Loner

Chapter 14

I didn’t see you in the dining hall the next day, or the day after that. I could have e-mailed you, but I wanted to let things run their natural course. Our breakthrough would propel us to the subsequent, inevitable phase.

The night before the penultimate Prufrock I stayed up until sunrise writing my own paper, “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?: The Self as Staffage in Emily Dickinson.” I printed a copy for my section leader, then saved her the trouble of passing it along to Samuelson by e-mailing it to him directly. More public accolades for my work in front of you couldn’t hurt.

There were two possible explanations for your absence in class: you’d gone home early for Thanksgiving break or you were avoiding Tom. (Perhaps the Ad Board had advised you to do so as they prepared to bring formal charges against him.) He looked so pleased to be him, finger combing his wavy locks, stretching his arms up as he yawned, leaping to his feet and making a show of holding the door for the girl who arrived on crutches. The darling of the Harvard English department, who cowardly skirted loneliness when his pretty professor wife was away by taking advantage of the school’s most beautiful (and, fortuitously for him, emotionally masochistic) undergrad. He had no idea what was coming, the dolt. Life’s delicacies had been served to him on a platter, he’d devoured far more than his fair share, and now they were about to be whisked away.

The day before Thanksgiving I took the T to South Station and boarded an overheated, full-capacity Greyhound reeking of fast food and body odor. Five hours later I debussed in Newark, New Jersey, where my mother was waiting to pick me up. As I climbed into the passenger seat, she leaned across the console to give me a seat-belt-restrained embrace. “Welcome home!” she said.

In the beginning of the semester, when classmates had asked where I was from, their eyes lit up at the first word — a New Yorker, you could see them thinking — as I dithered before arriving at the letdown of the second. Ah, just a dime-a-dozen Jersey boy, punch line of America, our only selling points tomatoes and a blue-collar troubadour who had named one of his best albums after Nebraska.

And I couldn’t even claim affiliation with the plucky working-class Joisey of Springsteen lyrics. My milieu was that of the fairly successful professionals who weren’t quite able to hack it across the river and so had settled for suburban convenience, good public schools, and affordable real estate while living in the shadows of glittering skyscrapers.

On the ride home my mother asked about my courses and friends, and I told the truth about the former and succinct lies about the latter. I didn’t reveal that my second-class citizenship in the Matthews Marauders had vaporized because I’d broken up with my she-seems-nice girlfriend, whom I’d dated primarily to gain access to her roommate, a semester-long odyssey, a girl with whom I had (thanks to my essay-writing abilities and compromised academic morality, along with her angst over her self-destructive romantic entanglements) partaken in denim-mediated ménage à Zengers — oh, speaking of sexualized clothing materials, for onanistic activity I also purloined the girl’s bathrobe belt, the tip of which lives in my pocket, and I may as well mention that I’ve gotten into this kind of porn where the woman belittles the viewer about his inadequate manhood — but, yeah, classes are going swell and I’m having a blast, how’re Dad and Anna and Miriam?

After dinner, to avoid my older sister and her abrasively outgoing boyfriend, I hid in our finished basement to watch TV. The boyfriend came downstairs anyway while I was flipping channels, so I stayed on a revisionist documentary about Christopher Columbus in hopes of boring him off. A self-proclaimed “Columbus buff,” he happily settled in. As I stood by the basement fridge, nibbling at a fruit platter intended for Thanksgiving, my phone dinged with an e-mail from Daniel Hallman about an unofficial high school reunion he’d gotten wind of that was happening RIGHT NOW at Applebee’s (the one at the mall). A few weeks ago I would have deleted it immediately. But I’d had sex now, twice. And been brought to orgasm by you. No one at Hobart High had ever seen this David Federman. They hadn’t really been acquainted with the first iteration, either — but that was just as well.

