The Rules of Attraction (12 page)

“Now, can you take the bus down Friday into Boston, or the train?” she asked, knowing damn well that Friday meant
tomorrow.
“How much does that cost? From Camden to Boston?”

“I have money. That’s not a problem. But
this
weekend?” I asked.

“Darling,” she managed to sound serious, even long-distance, “I want to talk.”

“What about Dad?”

There was a pause, then, “What about him?”

“Is he coming too?” I asked, then added, “I haven’t spoken to him in a month.”

“Do you want him to come?” she asked.

“No. I don’t know.”

“Don’t worry about it. I will see you at The Ritz-Carlton on Friday. Right, dear?” she hurriedly asked.

“Mom,” I said.

“Yes?”

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I was relenting. Suddenly she depressed me so badly that there wouldn’t have been any way to say No under any circumstance.

“Darling, yes. Now don’t worry. I will see you Friday, right?” She paused and then said, “I want to talk. There’s things we have to talk about.”

Like what? “Fine,” I sighed.

“Call me if there are any problems?”

“Yes.”

“Goodbye. Love,” she said.

“Yeah, you too,” I said.

She hung up first and I stood there for a minute and then slammed my fist against the wall and stormed out of the booth. My mother’s timing had never been worse.

I can tell by the way he moves that he knows. In some way he has caught on and I’m no longer left in the dark about the messenger who is me. I know he knows. The way he looks around a room, the dining hall, the way he walks past Commons. Everything about him. And I think,
I just think, that he knows it’s me. I’ve seen him look me in the face; those sultry dark eyes scan the rooms he’s in and they come on me. Is he too afraid to come up to me and tell me how he feels? I listen to “Be My Baby” and dance sad dances and sing His name while I listen and hug myself. I know he likes me. I know it. And tomorrow night at the ball it will be complete. The final answer will be …

(
I called my mother today … she wasn’t feeling well … I received a nice comment from a glowering teacher….)

A teacher asked us today in class if a person can die of heartbreak. He was serious. He is also a devil. My idea of hell is being locked in a room away from you but able to see you and smell you. Shut up, shut up, I tell myself over and over again. If I taught a class I would tell you, “You must sleep with me and love me to pass.” I have to learn to write my notes to Him neater. I sit so still thinking of Him. Afraid to breathe. Sometimes I think I will scream. Mary, I tell myself, tomorrow is the night. What do
you
think about? Who do
you
think about? Me? Alone? Who has seen
you
naked, I think to myself. Who have
you
slept with and loved, is another one. How many cigarettes have
you
smoked, also crops up. Two, today? True? Shrewjewblue-brewcrewdrewrabbitfrufru. Song for poor Mary. Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. Guess I’ll go eat some worms. Oh! Lay! Your! Hands! On! Me!

I am in a class now with only forty minutes left. I think I’m going to throw up. I have to see You. I am frustrated, I tell myself calmly, because I want to moan and writhe with You and I want to go up to you and kiss Your mouth and pull you to me and say “Love you love you love you” while stripping, while sex commences. I want to kill the ugly girls who sit around you at The Pub but cannot. I hear a Bread song and suddenly you appear. Someone came up to me and said “Undo the karma, undo the karma,” and I thought of you. I could leave and go somewhere, I guess. Take a vacation … where? Concentration … on what? Penn Station? Masturbation? I have seen this couple walking
around and they seem to be very unhappy and I want to touch you. I want you to touch them. Do you like those boring naive coy calculating girls? A poster I saw the other day in a room I peeked in on: When two snake rattlers fight, it is according to strict rules. Neither uses poison fangs, the object is only to force the opponent’s head to the ground and hold it there for a few seconds, thus establishing superiority. Then the grip is released and the loser dismissed. Who can turn the world on with her smile? Who can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile? Well, it’s you girl and you should know it, with each little glance and every movement you show it. Love is all around, no need to fake it, you can have it all, why don’t you take it, your gonna … Sometimes I hate Him. Tomorrow night.

PAUL
We were lying in my bed since the Frog was back. Sean sat up and leaned against the wall and asked me to hand him the cigarettes that were on the floor. I lit one for myself then gave them to Sean.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “No. Let me guess. Paul’s tense, right?”

“Ten points for Sean.”

