Chapter I #2
After he eats, Sam and I walk to the library.
Yash goes to study with someone named Annabel at the bagel shop.
Sam takes my hand and pulls me off the path and against a tree and we kiss for a while before moving on.
This attraction is our only language, and it’s fading.
Still, after that it’s hard to focus on Cosmos for astronomy, a gut to fulfill my science requirement.
I watch Sam instead. We always sit at a table in the library, not in the armchairs near the windows where I used to sit before I met him.
He has a book pinned open with his left hand and writes swiftly in a notebook with his right.
He’s translating Ovid back into Latin, a poem called ‘Iphis and Ianthe’ from Metamorphoses.
I looked down at my paperback. It really is like we go to different schools.
Next he’ll move on to Early Modern Ethics.
He’s got Hume, Rousseau, and Kant stacked up beside him.
Since I lost my golf scholarship, my college education has been funded by a series of loans and my job at High Five.
I am going to have to pay it all back, this paltry dabbling I’ve done, these wasted years.
I haven’t been serious. I watch how quickly Sam writes in Latin.
He looks at me. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I’ve made all the wrong choices.’
I go to my advisor. He teaches courses on Swinburne that I’ve never taken and is always adjusting the back pillow behind him. He shaves, but he lets the hair grow wild everywhere else on his head, great tufts sprout from his ears and nostrils, his eyebrows are thickly entwined.
I tell him I want to do an honors thesis in creative writing.
‘Too late for that,’ he says.
‘I want to stay another semester.’
‘It’ll mean another loan.’
‘I know. I want to write an honors thesis and take two seminars.’
‘You have to have a pretty high GPA for those.’
I hand him my transcript.
His tangled eyebrows move around. He removes the pillow behind him and replaces it with a smaller one beside his chair, then hands me back my transcript. ‘So be it,’ he says, and does something with his mouth that I think is meant to be kind.
A few weeks later, I run into Yash outside my writing class.
It’s midafternoon, early March, the sun strong again after its brief winter waning.
Sam is in his Ethics seminar for three hours.
Yash and I walk toward the quad. He says he was planning to get an iced tea and read in the sun.
I say that was my plan exactly. He remembers that my story was being workshopped that afternoon and asks how it went.
‘Everyone was very nice about it,’ I say.
‘Even Bryce?’
I laugh. I told him once about Bryce, a guy in my class who had no tolerance for female protagonists. If a story was about a woman, he would inevitably say that he’d had a girlfriend like that once. I don’t think he realized how often he said it. ‘He didn’t say a word.’
He bumps against me briefly. ‘He loved it!’
We get teas at the cafeteria and sit on the steps in the sun. I have this feeling that this is how all of college should have been and somehow wasn’t, sitting with Yash on the steps of the quad. I have a stab of sadness, then I remember.
‘I’m not graduating either.’
‘Really?’
I tell him about the thesis. I don’t mention the seminars I’ve signed up for. One of them is Immortality and I don’t want him to think I’m stalking him.
He nods and doesn’t say anything else. I point to the copy of The Golden Bowl by his foot and ask how it’s going and he tells a story that his professor had told him that morning about how Henry James, upon hearing of the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson’s suicide, went directly to her apartment in Venice, destroyed his many letters to her, and tried to drown her dresses in the lagoon, but they wouldn’t sink.
Yash acts out this story with much élan, gripping the gondolier’s pole James used to push the gowns underwater and recreating his haunted face as they floated back up to the surface.
Yash is even-keeled, always in a good mood, but today there seems to be an extra bit of joy.
When he’s done he sits back down and puts his face up to the sun.
‘I’m glad you’re staying here,’ he says, not opening his eyes. ‘I’ll have one friend.’
‘Me too.’
He bumps me with his shoulder again. ‘We’ll have our farewell to youth together.’
I tell Sam that night after my shift at High Five, so that he hears it from me first. We’re on his bed, eating jellybeans from the Easter basket his mother sent him. He has a stronger reaction than I anticipated.
‘You like to make things hard for yourself, don’t you?’
I shrug my shoulders. Here comes the judge.
‘You gave up your scholarship and took out student loans that everyone knows are hard to pay back even when you have a real profession in mind. And now you want to rack up another semester’s worth of debt—for no good reason apart from the fact that you don’t want to grow up.’
I was still in my work uniform: khakis and a teal polo shirt with a basketball decal high on the left boob.
I’d worked every semester of college, and two jobs during summer.
Sam had worked part-time at his father’s office in the summers and, after a trip to Europe this coming summer, that’s where he’ll work in the fall.
I look around at his free house with free utilities. I lift up the pink Easter basket by its handle and swing it between us. ‘I’m not sure you want to go toe to toe with me on growing up, Sam Bam,’ I say and get a small smile out of him.
The deadline for Sam’s and Ivan’s theses looms. Ivan got all his anxiety out early and now puts his head down and writes the thing, while Sam, who expressed no concern about it all year, is suddenly a wreck.
He’s writing about Hume’s principle of contiguity, but finds himself beginning to disprove his own argument.
His coffee intake triples, he starts smoking, and the only way he can fall asleep, for the few hours that he sleeps, is if he lies on his stomach while I rub his head and sing.
The first song I sing to him is ‘Scarborough Fair,’ which reminds me of ‘Been Too Long at the Fair.’
‘Do you only know songs about fairs?’ His voice is muffled, his face mashed into the mattress.
‘Maybe.’
He is asleep before I can start ‘North Country Fair.’
The singing lasts for a week or two. He says I have a pretty voice and calls me Calliope.
I wonder if Yash can hear me from his room.
After he hands in his thesis, he slowly calms down.
He asks me to help him quit smoking. Cigarettes had killed two of his grandparents and he promised his parents when he was a boy that he’d never touch them.
He has to be free of them by graduation, he tells me.
I make little bundles of cigarettes tied with ribbon for the next five days that reduce his consumption by three each day. On day six, no more.
A few days before graduation we go to a senior dance.
Yash got up his nerve and asked Lara Mertens.
We meet them there. The party is outside and there’s a band and a bar and blazing torches sunk in the ground all along the edge of an enormous garden.
Lara is friendly. She kisses me on each cheek, asks me if I’ve read any more Japanese history and rolls her eyes.
When Yash speaks, she is very attentive.
She likes him. Yash is not himself. He has a sort of mask around other women, I’ve noticed.
I thought maybe with Lara it would be different but it isn’t.
Other friends come up and we get separated from them and at some point Sam tells me to stop looking at Yash and Lara.
‘I can’t tell if he’s having a good time.’
‘Of course he’s having a good time. He’s on a date with the goddess.’
I run into a couple of people from my writing classes and talk to them for a bit, then I see Sam bum two cigarettes off his friend Brent.
I excuse myself and walk over and pluck them out of his pocket.
He tries to grab them back but I clutch them tightly and in our struggle I get knocked hard to the ground.
It’s a semiformal. I’m on the ground in a pale green dress.
I see Brent’s disgusted expression as he looks down at me.
He doesn’t have time to hide it. He doesn’t offer a hand up.
Sam does, but I don’t take it. I get up, brush the dirt off the back of my dress, and walk directly out to the road and the two miles home to Pye Street.