Heart the Lover

Chapter 1

The professor is holding up two neon-orange pieces of paper.

‘Despite its vulgar packaging,’ he says, waving a page in each hand like a flagman at Daytona, ‘I feel compelled to read this one aloud.’

The assignment had been to write a contemporary version of Bacon’s essay ‘History of Life and Death.’ I’d waited till the last minute to write it.

The only paper we had in the house was this thick stuff left over from our Halloween party.

And it wasn’t easy, feeding that cardstock into my typewriter.

The professor doesn’t read it as much as perform it. He gives it far more life and humor than I imagined it had.

There are two smart guys in the class. They sit up front together and I see only the backs of their heads, one with coppery brown hair and the other with a thick black ponytail.

The professor runs things by them so often I assume they’re his grad school TAs.

When my essay gets passed back to me, they both turn to watch where it goes.

After that day, the copper-haired one begins migrating back. Three classes later, he takes a seat beside me.

Soon he is walking me across campus to Modern Furniture, the only art history class that wasn’t full by the time I signed up.

Our seventeenth-century lit class has only about thirty people, but Modern Furniture is held in an auditorium with cushioned seats set on a steep slope down to the professor at his podium.

Behind him is a big screen that flashes pictures of Corbusier’s B 306 chaise longue and Bauhaus nesting tables.

I catch up on a lot of sleep in that class.

Sam has short halting steps and speaks in fits and starts too, little articulate bursts then a good bit of silence. We talk exclusively about the class.

‘He’s not focusing enough on Cromwell,’ he says, ‘and how resistance to him galvanized the imagination of this whole generation of writers.’

I agree. What else can I do? I am a mere student, and he is a scholar. That much is clear right away. I’ve never met a scholar who wasn’t a professor. And Sam isn’t even a grad student. He’s a senior, like me.

Later I go to the library and read about who Cromwell was, and the next time we walk to Modern Furniture I make a very small joke about the Rump Parliament. Sam’s laugh is soundless, more like panting.

He asks me if I’ve seen The Deer Hunter and I say yes and I figure he’s going to make a comparison somehow with Venitore, the hunter, in The Compleat Angler. Instead he asks me if I want to see it again, with him. It’s playing on campus Friday night.

We meet at the Student Union. He’s already bought my ticket.

They’ve set up rows of metal chairs and a screen on a stand.

We sit and wait for the lights to go out.

My roommate, Carson, passes us with her boyfriend, Bud, a Green Beret who drives up from Fort Bragg every chance he gets.

They’re arguing as they sidestep to empty seats three rows ahead of us and then, once settled, start groping each other.

The movie starts. It is long and brutal.

I have to look down into my lap for half of it.

Sam sits like a stranger beside me. Finally they sing ‘God Bless America’ at the dinner table after Christopher Walken’s funeral, the frame freezes, and it is over.

Sam gets up as soon as the credits roll, and I follow him out of the Student Union.

We head down a campus path that isn’t in the direction of my room on Pye Street or toward town, where I thought we might get a drink.

He points out his dorm from freshman year and I point out mine the next quad over.

The movie has made these buildings, these quads, these years of our lives seem unbearably na?ve.

I want to say something about it, but that feels na?ve, too.

Instead I start to say that I have to get up early and he asks if I’d like to get a beer.

We walk toward the bars, but he veers onto a side street then through the gate of a white fence and up a stepping-stone path to a front door lit by an overhead light.

‘Where are we?’

‘My house.’

I can tell he wanted to show it to me, knew it would be a draw.

It is.

He turns the knob—the house is unlocked—and holds the door open for me.

I step into a small vestibule with steep stairs off to the left.

To the right is a little table with a lamp and a pad of paper with a pen on top.

Through an open door is a living room painted navy blue with a striped couch and a wall of books.

I remark on the number of books.

‘That’s just the overspill,’ he says. I follow him through the living room into a large study out of an old movie—four walls of floor-to-ceiling books, a big, thick-legged desk, and a leather chair before the fireplace.

‘Is this where you smoke your pipe in the evening?’

With a small smile he pulls open the top drawer of the table beside the leather chair to reveal four old pipes nestled neatly on a wooden rack.

I laugh and he pants.

‘Whose house is this?’

‘Dr. Gastrell’s. Did you ever have him for Chaucer? Or his seminar on Milton?’