He got up, disgusted, and put on his boxer shorts.

“Why do you wear boxer shorts?” I asked.

He ignored me and continued getting dressed, cigarette dangling from his lips.

“No, I mean, I really never noticed that before, but you wear
boxer
shorts.”

He pulled on a T-shirt and then tied up his paint-splattered boots. Why were they paint splattered? Did he fingerpaint or something?

“Do you have them in different colors? Say, mauve? Or maybe tangerine?”

He finished dressing then sat on the chair next to the bed.

“Or do they only come in that … asphalt gray?”

He just stared at me. He knew I was acting like a fool.

“I knew a guy named Tony Delana in ninth grade who wore boxer shorts.”

“That’s a real scorcher, Denton,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“So you don’t want to go to Boston tomorrow, is that it?” he asked.

“Now, you have twenty points.” I put my cigarette out in an empty beer bottle that was on my nightstand and shook it.

Sean just looked at me and said, “I don’t like you that much. I don’t know why I’m here.”

“I’m sorry about that,” I say, getting up and putting on a robe. I smelled the robe. “I’ve got to do my laundry.”

I scanned the room for something to drink, but it was late and we had finished all the beer. I reached over him and held a bottle up to the light to see if there was anything left in it. There wasn’t.

“You’re going to miss The Dressed To Get Screwed party,” his voice was low and ominous.

“I know.” I tried not to panic. “Are you going?” I finally asked.

“Sure,” he shrugged, moved over to the mirror, still in the chair.

“What are you going to wear?” I asked.

“What I usually wear,” he said, staring at himself. The narcissistic little sonofabitch.

“Is that right?” I looked around the room. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I wanted a drink, I walked over to
the stereo and looked behind it. There was a half-empty Beck’s next to the speaker. I sat back on the bed.

He stood up. “I’m gonna go.”

“Where to?” I asked. I casually tasted the bottle. It was warm and flat and I made a face but drank it anyway.

“All night study room,” he said. The narcissistic lying little sonofabitch.

He walked to the door and I ended up blurting out, “I don’t want to go to Boston for the weekend. I don’t want to see my mother. I don’t want to see the Jareds,” (though I probably did want to see Richard) “and I don’t want to see Richard from Sarah Lawrence” (hoping to make him jealous) “… and…” I stopped.

He stood there, saying nothing.

“And I don’t think I want to leave you here…” Because I don’t trust you, I didn’t say.

“I’m gonna go,” he said. He opened the door and looked back. “I’ll take you to the bus station tomorrow. What time does it leave?”

“I think eleven-thirty.” I took another sip of the beer, then coughed. It tasted terrible.

“Okay, meet me at my bike at eleven,” he said, heading out.

“Eleven,” I said.

“Night.” He closed the door and I could hear his footsteps echo down the hallway.

“Thanks, Sean.”

I started to pack, wondering what Richard looked like now, trying to remember when I saw him last.

SEAN
Someone walks into The Pub, looks for someone, can’t find them and leaves, the door closes behind them. It wasn’t Lauren Hynde, the completely beautiful girl who had been leaving notes in my box, the only reason I’m in The Pub tonight, waiting to confront her. I saw her slip one in last Saturday, when I was up in Commons. I couldn’t believe it. I was so shocked that it was actually someone good-looking that I spent the last week in a sort of daze. Now I’m sitting at a table with four or five or six people, kind of listening to some lame conversation, looking for the girl. They’re all talking about what’s going on at the sculpture studio, about sculpture teachers, and sculpture parties, about Tony’s latest sculpture, even though they have no idea what it
says.
Tony told me it was supposed to be a steel vagina, but none of these idiots can figure it out.

“It’s so disturbing, lyrical,” this girl with a serious problem says.

“Very potent. Undefinable,” her friend, some dyke from Duke who’s visiting, who looks like she’s had way too much MDA, agrees.

“It’s Nimoy. Pure Nimoy,” Getch says.

My attention drifts. Somebody else walks in, somebody who if I remember correctly gave me a totally unprovoked kiss on the lips at the last Friday night party. Peter Gabriel still plays on the jukebox.

“But it’s Diane Arbus with none of the conviction,” one of the girls says and she’s
serious.

Denton gives me a steely look from across the table. He probably agreed with that.