I borrowed my mother’s car and drove past the gated condominium communities and the gargantuan houses that looked like they’d just had cellophane peeled off them, their driveways full of SUVs and hockey nets, the lawns cleared of leaves, and arrived at the mall. An immaculately mopped retail complex with a cornucopia of national franchises to suit one’s every consumerist impulse: there was the Cheesecake Factory, where I’d celebrated my sixteenth birthday with my family; Foot Locker, purveyor of all my white sneakers; the Gap, my annual back-to-school jeans and shirts merchant; and Panda Express and Perfumania, Vitamin World and Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch and American Eagle, their logos as familiar as national landmarks.

And there was Applebee’s. (Why, I thought, is an Applebee’s not a s’eebelppA, nor, for that matter, an Orangebird’s?) My former classmates milled about within expected spheres. I walked past the popular kids near the front, Paul de Witt and Joel Blum and Laurel Wilcox-Richards and Heidi McMasters and their respective aides-de-camp. There wasn’t a single greeting from them, not even a nod of recognition. I could’ve been a busboy clearing away their popcorn shrimp. That was fine; they seemed so provincial now, attending their respectable second-tier institutions, continuing their alcohol and pot habits at frat parties with bourgeois predictability while, unbeknownst to them, I was doing coke at a Harvard final club.

“ID?” the bartender asked when I ordered a vodka soda.

“Shit,” I said, digging through my wallet. “I must have left it at college.”

Root beer in hand, I located my erstwhile clique, or three-fifths of it. (No one had heard from Michael Lu since he’d left for the University of Chicago.) The attention was on Daniel, who was cataloguing his adventures with blackouts and six-packs, bongs and sluts. He bragged about his hookup tally: a baker’s dozen so far this semester at Wisconsin, a number so outlandish that he couldn’t have been making it up. It took them all a moment to realize I was there and, after a round of hellos, Daniel picked up where he’d left off, breaking out his phone to show us pictures of three conquests on Facebook (surely the better-looking ones).

He polled the others on how they had fared in that department. Unwillingly celibate Paresh deflected and stammered. Perspiring like a criminal under the interrogation lights, George claimed to have gotten two blow jobs.

“What about you, David?” Daniel asked with the cocksureness of being the sexual lieutenant of our blundering platoon. “You tap any Harvard ass yet?”

I hadn’t wanted to cheapen our experience by citing it in present company, but Daniel posed the question with such slick hostility that I couldn’t resist. “A couple,” I said.

“A couple,” he repeated. “Meaning you were with a couple, like in a threesome, so now you’re bisexual?”

Titters from Paresh and George.

“Here’s one,” I said, pulling up your Facebook profile on my phone. Their greasy fingers passed you and your plaid shirt around.

“She’s hot,” Paresh said.

“Superhot,” seconded George.

“You’re boning her?” Daniel asked, incredulous.

“Ask me at Christmas break.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s only a matter of time,” I said coolly. “On Saturday night she gave me a hand job.”

“Ooh, a hand job.” He snickered. “What is this, the eighth-grade trip to Washington, DC?”

“I’m taking it slow,” I said, regretting the disclosure. “She’s not the kind of girl who’s just another notch on your bedpost. This is serious.”

“If you’re not fucking, exactly what kind of ‘serious’ things do you do with her?”

“We go to parties at final clubs. Sometimes we do coke.”

“Coca-Cola,” George said, looking at Daniel for approval while hyperventilating with laughter.

“If you’re really hooking up with her, text her something,” Daniel challenged me.

“She’s with her family. I don’t want to bother her.”

Daniel folded his arms and grinned at the others. “He doesn’t even have her number. Because he’s taking it slow.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll e-mail her. This is so stupid. I’m sure she’s out in Manhattan now. She lives on the Upper East Side.”

I said the last two sentences looking down at my phone, knowing without seeing their faces that they were impressed. As they bunched around the screen, I composed a Facebook message:

At high school reunion. Gag me. How is your vacation going?

I pocketed the phone and kept my hand on it in case it vibrated.

Daniel went to the bathroom and, on the return trip, with his crudely acquired sexual bravado, somehow managed to wangle a conversation with Heidi McMasters. Daniel Hallman talking to Heidi McMasters! It would have been inconceivable six months ago. As Paresh and George compared the merits of their school’s dormitories, I watched Daniel feign suaveness. My initial envy was tempered by seeing Heidi, for the first time, for what she was: just a cute suburban girl whose best years were already behind her. He strode back to us as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, deliberately not mentioning his transcendence of previously impermeable social borders so that Paresh and George would obsequiously grill him, the intrepid explorer, about the otherworldly wonders he’d glimpsed in his travels.

