“Is she in something now? A show, I mean?” I’d never been to New York City before, and I desperately wanted to change that.
“She just finished
some
thing,” Julian said distractedly. “She comes up here sometimes to do things at summer stock.”
“Where does she go to school?”
“She doesn’t!” Julian laughed, as if it were the most brilliant idea ever. “Although between you and me, she turned down full rides at Ivy League schools.”
“Her parents must have been furious,” I said.
Julian laughed again. “Don’t be silly. What does she need to go to Harvard for? She’s already smarter than you or I will ever be, for all the good it’ll do her. I can’t even imagine her there, with all those neo-con banker babies and sons of sports franchise managers.” He shuddered. “On Broadway she’s being taken out by ambassadors and actual
Swiss
people, for God’s sake. Makes me wonder what the hell I did wrong to wind up
here
. Speaking of . . . what are you writing for the contest?”
A half hour earlier I’d been considering a change of majors. Now suddenly I wanted nothing more than to win the contest and read my story in front of the deans and all the alumni. More than anything, though, I wanted to read it in front of Julian.
I shrugged and asked, “What are
you
going to write? The Jan Sokol story? You could call it ‘The Guest Lecturer.’”
He grinned and shook his head. “That’s classified, I’m afraid.”
Promising to show me better pictures of the lovely Evelyn, Julian invited me back to his room. He had a double all to himself, after his roommate had withdrawn in the third week, and it was truly the Shangri-La of dormitories. He’d lofted the two beds, wedged the mattresses on the top, and pushed both desks together to create a massive work space, which was covered in library books and unorganized papers. On the wall, in a frame, was a red-and-black chessboard.
“You play chess?” I asked, hardly surprised.
“Yes, but I much prefer checkers,” he said. “We could play, if I had any damn pieces. I keep meaning to buy some, but the pieces always come with a board, and I’ve already got a board. It’s the oldest game in the world. Did you know that? There are hieroglyphics in Egypt with the scores of checkers games, and in one of the tombs they found a whole set! They think it came over from India. Anyways, I keep the board around because I figure someday I’ll find some pieces. You can’t hang a checkerboard on the wall in act one if no one’s going to play it in act two. Chekhov. Or something like that. Can I get you anything?”
He set some coffee on a Bunsen burner and found some bagels in the back of a minifridge. “Six years at boarding schools and you learn how to maximize your space.” He sprinkled the bagels with a strange spice. “
Za’atar
. I put it on everything.”
Though I’d never heard of it in my life, I nodded and smiled. “Ah . . .
za’atar
,” I replied. “My grandmother used to put this on her shredded wheat.”
Julian seemed delighted at the idea, and I was thrilled to have gotten one over on him. He continued eagerly, “Maimonides said it cures parasites and flatulence. With that sort of range, I figure it must be good for everything else in between.”
This seemed to be Julian’s philosophy on life: that no one could ever hope to get the breadth of the whole thing, so he would stick to the extremes and assume the middle was thus covered. He knew everything there was to know about Schopenhauer and Napoléon Bonaparte. He read every gossip rag with a headline about the marriage of Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson. But he didn’t seem to know normal things, like the difference between Newt Gingrich and Roger Ebert. Each night after we’d hung out for one hour, I’d spend three more at the library, reading up on everything he’d mentioned, even in passing. And in each word and place I sensed an unfolding universe of stories, just waiting for me to make them real.
Shelly hated him, naturally. As often as he invited her to join us over in Shangri-La, she refused to accept. If I even brought him up in her presence, she rolled her eyes until I stopped.
“He’s totally in love with you,” she snapped.
