Who Do You Love (20 page)

Andy looked over the guy's shoulder, his eyes widening like he'd seen something important. “Check it out!” he said. Ponderous as a hippo in a mud wallow, the guy had started to turn, exposing a lovely, immense span of jowl. Andy drew back his fist and hit the guy hard, and the guy went down, taking both beers with him. He was getting ready to kick the guy in his ribs with his Nikes, which, in retrospect, would have hurt Andy more than the guy, who was well padded, when two of Beer Guy's buddies grabbed his arms, and a third one started pounding on him. Andy saw the fist approaching just as Rachel came running over in her gown, her lipsticked mouth open in a perfect O of dismay.

•••

Beer Guy's name was Kyle Davenport, because of course it was, and he was president of the Alphas, because of course he was, and the Alphas were the brother fraternity to Rachel's Gammas. Because obviously, that, too. Rachel told him all of this, sitting on the edge of her bed, holding a wet washcloth full of ice against the side of
Andy's
face, where one of Davenport's fraternity brothers had pasted him.

“This is not ideal,” Rachel said. She'd changed into her pajamas, and most of her makeup had been wiped or cried away, but her hair was still in its updo, which made her look like a little girl playing dress-up, wearing a strange kind of hat.

“I'm sorry,” Andy said for what felt like the hundredth time since Rachel had come running to him, skidding through the beer puddle, saying,
Oh my God, Andy!

He took the washcloth out of her hand. “So what happened?” he asked.

She sighed, looking deflated. “The cops came.”

He nodded. He'd caught some of that while Rachel had been hustling him out the door. “The good news is, we were checking IDs, so we're not going to get in trouble for serving anyone underage.” Another sigh. “Kyle didn't know your name, and he didn't say much about how it all started, so nobody's going to be charged. The bad news is, having cops show up at your rush party isn't going to impress potentials.” Another sigh. “Or the alums. This just doesn't reflect very well on us.”
Me,
Andy thought.
I don't reflect very well on you.

“I should go,” he said, without realizing he was going to say it out loud.

Rachel lifted her hands to her eyes and rubbed them like a tired toddler. “Maybe that's a good idea,” she said. Andy sat back, startled. This wasn't part of the script. He'd apologize, and she'd forgive him. He'd say that he should leave and she'd insist that he stay, telling him that she understood why he'd hit that asshole, and how, given the situation, she would have done the same thing, and that whatever trouble she was in, however mad her fellow officers were, none of that mattered, because she loved him.

Except that didn't seem to be happening. Her face was unreadable, her back and shoulders stiff. He reached for her hands. She pulled them away and got off the bed to face him. “You don't think we're good people,” she began.

“That isn't true,” he said. His lip was already puffing up. He wondered if he'd get a black eye, too, and whether Coach would notice, and what he'd say to explain it.

She held up her hand. “No, just listen, okay?” She huffed out air, balled her hands into fists, said, “God, I'm so sick of this.”

“Sick of what?”

“Sick of being talked over! Even in my women's studies class, it's always guys doing the talking, so how about you just be quiet and listen for five minutes?”

“I listen,” Andy protested, thinking that he definitely didn't need to enlarge the argument to include Rachel's imagined oppression. One look at her face, at the scorching glance she threw him, and he closed his mouth.

“You think we're bad people. No, don't deny it,” she said, holding up her hand like he'd tried to argue. “You think we're shallow and frivolous and we only care about our hair and makeup, and maybe some of that's true. Maybe a lot of it's true. But that's not all we are. And, Jesus, Andy, even if it was, that doesn't mean that it's okay for you to get into fights at our formals, to embarrass me or put my position at risk.”

Put my position at risk.
She sounded like a boss, giving the new hire a bad performance review. He stared at his sneakers, trying to keep his leg from jiggling, forcing himself to hold still and take it.

“I'm sorry,” he said again. “I don't know what else to tell you. It was dumb, and I shouldn't have done it.”

