“I want to apologize on Josh's behalf,” he said. “That was thoughtless of him to say, and it was even more thoughtless of us to laugh. Sometimes, like Rousseau, I hate the very human inclination toward insensitivity.”
Now this, this made me laugh. My laughter made everyone else laugh even harder. Everyone, that is, except Kieran.
“She's on to you, assclown,” ALF said.
And Kieran silently thumbed the white plug in his ear.
Despite their differences in appearance and personality, ALF and Kieran are good friends. I know this because we all just hung around the dorm, bullshitting and drinking beer for the rest of the night. We didn't even bother trying to hide our alcoholic indiscretions because if there's an RA around, no one seems to know who it is. It's pretty lawless.
I know from the Storytelling Project that people are inclined to reveal intimate details to people they barely know because it somehow feels more anonymous, and therefore safer, than talking to a friend or family member. It's the same principle that keeps psychotherapists in business. So it didn't take long before we got around to talking about the circumstances that brought us back to campus, instead of staying at home with our respective families. We all insisted that we had the worst parents, the worst hometown, the worst reason for being here.
“We are all in the winter of our discontent,” Kieran said.
“Shut up, assclown,” ALF said.
Of course, it turned into a competition, as most conversations here do.
Tanu is here because she told her parents over Christmas dinner that she hates biophysics—she wants to be an Urban Studies major. Her parents already have medical school funds earning interest in a 529 plan and did not take this very well.
“They said, ‘We're not paying thirty grand a year for you not to be a doctor!'”
“And what did you say?” I asked.
“Bye-bye!”
I was impressed and tried to see Tanu in a whole new light. Yes, with her dusky eyes, high cheekbones, and kohl-colored hair, Tanu could be quite pretty. Unfortunately, she's got a stampede of teeth all bodychecking each other in the race to be the first to reach the front of her mouth.
Kazuko is here because her parents sent a check for a plane ticket to Portland and she spent it elsewhere.
“What did you buy?” asked Tanu.
She thrust out her leg. “These shoes,” she said.
“And?”
“That's it.”
“You don't feel guilty?” I asked.
“If you met my parents, you wouldn't be asking me that,” she said flatly.
ALF is here because he crashed into the Tanners' backyard and can't repair his spaceship.
“Why are you here, Jessica?” Kieran hesitated. “Jessica Darling, right?”
“Uh, right.” I was surprised that he even knew my last name—no one introduces themselves by first and last names—let alone remembered it from when our professor publicly posted our grades.
“Jessica Darling,” he repeated.
I rolled my eyes. “I know. The porn star . . .”
“Ah, yes!” ALF piped in. “I love your work.”
“I wasn't thinking that,” Kieran spat, his irritation directed at ALF. “I was thinking nomen et omen. Names are prophetic. And about how yours—Darling—might have affected you.”
Before I could say anything about “Notso,” my family nickname, Kazuko snorted.
“Nomen et omen. My parents would disagree with that.”
“Why?” Kieran asked.
“Because Kazuko means ‘pleasant child,'” she said with a mischievous smile.
“Mine means ‘body,'” Tanu interjected.
“Wow, that's so eerie,” ALF said. “Because . . . you have a body.”
And we all laughed.
“Go ahead and mock me,” Kieran said before returning his attention to me. “So do you prefer Jessica or Jess or something else?” Being unfailingly polite is all part of the dreamo gambit.
“Well, at school I'm known as J. Just as long as you don't call me Jessie, which is what my parents call me,” I said. “I don't really have a preference between J or Jess or Jessica, though—” I stopped short.
“What?”
“Well, uh, the only person who consistently called me Jessica was, uh . . .”
“Your ex-boyfriend,” Kieran said.
I nodded. Oh, dreamo boy. So attuned to the details.
“The dead one?” Kazuko asked.
Kieran threw her a look. “He wasn't her boyfriend.”
“Right, this was another guy. A real ex-boyfriend.”
