The Book of Skulls

chapter fourteen Timothy

We’re a heavy mixture, we four. How did we ever get together? What tangling of lifelines dumped us all into the same dormitory suite, anyway?

In the beginning it was just me and Oliver, two freshmen who’d been computer-assigned to a double room overlooking the quadrangle. I was straight out of Andover and very full of my own importance. I don’t mean that I was impressed by the family money. I took that for granted, always had: everybody I grew up with was rich, so I had no real sense of how rich we were, and anyway I had done nothing to earn the money (nor my father, nor my father’s father, nor my father’s father’s father, et cetera et cetera), so why should it puff me up? What swelled my head was a sense of ancestry, of knowing that I had the blood of Revolutionary War heroes in me, of senators and congressmen, of diplomats, of great nineteenth-century financiers. I was a walking slab of history. Also I enjoyed knowing that I was tall and strong and healthy — sound body, sound mind, all the natural advantages. Out beyond the campus was a world full of blacks and Jews and spastics and neurotics and homosexuals and other misfits, but I had come up three cherries on the great slot machine of life and I was proud of my luck. Also I had an allowance of one hundred dollars a week, which was convenient, and I may not actually have been aware that most eighteen-year-olds had to get along on somewhat less. Then there was Oliver. I figured the computer had given me a lucky dip again, because I might have been assigned somebody weird, somebody kinky, somebody with a squashed, envious, embittered soul, and Oliver seemed altogether normal. Good-looking corn-fed pre-med from the wilds of Kansas. He was my own height — an inch or so taller, in fact — and that was cool; I’m ill at ease with short men. Oliver had an uncomplicated exterior. Almost anything made him smile. An easygoing type. Both parents dead: he was here on a full scholarship. I realized right away that he had no money at all and was afraid for a minute that would cause resentment between us, but no, he was altogether levelheaded about it. Money didn’t appear to interest him as long as he had enough to pay for food and shelter and clothing, and he had that — a small inheritance, the proceeds of selling the family farm. He was amused, not threatened, by the thick roll I always carried. He told me the first day that he was planning on going out for the basketball team, and I thought he had an athletic scholarship, but I was wrong about that: he liked basketball, he took it very seriously, but he was here to learn. That was the real difference between us, not the Kansas thing or the money thing, but his sense of dedication. I was going to college because all the men of my family go to college between prep school and adulthood; Oliver was here to transform himself into a ferocious intellectual machine. He had — still has — tremendous, incredible, overwhelming inner drive. Now and then, those first few weeks, I caught him with his mask down; the sunny farm-boy grin vanished and his face went rigid, the jaw muscles clamping, the eyes radiating a cold gleam. His intensity could be scary. He had to be perfect in everything. He had a straight-A average, close to the absolute top of our class, and he made the freshman basketball team and broke the college scoring record in the opening game, and he was up half of every night studying, hardly sleeping at all. Still, he managed to seem human. He drank a lot of beer, he balled any number of girls (we used to trade with each other), and he could play a decent guitar. The only place where he revealed the other Oliver, the machine-Oliver, was when it came to drugs. Second week on campus I scored some groovy Moroccan hash and he absolutely wouldn’t. Told, me that he’d spent 17½ years calibrating his head properly and he wasn’t about to let it get messed up now. Nor has he blown so much as a single joint, as far as I’m aware, in the four years since. He tolerates our smoking dope but he won’t have any.

The spring of our sophomore year we acquired Ned. Oliver and I had signed up to room together again that year. Ned was in two of Oliver’s classes: physics, which Ned needed to fulfill his minimum science requirement, and comparative lit, which Oliver needed to fulfill his minimum humanities requirement. Oliver had a little trouble digging Joyce and Yeats, and Ned had a lot of trouble digging quantum theory and thermodynamics, so they worked out a reciprocal coaching arrangement. It was an attraction of opposites, the two of them. Ned was small, soft-spoken, skinny, with big gentle eyes and a delicate way of moving. Boston Irish, strong Catholic background, educated in parochial schools; he still wore a crucifix when we were sophs and sometimes even went to mass. He intended to be a poet and short-story writer. No, “intended” isn’t the right word. As Ned explained it once, people with talent don’t intend to be writers. Either you have it or you don’t. Those who have it, write, and those who don’t, intend. Ned was always writing. Still is. Carries a spiral-bound notebook, jots down everything he hears. Actually I think his short stories are crap and his poetry is nonsense, but I recognize that the fault probably lies in my taste, not in his talent, since I feel the same way about a lot of writers much more famous than Ned. At least he works at his art.

He became a kind of mascot for us. He was always much closer to Oliver than he was to me, but I didn’t mind having him around; he was somebody different, somebody with a whole other outlook on life. His husky voice, his sad-dog eyes, his freaky clothes (he wore robes a lot, I suppose by way of pretending he had gone into the priesthood after all), his poetry, his peculiar brand of sarcasm, his complicated head (he always took two or three sides of every issue and managed to believe in everything and nothing simultaneously) — they all fascinated me. We must have seemed just as foreign to him as he to us. He spent so much time around our place that we invited him to room with us for our junior year. I don’t remember whose idea that was, Oliver’s or mine. (Ned’s?)

