Lost and Wanted(78)

    Up until that point, the evening had been like any other, but the offer to walk me home felt like a romantic gesture, and both of us became unusually quiet as we got closer to the house on Brewer Street, where Charlie and I rented an apartment on the second floor. What was so exciting for me was the feeling of being with someone—not smarter, necessarily, because I knew I was better than Neel at grasping an abstract idea and proving it mathematically—but so committed to the precise articulation of ideas. It wasn’t true what Charlie said about me, or not entirely: I might have tended to allow other people to choose me, but once I was in a relationship, I was usually the one in control. My conversations with Neel, on the other hand, felt more equal, or even as if I were going to have to prove myself, if I wanted to hold his attention. I wanted to prolong the potential of a real relationship as long as possible, not take any step that would propel Neel and me in one direction or the other. I couldn’t imagine anything better than imagining myself with Neel.

We stopped just outside the light from the fixture over the porch. I was shivering in a dark green cashmere coat that I’d bought with Charlie at a thrift store in Porter Square, more for style than for warmth. Neel was looking at me with his unique brand of curious detachment.

“So see you,” I said.

He kept his hands in his pockets. “Is that a euphemism?”

“We deplore euphemism,” I said. “Remember?”

“Too bad for me, then,” he said. He lingered for a second—I thought he was going to kiss me—but only squeezed my hand, before he turned and went. I watched him go, thinking how strange it was that the buoyant feeling in my chest could be produced from so little.

The people who lived below Charlie and me in that apartment house on Brewer Street had a small child, and seemed often to be screaming at each other; that night the commotion struck me as somehow touching, part of what my Justice professor had just referred to as the “rich pageant of human experience.” I ran up the stairs, eager to tell Charlie about my spontaneous date with Neel.

    But the apartment was dark. I turned on the lights, threw my stuff on the couch. Then I went into the kitchen to look for something I could eat—our refrigerator was almost always empty. I was rooting around in the cabinet for my Pringles, or even Charlie’s Smartfood, when I heard a sound from her room.

“Charlie?”

Her door was half-open, but because the lights were off and she hadn’t said anything, I’d assumed the room was empty.

“I thought you weren’t here!” I said.

She was lying in her bed, the covers pulled up to her chin.

“Are you okay?”

I turned on the light. The magazines that were always lying around her room had gone from a mess to something more alarming. They covered the floor like a carpet: Vogue and Elle, Essence and Vibe, as well as Daily Variety and Vanity Fair. Charlie didn’t drink more than the average Harvard student, and she didn’t like weed. Her drugs of choice were ibuprofen and caffeine; when she had a migraine, she went to the campus health center for something stronger. The night table was crowded with empty plastic bottles of Diet Coke—I could smell the saccharine sludge at the bottom—and there was an economy-sized bottle of Advil on the base of the lamp, from which she would take five or six tablets at a time. I’m embarrassed to think I once suggested she try to wean herself off it.

“He was here,” she said.

“Who?”

“Pope. I left our door unlocked, but I still don’t know how he got in downstairs.” She was wearing plaid pajama pants and a worn gray T-shirt that said Choate Lacrosse in yellow.

“Pope followed you home?”

“No—he was watching rehearsal again. He found me afterward, and said he wanted to apologize for being ‘badly behaved.’ I said I was meeting you at home, and I had to go, but he said it would just take a minute. I said we could talk at the theater, but he said we couldn’t. He asked if he could walk me home.”

“What did you say?”

Charlie shrugged. “I said okay. And he was actually very polite and nice, at least while we were walking. He said he shouldn’t have said those things to me—of course it was confusing for me—even if he felt them. He said my thesis was the best one he’d advised in years, and he really wanted to continue. He promised he wouldn’t talk about his feelings, or even touch me anymore.”

    “He touches you?”

“Well, not—you know. But yeah. His hand on my arm or my back all the time, once on my thigh. He promised not to do it anymore, as long as I don’t drop the tutorial. He said he’d never forgive himself if I quit—and that he didn’t want to give me an incomplete.”

“An incomplete—Charlie, that’s a threat!”

“Well, I mean, I have thought about it.”

“You can’t quit your thesis—no matter what. You’d graduate without honors, and you wouldn’t be able to apply for the Henry—or any other fellowship. What did you say to him?”

I didn’t mean it as any kind of reproach, but Charlie was defensive.

“I said, okay—I mean, what am I supposed to say? I don’t want an incomplete either. It’s not like I was taken in.”

“Of course not.”