Teddy Wayne - Loner

Yes, because I waited for her late arrival, and she intentionally rubbed her elbow against my arm, and she asked me to walk her across the Yard, and I saw you but tied my shoes so you wouldn’t see me.

“No, we just saw each other when we walked out,” I said. “Look, the movie’s starting.”

I snuggled closer to her and she dropped it. Sara teared up during the sequence when Dumbo’s mother cradles him with her trunk through the bars of her cage.

“I should’ve warned you,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I always cry during this scene.”

The awakening of an erection. I was disturbed by the lack of obvious stimuli — the main on-screen visual was the animated elephants’ non-pathetically phallic trunks — but when Sara’s tears grew more pronounced, I noticed, so did my penis. To allay it, I looked at the nearby Anti-Imperialist Marxism in Latin America . (I’d gotten about a hundred pages into it by now, all during sessions on Sara’s bed; it was more interesting than its dry title promised, an engaging primer on both specific Latin revolutions and the precepts of Marxism.)

“You didn’t find that sad?” Sara asked when the movie ended.

“It’s an animated kids’ movie,” I told her.

“You never seem to get moved by any of the movies or plays we watch.”

“Who gets moved by plays?”

“ I do.”

“Guys don’t cry during plays,” I said.

She studied my eyes, as if plumbing their depths might solve the mystery of me. “You don’t even laugh all that much. Like real laughs.”

“I laugh at your jokes,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true. I always at least smiled at them, but it was a forced response to the concept and effort, and I often had to remind myself to emit a polite chuckle.

“I should hope so.” She tapped my forehead with her finger. “Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?” I asked.

“That’s what I’d like to know,” she said. “Who’s in there?”

S’ohw ni ereht?

“No one,” I said in the automatonlike voice. “I’m actually a robot. I have no soul.”

“It’s a joke,” I added when she didn’t react.

“I feel like there’s a lot you bottle up inside,” she said gently. “I wish you’d let it out with me.”

“Would you really want some guy who’s uncontrollably weeping all the time?” I asked, thinking of Steven after his breakup.

“Maybe you’ve got a point,” she said with a short laugh. Then a hesitant undertone crept into her voice. “I told my parents about you.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“How smart and thoughtful you are. How you’re the one person here I feel like gets me.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“They want to meet you.” She chewed her bottom lip. “I thought maybe you could visit Cleveland over winter break.”

“Sure, that’d be fun,” I said, imagining the bleak prospect of being snowbound in Cleveland with the Cohens. “Let’s talk about it closer to the break. My family might be upset over losing time with me.”

“Do your parents know about us?” she asked a minute later, shyly averting her eyes.

“Uh-huh.” I hadn’t spoken to my mother since that phone call before the Ice Cream Bash and had relayed only bare-bones, predominantly academic data about my life over e-mail. “Well, just my mom. I figured she could tell my dad.”

“And what did you tell them about me?”

“The same stuff, pretty much,” I said. “Smart and thoughtful. Quotes Great American Novels to buttress her arguments.”

She mussed the part in my hair. “Buttress,” she said, smiling. “I should disable your thesaurus function, too.”

She left for the bathroom with her toiletries. Reliably hygienic Sara, who always brushed and flossed and rolled on clinical-strength antiperspirant before bed. Sara Cohen, who wanted me to visit her and her family in Cleveland, the only one who wanted me to let everything out with her.

There was a lot you bottled up, too. I knew hardly anything about you beyond what I’d seen on the Internet. I didn’t even know what your room looked like.

Without having thought it through, I found myself turning your doorknob.

I remained inside the doorframe. The swath of light that seeped in from Sara’s room outlined a path to your bed, where creamy sheets lay rumpled under a white comforter. The walls were bare except for a single canvas painting with an abstract design. A Turkish rug sprawled across the floor, a few articles of clothing strewn about it.

Sara would be back soon. As I shut the door, something slipped to the floor on the other side. Your robe. It had slid off the peg attached to the door. After hanging it back up, I buried my nose in the interior folds, the material that had recently been in contact with your nude skin. Rubbing the belt, my fingers came across an imperfection. Upon closer examination, I discovered it had, at one end, its own small VMW monogram.

I extracted the belt from the robe’s two loops, balled it up, and stuffed it in my pocket as a souvenir.

I was already between Sara’s pink flannel sheets when she came back. As we carried out our nocturnal routine I thought of the silk resting in my pocket. When I ejaculated, I spasmed six times on her stomach, as if discharging a revolver of all its bullets. Sara reached for the shirt she’d demoted to a rag for the cleanup of these skirmishes. It featured an illustration of a feathered quill crossing a blade with the cursive inscription THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD. She regularly laundered it, but it built up a mushroomy odor between washings as it putrefied in its airless bedside-table drawer, and the blue cotton was now marbled with semen stains. The penis mightier than the sword, I thought with creative kerning each time it came out as I pictured the nib of a retractable ballpoint pen emerging like an uncircumcised penis.

The next morning I hid the belt in my drawer. But before I left for brunch I snipped an inch off the tip where the small VMW monogram was stitched, tucked it into the fifth pocket of my jeans, next to the Lactaid pills, and throughout the day I stroked it with my index finger.

I anticipated your reaction when I’d eventually “find” the belt under your bed. You wouldn’t remember the missing monogram by then; you’d simply be grateful. How irksome it was to lose one small but integral piece from a larger item — a screw from an IKEA chair, the drawstring of a hooded sweatshirt, an ace from a deck of cards. Once it was gone, it could feel impossible to make the thing whole again, as if it were permanently doomed to a semi-functional life.

You shuffled in especially late to the next Prufrock lecture and didn’t sit near me. I caught your eye when class ended, but you were the first out the door. En route to Sever you ran into your black-haired friend Suzanne Marsh (Ilchester Place, London; Marymount International School London). The daughter, according to Google, of a famous British artist. The two of you procured cigarettes from your bags and stopped near University Hall to brazenly smoke within spitting distance of the school’s administrative offices. So you had time for her but not the guy who wrote your paper.

As I approached, a student with a clipboard buttonholed me.

“Want to sign this petition to improve the benefits of dining service workers?” he asked.

“For the dining service workers? Sure,” I said, loudly enough for you to hear me, and scrawled my name.

“If you give your e-mail we’ll send you updates on this and other movements, too,” he told me.

“Cool,” I said, writing down a fake address before sidling up to you. “Can I get one of those?” I asked, pointing to your cigarette.