All the Sad Young Literary Men Read online

  “No thanks,“ I said. I had now spent three nights getting very drunk. I knew I’d held long conversations with people, including the prettiest of my new classmates, but I couldn’t remember any-one’s name, and in general I had a bad feeling about the whole thing. Now I was constructing a complicated chart, my first big assignment in college, which would tell me the classes that would most quickly fulfill the reading list with which my favorite high school history teacher had sent me off into the world. “Homer,” it began. “Herodotus. Tacitus. Augustine. Lactantius.”

  “You can do that later,” said Ferdinand. “Now is the time for the bars. You have to lay the groundwork. Tomorrow will be too late.”

  “Forty bucks a night for groundwork,” I grumbled.

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “But you need to spend money to earn money. You coming?”

  I told him no and he was out the door. I sat there that night, the course guide and the CUE guide and the Confi guide and my long, increasingly Anglocentric list—“Chaucer,” it continued. “Jonson. Johnson. Sterne. Burke. Carlyle. Thackeray. Eliot.”—all strewn across our paisley couch, and felt sad for myself, and sorry. To arrive at Harvard and find—Ferdinand! It was infuriating. It was absurd. Our dorm was in the very center of the Yard, our windows opened onto the little quadrangle between Matthews, Straus, and Massachusetts Hall. It was still warm and outside a few people were playing Frisbee. Were they douchebags? Maybe, but I could have gone out there and said hello, laid the groundwork, maybe now they were douchebags but later on they’d be geniuses? Then again, they kept dropping the Frisbee, those guys, and it was like they’d never played before. It was all too sad. I opened Ferdinand’s CD book, having no CDs of my own—a few years earlier I’d made the determination, based on my extensive purchasing of cassette tapes throughout junior high, that the compact disc was a technology bound for speedy obsolescence, and decided to wait it out—but Ferdinand’s collection was all greatest hits, greatest hits, Allman Brothers, greatest hits. All those hours, those irretrievable hours, I’d spent studying for the SATs. All those days, those irretrievable sunny days when I flipped through the catalogs, considered my applications, wondered at the roundedness of my character—and now Ferdinand was my roommate? He was the first in a series of disappointments at that bitter place, though eventually I think they formed a pattern, and I tried to read it.

  And I had grand notions, too. I had quit football because I was too small, but also so that I could read Kierkegaard. My history teacher’s list was nice, but here was Fear and Trembling. Here The Sickness Unto Death. I considered dipping into Weber. Occasionally the word Foucault would float from my tongue, a trial balloon. In such moods I denounced Ferdinand—he was not Harvard!— but at the end of the year I stayed with him. We were hanging out with lacrosse players and their girlfriends, I was badly drunk three nights a week, and some of my morning classes went by unattended, went by anyway, while I lay in bed moaning. In the weeks before rooming groups were due, I made a few halfhearted sorties in the Freshman Union to some of the more articulate kids I’d met in my classes, but they were as wary as they were intelligent, their groups had congealed and they liked it that way, and anyhow I hadn’t yet learned how to talk with them: instead of Foucault the word douchebag kept escaping, like a dark secret, from my lips. One late night in the basement of the Owl Club, Ben, a slight and drunken lacrosse player, asked shyly if he could room with Ferdinand and me, and we said OK. So that spring the three of us joined hands together for the housing lottery, and stepped over, without really knowing what we were doing, into the chasm of the rest of our lives.

