Arthur should have been put on a bus back to New York that day, to honor the rule, but the rule was far from our minds. I wanted him to see a Friday-night party-tonight’s was at Crumbly House-and, though word had spread among the campus cokeheads that I was holding a fire sale out of Oswald Apartment, and Arthur had already covered Robert Woolfolk’s payment, we needed another big night, a party night, to shift the last of his stash.
We had the Apartment mostly to ourselves. Matthew had lately been sleeping with his sophomore girlfriend in an off-campus house in North Camden, and Arthur had taken Matthew’s place in the bedroom in the rear of the suite. My bed was in the big common room, with the fireplace and couch. That afternoon Arthur and I lounged stuporously in that front room as the thin December light dimmed in the bare apple trees outside, the two of us recovering from the night before, waiting for the night to come. Arthur didn’t like the Devo and Wire and Residents records Matthew and I had in constant rotation those days, and he’d dug deep in Matthew’s collection to find something he liked better: Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. We slumped in the dark, me on my bed and Arthur on the couch, and the hysterical symphonic glamour of that music seemed to speak for the rich absurdity of our circumstance so well it felt as though we’d never need to utter a word again.
The first knock on the door wasn’t a customer for Arthur’s wares but a member of the cleaning staff, a woman I’d seen a dozen times before but without any name that I knew. Pale and thick and stooped, she seemed to me a kind of crone, though she was surely no older than forty. It was her job to scour the Oswald bathrooms, most of which were common spaces, adjoining public corridors. But once a week she had to clean the private bathroom in our apartment, and so we let her in. With barely a nod at Arthur she vanished through Matthew’s room, into the back of the suite. I flipped the record and sagged back on my bed.
The woman was typical of an army of gray locals who maintained the buildings and grounds at Camden. They had none of the color or defiance of the usual townies, but were true servants, perfecting the art of deference to the point of invisibility. We knew the names of a few of the older men, those who’d served for twenty-five or thirty years and, having seen generations not only of students but professors come and go, achieved talismanic status. They had snaggly grins and names like Scrumpy or Red and were hailed as they bumped past on a mower or snowplow. But the toilet-scrubbing, Morlockian women never spoke. Runyon liked to call them little people, and I once saw him raise a beer and say, “I’d like to thank all the little people, especially the one that mopped the puke off the landing Saturday morning while I was still blissfully passed out.”
Before the album side was finished playing I had to rouse myself to answer another knock. Now it was Karen Rothenberg and Euclid Barnes. Karen and Euclid were friends of Moira’s, from Worthell House, and I suppose they were mine also. Now they were also customers-had been, already, during the three-day binge surrounding Arthur’s arrival. Euclid was a tall, soft junior with loose dark bangs that tumbled into his eyes. He was resignedly, mopily gay, never found anyone to have sex with, complaining bitterly of his isolation in Vermont. Karen was his protector and solicitor, a dark-haired, heavy girl who wore gothy makeup and affected a jaded exhaustion. In relentlessly pitching Euclid at various boys it seemed to me Karen was really protecting herself from a terror of her own desires. One desultory three A. M., weeks ago-which was to say, in Camden time, eons past-I’d fended off a double advance from Karen and Euclid. Now they were both openly obsessed with Arthur, the wild child of Brooklyn.
Euclid shook out of his pea coat and threw it over a chair, then immediately began fumbling with his cigarettes. “What are you listening to?” he said.
“Genesis,” I said.
“Nonsense, this sounds nothing like Genesis. Take it off.”
“Where’s Moira?” said Karen.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“She said she’d meet us here.”
“Okay, but I didn’t hear about it.”
Karen plopped herself on the couch at Arthur’s feet, startling him from his doze. This spree might be more wearing for him than I’d realized.
“I’m absolutely tapped,” Euclid muttered around his cigarette. He tossed four twenties onto the dresser. “My parents are late with a check, blame them. This has to be the last.”
“We’re almost out anyway,” I said. Arthur was sitting up, rubbing his eyes.
Euclid frowned, disapproving my unworldliness. “Isn’t there always more?” His eyes slid to Arthur, now understood to be cocaine’s personal escort in its inevitable passage from New York to Camden. For the first time it occurred to me this needn’t be a one-time thing. I’d thought of my dealerhood as a kind of paraphrase, a larkish appropriation of Runyon and Bee, upstairs. But then maybe Runyon and Bee had been ironic when they began too.
“This music is agony. It sounds like troll music.”
“What’s troll music?” said Arthur.
“It’s the music trolls listen to,” said Euclid. He shook his head to show that if you didn’t understand this it couldn’t be explained. “I always predicted Dylan and Matthew would succumb to the pressure of living in Oswald, but I’m sorry to see it happen so quickly.”
“This place is a hotbed of trolls,” I agreed.
“Ooh, play this, I like this,” said Karen, sing-songing for her pleasure like a child. She’d been flipping through a pile of LPs and now held up the Psychedelic Furs.
“Dang, I hate that shit,” said Arthur with dopey sincerity, and we all laughed.
“Do it yourself,” I told Karen. She replaced one record with the other, then cranked the volume. Richard Butler snarled Yaaah fall in love and as if on that cue Moira came in without knocking and joined us there as we sat, all of us on my bed now, while Arthur sliced lines of coke on a duct-taped scrap of sheet steel Matthew and I had liberated from the welding studios. In four days Arthur had come a long way toward the Camden manner of dealing cocaine, the casual sampling which surrounded every act of throwing down bills as Euclid had just done. In Arthur’s idiom the dealer was meant to be above partying with his customers, but that distinction was meaningless here.
I was happy to see Moira. The binge with Arthur and Runyon and Bee had been boyish, and I missed her. I was glad she’d invited herself with Euclid and Karen, glad she’d known to enter without knocking. In fact, as she slid in beside me, under that roar of guitars which made conversation unnecessary, I decided I probably loved her, that I’d need to be more than her confidante. In fact it would be two nights later, after Arthur had finally gone, that Moira and I slept together again, a costly mistake in a December of costly mistakes. Now I just smiled, assuming she felt what I did.
We all did lines. When Arthur objected that we’d given away too much I silenced him by buying an eighth myself with my share of our profits. In fact, everything I did was meant to chagrin Arthur. That I treated him so casually as my sidekick masked an obsession with Arthur’s witnessing eyes. While we did the lines Euclid and Karen plied Arthur with questions: Why were the laces on his shoes never done up? How he could walk with his jeans so low? Was anyone ever tempted to pull them down around his ankles? When Arthur looked to me for help in his bafflement, I looked away, pulled Moira closer, only laughed. See me get the girls, Arthur, and get the friends, and get the jokes, see how hip I am-if you’d grasped how I was on the brighter path all along you never would have thrown me over for Mingus. You and Mingus never would have thrown me over for one another. Arthur and I were still playing chess, two wretched nerds on his Pacific Street stoop, and now I’d toppled his queen but let him go on playing, hobbled and bound to lose. See, see? In another day or two I’d exile Arthur back to Brooklyn, to Robert Woolfolk. But first he had to take a good look at what he’d lost and I’d won.