Jeffrey was right. We didn’t like this. It seemed foolish to maintain our proximity to Marie a minute longer than necessary, let alone for twelve more hours. But Jeffrey had insisted, and Nolan soon came around to his way of thinking.
“It’s better for all of us in the long run,” he said to me. “We need to know for sure that we can trust Marie, and she needs to know for sure that she can trust us.”
“We’re only talking twelve hours,” Jeffrey added, “and for most of them we’ll be asleep.”
Fat chance of that, I thought. And yet, amazingly, I had dozed. And beside me Jeffrey was dreaming of flying, maybe, or dunking a basketball, or perhaps he was reliving his first date with Sara in the reserve room of Firestone Library, sipping their coffees and whispering back and forth, their whole future still tantalizingly ahead of them.
As I lay on my back, trying to ignore the hard floor beneath me, I thought about what Jeffrey had said earlier. I knew that Nolan once had a thing for Sara, but I assumed it was short-lived. I remembered the cold, rainy afternoon of our sophomore year when Nolan stopped by my dorm room and asked if we could go for a walk. Never mind the freezing rain—he needed to talk through a problem he was having, and he preferred to do it on the move. He was always on the move.
I needed to return my car to the parking lot at the edge of campus, so we drove there together and then walked back toward the dorms. But he wasn’t talking. He was kicking a rock in front of him, until it rolled into the gutter. Then he said, “So I’m sort of in love with Sara.”
I nearly laughed. “Oh, is that all? Come on, we all are.” Jeffrey had a habit of telling Sara that she was the prettiest girl in the room. This wasn’t mere flattery. We had all become friendly with her by then, and despite the various imperfections that had come to light—like how, despite her high grades, she seemed to require constant reassurance from her professors; like how one of her front teeth wasn’t real, having been knocked out by a field hockey stick in high school gym class—I nonetheless continued to view her as someone on whom the Great Sculptor had worked overtime.
Unlike many women her age, Sara seemed to recognize the power of her body, of her beauty. She hadn’t yet learned this lesson that day of freshman year in our modern European authors class. She hadn’t imagined just how threatening her sexuality might seem, even to an internationally renowned academic like Professor Rinehart. But this was a lesson she came to learn, and in the three years I’d known her she had changed in subtle ways, toning down the makeup, dressing a little more like it was 1994 in Jersey and the trend in fashion was to obscure rather than reveal. She had changed just enough to make her time at Princeton easier.
Except at parties. Then the hair came down and the cowboy boots came out, and, in her words, her “inner Texas” got unleashed onto an unsuspecting campus.
Yet even then she was no flirt. Guys would seek her out, laserlike, standing too close, shouting over some band playing Pearl Jam or Nirvana and toasting her plastic cup of beer with their own. She would slip away gracefully and go over to Jeffrey and put her arm around his waist—or, in his absence, she’d come over to one of us and say, “Save me.” So you’d engage in the easy banter particular to a guy and his buddy’s girlfriend. And you couldn’t help feeling proud, knowing that you were the one that the prettiest girl in the room had chosen as her knight in flannel armor.
At one of these parties, when intoxication had sufficiently lowered my inhibitions, I asked her what exactly she saw in Jeffrey. Simple curiosity. He was my friend, but she seemed out of his league.
“I know he won’t beat the shit out of me,” she said with little hesitation. Then, as if basing her next words on my reaction, she grinned. “I’m kidding. I mean, books.” Before Princeton, she went on to explain, she’d never met a guy who read books outside of class. Then, as if unsatisfied with literature as an answer, she went on to mention his smile, his sense of humor, his intellect. Then her face lit up again, as if just remembering something. “And he loves me.”
But now Nolan was telling me that he, too, loved her. “I’m being serious,” he said. “I’ve thought about this for a while. I think I’m in actual love with her. I’m talking about we-can-be-together-forever kind of love.”
Nolan’s romantic exploits rarely included the same woman for very long. He wasn’t looking for love, and—the way he told it, anyway—he seemed remarkably candid about this fact with the women he dated. He believed that his liaisons were in fact far more honest and respectful than most long-term, monogamous relationships, which, as he described them, were typically nothing but cauldrons of manipulation and hurt feelings. My own theory was that his philosophy came second to his actions. He was a good-looking guy with a magnetic personality. He found romantic partners easily.