“But the revisionist theory on her seems completely unmotivated,” someone else gleefully replies. There’s a pause, then someone asks, “What about Wee Gee. What do you think about Wee Gee, for Christ sakes?”

Vaguely horny I order another pitcher and a pack of Bar-B-Que potato chips, which give me indigestion. Peter Gabriel turns into more Peter Gabriel. The girl who kissed me on the lips last Friday leaves after buying a pack of cigarettes and in some warped way I’m disappointed. She’s
not that pretty (slightly Asian, Dance major?) but I’d probably fuck her anyway. Back to the conversation.

“Spielberg has gone too far on this one,” the angry mulatto intellectual with the neo-Beatnik casual but hip look plus beret who has joined the table hisses.

Where has he gone? Does he just hang out in the Canfield apartment and drink like a maniac and split on parents weekend and have a whole bunch of friends visiting him every term from boarding school? What the fuck does he do with his life? Little Freshman girls confiding in him and long walks around the dorms after dinner?

“Simply too far,” Denton agrees. He’s serious, not joking.

“Simply too far,” I say, nodding.

The table behind ours, Juniors arguing about Vietnam, some guy scratching his head, joking but not really, says, “Shit, when was
that?
” someone else saying, “Who gives a shit?” and this fat, earnest-looking girl who’s on the verge of tears, bellows, “I do!” Social-Science-Major-Breakdown. I turn back to our table, with the Art Fucks because they seem less boring.

The dyke from Duke asks, “But don’t you think his whole secular humanism stems from the warped pop culture of the Sixties and not from a rigorous, modernist vantage point?” I turn back to the other table but they’ve dispersed. She asks the question again, rephrasing it for the intense mulatto. Who in the hell is she asking? Who? Me? Denton just keeps nodding his head like she’s saying something incredibly deep.

Who
is
this girl? Why is she alive? Wonder if I should leave right now. Get up and say, “Goodnight fuck-ups, it’s been a sheer sensation and I hope I never see any of you again,” and leave? But if I do that they’ll end up talking about me and that seems worse and I’m seriously drunk. Hard to keep my eyes open. The only pretty girl at our table gets up, smiles and leaves. Someone says, whispers loudly, “She fucked … are you ready?” The table leans inward, even me. “Lauren!”

The table gasps collectively. Who’s Laurent? That
French guy who lives in Sawtell? Or is it the alcoholic girl from Wisconsin who works in the library? It can’t be
my
Lauren? It can’t be
that
one. There’s no way she’s a lesbian. Even if she is, it turns me on a little. But … maybe she’s been putting the notes in the wrong box. Maybe she meant to put them in Jane Gorfinkle’s box, the box above mine? I don’t want to ask which Lauren they mean even though I want to know. I look over at the bar, try to get my mind off it, but there are at least four girls I have slept with standing there. None of them are looking over at me. Businesslike and impersonal they sip beers, smoke cigarettes

oh, what the fuck. I finally snap, get out of there, leave. As simple as that. I’m out the door. Fels is close by. I have some friends who live there, don’t I? But thinking about it bores the fuck out of me so I just walk around the dorm for a while and then split. Sawtell is next? Nah. But that girl, that girl who kissed me … I think she lives in Noyes, a single, room 9. I go to her door and knock.

I think I hear some laughter, then a high-pitched voice. Whose? I feel like a fool but I’m a drunk, so it’s cool. The door opens and it’s the girl who left the table, not the girl who kissed me, and she’s wearing a robe and behind her I can see some hairy, pale guy in bed, lighting up a big purple bong on a futon. Jesus, this really sucks, I’m thinking.

“Um, doesn’t Susan live here?” I ask, turning red, trying to keep it cool.

The girl looks back at the guy in bed. “Does Susan live around here, Loren?”

The guy sucks in on the bong. “No,” he says, offering it to me. “Leigh 9.”

I leave, fast. I walk out, fast. I’m outside, it’s cold. What am I going to do? I think.
What is this night
unless I do
something?
Is this just going to be
nothing?
Like every other fucking night? Something goes through my head. I decide to go to Leigh 9, where Susan lives. I knock on the door. I can’t hear much but Springsteen’s “Nebraska” album. Great music to fuck by, I’m thinking. It takes a while but Susan opens the door, finally an answer.