Mr. X

She meant that she would be able to explain a leave of absence to him, if that was what I wanted. The thought of Phil’s disappointment made me feel like a traitor. ‘I guess I’ll have to get straight As and be elected president of my class before you and Star stop worrying,’ I said.

‘Hey, Ned!’ Phil shouted from the other room. ‘Your mother and Bobby Fischer, separated at birth, is that the deal?’

‘Okay,’ Laura said. ‘We’ll see how you feel at semester break. In the meantime, please remember that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, all right?’

Over lunch, the astonished Phil explained the Machiavellian stratagems by which my mother had sandbagged him. Star ate half of what was on her plate, looked at her watch, and stood up from the table. She had a long drive ahead of her, time to go, thanks so much, goodbye.

By the time I carried her bag downstairs, she was giving Laura a hug from the depths of her new winter coat. I walked her down the path to the Lincoln, wondering if she thought she could get in and drive away without speaking to me. We came up to the car door, and I said, ‘Mom.’ She wrapped me in her arms.

‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘Throw a few things into a suitcase and tell those nice people you’re going to stay with me while you think things over.’

‘What?’ I pulled back and looked at her. She was serious.

‘I have enough room to put you up. You can wait tables at Inside the Outside until we find something better.’

If she had sandbagged Phil, what she was doing to me felt like a mugging. ‘What’s going on? Laura’s after me about transferring or dropping out for a semester, you can’t even look at me, both of you act like I turned into some person you don’t even like … I’m not where I’m supposed to be, I’m too skinny, I’m a liar … All of a sudden, come to Cleveland …’ I raised my arms and shook my head in bafflement. ‘If you can, explain it to me, how about that?’

‘I want to protect you,’ she said.

I couldn’t help it – I laughed at her. ‘Middlemount’s a lot safer than a nightclub in the middle of Cleveland.’

Some thought, an explanation or rebuttal, surged across her face. She visibly thrust it away. ‘Maybe I never had a chance to go to college. But you know what? Working at Inside the Outside isn’t such a bad deal.’

I had offended her. Even worse, I had insulted her. ‘Hey, Mom, I never wanted to go to Middlemount, it just happened.’

‘Then get in the car.’

‘I can’t.’ In the face of her huge, silent challenge, I said, ‘I did have a lot of problems, but I can work them out.’

‘Uh-huh,’ she said. ‘The things you don’t know, they’d fill a football stadium.’

‘Like what?’ I said, remembering the refusal I had just seen.

‘You and me, honey, we don’t know anything at all.’ The warmth of the new coat enveloped me once more, and when I felt her arms and shoulders tremble as she kissed my cheek, I almost decided to climb into the old Lincoln and drive away. Star patted the back of my head twice, three times, waited a beat, then once more. ‘Get back inside before you freeze to death.’

I spent most of the next few days studying.

The Grants kept up a cheerful patter during the drive to O’Hare, though I could tell that Laura was still unhappy. Phil marveled at my mother’s progress in the year since their last championship. In the past, he had been able to predict her decisions three or four moves ahead. ‘I knew her game better than she knew mine. I could surprise her, whereas she always had to take chances to surprise me.’

‘Whereas?’ Laura said.

‘Yes. The point is, once you get to that stage, the situation never changes. But this year, Star figured out my strategies before I knew what they were. I thought she was just messing around until she started taking my pieces off the board. The level of her game went way past mine, which means that her ability is out of sight.’

‘Whereas yours is merely above average,’ Laura said from the back seat.

‘Why are you picking on me? Ned, she’s picking on me, isn’t she?’

‘Sounds like it,’ I said.

‘You in a bad mood, honey?’

‘I’m afraid of losing Ned.’

Phil looked at her in the rearview mirror. ‘We can’t get rid of the guy. He’s coming back in a couple of weeks.’

‘I hope he does,’ Laura said.

Phil glanced at me, then back up at the mirror. ‘After you two got back from downtown, Star seemed sort of antsy, like she was upset. Did she seem upset, Ned, when you were saying goodbye?’

‘More like worried,’ I said. ‘She wanted me to drive back to Cleveland with her.’

‘Oh, no,’ Laura said.

‘Just get in the car and drive away?’

