The City of Mirrors
Page 51

About the remainder of that first year, there is not much else to say. My grades were good—better than good. Though I knew I had done well, I was still astonished to see my first-semester report with its barricade of A’s, each emphatically embossed into the paper by the old-fashioned dot matrix printer. I did not use this as an opportunity to slack off but redoubled my efforts. I also, for a brief time, acquired a girlfriend, the daughter of the South American dictator. (He was actually the Argentine minister of finance.) What she saw in me I have no idea, but I wasn’t going to interrogate the point. Carmen possessed a good deal more sexual experience than I did—a great deal. She was the kind of woman who used the word “lover,” as in “I have taken you as my,” and she applied herself to pleasure’s project with greedy abandon. She was blessed with a single room, rare for a freshman, and in that hallowed precinct of draped scarves and female aromas she introduced me to what might have passed for actual, grown-up eroticism, working her way through the full menu of bodily delights, appetizers to dessert. We did not love each other—that sainted emotion still eluded me, and Carmen had little use for it—nor was she what I would call conventionally attractive. (I can say this because I wasn’t, either.) She was a little heavy, and her face possessed a slightly masculine bulk around the jawline, which looked like a boxer’s. But unclothed, and in the heat of passion, crying out naughty things in her Argentine-inflected Spanish, she was the most sensual creature who ever walked the earth, a fact magnified a hundred-fold by her own awareness of it.
Between these carnal escapades—Carmen and I would often race back to her room between classes for an hour of furious copulation—and my voluminous classwork and, of course, my hours at the library—time well spent replenishing myself for our next encounter—I saw less and less of Lucessi. He’d always kept odd hours, studying through the night and living on naps, but as the semester wore on, his comings and goings became more erratic. When I slept over at Carmen’s, I might not see him for several days in a row. By this time I had widened my society beyond the walls of Wigglesworth to include a number of Carmen’s friends, all of them far more cosmopolitan than I was. Lucessi obviously resented this, but any effort to pull him into the circle was sternly rebuffed. His hygiene took another dip; our room stank of socks and the trays of moldy food he brought back from the cafeteria and never removed. Many times I entered to find him sitting on his bed, barely dressed, muttering to himself and making odd, twitchy hand gestures, as if involved in earnest conversation with some unseen party. At bedtime—whenever he decided that was, even if it was the middle of the day—he would smear his face with a layer of acne cream as thick as a mime’s makeup; he began to sleep with a scuba diver’s knife in a rubber sheath strapped to his leg. (This should have disturbed me more than it did.)
I worried about him, but not very much; I was simply too busy. Despite my new, more interesting circle of friends, I had always assumed that the two of us would continue to room together. At the end of the year, all freshmen entered a lottery to determine which of the Harvard houses they would live in for the next three years. This was regarded as a rite of passage as socially determinant as whom one married, and it possessed two aspects. The first was which house one sought to live in. There were twelve, each with its own reputation: the preppy house, the artsy house, the jock house, and so forth. The most desirable were the ones located along the Charles River—extremely fancy real estate for the price of an undergraduate tuition. The least were the ones in the old Radcliffe Quad, far up Garden Street. To be “quadded” was tantamount to exile, one’s life forever chained to a schedule of shuttle buses that, inconveniently, stopped running long before the party had ended.
The second aspect was, of course, who would room with whom. This made for an uncomfortable few weeks as people sorted out their allegiances and prioritized their friendships. Rejecting one’s freshman roommate in favor of other parties was common but no less awkward than a divorce. I considered having this very conversation with Lucessi, then found that I didn’t have the heart. Who else would be willing to room with him? Who else would tolerate his quirks, his doleful personality, his unhealthful aromas? On top of which, come to think of it, nobody else had asked me. Lucessi, it seemed, was mine.
As the day of the lottery approached, I sought him out to see what he wanted to do. I told him I thought we might go in for Winthrop House, or else Lowell. Quincy, maybe, as a backup. They were river houses but without the distinct social slant of some of the others. This conversation occurred in the middle of the afternoon of a warm spring day that Lucessi had apparently slept through. He was sitting at his desk, wearing only briefs and an undershirt, fussing with a calculator as I spoke, punching in meaningless digits with the eraser end of a pencil. A white crust of dried toothpaste ringed his mouth.
“So what do you think?”
Lucessi shrugged. “I already entered.”
His words made no sense. “What are you talking about?”
“I asked for a single in the quad.”
Psycho singles, they were called. Housing for the maladjusted; rooms for people who couldn’t handle roommates.
“It’s pretty nice up there, actually,” Lucessi went on. “Quieter. You know. Anyway, it’s done.”
I was dumbfounded. “Lucessi, what the hell? The lottery’s next week. I thought we were going to go together.”