Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost Part 10

We approached the Greenwich woods. Lucy, opening her mouth for the first time in over an hour, suddenly yelled, "I'm going home," turned around, and stomped off back toward the dorms.

"Lucy, no!" Elizabeth yelled and ran after her a little ways. When Lucy kept going, she stopped and we both watched her small shape, flowing in black overcoat, scarf, and boots, pound down the path into the night.

Elizabeth rejoined me and we continued walking back toward Greenwich. "What's wrong with her?" I asked "She's just really difficult sometimes." I saw Elizabeth was crying. We didn't speak until we got back to 21.

We set up on the floor of my room. I didn't have a mirror, so Elizabeth expertly cut some lines on the cover of a ca.s.sette tape. At first she still didn't want to talk.

"Did I do something to upset Lucy?" I asked.

"Not exactly. She's just-grrrrr! Why is she being like this?!" She told me about her friendship with Lucy, a saga that had involved frequent periods of nonfriendship from the time they were children together. Elizabeth swore that she was through with putting up with this behavior, but "isn't she just perfect? Isn't she the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?"

I thought to say, "No, you are," but wasn't sure whether she would storm out of my room, so instead I said, "Yeah, she's cool."

When the c.o.ke took hold, I summoned the courage to ask, "Is Lucy upset that you're hanging out with me?"

"What?" Elizabeth scrunched her face. "No, not you. Susie."

"Susie?"

"She can tell I'm in love with Susie."

"Really?"

"I mean, of course. She's amazing, isn't she?"

We lay on my bed together, dressed in our overcoats and snow boots. "You know, everyone says you guys are all going to be expelled," she told me.

"Do you think they can do that?"

"I dunno, but that's what people say. Are you scared?"

I thought about it for a moment, tried to picture being expelled. "It's kinda abstract, you know?"

We turned out the lights so we could listen to the instrumental side of David Bowie's Low alb.u.m. We listened to it once and then rewound the tape and played it again. "If you don't understand this alb.u.m, you don't understand Bowie," Elizabeth said. I listened intently to the lyrics: Don't look at the carpet,

I drew something awful on it

See

You're such a wonderful person.

But you got problems oh-oh-oh-oh.

I'll never touch you.

I looked at Elizabeth to see if she saw the significance of them. She looked at me and nodded, as though, it seemed to me, she had heard my thoughts. I watched her round deep eyes focus on a sputtering candle; her brow furrowed intensely, and her full lips pursed. I realized I was staring at her and tried not to, but found myself unable to stop.

"He's saying," I took a deep breath, "that we are vandals to art, and beauty. We dessicate it when we touch it."

"Maybe," she nodded and stared at me with a look I filled with horrible meaning.

"And he means, we do that when we touch people?" Elizabeth smiled at me, what seemed a malicious mocking, and turned away. We focused hard on the instrumental tracks.

When the alb.u.m ended the second time I said, "He's saying, if music can come from machines, then what makes us real?"

Elizabeth didn't respond. I propped myself up and looked down at her, through the darkness. She had fallen asleep, her lips curled in a menacing sneer. The urge to kiss or touch her was overwhelming, so I lay back down and stared at the ceiling, spending the next few hours listening to my heart beat as I came down from the c.o.ke. I wondered if it should be beating this fast. That can't be right, I thought, taking short gulps of breath. Outside, a bird started to chirp, the loudest bird I'd ever heard. I tried for hours to sleep, but the combination of the excitement created by Elizabeth's body next to me, and the very real possibility that I was going into cardiac arrest from the drugs, kept me wide awake.

Hours later, sleep had just begun to touch me when I heard a noise from the window. Someone was trying to force it open. I sat up in bed, too terrified to move or speak. The person on the other side seemed to have grabbed a trick tree branch with which he'd pried open the window a tiny bit and was forcing it to yield further. Finally there was one great shove and a grunt and the window sprang open entirely, its hinge snapped. I gasped and rose up in bed. A small canvas knapsack flew in through the window, followed by a figure who leapt in, crashing to the floor and yelling in pain. He lay cringing and grabbing his ankle. Poking out from a camel overcoat, I saw a pair of red Converse high-tops.