  That summer I failed to intern at the Washington Post or even to write travel copy for the student travel guide. Instead I went back to Maryland and worked as a camp counselor, and at the end of most every day, exhausted, I would drive to my mother’s grave and water the tree my father and I had planted there. I don’t know what significance this has, but it sticks in my mind from that time. Perhaps because memory is a faulty organ, or anyway a very mechanical one that works through repetition, I remember the nightly exhaustion, from carrying eight-year-old campers, and the heat, and the watering. Then I would go home and take a nap, and at night, when there wasn’t much to do, I’d go driving just as I had in high school and try to figure things out. I used to think that by driving and driving through the suburbs of Maryland I’d finally just break through, break out; and then, finally, I did, I left. And now where was I? My mother’s old Oldsmobile still ran, and I went up 32, I went down 32, and time permitting I’d pull over at some highway McDonald’s and try to get through the Confessions of Rousseau. The books he had read as a child, said Rousseau, “gave me odd and romantic notions of human life, of which experiences and reflection have never wholly cured me.” I resolved, also, never to be cured. I went to the parties we still threw that summer, melancholy keggers at which we told tales of our heroic college exploits, and got drunk, just as in college, and once in a while, to salve my wounded heart, the not-yet-graduated Amy Gould would let me kiss her behind a tree.

  Then summer was over, and I returned to school for more of what I’d left. The couch, my old television, our Simpsons tape; my laptop in the library, the lectures at ten in the morning, the wind as I walked to them among a herd of faces, very few of whom were my friends. Ferdinand, for his part, only accelerated his activity. His groundwork had paid off. He had, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said of his friend John Peale Bishop, “an insatiable penis,” and by second semester sophomore year he was running a hotel room, as he liked to put it, out of Leverett J-12. No one knew this better than I, who as his bunk mate had to journey to the yellow common-room couch every time I heard an extra pair of footsteps accompany him through the door. Things got so busy that I suggested to Ben, who’d won the coin flip at the beginning of the year and thus his own room, that he give up his place to Ferdinand and move in with me. “No way,” said Ben. “What about when I get laid?” There was a pause. “Look,” he said, “a coin toss is a coin toss. Or isn’t it?” It was, it was, and so I continued to make the trip, and to be honest I didn’t mind. Ferdinand was not discriminating, not at all; he had a massive tolerance for giggliness or crudeness from attractive women, but just as often they were very impressive, the women, and increasingly so. The silhouettes of the daughters of our professors, and of hedge-fund presidents, junk-bond kings, and Hollywood impresarios, flickered through our hallways, whispered good-bye in the morning, walked quietly out. They were the sorts of women that, if you had a rule against sleepovers, for them you’d make an exception.

  And then one day—it was a cold lazy Sunday in what was now our junior year, we had all, even me, gone out the night before and spent the day lying half ruined and miserable on the couch, watching football—Ferdinand came home with Lauren, whose father was Vice President of the United States. Four of us were there, in various states of recline, Ben and I and Nick and Sully, and we accepted her presence with a lordly calm. We were all here together at this college, after all, this just and classless place, all our destinies were set at zero, and anything was possible, was the idea. Anything was possible, but it was hard not to notice how much Lauren resembled her father—she was blond where he was dark, but otherwise they shared the same soft features, and the slight blurriness or sensual weakness in the mouth, and they were handsome in a similar way, and also a little regal and a little outsized. We acted casually enough, we thought, but it was hard not to feel that here, in our room, we were finally coming into contact with greater things.

  Lauren began to come by in the evenings, and often she was drunk. Are the rich very different from you and me? Judge for yourself. She was drunk, and it was my role to sit in the room I shared with Ferdinand and try to work on my junior paper. “It’s important that you do this,” Ferdinand told me. “You need to be, like, the Scholar. It creates an atmosphere.”

  I didn’t like this very much. “Why can’t someone else be the Scholar?”

  “Because,
” he answered, leaving, “you’re our last best hope. And, anyway, you never go out.”

  “I do too!” I called after him. Immediately I put on my coat and walked out into the night. But Ferdinand was right, of course; I had become a shut-in, a recluse, and outside the room and outside my carrel I wasn’t sure what to do. The libraries were closed now, and when I ducked behind big redbrick Leverett to walk along the Charles, the wind came off the river mixed with a hard dust. I went to the Grille finally and drank a four-dollar pitcher without talking to anyone—by this point I didn’t know anyone—and then, defeated, I went back home. I had a paper to write. That semester I was working on Lincoln, and something of his tragedy had entered my bones, so that if I was noble I was noble like Lincoln, and if I was solemn I was solemn like Lincoln.

