Nicole balanced her book on her hip with one hand, took the jacket from him with the other. “Thanks, Craig,” she said. “Wow!”
“I’m not cold,” he said, and then wished he hadn’t. Instead of sounding chivalrous, now he sounded like he’d been looking around for a coat rack and had happened to run into her.
“Well, I’m freezing,” Nicole said, stuffing her arms into his jacket. “I was so stupid leaving the dorm like this. I guess I thought I’d be back for dinner, but then I got obsessed with this stupid paper, and ended up just eating one of those disgusting sandwiches out of the vending machine. I had no idea how cold it had gotten.”
“Yeah,” Craig said. “When’s your paper due?”
“Couple of weeks,” she said.
He couldn’t help opening his mouth and eyes in astonishment. “And you’re working on it already?”
Nicole laughed, rolled her eyes, and then widened them, mimicking him. “Yeah,” she said. “College is hard for some of us, Craig. Just because you’re one of those guys who just sails through everything with no problems . . .”
Craig considered correcting her, but decided not to. He shrugged.
“Perry says you just sort of open your book, and close it, and you’re done. Believe me, I wish I could get away with that.”
Craig was ready to get this part of the conversation over with. He remembered the clammy handshake Dean Fleming had given him in Chez Vin that first night, and the few phony sentences the dean had managed to stammer out about how great it was to have his old friend’s son in the Honors College, pretending it was a coincidence. Since then, on the few occasions Craig had passed Dean Fleming in the administrative hallway, the guy had gone way out of his way to pretend he didn’t know Craig any better than any of the other students, and Craig felt pretty certain he was pissed he’d had to do that favor for his old Dartmouth pal.
“Well, I should probably study more than I do.” He dragged a hand across his eyes. Was he mistaken, or was the light getting brighter the longer it lingered on Nicole Werner’s hair and face? He inhaled, and said, “So, want to walk back to Godwin?”
“Like I said, I’m waiting for Josie. Want to wait with me?”
“No,” Craig said. Too quickly. For a second there he’d forgotten about Josie. “That’s okay.”
He raised a hand in a gesture of farewell and took a step backward, but Nicole said, “What about your coat?”
She sounded alarmed, as if he were about to walk off a plane without a parachute—but maybe she always sounded alarmed. He remembered the way she’d waved Perry over in the cafeteria one night. Perry! she’d said. I forgot to tell you! I went home last weekend, and I saw Mary. She said to say hi!
Perry had just grunted. He hadn’t even looked up from his tray. Whoever Mary was had seemed like a really big deal to Nicole, but when Craig asked Perry about it, he said, “Who cares?”
“Nicole seems to care,” Craig pointed out. “She made this Mary sound like a long-lost cousin, or somebody risen from the dead.”
“Well, Nicole always sounds excited.”
It had occurred then to Craig, again, that Perry was nursing some unrequited love grudge, but he also thought he had a point. Nicole, and girls like her, did usually sound excited, or alarmed, or semihysterical, when they weren’t. It was something about the hard vowels and the crisp consonants and the way most of their sentences ended with “you guys!” And sounding like a question: “I’m, like, so hungry, you guys?!” You’d think some girl was starving to death, but she might just mean she wanted to borrow some quarters for a roll of Lifesavers.
“It’s not a problem,” Craig said, still backing away. “I’ll get it from you back at the dorm.”
“Wow!” Nicole said. “Thanks so much, Craig. You’re so nice!”
“Sure,” he said, trying to smile like a nice guy but imagining his own mug shot on a sexual predator website.
Josie had not, it seemed, told Nicole about the other night. Maybe, he hoped, she wouldn’t. But why wouldn’t she? Briefly he’d held out some hope that she’d been so drunk she didn’t even remember the incident, but that hope had been dashed when he’d passed her in the courtyard on Sunday morning, and she’d stopped dead in front of him.
“Hi,” he’d said.
“Yeah,” Josie had said. Craig had tried hard not to look her in the eyes, but they just bored straight into his own, and then he couldn’t look away. It was a bright morning, too, and his eyes started to water in the glare. He hadn’t left the dorm since Friday. He’d been pretty much either stoned or sleeping since he’d last seen her. “So, ‘hi’ is all you have to say to me?” she asked.