As the night ended, Daniel asked if my “hand-job queen” had written back.

“No,” I said. “I remembered she was going to see a movie tonight.”

“Do you even really know this girl?” he taunted. “Or do you just jerk off to her picture?”

“Of course I know her,” I said. “I see her all the time.” The only photo of us actually together also included Sara, with my arm around her, and if it came out that I’d been dating her, they’d never believe I had also hooked up with you. And the one of me at the library would provide Daniel with more ammunition — that you must have been giving me hand jobs under the table all night long while we studied.

Maybe you really were at a movie. Even so, there was no need for you to ignore me, not after what we’d done together. It was less than a week ago, but the memory was already growing fuzzy. Talking about you in the third person almost made me feel as if I’d conjured you up, a character in a dream. It’d all be better once school resumed and I saw you again. But four days was too long to wait.

After logging another sixty hours with the Federmans, on Saturday morning I told my mother I’d made plans to meet a college friend in Manhattan and would she mind dropping me off at the train station after lunch?

“Of course,” she answered, and asked when I’d be back.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “If it’s late, I’ll take a taxi home from the station.” Then, optimistically: “I may just sleep over and come back in the morning. Okay if I play it by ear?”

Most eighteen-year-olds in my position might have had to negotiate to stay out late in New York City without concrete expectation of a return. My mother couldn’t have looked more pleased I was getting out of the house. Chumless David, who’d spent his adolescence in his room, who hadn’t had so much as a sleepover past the age of nine, had not only made a close friend at school, but a Manhattan sophisticate to boot.

“Perfectly fine,” she said.

“Are you kidding me?” Anna whined. “You wouldn’t let me see Sophie tonight because you said we all have go to the Goldmans’. Why is he allowed to get out of it?”

“David’s in college,” my mother told her. “He’s allowed to visit his friend in the city if he wants.”

Before leaving I mapped out which subway to take down to Zipper & Button, the clothing boutique in SoHo whose label was on your black sweater. Riding the A train, my reflection in the window that of a disgruntled native, I thought of taking a selfie and sending it to Daniel Hallman, telling him I was clothes shopping in downtown Manhattan today; did he want me to pick up anything for him, or did he prefer to stick to the mall?

The streets were clogged with shoppers chasing post-Thanksgiving sales. Zipper & Button, however, advertised no holiday deals and was empty but for two unsmiling female clerks. They looked up from their conspiratorial huddle behind the counter and gave me a cold, cursory appraisal.

With its exposed-brick walls and creaky floors, the space felt more like someone’s home than a store. From speakers whispered an acoustic guitar and a woman singing in what sounded like a Scandinavian dialect. Inventory was sparse and didn’t look particularly masculine. It occurred to me this might be a women’s-only shop.

I took another lap around the racks to check that I hadn’t missed anything. This time I located a sweater identical to the one you wore, two lines of stitching from the shoulders meeting at the chest, only in gray instead of black. I brought it to the counter.

“Is this men’s?” I asked.

“Unisex,” they answered together. Xesinu.

I took it into the dressing stall and pulled it over my T-shirt. It softly conformed to my upper body, a luxurious departure from the lumpy, scratchy sweaters of unwanted childhood gifts. Next to my Gap jeans and Foot Locker sneakers, it looked incongruous, the brooding musician whose siblings were a dentist and a database administrator. I needed a whole new wardrobe, but this was a start. For the price I’m paying, I heard my father grumble, you’d think they could throw in a pair of pants.

I charged the sweater to my debit card, wore it out of the store, hopped on the uptown 6 train, and walked over to Park Avenue, where I found the elegant prewar residence of good ol’ Larry and Margaret.

