95
Heading into his final quarter of school, which began three weeks after his father died, Connell had only one course left to take in his major. He also needed to finish one science requirement, and he was taking a theater elective, the plays of Tennessee Williams. He had planned to write a thesis on Bellow’s influence on Amis, but he couldn’t get his act together to do so, and he’d stopped caring about graduating with special honors in the department. General honors in the college would do.
Shortly after the start of the quarter, he started dating a girl named Danielle and going to the Tiki or Jimmy’s with her and their friends. He played pool and foosball and Addams Family pinball and had long conversations deep into the night fueled by caffeine, and he had a lot of sex with Danielle. There were people crashing on his couch nearly every night, friends of his or of his roommates, and it felt like a single endless party. He started skipping classes. He still made it to the Blue Gargoyle tutoring center three times a week to meet Delores, the fifth-grader he’d been helping with her reading since September. He started staying in Danielle’s apartment while Danielle was at class. He would be there waiting when she got back, and because she always seemed happy to see him, he didn’t let himself wonder whether he was wasting his time. He worked on his role in Williams’s one-act, Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen, a lonely play about a man who comes home to his quietly suffering girlfriend and narrates to her the story of his night spent wandering the streets, which felt quite a bit like his life, except for the part about coming home to his girlfriend, as it was always she who came home to him. His other classes fell to the side. There was a paper he didn’t do in the medieval literature class, and then there was a project he didn’t do in the science class, and then the halfway mark came and went and he knew he was going to fail, but he couldn’t stop himself from failing, and he couldn’t drop any classes because he was only taking three. He knew he was in a whirlpool, and he could feel himself going under, but he couldn’t grab anything firm. His mother wasn’t going to be able to come out for the graduation, because she’d gotten a recent promotion and couldn’t take time off, so he didn’t have to do a lot of explaining about why he wasn’t walking with the others, and it wouldn’t be the worst thing to let her think he had graduated. Danielle was still in her third year. She told him she’d had fun with him and left for a summer in Florence to study Renaissance art. He sold what he could, shipped his books, and got on an Amtrak train in honor of his father, because they had talked of riding the rails across America together. The Lake Shore Limited left at night, passing through Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before it entered upstate New York. When the sun came up, he saw small cities, former hubs, gorgeous Hudson views. He read a little, didn’t sleep, didn’t talk to anyone. Mostly he looked out the window and thought of his father, who would have found it fascinating, the history of manufacturing in America written on abandoned factories, rusty buildings, heaps of scrap. Somewhere after Poughkeepsie he started crying, and he cried on and off for an hour and half until they pulled into Penn Station. He hadn’t taken this trip intending to mourn his father, but it occurred to him that that was what he was finally doing, that when he’d boarded in Chicago he’d undertaken a twenty-hour vigil of silence for him. It took seeing the haunted glory of upstate New York, and being unable to talk to him about it, for him to understand what it meant that his father was gone.
? ? ?
When he entered the lobby of the building on Park Avenue, he beheld a scrawny kid in an ill-fitting doorman’s uniform looking as if he was playacting in his father’s clothes, and another in a porter’s outfit giving a sopping mop a desultory pass over the tiles. “Where did you go to high school?” he asked the kid at the control panel, and he cringed to see that familiar mix of deference and condescension in the kid’s eyes that said that this was a pit stop for him. The kid confirmed his suspicion: there had been a steady stream of graduates since his own stint.
He asked for Mr. Marku. The kid spoke into the intercom in a muted voice that strained after maturity, and a few minutes later Mr. Marku emerged from his apartment and hugged Connell with a warmth that caught him off guard. They went into his office. The fish in the tank were smaller now, but there were more of them, and they were more colorful.
“You’re feeling well,” Mr. Marku said, lighting a cigarette. “You’re looking well. You finally shaved.” He rubbed his hand on his own chin, his eyes betraying his delight. “You came to pay me a visit.”
“And to see about something,” Connell said. “About work.”
Mr. Marku gave him a long look. “You’re finished college.”
Connell clicked a pen on his thigh. “Yes.”
“You want to come back here.”
“I do,” he said. “I’m sorry about how things ended.”
Mr. Marku waved his hand as if swatting away a fly. “Summer work.”
“I was thinking beyond that,” Connell said.
“You have other options. A smart kid like you.”
“I’ll do a good job,” Connell said. “I’ll do a better job than before.”
Mr. Marku stopped blinking, his lightly appraising gaze shifting into a harder stare.
“These guys have wives, families, bills. It’s a steady paycheck for them, a respectable job. Maybe not for you.”
“No more books,” Connell said. “I won’t read, I’ll wear the hat. I’ll shave every day. I know the ropes.”
Mr. Marku shook his head. Maybe he was remembering Connell’s flaws—the tardiness, the way he nosed his way into people’s business in the building, how he sat down at every opportunity.
“I’m not a kid anymore,” Connell said. “I get it now. I’ll never be late, I’ll keep my mouth shut and my nose down. I won’t ever sit down.”
Mr. Marku laughed. “Even I sit down.” He shook his head again, but this time it seemed as if he was trying to work it out. “I don’t have anything full-time.”
“Anything,” Connell assured him.
“You want to look somewhere else with your college degree,” he said. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
“I like it here,” Connell said. “I don’t want to go to an office, sit at a desk all day, push paper.”
A long silence followed, punctuated by a sudden frenzy of activity in the fish tank.
“You’ll show up tomorrow at eleven forty-five,” Mr. Marku said finally.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Summer work,” he said, and Connell nodded. “That’s all I have. Then you have to move along.”