"Steve Shavel?"

He jumped to his feet. "I am. And who are you and what are you doing in my room? With a woman, no less!"

Elizabeth snoozed in oblivion. "We're just sleeping. See, we're fully dressed. Our shoes on, even."

Steve stood over the bed and looked at us. "Ah, so you are."

"We're problematizing our celibacy . . . ," I said, recalling the term.

Steve nodded. "Very admirable. Well done, then."

"Thank you."

"But what are you doing in my bed? Are you Susie's Krishna?"

"No. I'm Richard. I'm a first-year. I was thrown out of the dorms."

"Sorry to hear that but all the same, I'm not running a boardinghouse here. This is completely unacceptable."

"No one knew if you were coming back. Or even if you're enrolled. . . ."

"No one knew? Why wouldn't I come back? This is a travesty. Sasha!" he bellowed. As he threw open the door and marched up to Susie's room the entire house awoke, stirred from their futons and crevices on the living room floor, shook themselves off, and followed him up to Susie's room.

"Sasha!" Steve yelled, throwing open her door. "This is an outrage. What's the idea of giving away my room?"

Susie rubbed her eyes and sat up. "Calm down, Steve. No one knew where you were."

"Well, where did you think I was? I went down to talk to a Tractatus expert in North Carolina, then by amazing luck I stumbled into an estate auction and won a humidor of pre-Castro Cuban cigars for two hundred dollars. So I had to just pop down to Florida to smoke them. And then I came straight back here, just going for a few weeks to the transcendental workshop in Vermont, and I find you've given my room away and allowed this interloper to problematize on my bed."

"Oh, and maybe you stopped for a month or two at Smith?" Ox asked.

Steve shot up, straightening his spine. "Where did you hear that?"

Everyone laughed.

"That is not true. I just visited a friend who had a first edition I needed to see in her room, and it got late and so I needed a place to stay."

"It got late for a month?"

The bickering continued as the gray dawn filled the house. Steve eventually admitted that he had been "working with some girls in Comstock House on their orgone issues" and he had been persuaded to stay there, for the moment, as he "probably should do a bit more work before I let them loose on their own." The fact that he hadn't been, and didn't seem to have any intention of becoming, an enrolled student didn't enter into the discussion on whether or not the room was still rightfully his.

I was struck, never having had a nonofficial conversation with a thirty-year-old, by how young he looked. With his spiked hair, skinny tie, and buoyant energy, he actually seemed ten years younger than most of the lethargic inmates of the house.

While he brought a new effervescence to the mod just as we'd seemed on the brink of descending into the mold, his presence also added a new wrinkle to life in 21. Every afternoon, Steve strolled in from wherever he was staying at Smith and proceeded directly to the downstairs bathroom, where he would stay for two, three, and one day even five, hours, causing havoc as the other thirty of us had to share the one remaining tiny bathroom upstairs.

What Steve did in the bathroom was a constant topic of speculation. Autoerotic activities were, of course, suggested but always refuted by the fact that "it doesn't take four hours to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e." Spiking the hair with his Brylcreem certainly could account for as much as fifteen minutes of the time, a bowel movement another fifteen to twenty. But this still left hours unaccounted for. It was a mystery we would debate until the end of my Hampshire days, without ever coming close to solving it.

My life, however, also took on a new wrinkle as I started to pay nightly calls on Elizabeth. Together we rounded up what money we could gather and dropped in on Carl for our baggies of white powder. Often we would end up pa.s.sing out together around dawn, but the sleepovers remained, to my deepening confusion and frustration, fully dressed and entirely chaste.

Elizabeth spent much of our time together puzzling over the unconscionable behavior of Lucy, who continued to blow hot and cold, and listening to the Cramps, the Cure, and Christian Death and debating their meaning while I privately fantasized about her.

These fantasies remained tightly sealed away despite the fact that one night, Elizabeth initiated a conversation about our relationship.

Five lines of c.o.ke into an evening she suddenly said, "Do you think we should sleep together?"

I nearly choked on the Jack Daniel's I was gulping and stammered, "We, I mean, we do sleep together. Like every night."

