The Rules of Attraction (26 page)

I lie on my bed in the dark for close to an hour, drinking the last of Bertrand’s six-pack of Grolsch and listening to “Funeral for a Friend” and trying to play along with it on my guitar, thinking about Lauren. Something hits me. I walk over to my desk in the dark and pick up the tube of Fun Blood I bought in town earlier. I sit in the chair, drunk, turn the Tensor lamp on and read the instructions. Since I don’t have any scissors to cut the cap off with I bite it off instead, tasting a couple drops of the plastic-tasting liquid. I spit it out, wash the taste away with the warm Grolsch.
Then I squeeze the tube, some of it onto my fingers. It looks very real and I hold my wrist out and squeeze a thick red line across it, the cool liquid slowly dripping off my wrist, onto the desk. I squeeze another line across the other wrist. “Funeral for a Friend” turns into “Love Lies Bleeding.” I lift my arms up, both dripping Fun Blood, Fun Blood running down to my armpits. I sit back in the chair and squeeze more Fun Blood across my arms. I get up, go to the closet, and look at myself in the mirror. I bend my head back and squeeze a thick line across my neck. I feel relieved. Fun Blood runs down my chest, staining my shirt. I draw a thick line across my forehead. I move away from the mirror and sit on the floor, next to one of the speakers, Fun Blood dripping from my forehead, past my nose down to my lips. I turn the volume up.

The door opens slowly and I can hear over the music, through the parachute, Lauren calling. “I knocked, Sean. Hello?” A hand parts the slit in the parachute.

“Sean?” she calls out. “I got your … message. You’re right. We have to talk.”

She steps through the parachute and looks over at my bed and then at me. I don’t move. She gasps. But I can’t help it and I start to crack up. I look over at her, slick with Fun Blood, drunk and smiling.

“You are so fucking sick,” she screams. “You’re so sick! I can’t deal with you.”

But then she turns around before she slips through the parachute, and comes back into my room. She’s changed her mind. She kneels in front of me. The music swelling to a crescendo as she wipes my face off delicately. She kisses me.

LAUREN
Walk into The Pub. Stand near the cigarette machine. Out of order. Talking Heads are blasting out from the jukebox. Sean is standing near the bar wearing a police jacket and black T-shirt. Visiting punks are talking to him. Walk over and ask him, “Are you okay?” End up sitting with him, staring at the pinball machine, Royal Flush, while he sulks.

“I feel my life is going nowhere. I feel incredibly lonely,” he says.

“Do you want a Beck’s?” I ask him.

“Yeah. Dark,” he says.

I cannot deal with this person one more minute. Brush past Franklin, who’s leaning against the out-of-order cigarette machine. Smiles wanly. Push my way to the front of the bar and order two beers. Talk to that nice girl from Rockaway and her awful roommate. That weird group of Classics majors stand by, looking like undertakers. Typical night at The Pub. People dressed in underwear, Drama majors still with make-up on. Brazilian guy who can’t drink because he lost his I.D. Someone pinches my ass but don’t turn around to look.

Bring the beers back to the table. Sean has faint red stains on his face and I’m about to wet a napkin with Beck’s to rub them off. But he starts complaining and he looks at me hard when he asks, “Why don’t you like me?”

I get up, walk to the bathroom, wait in line, and when I come back he asks me again.

“I don’t know,” I sigh.

“I mean, what’s going on?” he asks.

Shrug and look around the room. He gets up to play pin-ball. “This wouldn’t happen in Europe,” someone in a surfer outfit—actually the boy from L.A.—says and of course Victor comes into mind and then oh shit, someone’s kneeling next to my chair telling me about the first times they tripped on MDA, showing me the bottle of Cuervos they smuggled into The Pub, and to my disappointment I’m interested. Sean sits back down and I just know we’re going to fight.

I sigh and tell him, “I like someone else.”

He plays pinball again. I go to the bathroom again hoping someone will take our table. I’m in line with the same people that I was in line with last time. When I come back to the table he’s there. “What’s going on?”

“I like someone else,” I tell him.

Cute Joseph who Alex-nice-girl-from-Rockaway is sleeping with—walks in and hands the Brazilian boy something. Then I notice Paul. He’s looking at Joseph, then the Brazilian. Paul has a new flattop which looks okay, sexy in a goofy way and he looks over at me and I raise my eyebrows up and smile. He looks at Sean and then at me and waves tiredly. Then he looks back at Sean.

