“Tried what things?” said Charlotte. “What’s an example?”
“Well—” Laurie hesitated. “You were talking about boyfriends and what boyfriends expect and everything…”
“Yeah…”
Laurie’s voice rose. “Charlotte! That’s not the end of the world! This is the time to cut loose! To really learn about everything! To learn about guys, to really get to know them! Really find out what goes on in the world! You just have to let yourself fly for once, without constantly thinking about what you left behind on the ground! You’re a genius. Everybody knows that. I’m being sincere, Charlotte. Totally. Now there’s other things to learn, and this is the perfect time to do it. Take a chance! That’s one reason people go to college! It’s not the only reason, but it’s a big reason.”
Silence. Then Charlotte said, “So you’re talking about…going all the way…”
Silence. Then, “Not just that, but, well—yes.”
Embarrassed pause. “Have you done that, Laurie?”
Bravely, nothing to be ashamed of: “Yes, I have.” Silence. “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not all that big a deal.” Silence. “And it’s a relief. I mean—well, you know.” Silence. “If you decide you want to, all you have to do is call me up, and I can tell you—I can tell you some things.”
Laurie went on for a while, in the abstract, about how little the deal was. Charlotte kept the receiver at her ear. She let her eyes wander…the pale gray wash up the side of the tower…the curious ragged diagonal the lit-up windows on the other side of the courtyard made…the bra that had somehow gotten tangled around the high heel of a shoe underneath Beverly’s bed. Laurie was going on about how every girl was on the pill, and it didn’t cause you to gain weight, the way she’d always heard…
Charlotte had a picture in her head of thousands of girls getting up out of bed in the morning and shuffling to the bathroom with sleepers in their eyes and standing in front of a small, discolored cream-gray enameled basin with an old-fashioned zinc-gray chain attached to a black rubber stopper and a medicine cabinet with a mirror on the door, and they’re all reaching up, in a fog, thousands of college girls—she can see thousands of arms and hands reaching up, in this building, that building, the one across the way, the one behind that—incalculable numbers of buildings—they’re all reaching up and opening the cabinets and taking The Pill, which she imagined must be the size of the pills they give mules on the Christmas-tree farms for heartworm.
That was the picture, but she didn’t actually hear anything after “Yes, I have.”
7. His Majesty the Baby
It was very nearly dark, and along the footpath on the edge of the Grove, blinking yellow lights came bobbing and bouncing by, one after the other, weak yellow lights, bunched together here, spread out there, but a whole train of them, all going in the same direction, bouncing and bobbing and blinking along the footpath by the arboretum. Adam squeezed the brake levers on his bicycle and stopped, even though he was already late for his meeting at The Daily Wave.
It took a moment or two to figure out this spectral locomotion: joggers. The yellow lights, which blinked in order to alert motorists at night, were built into the CD players they wore Velcro’d around their upper arms. But their arms—they were hardly even there! These joggers were girls, every one of them, so far as Adam could make out, and half of them were terribly thin, breastless, bottomless, nothing but bones, hair, T-shirts, shorts, big sneakers, and blinking lights. They were determined to burn up every last calorie they could squeeze out of their juiceless hides—or die, literally die, trying.
Adam saw a story in it immediately—THE ANOREXIC MARATHON—and nobody at the Wave was going to grouse about his being late if he arrived with a good idea like this one—on top of the real bombshell he was delivering this evening concerning—he could already envision this story’s headline, too—THE GOVERNOR, THE BLOW JOB AND THE BRAWL.
He hurried on, pedaling past Crowninshield, past the Little Yard, all the while wondering if it was hard to get anorexics to agree to pictures. THE LIVING DEAD WHO WON’T LIE DOWN…The interviews? No problem for an enterprising reporter like him. None of these wimp-out caveats—“the names have been changed”—either. He could see it in print. He could feel it in print. There was something almost chemical about new story ideas. They gave him a visceral rush. THE GOVERNOR, THE BLOW JOB AND THE BRAWL—although little Greg Fiore would never have the guts to put BLOW JOB in a headline. He pedaled faster.
Out in the real world, as opposed to Dupont’s cocoon, the typical news-room of a daily newspaper wasn’t much different from the home office of an insurance company: the same somber, invincible synthetic carpeting, the same rows of workstations with young backs humped over in front of low-grade-fever-blue computer screens. Only college newspaper offices such as the Wave’s preserved the lumpen-bohemian clutter of newsrooms in the fabled Front Page era of the twentieth century, not that anybody at the Wave other than Adam himself or possibly Greg, the editor in chief, had ever heard of Front Page or its era, more than seventy years ago, back in the last century, which to college students today was prehistory.
As Adam walked in, Greg was rocked back on the rear legs of the old wooden library chair he used, holding forth to five other staff members, two boys and three girls, who had perched themselves wherever they could, against a backdrop of discarded pizza take-out boxes glistening with their greasy cheese residue, cardboard baskets that buffalo wings and chicken fingers had come in, cracked translucent tops from containers of coffee and jumbo Slurpees and smoothies, mealy-feeling molded gray composite-cardboard trays, various crumpled bags, and sheets of newspaper and computer printouts strewn upon an exhausted carpet splotched with raspberry Crazy Horse caffeine-jolt spills or worse. The bombness of it all! The pizza boxes…after this meeting he would have to hustle over to PowerPizza and put in four frantic hours of pizza deliveries.
A skinny Chinese girl named Camille Deng—that skank, thought Adam—was saying, “I think we’ve still got some unresolved homophobia issues here. I don’t buy the administration’s cop-out that the maintenance staff ‘thought they were combating homophobia.’ ”
“Why not?” said Greg, leaning back even farther on the chair’s hind legs and eyeing Camille down his nose. Greg and his gotta-be-tough-newspaperman pose, thought Adam. Greg and his scrawny neck and receding chin.
“Well,” said Camille, “do you think it’s just a coincidence that Parents Weekend is coming up, and the administration, which is always telling us how they’re a hundred percent behind diversity and everything, you think they might just possibly not want the parents to see descriptions of how Dupont guys make love written in chalk all over the sidewalks? ‘We’re Queer and We’re Here’—you think Dupont Hall wants to let that big cat out of the bag? Because they are here.”
“How come you’re saying they?” said a boy with shaggy red hair. Randy Grossman. “You sure you don’t have an issue yourself? Like maybe a little covert pariah-ism? Like maybe a little self-loathing lesbianism?”
Camille went Unnngghh in a groan of utmost contempt.
I’ve got an issue of covert pariah-ism, too, when it comes to Randy, thought Adam. Randy had turned into an aggressive pain in the ass ever since he came out. Like everybody else on the Wave, Adam had admired him for his courage. Now he wished to hell he’d go back in the closet.
Greg ignored Randy and said, “Look, Camille, some night-shift security guy spots all this writing on the sidewalks describing ‘cock-and-ass jobs’ and sticking fingers up the ass and stroking the prostate—I saw the remains of that one myself—and it’s two or three in the morning, and Security tells Maintenance, and Maintenance decides—remember, we’re talking about the night shift here—”