The Rules of Attraction (18 page)

“You know, your father and I first came here seventeen years ago for our fifth anniversary. It was in December and it was snowing and we would order these,” I told him quietly, holding the glass up, tasting it.

He sipped his drink and seemed to relax.

I couldn’t say anything for a long time. I finished what was in the glass and poured the rest of the champagne from the small green Taittinger bottle into it. I drank more, then asked about Richard.

“I wonder what happened to Richard tonight,” I said, straining for conversation.

“Mid-terms,” Paul said derisively, and then, “I don’t know.”

“Any ideas?” I asked.

“Walking?” he sighed. “I don’t know.”

“His mother says he has a new girlfriend,” I mentioned.

Paul got very hostile very suddenly and rolled his eyes up. “Mom, Richard’s bi.”

“Bi what?” I asked.

“Bi,” he said, lifting his hands as if to describe this condition. “You know. Bi.”

“Bilingual?” I asked, confused. I was tired and needed sleep.

“Bisexual,” he said and stared at his glass.

“Oh,” I said.

I liked my son very much. We were in a bar together and he was being polite and I wanted to hold his hand, but I breathed in and exhaled. It was too dark where we sat. I touched my hair and then looked at Paul. And for a very brief moment there it seemed as if I never had known this child. He sat there, his face placid, expressionless. My son—a cipher. How did it end up this way, I wondered.

“Your father and I are getting a divorce,” I said.

“Why?” Paul asked, after a while.

“Because…” I stalled. Then said, “We don’t love each other anymore.”

Paul did not say anything.

“Your father and I have been living apart since you left for school,” I told him.

“Where does he live now?” he asked.

“In the city.”

“Oh,” Paul said.

“Are you upset?” I asked. I thought I was going to cry but it passed.

Paul took another sip and uncrossed his legs. “Upset?” he asked. “No. I knew it was going to happen sooner or later.” He smiled as if he remembered something private and humorous and it made me sad, and all I could say was, “We’re signing the papers next Wednesday afternoon.” And then I wondered why I told him this, why I gave him this detail, this piece of information. I wondered where Paul was going to be next Wednesday afternoon. With that friend, Michael, at lunch? And I wanted badly to know what he did at school—if he was popular, if he went to
parties, who he slept with even. I wondered if he was still seeing that girl from Cairo, was it? Or Connecticut? He had mentioned something about her at the beginning of the year. I was sorry I brought him to Boston for the weekend and made him sit through that dinner. And I could have told him this in the hotel room. Being in the bar did not matter.

“What do you think?” I asked my son.

“Does it matter?” he said.

“No,” I said. “Not really.”

“Is this what you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Yes.” I finished the champagne. There was nothing left to do.

“Is there anything else?” he asked.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I suppose not.”

“Okay.” He put the cigarette out and did not light another one.

STUART
I don’t know what gets into me but I go to The Dressed To Get Screwed party in only my underwear, thinking my body looks okay, thinking I want to get Paul Denton’s attention. So I do some coke with Jenkins and get completely fucked-up drinking that sickly
sweet, sticky alcohol punch and when Billy Idol comes on I just go crazy and do this great number. The whole party loves it and they’re all in a circle and I’m in the middle twirling and gyrating and jumping around, hoping he was watching me. I looked for him afterwards, turned on, dizzy and a little sick from dancing so hard, drunk, stoned, Dance majors coming on to me, and feeling pretty good. But, of course, I couldn’t find him. He wasn’t anywhere. He probably thought it was too uncool to come to these things anyway. But who
doesn’t
go to The Dressed To Get Screwed party, besides that weird Classics group (and they’re probably roaming the countryside sacrificing farmers and performing pagan rituals)? I ended up going home alone. Not really, I fooled around with Dennis a little while, but I fell asleep like I usually do on Friday nights: unscrewed.