“That’s absurd,” I said, trying hard not to flush at the suggestion—and it was absurd. About Julian’s preferences in the bedroom I didn’t dare speculate, but I felt certain that his interests in me were as a kindred spirit who shared his deepest obsession. Back home, there’d been no one. Girls could dabble in poetry and keep diaries. But guys were expected to be memorizing sports statistics, not the opening sentence of
A Tale of Two Cities
. Even my English teachers seemed to hold books several feet from their bodies, as if some contagion might be multiplying within the pages. Julian held books right up close to his face—a habit formed, he explained, in his nearsighted youth—and now, even with contact lenses in, he liked to have the page within a few inches of his eyes. So close that the pages scraped the tip of his nose as he turned them. So close that, when he inhaled sharply at a particularly good turn of phrase, the paper seemed to lift up slightly and tremble before settling back again.
In class, once Julian knew he had an ally, he talked more often, and together we eviscerated the bland tales of moonlit marriage proposals and drunken deflowerings that our classmates brought in. Morrissey began to call on Julian and me as one person, and often he’d jokingly call us by the names of famous writing duos.
“Hawthorne? Longfellow? What do you think about all this?” or sometimes, “Emerson? Thoreau? Which of you wants to start?” Once we even scored a “Fitz? Hem?” but most of the time we were “Pinkerton and McGann”—which always got a chuckle as the class thought back on the day of the guest lecturer. I still wondered often what had become of the weeping writer.
As the weeks went on, Julian and I worked furiously on our contest entries. Julian would invite me over in the afternoons to work, and for hours we would sit there, me scribbling on a yellow legal pad and him hammering on the typewriter, with the humming aerator of his fish tank behind us.
We had only two rules: one, we would never write anything about each other—that was
off-limit
s—and two, we would not peek at the other’s work until it was finished. The first condition I succeeded in following only because I felt certain that if Julian could be captured in words, I was not yet good enough to do it. But the second condition I violated every chance I got.
When he got up to go have a cigarette outside, Julian would take his pages with him. But one day I found some old drafts, buried in a drawer, under a collection of playbills from shows that Ev had been in. Julian’s story was called “Polonia,” and the little I got to read involved a Polish family who, due to absurd circumstances involving a sick cow, are forced to move to Wales and take up shoe making. That night I lay awake for hours, just imagining how good the rest of it had to be. Where did he come up with these ideas? As hard as I tried to make up something amazing, I found myself returning to the dry inkpots of estranged redneck families and tedious suburban sprawl. As I lay in bed I repeated to myself,
“Tell all the truth. Slant slant slant slant slant.”
It seemed clear that I’d never get anywhere with something as cliché as a story about a kid whose mother misses his birthday party. I scrapped “The Flight Attendant’s Son,” knowing that if I was going to beat Julian’s imagination, I was going to have to dig deeper, be edgier, and expose even more of myself.
“Truth truth truth,”
I muttered to myself as the keyboard clicked and clacked. By sundown I was half done with a passable draft of “Just Another Bastard Out of Carolina.”
Only three days later, when Julian ran downstairs to pick up a new supply of
za’atar
that had just arrived at the mailroom, I found his old story was missing from the drawer—replaced by something new, titled “A Friend of Bill W.,” about a twelve-year-old boy in an Eastern Orthodox church choir who steals vodka from the deacon’s desk each night and then begins hiding in a confessional so he can attend the AA meetings they hold at the church every Tuesday. A frantic flip to the final pages revealed that the boy is caught guzzling holy wine in the shadow of the icon of Saint Basil and soon thereafter is expelled in disgrace.
“Son of a bitch,” I groaned as I hid it back away. How did he come up with this stuff? How could I possibly top a story about being excommunicated at age twelve?
I lamented this injustice to Shelly that night as we watched television in her room.
“He’s too fucking
interesting
. He lived in, like, a dozen countries before he turned ten. His parents own an import/export company that spans the freaking globe. This is the farthest from North Carolina that I’ve ever been. I’ve never been to New York City. I’ve never even been on a
plane
before.”
“I thought your mother was a flight attendant? Don’t you, like, fly for free?”
“There’s just a discount,” I muttered. Neither of us said anything for a moment. By now she was sick of hearing about Julian and the writing contest, although I knew she was quietly working on her own submission. She left it lying out but I never once thought to steal a look.
