Martha is an assistant professor of classics, tenure-track. I was the maid of honor in her wedding, but the truth is that we talk about twice a year and see each other less than that.
And as for me: Cross had been wrong, and I didn’t particularly like college, at least for the first few years-it seemed so vast and watered-down. But then as a junior I ended up getting an apartment with another girl and two guys, though I knew only the girl ahead of time and knew her only a little. One of the guys wasn’t around much, but the other one-Mark, who was a senior-and the girl, Karen, and I made dinner together most nights, and watched television afterward. Upon moving in with them, I thought at first that they were both kind of LMC, but somewhere along the way, I forgot that I thought this. I learned to cook from Mark, and that summer, a few weeks before he moved out, he and I became involved; he ended up being the second person I ever kissed, the second person I had sex with. (Once, I had imagined that the first boy you were involved with was your initiation, that after him the switch had been flicked and you dated continuously, but, at least in my own case, I had been wrong.) After the first time Mark and I kissed, I was talking to Karen about it-I didn’t know for sure if I liked Mark-and I brought up Cross. I was planning to say he was someone I had been certain about, but before I could, Karen said, “Wait a second. The guy you dated in high school was named Cross Sugarman?” She began to laugh. “What kind of person is named Cross Sugarman?”
I actually didn’t-I don’t-particularly like talking about Ault. I don’t even really like reading the quarterly, though I always at least page through it. But if I give it real attention, my mood plummets; I remember my life there, all the people and the way I felt. In college, or after, in the course of ordinary conversation, someone might say, “Oh, you went to boarding school?” and I’d feel my heart thickening with the need to explain what the person did not truly care about. By my sophomore year at Michigan, if the subject arose, I would make only the most superficial remarks. It was okay. It was hard. I was lucky to go. These conversations were a lake I was riding across, and as long as we didn’t dwell on the subject, or as long as I didn’t think the person would understand anyway, even if I tried to explain, I could remain on the surface. But sometimes, if I talked for too long, I’d be yanked beneath, into cold and weedy water. Down there, I could not see or breathe; I was dragged backward, and it wasn’t even the submersion that was the worst part, it was that I had to come up again. My present world was always, in its mildness, a little disappointing. I’ve never since Ault been in a place where everyone wants the same things; minus a universal currency, it’s not always clear to me what I myself want. And anyway, no one’s watching to see whether or not you get what you’re after-if at Ault I’d felt mostly unnoticed, I’d also, at certain moments, felt scrutinized. After Ault, I was unaccounted for.
But I should say too that I don’t scrutinize others the way I once did. I did not, when I left Ault, carry my vigilance with me; I’ve never paid as close attention to my life or anyone else’s as I did then. How was I able to pay such attention? I remember myself as often unhappy at Ault, and yet my unhappiness was so alert and expectant; really, it was, in its energy, not that different from happiness.
And so everything has to turn out somehow, and other things have happened to me-a job, graduate school, another job-and there are always words to describe the way you fill up your life, there is always a sequence of events. Although it doesn’t necessarily have a relationship to the way you felt while it was occurring, there’s usually some satisfaction in the neatness of its passage. Some anxiety, too, but usually some satisfaction.
On the night of my graduation from Ault, there was a party at a club in Back Bay, a place Phoebe Ordway’s parents belonged-they were the ones giving the party. My own parents had already left for South Bend, but other parents were there early on, for dinner, and then they took off and my classmates, many of whom had been openly drinking in front of parents, stayed and danced and cried. I drank beer out of green bottles, and got drunk for the first time, and it felt great and dangerous. Great like I was wearing a cape that made me invisible, so I could observe everyone else without being observed-at one point, Martha was dancing with Russell Woo (I did not dance at all, of course) and I sat at a round table for eight by myself, utterly unself-conscious. And it felt dangerous because what was to stop me from just walking up to Cross, there in a group of people near the bar, and doing exactly what I wanted? Which was to wrap my arms around his neck and press my face into his chest and just stand there forever. I had had four beers; no doubt I was less drunk than I believed myself to be, and that’s what stopped me.
A little before midnight, Martha said she was exhausted and wanted to leave. I was in the middle of a long conversation with Dede, who was smashed and was saying in a strangely beneficent way, “You were always so sad and angry. Even when we were freshmen, you were. Why were you so sad and angry? But if I’d known you were on scholarship, I could have lent you money. You were dating that kitchen guy last year, weren’t you? I know you were.” I was not completely listening to her-I was watching Cross as he moved around the room, danced, left, came back, talked for a while to Thad Maloney and Darden. I stayed at the party so I could keep watching him. Martha and I were both supposed to spend the night at her aunt and uncle’s in Somerville, but when Martha left, I stayed. I thought that because I was drunk, maybe everything would be different, that as the night waned, Cross would eventually come to me. But instead, when the DJ played “Stairway to Heaven” as the last song of the night, Cross slow-danced with Horton Kinnelly and then the song ended and they stood side by side, still close together, Cross rubbing his hand over Horton’s back. It all felt both casual and not random-in the last four minutes, they seemed to have become a couple. And though they had not interacted for the entire night, I understood suddenly that just as I’d been eyeing Cross over the last several hours, he’d been eyeing Horton, or maybe it had been for much longer than that. He too had been saving something for the end, but the difference between Cross and me was that he made choices, he exerted control, his agenda succeeded. Mine didn’t. I waited for him, and he didn’t look at me. And that was what the rest of senior week was like, though it surprised me less each time, at each party, and by the end of the week, Cross and Horton weren’t even waiting until it was late and they were drunk-you’d see them entwined in the hammock at John Brindley’s house in the afternoon, or in the kitchen at Emily Phillip’s house, Cross sitting on a bar stool and Horton perched on his lap.
It was at Emily’s house-this was the last party, in Keene-that I opened the note from Aubrey, the note where he declared his love for me. It was three-thirty in the morning, and I was standing in a field where Norie’s car was parked, searching for the toothbrush in my backpack, when I found the card. I was very moved, not only because what he’d written was so sweet but also because-even though it was from Aubrey, tiny and prissy Aubrey-it meant the Times article hadn’t made me untouchable; Cross Sugarman wasn’t the only Ault boy who had ever noticed something worthwhile about me.
But not the last night of senior week, the first night-the night at the club in Back Bay: When Martha told me she was leaving, I didn’t yet understand that Cross and Horton were together, and I wanted to stay.