It’s party time and she is ready. The party is swirling and miraculous-seeming and she has dressed so carefully that she tries to avoid the living room and dance floor because if she gets messed up she thinks she will never see you, or you will never see her. This is why she is very careful as she roams the party looking for you. She enters the living room of this house, this tomb of destruction, songs she loves being danced out by sweat-drenched captives
of the room’s embrace. She is shocked not happy to see how many have decided to come wrapped in white sheets. Should she have? It is so very dark that she can only make out the paleness of unclothed bodies, a camera, a video crew in one corner capturing this night’s images, other images, less graphic, flickering above them on the upperwalls, below the ceiling, a skinny boybody dancing enthusiastically in a circle made of those same sweat-drenched captives, near-naked people seem everywhere but it is not, strangely enough, or maybe it is strangely enough, erotic, and she walks by them, through the living tomb and into an area where pink beverage is being scooped from a cylindrical gray bin by a girl so fleshy that it makes her titter and she still doesn’t see you. She searches hallways and bathrooms, finds couples fucking under the October moon on the lawn, upstair bathrooms, upstair bedrooms, roams the hallway, even the kitchen for god’s sake, but she does not see you until she is back under the killing blue lights of the living room now illuminated. As fate has it you are dancing, swaying, with a beautiful girl she does recognize, but she does not think that you like her, but the music is too loud to feel anything really except—that you will give yourself to her. She stands next to a black box bigger than herself where music pours from, holding a pink drink and she loves the way your head is thrown back, moving, trying to keep the beat (you are not a good dancer) and the song ends, a new one overlaps it and it makes no sense at all. She follows you out of the room, you look back at the girl and decide to take her arm and the blue light makes your white sheets glow beneath the jacket you are taking off and she follows you to the light at the door and says … “Hello” … and never has a second hurt and ruptured, blistered so harshly because the music’s too loud and you can’t hear, don’t even notice, and you take her hand instead and you are both leaving. You smiled, she thinks, at her. But by then she was hiding in the corner of the room, standing on the rolled-up carpet, the room a black-blue mass moving to the songs, her love
still silent and undeclared and it was time to make a decision. What can she do? Can she go to you and tell you things without you thinking of her as a crazy love maniac? No. Maybe it’s not even that, but it
is
over. And she will not be with you. It’s simple. But your smile actually echoes still, and it
is
too late. She stands in the corner, waiting, listening to the music, music that tells her nothing, doesn’t even offer a clue as to what to do, just playing loudly, the same, excruciating, dumb beat that traps her, doesn’t move her, and on the way out of this place, alone, she bumps into someone who has shaved their head and he sticks his tongue out at her, wagging it, yelling orgyinboothorgyin-booth but she doesn’t listen, her face, still hot but numb with rejection, down, staring at the floor—its
over.
It is time. Baldboy laughs at her. She walks away, by End of the World, looks down at the lights of the town. There won’t be any more notes. It’s last call.

LAUREN
A lightbulb. I’m staring at the lightbulb above Sean’s head. We’re at Lila’s and Gina’s apartment in Fels. Two lesbians from the poetry workshop I recently joined. Actually, Gina in strict confidence told me that she’s on the Pill, “just in case.” Docs that mean she’s a lesbian technically? Lila, on the other hand, has confided in me that she’s worried Gina will leave her since it’s “in” to sleep
with women this term. What do you say to someone? Well, what about next term? Actually,
what about
next term? You watch Sean too, you watch him roll a joint and he’s pretty good at it which makes me want to sleep with him less, but oh who cares, Jaime answered the phone, right? and it’s a Friday, and it was either him or that French guy. His hands are nice: clean and large and he handles the pot rather delicately, and I want him suddenly to touch my breasts. I don’t know why I think this but I do. Not exactly handsome, but he’s passable looking: light hair combed back, smallish features (maybe a little like a rat?), maybe too short, maybe too thin. No, not handsome, just vaguely Long Islandish. But a big improvement over that Kir-sipping Iranian editor you met at Vittorio’s last party who told you you were going to be the next Madonna. After I told him I was a poet, he said he meant Marianne Moore.

“So, who’s going to help us bomb the weight room?” Gina asks. Gina is part of Camden’s “old guard” and the arrival of the weight room and an aerobics instructor has made her livid (even though she wants to sleep with the aerobics instructor—who, in my opinion, doesn’t even have that nice a body). “Lila is devastated,” she tells me.

Lila nods and rests her head on the Kathy Acker book she’s been flipping through.

“B-U-M-M-E-R,” I spell out, sighing. Look at the Mapplethorpe photo of Susan Sontag pinned above the sink and snicker.

Sean laughs and looks up from the joints as if I said something brilliant and it’s not funny but because he laughs I laugh.

“Tim loves it,” he says.

“Let’s kill him and we’ll call it art,” Lila says. How does Lila know Tim, I wonder. Does Tim sleep with lesbians? I am drunk.

Still holding a glass of the pink punch it occurs to me that I am so drunk I cannot get up. I just tell Lila, “Don’t get depressed,” and then to Gina, “Do you have any coke?” too drunk to be ashamed.