“Just make something
up
,” she sighed. “It’s
fiction
, for chrissakes.”
But I could not make anything up. In Raleigh I’d hardly been able to keep from drifting off into my imagination—anything to escape the doldrums of school, the tediousness of work, and the quiet of an empty house. But now, suddenly, my imagination seemed to have frozen up, like a used car in the depths of winter. As the deadline for the contest approached, I was so miserable that I began avoiding Julian entirely. It was hard not to notice that he wasn’t banging down my door, either.
The night before the submissions were due, Julian called.
“Did you finish?” he asked. It was the first time we’d spoken in a week.
“Yes,” I said. Both of my stories were as done as they’d ever be. All that remained was to decide which of them was worse than the other.
“Good. Because mine is a
disaster
and I was hoping you would do me a favor?”
Was he going to ask me to read it? Was this his way of rubbing it in my face? Still, I had been dying to read the finished product, if only to remind myself how it was all really done.
“This will
just
take an hour, I swear. I’m
so
close to being done.”
Something in his shaky sound reminded me of Sokol, during his visit to our class. Was Julian hammered? Or just on the brink of exhaustion?
“My friend Ev is here and I
absolutely
cannot work with her around. Could you, I don’t know, take her around campus or something for an hour?”
My heart stopped beating. And I don’t think it beat again until fifteen minutes later, when I arrived at the door to Julian’s room.
He came to the door wearing only a hotel dressing robe, a week’s growth of beard on his face, and three days’ rings of red under his eyes. The room was a disaster, with old coffee on the Bunsen burner and the checkerboard hanging crookedly. Julian barely acknowledged my arrival, aside from turning back to fold down the page that had been jutting halfway up from his typewriter, as if my superhuman eyes might be able to catch a word or two from the door. What I
could
read were the golden-inlaid titles of a few enormous library books, stacked beside the machine:
The Demise of the British World Order
,
Convicts of Kimberley
, and one bizarrely titled
Windradyne of the Wiradjuri.
Just as I noticed a large map of Australia folded open on the desk, my line of sight was cut off by a high-cheeked girl, her face framed by a cascade of golden hair, on top of which sat a small pillbox hat made of leopard skin.
“He’s
un
-believable,” she announced, rolling her eyes back at Julian. Her eyes were bored; they bore right through me.
“You’re,
uhm
, Evelyn?” I stammered, trying to sound cool as she shut the door behind her.
“Call me Ev,” she said, with the same smile as in the picture. There, but masking something. “Julian told me your name is Pinkerton? I thought you’d be British.”
I got the clear sense that she was disappointed I wasn’t. According to Julian, she spent all her time hobnobbing with ambassadors and Swiss people. How could I hope to impress her?
“He’s just joking. It’s sort of funny, actually,” I said, and quickly began telling her the story of the guest lecturer.
It was snowing outside, but she wanted to smoke, so we ventured off into the cold night together. Originally I thought we might stop at the library for some coffee, but instead we just walked in circles for an hour, and then two—trading more stories. Occasionally I’d stop to point out one of the older, impressive brick-and-marble buildings, but I got the sense she’d seen plenty of far older and more impressive ones before. Her tone of voice seemed to say:
Oh, is this what you call a fountain? Is this what you’d call a college? Is Julian what you’d call a writer?
Of the gently falling snow she said, with heavy sarcasm, “When I was eight years old it snowed once in Atlanta over Christmas, and my grandmother called it a
miracle
.” She looked at everything like it was a sad, small version of something better she’d seen somewhere else. It was how she looked at me.
The
only
thing she seemed to admire was my gold wristwatch. At first I thought she was worried about the time, but soon I saw that it was, in fact, because it was clearly nicer than anything else I was wearing. And yet she remained politely attentive as I spun out story after story—the neurons in my brain firing double time, trying to think of something that might astound her. I told her all about my drab little town, and my drab little mother, and my drab little after-school job. After a while I couldn’t stand to hear her pretend to be interested anymore, so finally I asked her how she and Julian had become friends.