The Rules of Attraction

  PAUL We were lying in my bed since the Frog was back. Sean sat up and leaned against the wall and asked me to hand him the cigarettes that were on the floor. I lit one for myself then gave them to Sean.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “No. Let me guess. Paul’s tense, right?”

  “Ten points for Sean.”

  He got up, disgusted, and put on his boxer shorts.

  “Why do you wear boxer shorts?” I asked.

  He ignored me and continued getting dressed, cigarette dangling from his lips.

  “No, I mean, I really never noticed that before, but you wear boxer shorts.”

  He pulled on a T-shirt and then tied up his paint-splattered boots. Why were they paint splattered? Did he fingerpaint or something?

  “Do you have them in different colors? Say, mauve? Or maybe tangerine?”

  He finished dressing then sat on the chair next to the bed.

  “Or do they only come in that … asphalt gray?”

  He just stared at me. He knew I was acting like a fool.

  “I knew a guy named Tony Delana in ninth grade who wore boxer shorts.”

  “That’s a real scorcher, Denton,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “So you don’t want to go to Boston tomorrow, is that it?” he asked.

  “Now, you have twenty points.” I put my cigarette out in an empty beer bottle that was on my nightstand and shook it.

  Sean just looked at me and said, “I don’t like you that much. I don’t know why I’m here.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” I say, getting up and putting on a robe. I smelled the robe. “I’ve got to do my laundry.”

  I scanned the room for something to drink, but it was late and we had finished all the beer. I reached over him and held a bottle up to the light to see if there was anything left in it. There wasn’t.

  “You’re going to miss The Dressed To Get Screwed party,” his voice was low and ominous.

  “I know.” I tried not to panic. “Are you going?” I finally asked.

  “Sure,” he shrugged, moved over to the mirror, still in the chair.

  “What are you going to wear?” I asked.

  “What I usually wear,” he said, staring at himself. The narcissistic little sonofabitch.

  “Is that right?” I looked around the room. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I wanted a drink, I walked over to the stereo and looked behind it. There was a half-empty Beck’s next to the speaker. I sat back on the bed.

  He stood up. “I’m gonna go.”

  “Where to?” I asked. I casually tasted the bottle. It was warm and flat and I made a face but drank it anyway.

  “All night study room,” he said. The narcissistic lying little sonofabitch.

  He walked to the door and I ended up blurting out, “I don’t want to go to Boston for the weekend. I don’t want to see my mother. I don’t want to see the Jareds,” (though I probably did want to see Richard) “and I don’t want to see Richard from Sarah Lawrence” (hoping to make him jealous) “… and…” I stopped.

  He stood there, saying nothing.

  “And I don’t think I want to leave you here…” Because I don’t trust you, I didn’t say.

  “I’m gonna go,” he said. He opened the door and looked back. “I’ll take you to the bus station tomorrow. What time does it leave?”

  “I think eleven-thirty.” I took another sip of the beer, then coughed. It tasted terrible.

  “Okay, meet me at my bike at eleven,” he said, heading out.

  “Eleven,” I said.

  “Night.” He closed the door and I could hear his footsteps echo down the hallway.

  “Thanks, Sean.”

  I started to pack, wondering what Richard looked like now, trying to remember when I saw him last.

  SEAN Someone walks into The Pub, looks for someone, can’t find them and leaves, the door closes behind them. It wasn’t Lauren Hynde, the completely beautiful girl who had been leaving notes in my box, the only reason I’m in The Pub tonight, waiting to confront her. I saw her slip one in last Saturday, when I was up in Commons. I couldn’t believe it. I was so shocked that it was actually someone good-looking that I spent the last week in a sort of daze. Now I’m sitting at a table with four or five or six people, kind of listening to some lame conversation, looking for the girl. They’re all talking about what’s going on at the sculpture studio, about sculpture teachers, and sculpture parties, about Tony’s latest sculpture, even though they have no idea what it says. Tony told me it was supposed to be a steel vagina, but none of these idiots can figure it out.

  “It’s so disturbing, lyrical,” this girl with a serious problem says.

  “Very potent. Undefinable,” her friend, some dyke from Duke who’s visiting, who looks like she’s had way too much MDA, agrees.