‘After telling you I was leaving.’

Laura said, ‘I knew it,’ and Phil said, ‘I’ll be damned.’ He checked the mirror again. ‘What did you say?’

‘It’s not important.’

‘I don’t know,’ Phil said. ‘Ned, one thing about your mother, and I’ve always thought she was great –’

‘No kidding,’ Laura supplied.

‘You do, too, Laura, come on, one thing about Star, she’s full of surprises.’

I tried to say goodbye to the Grants at the security check, but they talked their way past the guards and walked me to the departure gate. We were about half an hour early. Phil wandered off to inspect a gift shop. Laura slumped against a square column and smiled at me from a face filled with complicated feeling. I remember thinking that she had never looked so beautiful, and that I had rarely been so conscious of how much I loved her. ‘At least you didn’t run away to Cleveland.’

‘I thought about it for a second or two,’ I said. ‘You knew what she was going to say?’

She nodded, and her warm eyes again met mine. ‘Star and I have some things in common, anyhow. We both want our Ned to be safe and happy.’

I looked down the corridor, where Phil was peering at a rack of baseball caps. ‘What was all that about Biegelman’s? When you and Star got back, you were mad at me, and she was in outer space.’

‘Forget about it, Ned, please. I made a mistake.’

‘You thought you saw me in Biegelman’s?’

Laura rammed her hands into the pockets of her down coat and bent her blue-jeaned right leg to plant the sole of a pretty black boot on the flank of the column. The back of her head fell against its flat surface. She turned her head toward the people moving up and down the corridor and smiled reflexively at a small boy encased in a snow-suit waddling ahead of his stroller.

‘There was a little more to it.’

A long stretch of corridor opened up in front of the boy, and he broke into a lumbering run until sheer momentum got the better of him. He flopped down onto the tiles, his arms and legs spread-eagled like a starfish. Without breaking stride, his mother leaned over, scooped him up, and dumped him into the stroller.

‘Eventually, I got tired of trailing after Star.’ Laura was watching the boy’s mother move efficiently down the corridor. ‘I love her a lot, Ned, but sometimes she can make it hard to give her what she needs.’ She turned her head and smiled at me again. ‘We got to Biegelman’s, she found exactly the right coat, it was on sale, we hadn’t seen anything else all morning, so it should have been simple. All right, it was a little expensive, but not much. I would have bought it for her in a second.’

I was thinking: The story always hides some other, secret story, the story you are not supposed to know.

‘But Star didn’t like my spending so much on her, so she had to play this game. The coat wasn’t the right color. Could the clerk see if they had one in a lighter color? It was obvious they only had that one, and the only woman in Naperville likely to buy it already had it on. Mr Biegelman came up to help, and I walked away. When I looked back, your mother was gone. Then I looked through the window, and there she was, out on the sidewalk in that coat. She was talking to you.’

‘Me?’

‘That’s how it looked,’ she said. ‘Star seemed so unhappy … so disturbed … I don’t know what. You, the person I thought was you, turned his back on her and walked away. I started to go toward the door, but Star came back in and gave me this look, so I didn’t say anything. Mr Biegelman gave us the extra discount, and I pulled out my credit card. But I did ask her about it on the way home.’

‘What did she say about the guy?’

Laura pushed herself off the pillar. ‘First she said there wasn’t any guy. Then she said, oh, she forgot, a stranger came up and asked for directions. Then she cried. She didn’t want me to notice, and to tell you the truth, I was a lot more interested in what you’d have to say, because Star wasn’t about to tell me anything at all. But it wasn’t you, so I made a mistake. Obviously.’

‘I guess so,’ I said.

My flight was announced, and Phil pulled me into an embrace and told me he was proud of me. Laura’s hug was longer and tighter than Phil’s. I told her I loved her, and she said the same to me. I surrendered my ticket, stepped into the mouth of the jetway, and looked back. Phil was smiling and Laura was staring at me as though memorizing my face. I waved goodbye. Identically, like witnesses being sworn in at a trial, they raised their right hands. Other passengers swept forward in a confusion of ski jackets and carry-on bags and urged me down the jetway.