My plan was to sit in a restaurant or coffee shop with a view of your building. At some point you’d pop out for a cigarette, and that’s when our coincidental run-in would transpire. I’d dart out and we’d laughingly exchange What are you doing here?s. Oh, I just saw a friend, but I have a few hours to kill before my train; sure, I could join you for a walk through Central Park. Away from school, away from Tom and Liam and Suzanne and Jen and Christopher and Andy and everyone else, you could be your unguarded self. Don’t take the train back, you would plead as dusk descended. Stay here, my parents are dying to meet you. You’d bring me back to your apartment, feverish with excitement. So this is the David we’ve been hearing so much about! Margaret would swoon.

But during my many jaunts down your block through Google Street View, I’d failed to notice the critical oversight in my strategy: Park was strictly residential. There wasn’t a single commercial establishment that could serve as an inconspicuous hideout; it was as if the avenue were designed to discourage the casual lurker.

A landscaped meridian bisected north- and southbound lanes of traffic, with concrete embankments serving as islands for pedestrians who didn’t catch the green light in time to make it all the way across the boulevard. Raised flower beds bordered interior strips of each median that had held grass in warmer months.

I stood in the middle of the crosswalk opposite your building, surveying my options. If I waited on the sidewalk right outside your home, I would blow my cover; if you saw me sitting on the edge of the island’s empty flower bed, you’d know I was on a stakeout. Failing to come up with a better solution, I decided to stay put. Under the pretense of waiting to cross the street, I remained adrift on my concrete no-man’s-land, eyes fixed on the green awning that canopied a set of double doors from which you might at any point emerge.

As the afternoon sun sank, suffusing the street with a tangerine glow, the indigenous species of the Upper East Side meandered by, women with pinched faces and coiffed hair, their toy dogs snug in cashmere sweaters, nonagenarians escorted by uniformed help, teens in sweatpants with the names of their prep schools scrolled in oversized fonts down the legs, towheaded toddlers slumbering in strollers.

Your building’s doorman, dressed in a brass-buttoned suit and a porter’s hat, maintained equal vigilance from his post inside your lobby so as not to be caught unawares by an approaching resident. And he never was, always anticipating the precise moment to turn the handle and swing the door open, stepping aside and acknowledging the occupant’s return with a deferential nod.

Every so often the door would open and he’d march out on his own to the curb, blow a whistle, and wave a white-gloved hand at the oncoming traffic. A yellow cab would screech to a stop in front of the awning and a resident would materialize from the lobby and climb in.

After one of these excursions, rather than going back inside the building, he headed over to my island. I typed pointlessly into my phone.

“You waiting for someone?” he asked in a gruff outer-borough accent.

“I’m doing a study on pedestrian traffic for Harvard University,” I told him. “I’m measuring the ebb and flow of population density and calculating carrying capacity.”

I held up my phone, ostensible proof of my scientific method.

“Harvard?” He grimaced, looked around as if uncertain what to do with this information, and nodded. “All right.”

Evening set in. The temperature dropped and it began drizzling. I thought about running over to another avenue to buy an umbrella, but if you chose that interval for your appearance, all my work would have been for naught.

The sky cleaved and the drizzle turned into a downpour. The only awning nearby was your own, and I couldn’t make that my haven. All I could do was stay in place, getting soaked as walkers scattered and I remained the one person outside sans umbrella.

On top of being wet, I was hungry, cold, and tired from standing. I didn’t know if you were home; if so, when you’d be leaving; or, if you were out, when you’d be returning. Yet the adverse conditions only fortified my determination. I was scaling Everest. It’d be another heroic story to tell you someday.

As it turned out, you were home.

You carried an open umbrella out of the lobby around ten o’clock, walked to the corner opposite where I stood, and stepped off the curb. My fatigued quadriceps contracted with anticipation. I stayed where I was, assuming you were going to cross the street in my direction, but instead you held up your hand to hail a taxi, forgoing your doorman’s services.

“Hey!” I yelled, but my voice was lost in the thrum of raindrops and whistling traffic. Two cabs spotted you simultaneously and jockeyed for your fare at the corner. While you folded your umbrella and climbed into the nearest one, I made a cavalier dash across the street. Your car took off as I jumped into the second cab, my wet jeans squeaking against the pleather seat.