“Is he the reason you're here?” Kieran asked.
I sipped my beer before answering. “Indirectly,” I said.
“What do you mean ‘indirectly'?” ALF demanded.
“By indirectly I mean, ‘not directly.'”
“Which means Jessica doesn't feel like sharing,” Kieran said. “And we should respect that.”
“Respek,” ALF said Ali G-style, knuckles out. We bumped fists. ALF is funny.
“There is a more direct reason why I'm here, though,” I said.
“Do tell!” Tanu begged, always too eager to hear one of my stories.
“I walked in on my parents doing it doggie-style.”
And then the room exploded with a shrieky freak-out.
“You win!” Tanu exclaimed. “Nothing could be worse than that!”
“I'm pretty sure that's true, but we haven't heard Kieran's reason for being here,” I said, looking his way.
“Oh, go ahead and tell them,” urged ALF.
Kieran was staring into the nonworking fireplace, a faraway look in his eyes.
“Ladies, get ready to weep and then drop your panties,” said ALF. “As opposed to the reverse order, which is usually how it happens with me.”
Kieran didn't respond.
ALF snapped his claws in front of Kieran's face.
Kieran slowly returned to the rest of the room.
“I'm here because my parents are yachting around the Caribbean. And I'm an only child. And I'm not friends with any of my friends from high school anymore, if we were ever really friends at all. And there's only so much weed you can smoke by yourself. So.”
“There's more,” I said.
“What?”
“There's more than what you're telling us.”
“And how do you know?”
“I read faces,” I said.
“Really?” Tanu asked. “Like a palm reader?”
“Well, yeah. But with faces. And I'm not a charlatan.”
And before I could say “microexpressions” Kieran revealed the whole truth.
“I was supposed to go to Vail with my girlfriend. Only she isn't my girlfriend anymore. Which is painful because I'm still in love. Or in limerence. I'm not sure it matters. Our bond was illusory, but this pain is real. I hurt.”
In my mind, I could hear Dexy butchering REM.
Everybody hurts . . . everybody cries . . .
I smiled sadly, thinking about my friend. She's not coming back for spring semester, as I'd hoped. Maybe next fall. While I'm sad because I miss her, I know it's better that she stay home until she's ready. This city can break the best of us.
Kieran thought I was reacting to his story. He rubbed his dry, bloodshot eyes.
“It still hurts,” he repeated more softly for impact.
It worked. Upon hearing Kieran's confession the females in the room sighed.
Except me. I looked him in the eyes and told him what I thought of his sob story.
“I still win.”
the fifth
To avoid a negative bank balance, I tried picking up a few hours at I SCREAM! But there's little demand for frozen nourishment in the dead of winter, even less when 90 percent of the university population is still on break. This includes my adviser for the Storytelling Project, which is why it's on hiatus until the start of the spring semester. So I've got lots of time, but no money for s
pending it. This is one-half of the typical conundrum for a New Yorker, who usually has neither time nor money, which, in my opinion, is really not much of a problem at all.
Since it's too cold and wet to wander aimlessly around the streets, I've been spending a lot of time with my fellow refugees.
“You know what sucks?” I asked the group assembled in the lounge.
No one responded because they were all in iPod isolation. I'm fascinated by group iPoding. It's social, yet solipsistic at the same time.
I wildly waved my arms to get their attention. Kieran kept his plugs in place and didn't look up from his paperback copy of Empire. Tanu, Kazuko, and ALF pulled theirs out at the same time.
“I didn't hear you,” they all said.
“You know what sucks?” I asked again.
“A toothless hooker,” suggested ALF without missing a beat.
“Good guess,” I said. “But the correct answer is sperm banks.”
Tanu, Kazuko, and ALF all said, “Ooooooooooooooh.” As if it were obvious.
Then I went on to tell them how I'm so poor that I've seriously considered selling my ova for cash, but that it's a really painful, time-consuming proposition.
