceptance, an ability to blend in, days unmarked by boredom) might not.

Freaks, they were! Nearly every single one of them, with their gifted ghettos and their gold stars, their perfect SATs and their yellow Honor Society shawls, though many of them hid their freakish selves well. Until they arrived at Harvard. And then they were just one of the crowd. Halle-fucking-lujah.

“ABC!” they all sing at the top of their lungs, “easy as one-two-three,” as a few expertly rolled joints, which appear out of nowhere, are passed around the room, and the tops of Red Stripes are popped open, and the loose flesh on those upper arms is flapping like crazy now, fingers snapping, hips and chests thrusting, knees bending, never mind the torn menisci or the doctor’s orders or the intensity of the cannibis compared to the oregano dime bags of their teendom, and fuck those nubile hotties downstairs, look at these old-timers go, each caught in the act of remembering, collectively, that era of wing testing—pre-Harvard, pre-adolescence, pre-kindergarten even—when they believed not only that they could fly but that they’d remain aloft forever.

•  •  •

“This isn’t your
first time, is it?” Addison’s daughter Trilby asks Mia’s son Max, who is hovering above her, supercharged and naked but for his socks, on the Aerobed in the basement rec room of Jane’s dead mother’s house.

“No, of course not,” he lies. “Is it yours?” He can’t remember how old Trilby is. Fifteen? Sixteen? She seems ageless. And a thousand times more worldly than he’ll ever be.

She was the one who chided
him
for being a pussy for not coming out with her and her sailing camp friends (her sailing camp friends!) to hear that horrid band, Vaginal Discharge, whose name, improbably, turned out to be less offensive than their music. And because Max didn’t want Trilby to think him a pussy—because, in fact, he’d been imagining this precise tenterhooky moment of turgidity from the minute he arrived at the house Friday night and saw a completely transformed Trilby, pouting pink-haired in the window seat in her black jeggings and low-cut black tank, looking ripe, wise, injured, and willing—he threw away seventeen years of his mother’s careful training and dire warnings about “fast” girls (the whole notion of which, he decided, was an absurd relic from Mia’s adolescence) and left eleven-year-old Josh, whom he swore to secrecy, in charge of the little kids. “No way!” Josh had said at first, when he found out Eli, their fifteen-year-old brother, who was equally if secretly fascinated by Trilby, would be sneaking off to the concert as well, until Max promised Josh to buy him
and two friends
three tickets to whatever R-rated movies were coming out that summer, no questions asked.

Houghton and Thatcher, twelve and eleven years old, respectively, were staying behind as well, but Max didn’t trust two kids who spent eight hours a day watching youporn to entertain Jane’s seven-year-old daughter Sophie or to listen for the cries of his baby sister Zoe for whom, granted, Max would responsibly thaw a frozen yellow sac of breast milk his mother left behind before they left, in case she woke up, but still.

He wishes he could live up to everyone’s lofty expectations of him, he really does, but he wants to be inside Trilby more than he’s wanted anything in his entire seventeen years, and this need has clouded any claim he may have once had to better judgment. Evangeline Sorrensen, Max’s girlfriend back in LA, refuses to go all the way with him, even though his tongue and fingers have explored every contour of the soft flesh between her legs, and her mouth seems to spend more time on his cock than it does eating food, although she claims not to be anorexic, just ectomorphic, which he began to doubt the day she told him she doesn’t swallow because each teaspoon of sperm contains five to seven calories. “Why can’t we just do it the normal way?” he’d asked her recently, for he really can’t understand the difference between penetrating her anus, as she’s several times allowed him to do, and missionary sex. In fact, he finds the distinction absurd, like entering a house—into which you’ve been invited!—through a broken window on the second floor when the front door is just waiting there, fully functional and convenient. He realizes gay men do it that way all the time, because what other choice do they have, but in the context of a now six-month, exclusive heterosexual relationship, the back door feels somehow raunchier, dirtier,
wronger
—for lack of a better or more grammatically correct term—than he imagines normal sex might feel.

“I made a promise,” Evangeline had said, holding up the gold purity ring she wears on her left ring finger, which she received gratis at a fancy father/daughter dinner dance financed by government grants to high school abstinence programs. Max finds the whole idea of a purity ring creepy, like a chastity belt but somehow less honest, since at least a chastity belt declares its intentions out loud, while a gold band given to you by your father and worn on one’s ring finger, for heaven’s sake, feels like a whole other Humbert Humbert–level of pretense and smut. Especially when worn by a daughter who has no compunction about taking it up the ass.

“That’s ridiculous!” Trilby had shouted over the din of the atonal music, when Max had answered, in response to her “So are you and your girlfriend having sex or not?” that they did anal but not vaginal.

