Joe Strummer made way for David Bowie. “Young Americans” was a longer song than I’d realized; it just kept going on and on, the sheer tedium of it offering a kind of release. I stopped trying to dance, surrendering my body to auto pilot and reflecting instead on my argument with Eric, the way he managed to get me to take the bait.
Chickenshit George Eliot
, I thought, and the unlikeliness of the phrase made me laugh out loud. Polly looked up. She was waiting
out the saxophone solo, shuffling in place, letting her head loll lazily from side to side. Her face was damp, flushed with exhilaration. She stuck her tongue out and panted like a dog.
“God,” she said. “We should do this more often.”
I broke a
sweat on “Pump It Up” and began to unclench a little. I had been dancing for maybe fifteen minutes at that point, and my anxiety had ebbed to a manageable level. I’m invisible, I kept reminding myself,
No one knows I’m here
. I wasn’t having fun exactly, but I did register the first rumblings of self-congratulation, the secret pride that comes when you face up to fears that other people don’t even know you possess.
“Super Freak” was my breakthrough. As soon as I heard those familiar bass notes, I began to move differently. My legs felt bouncy and strong, like I’d just removed a pair of ankle weights. The beat was obvious and I let it take me where it wanted.
When I get to her room, she’s got incense, wine, and can-dles …
Polly swung her hair back and forth as she sang along; there was a startled look of illicit pleasure on her face, as if she’d achieved a state of mystical union with Rick James.
It’s such a freaky scene … Yow
!
In fact, the whole room seemed to have undergone some sort of transformation, like water come to a boil. People collided and spun, careening through the crowd, changing partners and moving on in some kind of manic, free-form square dance. A sweaty football player banged into me, almost knocking me down. When my balance returned I found myself moving at a higher frequency, my arms and legs churning effortlessly, as though my body were a machine powered by the song.
“Woo!” I shouted, punching the air like John Travolta.
Once, back in high school, I’d gotten stoned and watched a Popeye cartoon. In this particular episode, at the low point of the pre-spinach narrative, Popeye had been turned into a punching bag, his feet rooted to the ground, his arms pressed uselessly to his sides. Bluto pummelled him without mercy, his fists a blurry windmill of
punishment. Popeye’s clothes fell off first, followed by a host of strange objects they’d apparently been concealing—a lantern, a spy glass, a ship’s wheel, a life preserver, an anchor—the tools and debris of a lifetime spent at sea. I wondered if something similar wasn’t happening to me as I danced, if burdens I hadn’t even known I was carrying were falling away from my body. High school dropped away. The 1970s. New Jersey. The years I’d spent sitting on the bench, waiting for my shot at gridiron glory. The guitars I’d never quite learned to play. The girls who wouldn’t look at me. The friends I’d lost. The people I’d hurt. My crummy summer jobs. The whole accumulated weight of the past. I felt lighter and lighter, pumped full of fresh air, and though my feet remained rooted to the ground, I experienced an odd sensation of rising, a slow inexorable ascent, as though I were moving upward on an invisible escalator, dancing my way into a brighter and easier future.
“Woo!” I shouted again, just in case anyone hadn’t heard me the first time.
“Oh man,” Matt
shook his head, resting a compassionate hand on my shoulder. “Man oh man.”
“Yes?” I was standing next to him at the beverage table, sipping flat club soda with no ice while Polly waited on line for a turn in the bathroom. A struggle for control of the stereo had resulted in a string of REO Speedwagon and Journey tunes that had cleared the dance floor as effectively as an attack of poison gas. We were biding time, charging our batteries for the inevitable counterstrike.
“Sweet Lordy,” he replied, administering a gentle squeeze to my trapezius muscle. “Are you the worst dancer in the world or what?”
“Fuck you,” I said, twisting out of his grasp.
“I didn’t mean it as an insult,” lie assured me. “It was more of an observation.”
“Oh well in that case, fuck you.”
“Just ignore him,” Jessica told me. “You did fine.”
“You know what?” I said. “No one was even watching me.”
“I was,” Matt volunteered. “Wanna know what you looked like?”
He set his plastic beer cup down on the table, twisted his face into a moronic grimace, and lurched into motion, shifting his weight from one leg to the other like a clumsy giant while simultaneously jabbing at the air in every possible direction, as though trying to punch out a swarm of flies.
“Come on everybody,” he called out, the lures on his fishing cap flapping up and down as he stomped. “Let’s do the Danny.”
Under normal circumstances, I would have felt exposed and mortified by this sort of personalized public mockery, but that
night I had attained a lofty state of detachment. This was about Matt, I realized, not about me. The longer he kept up the joke, the sorrier I felt for him.
“Help me, Jesus!” he cried out. “I’m a dancing fool!”
He tucked his chin down into his chest, hunching his shoulders like Frankenstein as he began to run in place, pumping his knees and elbows with jerky exaggeration. There was a startled, almost desperate look on his face.
“I can’t stop!” he shouted, loud enough that people around us began to take notice. “I’ve got dance fever!”