“Men can just jack off at a sperm bank and make easy money,” I said.
“Biology is destiny,” opined Kazuko, a Women's Studies major.
Kieran sighed heavily to signal for attention. “It's not the bank itself that you have a problem with, but the method for donation.” His plugs were still in his ears.
“I thought you were plugged in,” I said.
“I only appeared to be plugged in,” he said. “It's all part of the grand illusion we call reality.”
“Oh, shut up,” I said with my most withering glance.
“So,” ALF said, returning to the subject. “You hate cock.”
“I am not a cock hater,” I said. “I love cock. I looooooooooooove it.”
I was being intentionally crude, mostly to see how Kieran would react. He didn't. It's very difficult to get any kind of reaction out of someone so blunted.
ALF stood up and pantomimed unzipping his pants. “Well, there's only one way to prove that . . .”
The rest of his sentence was drowned out by the sound of screams.
Later that evening, when I was making a box of ghetto-brand rice and beans for dinner, I heard a knock at the door to the suite. I nearly jumped out of my Chucks, as I had been used to complete solitude on the sixth floor. I looked through the peephole and was surprised to see Kieran there, having come all the way up from the second floor. I don't know how I didn't hear him coming, because he always wears flip-flops (even in subfreezing temps) that smack the floor with each step. Standing face-to-face in the doorway, I noted that he's only an inch or so taller than I am, and thin enough that we could probably wear the same pair of jeans.
“What are you doing here?” I said, leading him to the tiny kitchen.
“I had to ask,” he said. “Is your family that bad off that you'd consider selling your eggs?”
“Oh no,” I said, stirring the mix into the boiling water. “My parents are firmly upper middle class. I'm the only one that's poor.”
And then I told him all about how they're teaching me a life lesson through poverty.
“Let me give you some money.”
I blinked at him. One. Two. Three times.
“You're kidding, right?”
“No.”
“I can't take your money,” I said. “I barely know you. And besides, that would be like prostitution or something.”
“Only if we sleep together,” he said.
“Which isn't going to happen.”
“Right,” he said. “Because you hate cock.”
“No, I loooooove it in general. Just not yours specifically.”
He laughed. Kieran has a high, raspy chuckle that always ends with a “Whoo boy, that was a good one”–type whistle. It's a surprisingly lighthearted laugh for someone so . . . heavy.
“Seriously, I want to give you some money. You'd be helping me out.”
“How so?”
“According to Plato, it's impossible to be both good and rich at the same time. So you would be doing me a favor.”
I grumbled under my breath and the pot boiled over. Water on the range top sizzled and hissed.
“What?”
“You didn't need to invoke Plato, you know. You could have just as easily used any train-wreck socialite to make the same point.”
“I am such a pretentious, ambitionless ass,” he said, dropping his head in shame.
“Pretentious, ambitionless assclown,” I corrected.
I clanged the lid back on the pot to draw attention away from the smile that had slipped across my face with the stealth of a bank robber in broad daylight.
“I'm not taking your money,” I said seriously. “But I will take some salsa, if you've got it.”
“I don't,” he said.
“Then you,” I said, “are useless to me.”
And then I patted his head like he was one of those skeletal puppies pictured on those fund-raising cans placed next to cash registers.
I touched him like I didn't want to catch something. Something serious.
the seventh
I was sitting on my bed, listening to The Cure and shuffling Marcus's postcards into alternative messages:
I WISH OUR RIGHT WAS LOVE
LOVE I WISH WAS OUR RIGHT
I LOVE OUR WISH WAS RIGHT
RIGHT OUR LOVE WAS I WISH
when Kieran knocked on my door. I had gotten into the habit of propping the suite door open, to encourage visits from my fellow refugees. The only one who'd taken me up on it was Kieran, so I knew it was him even before I heard his familiar flip-flopping shuffle. I stashed the postcards under my pillow and grabbed a National Enquirer from the stack on my desk.