10

Middlemount closed around me like a fist. In the week before finals, I sank deeper into the old pattern, rushing under metal skies between classes, the meal job, and the library, often falling asleep with my churning head on an open book. Sometimes it seemed as though I had passed from one frozen night into another without the intervention of daylight; sometimes I looked at my watch, saw the hands pointing to four o’clock, and could not tell if I had missed some badly needed sleep or a couple of classes and an appearance before the pots and pans.

On the first day of finals I had the English and French exams, history on the second day, then a day off, chemistry on the next, and calculus on the final day. Through Monday and Tuesday I can remember coming into the bright classrooms, taking my seat, getting the blue books and the exam sheets, and thinking myself so far behind that I was incapable even of understanding the questions. Then the words began to sink in, the darkness to lift, and soon, as if more by radio transmission than by thought, coherent sentences declared themselves in my mind. I took dictation until the blue books were filled, and then I stopped.

On Wednesday night I fell asleep at my desk. Raps at the door jolted me awake. When I opened it, I was startled to see Simone Feigenbaum, a girl from my French class, standing in front of me, dressed, as always, in black. Simone was from Scarsdale. She smoked Gitanes and was in the Bob Dylan – Leonard Cohen crowd. The thought that she probably wanted to borrow a textbook evaporated as she flowed in and put her arms around me. In the midst of a lengthy kiss, she pulled down my zipper and reached, with a sly, comic bravado, within.

My clothes windmilled away, and hers flew off over her head. We toppled into my narrow bed.

Instantly, Simone Feigenbaum was zooming over, under, alongside my body, her breasts in my face, then her stomach, then her buttocks, then her face was in my face and both of us were working away like pistons until I seemed suddenly to turn inside out. Her breasts nudged my face and I got hard without ever actually getting soft and we did everything all over again, only slower. And so on, repeatedly, until my thighs ached and my penis was waving a limp white flag. I was eighteen, and a virgin besides, technically speaking.

Around six in the morning, Simone slipped out of bed and into her clothes. She asked if I had an exam that day. ‘Chemistry,’ I said. She produced a vial of pills, shook one into her hand, and dropped it on my desk. ‘Take that fifteen minutes before you go in. It’s magic. You’ll amaze yourself.’

‘Simone,’ I said, ‘why did you come here?’

‘I had to make sure I screwed you at least once before you flunked out.’ She opened the window of my ground-floor room and jumped down into the crest of snow between the dormitory and the path. I closed the window and slept for a couple of hours.

I swallowed the pill on my way to the exam. Another bright classroom, another menacing desk. During the distribution of the blue books and question sheets, I felt as if I had taken nothing stronger than a cup of coffee. I opened the blue book, read the first question, and discovered that not only did I understand it perfectly, I could visualize every detail of the relevant pages in the textbook as if they were displayed before me. At the end of the hour I had filled three blue books and completed all but one of the extra-credit questions. I floated out of the classroom and gulped a quart of cold water from the nearest fountain.

The calculus exam was twenty-two hours away. I took my guitar into the lounge and spent the afternoon playing better than I had thought possible for me. I skipped dinner and forgot about my meal job. Instead, I remembered the bridge to ‘Skylark’ and the verse to ‘But Not for Me.’ I knew who my mother had met on the sidewalk outside Biegelman’s – me, the real me, this one. After six or seven hours I said, ‘I have to memorize the math book,’ and returned to my room on a wave of applause.

When I opened the calculus textbook, I found that I had already memorized every page, including footnotes. I stretched out on the bed and observed that the cracks in the ceiling described mathematical symbols. Someone yelled, ‘Dunstan, phone call!’ I floated to the telephone and heard Simone Feigenbaum asking me how I felt. Great, I said. Had the pill done any good? I think it did, I said. Did I want another one? No, I said, but maybe you could come back to my room.

‘Are you kidding?’ Simone laughed. ‘I’m still sore. Besides, I have to study for my last exam. I’m going home afterward, but I’ll see you after the break.’

I levitated back to my room and stretched out. Sleep refused to come until seven in the morning, when absolute darkness swarmed from every wall and corner and escorted me into unconsciousness.