“Follow that cab directly in front of us,” I told the driver. “Please.”

A chase sequence in traffic-jammed Manhattan wasn’t as exhilarating as it might sound. We stopped at frequent red lights; our cars never exceeded fifteen miles per hour; my driver yammered on the phone the whole time in a foreign language.

When we reached your destination, the rain had stopped. Our cabs pulled up in tandem at a curb that, according to the on-screen map, was on the Lower East Side. I paid with my debit card but had trouble swiping it cleanly, and by the time I was done you’d disappeared into a bar on the corner. A squat man with an imperious stomach guarded the door. I could wait until you departed, but at that point you might be headed home. And I was tired of waiting.

I sauntered up to the bar’s entrance, scratching the back of my neck and checking my phone with blasé distraction. Slouched on a stool, hands in the pockets of a puffy jacket, the bouncer barely lifted his eyes from his own phone. “ID,” he mumbled.

“I left my wallet here last night,” I said. “They’re expecting me.”

He yawned and blinked wearily. “Can’t let you in without ID.”

“My friend got his stomach pumped because he was here last night,” I said. “We had to leave right away, and I’ve been in the hospital with him all night and day. I’ve got a flight tomorrow, and if I don’t get it—”

He released a bored sigh. “Make it quick,” he said.

My first time in a bar — and a New York City bar, at that. But it wasn’t what I had expected from a Manhattan establishment, nor was it the kind of place I would’ve guessed you’d haunt. Bad eighties music shrieked on a jukebox; retro arcade games blinked and blipped against one wall; the floor was sticky with beer. A number of ironic moustaches and earnest beards among the male clientele; the women seemed intent on marring their looks with conscientiously frumpy clothes and eccentric glasses.

I pretzeled into an opening at the bar, but the bartender kept fielding orders from whoever was next to me. After the third such slight, I managed to interpose a request. She cupped her hand behind her ear.

I held up two fingers. “Vod-ka so-das!” I hollered, and scanned the crowd for you while I waited. There was another room in the back. You had to be there.

The bartender served me my drinks and asked if I wanted to start a tab. Low on cash, I said yes and gave her my debit card. I chugged one of the drinks and took the other to the back room, shaky from the booze on an empty stomach and a day of standing guard in the rain.

And there you were. Yes — that was your head; I could pick out that compound of colors in the stands of a stadium. You sat on a stool at the corner of a high-top table with two girls, your back to me. I bushwhacked through a thicket of twenty-somethings, the last leg of a grueling obstacle course. The day had worn me down, but I suddenly felt helium-filled, it had all been worth it, who cared if I woke up with a cold tomorrow. I stifled a keyed-up laugh as I reached out to tap your shoulder. You twisted around and the scar on your forehead shot up in surprise.

“I thought that was you!” I said. “Funny bumping into you like this.”

You glanced at your two companions before looking back at me.

“So, how was your Thanksgiving with good ol’ Larry and Margaret?” I asked.

“It was fine.” You fingered the straw in your drink. “How’d you know their names?”

“It came up the last time we hung out, after the Harvard-Yale Game,” I said. “You were pretty inebriated,” I added chucklingly, to explain your forgetfulness to the two other girls.

You squinted at me before responding. “What are you doing here?”

“Meeting up with some old friends,” I said. “I’m early.”

You took a long sip.

“Did you get a chance to”—sotto voce, though the other girls were now talking among themselves—“talk to the Ad Board?”

The straw still in your mouth, eyes on mine, you nodded once.

“Good,” I said. “You’ve done the right thing.”

“Where d’you get that sweater?” you asked. (Where’d Jew get that sweater, it sounded like.)

I looked down as if to remind myself of what sweater I’d worn that day. “Christmas,” I said. “I got it for Christmas last year.”

“Veronica, who’s your friend?” one of the girls you were with cut in.

“This is David,” you said. “He goes to school with me.”

The friend translated for the third girl, who couldn’t hear. “From Harvard!” she shouted.

“We’re in the same dorm,” you said.