  I was open to influence then, to any influence. I was ready to rearrange myself, if that’s what it took. Because the plans that I’d had for myself had faltered, somewhere, and I could not tell why. Does he who fights douchebags become, inevitably, something of a douchebag? I don’t know. Maybe.

  I was lost.

  One night as I worked on Lincoln, Lauren came into the bedroom to visit. Ferdinand had gone out for cigarettes, and it was just me.

  “Whatcha doing?” she asked. She was a little drunk, she wore jeans and a loose light-blue cardigan over a white T-shirt, and she set herself down on the corner of my bed.

  “Nothing,” I said. “A little Lincoln.” In fact I had an idea about Lincoln that I’d stolen from Edmund Wilson—that by his eloquence he had foisted his interpretation of the war on future generations—and I was now trying to so muddle this idea with quotations from various French theorists that it might come to seem my own. But I didn’t feel like sharing all of this with Lauren.

  Perhaps she sensed my disapproval, my remove, because immediately she tried to bridge it.

  “Ferdinand says you’re from Clarksville?”

  “Yup.”

  “It’s nice up there.”

  “It’s up and down. We were in between.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she said quickly. “I hate being rich. Don’t you think money is so dumb?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. Of course I did think it, but abstractly. My parents had done fine, financially, especially after my mother also became a computer programmer, but they never had the sense that they would do fine indefinitely. It was occasionally suggested during money-related arguments in our household that computers might get canceled. “I don’t know,” I repeated. “I guess there’s no use being ashamed of it.”

  “I just wish I could be more like you,” she said. “You know? Sort of serious and scholarly.”

  “And I wish,” said I, “that I could be you.”

  “We could trade,” she decided. She leaned over toward me in such a way that I could see down her shirt, but what struck me then was just her nearness, her girliness. “But you have to warn me first—why don’t you like being you?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. Jesus, where to begin? “I just—” And here something happened to me that had happened to me once or twice before, always with women: a moment of unpremeditated screaming honesty, of saying out loud what had remained in my mind only a kind of vagueness, a foreboding, not even a thought. “I just don’t understand what people want from me,” I said. “I just don’t really understand what I’m doing.”

  Her eyebrows went up, momentarily. She looked great doing it—I realized her features were so generous that her mouth and brow and jaw could absorb a great deal of emotion without actually seeming to move. A few years later, during the campaign and on her father’s face, it would be called “stiffness.” That’s not what it was. “Yes,” she said now. “I feel like that too. I see people looking at me and I don’t know what they mean. Or what they see, you know?”

  “But you get along with them.”

  “I’m not as grouchy as you,” she said, shrugging. I liked it how she shrugged, and when she smiled at me I smiled back. I disapproved of her, disapproval was what I knew, but she seemed so young to me then, so changeable.

  And so I pushed my luck and asked, “How are things with Ferdinand?”

  “Ferdinand . . . ,” lying back woozily on my bed. I wasn’t a big bed-maker but on this day, miraculously, I’d made it, and cleared off my clothes to boot.

  “Listen,” I said, standing up, standing over her. “What do you see in him?”

  “Ferdinand?” With some difficulty she propped herself up on an elbow. “I don’t know. He’s . . . fun. And I’m—” She lay back down, lounging. “You know, I’m just in college.”

  I looked at her—closely, closely. She resembled royalty, I tell you. She was practically the leader of the free world. Yet she lacked speech. I—on the other hand—standing in that little room, my fingertips still warm from the keyboard—I did not lack it!

