Chapter 1 #2
‘In a good way,’ he says, and kisses me.
On Monday Sam walks me to Modern Furniture, and when I get out fifty minutes later he’s waiting.
‘Want to come over for lunch?’
We eat turkey sandwiches and make out on the couch again. He doesn’t rush things. We kiss and kiss until I have to go to Logic.
I walk across campus a little lightheaded.
I keep bursting out laughing, thinking about making out on Doc Gastric’s couch on a Monday in broad daylight.
All the awkwardness dissolved when we were kissing.
He said little things and I said little things and we made each other laugh on that striped couch.
Could he tell how little experience I’d had?
Only one boyfriend so far, Jay, the year before.
We met in the fall and I brought him home for spring break and fell out of love with him in my mother’s kitchen.
I told him on the plane back to school, which is a terrible place to break up.
He cried and thrashed around but wouldn’t get up and go to the bathroom to pull himself together.
The conversation started quietly enough, with him saying what he often said to me, which was that I bottled up my feelings until they came out like a fire hose, that if I didn’t withhold so much we could reach each other better.
But as he slowly realized that he wasn’t going to be able to talk me out of my decision, his recriminations got louder.
He’d paid for our flights. He could have gone to Key West with his friends instead of a shitty town in Massachusetts.
His mother thought I was lesbian. ‘I taught you everything I know about sex!’ he hollered all the way down the aisle into the cockpit, which had no door back then.
It was true. He had. I’d been a virgin and he’d been a fun and loving guide.
I’d had nothing to compare him or our sex to at the time, but now I know that he was particularly uninhibited and passed along that attitude to me.
He did not like that now I was going to pass it along to someone else.
He got very hung up on that fact. It was the longest flight of my life, and I was grateful when the wheels hit the runway and my freedom was near.
After Jay, I made out with the bartender at the restaurant I worked at, with a guy at the senior pig roast at the start of the semester, and most recently with a friend of Carson’s who had also dressed up as Cyndi Lauper for our Halloween party.
Sam invites me for dinner on Friday. I imagine having the house to ourselves, Dr. Gastrell’s candlesticks lit in the dining room. At the door, I hand him a bottle of wine.
Sam looks at the label and puts his arm out for me to go into the living room.
‘We’re pairing a 1987 Riesling with the pepperoni this evening,’ he says behind me to Yash and a guy I don’t know on the couch.
This guy has a mat of ginger curls six inches thick on top of his head.
He has short legs and big sneakers splayed on top of Dr. Gastrell’s polished coffee table.
Beside the sneakers are four boxes of pizza. Yash goes to fetch some wineglasses.
Ginger guy points at me. ‘Freshman year. Stranger mixer. You went with Dale Greensmith.’
‘This is Ivan,’ Sam says.
Ivan shuts his eyes. ‘Red dress. Black buttons.’
‘Well you’re freaky.’
‘I’m right, aren’t I?’
‘About the dress. The date I don’t remember.’
They laugh like I’m lying, like you could never remember a dress better than a guy.
‘In Riesling veritas,’ Yash says, pouring the wine into small, impossibly thin glasses the shape of bluebells. ‘We’ll get to the truth about old Dale Greensmith before the end of the night.’
Sam and I sit in the armchairs across from Yash and Ivan. The wine is sweet and foul, but I love holding the fragile little glass in my fingers.
Ivan is another English major I’ve never met before. ‘Tell me everything, bar-none everything, that comes to mind when you think about James Joyce,’ he says.
Fortunately my high school English teacher was a little obsessed with Joyce. ‘Stream of consciousness, onomatopoeia, epiphany, yes I will yes I said Yes, and falling softly, softly falling on the living and the dead.’
Ivan presses the heels of his hands into his eyeballs and rocks his head back and forth. ‘“Falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” I’m so fucked,’ he whines.
‘He’s writing his thesis on Finnegans Wake,’ Sam says.
Ivan parts his hands to look at me with a last shred of hope. But I’ve never heard of it.
‘Are you writing a thesis?’ I ask Sam.
‘You have to, in the honors program.’
‘Oh, right.’ The honors program. I feel like I go to a different college, and they know it.
‘Who have you taken?’ Ivan asks.
It was that kind of thing. They don’t ask what classes but which professors.
I strain a little to think of some names. ‘Brody, Iyengar, Doukas.’ They were the only ones that came to mind.
No recognition.
‘They teach creative writing.’
‘Those poor fucks,’ Ivan says. Sam signals something to him. ‘I just mean, what could be worse than reading crappy stories all semester?’
