Loner (19 page)

You'd speculated about my romantic personality and you'd now heard me having intercourse. No more measuring out my life with coffee spoons; it was time for a paradigm shift. Breaking up with Sara the morning after sex would be too harsh. And you were still asleep anyway. The real coup would be if you overheard it. Not only would it alert you to our severance, one that I'd initiated, but if Sara became distraught, it might make David from Prufrock look a little dangerous, not so wholesome after all.

That night, during dinner, I asked Sara when she wanted me to come over.

“Maybe we should take the night off,” she said. “I'm feeling kind of out of it.”

“No problem,” I said.

On the walk home to Matthews I saw your light was on. I said good night to Sara at the fourth floor, waited a few minutes, and marched upstairs and knocked on her door.

“We're on a break tonight, remember?” she said.

“I know. But I need to talk to you about something.”

She looked mildly chagrined but let me in and went to her desk chair. I sat on her bed, leaning against the wall that separated your rooms, and exhaled forcefully to communicate that what I was about to say was the culmination of much agonizing soul-searching.

“I don't think this relationship is working,” I began.

She seemed more incredulous than upset. “You're breaking up with me?” she asked, almost laughing.

I looked down and slowly nodded to myself. “I don't think we're right for each other. We're different people. We want different things.”

I paused as a siren wailed from Mass Ave. then faded.

“I've been grappling with this for a while,” I continued. “I was hoping time would prove me wrong. But I guess I can't change the way I feel deep down.”

“How exactly is it that you feel?”

“Like I can't breathe,” I said.

She sat next to me on the bed. “And
t
his
is when you choose to tell me? You couldn't have done this, say, last night before we went to bed? Or, better yet, last week?”

“I realized it wasn't fair to keep you in something that I wasn't fully invested in.”

“ ‘
Invested in,
' ” she repeated bitterly. “Is it because we had sex? Have you lost your
investment
now that you've had me?”

“Of course not,” I said, which was technically true. “It's not anything you did; it's me. There are plenty of guys out there you'd be better off with, maybe guys you wouldn't consider because you were with me. I don't want to hold you back from that.”

“Ugh, stop with the clichés!” she said. “Are you reading from a script or something? Now I'm wondering if you ever actually felt anything—if you even cared about me.”

My eyes fell on
Anti-Imperialist Marxism in Latin America
on her bookshelf. I hadn't gotten to finish it and never learned the outcome of various proletariat revolutions.

“I'm doing this
because
I care about you,” I said softly, recognizing that they weren't the words of a dangerous asshole so much as a generically noncommittal male.

“No,” she said stoically. “You don't care about me. I don't think you're capable of caring about anyone besides yourself.”

“I'm not sure where you're getting that.”

“You're missing whatever it is that makes you feel things for other people,” Sara said.

She was wrong. My feelings were stronger for you than for anything else in my life, though I couldn't refer to that in my defense.

“Sometimes I have no idea who you really are,” she went on. “I feel like I projected all these qualities I wanted onto you.”

Prohibited from using platitudes, I had nothing. She buried her face in her pillow. “Would you please leave,” she said meekly. “I don't want to see you right now.”

“Sara,” I pleaded halfheartedly.

“‘
Like I can't breathe,
'” she said, freeing her mouth from the pillow. “Really nice.”

“Well, I'm sorry I'm not the nice boyfriend you thought I was!” I shouted so that you had to hear it.

I let myself out and waited on the other side of the door until I heard her sobs, instigating the familiar movement in my boxers. Back in my room, I lay on my bed as rollicking bands of revelers streamed below my window on their way to Saturday-night destinations, off to share scorpion bowls at the Hong Kong on Mass Ave., to clink shot glasses in the River Houses, to trade bon mots during punch season at the final clubs.

No matter. You had heard me reject Sara, and you had heard her cry. I was someone who had the power to wound another person.

Chapter 12

F
or the next several days I kept a low profile, skulking into the dining hall at odd hours and sitting alone at an outpost with my books. I managed to duck Sara in Matthews, too, and studied in out-of-sight carrels in Widener.

One night, tired of eating by myself, I knocked on Steven's door.

“I'm getting sick of Annenberg food,” I said when he opened it. “You want to go to Noch's? It's on me.”

“Um.” He bent his spindly arms and massaged his knobby elbows. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but because Sara's the one who got dumped, we felt we should support her right now.”

I hadn't considered this consequence of our breakup, assuming that, after a few days, Sara and I would broker a détente and the unity of the Matthews Marauders would be, as ever, preserved.

“But the two of us getting pizza doesn't involve Sara.”

“Well, there's also . . .” He reached around himself and scratched his upper back. “I don't know how to say this exactly, but there was some stuff about you? Stuff that was said, I mean?”

“What sort of stuff?”

His face scrunched up in a rare expression of social discomfort. “That, with Sara, before you broke up . . .”

I'd never seen Steven hem and haw like this; he was incapable of embarrassment for himself, but it seemed that he was embarrassed for me. Had Sara said I wasn't good in bed? That I'd clearly lied about not being a virgin? I'd wanted to be the kind of person people gossiped about, but not like this, with who knew what grinding through the freshman rumor mill.

