I returned to Ohio for Christmas. I was glad to be home, but mine was the exile’s gladness; none of it seemed to pertain to me anymore, as if I’d been gone for years, not months. Harvard was not my home, at least not yet, but neither was Mercy, Ohio. The very idea of home, of one true place, had become odd to me.
My mother did not appear well. She had lost a great deal of weight, and her smoker’s cough had worsened. A glaze of sweat appeared on her brow at the smallest exertion. I paid this little mind, accepting at face value my father’s explanation that she had overdone it making ready for the holidays. I dutifully went through the sentimental motions: tree trimming and pie baking, a trip to Midnight Mass (we never attended church otherwise), opening my presents while my parents looked on—an awkward ceremony that is the bane of all only children—but my heart was nowhere in this, and I departed two days early, explaining that with exams still ahead of me, I needed to get back to my studies. (I did, but that wasn’t the reason.) Just as he’d done in September, my father drove me to the station. The rains of summer had been replaced by snow and biting cold, the warm wind through open windows by a blast of desiccated air from the dashboard vents. It would have been the perfect time to say something meaningful, if either of us could have imagined what such a thing might be. When the bus pulled away, I did not look back.
About the remainder of that first year, there is not much else to say. My grades were good—better than good. Though I knew I had done well, I was still astonished to see my first-semester report with its barricade of A’s, each emphatically embossed into the paper by the old-fashioned dot matrix printer. I did not use this as an opportunity to slack off but redoubled my efforts. I also, for a brief time, acquired a girlfriend, the daughter of the South American dictator. (He was actually the Argentine minister of finance.) What she saw in me I have no idea, but I wasn’t going to interrogate the point. Carmen possessed a good deal more sexual experience than I did—a great deal. She was the kind of woman who used the word “lover,” as in “I have taken you as my,” and she applied herself to pleasure’s project with greedy abandon. She was blessed with a single room, rare for a freshman, and in that hallowed precinct of draped scarves and female aromas she introduced me to what might have passed for actual, grown-up eroticism, working her way through the full menu of bodily delights, appetizers to dessert. We did not love each other—that sainted emotion still eluded me, and Carmen had little use for it—nor was she what I would call conventionally attractive. (I can say this because I wasn’t, either.) She was a little heavy, and her face possessed a slightly masculine bulk around the jawline, which looked like a boxer’s. But unclothed, and in the heat of passion, crying out naughty things in her Argentine-inflected Spanish, she was the most sensual creature who ever walked the earth, a fact magnified a hundred-fold by her own awareness of it.