  “It’s Nimoy. Pure Nimoy,” Getch says.

  My attention drifts. Somebody else walks in, somebody who if I remember correctly gave me a totally unprovoked kiss on the lips at the last Friday night party. Peter Gabriel still plays on the jukebox.

  “But it’s Diane Arbus with none of the conviction,” one of the girls says and she’s serious.

  Denton gives me a steely look from across the table. He probably agreed with that.

  “But the revisionist theory on her seems completely unmotivated,” someone else gleefully replies. There’s a pause, then someone asks, “What about Wee Gee. What do you think about Wee Gee, for Christ sakes?”

  Vaguely horny I order another pitcher and a pack of Bar-B-Que potato chips, which give me indigestion. Peter Gabriel turns into more Peter Gabriel. The girl who kissed me on the lips last Friday leaves after buying a pack of cigarettes and in some warped way I’m disappointed. She’s not that pretty (slightly Asian, Dance major?) but I’d probably fuck her anyway. Back to the conversation.

  “Spielberg has gone too far on this one,” the angry mulatto intellectual with the neo-Beatnik casual but hip look plus beret who has joined the table hisses.

  Where has he gone? Does he just hang out in the Canfield apartment and drink like a maniac and split on parents weekend and have a whole bunch of friends visiting him every term from boarding school? What the fuck does he do with his life? Little Freshman girls confiding in him and long walks around the dorms after dinner?

  “Simply too far,” Denton agrees. He’s serious, not joking.

  “Simply too far,” I say, nodding.

  The table behind ours, Juniors arguing about Vietnam, some guy scratching his head, joking but not really, says, “Shit, when was that?” someone else saying, “Who gives a shit?” and this fat, earnest-looking girl who’s on the verge of tears, bellows, “I do!” Social-Science-Major-Breakdown. I turn back to our table, with the Art Fucks because they seem less boring.

  The dyke from Duke asks, “But don’t you think his whole secular humanism stems from the warped pop culture of the Sixties and not from a rigorous, modernist vantage point?” I turn back to the other table but they’ve dispersed. She asks the question again, rephrasing it for the intense mulatto. Who in the hell is she asking? Who? Me? Denton just keeps nodding his head like she’s saying something incredibly deep.

  Who is this girl? Why is she alive? Wonder if I should leave right now. Get up and say, “Goodnight fuck-ups, it’s been a sheer sensation and I hope I never see any of you again,” and leave? But if I do that they’ll end up talking about me and that seems worse and I’m seriously drunk. Hard to keep my eyes open. The only pretty girl at our table gets up, smiles and leaves. Someone says, whispers loudly, “She fucked … are you ready?” The table leans inward, even me. “Lauren!”

  The table gasps collectively. Who’s Laurent? That French guy who lives in Sawtell? Or is it the alcoholic girl from Wisconsin who works in the library? It can’t be my Lauren? It can’t be that one. There’s no way she’s a lesbian. Even if she is, it turns me on a little. But … maybe she’s been putting the notes in the wrong box. Maybe she meant to put the
m in Jane Gorfinkle’s box, the box above mine? I don’t want to ask which Lauren they mean even though I want to know. I look over at the bar, try to get my mind off it, but there are at least four girls I have slept with standing there. None of them are looking over at me. Businesslike and impersonal they sip beers, smoke cigarettes

  oh, what the fuck. I finally snap, get out of there, leave. As simple as that. I’m out the door. Fels is close by. I have some friends who live there, don’t I? But thinking about it bores the fuck out of me so I just walk around the dorm for a while and then split. Sawtell is next? Nah. But that girl, that girl who kissed me … I think she lives in Noyes, a single, room 9. I go to her door and knock.

  I think I hear some laughter, then a high-pitched voice. Whose? I feel like a fool but I’m a drunk, so it’s cool. The door opens and it’s the girl who left the table, not the girl who kissed me, and she’s wearing a robe and behind her I can see some hairy, pale guy in bed, lighting up a big purple bong on a futon. Jesus, this really sucks, I’m thinking.

  “Um, doesn’t Susan live here?” I ask, turning red, trying to keep it cool.

