Teddy Wayne - Loner

“Mmhuh,” I said.

Her heartbeat was palpable to my cradling arm. “Well,” she said, “I hope you’re not intimidated by my extensive erotic record.”

A humble, self-deprecating remark that, a couple of weeks earlier, would have made me banter back with wordplay, maybe compel me to recant my statement and tell her the truth. But now, after I’d captured you pre- and post-shower, Sara’s inexperience only reminded me that we were two virgins and that you were adventuring elsewhere on campus. People like you didn’t mutually masturbate — you had sex. No, even that was putting too chaste a spin on it. You fucked.

Citore drocer, I thought.

“That’s all right,” I said, offering neither any real assurance nor a lighthearted follow-up to put her at ease. My arm remained around her, but it suddenly felt like it wasn’t mine anymore, a prosthetic limb.

Another silence as her wheels turned for the phrasing of her next question. “Did you have a girlfriend in high school?”

“Heidi,” I answered.

“When were you together?”

“Tenth grade on.”

“When’d you break up?”

“This summer,” I said. “She wanted to stay together for college. I didn’t.”

Sara processed that revelation for some time. “What was she like?”

“She was nice.”

“Was she pretty?”

“Well, she was the lead in most plays. I guess that says something.”

“Who’s prettier, me or her?” Sara asked, then quickly laughed. “Just kidding.”

I yawned loudly. “I’m actually kind of tired. Mind if we go to sleep?”

“Of course,” she said.

As I dozed off to the white-noise machine, I stroked Sara’s arm, mentally elongating it until it reached your lithe proportions.

The one way to guarantee I sat by you in Prufrock would be to wait for you to enter the room first, tricky to engineer, since you were consistently late to class. The next Tuesday I stood outside the door in Harvard Hall, pecking at my phone. As the students trickled in and you still hadn’t shown, I grew anxious; I’d yet to be tardy for any classes, and though they didn’t take attendance at the lectures, I didn’t want to blemish my self-monitored perfect record.

When I heard, through the door, Samuelson begin his lecture, I gave myself a deadline: three more minutes.

Five minutes later I was about to go in, when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I stole a look down the hallway to confirm it was you, pocketed my phone with the certitude of someone finished with his important business, and looked up.

“Hey,” I said.

You nodded. There was now, at least, instant facial identification.

I opened the door for you. You went to the nearest empty seat. It didn’t look strange when I sat in the one next to it; we’d entered the room together and these were the easiest-to-reach places.

I would be sitting within a foot of you for eighty minutes. There was no chance I could follow Samuelson’s winding disquisition on The Portrait of a Lady and Daisy Miller .

My peripheral vision was limited to your left hand, its blue rivers of veins faintly flowing under smooth skin, its piano-player fingers, its pale pink nails and their small white suns cresting over the curved horizon. I could absorb more comprehensively your scent, whose intimations that I’d nosed before now blanketed me: an amalgam of your shampoo and lavender perfume, a hint of cigarettes and whatever natural aroma you exuded. If I could inhale it continuously, eternally, without ever breathing out, I would.

Samuelson riffled through papers on his lectern as he prattled on. “One of you wrote an essay this week that nicely dovetails with that point. Let me just find it…”

We overestimate destiny’s role in our lives, selectively applying it to favorable outcomes; think of all the times when you didn’t run into your long-lost friend in the street, when you didn’t just catch a bus, when you didn’t get placed in a dorm with Veronica Morgan Wells. Or, more starkly, of all the good things that never happened to you because you weren’t born as someone else with a better life. But the law of averages — which, when advantageous to us, we prefer to call fate, when disadvantageous we decry as bad luck, and when neutral we ignore — will occasionally smile upon us when we most need it.

Samuelson located the correct paper. “David Federman argued that, quote, ‘perhaps the peg-leg-as-primal-wound is intended to throw the reader off the scent with a facile psychological misreading, and Melville’s underlying point is that Ahab is simply a susceptible participant in an economic system designed for manic, unslakable ambition. The real primal wound is not his missing leg; it is America.’ ”

I hadn’t even known Samuelson read the student essays; my section leader must have been so taken with my writing that she’d pressed it on him. It was thrilling to hear those sentences preached to the entire room, especially the final clause, intoned with the halting majesty of a presidential peroration or the voice-over in a domestic car commercial. Rendering the experience even more exhilarating: you, in an orchestra seat to witness my glory.

“David, are you here?” Samuelson asked, peering out into the crowd, since he didn’t know who I was.

Everyone looked around for the mystery writer. I raised my hand slowly, as if reluctant to take credit.

I savored your surprise next to me: you didn’t know who David Federman was, either; might not have even remembered my first name and certainly didn’t know my last. You wouldn’t forget it now.

“It’s a compelling idea — I’d love to discuss it further,” Samuelson said to me. “Sign up for office hours.”

He dismissed us. My body, to others, remained earthbound, but I was in a crow’s nest high above them. And good luck, let alone destiny, had nothing to do with it. No; years of solitude, hours spent reading when others were going to birthday parties and sleepovers and keggers, had all built up to Professor Samuelson’s public acclamation for an essay I’d tossed off in a single sitting. I imagined him inviting me to guest lecture an upcoming class, whatever topic I liked; he just wanted the other students to be inspired by my example, and you would sit in the front row, transcribing every word, marveling at my harpoon-sharp mind.

I stood up poker-faced, the star running back who no longer needs to spike the football in the end zone to celebrate his victories.

“Nice work,” you said as we filed out.

“Oh, thanks,” I said. “What did you write about?”

“I got an extension till tomorrow. I haven’t started yet.”

We stepped out into the honeyed light of a New England autumn afternoon. Students were starting to wear scarves. The air was spiced with the first fallen leaves. A breeze trembled a nearby oak, showering the pavement with acorns.

I walked with purpose in the direction of Sever, knowing you were heading there for Gender and the Consumerist Impulse.

“Which book are you writing about?” I asked.

“No idea,” you said. “I’m fucked.”

You didn’t mind cursing with me, cursing with a sexual term, with a sexual term that, as a sentence, could also suggest an explicit action.

“What about Moby-Dick ?”

“Mm,” you said, unimpressed. “Seven-hundred-page books by dead white men aren’t exactly my bag.”

“Yeah, I know.” I chuckled. “What’s interested you most so far?”

“I liked Daisy Miller .”

We were approaching Sever; I was running out of time, and this wasn’t a dialogue I could easily continue in Sara’s room.