Chapter 17 The Most Beautiful Thing I Had Seen in the Natural World
The Most Beautiful Thing I Had Seen in the Natural World
Ethan Pomerleau lived in a freshman dorm with a roommate eleven years younger than he was.
I was only a year older than Tina, but even that felt like a lot.
Still, I didn’t want to portray myself as older and wiser than I was to Ethan.
I knew my appeal for older men (and Ethan was older) was the idea that I looked like an ingenue but had the vulpine experience in bed of a woman with history.
Also, a lot of Ethan’s wisdom had come from a world I knew only through Hollywood’s eyes. Good Lord, the guy had been in Vietnam.
He took me to the bar I had been going to with Tina and other women from Capen House for a couple of months now, the kind of place that—when I had been living in Manhattan—I thought was beneath me.
Apparently, it wasn’t. If my high school friend Marie Morris, in her first months as a college student, had been getting hammered on a concoction called “Daddy, I Don’t Wanna Drink This,” I discovered in Northampton that I was fine with something colored with blue curacao called “Caribbean Pass-Out Punch.” (Why, back then, were the names of so many drinks for young girls suggestive of roofies?
Rhetorical question. We know the answer.)
I had done a line off a Fleetwood Mac album cover—white on white, which meant my nose was hoovering all over the cardboard so I didn’t miss a speck—before meeting him at the Smith College bus stop, and together the two of us walked to the bar.
It was chilly and damp, and I walked very fast, which I said was because I was a New Yorker and he seemed to believe me.
Now we were sitting at a high-top not far from the heavy mahogany balustrade behind which were the rows of beautiful bottles of booze and two bartenders, one male and one female, both young and athletic, moving like dervishes to keep up with the party.
Ethan was nursing a bottle of Budweiser.
“How did Amherst find you?” I asked.
“Find me? What do you mean?”
I wasn’t precisely sure what I meant, but I was imagining that the school must have had some sort of outreach to veterans. “I guess I mean you’re a little older than everyone else in your class and probably the only dude who a few years ago was in a jungle getting shot at.”
“It was more than a few years ago.”
“Well, that’s kind of my point.”
He tore off part of the beer-bottle label, which was already peeling from condensation, with a fingernail. “They didn’t find me. I applied when I was a senior in high school in Vermont and got in.”
“But you didn’t go?”
“I was drafted first.”
“And you chose Vietnam over Amherst? Wow. You are a really good person. Or really insane.”
“Probably not either. At least not a really good person or a really insane one. But I did feel a duty to go.”
“Even though it was a terrible war and we didn’t belong there?”
“Even though,” he said. “Vermont was interesting back then. So many hippies. So many communes. The highway suddenly linked us with Boston, and the whole antiwar movement felt like a bunch of outsiders from the big cities trying to tell me how to think and what to do. So, for a stubborn local kid like me—a Vermonter through and through—going was almost a rebellion against the longhairs from Massachusetts and New York. The flatlanders.”
“Do you regret going?”
“I lived,” he said evasively. “I’m in college now.”
“We must all seem like babies to you.”
“No. But some of my fellow students have no idea how lucky they are. Just none. They take it all for granted. They’re entitled and naive.” This wasn’t nasty, but it was the meanest thing I’d ever heard him say. “Not you,” he added, as if he’d read my mind and was afraid he had offended me.
“You are the only person I’ve ever met who was there.”
“I’m not surprised. I’m the only veteran on the campus.
But your roommate? She knows easily a half dozen of us.
That’s the difference between growing up where you did outside Manhattan and where she did in northern Vermont.
” He looked up from the label he was peeling and asked, “How was being back there—in Tallmadge?” He knew the story of Kenny Foster from the night we had met at the mixer, and that I had just been home, traveling to and from the city to meet with my lawyer and the engineer.
“It was fine because I was a ghost. Snuck in and snuck out. I was only nervous when my mom and I were on the train platform, waiting for the train to Grand Central. My dad had taken his usual seven-thirty train because he’d gone to work in the morning.
But I didn’t see a single person I knew, so I was spared the Scarlet Letter gazes I always fear I’ll get when I’m back. ”
“And the city?”