  The girl looks back at the guy in bed. “Does Susan live around here, Loren?”

  The guy sucks in on the bong. “No,” he says, offering it to me. “Leigh 9.”

  I leave, fast. I walk out, fast. I’m outside, it’s cold. What am I going to do? I think. What is this night unless I do something? Is this just going to be nothing? Like every other fucking night? Something goes through my head. I decide to go to Leigh 9, where Susan lives. I knock on the door. I can’t hear much but Springsteen’s “Nebraska” album. Great music to fuck by, I’m thinking. It takes a while but Susan opens the door, finally an answer.

  “What’s going on, Susan? Hi. Sorry to be bothering you at this hour.”

  She looks at me strangely, then smiles and says, “No problem, come in.”

  I walk in, hands in my jacket pockets. There are two Xeroxed maps of Vermont … actually it’s New Hampshire, or maybe Maryland, up on the wall, above the computer and the bottle of Stoli. I’m too drunk to do this I realize as I stagger in, take a deep breath. Susan closes the door and says, “Glad you stopped by” and locks the door and her locking the door just depresses me; it makes me realize that she wants to fuck too and that that’s what’s expected of me and it’s my own fault and it’s really Lauren Hynde I want and I think I’m going to pass out and she looks really desperate, really young.

  “Where have you been?” she asks.

  “Movie. Wild Italian movie. But it’s all in Italian so you can’t watch it stoned,” I say, trying to be rude, turn her off. “Subtitles, you know.”

  “Yeah,” she smiles kindly, still in love with me.

  “What I mean, like, um, why are those maps, um … Yeah, like what are those maps doing up there?” I ask. What a dwid.

  “Maryland’s cool,” Susan says.

  “I want to go to bed with you, Susan,” I say.

  “What?” She pretends she didn’t hear me.

  “You didn’t hear me?”

  “Yeah. I did,” she says. “You didn’t feel that way the other night.”

  “So, how do you feel about it?” I ask, letting that comment fly right over my head.

  “I think it’s kind of ridiculous,” she says.

  “How? I mean, why do you think so?”

  “Because I have a boyfriend,” she says. “Remember?”

  Actually, I don’t, but I blurt out, “That doesn’t matter. You don’t have to not screw because of that.”

  “Really?” she asks skeptically, but smiling. “Explain.”

  “Well, you see, it’s like this.” I sit on the bed. “It’s like this…”

  “You’re drunk,” Susan says. God, the name Susan is so ugly. It reminds me of the word sinus. She’s daring me. I can almost smell how wet she is. She wants it.

  “Where have you been all my life?” I ask.

  “Did you know I was born in a Holiday Inn,” I think she says.

  I stare at her, really confused, really fucked-up. She’s next to me on the bed now. I keep staring.

  I finally say, “Just get naked and lay or stand, I don’t care, on the bed and, like, it doesn’t matter if you were born in a Holiday Inn. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Perfectly,” she says. “Are you still an Art major by any chance?”

  “What?” I ask. My eyes are tearing. She’s dimming the lights and it’s all really happening, boyfriend or no boyfriend. I’m drunk but I’m not drunk enough to say no. In the bathroom in Commons today someone had written “Robert McGlinn has no penis and no testicles” about fifteen times above the toilet.

  She turns to me, her flesh glowing green because of the lighted words from the computer screen, and says nothing. I lay back and she starts sucking my dick and trying to stick a finger up my ass. It feels good and she’s really into it and I’m thinking what do you talk about in situations like this? Are you Catholic? Did you ever like the Beatles? Or was it Aerosmith you asked girls? High school girls you met who wore black armbands the day Steven Tyler got married. High school sucked. She’s sucking still, her lips moist but hard. I reach under her shirt, massage her tits. She has a little stubble under her arm and it doesn’t really turn me off. It doesn’t turn me on all that much either, but it doesn’t turn me off.