I was distracted for a moment by the sight of a girl in equestrian clothes—the weird beige pants, the shiny knee boots, even the little black jockey’s cap—squeezing between Matt and Jess on her way to the table, like a lawn ornament come to life. All she needed was the little lantern. Without the slightest hesitation or change of expression, she plunged her hand into the punch bowl and pulled out a Rolex watch.
“I’ve been looking all over for this,” she informed me in a sweet Southern accent. “My Daddy would’ve killed me if I’d lost it.”
Though privately I thought she might have at least used the ladle, I shrugged to indicate my lack of jurisdiction in the matter and turned back to Matt. By this time, his imitation of me seemed to have evolved into some sort of one-man impersonation of the Three Stooges. He’d begun slapping himself in the head with distressing enthusiasm, emitting little whoops of joy in response to each self-inflicted blow. I watched in pained fascination, oddly unsurprised by the spectacle, as if something latent in his everyday behavior had finally found its way to the surface.
“Take that!” he growled, striking himself in the forehead with the palm of his right hand while his left fist spun threateningly in the air above his head. “Why I oughta—”
Before he could make good on this threat to clobber himself, Jessica grabbed a cup of beer off the table and flung it in his face. The splash stopped him cold. His shoulders sagged; he dropped his arms to his sides and stood there helplessly, breathing hard and
looking vaguely bewildered as the yellow liquid ran down his face and dribbled off the brim of his crooked hat. He glanced at me, then shifted his attention to the floor.
“Sorry,” he muttered, sticking out his tongue to catch a stray droplet about to detach itself from the tip of his nose.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “Forget about it.”
“It’s not okay,” Jess said sharply. “Can’t we go to a party just once without you doing something stupid?”
“I was trying,” he insisted, his voice contrite and defiant at the same time. He wiped his sleeve across his mouth. “I thought you’d like it.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “I love it when my boyfriend makes an ass of himself in public.”
The polo player—or whatever she was—stood nearby, licking the punch off her Rolex as she eavesdropped on this discussion. She kept this up for longer than could have been necessary, almost as if she’d come to think of the watch as a lollipop. I got so engrossed in watching her that I failed to notice right away that Polly had returned from the bathroom. Her presence didn’t really register on me until she’d dug her fingers into my wrist and yanked so hard on my arm that both of us almost ended up on the floor.
“Come on,” she said, addressing me in a no-nonsense voice I hadn’t heard from her before. In her borrowed coat and hat, she seemed no more familiar to me than the jockey. “We’re outta here.”
Polly wasn’t running
exactly, but she was walking so fast that it was hard to keep up with her, let alone carry on a conversation. We had already turned the corner onto Park Street and were rushing past the sub shop before she managed to explain that we were fleeing from Peter Preston, who had apparently crashed the party a few minutes earlier.
“You didn’t see him?” she asked breathlessly.
I shook my head. “There was all this weird stuff going on by the punch bowl. Did you have a scene?”
“No, thank God.” She glanced quickly over her shoulder. “I was in the bathroom when he went by. Ingrid saw him go downstairs. She said he looked furious.”
“Maybe he ran into Eric,” I speculated. “That should give us a couple hours’ head start.”
I thought that might get a chuckle out of her, but the next thing I knew she had dropped to her knees right there on the sidewalk, gesturing feverishly for me to do the same. We waited like that, crouching in the shadow of a parked car, until three sets of headlights had passed, then jumped up and hustled across the street, darting into the labyrinth of footpaths behind the drama school. Once we were safely hidden from the street, Polly leaned back against a skinny tree and pulled off her watch cap. I felt a huge surge of relief as her hair spilled out, softening the angles of her face, making her look like herself again.
“God,” she said, wiping one hand across her brow and sighing like an actress. “That was close.”
The pause that followed was so awkward and romantic, I had no choice but to kiss her. Her lips parted and her arms tightened around my back, and I understood right away that her plans for us to sleep together remained unshaken. This was a relief to me, of course, but not as much as it should have been. For reasons I couldn’t quite identify, I felt disturbingly insulated from the moment and from Polly herself. I’d spent months waiting to kiss her like this, and now that it was happening all I could think about was the party we’d just left—the thrill of dancing, the sound the beer made slapping into Matt’s face, the blank expression on the face of the girl licking her wristwatch—and what a good teacher Professor Preston had been, how much he’d taught me about Shakespeare.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“No,” I said, my voice trailing off. “I just …”
She looked at me for a few seconds, her lips thoughtfully puckered, then reached up to unzip her jacket. She did it slowly, like a stripper, watching me the whole time.
“Try it this way,” she said, wriggling out of the sleeves and letting the coat drop to the ground. “I’ll be more like kissing a girl.”
We crossed York
Street and slipped like thieves into Jonathan Edwards. We needed to be somewhere with a bed, and her room had been declared off-limits, due to the fact that Professor Preston supposedly had a key and no compunction about using it.
