Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“No? Ah, well.” The bus pulled ahead again. “Goodbye,” the woman called out, and walked away.

“Okay,” Tooly replied softly. So empty that word sounded to her. A motorbike buzzed past. Pedestrians in flip-flops hurried through gaps in the traffic.

But the woman — her mother — was gone.

TOOLY HAD PICTURED college life as wild and wanton. But Duncan and his roommates proved disappointingly straitlaced, notwithstanding the squalor of their apartment. They spent hours at classes and the library, toiling further once home. When darkness fell, they scarcely noticed, lit by the glow of their laptops, until someone walked into the room and flicked on a light.

Occasionally, Tooly passed a whole day alone there, perusing the bookshelves in their rooms, listening to music that Duncan had introduced her to. She ran the length of the parquet corridor in her socks and slid into the living room, where she browsed mail. In part, she lingered to avoid her home in Brooklyn, overwhelmed as it was by Sarah and her mercurial moods. In part, she lingered to find something of value. But there was another reason, of which she was a little ashamed: she liked this lifestyle — her version of college, which included neither examinations nor tuition fees, just people her age who had read books and had something to say about them. In the evenings, she lounged on Duncan’s bed and helped him decipher the findings in, say, Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball . Or she wandered into the common areas to watch TV with Xavi. She prepared meals for Duncan while he studied; sometimes she fed all of them.

But days passed before anything qualifying as “sexual relations” occurred between her and Duncan — not that it was entirely certain in these times of the Clinton-Lewinsky administration quite what constituted “sexual relations.” Anyway, he attempted nothing, as if unsure what was permitted and that he might be accused of criminally misinterpreting her signals. He lamented that, even in this age of gender equality, men still had to make the first move — guys were the ones who risked catastrophe. She disputed this, pretending to be unaware of any subtext, though she lay nude under the covers. Finally, she got fed up and took action.

“You’re quite good-looking,” he responded, as if in warning, “and I’m really not. You are aware of this?”

“I have a thing for ugly boys.”

“Wasn’t expecting that answer.”

“From now on, McGrory, I make it against the law for you to malign yourself. Only I get to.”

“And you make the laws?”

“Yes,” she said, kissing him. “I am the legislative body.”

She had slept with young men like him before, and they tended to fall into two categories: boys who concealed their astonishment at being allowed to touch female parts; and boys who sought to demonstrate their virility, as if Olympic judges awaited in the closet with scorecards. Often, young men sought reviews, wanting (not wanting) to hear how they rated and ranked — though not how many others that ranking might include. “Tell me. No, wait — don’t tell me. No, do … Why did you tell me?” Their self-absorption was not infrequently followed by professions of love. When quitting such types, she was surprised how they argued the matter, as if affections were up for negotiation. In Duncan’s case, he had such a low opinion of himself that all he expected was for her to withdraw.

But he had ample cause to esteem himself. Aside from his growing legal expertise, he had an exhaustive knowledge of music, played the piano decently (though he loathed practicing), and could draw effortlessly, able to reproduce in two dimensions anything that confronted him in three. On a sheet of inkjet paper, she sketched a nose. Within seconds, he had elaborated it into the nuanced face of a man with a pencil between his lips. He placed the pencil between his own lips and looked at her, trying not to smile.

“I’m so envious,” she said.

“It’s a useless skill.” Growing up, he had expected to apply this talent to becoming an architect like his father. But Keith McGrory had discouraged it, and Duncan conceded. “Anyway, architecture in New York is just for developers nowadays,” he told Tooly. “There’s almost an anti-design aesthetic — like they have to make buildings look cheap to demonstrate that they’re being efficient. This city is built for the market, not for beauty.” He began to gain momentum, then halted. “These aren’t even really my views. Just stuff my dad says. But I do sort of believe it.”

Even after a couple of weeks, he remained timid, preferring to have sex half clothed. She was struck by how many guys were ashamed of their bodies, when that was supposed to be an exclusively female preoccupation. Men were not only shy but shy about being shy. His self-consciousness had been exacerbated by the comments of his first girlfriend, who’d seen him in boxer shorts and remarked that a woman would kill for legs like his.

Tooly suspected a further cause for his awkwardness: he suffered from a conviction that women had for centuries lain miserably beneath hairy copulating oafs, with their liberation arriving sometime around 1968, after which every dignified man was obliged to compensate for the preceding millennia of orgasmic self-interest. This made sex a matter of due diligence. But she liked to giggle during — the act was so near silliness, in addition to being so near ecstasy. He remained powerfully embarrassed anytime he gained pleasure, as if he’d revealed himself as a shill for the patriarchy.

One time, it was different. He failed to put on a condom. Both noticed but neither interrupted the act. On the contrary, they continued more intensely, his self-consciousness gone for those minutes. The omission was ridiculous. For her to lose control of the situation — to risk tying herself to him — spooked Tooly. It aroused her, too.

Legs around him, both of them sitting up, she necked with him at length — not as a prelude to further activities but as an end in itself. No other animals did this, did they? Lips and tongues, eyelids fluttering, the disappearance from place and time. His eyes were swimming when she opened hers.

“Hello, you abomination,” she said.

“Hello, you beast.”

“You are a blotch on the soul of humanity.”

“Thank you, cannibal.”

“You’re welcome, evolution-defying organism.”

He hesitated, thinking up another endearment.

“Are you stuck, you botched cubist experiment?” she asked.

“I’m not stuck, you absurdist painting.”

“You’re copying me on the art front, you moral vacuum.”

“I’m not, you monstrosity.”

“You are, horrifying blobfish from the deepest depths of the abyss.”

That won — he laughed, kissed her chin.

In the background of this new affair, a civil war raged in that apartment between Emerson and Xavi, centering around the refrigerator. Emerson — in Billabong shorts and Reef sandals, plucking his chin beard indignantly — claimed someone was stealing his food, and applied raging Post-its (“Theft Is Wrong”) to his tofu burgers, Ben & Jerry’s frozen yogurt (“Not Yours”), even the Brita jug (“EMERSON water”). This played into the hands of Xavi, who took giddy pleasure in needling his roommate. Emerson resented Xavi’s and Duncan’s very presence, considering them interlopers in Columbia housing. He believed this justified his treating the common areas as his own, riding his mountain bike into the apartment, dumping it in the living room, mud-caked wheels spinning.

Of the three roommates, Xavi studied hardest yet also managed to be the most sociable, constantly off to parties, always dressed astonishingly: purple ascot, red jeans, paisley pocket square. He had moved to the United States at age seventeen, sponsored to attend high school in Connecticut and in possession of one battered suitcase, two silver suits, three black-and-white photos of his fiancée, a favorite Parker pen, and a toothbrush. Duncan — hardly a social success at that high school — befriended the new African kid, ate lunch with him, drove him around on weekends. By graduation, Xavi had become cultishly popular. He won a scholarship to Rutgers, and persuaded Duncan to enroll, too. In the dorms, Xavi proved a further success and always told his fans what an awesome kid Duncan was, insisting there was way more to the guy than it seemed.