“I used to date her roommate,” I clarified, bellying up to the table.

You stood up and offered me your seat. “We were actually just about to leave, if you want to claim this table for when your friends get here.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But they won’t be here for a bit. You guys should stay another round.”

“Unfortunately, we really have to go.” You buttoned your coat. “It was great running into you.”

“Stay for one more,” I said. “It’s on me. I insist.” I leaned over the table and made eye contact with your friends. “What are you guys drinking?”

“Scotch and soda,” one answered.

“Gin martini, extra dirty,” requested the other.

I looked at you. “I’m good.” You sat back down.

“I’ll get you a vodka soda, just in case,” I said, tapping the table as I left.

Back in the other room, it again took a while to get the bartender’s attention. “Close out your tab or keep it open?” she asked.

“Keep it open,” I told her. “The night’s just beginning.”

Four drinks was too many to carry in one trip, so I guzzled my own and cradled the other three against my chest as I began the perilous journey back, bracing for impact from rogue elbows, from men stepping back for full-bodied laughter, from women’s swinging bags.

When I arrived at the table your stools were empty. You must have gone to the bathroom together, as girls are wont to do. Better to stay there, I reasoned, than wander around the bar and lose you.

Ten minutes later I took out my phone and wrote you a message on Facebook:

Got the drinks. Where are you?

“Sorry, these seats are occupied,” I told a party of women who attempted to take your stools.

After a few minutes, when you still hadn’t shown, I surrendered the table to the glaring women and relocated your drinks to a ledge on a nearby wall, in unfortunate proximity to a speaker. “Sweet Caroline” came on, to cheers from the patrons. I wrote you again:

I had to give up the stools and moved to a wall.

I started sipping the scotch and soda.

The wall with an exit sign.

The densely packed room and the alcohol and the long day and my waterlogged clothes coalesced in a queasy, moist heat. “So good! So good! So good!” a man bellowed in my ear.

You probably didn’t receive Facebook notifications on your phone; that would account for why you hadn’t responded to the one I sent from Applebee’s. I wrote you at your Harvard e-mail:

In case you didn’t get my Facebook messages am with our drinks against the wall with the exit sign.

I polished off the martini. Your vodka soda I refused to besmirch with my lips and carried with me as I made my way to the front room, digging a thumb inside my jeans pocket and rubbing the piece of your belt. The stitched initials gave the weightless silk a feeling of tangibility, of something that could be held and corralled.

You’d ditched me.

My attempt to blunt my anger by drinking your vodka soda was a mistake. Vision juddering, a medley of liquors roiling inside me, I lumbered to the men’s room. I made it just in time, barging into the graffiti-tagged stall and kneeling in front of the scummy toilet seconds before my body rejected the poison. I cleaned myself up, hailed a cab back to Penn Station, remembered I’d left my card at the bar, apologized profusely as I handed the driver my remaining cash, and missed the last train by three minutes.

A cab to New Jersey would be exorbitant, and I’d have to wake my parents up and ask them to come downstairs and pay for it, with me drunk and disheveled. My return ticket granted me the privilege of staying overnight in the station. I sat against a wall, not letting myself nod off for fear of the indigent drifters who were also taking refuge there, waves of rage and nausea cresting in alternation, the swelling of one temporarily abating the other. As I scrutinized your Facebook page for any hints of where you’d gone, my phone died, leaving me with nothing but my acid thoughts for five hours.

I took the first train in the morning and walked an hour home from the station. “Taking a nap before my bus,” I called to my parents in the kitchen.

“Sounds like someone had a big night out in the city,” my mother said.

I got in bed, plugging in my phone and checking my e-mail. One new message, sent a few hours after my phone had died.

Just got email. Friend had emergency. Had to leave.

I responded:

No problem! I gave your drinks to my friends. We had a fun night. Hope your friend’s okay.

I nestled into my pillow but, despite my exhaustion, couldn’t fall asleep, buzzed on the welcome relief of knowing you hadn’t intentionally abandoned me, even feeling a little foolish for my premature, unwarranted fury. Of course there’d been a reason.