I looked at him. “What were you doing in Uganda?”
“Oh, a little of this, a little of that. As it turns out, they’ve got quite a civil war going on. Not what the brochure promised.”
“He was working in a refugee camp for the U.N.,” Liz explained.
“So I dug latrines, handed out bags of rice. It doesn’t make me a saint.”
“Compared to the rest of us, it does. What your new roommate hasn’t told you, Tim, is that he has serious designs on saving the world. I’m talking major savior complex. His ego is the size of a house.”
“Actually, I’m thinking of giving it up,” Lear said. “It’s not worth the dysentery. I’ve never shat like that in my life.”
“Shit, not ‘shat,’ ” Liz corrected. “ ‘Shat’ is not a word.”
These two: I could barely keep up, and the problem wasn’t merely that I was smashed, or already half in love with my new roommate’s girlfriend. I felt like I had stepped straight from Harvard, circa 1990, into a movie from the 1940s, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn duking it out.
“Well, I think English is a great major,” I remarked.
“Thank you. See, Jonas? Not everyone is a total philistine.”
“I warn you,” he told her, wagging a finger my direction, “you’re talking to another dreary scientist.”
She made a face of exasperation. “Suddenly in my life it’s raining scientists. Tell me, Tim, what kind of science do you do?”
“Biochemistry.”
“Which is … ? I’ve always wondered.”
I found myself strangely happy to be asked this question. Perhaps it was just a matter of who was asking it.
“The building blocks of life, basically. What makes things live, what makes them work, what makes them die. That’s about all there is to it.”
She nodded approvingly. “Well, that’s nicely said. I’d say there’s a bit of the poet in you after all. I’m beginning to like you, Tim from Ohio.” She polished off her drink and set it aside. “As for me, I’m really here to form a philosophy of life. An expensive way to do it, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I’ve decided to go with it.”
This luxurious ambition—four years of college at twenty-three grand a pop to amass a personality—struck me as another alien aspect of her that I was hoping to learn more about. I say alien, but what I mean is angelic. By this point, I was utterly convinced that she was a creature of the spheres.
“You don’t approve?”
Something in my face must have said so. I felt my cheeks grow warm. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t say anything. Piece of advice. ‘That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man, if with his tongue he cannot win a woman.’ ”
“I’m sorry?”
“Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona. In plain English, when a woman asks you a question, you better answer.”
“If you want to get her into bed,” Lear added. He looked at me. “You’ll have to excuse her. She’s like the Shakespeare channel. I don’t understand half the things she says.”
I knew almost nothing about Shakespeare. My experience of the bard was limited, like many people’s, to a dutiful slog through Julius Caesar (violent, occasionally exciting) and Romeo and Juliet (which, until that moment, I’d found patently ridiculous).
“I just meant I’ve never met anybody who thinks that way.”
She laughed. “Well, if you want to hang around with me, bub, better bone up. And with that,” she said, rising from the bed, “and speaking of which, I must be off.”
“But you’re not half as drunk as we are,” Lear protested. “I was hoping to have my way with you.”
“Weren’t you just.” At the doorway, she looked back at me. “I forgot to ask. Which are you?”
One more question I had no answer for. “Come again?”
“Fly? Owl? A.D.? Tell me you’re not Porcellian.”
Lear answered in my stead: “Actually, our boy here, though technically a junior, has yet to experience this aspect of Harvard life. It’s a complicated story I’m much too drunk to explain.”
“So, you’re not in a club?” she said to me.
“There are clubs?”
“Final clubs. Somebody pinch me. You really don’t know what they are?”
I had heard the term, but that was all. “Are they some kind of fraternity?”
“Um, not exactly,” Lear said.
“What they are,” Liz explained, “are anachronistic dinosaurs, elitist to the core. Which also happen to throw the best parties. Jonas is in the Spee Club. Like his daddy and his daddy’s daddy and all the Lear daddies since fish grew legs. He’s also the whattayacallit. Jonas, what do you call it?”
“The punchmaster.”
She rolled her eyes. “And what a title that is. Basically, it means he’s in charge of who gets in. Honeybunch, do something.”