There was no food in the house on Sunday and there was no use bemoaning, yet again, this part of the state’s lack of decent delis and diners. Hungover, all any of the downstaters wanted was a chocolate egg cream and a buttered roll. But they drove over to campus anyway and paid three bucks for brunch in one of the dining halls. They watched the residents, mostly freshmen and sophomores, move around the table with their trays-some of them still joined to last night’s date, most of them stuck in same-sex groups of friends or roommates who also hadn’t scored. A girl walked by wearing torn fairy wings. Another had a tall striped hat. There was a subdued murmur throughout the room, the smell of steam-table scrambled eggs and burning toast and bins of bacon and beef bourguignonne. The staff had hung cardboard skeletons from the window of the dish room; one of them wore an apron and a hairnet. Michael noticed that most of the kids eating had wet hair and damp clothes, just out of the shower, and it made him think how young they looked, half formed. Outside, the campus, too, seemed sodden, the leaves gone from every tree but still lying in black heaps and scattered rags across the grass and along the walkways.
Then a roll of laughter came from the far end of the room. And then, following one another at a run, three guys dressed as the Marx Brothers-Harpo, Groucho, Chico. They climbed over tables, sat in girls’ laps, chased one another, the whole routine. Groucho put his arms around one of the fat dish-room ladies and did the eyebrow thing. Harpo had his bicycle horn. Their costumes were excellent-theater majors, no doubt-and all their gestures dead-on. People began standing on their chairs to watch, some of them shouting jokes or bits of encouragement or merely caught up in the growing, crazed enthusiasm that made Michael think of his own students when some glorious distraction disrupted the day and sent them all to the windows-a sudden hailstorm, a screaming fire engine, the milk delivery truck backing itself into a basketball hoop on the playground.
And then, out of the blue, a boy stood up from one of the tables and smacked a full plate of steaming eggs right into Groucho’s face. The impact floored the poor kid, sent his cigar flying. There was a moment’s pause in the general noise and Michael found himself listening for a moan of anger or resentment, but what he heard instead was only the silence of a change in the tide. Suddenly, someone else dove for Harpo and pulled off his wig. He saw it fly into the air, bouncing from hand to hand until somebody else slam-dunked it into the milk dispenser. Chico’s hat, too, was being passed around and when he appeared again among the crowd, he was hog-tied in his own plaid jacket and someone had squirted ketchup and mustard down his shirt. On the other side of the room, some girls were dancing around a dog pile of guys-one of them had Harpo’s horn and was squeezing it in short bursts, like a rising orgasm. Then Harpo scrambled free. He was naked from the waist down, cursing wildly. He ran for the door they’d come in through, hunched over, bare-assed and limping. Chico and Groucho followed, Groucho turning as he ran, the nose and mustache gone, the eggs still stuck to his shirt front and hair. He gave the room the finger and was gone.
It took a few minutes for things to settle down. Someone else had the bicycle horn and blew it intermittently, another guy held up Harpo’s pants and underwear and danced them around a bit. But people were returning to their seats, finishing their coffee, picking up their trays. Michael turned to one of his housemates and said, “What the hell just happened?”
He shrugged. Chris was a good guy. Stocky, already balding, laid-back, and funny. His father taught industrial arts in a Bronx high school and that’s what Chris wanted to do, too. Michael knew he’d be good at it. Everybody’s favorite teacher. Chris had made all the furniture in his room-bed, dresser, desk, bookcase, even the box he kept his dope in, intricately carved with vines and flowers, satyrs and nymphs.
He was going to get married right after graduation and they had a running joke around the house about what his girlfriend had decided was going to be their wedding song: “Time in a Bottle.”
Chris shrugged, his elbows on the table. “The world is full of assholes,” he said, nonplussed. “What are you going to do?” Michael could see him asking his students this very question for the next thirty years.
At Damien’s that night, Michael scanned the room for the short-haired girl, not sure whether he was hoping to see her or not. There were a few people in costumes, mostly masks or crazy hats, nothing too ambitious. Some of the girls wore leotards under their parkas and little ears on their heads-black cats or bunny rabbits. The less shapely ones were kids in flannel pajamas or housewives in bathrobes, curlers in their hair. One kid-every year-in a thrift-store trench coat that he would part to reveal a piece of pink rubber hose glued to a square of brown carpet whenever he caught a girl’s eye.
Ralph still didn’t have any decorations up, but there was a plastic pumpkin filled with candy by the register and every once in a while he lifted it and tossed some candy into the crowd. When Caroline squeezed in beside Michael, she put her elbow on the bar and held out her hand. “Where’s mine?” she asked, coyly, but a little defiantly, too.
Ralph looked her up and down, baring his teeth in that strange grin. “Where’s your costume?” he said. He held the candy away from her, eyeing the turtleneck and jeans beneath her parka. “You’ve got to have a costume to get a treat,” Ralph said slowly, as if explaining something he thought she already understood. She stared at him a second longer and then abruptly turned away. The ends of her long hair briefly clung to Michael’s arm and shoulder as she turned. Then Bean moved in. He was still wearing the earring and the bandanna. He’d be wearing them for the rest of the year.
“Is he going upstairs?” he asked. He had put bits of black and gold paper over his teeth. “To get his nut?”
Michael shrugged. But Bean was watching Ralph behind the bar and didn’t seem to notice. Then he leaned closer, elbowing Michael’s side as if he were the one with the attention problem. “Is he going upstairs tonight?” he asked from behind his hand. “With her?”
Michael turned away from him-the bandanna was tight, digging into his eyebrows. He had a sudden recollection of Pauline’s big face, bearing down on him. “Doesn’t look like it,” he said, and Bean, still watching Ralph, said a breathless, “Fuck.”
And then he took a drag from his bottle of beer and shouted, “Hey, Ralph.” The hoop earring swaying with the effort. “What’s this about ghosts? I hear you got ghosts. You can’t sleep at night cause of the ghosts.” He looked around, noted the attention his voice had drawn. “Or is it because you’re some kind of frigging vampire?”
Ralph was handing beers over the bar to outstretched hands. When he finished, he walked down to where Bean stood. He touched the corner of his mouth, the drooping ends of his dark mustache. “You know, I never came down here when I was a kid,” he said softly. “There was an outside staircase we used. Straight to the second floor. I had it torn off when my folks moved south-it was a fucking death trap, it was so rotten. But when I was a kid, that’s how we went in and out. I never came in here. So I never really knew when the funeral parlor changed over to a bar. I mean, to a kid, it’s all the same. People are talking, somebody’s crying, somebody’s laughing. A fight breaks out. Every once in a while there’s this creepy silence and then everybody starts talking again. All the same. Still is.”
He looked at them all. He seemed to be making an effort to stay interested in his own words. “I had no problem with it. Dead guys, drunks.” He shrugged to show his indifference. “All the same.”