The Rules of Attraction (10 page)

“What do you want?” you asked as I stared at you, checking on your progress.

“Paper,” I said, not wanting to stop your train of thought.

“Here,” you tossed me a piece of composition paper.

“Are you almost finished?” I questioned.

“What time is it?” you asked, realizing that you told me you’d be done by ten.

“You have one minute left,” I told you.

“Shit,” you said.

So went our days, Victor. It always seemed that there was just one minute left, all the time…. That doesn’t make any sense, especially since we don’t often do, well, I guess that that might be wrong and, well….

(Oh Jesus, me and Franklin, what about Judy? This is not good.)

Well … perhaps I shouldn’t place value judgemints. Paul got very angry at me once because I couldn’t spell judgemint (see?) Shit. Juhgment. That’s wrong too. Actually, now I understand why he got angry. Jaime was reading the letter and I knew you were in love with her and not with me (though you would be by summer) and you could have cared less if I went out with the fag or not. Jaime asked who the letter was for. I told her it was for you. Jaime was a slut. That’s my opinion. She’s a … well, forget it. It isn’t worth it. I am very tired. That’s what I am. Tired of everything. Anyway, dear Victor this is enough. I’m going to stop thinking about you. I never signed that letter. I never even gave it to you. Don’t remember
what it even said. I just hope you remember who I am. Don’t you forget about me….

How tense sounding, I think of myself. I look over at Franklin.

Immobile, unmoving, I spend the rest of the night with him, in bed.

But I do not go up to breakfast with him.

BERTRAND
Je ne pouvais m’empêcher de m’approcher de toi à la soirée. J’ai bu trop de tequila et j’ai peut-être fumé trop de pot mais ça ne veut pas dire que je ne t’aime pas. Cependant après te l’avoir dit, j’ai marché jusqu’à la fin du monde et j’ai vomi. Hier nous nous sommes séparés avec Beba, ma petite amie. Toi, tu étais une des raisons pour ça (alors Beba ne sait pas que je te désire) mais pas la seule. C’est que depuis longtemps que je me sens séduit par toi. Je ne suis pas fou, mais tu m’intéresse et j’ai pris quelque photos de toi que j’ai fait quand tu ne regardais pas. Je ne peux pas croire que tu ne m’as pas remarqué. Si tu étais venue avec moi hier soir, je t’aurais rendue heureuse. J’aurais pu te rendre très heureuse. Et j’aurais pu te rendre plus heureuse que ce type avec qui tu es partie hier soir. En mettant les choses au pis je pourrais toujours retourner à Paris et vivre avec mon père. De toute façon, L’Amérique est chiante. Toi
et moi faisant l’amour dans la villa de mon père à Cannes. Et quitter mon boulot de redacteur à
Camden Courier.
Peut-être as-tu vu mes articles? “Comment prévenir le Herpes” et “Les effets positifs de l’extase.” Tu ne m’obsède pas. Je pourrais avoir n’importe quelle fille que je veux ici (et j’y ai passé près), mais tes jambes sont parfaites, meilleures que toutes celles des autres filles et tes cheveux sont si blonds et doux, meilleurs encore de tous et ta figure est parfaite elleaussi. Je ne sais pas si tu as eu une opération de nez mais ton nez est parfait. Tes traits sont vraiment parfaits. Je vais peut-être essayer encore une fois. Mais ne pars pas la prochaine fois. Rappelle-toi que je pourrais te rendre très heureuse. Je sais bien baiser et j’ai la Carte American Express de platine. Je suppose que tu l’as aussi. Tes jambes sont splendides, et meilleures que celles de toute autre fille. De quelle couleur sont tes yeux? Les photos que j’ai prises sont toutes en noir et blanc Je voudrais suivre les mêmes cours que toi, mais je fais de la photo et toi … quoi? Les beaux-art? Tu es sexy. Si je savais que quelqu’un s’est épris de toi comme moi, et toi, tu éprouvais le même sentiment envers lui, je partirais. Je rentrerais chez moi. Aucun doute.

PAUL
The days went by so quickly that time seemed to stop. During the next weeks I was only with him. I stopped going to Acting II, Improv Workshop, Set-Building, and
Genetics. None of them made a difference anyway. At least not in the way he did. I was in a dreamlike trance but it was tension-filled and satisfying. I was always smiling, looking like a perpetual drunk even though I quit drinking as much beer as I usually consumed since I did not want to obtain a beer-belly. I drank vodka instead.