About a hundred bad jokes flashed through Craig’s brain, like having Eddie Murphy or Lenny Bruce shuffling a deck inside his skull, but he managed to keep his mouth firmly shut. The morning sun was making Josie’s hair look so black and shiny and smooth it scared the hell out of him. He couldn’t have spoken if he wanted to.
“You’re a great guy, Craig,” she’d said. “Really exceptional. I hope you rot in hell.”
And then she was gone so fast he didn’t know in which direction she’d left.
Shit, he thought. She definitely remembered.
He didn’t see her again for at least a week, but that was mostly because he’d been staying away from anywhere she might be—avoiding the stairwells near her hall, slipping out the side entrance to Godwin instead of going through the courtyard—and when he did see her again, luckily she didn’t see him. She and Nicole were together in the cafeteria, dressed up for some sort of Greek tea or soiree or salon or something equally feminine and mysterious and inane. (Rush Week started as soon as midterms were over, and half the girls in Godwin Honors Hall were joining sororities, appearing suddenly around the dorm every evening in pearls and skirts, while the guys who were rushing stumbled around looking disoriented and hung over.) As soon as he recognized Josie’s black hair, he’d scrambled to the back of the cafeteria as fast as he could.
The next week, he didn’t go looking for the study group on the night he knew they’d be down in the Alice Meyers Memorial Student Study Room, although he missed the group. He missed Nicole, and it pained him to think he’d never be in that room with her again, listening to her breathe through her nose as she read her textbook. By then, he assumed she hated him and that Josie had given her some ugly Cliffs Notes version of the events:
The way, in his bed, Josie had asked, “Are you wearing a condom?”
It was the first whole sentence she’d uttered since she’d stripped off her clothes and, standing shiningly naked in front of him, had whispered, “I want you to fuck me. I’ve wanted you to fuck me for a long time.”
“Condom? No,” he’d said, sounding more annoyed than he’d meant to. But when would he have put on a condom? Did she think he’d come out of the shower wearing one?
Her dark eyes, bleary as they were, shot open then, and Josie put her hands on his chest, shoving, and said, “Get off!”
“What?” Craig asked.
“I said get off of me!”
Craig rolled off of her, although every nerve ending and instinct he had—his brain having been turned into a kind of strobe light—was telling him to stay on top of her and to keep going.
“I’ll get pregnant,” she said. “Or a disease!”
“Huh?” Craig said. “Aren’t you on the pill or something?”
“No,” Josie said. “Why would I be? I’m not even sexually active right now.”
At this, Craig had snorted, and said, “I’d say right now you’re pretty sexually active.” He hadn’t intended to sound so sarcastic, but the whole thing was just so fucking stupid. He’d been minding his own business when she’d come into his room and taken off her clothes and pulled him down onto her in his bed.
But at that point, she was already out of his bed, pulling her little silky panties up over her wildly lush and dark-haired pussy, and then she was looking around for her top, and Crai
g sighed, too loudly, and flopped down on his back and said, “I’ll go see if somebody on the floor will give me a condom,” before he realized she was crying.
“I can’t believe this,” Josie said, pulling her lacy tank top down over her breasts.
Craig sat up at the edge of the bed then. Luckily, he’d completely deflated, but he pulled his towel up off the floor and put it over his dick anyway. “Can’t believe what?” he asked, but by then she was dressed, and she’d unlocked his door, slipped out of it, and slammed it behind her. For just a second, in the space she opened as she left, Craig could hear the party going on in the hallway—all the hardworking students celebrating the harvest. Somehow he pictured them in plaid shirts and gingham dresses—ruddy with good health, living their productive lives, while he searched the dresser for clean boxers, put them on, got back in his messed-up bed, and shoved the buds of his iPod as deeply into his ears as he could.
