The City of Mirrors
Page 48
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College days, Harvard days: the feeling of time itself changed in those early months, everything rushing past at a frenetic pace. My roommate was named Lucessi. His first name was Frank, though neither I nor anyone I knew ever used it. We were friends of a sort, thrust together by circumstances. I had expected everyone at the college to be some version of the fellow I’d met at the Burger Cottage, with a quick-talking social intelligence and an aristocrat’s knowledge of local practices, but, in fact, Lucessi was more typical: weirdly smart, a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, hardly the winner of any prizes for physical attractiveness or personal hygiene, his personality laden with tics. He had a big, soft body, like a poorly filled stuffed animal’s, large damp hands he had no idea what to do with, and the roving, wide-eyed gaze of a paranoiac, which I thought he might be. His wardrobe was a combination of a junior accountant’s and a middle schooler’s: he favored high-waisted pleated pants, heavy brown dress shoes, and T-shirts emblazoned with the emblem of the New York Yankees. Within five minutes of our meeting he had explained to me that he had scored a perfect 1600 on his SATs, intended to double major in math and physics, could speak both Latin and ancient Greek (not just read: actually speak), and had once caught a home run launched from the bat of the great Reggie Jackson. I might have viewed his companionship as a burden, but I soon saw the advantages; Lucessi made me appear well-adjusted by comparison, more confident and attractive than I actually was, and I won not a few sympathy points among my dormitory neighbors for putting up with him, as one might have for tending to a farty dog. The first night we got drunk together—just a week after our arrival, at one of the countless freshman keg parties that the administration seemed content to overlook—he vomited so helplessly and at such extended duration that I spent the night making sure he didn’t die.
My goal was to be a biochemist, and I wasted no time. My course load was crushing, my only relief a distribution course in art history that required little more than sitting in the dark and looking at slides of Mary and the baby Jesus in various beatific poses. (The class, a legendary refuge for science majors meeting their humanities requirement, bore the nickname “Darkness at Noon.”) My scholarship was generous, but I was used to working and wanted pocket money; for ten hours a week, at a wage just above minimum, I shelved books at Widener Library, pushing a wobbly cart through a maze of stacks so isolated and byzantine that women were warned against visiting them alone. I thought the job would kill me with boredom, and for a while it nearly did, but over time I came to like it: the smell of old paper and the taste of dust; the deep hush of the place, a sanctuary of silence broken only by the squeaking wheels of my cart; the pleasant shock of pulling a book from the shelves, removing the card, and discovering that nobody had checked it out since 1936. A twinge of anthropomorphic sympathy for these underappreciated volumes often inspired me to read a page or two, so that they might feel wanted.
Was I happy? Who wouldn’t be? I had friends, my studies to occupy me. I had my quiet hours in the library in which to woolgather to my heart’s content. In late October, I lost my virginity to a girl I met at a party. We were both very intoxicated, didn’t know each other at all, and though she didn’t say as much—we barely spoke, beyond the usual preliminary blather and a brief negotiation over the mechanically baffling mechanism of her brassiere—I suspected she was a virgin, too, and that her intention was simply to get the thing done as expeditiously as possible so that she could move on to other, more satisfying encounters. I suppose I felt the same. When it was over, I left her room quickly, as if from the scene of a crime, and in four years I laid eyes on her only twice more, both times at a distance.
Yes, I was happy. My father was right: I had found my life. I dutifully telephoned every two weeks, reversing the charges, but my parents—indeed, my whole small-town Ohio childhood—began to fade from my mind, the way dreams do in the light of day. Always these calls were the same. First I would speak with my mother, who usually answered—the suggestion being that she had spent two weeks waiting by the phone—and then my father, whose jovial tone seemed contrived to remind me of his parting edict, and finally both together. I could easily imagine the scene: their faces angled close together with the receiver between them as they called out their valedictory “I love you”s and “I’m proud of you”s and “be good”s, my father’s eyes locked in an optic death grip on the clock above the kitchen sink, watching his money drain away at thirty cents a minute. Their voices aroused great feelings of tenderness in me, almost of pity, as if I were the abandoner and they the abandoned, yet I was always relieved when these calls ended, the click of the receiver releasing me back into my true existence.
Before I knew it, the leaves had turned, then fallen, their desiccated carcasses everywhere underfoot, suffusing the air with a sweet smell of decay; the week before Thanksgiving the first snow fell, my inaugural New England winter, damp and raw. It felt like one more baptism in a year of them. There had been no discussion of my returning home for the Thanksgiving break, and Ohio was too far in any case—I’d have wasted half the time on the bus—so I accepted an invitation to spend the holiday with Lucessi in the Bronx. Stupidly, I had expected a scene of Italian life straight out of Hollywood: a cramped apartment above a pizza parlor, everyone yelling and screaming at one another, his father leaking armpitty garlic sweat through his undershirt and his mustached mother, in a housecoat and slippers, throwing up her hands and wailing “Mamma mia” every thirty seconds.
