Envy(22)

They were well-rounded students, maintaining good grades in the required subjects, but excelling in the language arts. Their second semester, they pledged the same fraternity. They were avid sports enthusiasts and good athletes. They played on their fraternity football and basketball teams, sometimes competing with each other as avidly as with rival teams.

They were active and well-known on campus. Todd was elected to the Student Congress. Roark organized a campus-wide food drive to benefit a homeless shelter. Both wrote occasional editorials, articles, and human interest stories for the student newspaper.

After one of his stories was published, Roark was approached by the dean of the journalism school. He was highly complimentary of Roark’s work and asked him to consider switching the focus of his endeavors from creative writing to journalism. Roark declined. Fiction was his first love.

Roark never told Todd about that conversation, but he celebrated when Todd won first place in a national collegiate fiction-writing competition. Roark’s submission hadn’t even earned an honorable mention. He tried to conceal his jealousy.

They caroused and partied with their fraternity brothers. They drank enough beer to float a fleet. Occasionally they shared a joint, but they didn’t make a habit of it and never tried hard drugs. They nursed one another’s hangovers, loaned each other money during temporary financial crises, and when Roark contracted strep throat and his temperature shot up to one hundred and three, it was Todd who rushed him to the campus infirmary.

When Todd was notified of his father’s sudden death, Roark drove him home across two state lines, and then stayed on through the funeral to lend the emotional support his friend needed.

Disagreements arose now and then. Once, when Roark borrowed Todd’s car, he backed into a fireplug and dented the rear fender. Todd asked several times when he planned to have it repaired. He asked so frequently that it became a touchy subject.

“Will you get off my goddamn back about that?” Roark snapped.

“Will you fix my goddamn car?”

That heated exchange was the extent of the disagreement. Roark took the car to be repaired the following day, and Todd never mentioned it again.

And then there was the case of the missing Pat Conroy.

Roark drove to a bookstore in Nashville and stood in line for over two hours to meet the author and obtain a signed copy of The Great Santini. He admired Conroy more than any other contemporary novelist and nearly embarrassed himself when Conroy wished him good luck with his own writing pursuits. The autographed book was his most prized possession.

Todd asked to borrow it. He claimed that when he finished reading it, he replaced it in Roark’s bookshelf. It never turned up, not even when Roark practically tore their room apart searching for it.

What happened to the book remained a mystery. They eventually stopped arguing about it, but Roark never loaned Todd a book again, and Todd never asked to borrow one.

They were good-looking, each in his own way, so there was never a shortage of girls. When they weren’t talking about books, chances were very good that the subject was women. If one of them got lucky and a young lady stayed over, the other bunked down in a neighboring room.

One morning after a young lady had taken the “walk of shame” down the hallway of the fraternity house on her way out, Todd looked over at Roark and said morosely, “She wasn’t all that hot, was she?”

Roark shook his head. “Last night you were looking at her through beer goggles.”

“Yeah,” Todd sighed. Then with a sly smile he added, “But it all feels good in the dark, doesn’t it?”

They talked about women tirelessly and shamelessly, unabashedly adhering to the double standard. Only Roark came close to having a serious relationship, and only once.

He met her during his food drive. She had volunteered to help. She had a beautiful smile and a slender, athletic body. She was a smart and conscientious student and could converse intelligently on any number of subjects. But she also had a good sense of humor and laughed at his jokes. She was an excellent listener who focused on the topic when it turned to something serious. She taught him how to play “Chopsticks” on the piano, and he persuaded her to read The Grapes of Wrath.

She was a passionate kisser, but that’s as far as she would go. She clung to a strict moral code, founded on her religion, and she didn’t intend to break it. She hadn’t in high school with her longtime sweetheart, and she wasn’t going to until she knew she was with the man she would marry and grow old with.

Roark admired her for it, but it was damned frustrating.

Then she called him one night and said she had just finished reading the Steinbeck classic, and if he wasn’t busy, she would like to see him. He picked her up, they went for a drive, then parked.

She had loved the classic novel and thanked him for sharing it with her. Her kisses that night were more passionate than ever. She raised her sweater and pressed his hand against her bare breast. And if caressing her and feeling her response wasn’t the most physically gratifying sexual experience Roark had ever had, it was certainly the most meaningful. She was sacrificing something of herself to him, and he was sensitive enough to realize it.

He wondered if he was falling in love.

A week later, she dumped him. He was tearfully informed that she was resuming the relationship with her high school sweetheart. He was dumbfounded and not a little angry. “Do I at least get to ask why?”