With her back to him, he could see a blurry reflection of her face in the window. He thought she was crying, but he wasn't sure.

“You know, I could have a boyfriend here. I could,” she said in a thin, high voice. “It's not like guys don't ask.”

Andy felt like he was trying to swallow a ball of steel wool.

“My friends ask me all the time what I see in you,” she said. “They think you're stuck-up.”

“I'm stuck-up?” He couldn't keep from sounding incredulous. These girls, with the cars they drove and their clothes and their credit cards, they thought he was stuck-up?

“You barely even talk to them. You act like you're better than they are. You judge them . . .”

“I don't—”

“You do,” Rachel said. She was definitely crying now. “Maybe you don't do it on purpose, but they can tell.” She paused. “I can tell. You're always examining me, trying to see if I'm good enough, if I've stopped being so shallow and snobby. And I never quite get there, do I?”

He wanted to go to her, put his hands on her shoulders, turn her toward him. He wanted to kiss the tears off her cheek, pull off her pajamas, take her to bed, where everything was always right between them. But her body was stiff under his hands, and when he tried to get her to turn around and look at him, she wouldn't move.

“I think you should go,” she said. Her voice was dull; her eyes were aimed at the floor.

“I've already got a ticket for the bus. It leaves at seven. I don't . . .”

“I don't want you here.” Rachel raised her head and stared out onto the darkened quad, looking angry and fierce, like one of those carved figureheads on the front of ships. He was furious, but he wasn't sure where to direct his anger—at Rachel? At Beer Guy? At himself, for losing his temper? At his mom, for dressing him from the church's donation table in the first place?

“Okay,” he said, and Rachel left the room without a look, without another word.

•••

It took him five minutes to pack up his stuff—his toothbrush, his books, his boxer shorts, the stupid tux. He walked down the sorority house hall, head bent, hearing girls whispering behind the closed doors. At two in the morning, the campus was deserted, and he knew he had to find somewhere to be, unless he wanted to endure a second go-round with campus security.

At the all-night convenience store he bought three hot dogs and a big bag of pretzels, and paid another quarter for a cup full of ice. For a while, he sat on the bench in front of the shop, eating, then wrapping chunks of ice in paper napkins and holding them against his cheek. By three he was at the bus station, trying to read Sociology of the Family under the dim glow of the streetlights. He dozed for a while—probably not safe, but whatever, he'd already been beaten up. At sunrise, he came awake to the feeling of someone's hand on his shoulder.

Startled, he jumped to his feet, ready to run, ready to fight, ready for anything. Rachel was standing there, with a cup of coffee in one hand. Her hair was pulled back in a bun, with curls escaping around her face. Her eyes were red; her skin was blotchy. She looked beautiful.

“I love you, you know,” she said.

He wanted to tell her that he was sorry. That he was stupid. That he didn't think she was dumb or shallow, that he knew she had a good, true heart. But everything got tangled on its way from his brain to his tongue, twisted up with the memory of the beefy Beer Guy with his mean, glittering eyes, the disdainful twist of his lip, the way he'd made Andy feel like nothing, like less than nothing, like something a guy like that would flick off his cuff on his way to his good, clean, well-lighted life. So he kept quiet, just held Rachel's hand, tracing the shape of a heart on her palm until the bus pulled up to the station and it was time for him to go.

Rachel

2001

I
tucked my subway map into my bag, pulled out my notebook, and squinted at what I'd written, making sure I had the address right. It was early, just after seven on a gorgeous fall morning, and I was way uptown, doing drop-ins on families who had open cases with the Office of Children and Family Services. My master of social work program at NYU required a twenty-one-week internship, and I was doing mine with the Family Aid Society, which helped families dealing with housing issues, and all of the concerns that went along with that—unemployment, absences from school, the inability to buy and store nutritious food, and not knowing how to cook it when you had it.