What did the two of us do? I mostly hung out with him and no one else. I didn’t introduce him to Raymond or Donald or Harry and he didn’t introduce me to his friends. He taught me how to play Quarters and I learned how to flip that coin with such skill and dexterity into those plastic cups filled with keg beer that when we would play, either with Tony or just alone, he would end up getting smashed and I’d sit there slightly sober, sipping warm Absolut, staring. And he would be shocked that I had caught on so quickly and he would practice alone to keep up with me.

It was a time when I would notice old lovers at parties and not squirm, since I felt so confident about this new romance. Whenever I would pass one by in Commons or at a party or when Sean and I were in town or sitting by the End of the World watching fall turn into winter, I wouldn’t blush or look away. I would nod a hello, smile, and go back to whatever I was doing without flinching. At parties when I helped Recreation Committee set up (only doing it because of Sean) by rolling kegs in and setting the speakers up, I wouldn’t flirt or even want to look at anyone else. Not that I wouldn’t notice people I had slept with. No, they seemed to stand out even more, and I was only relieved that I wasn’t with them, but that I was with Sean instead.

Since his roommate Bertrand (“a stuck-up Frog,” he’d say) was either shopping in New York on weekends or over at his girlfriend’s place off-campus, we had the room to ourselves, which was good and bad. Good, since it was in a house where there was usually a party, any party, on any night of the week and so it was nice to get drunk in Booth, in the living room, or if it wasn’t snowing or raining or cold, out by the front porch, then walk up the stairs
to that room at the end of the hall. It was also bad because he was afraid people would hear us so he would get paranoid and have to drink a lot more before even any sort of foreplay could be initiated.

After sex (during sex he was crazed, an untamed animal, it was almost scary) we would both be starving and then we’d drive on his motorcycle to Price Chopper. He always had an extra helmet. I’d put my arms around his firm slim waist and he’d race down College Drive toward the market. Once there he would play a few games of Joust at the video machines near the front door and I’d buy the sliced cheese, the bad salami he liked a lot, the rye bread for him, the whole grain wheat for me, and, if it was before two, the inevitable six-pack of Genny or Bud. I liked Beck’s but he said it was too expensive and he didn’t have enough money. Most of the time he liked to shoplift. He loved to do it so much that I would have to calm him down. We’d only do it in the middle of the night when no one was there, just one checkout line open and the nightshift boys unpacking canned goods in back, with Rush coming from the speakers that during the day carried Muzak. I’d be wearing my long Loden wool coat I got at the Salvation Army in town and he’d be wearing his leather jacket with the tacky fur trim that had a surprising amount of pocket room and we’d pass through the checkout line without any hassling, my coat and his jacket weighed down with cigarettes, bottles of wine, Häagen Dazs ice cream, shampoo, and he would stop, just to be daring, and buy one piece of Bazooka gum. One night I saw an old lady who was too thin and who barely had any hair left and she was sorting out coupons and I almost didn’t want to steal the Swiss Chocolate Almond Häagen Dazs and the Ben & Jerry’s Heath Bar Crunch but Sean wanted it so badly that I couldn’t say no, since he stood there, defiant, sexy in tight jeans, his jaw set, his hair shiny but matted with sweat due to our lovemaking and casually tousled. How could I say no?

He didn’t tell me a lot about himself but I wasn’t particularly interested in his background anyway. We’d either get
drunk at The Pub on campus (sometimes we’d go there after dinner and stay until we closed the place) or we’d drive to The Carousel on Route 9 and sit and drink alone at the bar and those were the only times he’d say anything. He told me all about growing up in the South and that his parents were farmers and that he had no brothers, a couple of sisters and that he was on financial aid and that he was majoring in Literature, which was strange since there were no books in his room. It was also strange that he was from the South since he didn’t have a trace of an accent. But these weren’t the things I liked about him. His body wasn’t as nice as Mitchell’s, which had been systematically worked out, and last summer, in New York, he had gone to a tanning salon so his skin color was a combination of pink and brown, except for the shocking whiteness where his underwear had blocked out the ultraviolet rays. Sean’s body was different. It was in good, solid condition (probably from working on the farm as a boy) with barely any hair (a little on his chest) and hung well (well hung? I never knew how to use that expression anyway). He had brownish wavy hair he parted to one side that could of used some mousse but I didn’t press it.