Someone who may or may not have been me had possessed the foresight to set my alarm clock for an hour before the exam. The same someone had shifted the clock to my desk, forcing me to get up when it yowled. Once I was on my feet, I reeled to the showers and stood beneath alternating blasts of hot and cold water, realizing that I had slept through both breakfast and lunch, in the process missing two tours of duty before the pots and pans, and would have to survive the math exam before satisfying my hunger. I rummaged through my desk drawers, discovered half a packet of M & M’s, an entire Reese’s peanut butter cup, and the greenish, salt-flecked remains clinging to the bottom of a potato chip bag. I rammed this gunk into my mouth on the way to the exam. Professor Flagship strolled from chair to chair, handing out thick wads of paper covered with mathematical formulae. He said, ‘This is a multiple-choice examination. Check off the answers and use the blue books for calculations.’ To me, he added, ‘I wish you luck, Mr Dunstan.’

I believe that I had a dim grasp of the first few problems. All the rest were in a mixture of Old Icelandic and Basque. I kept falling asleep for two-second, three-second naps. Occasionally I covered a page with doodles or scrawled the random words that limped across my mind’s surface. At the end of the hour I tossed the question sheets and blue books into the heap on the table and went off-campus to guzzle beer at a student bar until the return of unconsciousness.

My recurring dream descended once again.

All the next day I lay in bed listening to the slamming of car doors and shouts of farewell. Because I didn’t remember going to the bar, I did not understand that I had a monstrous hangover. How could I be hungover? I almost never drank alcohol. To the extent I was capable of thinking anything at all, I thought that I had come down with some spectacular new variety of flu.

Memory returned in dreamlike, photographic flashes. I watched my hand add a caricature of Professor Flagship’s face to the body of a lion with stubby wings, protruding breasts, and a bloated penis. For a second, Simone Feigenbaum revolved her lush little body above me, and I thought: Hey, that happened! I opened a blue book to a fresh page and in neat block letters wrote, THE MAIN CAUSE OF PROBLEMS IS SOLUTIONS. I remembered tossing my test papers on the professor’s desk and watching, many hours later, a stiff, disapproving bartender swiping a cloth over five inches of polished mahogany and setting down a glass crowned with foam. I realized where I was and what I had done. It was the Saturday after final exams, and the campus was filled with parents picking up their sons and daughters. Other students, myself supposedly among them, were taking the bus to the airport.

The universe in which people could pack bags and climb into their fathers’ cars seemed unbridgeably distant from mine. I huddled in bed until the window was dark and the last car had driven away.

By tradition, our instructors posted exam grades in a glass-encased bulletin board on the quad before the college mailed them out. After the break, the board would be surrounded by students looking up other people’s grades. I expected to see my English and French results on the coming Monday, history no later than Tuesday, chemistry on Tuesday or Wednesday. I had extravagant hopes for chemistry. Calculus, the one that terrified me, probably would not show up until Wednesday.

The Grants expected me to come into O’Hare on Sunday afternoon. I was to call them Saturday to confirm, and my ticket was already waiting at the airport. When I felt capable of rational speech, I put in a collect call to Naperville and spoke an escalating series of whoppers about an invitation to join a friend in Barbados, and if they didn’t mind … My friend’s sister had backed out, so I’d be taking her place, the tickets were already paid for, and the family didn’t mind because I’d bunk with my friend and save them the price of a room …

The Grants said they’d be sorry not to see me, but spring vacation wasn’t far away. Phil asked if my friend might happen to be of the female variety. I said, no, he was Clark Darkmund, the name of a cherubic, porn-obsessed Minnesotan who had been rotated into the single next to mine after disagreeing about the merits of the philosophy expressed in Mein Kampf with his former roommate, Steven Glucksman of Great Neck, Long Island. Yes, I said, Clark was an interesting character. Great conversationalist, too.

‘How did the finals go?’ Phil asked.

‘We’ll see.’

‘I know my Ned,’ Phil told me. ‘You’re going to surprise yourself.’

After dinner in a student bar, I walked back to the campus. When I turned onto the path to my dorm, a German exchange student named Horst who looked like an Esquire model hastened up out of nowhere and appeared beside me. Had he been cherubic, Horst would have resembled Clark Darkmund, but there was nothing cherubic about him. He smiled at me. ‘Here we are again, alone in this desolate place. Now that you are sober, let us go to my room and undress each other very, very slowly.’