Some days, my boss had told me, my job would be nothing but paperwork, filling out forms and faxing them to the appropriate agencies, and then refaxing them when they got lost . . . but most of the time my work was on the ground, meeting with families—mostly single mothers and their kids—helping them get what they needed, whether it was an impromptu lesson in what to do with the kale from the farmers' market, or taking little kids off a mom's hands while she filled out a job application or spent a few hours at a community college.

I looked up at the door, then down at my notebook, then back to the door again. I was in the right place, even if I'd gotten slightly lost on my way here. I banged again. “Flora?” I yelled. No answer.

“She ain' here,” called a lanky guy reclining on the stoop next to where Flora and her two daughters lived. He wore a white ribbed cotton tank top, loose-fitting jeans that he'd belted below his hips, and the newest Air Jordans (in my time as an intern, I'd learned to recognize brand-name sneakers—lots of my clients either wanted them or spent way too much money to get them).

I put my notebook in my pocket and smoothed my skirt. “Do you know where she is?”

Lanky gave a lazy grin, exposing a gold tooth, and adjusted the angle of his baseball cap. “She left up outta here with he
r
man.”

“Which man is that?” Flora had gotten on FAS's radar—and eventually mine—because she'd brought her three-year
-o
ld daughter Ariel to the ER with a greenstick wrist fracture, the kind frequently caused by the twisting of large adult hands. When the social worker on call had interviewed her, she'd admitted that her boyfriend could “get a little rough,” especially when the kids interrupted his appointment with televised professional wrestling on Monday nights. We'd gotten Flora's boyfriend into anger management counseling, signed them both up for a parenting class that neither one was attending with any degree of regularity, and planned visits, both scheduled and unscheduled, to check in on the girls. If Flora had found a new fellow, that was good news. If she'd pulled her daughters out of school to run off with him, that was less than ideal.

The guy on the stoop shrugged. “Don't know his name. He hit the numbers. Took 'em all back to the DR.”

“Got it.” I knocked one last time, more for show than anything else, then stuck one of my new business cards into the crack between the door and the jamb, and then, trying to look purposeful in my stride, with my unruly hair pulled back into a bun, I walked toward my next appointment, enjoying the sunshine. It was a gorgeous day, clear and sunny without being savagely hot; and a light breeze seemed to have scoured the sky. Fall was coming—there was a crisp edge to the wind that let you know it was September and not May.
A perfect morning,
I thought, and pulled out my newly issued cell phone to call my boss, Amy Ung, to tell her that Flora was gone.

“Back to the motherland, huh?” Amy was tiny, with glossy, blunt-cut black hair that fell to her shoulders and in bangs across her forehead. She was in her thirties, always impeccably dressed in crisp pinstriped pants and a man's-style white cotton button-down that she'd probably purchased in the boys' section of some upscale department store.

Amy and her sisters were all native New Yorkers, raised by parents who had emigrated from China and ran a restaurant in Queens. (When I'd asked what kind, Amy had stared at me in silence, then said, “Chinese.”) Despite thirty-eight years in America, her parents still barely spoke English, although they understood it, which meant that, from a young age, Amy, their eldest, had been their liaison to the white-people world. Watching the way her parents had been treated by the officials from the health board who inspected their kitchen to the principal at Amy's school had left her with a desire to keep other families from being mistreated. Amy was married to a Jewish guy named Leonard, a surgeon doing his internship at Lenox Hill, and she and I had become friends in part, I think, because she had so many of her nights free while Leonard worked thirty-six-hour shifts and napped in a bunkroom in the hospital.

“No boyfriend?” she'd asked, the first night we'd gone out for drinks.

“No one special right now,” I'd said, and given her the abbreviated version of Andy and me, and how that had all ended in my junior year. I thought we'd been fine after the disastrous formal, but whenever I called his dorm room, Andy was out or busy, more often than not, and when he was around, he didn't have much to say—he was either exhausted from a workout or preparing for a meet or on his way out with his teammates. After he didn't return my calls for two weeks straight, I got the message. He didn't want me anymore.

