My stomach dropped. “He knows?”
“Are you serious? Everybody knows. It’s Alcott’s house we’re going to, by the way. You should see this place. It’s like something in a magazine.” He turned from the mirror. “Earth to Fanning. Am I talking to myself here?”
“Um, I guess not.”
“Then for fucksake, get dressed.”
17
The fall was a marathon of parties, each more extravagant than the last. Nights at restaurants I could never afford, strip clubs, a harbor cruise on a sixty-foot boat owned by an alumnus who never came out of his cabin. Bit by bit, the candidates dropped away, until only a dozen remained. Just after the Thanksgiving holiday, an envelope appeared under my door. I was to report to the club at midnight. Alcott met me in the entryway, instructed me not to speak, and handed me a pewter cup of powerful rum, which he told me to down. The building seemed empty; all the lights were out. He led me to the library, blindfolded me, and told me to wait. Some minutes passed. I was feeling quite drunk and having trouble maintaining my balance.
Then I heard, from behind me, an alarming sound—a low, animal growling, like a dog about to attack. I spun, stumbling, and whipped off the blindfold as the bear reared up before me. It seized me bodily, hurled me to the ground, and pounced on top of me, pushing the wind from my chest. In the dark room all I could make out was its great black bulk and gleaming teeth, poised above my neck. I screamed, utterly convinced that I was about to die—a prank, intended to be harmless, had obviously gone terribly wrong—until I realized that the bear, rather than tearing my throat open, had begun to hump me.
The lights came on. It was Alcott, wearing a bear suit. All the members were there, including Jonas. An explosion of general hilarity, and then the champagne came out. I had been accepted.
The dues were a hundred and ten dollars a month—more than I had to spare, less than I could do without. I signed on for extra hours at the library and found I could make up the difference easily enough. I had spent Thanksgiving at Jonas’s house in Beverly, but Christmas was a problem. I had told him nothing about my situation, and did not want to be the object of his pity. A semester of nonstop parties had also put me badly behind in my studies. I was at a loss as to what to do until I hit upon the idea of calling Mrs. Chodorow, the woman whose house I had lived in for the summer. She agreed to let me stay, even offered to let me have my room for free—it would be nice, she said, to have a young person around for the holidays. On Christmas Eve, she invited me downstairs, and the two of us passed the afternoon together, baking cookies for her church and watching the Yule log on TV. She’d even bought me a present, a pair of leather gloves. I had thought I was immune to holiday sentiment, but I was so touched that my eyes actually welled with tears.
It wasn’t until February that I decided to call Stephanie. I felt bad about what had happened and had meant to apologize sooner, but the longer I’d waited, the more difficult this had become. I assumed that she’d just hang up on me, but she didn’t. She seemed genuinely happy to hear from me. I asked her if she wanted to meet for coffee, and the two of us discovered that, even sober, we liked each other. We kissed under an awning in the falling snow—a much different kind of kiss, shy, almost courtly—and then I put her in a cab to Back Bay, and when I returned to my room, the phone was already ringing.
Thus were the terms established for the next two years of my life. Somehow, the universe had forgiven me my trespasses, my vain ambitions, my casual, self-interested cruelties. I should have been happy and for the most part was. The four of us—Liz and Jonas, Stephanie and I—became a quartet: parties, movies, weekend ski trips to Vermont, and lusty, drunken outings to Cape Cod, where Liz’s family had a house left conveniently unoccupied during the off-season. I did not see Stephanie during the week, nor did Jonas see much of Liz, whose life did not seem otherwise to intersect with his own, and the rhythms appeared to work. From Monday to Friday, I worked my tail off; come Friday night, the fun began.
My grades were excellent, and my professors took notice. I was encouraged to begin thinking about where I would pursue my doctoral work. Harvard was at the top of my list, but there were other considerations. My adviser was lobbying for Columbia, the chairman of the department for Rice, where he had taken his PhD and still had close professional connections. I felt like a racehorse up for auction but hardly minded. I was in the gate; soon the bell would ring, and I would commence my mad dash down the track.