But now, as he rounded the corner, jacketless, to Godwin Honors Hall—which looked stately and decrepit at the same time under a low, bright moon—he was really hoping that maybe Josie wasn’t so mad at him anymore, or at least had never told Nicole what had happened. Truly, he never really thought he stood a chance with Nicole anyway (because, for one thing, he knew he’d never have enough courage or imagination to figure out how to get together with a girl like that: every girl he’d ever hooked up with had made the moves on him first, and it seemed unlikely that Nicole would be that kind of girl), but it had surprised him how sad he was, after the shit with Josie, to think he’d blown that chance with Nicole without ever even actually having it.
When he came up the walk to the dorm, Lucas was smoking a cigarette under an elm tree in the courtyard.
“So!” Lucas called out. “Did you strike out again, young man?”
Craig held out his hand for a cigarette, but Lucas patted his pocket and said, “I’m out,” and then, “She’s not for you anyway, Craig. She’s one of those girls who’s waiting for marriage, and then she wants two kids and an SUV, and wants to stay home and bake cookies all day while you slave away at some shitty job. On the other hand, you’ve got ‘fuck-’em-and-dump-’em’ written all over you.”
“What?” Craig asked, sincerely astonished by this assessment. “Go to hell, Lucas. I do not have ‘fuck-’em-and-dump-’em’ written all over me.”
“Yeah, you do, Craig. You look at girls like you hate ’em.”
“What? I do not.”
Lucas shrugged, and tossed his cigarette over the wrought-iron fence and onto the sidewalk.
“Okay,” he said. “Sorry. Whatever. But I just don’t see you taking Little Miss Sunshine there on a walk through the park before you propose to her.”
To this, Craig said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. He watched the shadows of other students pass on the other side of the tiny glittering windows of Godwin Honors Hall. They knew what the hell they were doing there. For one thing, they hadn’t gotten into the Honors College just because their father was buddies with the dean.
“Besides,” Lucas asked, “wouldn’t you rather have a really great blow job than a really nice date? I mean, I just don’t picture that little virgin on her knees with her sweet red lips wrapped around your massive man tool.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Craig said.
But there was no animation in it.
No energy.
Lucas was probably right, he knew.
Lucas was often right.
Craig had never, he realized, been on an actual date. And the idea of one—asking for one, going on one—seemed like another one of those ten million things that all the normal guys, wearing khaki pants and carrying bouquets of daisies, would know exactly how to do, but which would be about as easy for Craig as building a spaceship and then going for a zip around the earth in it.
“Hey, sorry,” Lucas said to Craig’s silence. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Forget it,” Craig said, more to himself than to Lucas. “Let’s just go smoke a bowl.”
“Splendid idea, dude,” Lucas said. “Let us indeed go smoke a bowl.”
17
Perry Edwards was waiting outside her office when Mira got there. She wasn’t surprised. There’d been a look on his face when she dismissed the class at the end of the first session, and a hesitancy, as if he wanted to stay behind, had more to say. But Mira was already late for a committee meeting and had made a conscious effort to avoid eye contact, to gather her books and papers up in a way that would convey how rushed she was. She told herself that it was because she was rushed, but she knew there was something else, too—Perry Edwards’s intensity during class combined with what he’d said that day in the hallway when he was imploring her to let him audit:
“I have some fundamental questions about death, questions I’m trying to find answers to,” he’d said. “Because of Nicole. And not just philosophical questions. I have metaphysical questions. Physical questions.”
There was such an urgency in the way he’d said it that Mira had signed his override without asking for any further explanation.
At best, she thought, this was a true philosopher—a metaphysician in the making, one of the rare twenty-year-olds she occasionally encountered who actually had a mission, and the mind with which to accomplish it.
At worst, he was just another morbid college kid, and Mira knew all about those. Who knew better than she the fascination people had with death? Every year she took her class on a field trip to the local funeral parlor and the university hospital morgue, where she had plenty of opportunity to observe their rapt attention to the embalming table, their hushed awe upon being led through the basement to the room with the refrigerators. When there happened to be no dead bodies at the moment, someone—often the most squeamish-seeming of the girls—would express bitter disappointment. And when they were ushered into the autopsy room to find a body still on the coroner’s cabinet, there would be a rush of excited breathing, stillness, awe. Occasionally someone fainted, but no one ever left because they didn’t want to look.