I had dropped out of the Gammas that spring—or, rather, I'd gone inactive, telling my puzzled parents that it had been too hard to study with all the parties, hinting that the rampant disordered eating was also a factor. All I had to do was say the words
not the healthiest environment
and my mother was on a plane to help me find a new place. I should have felt guilty—the environment in the Gamma house was no more or less healthy than the atmosphere anyplace else on campus—but I didn't. After the formal, I'd started to see the sorority, and all of Beaumont, through
Andy's
eyes—its whiteness, its richness, its manicured, almost stagy perfection, and even though I'd tried, I couldn't un-see any of it. It was irritating, as if I'd been wearing a pair of proverbial rose-tinted glasses, and Andy, who was supposed to love me, slapped them off my face.

The apartment my mother and I had found off-campus wasn't all that different from my suite in the sorority house—it had been carved out of the upper floors of a Tudor-­style mansion made of cream-colored stucco and dark wooden beams. My suite had a fireplace, in addition to a black-and
-w
hite-tiled bathroom with a big old bathtub, a small but functional kitchen, and a little balcony.

Even though Andy and I hadn't officially broken up, it seemed like all the guys on campus had gotten word of my single status over the summer. When Charlie Corman asked me out in October, I didn't feel guilty about saying yes. I dated Charlie and a few other guys my senior year, a few more since I moved to Manhattan. I still felt
Andy's
presence, hovering over my life, informing my decisions, always there, like background music, faint but discernible, and none of the guys could banish his voice from my head.

When I applied to NYU my senior year to get a master's degree in social work, my parents had been dubious—about New York, about social work, about me spending my life with the poor, the homeless, the addicted, and the mentally unwell. I'd never told them about what had happened in Atlanta with Bethie Botts, or with Andy at the formal. What I'd said was that the world was a hard place, much harder for most people than it was for us, and that I wanted to help if I could. “You sent me to all of that Hebrew schooling, and they kept talking about
tikkun olam
—how it's our job to heal the broken world. I want to do that.” My mother had gotten weepy, and even my dad, who I suspected would have been happier to see me as a teacher or a librarian or, best of all, a stay-at-home mom, had said gruffly, “I'm proud of you,” and pulled me in close for a kiss.

My next visit that morning was with Brenda Perrone. Mother of three, ex-wife of two, Brenda had been the first case I'd handled completely on my own, after she'd shown up at our office in July, frantic and furious and dragging her children behind her, complaining that she'd come home to her apartment in Red Hook to find the door padlocked and an eviction notice stuck above the padlock.

“You knew this was coming,” Amy had said as she handed me Brenda's file. “Rachel will be handling your case now.” Ostensibly the office had gone to a computerized system years ago, but the reality was that there were still paper files, stuffed full of disturbance-of-the-peace citations that looked almost exactly like parking tickets; mimeographed copies of the inventories the corrections officers took when you went to jail.
One nail clipper, one wallet, brown leather, containing one five-dollar bill, three one-dollar bills, two quarters, a nickel, and two pennies.
I flipped through Brenda's file until I found the eviction notice and copies of the three follow-up letters that had been sent via certified mail.

“You signed for these,” I said. “Did you even read them?”

Brenda tossed her long black hair and tugged at her short leather jacket before looking down at the pile, then up at me. She was thirty-three and improbably pretty, given the hard life she'd led. Her own father had been abusive, her mom had died young, and she'd dropped out of high school, moved in with her boyfriend, and had her first baby at fifteen. “My girlfriend Celinda, the same thing happened to her, only it never happened. Nobody locked the door to her apartment.”

I flipped some more. “Your ex-husband told you six months ago that he lost his job and couldn't afford the rent and that you and the kids would have to find a less expensive place.”