  “But that’s just it!” I began. “I mean, we’re in college. It’s time to get serious! It’s time to get to the bottom of things. The meaning of them. I mean—”

  As I began to expound on this, I thought I saw her looking at me in a way I hadn’t seen a woman look at me in a long time. Probably she wasn’t, or she was just startled by all the words, but already in my mind, in my loins, I sensed a looming ethical dilemma. And I took a deep breath, a pause, because first I needed to tell her what I thought of things, and I needed to blow her mind. It wasn’t Ferdinand himself that I wanted to dissuade her from, exactly, and not in favor of me, per se, but the idea of Ferdinand, and the idea of me: it was important that I arrange these properly in her mind. Because fun—I turned the word over in my mind. Did she mean sex? Boats? Ice cream? There was right action and wrong action. There was Kierkegaard. There was fun, and then there were those ten minutes before the Grille closed, the music turned off, the lights coming up to reveal the beer spilled on the floor, the plastic cups lying there, and people’s coats had fallen off the little coat ledge in the corner, and you’d be going home alone. How was I going to explain all this to anyone? To Lauren, for example, poor privileged Lauren for whom no amount of grooming and training (and we were all getting it, in our way, the grooming and the training) would turn her into the person she actually wanted to be? To Lauren, who’d passed out on my bed?

  This was all in 1997. It was before the scandals broke, one after the other, in a rising, crescendoing spiral of tawdriness, and before it became clear that though her father was innocent, he lacked the skill to distance himself in quite the right way—that even his innocence appeared somehow manipulative. For now, the economy was moving along, the Serbs were off the hills above Sarajevo, the party of the opposition was in confusion and disarray. Ferdinand discovered Diesel jeans and, walking around with Lauren, looked better than ever. I began to think that she was right, right about everything, and though we didn’t talk much after that episode in my room—I wrote her a long e-mail, and she didn’t write back— I suspect it was the happiest time of Lauren’s life.

  And then, about a month after the e-mail, things came to a head in Leverett J-12. I had been buried in the library, reading all of Lincoln’s little notes and letters, all sixteen volumes, and finishing my great Lincoln paper, though admittedly much of my time was spent imagining what it would be like already to be the author of a great Lincoln paper. Would I grant interviews? But now things were getting tense, the deadline was nine in the morning, and I had to finish the Lincoln, for no one else would. When they stumbled in at around three I was already in bed, turning some final phrases over in my mind. When I heard them pause in the front hall and then paw each other for a while—transparent were the ways of Ferdinand to me—I knew I should get up. The trip to the couch was momentous, and though I wore a fairly new T-shirt and my best boxers I felt underdressed. I took my laptop along, and they smiled sheepishly at me, apologizing, as they walked past into the bedroom. And Lauren, happy and seeing me there on the ridiculous couch, my face illuminated in simulated concentration by the bright nim
bus of the monitor, Lauren winked.

  For the next two hours I sat at my laptop, that small and nimble machine, its purr doing little to muffle their sounds.

  At first they wrestled, she giggled, he growled.

  “My shirt’s chafing me, man,” I heard Ferdinand say, cracking up. “I’m taking it off.”

  A bit later I heard his shoes thud against the floor, separately. Hers followed, together and daintily, as if she’d not only taken them off simultaneously, but tried to lighten their fall. And presently, I thought I heard from the bedroom little wistful sounds, hesitating, like Ferdinand’s laugh, as they rubbed against each other.

  “My pants,” he then said. “They’re chafing me.” They giggled and again there was a furious rustling. His ambition was like a little engine, his secretary said of Lincoln, that knew no rest.

  What now? Was he sucking on her breasts? He’d explained to me once that if a girl has larger breasts, you can be rougher with them—was he being rougher? I suppose he massaged her inner thighs.

  And then there was a silence, some quick rustling. “No,” she said, regretfully but sharply. “You’re drunk.”

  “I’m shit-faced,” he agreed.

  “Me too.”

  "Oh, man,” he said after a while. “My pants were really chafing me.”

  She did a Mr. Burns imitation, thrumming her fingers together diabolically and intoning, “Excellent.” The moment had passed, and already they had settled into positions of sleep. I had listened to all this with profound attention, and now it was 5:00 a.m. I was just a paragraph away with my paper but this was rather a lot to take in. I was going to need a few more days for the Lincoln.