I told him about the expert. I shared with him that I’d gotten high alone but for my dog.
“When we’re finished here, let’s go back to Capen,” I added.
“I have some really good weed. Tina might be around. If she is, you can say hi to her. She won’t like us getting stoned, but she’ll be happy to see you. ”
He shook his head. “I don’t smoke weed.”
“But you were in Vietnam? I thought everyone there smoked weed.”
“I gave it up when I came home.”
“Why? That’s like saying no to chocolate!”
“Maybe because no one was trying to kill me anymore. It could be just that simple. Also? It’s against the law.”
These were both fair points. But the illegalities sure hadn’t stopped me. I liked being high far too much.
“It sounds like Tina doesn’t smoke. She doesn’t, right?” he asked, a waft of concern in his voice. Was he fretting that I was corrupting this girl from Vermont?
“Right.”
He nodded, relieved. “I’m curious. Before August 3, 1978, did you get high a lot?” he asked. I was not surprised he remembered the date I’d killed Kenny Foster—I’d told him the night we had met—but, still, I was impressed. Of course, his use of the date also made him sound like a lawyer or narc.
“Not as much as now. Mostly I drank keg beer back then.”
“So, it was Kenny Foster’s death that upped the amount you consume.”
“The amount I consume?” I repeated, turning it into a question and unable to smother my coke-fed giggles. “Good God, I don’t measure my weed like it’s…it’s oregano.”
“But his death is why you smoke so much?”
“I guess,” I agreed, happy to have an explanation for a habit that clearly didn’t thrill him.
“But being outed back home as Theo Catton’s mistress wasn’t great, either.
” (Yes, I had told him this, too, the night we had met, but only with the assurance that he wouldn’t tell Tina.
It had to be our secret, and, I suppose, a part of me shared it with him precisely because he was an older man and this seemed to my addled mind a first step in a seduction.)
“What other drugs do you do?”
“I’ve dropped acid a couple times, but only once since coming to Smith.
I’m not a big fan. Same with ’ludes. Like ’em, don’t love ’em.
Cocaine, however? Very good. Double V good.
Why? Do you want some? I don’t have any on me, but I have a friend at Smith who can give us a bump.
” I suspected I knew what his answer would be, but I was feeling so judged that I couldn’t resist acting as if I were oblivious to his aversion.
“No. And I have a feeling you’re already flying pretty fast.”
“Nah,” I lied. “Nah. Just happy it’s Friday and I’m back here.
I’m with you.” I reached across the wood and rested my hand on his wrist, planning to squeeze his fingers gently, but I realized that my grip must have felt like a blood pressure cuff when he looked down at my hand and then into my eyes.
“I was serious,” he said. “I gave all that up. Beer and wine are the most potent things I drink or snort or swallow.” Then he used his free hand to peel my fingers off his skin. “Also?”
I waited.
“Those aren’t great reasons to get high,” he said.
“Au contraire. I think they’re top-notch,” I told him, and I spread wide my arms theatrically.
The barstool lacked a back, and when I fanned my arms like angel wings, a tad miffed, I fell off.
I wasn’t drunk, just wired, and I landed on my hands and knees.
But I popped back up like a rubber ball.
Instantly, a lot of eyes were on me, supposing I was another blotto Smithie making a spectacle of herself.
Ethan had jumped off his barstool to help me back to my feet, but already I was shaking it off and climbing onto the ripped pleather cushion.
One of the bartenders, a young guy with a strawberry mane that cascaded like a rock star’s, was watching me carefully.
I mouthed the words I’m fine and forced a smile in his direction.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Ethan. I was unsure whether I had embarrassed him or he was worried about me.
“I’m okay. Only a flesh wound.”
“You’re not.”
“Not a scratch on me.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
And so I took my blue drink, which was still at least half full, and downed it like milk. Chugged it like a frat boy losing at beer pong.
Then we left the bar and started up the hill to Capen House.
He was a chivalrous guy, even if he didn’t approve of me.
I expected him to drop me off at the dorm, say hello to Tina if she was there, and then get on the first bus back to Amherst. I didn’t see how the evening could get worse, which is a testimony to the fact that I had no gift for prophecy—because, as I should have known by then, things can always get worse.