His proposition deepened my gloom, and my response surprised me even more than it did Horst. ‘I have a knife in my pocket,’ I said. ‘Unless you disappear right away, your guts will freeze before you know you’re cut.’

‘Ned.’ He looked stricken. ‘Didn’t we have an understanding?’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll count to three. Here goes. One.’

He summoned a charming smile. ‘That object in your trousers is undoubtedly far more magnificent than a knife.’

‘Two.’

‘You do not remember our conversation of last night?’

I shoved my hand into my pocket and closed it around the remnant of a roll of Life Savers.

Horst slid into the darkness with a regretful moue.

The next morning, transparent sunlight streamed down from a sky of clear, hard azure. The crisp shadows of leafless poplars stretched out across the bright snow.

Accompanied by my own crisp shadow, I walked into Middlemount and wandered around, sipping at a container of coffee and biting into an apple danish. Church bells announced the beginnings or endings of services, I didn’t know which. I inspected shop windows and otherwise goofed off. The church bells broke again into speech. Through down-sluicing light, I walked back to the college and at a crucial junction experimentally turned left instead of right and soon found myself at the edge of what appeared to be an extensive forest. Weather-beaten letters on a wooden sign nailed to the trunk of an oak read JONES’S WOODS.

At the time, all I understood was that if I walked into the woods I would feel better, so I left the road and walked into the woods.

I felt better, instantly. I seemed to be magically at home, or if not precisely at home at least in the right place. Across crunching snow packed so hard it scarcely registered my footprints, I wound through trees until I reached a ring of maples and sat down in the center of their circle, more at peace with myself than I had been since my arrival in Vermont. My anxieties dwindled, and my life was going to be all right. If I had to leave college, that was all right, too. I could always wait on tables at Inside the Outside. I could marry Simone Feigenbaum and be a kept man. Squirrels with fat winter coats raced down the trunks of oak trees and skidded across glassy snow. Eventually the light began to die, and the trees crowded closer together. I stood up and walked out.

Monday morning I went into town and bought a long salami, a square of cheddar cheese, a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, a bag of Cape Cod potato chips and two smaller bags of peanut M & M’s, a quart of milk, and a six-pack of Coca-Cola. Back in my room, I wrapped slices of salami and cheese in bread and washed down spoonfuls of peanut butter with Coke. Then I put on my coat and hurried to the quad to find three of my grades posted on the board. In English, I got a B+ on the exam and a B+ for the semester; in French, B and B, disappointing but not entirely unexpected. History, in which I thought I had done well, was a disaster. My C on the exam lowered my semester grade to B–. One of the conditions of my scholarship was that I had to maintain a certain average, and I’d been counting on a B in history to balance Ds or even a potential failure in my other two courses.

I stepped back from the bulletin board and noticed something move off to my left. Horst was watching me from beside a pillar at the top of the library steps. His attitude, of an almost regal patience, suggested that he had been there for some time. He drew a gloved hand from the pocket of his duffel coat and gave a slow, ironic wave. I lowered my head and took the nearest path in the opposite direction, on my way back to the right place.

Once I had entered the clearing, worries about examinations and grade-point averages floated off into the transparent air. For a disembodied time, I became a recording eye. Squirrels repeated their comic turns. A fox stepped out between the maples, froze, and rewound itself as if on film. When the air began to darken, I reluctantly got to my feet.

Tuesday morning, I cowered starving in bed until 11:00 A.M., got up to gulp milk from the carton and gnaw at cheese and bread, climbed back in bed for another hour of deep-breathing exercises, and finally managed to propel myself into the shower. There was the slightest possibility that our chemistry grades might be announced that afternoon. Most professors posted their grades before 3:00 P.M., and shortly before that hour I hurried into the quad and inspected the board. My section’s chemistry results had not been posted. I rammed junk food into my pockets and on the way to my sanctuary went into the brick cubicle of the dormitory post office to check my mailbox.

Wedged like a letter bomb behind the glass door of my box was an unstamped, cream-colored envelope addressed to ‘Mr Ned Dunstar.’ It bore the return address of the dean of student affairs.