“I just hope my roommates are out,” I said, giving her hand a little squeeze. “It’ll be hard for us to fornicate with them right in the next room.”
“Not for me,” she laughed. “I’ll copulate right in the common room if I have to.”
These words weren’t our own; they’d been given to us by the strangers who’d stumbled upon us only moments before. Polly’s decision to remove the coat had done wonders for my concentration, and by that point we were dry humping on the grass, using the borrowed parka as a kind of makeshift blanket. As a rule, dry humping was not a favorite activity of mine, but Polly’s dress had crept up around her hips and I could see the white of her panties glowing dimly through the stretchy opaque fabric of her tights as she pushed herself against me, and I felt as gratified and excited by this sight as an astronomer who discovers a new galaxy after a lifetime of pondering the emptiness of space. I was so transported, in fact, that my reaction to the sound of approaching footsteps was simply to ignore them, in the hope that the people attached to the feet would just mind their own business and go away.
“Mark it, uncle,” a cheerful male voice called out. “Behold the beast with two backs.”
“Oh stop it,” a woman said, giggling nervously. “Leave them alone.”
“Are they fornicators?” a second male voice inquired. It was deep and booming, but tinged with uncertainty. “Has the knave found his way to the forfended place?”
With a groan, I rolled off Polly and squinted in the direction of our audience. Maybe twenty feet away, clearly visible on the well-lit path, three people stood watching us—two men in Elizabethan regalia, plus a woman in jeans and a long sweater. The shorter man, who happened to be carrying a pizza box, was decked out in patchwork tights and a jester’s cap; the other was tall and stooped over, with an unconvincing white beard glued to his young and handsome face. He had a crooked walking stick in one hand, a six of beer in the other. Polly sat up too, tugging the dress down over her thighs.
“Is that Lear?” she wondered out loud.
The white-bearded actor thumped his stick on the sidewalk. “I am the king himself.”
“Sorry to bother you,” the woman said, tugging none-too-gently on King Lear’s arm. “They’re just jealous is all.”
“Carry on,” the fool told us, balancing the pizza box in one hand and throwing us a quick salute as he scurried to catch up with his companions.
I watched the three of them disappear around a bend, then turned to Polly, worried that the encounter had embarrassed or troubled her. But she couldn’t have looked more delighted.
“I guess that’s what we get for making the beast with two backs behind the drama school,” she reflected.
“I’m just glad it wasn’t Titus Andronicus,” I told her.
She rose to her feet, extending a hand to help me up. In the distance, we heard King Lear shouting into the night: “Let copulation thrive, for Gloucester’s bastard son was kinder to his father than my daughters got ’tween lawful sheets!”
“Speaking of sheets,” she said. “Have you washed yours recently?”
“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “Once a semester, whether they need it or not.”
I was hoping
we could slip into my bedroom unobserved, making a clean transition back to the good place we’d been before King
Lear had so rudely interrupted, but I’d forgotten about the Whiffenpoof party across the hall. It looked like the whole jamboree had transported itself to Entryway C; a mob of well-dressed people were swarming around the brightly lit doorway, talking and laughing in unnaturally loud voices, trying to compete with “Racing in the Street,” which was blasting from an open window on the second floor, the speakers turned out to face the courtyard.
“I love this song,” Polly told me. “It’s so utterly desolate.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Not one of my favorites.”
I wasn’t a huge Springsteen fan, but I always felt a bit proprietary about his music when I heard it at Yale. It didn’t sound right in this context, played for the enjoyment of people who were going to end up being the bosses of the people the Boss was singing about. Nobody in Entryway C was born to run; no one in the whole college—none of the students anyway—came home from work and washed up, and went racing the streets. I didn’t either, but I did take a certain pride in actually knowing a few people who did, or at least could have if they’d wanted to.
The stairwells were packed wall-to-wall with revelers holding enormous plastic cups and shouting in each others’ ears. Polly and I had to push and squeeze and thread and hello our way through the festive masses; it was a little like moving through a tilted subway car at the height of rush hour. Already I could imagine the stale beer reek we’d wake to in the morning, the way the gummy stairs would grab at our shoes as we tiptoed down to breakfast.
It must have taken us five minutes to climb three flights, ample time for me to consider the various scenarios that might confront us when we finally made it inside. The best one involved an empty suite, Polly’s dress on the floor, her bra draped over the back of my chair. The worst case had Mrs. Friedlin prostrate on the couch, still stubbornly waiting for Max, but it was after midnight and hard to imagine that the situation hadn’t resolved itself by now. In between those two extremes was a host of likelier possibilities, most of which would require us to make a few minutes of small talk with some combination of my suitemates before making a transparent excuse to escape
to the bedroom. (“We’re
tired,”
Ted and Nancy always lied, holding hands and smirking cheerfully just in case anyone was unclear about the true nature of their mission. “Gotta catch some shut-eye.”) If you lived in a dorm, it was pretty much a given that your sex life unfolded in the public domain. You either moved off-campus, took a vow of celibacy, or learned to put up with it like everyone else.