She smiled wryly and condescendingly at me. "I mean have s.e.x."

"Oh, right." I tried to break free from her gaze. "Right, I mean. Is that what you want?"

"I don't know. I mean, I guess it's not that important to me either way. Do you think about it?"

I broke down coughing. "I think," I said, finally pulling myself together, "I think about everything. But, you know, I try not to, I mean, we're celibate."

"Right, celibate." She looked me deep in the eyes and smiled. "So you're saying you don't want to?"

"No, no. I mean, I'm not saying anything. I mean, you're my friend, right? So you can do things with friends?"

"I think it might be interesting. But it might be weird."

"Yeah . . . I can see that. Totally. But it might be like a bonding experience."

Elizabeth inhaled another line off the mirror. "Do you want to go and score some more?"

We didn't have s.e.x that night, nor on any of the following nights of Jan Term, although we sporadically discussed the matter. Our actual celibacy did not, however, stop the chatter in 21 about my whereabouts.

"Oh, Rich," Jon asked one day. "You're spending a lot of time hanging out with that Elizabeth girl."

I nodded. "I guess she's pretty weird."

"Oh, really. Wow, well, does she know you're celibate?"

"Of course. She respects our lifestyle."

"That's cool. . . . So you guys are doing a lot of c.o.ke?" Jon looked at me sideways. I couldn't figure out whether he was expressing disapproval or curiosity, but I felt immediately defensive. Curiously, Mod 21 was the one place in Hampshire College where drugs were rarely seen. It was a gesture that seemed to infuriate our enemies all the more; the world a.s.sumed our behavior could only be explained by some bizarre combination of drugs, but when they learned that Jon, Ox, Steve, and the rest were behaving that way sober-a state more or less unknown on the rest of campus-that information often pushed people into frothing madness.

That night Elizabeth and I sat on the floor of my room. We were a couple lines into a half-gram when the door flew open and Steve Shavel stood before us. "Ah, Richard. Right, I forgot that you're borrowing my room."

"Oh, sorry."

"Oh, I say, is that cocaine you're doing there?"

Elizabeth hunched over the mirror to defend our diminished supply.

"Could I trouble you for just a line or two of that? I've got this Div Three I have to finish, you know."

Steve joined us, sprawling across the floor, smoking cigarettes by the light of the giant candle Elizabeth had brought over that was melting into the ragged carpet. Steve insisted we turn off the Siouxsie and the Banshees alb.u.m we were playing, selecting instead the Rolling Stones' Aftermath.

He sat with us for the rest of the night, trying to explain Wittgenstein's Tractatus to us.

"To ridiculously simplify it," he said after a long exposition, "when I say I have a headache and you say you have a headache, we have no way of knowing whether we're talking about the same thing."

"But we both know what our heads are," Elizabeth said.

"Yes, but what is an ache? How do I know my ache is your ache?"

"What else could it be?"

"In the world of subjective experience, it could be anything."

We sat staring into the candle considering that, listening to the Stones pound out "Paint It Black." "Wait a second," Steve said when it was over. "Play that again."

I rewound it. The c.o.ke was almost gone and I knew any minute it would start getting light out. I hated being awake when the sun came up. "Rewind it again," Steve said when the song ended. He seemed to be deep in a train of thought. Elizabeth and I, coming down hard though we were, waited anxiously to hear what he was thinking.

After the eighth time we played it, he stood up. "It's about . . . his girlfriend's funeral."

Elizabeth and I looked at each other, confused.

Steve said, "He talks about a line of cars all painted black . . . and my love never to come back."

"Ohhhhhh." A chill went up my spine. How had I never seen that?

Steve continued. "And what about looking into the setting sun, where he says my love will laugh with me before the morning comes."

Elizabeth and I laughed. "Wow, it is." We played the song back and over again, giddy with revelation. And suddenly, laughing in the middle of it, Elizabeth and I clasped hands and as Steve explained on, she traced one finger down the side of my face. That night, lying in bed together fully dressed, we stared at each other and somehow our faces came together and we kissed for a very long minute before she said, "Good night," turned over, and went to sleep. I thought, This is the moment I've been waiting for my entire life.