The Rules of Attraction

PAUL After we returned from our little excursion to the hospital, I went back to my room and wondered what I should do. I first called Casa Miguel and had Sean paged. He wasn’t there. He had already left. I sat on my bed and smoked a couple of cigarettes. I then went to The Pub, cautiously at first. I didn’t look around the room until I had made my way to the bar. Harry was already there, recovered, getting even more smashed by the jukebox with David Van Pelt. I got a beer, but didn’t drink it, then followed some people over to Booth (it was getting too cold for parties at End of the World) to confront Sean. It was a party, after all.

The party was in full-swing when I got there. Raymond was standing around but I didn’t want to talk to him. He came over anyway and asked if I wanted a drink.

“Yeah.” I craned my neck to look over the dance floor.

“What do you want? I know the bartender.”

“Rum and anything.”

He walked off and then I spotted Sean. From where I stood in the darkened living room of Booth I could see him in the light coming from the bathroom down the hallway. He was standing in the doorway and had a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other and he was trying to kick something off his boot. He saw me for an instant and then shyly turned away. I was feeling guilty about our meeting last night — telling him I had failed three classes last term. I only told him that because I thought he was great-looking and I wanted to sleep with him. I hadn’t failed any classes that term. (Sean later admitted to me that he had failed all four. In fact, I couldn’t imagine anyone failing not only four classes at Camden, but even one. I guess the thought seemed so irrational to me that I found him even more attractive in some perverse way.) He had been coming on to me the night before, there was no doubt about that and that’s all that really mattered. From where I stood he looked a little like a rock star caught unknowingly in a video. Maybe a little like Bryan Adams (without the acne scars, though, sometimes, admittedly, that can be sexy). I went over to him and told him how sorry I was.

“Yeah,” he said, looking modestly at the ground, still trying to kick something off his boots. I wondered suddenly if he was Catholic. My spirits rose: Catholic boys will usually do anything. “I’m sorry too.”

“Did you stay there?” I asked him.

“Stay there? Yeah, I guess,” he admitted, embarrassed, confused. “I stayed.”

“I’m really, really sorry,” I said.

“Oh, don’t worry about it. It’s okay. Some other time,” he said.

I felt so shitty about ruining his date that a rush of sympathy (or horniness: the two were interchangeable) went through me and I said, “I’ll make it up to you.”

“You don’t have to,” he said, though you could tell he had not wanted to say that.

“I know I don’t, but I want to. I really insist.”

He looked down and said he had to use the restroom and I said I’d wait.

I wondered if we were going to sleep together tonight, but then I tried to push the thought away and pretended to be rational about the whole thing. In the meantime, four gorgeous Dartmouth guys came into the party. When I went back to the keg to get another beer for Sean (if nothing else, I was going to succeed in getting him drunk) they all walked over to him and started a conversation. Jealously I hurried back. When I handed him the beer, almost protectively, the one that was the best-looking went off dancing with the student body president (“The Vagina Lady,” Raymond always seemed to call her). The Dartmouth boys thought that this was the annual Dressed To Get Screwed party and they were quite disappointed that they had driven all the way from Hanover to come to the Camden Early Halloween Ball. They said this sarcastically and I thought it was a little mean. But I asked them, flirtatiously, “Aren’t you all a little far away?”

“It’s really not all that far away, I guess,” the blond said.

“So, what’s going on in the real world?” I asked, laughing.

“It’s cool,” the one with a slight double-chin said.

“The same stuff,” another one said.

“You guys are kind of in the middle of nowhere, aren’t you?” the blond asked. They were all looking at the dance floor, nodding their heads.

“Kind of,” I said.

Then Sean made some rude comment that I couldn’t hear. I realized then that I was making Sean jealous by talking to these guys, so I immediately stopped talking to them. But it was too late. He was so jealous that he ended up telling them off. He told them it was the Get Fucked party and that they should bend over and get fucked. I hoped I wasn’t playing too hard to get, but it was sort of erotic to hear him say that, yet I still showed no emotion. I was afraid that the Dartmouth guys were going to beat him (actually, me) up but they just walked away, too stunned to say anything, their suspicions about this place confirmed by Sean’s brash actions. After a while, when it was nearing midnight, I asked him if he wanted to come by my room. I had asked Raymond to stop at Price Chopper on the way back from the hospital so I could pick up a six-pack, especially for this occasion. But I wasn’t sure if we’d even get around to drinking it since he was fairly drunk by now anyway. I first made sure he was interested by asking him if he wanted to go to his room first.

“We could,” he said. “My roommate’s gone a lot. His girlfriend lives off-campus, so he’s there a lot.” He was slurring his words. He bumped into someone’s drink, oblivious.

“Do you have any alcohol?” I asked, laughing.

“I have alcohol?” he asked himself. “Do I?”

“You do?” I asked.

“I don’t … have any,” he said, starting to laugh also.

“Let’s go to my room,” I said. “I have beer.”

We walked out of Booth, past the Dartmouth guys. Someone had stuck pieces of paper with the word “Asshole” on them to their backs. We started for Welling.

“Are you a Catholic?” I asked him.

We walked a little while before he finally answered. “I don’t remember.”