I didn’t know he was queer, at the time. Or rather, that he was gay, to use the term he prefers. The problem with leading a sheltered Wasp life is that you see only a narrow slice of humanity, and you don’t come to expect the unexpected. I knew such things as fags existed, of course. We had them at Andover. They walked with their elbows out and combed their hair a lot and talked with a special accent, the universal faggot accent that you hear from Maine to California. They read Proust and Gide all the time and some of them wore brassieres under their T-shirts. Ned wasn’t outwardly swishy, though. And I wasn’t the sort of meatball who automatically assumed that anyone who wrote (or read!) poetry had to be queer. He was arty, yes, he was hip, he was nonjock all the way, but you don’t expect a man who weighs 115 pounds to have much interest in football. (He did go swimming almost every day. We swim bare-ass at the college pool, of course, so for Ned it was like a free beaver flick, but I didn’t think of that then.) One thing, he didn’t go around with girls that I noticed. Still, that in itself isn’t a condemnation. The week before finals, two years ago, Oliver and I and a few other guys had what I guess you’d call an orgy in our room, and Ned was there, and he didn’t seem turned off by the idea. I saw him balling a chick, a pimply waitress in from town. It was a long time afterward that I realized: one, that Ned might find an orgy useful to him as material to write about, and two, that he doesn’t really despise cunt, he just doesn’t care for it as much as he does for boys.

Ned brought us Eli. No, they weren’t lovers, just buddies. That was practically the first thing Eli said to me: “In case you’re wondering, I’m hetero. Ned doesn’t go for my type and I don’t go for his.” I’ll never forget it. It was the first hint I had had that Ned was that way, and I don’t think Oliver had realized it either, though you never really know what’s going on in Oliver’s mind. Eli had spotted Ned right away, of course. A city boy, a Manhattan intellectual, he could put everybody into the proper category with one glance. He didn’t like his roommate and wanted out, and we had a huge suite, so he said something to Ned and Ned asked if he could transfer in with us, the November of our junior year. My first Jew. I didn’t know that, either — oh, Winchester, you naive prick, you! Eli Steinfeld from West Eighty-third Street, and you can’t guess he’s a Hebe! Honestly, I thought it was just a German name: Jews are called Cohen or Katz or Goldberg. I wasn’t really captivated by Eli’s personality, you might say, but once I found out he was Jewish I felt I had to let him room with us. For the sake of broadening myself through diversity, yes, and also because I had been raised to dislike Jews and I had to rebel against that. My grandfather on my father’s side had had some bad experiences with clever Jews around 1923; some. Wall Street Abies suckered him into investing heavily in a radio company they were organizing, and they were crooks and he lost about five million, so it became a family tradition to mistrust Jews. They were vulgar, pushy, sly, et cetera et cetera, always trying to do an honest Protestant millionaire out of his hard-inherited wealth, et cetera et cetera. In fact, my Uncle Clark once admitted to me that Grandfather would have doubled his money if he’d sold out within eight months, which is what his Jewish partners secretly did, but no, he hung on waiting for still fatter profits, and got clobbered. Anyway I don’t uphold all the family traditions. Eli moved in. Short, somewhat swarthy, a lot of body hair, quick nervous bright little eyes, big nose. A brilliant mind. An expert on medieval languages; already recognized as an important scholar in his field and still an undergraduate. On the other side of the ledger, he was pretty pathetic — tongue-tied, neurotic, hypertense, worried about his masculinity. Forever prowling after girls, usually getting nowhere. Doggish girls, too. Not the spectacularly ugly broads that Ned prefers, God knows why; Eli went after a different sort of female loser — shy, scrawny, inconspicuous girls, thick glasses, flat chests, you know the bit. Naturally, they’re as neurotic as he is, terrified of sex, and they wouldn’t come across for him, which only made his problems worse. He seemed absolutely afraid to approach a normal, attractive, sensual chick. One day last fall as an act of Christian charity I turned Margo on to him and he screwed things up something unimaginable.