“When was I supposed to do that?” Brenda asked. She was working long days in a bakery, which left her no time to set up appointments and check out possible housing. I had encouraged her to keep her job; I'd found a short-term shelter where the family could stay together, and a kennel that would board their dog, and city-funded summer programs for her children, including one where her oldest boy, Nicky, got to spend July with a wealthy and well-meaning family at their summer cottage on Nantucket. In August, she'd moved into a new place in Harlem, on a quickly gentrifying block filling up with young couples who wanted more space than they could afford in trendier neighborhoods but weren't ready to abandon the borough.

That morning I found Brenda sitting on the couch of her still mostly empty apartment, on the twelfth floor of a fifteen-story building. Her eyebrows were plucked into thin arches; her eyes were heavily lined with black pencil. Her thin hair clung to her scalp and face in sticky clumps, her breath smelled like stale coffee, and her two-bedroom apartment had already acquired its signature scent of cigarette smoke and unflushed toilet, with accent notes of fast food and dog. Brenda's pride and joy was a Siberian husky, a dog she'd told me she'd paid a breeder a thousand dollars for, whose breath made you think that a small rodent had crawled inside her mouth and died there. The dog, who was large and white and named Whitey, spent most of her time curled up asleep at Brenda's feet, and at least once every ten minutes she'd let loose a long, mellow-sounding fart, like a low note on a clarinet.

“Who pays a breeder a thousand bucks for a dog when you can go to any shelter and get a dog for free?” I'd asked Amy during one of our dinners. We'd go out together, once a week, and were methodically working our way through all the cuisines in New York City. By then we'd sampled Ethiopian, Italian, Thai, and Korean. We were eating Indian that night, samosas and saag paneer and tandoori chicken. Amy had given me an indulgent smile and said, “Oh, grasshopper, you have much to learn.”

I shifted on the couch. Brenda pinched the sleeve of my jacket between two long-nailed fingers. “This is real nice,” she said.

“Thank you.” The jacket wasn't anything special, but it would, I hoped, look formal enough to command some respect from the women I worked with, most of whom were older than I was. Lucky for me, my parents had bought me a leather tote when I'd graduated from Beaumont, and it was still in good shape, big enough to hold a day's worth of case files, my wallet and keys, and the tape recorder and camera I needed to do my interviews or document conditions at a client's home.

Brenda let go of my jacket and toyed with her hair.

“How have things been?” I inquired, keeping my voice intentionally mild. I'd learned, from shadowing Amy for three months, how to keep judgment off my face and out of my voice, and to try not to ask a question unless I knew the answer. When I'd arrived, I'd used the bathroom, where I had spied with my little eye a man's razor and a can of Barbasol next to the sink, and whiskers in the bowl. Her oldest son was eighteen, small for his age, with no beard that I could see.

Brenda slid her gaze sideways. She knew she wasn't supposed to have another adult with a paycheck sharing the apartment that had been approved for just her and her children. She also knew, or at least I guessed she did, that the amount of work and red tape it would require to evict the boyfriend was such that the agencies involved would probably decide to look the other way, in the event I decided to blow the whistle.

“What's the story, morning glory?”

She shifted on the couch. “It's just a friend who's visiting. A guy I knew from my old job.”

I didn't speak and kept looking at her. Another thing Amy had taught me was that strategic silence could be a social
worker's
best friend. And it worked. Brenda kept talking.

“I just thought he could help out. With the bills. I've got electric, water, gas, cable . . .” She raised a finger for each utility, as if I was unfamiliar with what it cost to live in an apartment. Fresh paint on her nails, I noticed with annoyance. Brenda couldn't get it together to feed her kids breakfast most mornings or to make sure they got to school half the time, and her phone was constantly being turned off—not safe, I told her; if there was an emergency, she'd need to be able to call 911—but she always found time and cash for a manicure. A manicure and a man, and she usually got pissy when I called her on it.