I liked him for his motorcycle too. Even though I had grown up in Chicago I had never ridden one before and the first time I had been on one with him I laughed my head off, dizzy with excitement, the danger of it amusing me. I liked the way we fit on it, sometimes my hands on his thighs, often below, and he wouldn’t say anything, just drive faster. He drove like a madman anyway, through lights, through stop signs, going around corners in the rain at what seemed like eighty miles an hour. I didn’t care. I would just hold on tighter. And after that, riding drunk on the way back to campus from drinking at The Carousel in the windy New England night, he would pull up to the Security gate and wait for the guards to let us in. He would act as sober as possible, which really didn’t matter since he knew all the Security guards anyway (I’ve found that people on financial aid usually do). We would go to his room
or my room if the Frog was in, he’d fall on my bed, kicking off his boots and telling me I can do anything I want. He didn’t care.

STUART
What would he do if I came over one night with a bottle of wine or some pot and said, “Let’s have an affair?” I have moved to Welling House, across from Paul Denton’s room.

Dennis was the one who really pushed the move on me since he couldn’t stand the awful Freshman yuppie roommate I had been stuck with, even though I was a Senior, since I had forgotten to tell them I was coming back last term. Luckily I was first on the waiting list for a single, so when Sara Dean left because of her “urinary tract infection” or “mono” (depending on who you ask, since everybody in the world knew she had an abortion and freaked) I moved in immediately. Unfortunately, so did Dennis, who lived off-campus but who was too much of an alcoholic to walk (driving was out of the question) home after parties and long nights at The Pub, so I’d let him sleep in my room where we’d have long fights about why I wouldn’t sleep with him. He would get back at me by showing up to the room, on Sunday nights with a case of Dewar’s and a group of his fellow actors, and they’d spend long hours rehearsing Beckett (always in white face) or Pinter (for some strange
reason, that too, in white face) and they’d get loaded and all pass out, which meant I had to move downstairs to the living room, or wander the hallways, which was all right with me since I was always hoping to run into Paul Denton.

The first time I met Paul was in an acting class and we had to do an improv scene together and I was so bowled over by how handsome he was that I botched the scene up and I think he could tell. I was so embarrassed that I dropped the class and made sure to keep out of his way. He’ll probably loathe the fact that I moved in across from him and ignore me, but at least we’ll get to share the same bathroom.

SEAN
Sitting in class, staring at the desk, someone’s carved “Whatever Happened To Hippie Love?” I guess the first girl I kind of liked at Camden was this hippie I met my Freshman year. She was really stupid but so gorgeous and so insatiable in bed that I couldn’t help myself. I had met her once, before I fucked her, at a party off-campus my first term. The hippie had offered me some pot and I was drunk so I smoked it. I was so drunk in fact and the pot was so bad that I threw up in the backyard and passed out in some girl’s car who had brought me. I was embarrassed but not really, even though the girl who drove was pissed off since I lost it again all over the backseat of
her Alfa Romeo on the way back to campus, and was jealous since she could tell that the hippie and I had been making eyes at each other all night, and had seen the hippie even kiss me before I left to throw up in back.

I really got to meet her the following term when another person I knew when I first came to Camden (and who had been a hippie but quit) introduced us at a party at my urging. I cringed, mortified, when to my shock I realized I had been in the hippie’s Intro to Poetry Workshop my first term and this girl on the first day of class, so high her head looked like it was on springs, like some doped-up jack-in-the-box, raised her hand and said slowly, “This class is a total mindfuck.” I dropped the class, disconcerted, but still wanting to fuck the hippie.

This was the Eighties, I kept thinking. How could there be any hippies left? I knew no hippies when I was growing up in New York. But here was a
hippie,
from a small town in Pennsylvania, no less. A hippie who was not too tall, who had long blond hair, features sharp, not soft like one would expect a hippie’s features to resemble, yet distant, too. And the skin smooth as brown marble and as clean. She always seemed clean; in fact she seemed abnormally healthy. A hippie who would say things like, “None of your beeswax,” or commenting on food, “This is really mellow chili.” A hippie who would bring her own chopsticks to every meal. A hippie who had a cat named Tahini.

JIMI LIVES was painted in big purple letters on her door. She was constantly stoned. Her favorite question was “Are you high?” She wore tie-dyed shirts. She had beautiful smallish firm tits. She wore bell-bottoms and tried to learn how to play the sitar but she was always too stoned. She tried to dress me up one night: bell-bottoms, tie-dyed shirt, headband. Didn’t work. It was extremely embarrassing. She said “beautiful” constantly. She didn’t have any goals. I read the poetry she’d write and lied that I liked it. She had a BMW 2002. She carried a bong in a tie-dyed satchel that she had made herself.