“‘Hart’ spelled that way is an animal.”
“What kind of an animal? Wait, I know. It’s like a deer, isn’t it? I’ve seen it in Shakespeare.” Ivan was crazy about Shakespeare. Once when we were walking around somewhere he told me the whole plot of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. It took twenty minutes.
“A warm heart,” repeated Ivan, holding my wrist. “I think it’s probably true.” I looked at him. He was smiling and looked gentle. What if he thought I was expecting something?
“I’d better go,” I said.
“Right now?”
“Yeah.”
“To do what? Sleep?”
“Yeah.” I looked at him.
“Okay,” he said.
I felt like I had won, and yet when I turned to go through the gate I also felt like something had been ripped out of my chest.
? ? ?
Hannah was at her computer. “Where have you been?” she asked.
“In a bar,” I said. Her eyes widened. I told Hannah about the evening in a voice full of grief but without being able to convey what exactly had been grievous.
“Was it fun?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I really didn’t know.
My clothes smelled like my aunts, the ones who still smoked. When I climbed up into the bunk and lay down, the room started spinning. It got worse when I closed my eyes. I tried opening my eyes and sitting up. Then I was less dizzy. But what was I going to do—sit there like that all night?
I forced myself to lie back down and keep my eyes closed, and soon I fell into a shallow sleep about Rupert Murdoch. When I woke up, the light outside had gone out—Hannah was snoring away under me. I was thirstier than I had ever been in my life. I found my mug in the dark, went down the hall to the bathroom, and ran the cold tap, thinking about my warm hart.
? ? ?
Svetlana and I watched a movie about Pablo Neruda’s mailman. I had thought it might somehow resemble that poem about the atom, but it didn’t. The night was humid and glutinous, and everyone’s hair was wrecked. When I got back to the dorm, Angela, who usually stayed in her bedroom with the door closed, was sitting at her desk with a hand mirror and a wide-toothed comb.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. There was a big wing of hair that kept floating up in front of her forehead, like a gigantic sandwich. She gave me some hairpins and asked me for help. I felt touched and tried to pin it down. But it was no use—the pins weren’t strong enough.
My hair was like a loaf of bread behind my head, with a frizzy halo around my face.
I found a voice mail from Ivan, asking if I was free that evening. “Maybe you will call me back,” he said. I thought about whether to call him. Angela asked if I thought she should use hair spray. I said I thought hair spray would just harden it the way it already was.
“Yeah . . .” she said. I could see she was going to use hair spray.
As she was shaking the can, the phone rang.
“Hello?” I said, my heart racing.
“Darling.” It was my mother. She had just watched The Wizard of Oz and wanted to tell me how hilarious it was when the wizard floated away in a hot-air balloon, waving and shouting, “Goodbye, folks!” She said she had never noticed before how funny this was. The way she described it was really funny.
She asked what was new with me. I told her I had just gotten this message from Ivan and was trying to decide whether to call him, since it was now nearly eleven on a Friday, a time when nobody was home. She said that of course I should call him—that if he had asked me to call him he probably would be home. She sounded a little bit forlorn. Her boyfriend had just gone home—she had sent him away after The Wizard of Oz.
After we hung up, I dialed Ivan’s number and got his machine. “I called but you weren’t there,” I said, and hung up.
I decided to take a shower. As I was looking for the towel, the phone rang. My heart sped up again. It was Ralph. He asked if I was up for a walk. He came over right away, clutching a videocassette in a plastic case. Even his neatly trimmed hair had turned puffy and untoward. He said he needed to return the cassette first, so we decided to walk to the video store.
In the hallway I started to lock the door, then remembered that Angela was in her bedroom. Ralph made a joke about the door—about how defiantly I had looked at it. We started laughing hysterically, because of the door and because of everyone’s hair, when I turned and saw, to my horror, Ivan’s hair rising up above the bannister, frizzed out of his head like a diabolical tent.
“Oh—hi,” I said. I stopped laughing. “We were just returning Ralph’s movie.”
“Oh,” Ivan said.
“I’m sorry—did you want to . . .” Ralph looked from me to Ivan.
“No, no, return your movie,” Ivan said to Ralph. “Will you be around later?” he asked me.
“I’ll call you when we get back,” I told Ivan.
“You don’t have to come,” Ralph told me.
“No, we planned to go,” I told Ralph.
The three of us headed down the stairs. Someone somewhere went out a fire door, triggering an alarm that sounded like the chirping of a million demented cicadas.
“So, you guys just watched a movie,” Ivan shouted over the alarm.
“Ralph watched a movie,” I said, at the same time that Ralph said, “I watched a movie.”
But Ivan seemed determined to believe that Ralph and I had watched the movie together. “Did you guys fight over what to get?” he asked jocularly.
“I wasn’t there,” I said.
We went out the gates and started walking toward the square. Ralph and Ivan were talking about the housing lottery. Periodically I would step off the curb or trail behind them. It turned out that Ralph had been assigned to the same house that Ivan lived in, the twelve-story high-rise. Ivan started describing the view from different windows. He seemed to know the view from every window.
“Oh, good to know,” Ralph kept saying.
We stopped at a red light. “I guess I’ll go back and do some math,” Ivan said darkly, and loped off into the night.
Ralph and I returned the movie, Peter’s Friends. I had never seen Ralph hate a movie so much that he had to go out in the middle of the night to return it. We kept walking toward the river. It seemed like it was just starting to rain. The closer we got to the river, the more raindrops we felt—but then every time we headed back toward the square the raindrops would stop. We tried walking around the square for a while, but that was depressing, so we started to go back toward the park outside the school of government.
“It looks like we’re going back to the park,” we said, looking at the sky. It didn’t rain. We got to the park. But what if it started to rain now?
“Should we turn back?” I said.
“I think we’re turning back,” Ralph said.
“Are we?”
“I think it’s because we ran into your friend.”