  “Wait … wait…” I try to pull my underwear off all the way, then the jeans, but I’m on the bed and she’s sucking me and trying to push my legs farther apart and even though I’m sort of grossed-out by the whole thing, it feels too good to complain. She lifts her head up. “Diseases?” she asks. “Nope,” I say though I should just say yeah crabs and end this. She lays across me and we start kissing, deep, intensely. I lift her shirt up over her head, line of green saliva attached to our lips as she brings her head up. I touch the side of her face, then unbutton my shirt, kick my pants off. “Wait, turn the light off,” I tell her.

  She grins. “I like it on.” She places her hands on my chest.

  “Well, like, fuck that. I want it off. Deal with it.”

  “I’ll turn it off.” She does. “Is that better?”

  We start kissing again. Now, what’s going to happen, I wonder. Who’s going to initiate the dreaded fucking? What would her parents say if they knew that this is all she does here? Write haiku on her Apple, drink vodka like some crazed alcoholic fish, screw constantly? Would they disown her? Would they give her more money? What?

  “Oh baby,” she moans.

  “You like this?” I whisper.

  “No,” she moans again. “I want the lights on. I want to see you.”

  “What? I don’t believe this.”

  “I want to know what the fuck I’m doing,” she says.

  “I don’t see how you can be confused,” I tell her.

  “I’m into neon,” she says, but she doesn’t turn it back on. I push her head down.

  She starts sucking my cock again. I start to get her off with my hand. She gives decent head. I tell her “Wait-I’m gonna come…” She lifts her head. I go down on her, slowly, kiss her tits (which are sort of too big) and then past her stomach to her cunt, spread, swollen, three fingers easing into it, licking it at the same time. Bruce is singing about Johnny 69 or someone and then we’re fucking. And I come—spurt spurt—like bad poetry and then what? I hate this aspect of sex. It’s always someone wanting and someone giving but the giver and the wanter are hard to deal with. It’s hard to deal with even if it goes good. She hasn’t come, so I go down on her again and it tastes vaguely seedy and then … where do you go once you’ve come? Disillusionment strikes. I can’t stand doing this and I’m still hard so I start to fuck her again. She’s groaning now, humping up, down, up, and I put my hand over her mouth. She comes, licking my palm, snorting. It’s over.

  “Susan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Where’s the Kleenex?” I ask. “Do you have a towel or something?”

  “Di
d you come yet?” she asks, confused, lying in the darkness.

  I’m still in her and I say, “Oh yeah, well, I’m gonna come. In fact I’m coming now.” I moan a little, grunt authentically and then pull out. She tries to hold me, but I just ask for some Kleenex.

  Susan says, “I don’t have any,” and then the voice cracks, she starts to cry.

  “What? What’s wrong?” I ask, alarmed. “Wait. I told you I came.”

  LAUREN Victor hasn’t called. I’ve changed my major. Poetry.

  What do Franklin and I do? Well, we go to parties: Wet Wednesday, Thirsty Thursday, parties at The Graveyard, at End of the World, Friday night parties, pre-Saturday-night party parties, Sunday afternoon parties.

  I try to quit smoking. Write letters to Victor in computer class that I never send. Franklin always seems to be broke. He wants to sell blood to get some cash, maybe buy some drugs maybe sell some drugs. I sell some clothes and old records in Commons one afternoon. We spend a lot of time in my room since I’ve got a double bed. I’ve stopped painting completely. Since Sara left (even though the abortion by her account wasn’t traumatic enough to excuse her absence) I watch her cat, Seymour. Franklin hates the cat. I do too, but tell him I like it. We hang out in the Sensory Deprivation Tank. Sometimes Judy and Freshman and me and Franklin go to the movies in town and no one cares. What is going on? I ask myself. We drink a lot of beer. The boy from L.A., still wearing shorts and sunglasses and nothing else, came on to me at one of the parties last week. I almost went home with him but Franklin intervened. Franklin is an idiot, really unintentionally hilarious. I have come to this conclusion, not by reading his writing, which is science fiction, which is “heavily influenced by astrology,” which is terrible, but by something I don’t understand. I tell him I like his stories, I tell him my sign and we discuss the importance of the stories but … I hate his goddamned incense and I don’t know why I’m doing this to myself, why I’m being such a masochist. Though of course it’s because of a certain handsome Horace Mann graduate who’s lost in Europe. I try to quit smoking.