Teddy Wayne - Loner

I returned to my desk and set my laptop down as if I were about to fire off the career-ending missive. You followed me in and shut the door behind you.

“I should be the one to do it, then.” You pushed the laptop closed and kept your hand pressed on top of it.

“You’ll talk to the Ad Board?”

You nodded.

“Do you have hard evidence?” I asked. “E-mails?”

“He never put anything incriminating in e-mail.”

“You must have texts with him,” I said. “Even if he deletes his, you still have them on your phone.”

You shook your head. “He uses a prepaid phone so his wife won’t see; he could deny writing them. My testimony is the only way to do it.”

“Do you want me to be there with you when you end things with him?”

“No,” you said. “He’s not dangerous. Just an asshole.”

Your eyes landed on the framed photo atop the bookcase of Steven and his cheerful parents on vacation in some warm-weather climate. You picked it up and studied it.

“Maybe you should try being with a nice guy for a change,” I said. “Or at least an assholish nice guy.”

The room’s silence was pierced by some stray shouts from the Yard.

“Maybe,” you said a little shyly, at last acknowledging what was getting harder to ignore the past few weeks. I thought of when I stood outside Sara’s door, timidly paging through 101 Idealistic Jobs That Actually Exist , how all I’d had to do was act the way I knew she wanted me to.

I leaned forward to kiss you. You recoiled.

“What the hell?” My tone and volume surprised us both. You held the picture frame up in front of you as if for protection.

“What’s your fucking problem?” I felt myself becoming hard. “You think I’m not good enough for you?”

“There’s no problem,” you said softly.

“Then put the picture down,” I ordered, just the way Liam bossed you around. As I advanced forward a step, you took one back.

“There’s no problem,” you repeated, finding yourself against the wall. Your hands dropped slowly but continued to clutch the photo. When I attempted to pry it from your fingers, you pushed my hand aside and gently pressed the long side of the frame against my crotch.

“This feels good, doesn’t it,” you said, running the frame up and down.

“Yes,” I said. “But put the picture down.”

“Shh.” You clamped your hand over my mouth. “Do you want me to keep going?”

I made an affirmative guttural sound as the Zengers merrily grooved over my stiff penis. I closed my eyes and you slid the picture faster and faster, buffing the surface, the friction heating up the denim, the bodily sensation less titillating than the psychological one, the first tremors of orgasm announcing themselves before the seismic wave.

“You really are an asshole,” you whispered in my ear, and I exploded, my legs buckling from the release of tension, hands groping the desk for support, a wail of the deepest rapture rising from my throat as you withdrew your hand from my face.

Then it was over and you were halfway out the door. I watched you go, collapsing into my desk chair like a boxer onto his corner stool after a twelve-round match.

It was happening.

I didn’t see you in the dining hall the next day, or the day after that. I could have e-mailed you, but I wanted to let things run their natural course. Our breakthrough would propel us to the subsequent, inevitable phase.

The night before the penultimate Prufrock I stayed up until sunrise writing my own paper, “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?: The Self as Staffage in Emily Dickinson.” I printed a copy for my section leader, then saved her the trouble of passing it along to Samuelson by e-mailing it to him directly. More public accolades for my work in front of you couldn’t hurt.

There were two possible explanations for your absence in class: you’d gone home early for Thanksgiving break or you were avoiding Tom. (Perhaps the Ad Board had advised you to do so as they prepared to bring formal charges against him.) He looked so pleased to be him, finger combing his wavy locks, stretching his arms up as he yawned, leaping to his feet and making a show of holding the door for the girl who arrived on crutches. The darling of the Harvard English department, who cowardly skirted loneliness when his pretty professor wife was away by taking advantage of the school’s most beautiful (and, fortuitously for him, emotionally masochistic) undergrad. He had no idea what was coming, the dolt. Life’s delicacies had been served to him on a platter, he’d devoured far more than his fair share, and now they were about to be whisked away.

The day before Thanksgiving I took the T to South Station and boarded an overheated, full-capacity Greyhound reeking of fast food and body odor. Five hours later I debussed in Newark, New Jersey, where my mother was waiting to pick me up. As I climbed into the passenger seat, she leaned across the console to give me a seat-belt-restrained embrace. “Welcome home!” she said.

In the beginning of the semester, when classmates had asked where I was from, their eyes lit up at the first word — a New Yorker , you could see them thinking — as I dithered before arriving at the letdown of the second. Ah, just a dime-a-dozen Jersey boy, punch line of America, our only selling points tomatoes and a blue-collar troubadour who had named one of his best albums after Nebraska.

And I couldn’t even claim affiliation with the plucky working-class Joisey of Springsteen lyrics. My milieu was that of the fairly successful professionals who weren’t quite able to hack it across the river and so had settled for suburban convenience, good public schools, and affordable real estate while living in the shadows of glittering skyscrapers.

On the ride home my mother asked about my courses and friends, and I told the truth about the former and succinct lies about the latter. I didn’t reveal that my second-class citizenship in the Matthews Marauders had vaporized because I’d broken up with my she-seems-nice girlfriend, whom I’d dated primarily to gain access to her roommate, a semester-long odyssey, a girl with whom I had (thanks to my essay-writing abilities and compromised academic morality, along with her angst over her self-destructive romantic entanglements) partaken in denim-mediated ménage à Zengers — oh, speaking of sexualized clothing materials, for onanistic activity I also purloined the girl’s bathrobe belt, the tip of which lives in my pocket, and I may as well mention that I’ve gotten into this kind of porn where the woman belittles the viewer about his inadequate manhood — but, yeah, classes are going swell and I’m having a blast, how’re Dad and Anna and Miriam?

After dinner, to avoid my older sister and her abrasively outgoing boyfriend, I hid in our finished basement to watch TV. The boyfriend came downstairs anyway while I was flipping channels, so I stayed on a revisionist documentary about Christopher Columbus in hopes of boring him off. A self-proclaimed “Columbus buff,” he happily settled in. As I stood by the basement fridge, nibbling at a fruit platter intended for Thanksgiving, my phone dinged with an e-mail from Daniel Hallman about an unofficial high school reunion he’d gotten wind of that was happening RIGHT NOW at Applebee’s (the one at the mall). A few weeks ago I would have deleted it immediately. But I’d had sex now, twice. And been brought to orgasm by you. No one at Hobart High had ever seen this David Federman. They hadn’t really been acquainted with the first iteration, either — but that was just as well.