College days, Harvard days: the feeling of time itself changed in those early months, everything rushing past at a frenetic pace. My roommate was named Lucessi. His first name was Frank, though neither I nor anyone I knew ever used it. We were friends of a sort, thrust together by circumstances. I had expected everyone at the college to be some version of the fellow I’d met at the Burger Cottage, with a quick-talking social intelligence and an aristocrat’s knowledge of local practices, but, in fact, Lucessi was more typical: weirdly smart, a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, hardly the winner of any prizes for physical attractiveness or personal hygiene, his personality laden with tics. He had a big, soft body, like a poorly filled stuffed animal’s, large damp hands he had no idea what to do with, and the roving, wide-eyed gaze of a paranoiac, which I thought he might be. His wardrobe was a combination of a junior accountant’s and a middle schooler’s: he favored high-waisted pleated pants, heavy brown dress shoes, and T-shirts emblazoned with the emblem of the New York Yankees. Within five minutes of our meeting he had explained to me that he had scored a perfect 1600 on his SATs, intended to double major in math and physics, could speak both Latin and ancient Greek (not just read: actually speak), and had once caught a home run launched from the bat of the great Reggie Jackson. I might have viewed his companionship as a burden, but I soon saw the advantages; Lucessi made me appear well-adjusted by comparison, more confident and attractive than I actually was, and I won not a few sympathy points among my dormitory neighbors for putting up with him, as one might have for tending to a farty dog. The first night we got drunk together—just a week after our arrival, at one of the countless freshman keg parties that the administration seemed content to overlook—he vomited so helplessly and at such extended duration that I spent the night making sure he didn’t die.
My goal was to be a biochemist, and I wasted no time. My course load was crushing, my only relief a distribution course in art history that required little more than sitting in the dark and looking at slides of Mary and the baby Jesus in various beatific poses. (The class, a legendary refuge for science majors meeting their humanities requirement, bore the nickname “Darkness at Noon.”) My scholarship was generous, but I was used to working and wanted pocket money; for ten hours a week, at a wage just above minimum, I shelved books at Widener Library, pushing a wobbly cart through a maze of stacks so isolated and byzantine that women were warned against visiting them alone. I thought the job would kill me with boredom, and for a while it nearly did, but over time I came to like it: the smell of old paper and the taste of dust; the deep hush of the place, a sanctuary of silence broken only by the squeaking wheels of my cart; the pleasant shock of pulling a book from the shelves, removing the card, and discovering that nobody had checked it out since 1936. A twinge of anthropomorphic sympathy for these underappreciated volumes often inspired me to read a page or two, so that they might feel wanted.
Was I happy? Who wouldn’t be? I had friends, my studies to occupy me. I had my quiet hours in the library in which to woolgather to my heart’s content. In late October, I lost my virginity to a girl I met at a party. We were both very intoxicated, didn’t know each other at all, and though she didn’t say as much—we barely spoke, beyond the usual preliminary blather and a brief negotiation over the mechanically baffling mechanism of her brassiere—I suspected she was a virgin, too, and that her intention was simply to get the thing done as expeditiously as possible so that she could move on to other, more satisfying encounters. I suppose I felt the same. When it was over, I left her room quickly, as if from the scene of a crime, and in four years I laid eyes on her only twice more, both times at a distance.
Yes, I was happy. My father was right: I had found my life. I dutifully telephoned every two weeks, reversing the charges, but my parents—indeed, my whole small-town Ohio childhood—began to fade from my mind, the way dreams do in the light of day. Always these calls were the same. First I would speak with my mother, who usually answered—the suggestion being that she had spent two weeks waiting by the phone—and then my father, whose jovial tone seemed contrived to remind me of his parting edict, and finally both together. I could easily imagine the scene: their faces angled close together with the receiver between them as they called out their valedictory “I love you”s and “I’m proud of you”s and “be good”s, my father’s eyes locked in an optic death grip on the clock above the kitchen sink, watching his money drain away at thirty cents a minute. Their voices aroused great feelings of tenderness in me, almost of pity, as if I were the abandoner and they the abandoned, yet I was always relieved when these calls ended, the click of the receiver releasing me back into my true existence.
Before I knew it, the leaves had turned, then fallen, their desiccated carcasses everywhere underfoot, suffusing the air with a sweet smell of decay; the week before Thanksgiving the first snow fell, my inaugural New England winter, damp and raw. It felt like one more baptism in a year of them. There had been no discussion of my returning home for the Thanksgiving break, and Ohio was too far in any case—I’d have wasted half the time on the bus—so I accepted an invitation to spend the holiday with Lucessi in the Bronx. Stupidly, I had expected a scene of Italian life straight out of Hollywood: a cramped apartment above a pizza parlor, everyone yelling and screaming at one another, his father leaking armpitty garlic sweat through his undershirt and his mustached mother, in a housecoat and slippers, throwing up her hands and wailing “Mamma mia” every thirty seconds.