“I want to know you,” Sean whines.

“What?”

“Know you. I want to
know
you.” Pleading.

“What does that mean?
Know
me?” I ask him.
“Know
me? No one ever
knows
anyone. Ever. You will never
know
me.”

“Listen,” he says, touching my hands.

“Will you calm down,” I tell him. “Do you want some Motrin?”

A fight starts over near the jukebox. Seniors want to put tapes on and unplug the jukebox. Freshmen don’t want to and I try to concentrate on that. The Freshmen end up winning just because they’re bigger than the Seniors. Physically bigger. How did that happen? “Boys of Summer” comes on. Think of Victor. Sean gets up to play more pinball with an unhappy Franklin. Royal Flush is the name of the game. There’s a King and a Queen and a Jack lit up, all looking straight at the person playing pinball and the crowns on their respective heads blink off and on whenever the player scores. It’s amusing for a while.

I look back over at Paul across the crowded Pub. He looks miserable. He’s looking at Sean. He’s staring at Sean. Sean keeps looking over at me, like he knows Paul is looking at him, and then I’m looking over at Paul and Paul is still staring at Sean. Sean catches this and, blushing, rolls his
eyes up and turns back to the pinball machine. I look back at Paul. He crumples his plastic beer cup and looks away, agonized. And I’m starting to catch on to something and then I’m thinking no way, oh no way. Not that. I look back at Sean, semi-realization hitting me but then it leaves because he’s not staring back at Paul. And then I get angry, start remembering how awful it was with Paul and Mitchell. Paul denying everything, how pathetic I seemed, wondering how I was supposed to act when there was no real competition. If it had been another girl with Paul that weekend on Cape Cod instead of Mitchell, or another girl here in The Pub right now, mooning over Sean, that would have been fine, great, easy to “deal with.” But it was Paul and it was Mitchell and there was nothing I could do. Lower my voice? Casually mention I need to shave, Judy and I suggested, hysterical, one night last term, but in the end it wasn’t really funny and we stopped laughing. Now the possibility hits that perhaps Mr. Denton is staring at me and not at Sean. “Boys of Summer” ends, starts again.

Rupert sits down next to me wearing a David Bowie T-shirt and a fedora, still hasn’t taken off the horrible mask he’s wearing, and offers me some of his coke. I ask him where Roxanne is. He tells me that she went home with Justin. Just smile.

VICTOR
New York was a real hassle. I ended up staying with some girl who thought her mail was coming from Jupiter. She had no hips and was a Gitano jeans model from Akron, but still it was a drag. She caught me going out with Philip Glass’s daughter anyway, and kicked me out. I stayed at Morgan’s for a couple of nights and split without paying the bill. Then I stayed at some Camden grad’s place on Park and unplugged all the phones since I didn’t want the ’rents to know I was back in town. Tried to get a job at Palladium but some other Camden grad got the only job left: coat check. Got into a rock band, dealt acid, went to a couple of okay parties, went out with a girl who worked at
Interview
and who tried to enroll me into Hunter, went out with another model, one of Malcolm McLaren’s assistants, tried to get back to Europe, but decided on a cold partyless night in November to head back to New Hampshire and Camden. Got a ride with Roxanne Forest, who was in town for some movie premiere or the opening of another Cajun restaurant and I stayed with her and Rupert Guest Drug Dealer at their place in North Camden, which was cool since he had unlimited supplies of great Indica pot and Christmas Tree bud. Besides that I also wanted to get in touch with Jaime. When I called Canfield, a girl with an unfamiliar voice answered the phone.

“Hello? Canfield House.”

“Hello?” I said.

There was this pause and then the girl recognized my voice and said my name, “Victor?”

“Yeah? Who is this?” I asked, wondering if it was Jaime, pissed off that she hadn’t been in Manhattan when I got back.

“Victor,” the girl laughed. “It’s
me.
”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “You.”

Rupert was on the floor trying to glue a beer bong he’d made back together, but he was wasted and kept cracking up instead. I started cracking up too, watching him and said to the voice on the phone, “Well, how are
you?
”

“Victor, why haven’t you called me? Where are you?” she asked. Either that or I was seriously tripping.