‘They’re not crappy anymore. I’m in advanced.’ You had to take 101, 201, and 301 to get into advanced.
‘Oh, advanced.’ Ivan laughs.
‘I took a creative writing class freshman year,’ Yash says.
‘No you didn’t,’ Sam says.
‘I did. With Iyengar.’ He looks at me. ‘She hated my story.’
‘That is not true,’ Sam says.
‘Hated it.’
‘There were little checkmarks and a nice comment.’
‘Two checkmarks in fifteen pages, and the comment was patronizing.’
‘It wasn’t.’
‘This shows future promise.’ He grimaces.
‘It was probably the first paper you’d ever gotten back without the word “genius” or “incandescent,”’ Sam says, ‘at the bottom.’
‘It’s not that. It isn’t. But “future promise”? Like someday far from now I may show the faintest flicker of talent?’
‘So you never took another one?’ I ask.
‘No.’
‘He didn’t even take that one,’ Sam says. ‘He dropped it after three weeks.’
‘None of the writers I admire ever took a class in creative writing,’ Yash says. ‘I think I’ll be okay.’
Ivan passes me a slice of pizza on a delicate white plate with a gold rim and a cluster of rosebuds in the center. ‘Apart from the night of the red dress, why have we never seen you before?’ he asks me. ‘Where have you been hiding?’
I wasn’t in a sorority and I didn’t go to frat parties and I worked at a restaurant three nights a week. ‘I don’t know. I was on the golf team for my first year, so I traveled a lot.’ This is stretching the truth a bit.
‘You were on the fucking golf team?’ he says. Our university has a very good golf team—ACC Champions eleven years straight.
‘Freshman year. Then I quit.’ I quit the first week.
‘Damn. You were a recruit.’
‘Everyone’s a recruit.’ Did he think it was 1920? No one walked on anymore.
‘She’s not Daisy Buchanan, she’s Jordan Baker,’ Yash says, then bends an ear toward me. ‘Does your voice sound like money?’
‘No. It sounds like someone who gave up her golf scholarship.’
I can tell they all like me better once they’ve changed my name to Jordan. They use it a lot.
Yash carries the empty pizza boxes into the kitchen and comes back with cards. ‘Surely Jordan knows how to play hearts.’
I don’t, but I love card games and am a quick learner and shoot the moon in the second hand.
‘Jordan. Sly J. Watch out there, Sammy.’
Sam glances quickly at me, that little smile above his fan of cards.
‘Well,’ says Sam after we play six hands, gathering up all the cards and not dealing them out again.
‘Time to show her your etchings?’ Ivan says. ‘There are actual etchings in his room. God’s truth.’
‘Have a look?’ Sam is blushing and also asking me with his eyes.
Yash is loading the dishwasher in the kitchen.
I nod.
In the hallway he takes my hand and I follow him up the tight steep staircase.
There’s a turn at the top then two more steps.
He reaches for a switch on the wall. An old sconce comes on after a delay, dimly.
He leads me into the front bedroom. He doesn’t turn on the overhead and we don’t look at any etchings.
He pulls me onto Dr. Gastrell’s tall double bed.
We kiss and wrap our legs around each other and he says he’s been wanting to get me up here all night.
We press hard against each other and I feel like I might come before I get my jeans off.
We laugh because my fingers don’t seem to be working but I get them unzipped and he reaches for me as soon as I kick them off and he makes a sort of low growl when he feels how wet I am.
I feel him, too, straining against the zipper of his jeans.
I reach for his belt and he says something that sounds like no.
I can feel his pulse through the fabric, the shape of his tip.
It takes all my strength to remain still.
He kisses me and starts to finger me and doesn’t explain why I can’t touch him.
I sit up and pull my pants back on. The desire is still careening around inside me, irritatingly, like being drunk when you need to be sober.
‘Please don’t take it the wrong way,’ he says.
I can hear Yash and Ivan arguing downstairs, a few thuds, then Yash laughing. I feel mortified, like the two of them already know what has happened. Ivan sent us up here. He knew how it would play out. I have a paranoid streak and I need to get out of here.
I put on my shoes, adjust my bra, and open the door.
‘Jordan.’ Sam can move very quickly. He touches my arm, my hip.
Lifts my shirt and strokes it with his thumb.
‘Please stay. Please, please, please. I can explain.’ His lips in my hair, his thumb moving over my hipbone.
I don’t want to go downstairs and see Yash and Ivan on my way out. Eventually I relent.