“Hey,” he said, sulking and slinking into the room. “It's darker than Plato's cave in here.”
Wallach's rooms are all inadequately lit with weak, humming bulbs that give everyone a sickly complexion. But I don't think that's why he said it.
“I hope you name-checked Plato as a joke,” I said.
“I do have a sense of humor. Though it's hard to come by these days because I'm so sad about my girlfriend. My ex-girlfriend. Yeah. My ex . . .” His voice trailed off and his eyes took on that wandering look. “Are you still sad about your boyfriend?”
“Oh no,” I answered, ignoring the postcards under the pillowcase that said otherwise. “Being here has been very cathartic. It's kind of like a monastic retreat, complete with solitude, poverty, and chastity.”
“And knowledge,” he said, holding up the National Enquirer. He glanced at the cover, graced by Loni Anderson and Burt Reynolds. “This is from 1988.” He rifled through the stack. “These are all from the eighties.”
“I buy them from a homeless guy on 103rd Street for a quarter. It's my one indulgence.”
“Why would you read about gossip that's almost older than we are?” he asked, skimming through an issue that devoted four pages to Delta Burke's weight troubles. “About has-beens and never-weres who have no relevance in today's society? Isn't it depressing?”
“Actually, it's not,” I said. “I take great comfort in these old pages. The skyrocketing fame, the scandalous falls from grace. None of it matters anymore.”
“But doesn't that just remind you of the futility of life?”
“Are you for real? Wait, don't answer that. That's only the worst question one can possibly ask a Philosophy major.”
“I won't refute that,” he said.
“Thank you,” I replied. “Anyway, these magazines remind me that everything is fleeting, the good stuff and the bad stuff. And no one is immune. Not Roseanne then, not Lindsay Lohan now, and not me. And that helps me take things less seriously. At least that's my goal. I can't say it's totally kicked in yet.”
“It makes you think of the temporality of human existence,??
? he said. “But in a good way.”
“Right.”
He was standing in a shifty way that indicated that he wasn't sure whether he should have a seat or show himself to the door. I gestured toward my desk chair and he promptly sat himself down in it.
“You should teach a course about this,” he said. “Get it added to the Core Curriculum.”
“Everyone should hope to be as enlightened as I am.”
And then it got quiet and Robert Smith's plaintive wail filled the room.
“Go on, go on just walk away . . .”
“I can't believe you listen to The Cure,” he said. “Where's your ankh?”
“Oh, I'm sorry,” I mocked. “Where's your Emily the Strange T-shirt?” I thrust my finger toward his birdcagey chest. “Oh there it is, you emo boy, you.”
His eyes narrowed. “I am not emo.”
“Oh give it up,” I said. “No one admits to being emo, but emo is still out there. Someone has to be emo. And that person is you.”
“I am not emo.”
I was clearly getting to him and it brought me much pleasure. I leapt up, got him in a choke hold, ripped off his wool cap, and knuckled a noogie right into his skull. We're practically the same size, and his reflexes have been delayed by so many blunts, so it really wasn't all that difficult.
“Say it! Say ‘I'm sensitive emo boy'! SAY IT!!!”
“Never! I'll never say it!” He broke free, fled to the corner of my room, and cowered in the corner behind a pile of dirty laundry.
He whimpered. “I . . . feel . . . so . . .”
“Emo?” I suggested.
“Violated . . .”
And there was a moment . . .
(“Without you . . . Without you . . .”)
. . . before we both started laughing our asses off. It was all so dumb.
“Anyway, talk to me in twenty years and we'll see if anyone is still listening to Death Cab for Cutie, okay?”
“Twenty years?” he asked. He took out his combination cell/ camera/Palm and tapped away. “It's a date.”
And then we both settled into the pillows and thumbed through National Enquirers and spoke when we had something to say and were quiet when we didn't and he hardly annoyed me at all. And it was so nice that I forgot about the postcards. For a while, anyway.