Lost and Wanted(77)
“You’re starting a little late for that, aren’t you?” I said. “I think you should focus on just the one marriage.”
“Right,” Neel said, but he didn’t take his eyes off mine. “That’s what I’m planning to do.”
12.
Neel and I had done our problem sets together for Arty; as undergrads, we’d studied in the Cabot Science Library, and sat around his room at the Grossmans’ arguing and gossiping—but we didn’t actually become a couple until the beginning of our senior year. A brief, depressing relationship of mine had just ended. On our first date, the young man in question confided in me gleefully about a bet he had going with his three roommates—members of the same all-male social club, with weekend binge-drinking habits and investment banking aspirations—about who among them was going to make the first million.
More significantly, Charlie’s long-term boyfriend, Kwesi, had graduated, won a Rhodes, and gone off to Oxford; she’d been the one to insist that they separate, very much against the advice of her parents. This was while she was still planning to complete her thesis and apply for the Henry Fellowship at Oxford herself, so it was possibly more of a hiatus than a break. Charlie said that she didn’t want Kwesi to feel tied down by an undergraduate girlfriend during his time in England, but I thought she broke things off also because Kwesi was so exactly what her parents had always hoped for her. Like everyone, I liked Kwesi—but I couldn’t help being grateful that Charlie and I were single at the same time.
Somehow I had put off fulfilling my Moral Reasoning requirement, and was taking Michael Sandel’s blockbuster course, Justice. I found myself debating with freshmen in our TF-led sections questions like, “Is it right to lie, if doing so might save the life of a friend?” and “Is patriotism a form of racism?” The class seemed so easy, compared with the work I was doing for my thesis with Professor Aksoy, on effective field theory calculations of the W and Z masses, that I spent very little time on it, often writing the response papers during the lectures. Charlie and I now lived off campus, and we had plans for after graduation. In addition to the work on my own thesis, I had a job with Arty as a faculty aide and was applying to PhD programs; Charlie was just as busy, writing her thesis on Laclos, rehearsing her role as Mme. de Merteuil, and applying for the Henry.
By the time I heard about them, that fall of our senior year, Pope’s overtures to Charlie had become impossible for her to ignore. Sometimes he would stop in the middle of their tutorial, say that he couldn’t continue because Charlie’s presence was too distracting. She kept him up at night. Yes, there had been other girls, but he’d never felt anything like this before. He knew she didn’t feel the same way, but he had to be honest with her; he couldn’t pretend their relationship was purely pedagogical anymore. I noticed that she was often sicker than usual on Thursdays, and occasionally spent that day in bed, skipping not only her tutorial but her other classes as well.
When I asked her what she was going to do about Pope, Charlie usually made a joke and brushed it off. But she did once ask me if I knew what actually happened when students reported a teacher for that type of offense: that they had to testify in front of a board of other students and faculty, who would then hear the tenured professor’s side and make a decision. She said that if she’d learned anything from her mother, it was that there was always more than one solution to any problem. She was a big girl, and she could handle it on her own. Many times I resolved to press her to do something—I fantasized about ways I might help. Charlie and I both felt very adult that last year of college, very experienced; I think we believed that what we’d achieved academically was akin to growing up, rather than something we might have done in place of it.
One Friday night I had planned to get Chinese food with Charlie after her rehearsal. I was taking a shortcut diagonally through the Yard after a lecture entitled, “Is Torture Always Wrong?,” heading home, when I ran into Neel. As always happened when another romance ended, we’d been spending more time together, and I was glad to hear him calling my name. He told me he’d spent most of the day at the college observatory on Garden Street, and was meeting some mutual friends for a beer. Did I want to come?
I don’t think I worried about alerting Charlie to my change of plans. “The problem with you,” she once told me, “is that you go out with the people who ask you; you never take the initiative with anyone you like.” Now the person I liked had asked, and I knew she would want me to go. Anyway, it was early.
Neel and I passed through the wrought-iron gate and started down the brick sidewalk, under the double-globe streetlamps. I asked him about the observatory, and we talked about the program he was organizing for at-risk teenagers to visit at night and view the comet, Swift-Tuttle.
“My parents were confused—my father asked me what risk I meant. He didn’t understand that the program was for poor kids, and I realized it was because I hadn’t made it clear. Because I was uncomfortable saying it. What is it about Americans that makes it so hard for us to say what we mean?”
We developed a theory about our national addiction to euphemism as we walked to the bar: we also disliked “hooked up” and “passed away.” Our friends Chris and Vlatko were already there when we arrived, along with Vlatko’s girlfriend, a computer science concentrator whose name I can’t remember now. We finished two pitchers talking about people we knew in common, and when I said that I had to go home because I had a research fellowship application to finish, Neel offered to walk me.