Still, Perry Edwards’s interest seemed bigger than morbid fascination. During that first class he had an answer to every question. This material wasn’t new to him. He’d been doing his own research, for his own reasons. That’s what had made her think she might not want to talk to him after class—that she was not, perhaps, ready to hear about those reasons.
“See you next time,” she’d said that day at the end of class, without looking up.
“Thank you, Professor Polson,” he’d said as he stepped past her, out the door, and into the hallway.
Now he was standing outside her office door, and Mira cleared her throat so she wouldn’t startle him when she came up behind him. There was no one else in the corridor this early on a Thursday morning. He was looking at something she’d tacked up two semesters earlier, a photograph she’d taken in the Balkans during her Fulbright year: a color image of a charnel house in a small village in the mountains.
It had been, in the nineteenth century, the custom in the village to exhume corpses from the local cemetery a few months after their burial, and to display the skulls and long bones, brightly painted with the names and dates of their former owners. Mira had taken the photograph from a distance, but with a zoom lens on a sunny day, and the effect, when the photograph was printed up, startled even her: A dizzying multitude of skulls stared from their dry sockets at a little gathering of tourists, staring back.
Below the photo, Mira had taped an explanation of how the villagers believed that the dead could escape from their graves, and that the only way to avoid this was to dig up the bodies, to make sure they were in their graves, and that the flesh had fully decomposed. That way, if they came upon a corpse on which the flesh hadn’t rotted away (a potential “walker”), the villagers could go through the stake-through-the-heart ritual.
Once or twice, according to village folklore, they came upon an empty grave, and panic broke out. It was said that the village lo
st three quarters of its nonelderly population during one such panic. They packed up their wagons and moved, leaving behind any grandparents too enfeebled to come along. The year Mira visited the village it was little more than a field of a daisies with a stone church at the center of it, and its only attraction was the charnel house.
“Oh,” Perry said, turning. “Professor Polson. I don’t want to bother you. I just wonder if I could—”
Mira handed him the book she held in her hands, Nils Stora’s Burial Customs of the Skolt Lapps, as she felt around in the darkness of her leather bag for her keys, coming up, first, with the purple nipple of one of the boys’ bottles:
Despite everything she’d read or been told about what she should do, Mira still let the twins carry their bottles around with them when she took them to the store, or to the park. Sometimes the nipples were dislodged, or dirtied, or they wound up on the floor of the car. Who knew how long ago she might have stuffed this one into her bag? Perry Edwards looked at it, and then looked away, as if Mira had shown him something intimate—which, she supposed, it was.
She reached in again, and this time snagged the key ring, which was attached to a rubber heart that Clark had given to her years ago. (“Squeeze me,” it read, and when you did, a little mechanical voice said, “I WUV you.”) She unlocked the door and ushered Perry in, and he sat in the chair across from her desk, looked around, and then handed Mira’s book back to her.
“Are you . . . ? Is this . . . time? An okay . . . ?” he stammered politely.
“It’s fine,” Mira said. She cleared the books she had piled on her own chair, stacking them on the floor at her feet, and then sat down at her desk, folded her hands in her lap, and said, “How can I help you?”
“I’ve been reading,” Perry said, unzipping his backpack on the floor and leaning over it. He took out a book with the Roper Library’s generic brown cover, and held it up as if it would explain something on its own.
She took the book from him. It was G. Melvin’s Handbook of Unusual Phenomena—book twenty-four on the suggested reading list. It was a text Mira had put on loan in the Godwin Hall dormitory library several years before, but that, to her knowledge, no one had ever checked out. She kept it there for students who might want to explore Ukrainian death and burial superstition further—in particular an account (late for such an account) of a teenage girl killed in a farm accident circa 1952 in a primitive village in the foothills. The girl was said to have managed an escape from her tomb, and the proof of this was that, although she was not seen in the flesh, whenever a photograph was taken in the village in the year following her death, the girl’s shadowy image could be seen in the upper left- or right-hand corner.