“I’m in New York City where the girls are pretty and life is kinda shitty and the birds are itty bitty—” I laughed, then noticed movement on Rupert’s part. He jumped up and put Run D.M.C. on the stereo and started rapping along with them, singing into the Kirin bong.

“Give it to me,” I said, reaching for the bong.

“I’ve been…” the voice stalled.

“You’ve been what, honey?” I asked.

“I’ve missed you badly,” she said.

“Hey honey. Well, I’ve missed you too.” This girl was looney-tunes and I started cracking up again, trying to light the bong, but the pot kept falling out.

“It doesn’t sound like you’re in New York,” the voice said.

“Well maybe I’m not,” I said.

The voice stopped talking after that and just breathed heavily into the phone. I waited a minute and then handed the phone over to Rupert, who made pig noises into it, then turned on the VCR all the while rapping to “You Talk Too Much.” He bent down and said, “You never shut up,” into the receiver, then “Sit on my face if you please.” I had to put my hand over the receiver to keep this girl from hearing me laugh. I pushed Rupert away.

He mouthed, “Who is it?”

I mouthed back, “I don’t know.”

I get a hold on myself and then finally asked this girl what I called for in the first place, “Listen, is Jaime Fields in? Room 19, I think.” The bong dropped against the table. I picked it up before it rolled off the table and shattered.

“You shithead! Be careful,” Rupert screamed, laughing.

The girl on the phone wasn’t saying anything.

“Hello? Anyone there?” I tapped the phone against the floor. “I’d like to buy a vowel, please.”

The girl finally said my name, really whispered it, and then hung the phone up, disconnecting me.

LAUREN
Drunk. Blur. His room. I wake up. Music blasting from upstairs. Stumble into hallway. Susie tried to kill herself earlier. Slit her wrist. Blood all over the door across the hall. Guy she likes. Use the bathroom, wearing his shirt, black space, can’t find a light, it’s freezing. My face so puffed from sobbing that I can barely open my eyes. Wash face. Try to throw up. Walk back to his room. Crying sound coming from phone booth. Probably Susie back from hospital. Walk by phone. Not Susie, but Sean. Kneeling, crying into the phone “fuck you fuck you fuck you.” Go back to his room. Fall back on bed. Later he comes in, wiping his face sniffing loudly. Pretend to sleep while he packs, shoves some shirts into an old leather satchel and grabs his police jacket and leaves the door open. Expect him to come back. He doesn’t. French guy who told me he loved me comes into the room drunk. Looks down at me lying on his roommate’s bed. He laughs and falls on the bed next to me. “Je savais toujours que tu viendrais,” he says and passes out.

SEAN
The last time I saw my father had been in March when I met him in New York for a long weekend to celebrate my twenty-first birthday. I remember the entire trip quite clearly which surprises me considering how drunk I
was most of the time. I remember the look of the morning at an airport in New Hampshire, playing gin with some guy from Dartmouth, a rude stewardess. There was a meal at The Four Seasons, there was the afternoon we lost the limousine, the hours spent shopping at Barney’s, then Gucci. There was my father, already noticeably dying: his face yellowish, his fingers as thin as cigarettes, eyes that were wide and always staring at me, almost in disbelief. I would stare back, finding it impossible to imagine someone that thin. But he acted as if this wasn’t happening to him. He still held a certain degree of normalcy about him. He didn’t appear scared, and for someone apparently quite ill had enormous amounts of stamina. We still saw a couple of lame musicals on Broadway, and we still had drinks in the bar at The Carlyle, and we still would go to P.J. Clarke’s, where I played songs on the jukebox I knew he’d like though I don’t remember why exactly this rush of generosity occurred, what brought it on.

It was also a weekend when two women in their mid-twenties tried unsuccessfully to pick up on my father and I. They were both drunk and due to the cold weather I had sobered up from whatever drinking binge I had been on, and my father had stopped drinking completely, and we lied to them. We told them we were oil barons from Texas and that I attended Harvard and came to Manhattan on weekends. They left whatever bar we had been at with us and we piled into the limousine which took us to a party someone my father knew at Trump Tower was having where we lost them. What was strange about that situation was not the pick-up itself, for my father had always been quite adept at casually picking up women. It was that my father, who would normally have flirted with these two, didn’t this last March. Not in the bar, not in the limousine, not at the party on Fifth Avenue we lost them at.