I shake my head. I’ve heard of Gastrell before. ‘Gastric,’ people call him. Stay away, I’ve heard, he’s notoriously hard. Can undergrads actually take seminars?

‘He’s on sabbatical, doing research at Merton.’ He sees my lack of recognition. ‘At Oxford. He asked us to take care of the place for the year.’

‘Us?’

‘Yash and me.’

Yash?

There’s so much he expects me to know.

Neither of us is sure what to say after that.

Sam shuts the drawer with the pipes and I ask where the bathroom is.

He points to a sloped door beneath the stairs.

I don’t really have to go. I just need to be alone for a minute.

The toilet bowl is deep and the tiny bit I pee makes a loud sound when it hits the water, so I stop.

The mirror above the sink is an oval fixed high on the wall.

I can see half my forehead at a time, one eye or the other, if I stand on tiptoe.

The hallway is empty, the door out to the street a few steps away. In ten minutes I could be back in my room on Pye Street. But Carson and Bud will be there going at it in one way or another. A refrigerator opens and I follow the sound.

We sit with our bottles of beer on the striped couch in the navy room. Its cushions are stiff and we are stiff and he isn’t a guy who’s afraid of the long pause. We pick at our labels and speak sporadically. He asks if I have a lot of work this weekend and I say I have to write a short story.

‘Why?’

‘For my fiction class.’

He nods slowly, full of some thought he’s decided not to share. ‘What will you write about?’

I look around the room. ‘Tonight, probably.’

He looks alarmed. Then he pants. ‘Good one.’

The front door opens and slams against the wall.

‘Fucking fucking hell,’ says a voice from the hallway. The door shudders shut. ‘I’m locking it in case she followed me.’ A whoop-laugh. ‘You here? How was the daisy?’ He swings into the room, the other guy from our class. Yash. ‘Oh my. If she isn’t right here before us.’

His hair is out of its ponytail, thick and black, just past his shoulders. He is trying hard to stop laughing.

‘The daisy?’ I say.

‘Date, daisy,’ he says. ‘We call all our dates daisies. And my daisy tonight was a doozy.’ He smiles wide and comes closer. I glance at Sam, worried that he’s going to kick him out, but he’s got a little grin on his face I haven’t seen yet. He’s as relieved as I am that there are three of us now.

‘What happened?’ he says.

‘Well, I go and pick her up at Kappa,’ Yash says, standing in front of the coffee table facing us.

Sam and I lean back at the same time, as if we’ve turned on a TV.

‘You have to sign in and give blood and take a vow of chastity and then you have to wait in a fucking parlor with doilies on all the tables for twenty minutes with all the other pathetic dudes. God, that guy Ian was there—the one who quoted Victor Hugo’s last words. ’

Sam chuckles. ‘I see black light.’

‘I saw black light at Kappa for sure. It’s creepy in that room, and sort of smelly too, like if I get a whiff of my mother’s fingers, all the stuff she’s poked her fingers in during the day.

’ He looks at me and jabs a finger in the air a few times.

‘My mother is a real poker,’ he says. ‘Finally we hear steps on the stairs and these girls all come down together and they look kind of alike and now none of us remember anymore who we’re taking out because we’ve been stuck in that playpen all night.

However, someone identifies me from the lineup and we get the hell out of there.

I take her to Pip’s, we talk about her father, who has some rare ghastly disease, and her brother, who sounds like an a-hole, and I order something that should have been called maroon glop over dirty sponge and bring her back to Kappa.

She wants to show me something back in the playpen, which is now empty and very dimly lit, and I have to look at some god-awful Confederate musket on the wall, which she reveals belonged to her grandfather, and I head fast for the door, but her legs are suddenly ten feet long and she gets there first and presses me up against some coat hooks and unhinges her jaw like a snake.

It was terrifying. I make a break and manage to get the screen door between us’—he holds up the imaginary door like a shield—‘and say goodnight politely and run.’

Sam is laughing so hard he makes sound.

Yash snorts and apologizes and wipes his eyes. He straightens up and wiggles his fingers at us. ‘I hope this is going a little better.’

‘It’s a little awkward,’ I say, and they both laugh.

‘It’ll get better. Sam is an acquired taste,’ he says. ‘Bonne nuit.’ And he clomps up the stairs.

Sam gets up and shuts both doors to the living room. When he sits back down on the couch, he’s closer.

‘The daisy? Please tell me not as in Daisy Buchanan.’