The City of Mirrors
Page 60

“Pleased to meet you!”
“Likewise!” She was short, hazel-eyed, with a spray of freckles and glossy brown hair. Unremarkable compared to Liz, but pretty in her own way—cute would be the word—and smiling at me in a manner that told me Liz had laid the groundwork. She was holding a nearly empty glass of something clear. Mine was empty, too. Was it my first or my second?
“Liz says you go to B.U.!”
“Yeah!” Because the music was so loud, we were standing very close. She smelled like roses and gin.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s okay! You’re a biochem major, right?”
I nodded. The most banal conversation in history, but it had to be done. “What about you?”
“Poli-sci! Hey, do you want to dance?”
I was an awful dancer, but who wasn’t? We made our way to the light-confettied ballroom and began our awkward attempt to perform this intimate act, pretending we hadn’t met each other thirty seconds ago. The dance floor was already full, the music having been strategically withheld until everybody was adequately liquored; I glanced around for Liz but didn’t find her. I supposed she was too cool to make a fool of herself in this way and hoped she didn’t see me. Stephanie, not to my surprise, was an enthusiastic dancer; what I hadn’t banked on was that she’d be so good at it. Whereas my moves were an ungainly mimicry of actual dancing, wholly unrelated to this song or any other, hers possessed a lithe expressiveness that verged on actual grace. She spun, twirled, gyrated. She did things with her hips that elsewise might have looked indecent but under the circumstances seemed ordained by a different, less constricted morality. She also managed to keep her attention on me the whole time, wearing a warmly seductive smile, her eyes focused like lasers. What had Liz called her? A “party girl”? I was beginning to see the advantages.
We broke after the third song for yet another drink, slung them back like sailors on leave, and returned to the floor. I’d eaten no dinner, and the booze was doing its work. The evening dissolved into a haze. At some point I found myself talking to Jonas, who was introducing me to other members of the club, and then playing pool with Alcott, who was not such a bad fellow after all. Everything I did and said seemed charmed. More time passed, and then Stephanie, whom I’d briefly lost track of, was pulling me by the hand back toward the music, which pumped without ceasing like the night’s own heartbeat. I had no idea what time it was and didn’t care. More fast dancing, the song downshifted, and she wrapped her arms around my neck. We’d barely spoken, but now this warm, good-smelling girl was in my arms, her body pressed against mine, the tips of her fingers stroking the hairs at the back of my neck. Never had I received such an undeserved present. What was happening to my anatomy was nothing she could have missed; nor did I want her to. When the song ended, she placed her lips against my ear, her breath a sweet exhalation that made me shudder.
“I have coke.”
I found myself, then, sitting beside her on a deep leather couch in a room that looked like something in a hunting lodge. From her purse she produced a small packet made of notebook paper, sealed by complex folding. She used my Harvard ID to arrange the coke in two fat lines on the coffee table and rolled a dollar bill into a tube. Cocaine was an aspect of college life that I had not experienced but did not see the harm of. She bent to the table, sucked the powder deep into her sinuses with a delicate, girlish snort, and passed me the bill so that I might do the same.
It wasn’t bad at all. It was, in fact, very good. Within seconds of the powder’s purchase, I experienced a Roman-candle rush of well-being that seemed not a departure from reality but a deeper entry into truth. The world was a fine place full of wonderful people, an enchanted existence worthy of the utmost enthusiasm. I looked at Stephanie, who was quite beautiful now that I had eyes to see, and sought the words to explain this revelation on a night of many.
“You’re a really good dancer,” I said.
She leaned forward and took my mouth with hers. It was not a schoolgirl’s kiss; it was a kiss that said there were no rules if I didn’t want there to be. It did not take long before our bodies were a confusion of tongues and hands and skin. Things were being slid aside, unlatched, unzipped. I felt like I had plummeted into a vortex of pure sensuality. It was different than it had been with Carmen. It had no edges, no roughness. It felt like being melted. Stephanie was astride my lap and drawing her panties aside and down she went, enveloping me; she began to move in a wondrous, aquatic fashion, like an anemone undulating on the tides, rocking and rising and plunging, each variation accompanied by the creak of leather upholstery. Mere hours since I’d been pacing my room, consigned to a night of humiliated loneliness, and here I was, fucking a girl in a cocktail dress.
“Whoa. Sorry, bud.”
It was Jonas. Stephanie was off me like a shot. A moment of frantic activity as the pants were yanked upward, the dress downward, various articles of underclothing rammed into adjustment. Standing in the doorway, my roommate was in a state of barely contained hilarity.
“Jesus,” I said. I was pulling up my fly, or trying to. My shirttail was stuck in the zipper. More comedy. “You could have knocked.”
“And you could have locked the door.”
“Jonas, did you find her?” Liz appeared behind him. As she stepped into the room, her eyes widened. “Oh,” she said.
“They were getting better acquainted,” Jonas offered, laughing.