EACH YEAR THERE WAS A party before Spring Break called Screw Your Roommate, where the girls ask out the guys, but not for themselves, for a roommate or a friend. It was a combination of blind date and practical joke. One day a girl came up to me outside dining hall and said, “You’re Greg Marnier, right? Do you want to take Beatrice to the dance?”
“Which Beatrice?” I said, but I knew which one she meant. We had a philosophy seminar where we both talked too much. In class she dressed like a grown-up, in dresses and low heels, and sometimes took her shoes off under the table and sat with her feet on the chair and her chin on her knees.
“Castelli-Frank. She’s about as tall as you, she’s got red hair. How many Beatrices do you know?”
“Just her.”
“Well?”
“Do you think she wants to go with me?”
“I don’t know, but she mentions you sometimes. I’m her roommate. You really get on her nerves. I mean that in a good way.”
“It doesn’t sound good.”
“Look, she likes you, okay. Do you want to go or not?”
“Yes,” I said. “Okay. I like her, too.”
This cost me a lot, saying yes. I was nineteen years old and had never been on a date — I’d never been in a sexual situation. But then a few days later Beatrice herself came up to me after class and said, “Are you doing anything Saturday night? Because there’s this stupid dance and I want to set you up with my roommate.”
“I think I met her,” I said.
“She’s prettier than me.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“She’s nicer than I am, too. I’m a big fan of this girl. I like you, too.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “No. I don’t know. Let me think about it.”
Eventually I called up the roommate and said no, I couldn’t go to the dance with Beatrice, and they must have worked it out together because Beatrice didn’t ask me again. But I started hanging out with her after that, maybe because she felt like, okay, at least that’s clear. She used to read in our college library, and once when I saw her sleeping there I worked until she woke up, then asked her for coffee. When the waiter came around with our drinks, Beatrice said, “Give me your potted history.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You know, your life story.” And we went from there.
Her mother was from Rome, an actress. She came over to LA to make it in the movies and landed a few small parts in unmemorable pictures before marrying one of the industry lawyers and settling down to raise kids. Beatrice spoke decent Italian and identified strongly with the Italian side of her family. “A bunch of old socialists,” she called them, but her American childhood was very privileged. It made her generous with money, and I still have a first edition of E. B. White’s Here Is New York, which she found in the Strand and bought for me because we’d been having an argument about New York. At that time I was still southern enough to believe that New Orleans is the greatest city in America.
It was a shock to me when she started going out with Robert James. Personally, I liked Robert. For the kind of guy he was, he showed an unusual interest in intellectual ideas, even if he tended to boil them down into something he could digest. He had leftish sympathies. In his own controlling way, he tried to deal honestly with people. But Beatrice belonged in a different league. She was a real highbrow; she had appealingly uncomfortable standards. How she put up with some of Robert’s richer friends, and some of his poorer opinions, I couldn’t figure out.
Even by undergraduate standards, they had an up-and-down relationship. A few months after they got together, they split up. I don’t know why. Nothing that happened to Robert made him look or dress or sound any different, but you could tell Beatrice had things on her mind. Always quick to argue, she started getting angry quicker. Once she saw him waiting in line at Claire’s, a cake-and-coffee shop on the corner of the New Haven Green. Only students hung out there. It was overpriced and dark and the cake wasn’t very good, but it had gotten a reputation as a date hangout for the short winter afternoons.
Maybe Robert had taken a girl there, maybe he really didn’t see her, but anyway, when he kept his shoulder turned, she called out loudly, “Don’t turn your back on me. You saw me. I didn’t blow you so two weeks later you could turn your back on me.”
I wasn’t there, but I heard about it from Walter Crenna, who was.
“Did she say that?” I said. “God, did she really say that? What did he say?”
“I don’t know. I was at the cashier. I had to pay for my cake.”
Walter was probably my best friend at Yale, outside of roommates — a heavy-footed, tall, awkward lit-magazine type. He had a sweet tooth and ate like he talked, slowly, with pleasure. His cheeks were pale and blotchy, but childlike, too; I think he hardly shaved.
By Christmas Beatrice and Robert were back together. In the spring she persuaded him to take an art class. There was something genuinely charming about the way he lugged the gear around (oversize paper pad, easel, paints) and set up openly in the middle of the quad. You could see him mixing his paints, taking his time. It struck me as a public declaration of love — he knew perfectly well he was no good. People stopped by to look at his work, which was not only bad but childishly bad. Still, he battled manfully with perspective, the way a father might, assembling a crib for his baby out of duty. A lot of girls stopped by, too. They could see he was being sweet.
Beatrice and Robert spent part of the summer together, sailing the waters around the James family place near York. She came back the next fall a little more in love than she was before — she liked his father.
But it didn’t last; they got along better at home than at school.
For some reason we couldn’t understand, Robert cared a lot about secret societies. He was determined to get into Skull and Bones and spent time and energy making the right friends. Beatrice had no patience for this kind of thing. I remember sitting with him on “tap” night. Robert just stayed in his room, and eventually Walter and I went out to bring back pizza and a six-pack of beers. Robert had missed dining hall, but he didn’t want to leave in case someone from Skull and Bones knocked on his door. But nobody did.
Two days later I got a note from him, an invitation to join a new club, which was going to be everything the secret societies weren’t. “Open, inclusive, intellectually serious.”
We went to Mory’s, which I had never been to before; Robert had just become a member. There was an entrance on York Street that was hard to find, and inside there were lots of little rooms with beat-up wooden tables and paneled walls.
Robert had some idea of getting us to talk seriously about our futures, but in fact all we talked about is where we wanted to live after graduation — LA, New York, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans. Most of us defended our home states, except for Johnny Mkieze and Bill Russo, who both came from Detroit. Johnny was born in Lagos, though, and went to school at Country Day, which (as Bill pointed out) is as much like Detroit as Yale is like New Haven. Bill’s father was a real Detroiter. He grew up in Indian Village and bought his first house on Ellery Street; they only moved out when Bill’s mom got pregnant. Now half the block was boarded up, burned down or sitting empty. This may have been the first time I heard about what was happening to Detroit.