Lost and Wanted(23)
“You don’t know her,” I told him. I began by defending her, which only encouraged Neel to argue. I wonder now if I secretly wanted him to point out her flaws.
“Does she really read all those fashion magazines?”
“It’s for her classes, actually. They do feminist readings of magazines and TV shows and stuff.”
“Uh huh,” said Neel, not bothering to hide a smirk. “What’s her family like?”
“Her dad’s a psychiatrist in private practice, but he used to run the department at Tufts medical school. And her mother started an art gallery. Now she’s on the board of the Museum of Fine Arts—and she runs a free after-school program for kids.”
“So they’re these very high-culture black people and she embraces anything popular, television, media, in order to annoy them. She wants to be an actor for the same reason. But”—Neel raised his index finger, a parody of our professor, Arty Hofmann—“she does it through the prism of academia, so she’s not escaping at all.”
I had to admit that this did seem like an accurate assessment of Charlie, one I hadn’t come to myself in spite of how much time I spent with her. As my friendship with Neel developed, we continued to talk this way about people, especially Charlie. Sometimes, sitting on his mattress and engaging in this glorified form of gossip, I knew I was betraying my friend and felt guilty. I didn’t read fashion magazines, not out of any discipline or intellectual purity, but because they made me feel unsophisticated and ugly. I was aware that Neel was giving me a sort of compliment, and also that this compliment was at the expense of my friend, and maybe women in general, but it felt so good to receive that I overlooked that part of it.
This kind of conversation extended to our love lives as well. During those times that Neel had a girlfriend, I knew about her from the beginning: her irresistible attractions, her humorous foibles, the thing he had identified that he guessed would doom them in the end. I shared the same information about my romantic life with him. I sometimes found myself on a second or third date—drinking at Shays, at a concert in the drained swimming pool under Adams House—distracted by the thought of how I would describe the interaction later on, to Neel. Sometimes, sitting and talking on that mattress, it seemed as if we’d outsmarted not only other people, but love itself.
* * *
—
Neel’s and my friendship was of a very collegiate type. We studied together, drank together, hugged each other each time we said goodbye, but in the first three years we spent together at Harvard, we never went beyond that. Later, when we did get together for real, we would speculate about what had taken so long, but I don’t think we really figured it out. I wonder now if it was the way we talked together that had kept us apart. It was so safe, so empowering, that neither one of us wanted to give it up for the real thing; we wanted to hold up that potential against which everything else could be compared.
At the end of one of my evenings in his cold and uncomfortable apartment, it was a pleasure to return to the spacious, overheated room I shared with Charlie in Lowell House. She was always awake. If she wasn’t shut in her room with her boyfriend, Kwesi, she would be puttering around our messy common room in a white silk bathrobe with multicolored butterflies. We would make Swiss Miss hot chocolate, dumping two or three packets in the mugs we’d stolen from the dining hall, until the surface of sludgy liquid was swimming with marshmallows, and talk until the early hours of the morning.
Charlie had been with Kwesi—straight-A philosophy concentrator, varsity soccer player, and president of the Black Students Association—since freshman year. (Kwesi would go on to win a Rhodes and teach at the London School of Economics.) Through Kwesi, Charlie was able to move between the black and Latino–centric social world of the Radcliffe quad, and her mostly white friends from boarding school, the Hasty Pudding Club, and the Signet, an arts club where she sometimes ate lunch on Thursdays. In our day, housing at Harvard was “semi-random,” which meant that you could list your three top choices on your housing form; the fact that black and Latino students often chose the less convenient houses at Radcliffe in order to remain together—this strikes me now as one of the most quiet and effective protests I’ve ever witnessed—embarrassed the university, and no doubt led to the institution of complete randomization a few years after we left.
Charlie and Neel didn’t get to know each other well until our senior year, but each of them seemed amused by my description of the other. When I was with Charlie, the whole style of Neel’s off-campus apartment seemed pretentious, and the things he said—he was planning to teach physics to children in rural India after graduation; he was a Marxist-Leninist—absurd. Charlie made fun of his clothes (which he did actually have the money to replace, had he chosen to) and his hand-rolled cigarettes (which she purposely misidentified as cloves).
When I was with Neel, though, it was the other way around. Neel even suggested that Charlie was tolerated by her black friends because of Kwesi, but that there were people who dismissed her as a snob, a Black American Princess, and worse. I defended her—how could you please everyone?—but Charlie and Neel were the two best talkers I’d ever known, and I found myself susceptible to their arguments. I sometimes consoled myself with the thought that this was the way a scientific mind worked, constantly doubting, open to revising its ideas if new evidence presented itself. But the fact was that Neel and Charlie did just as well academically as I did, and they weren’t constantly changing their minds, or finding that their own ideas shifted under the influence of powerful fields created by two equally magnetic friends.