“Depression becomes some,” Lila says.

“No,” Gina.

“You want some?” Sean asks.

“No.”

Depression becomes some?

Can’t argue with that so we light the first joint. Wish we had sex and it was over with so I could go back to my room with the down pillows and the comforter and pass out with some dignity. Lila gets up. Puts on a Kate Bush record and dances around the room.

“This place has really changed.” Someone hands me the joint. I take a long, hard hit and look around the apartment and agree with whoever said that. Stephanie Myers and Susan Goldman and Amanda Taylor lived here my Sophomore year. It
is
different.

“The Seventies never ended.” Sean the Philosopher Bateman this time. What a stupid thing to say, I’m thinking. What a strange and supremely stupid thing to say. He smiles at me and thinks it’s profound. I feel sick. I want them to turn the music down.

“I wonder if everyone goes through this much hell at college,” Lila ponders, dancing next to my chair, staring dreamily at me. Do I want to sleep with another girl? No.

“Don’t worry darling,” Gina says. “We’re not at Williams.”

Not at Williams. No, that’s for sure. Smoke more grass. For some reason he’s not looking at Gina. Lila sits down and sighs and resumes looking at the drawings in the Acker book. Go to Europe if you don’t like it, I’m thinking. Victor, I’m thinking.

“Louis Farrakhan was supposed to visit but the Freshmen and Sophomores on student council voted against it,” Sean says. “Can you believe that?” So he’s politically conscious too. Even worse. He smokes more of the pot than Gina and I combined, someone’s even brought out a bong. He holds it like Victor holds it. I look at him, nauseated, but it’s too smoky and Kate Bush is too screechy and he
doesn’t notice. “They even want someone to redesign the school sign,” he adds.

“Why?” I find myself asking.

“Not Eighties enough,” Lila suggests.

“Probably want flashing neon,” Gina.

“Get Keith Haring or Kenny Scharf,” Lila grimaces.

“Or Schnabel,” Gina cringes.

“Too passé,” Lila mutters.

“Lots of broken plates and ‘suggestive’ smears,” did Sean say this?

“Or getting Fischel to do the pamphlet. Some of the chic jet-setting nihilistic Eurotrash who live off-campus, nude, standing around with dogs and fish. Welcome to Camden College-You’ll Never Be Bored.” Gina starts laughing.

“I’m gonna redesign it,” Lila says. “Win the money. Buy a gram.”

What money? I’m thinking. Have I missed something. Am I out of it?

The grass is good but I have to light a cigarette to stay awake and during a break on the record we can all hear someone from the party next door scream, “That’s phallic—yeah! yeah! yeah!” and we all look at each other, stoned, and crack up and I remember seeing Judy crying in a doorway upstairs at the party, in the bathroom, Franklin trying to comfort her, Franklin glaring at me as I left with Sean.

Now the inevitable.

We’re in his room and he plays me a song. On his guitar. He
serenades
me and it’s almost embarrassing enough to sober me up. “You’re Too Good to Be True” and I start crying only because I can’t help but think of Victor, and he stops halfway through and kisses me and we end up going to bed. And I’m thinking what if I went back to my room now, and what if there was a note on the door saying Victor called? What if there was just a note? Whether he called or not doesn’t matter. Just to see a note, just to see maybe a V, and fuck the rest of the letters. If
there was just a sign. It could make me elated for one week, no, one day. I put my diaphragm in at Gina’s and Lila’s apartment so there’s no drunken forgetfulness on my part, no running to the bathroom in the middle of foreplay.

Sean fucks me. It’s not so bad. It’s over. I breathe easy.

SEAN
We walked slowly back to my bedroom (she followed me like she knew this would happen, too eager, too stunned to speak) past the party which was still going on, across the Commons, and upstairs to Booth. I was so excited I couldn’t stop shaking and I dropped the key when I tried to unlock the door. She sat on the bed and leaned against the wall, her eyes closed. I plugged in the Fender and played her a song I’d written myself and then segued into “You’re Too Good to Be True” and I played it quietly and sang the lyrics slowly and softly and she was so moved that she started to cry and I stopped playing and knelt before the bed and touched her neck, but she couldn’t look at me; maybe it was the grass we smoked at the dykes’ who want to blow up the weight room, or maybe it was the Ecstasy I’m pretty sure she was on; maybe it was that she loved me. When I tilted her face up, her eyes were so grateful that …