Quite a foursome. I doubt that I’ll ever forget the first (and probably only) time all of our parents got together, in the spring of our junior year, at the big Carnival weekend. Up till then I don’t think any of the parents had visualized their son’s roommates in any clear way. I had Oliver home to meet my father a couple of Christmases, but not Ned or Eli, and I hadn’t seen their folks either. So here we all were. No family for Oliver, of course. And Ned’s father was dead. His mother was a gaunt hollow-eyed bony woman nearly six feet tall, in black clothes, speaking with a brogue. I couldn’t connect her with Ned at all. Eli’s mother was plump, short, a waddler, very much overdressed; his father was almost invisible, a tiny sad-faced man who sighed a lot. They both looked much older than Eli. They must have had him when they were thirty-five or forty. Then there was my father, who looks the way I imagine I’ll look twenty-five years from now — smooth pink cheeks, thick hair shading from blond to gray, a moneyed look about the eyes. A big man, a handsome man, the board-of-directors type. With him was Saybrook, his wife, who I guess is thirty-eight and could pass for ten years younger, tall, well-scrubbed, long straight yellow hair, big-boned athletic body, very much the fox-and-hounds sort of woman. Imagine this group sitting under a parasol at a table in the quandrangle, trying to make conversation. Mrs. Steinfeld trying to mother Oliver, the poor dear orphan. Mr. Steinfeld eyeing my father’s $450 Italian silk suit in horror. Ned’s mother completely out of it, understanding neither her son, her son’s friends, their parents, nor any other aspect of the twentieth century. Saybrook coming on all hearty and horsey, talking blithely about charity teas and her stepdaughter’s imminent debut. (“Is she an actress?” Mrs. Steinfeld asked, baffled. “I mean her coming-out party,” said Saybrook, just as baffled.) My father studying his fingernails a lot, staring hard at the Steinfelds and at Eli, not wanting to believe any Of this. Mr. Steinfeld, to make conversation, talking about the stock market to my father. Mr. Steinfeld doesn’t have investments but he reads the Times very carefully. My father knows nothing about the market; so long as the dividends come on time, he’s happy; besides, it’s part of his religion never to talk about money. He flashes a signal to Saybrook, who deftly changes the subject, starts telling us about how she’s chairman of a committee to raise funds for Palestinian Arab refugees, you know, she says, the ones who were driven out by the Jews when Israel got started. Mrs. Steinfeld gasps. Such a thing to say in front of a Hadassah member! My father then points across the quadrangle to a particularly long-haired classmate who had just turned around and says, “I could have sworn that fellow was a girl, until he looked this way.” Oliver, who has let his hair grow to his shoulders, I suppose to show what he thinks of Kansas, gives my father his coldest, coldest smile. Undaunted, or unnoticing, my father continues, “Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but I can’t help suspecting that many of those young men with flowing locks are, you know, a trifle homosexual.” Ned laughs out loud at this. Ned’s mother turns red and coughs — not because she knows her boy is gay (she doesn’t — the idea would be incredible to her) but because that fine-looking Mr. Winchester has said a nasty word at the table. The Steinfelds, who are quick on the uptake, look at Ned, then at Eli, then at each other — a very complex bit of reaction. Is their boy safe with such a roommate? My father can’t comprehend what his casual remark has started and doesn’t know who to apologize to for what. He frowns and Saybrook whispers something to him — tsk, Saybrook, whispering in public, what would Emily Post say? — -and he responds with a magnificent blush extending far into the infrared. “Perhaps we can order some wine,” he says, loudly, to cover his confusion, and imperiously summons a student-waiter. “Do you have Chassagne-Montrachet ‘69?” he asks. “Sir?” the waiter replies blankly. An ice bucket is fetched, containing a bottle of three-buck Liebfraumilch, the best they can offer, and my father pays for it with a brand-new fifty. Ned’s mother stares at the bill in disbelief; the Steinfelds scowl at my father, thinking he’s trying to put them down. A beautiful, beautiful episode, this whole lunch. Afterward Saybrook draws me aside and says, “Your father feels very embarrassed. If he had known Eli was, well, attracted to other boys, he would never have made that remark.”

“Not Eli,” I said. “Eli’s straight. Ned.”

Saybrook is flustered. She thinks I may be putting her on. She wants to say that she and my father hope I’m not fucking around with either of them, whichever one may be queer, but she’s much too well bred to tell me that. Instead she slides into neutral chitchat for the prescribed three minutes, gracefully breaks free, goes back to explain to my father the latest twist. I see the Steinfelds conferring in anguish with Eli, no doubt giving him hell for rooming with a snotty Gentile and warning him sternly to keep away from that little faygeleh, too, if it isn’t (oyl veh!) already too late. Ned and his mother are generation-gapping also, not far away. I pick up stray phrases:

“The sisters are praying for you… transfer to Holy Cross… novena… rosary… your angel father… novitiate… Jesuit… Jesuit… Jesuit…” To one side, alone, is Oliver. Watching. Smiling his Venusian smile. Just a visitor on Earth, he is, is Oliver, the man from the flying saucer.

I’d rate Oliver as the deepest mind of the group. He doesn’t know as much as Eli, he doesn’t give the same appearance of brilliance, but he has a more powerful intelligence, I’m sure. He’s also the strangest of us, because on the surface he appears so wholesome and normal, and he really isn’t. Eli has the quickest wits among us, and he’s also the most tormented, the most troubled. Ned poses as our weakling, our fairy, but don’t underestimate him: he knows what he wants all the time, and he sees that he gets it. And me? What’s there to say about me? Good old Joe College. The right family connections, the right fraternity, the right clubs. In June I graduate and begin to live happily ever after. An Air Force commission, yes, but no combat duty — it’s all arranged, our genes are deemed too good to waste — and then I find an appropriate Episcopalian debutante, certified virgin and belonging to one of the Hundred Families, and settle down to be a gentleman. Jesus! Thank God Eli’s Book of Skulls is nothing but superstitious crap. If I had to live forever I’d bore myself to death in twenty years.