She had to wonder about Clove Wilberson, whose name came up too often. Greer Googled her, and found an entire Clove Wilberson dossier online, much of it having to do with field hockey, which Clove had played at St. Paul’s School and now played at Princeton. A photo of her, mid-run, featured assertive bones beneath the skin of an oval face, and the obvious exertion that moved her blood. Her ponytail was captured mid-flight. She had enviable upper arms. She was definitely much better-looking than Greer, who sat studying the photo and silently asked: Clove Wilberson, have you been to bed with my boyfriend?
But it was a question she didn’t really want answered. Greer and Cory had originally acted as though being apart for college was a natural occurrence, though all the couples they knew—even the ones at the same school—had broken up after a while, getting knocked off one by one in a kind of protracted Agatha Christie rubout.
Maybe, Greer thought, the sense of longing helped keep her and Cory together. She herself had had moments when she’d almost strayed from him. Sitting at someone’s off-campus party late at night once in the fall of junior year, she felt the hand of her friend Kelvin Yang stroking her hair. They’d all been singing the song “Hallelujah” with its three million verses, while Dog accompanied them on ukulele. They were sitting on a rug in a dim room, wailing the beautiful, dirgelike song that reminded them of young love and what could so easily be lost, and there was big, built drummer Kelvin beside her. She let him stroke her hair and she even leaned against him, noting his unfamiliar smell with almost clinical distance, then deciding she liked it, then actually lying down in his lap. He leaned over and gave her a kiss, a couple of kisses, notching them here and there in a way that was like a parent but not. Greer thought about how her own father had rarely kissed her when she was growing up, and she wondered if, because of this, she had become one of those women who would always disastrously need a man front and center in her life, and who couldn’t manage without one.
Was it okay that she needed Cory the way she did? What would Faith Frank have to say about this? Everyone seemed to want love, whether they admitted it or not. This Greer knew as she let herself be kissed by Kelvin, just a little. She disliked it when her friends remarked on the longevity of her relationship with Cory, as if it were such an unnatural feat. “You guys are amazing,” said Zee. “I have never had a relationship that lasted even two months.”
Cory was the only one she wanted to see in the morning, not a stumbling fleet of dorm-mates, and not a roommate in some tiny railroad apartment. Roommate culture was booming. People found other people to live with easily these days through websites and message boards, and they moved in together and marked their milk in the refrigerator and left each other notes when something had been done that wasn’t to their liking. A friend who had graduated a year earlier described standing tensely in place when she found a note that read, “Kindly dispose of sushi containers THE NIGHT you get them. The next day it smells like a fish factory in here, FOR FUCK’S SAKE.”
The kindly was deadly. Greer and Cory would never write kindly. Their own sushi containers, which would hold his tuna and eel, and her inside-out avocado roll, would be disposed of or not, and if their little phantom apartment smelled like a fish factory, so be it. Love was a fish factory—love, with all its murk and stink. You had to really love someone to live with him or her in close quarters.
“Soon,” Cory said, “soon,” willing time to pass in the way it did when you were young. Later, Greer knew, when they were finally living together and taking for granted the small details of a life spent close-up in a broth of shared DNA, and swirled sheets, and a havoc of days and nights, she would think, Slow down, slow down. But for now, still in college, heading toward what was theirs, they both thought, Hurry up.
THREE
Cory had been born Duarte Jr., but because his name was foreign and his parents were immigrants with accents, right before the move from Fall River when he was nine years old he’d announced that he was changing Duarte Jr. to something else. The new name he picked was as American as possible. Cory was the main character on Boy Meets World, which Duarte Jr. had watched obsessively for years. Cory was such a popular and reassuring and normalizing name. He had to beg his parents to call him that, though his father refused. “Duarte is my name too,” his father said. His mother was resistant at first as well, but then she caved out of love.
“Is important to you?” she asked, and he nodded, so she said, “Okay.”
Not long after his new name had become fully affixed to him, he realized it was embarrassing to have named himself after a character on a TV sitcom. But Duarte Jr. had become Cory now and forever, an American boy like all the other American boys in school. And he did fit in well in Macopee—an outgoing, quick-witted, exceptionally tall boy. In Fall River there had been a significant Portuguese population. Here it was different. When Duarte Sr. and Benedita came to the Macopee science fair, his mother stood in front of an experiment involving condensation and asked in a loud and unembarrassed voice, “What this thing do?”
The following day, Cory heard the condensation kid say to someone else, using an accent, “What this thing do?” followed by skittering laughter.
Cory burned from this; he twisted and he burned, but he fiercely ignored it, drawing attention away from his parents by continuing to be smart and strong and funny and capable and outgoing. Somehow these traits, strenuously demonstrated, were the antidote to being seen as different. Only when he got home from school at the end of the day, unlooping the straps of his backpack and dropping it onto the floor in the front hall of the house, did he feel he didn’t have to prove himself. He knew he could be himself at home, and that it would be welcomed.
His mother had loved him since birth with fierce reverence, never holding back the way his father did, but instead depositing trace kisses all over Cory as if scattering rose petals. He came to assume that he had earned this kind of treatment, and over time he figured that one day a girl would love him the very same way. He was confident of this throughout childhood and then even during the hideous period in which he was so underweight and long-limbed that he looked like one of those handmade wooden folk-art marionettes. He was confident even as a vague mustache formed itself like spreading mildew above his lip, while the rest of him stayed boylike, the chest concave. Then he was no longer a marionette, but instead he was one of those mythical half-and-half animals. Except instead of being half-man, half-horse, Cory was half-man, half-boy, forever trapped in a mortifying between state.
Still, somehow, he remained confident, having spent his entire life with his parents praising him and calling him Genius One, or Gênio Um. His brother, Alby, was Genius Two, or Gênio Dois. Both boys had been similarly anointed, and all they had to do was keep being brilliant and industrious. They were never asked to help out around the house; that was women’s work. All they needed to do was learn, and prove themselves academically, and soon suitable rewards would come.
One day in seventh grade on a trip to the relatives’ house in Fall River for Christmas dinner, his cousin Sabio Pereira, known as Sab, who had been his close buddy when they were very young, beckoned Cory upstairs. From deep inside his closet Sab proudly produced a copy of a magazine called Beaverama. “Where’d you get this?” Cory asked, shocked, but Sab just shrugged and gloated at his secret access to hard-core porn. The women in the photos were pliant, both literally and figuratively open.
“I’m going to fuck this one’s brains out,” Cousin Sab cheerfully said, the two of them sitting cross-legged on the bed with the magazine between them like a little warming campfire. “I’m going to seriously come all over her face. She’s going to want it from me again and again. She’s going to need it from me.”