“What did she say?”

“That you crossed a line,” Steven said.

“Crossed a line? What line?”

“Apparently”—he examined his fingernails—“she didn't really say yes.”

Though he swallowed the final word, it sounded louder than the rest. I thought back to our latest encounters and replayed their limited dialogue.

“She didn't explicitly say no, either,” I told him. “And, not to get too graphic, but she took out her tampon.”

Steven put up his hands. “I don't want to get in the middle of anything.”

“She took out her tampon!” I repeated. “Explain to me how that's not saying yes!”

He didn't respond.

It wasn't like Sara to confide such personal details to the Marauders. “She told all of you this?” I asked.

“Just Carla,” he said. “Then Carla told the rest of us.”

I imagined Carla sharing the misinformation at the next BGLTQ meeting, all her “allies” shaking their heads at my purported wrongdoing, but isn't this what we've come to expect?

“I could meet you at Noch's after dinner,” Steven offered. “I'll have eaten already, but I can sit there with you for a little bit.” The pitiableness his charity ascribed to me made me feel worse than if he'd said he never wanted to talk to me again.

“That's okay, I'll be fine,” I said abruptly, and told him I had to study during dinner anyway. I did just that, choosing Annenberg over Noch's to prove I didn't have to cower from calumny, taking visual sips across the room of Sara to gauge if she was further slandering me. Once in a while she nodded solemnly, as if confirming that, yes, I had done terrible things to her, even more horrific than she'd previously let on.

But I was being paranoid. No real line had been crossed. This was college. People had sex. They didn't just hold hands and masturbate.

You cut the next Prufrock. The following week featured Tom's guest lecture on
The Sound and the Fury
, an intellectually posturing performance full of verbal pyrotechnics, signifying nothing. You sat in the front row with the rest of your section, laughing along at his pandering pop-culture references.

When it was over I waited for you outside Harvard Hall. “How's it going?” I asked, falling in step with you over to Sever.

“All right.”

“Sara and I broke up,” I said. “That's why I haven't been in the room for a while.”

“That's too bad,” you said in your usual affectless tone.

“Yeah. She took it pretty hard.” I inhaled deeply through my nostrils, as if I were reeling with guilt over the pain I had inflicted on your devastated roommate. “Anyway, do you want to meet up sometime to work on next week's essay?”

Before you could answer, someone called your name across the Yard. Liam took his time walking over to us. I scuttled away a few feet as he parked his hands on your hips, pulling you against his midsection. Your head came up to his chest. After whispering in your ear he smiled and leaned down to kiss you. Your lips closed instinctively as he forced his against them. It reminded me of when
Sara tongued me, the instinctive desire to shield an orifice from a probing foreign object.

“I gotta run,” he said, lacing his fingers in yours as he took a reluctant step back. “But I'll see you at the thing tonight. Come anytime after nine.”

“I don't think I can make it tonight,” you told him. “I'm ­sorry—I'm totally behind in my work.”

You appeared less contrite than apprehensive. He nodded slightly and pursed his lips as if he'd anticipated this excuse.

“Babe, I can't help it if everyone's assigning essays before Thanksgiving,” you said.

“Why don't I stay in with you, then. I've got some reading.”

“Okay.” Your voice was a little unsure. You turned your head and looked over at me. “David'll be there, too,” you said cheerfully. “He's helping me with my paper. You remember David, right? He came to the club a few weeks ago?”

Liam looked my way. I lifted my forearm, my parka's sleeve making a waxy sound, and flashed a palm in his direction.

“What class is this for?” he asked, alternating his gaze between the two of us.

“From Ahab to Prufrock,” I spoke up. “Tragically Flawed Hero(in)es in American Literature, 1850–1929.”

“My English class,” you translated.

“Fine,” he said. “I'll leave you two to your study date.”

“Tomorrow night I'll come over, I promise,” you said, stroking the back of his neck and rising to your tiptoes for a parting kiss.

My breakup with Sara had paid off. Maybe she'd even told you about the line I'd “crossed,” thinking it would cast me in a negative light—except with your predilections it would have the reverse effect. Liam still had you, still groped your figure as though it belonged to him, but you'd picked me for the night. Your inconsistency was just the result of working through complicated feelings. You were beginning to unshackle yourself from him.

We finalized our plans for the evening and you went off to Gender and the Consumerist Impulse. On my way back to my room I realized we hadn't discussed what you wanted to write about; I would need to prepare. I rushed over to Sever to catch you, but the class had already begun. The door to the room was open a crack, and I could hear your professor speaking.

It was dicey to loiter outside any classroom for you, especially for a feminism course, where my being caught might itself be fodder for an entire conversation about the male gaze. But there I waited, ears keenly tuned for anything resembling your voice, copy of Emily Dickinson out for pretense and defense. (How could I, a lover of the Amherst recluse, evince any sort of untoward
signifiers
?)