“I know, right?” Max had said, but by then Trilby was sucking on a joint passed to her by fair-haired Finn, who looked every inch the sailing camp counselor-in-training, and then Trilby passed it on to Max—his first one ever, though he blithely pretended otherwise—and the whole Evangeline hypocrisy went up, so to speak, in smoke.

For her part, if you’d asked her just a few hours ago, Trilby would have said she’d rather lose her virginity to Finn Angstrom, who drove them to the show, or even to Linus, Finn’s little brother who was her age, but Finn wouldn’t give her the time of day—he made fun of her tongue ring, even after she’d removed it, and wouldn’t even drive them home; they had to call a taxi to make it back by eleven, jerk—and the jury’s still out on whether Linus has even gone through puberty yet. But being with Max tonight has surprised her, and not in a bad way. For one, he doesn’t play games. He’s pretty much who he appears to be on the surface, and he doesn’t try to hide his true intentions, though she has a hunch that he’s lying about his loss of virginity, although who wouldn’t if you were seventeen? I mean, really. For another, even though he’s kind of a dweeb, he’s not the type of dweeb who’s awkward so much as he’s the type of dweeb who is unaware of the underlying coolness just waiting for expression. He genuinely seems to care about grades and following the rules and public opinion, sure, but also, quite demonstrably, about his loved ones and feelings and kindness and doing the right thing, traits her mother constantly berates her father for not having. She wonders if that kind of stuff could ever rub off on you, were you to spend enough time in the presence of someone who possessed it. She imagines—no, she’s sure—it could.

That night, when Eli had wandered off to the bathroom without telling anyone, Max looked shell-shocked, genuinely upset to have lost track of his little brother. Before running off to search for him, he grabbed Trilby by the hand and said, “Please, stick with me, Trilby. I don’t want to lose anyone else I love in this crowd.” Then he immediately blushed, realizing he’d just shown his hand, hoping she hadn’t heard him above all that noise, and his blush made her blush, and she said, “Max Zane, did you just say you loved me?” to which he answered—and this killed her, it’s the reason she’s naked with him right now—“Trilby, if you help me find my little brother, I will not only give you my undying love, I will worship at the altar of Trilby Griswold until the end of time.” Then he grabbed her face and kissed her, quite passionately, on the lips, which is when Eli suddenly reappeared, and Max could tell Eli was upset by their embrace, so he texted Trilby—he texted her! while standing next to her! just to make sure she understood where he stood—“oops i think we just hurt Eli’s feelings. wd like 2 kiss u again but not in front of little bro, ok?”

“Ok,” she’d responded, feeling weak-kneed as she hit “send,” then she squeezed his hand surreptitiously, and he squeezed back, and it was as if Finn and Linus Angstrom no longer existed, and the band’s music was just noise, and the people around them were just barriers to her destiny, and the only place she wanted to be was alone and unclothed with Max, as swiftly as possible.

“Of
course
it’s not my first time,” she lies to him, hyped up on expectation and the sight of his erection. To prove her lie, she pulls out the condom she purchased that afternoon at the Store-24 in Harvard Square, as a precautionary measure against Finn’s rumored experience, and rips it open with her teeth. “Do you want to put it on, or should I?” she says, praying for the former.

Max, ever the gentleman, says, “Oh my God, I’m so glad you have that. I totally forgot to bring one,” and offers (thank God, thinks Trilby) to slide it on himself, having practiced numerous times on unwitting bananas.

It turns out, however, that because of many factors, including but by no means limited to trembling hands and youthful embarrassment and surging adrenaline, it’s a bit harder to unroll a condom onto your own technically still-virgin penis in the heat of the moment than it is to unfurl one onto the head of a health-class banana. Trilby ends up having to help him, and they both giggle self-consciously as she does so, and then she stares into Max’s eyes, and he stares into hers, and everything else drops away, and then, without any fanfare, without any of the pain or bleeding she’s heard can accompany such maiden voyages, he’s deep inside her, and the ease of his entry surprises her, since she’s never ridden a horse or done gymnastics. In fact, Trilby is so consumed and moved by what’s occurring at the perfect jigsaw nexus between her and Max, she starts to cry. The sensation surpasses, by factors too great to name or count, any previous pleasure she’s ever known, including riding the Kingda Ka at Six Flags, listening to certain Death Cab for Cutie songs on her iPod, or eating freshly steamed lobsters on the porch of her grandparents’ house in Maine. Not that she would ever publicly admit to enjoying “I Will Follow You into the Dark,” but it has, on occasion, moved her to tears.