#1

Professor Bauerschmidt was tall and bald and had cheeks that were so gaunt that Paul could see strands of muscle press against his cheekbones.  He smoked and he hated being without a cigarette, so when he taught he would stick a piece of chalk in his mouth, which would leave little white marks against his lips.  During his short career as a student at Didymus College, Paul tried to describe everyone in terms of some obscure cultural reference.  “Professor Bauerschmidt reminds me of a French intellectual from the 1950s,” he told Aaron Hamilton, his roommate.  Aaron was tall and gangly and had a trick of climbing the hallway walls while he talked to girls.  He would stretch out his long arms and rest splayed hands against the cinderblocks on either wall and slowly winch his way up.  He wasn’t interested in French intellectuals.  On their first day as roommates, he’d shown Paul every pair of boxer shorts that he owned, naming the labels and asking him to admire the plaid.  Paul hadn’t known that boxer shorts existed.  To Paul, underwear were always white and always pressed against your hip joints.  When Professor Bauerschmidt talked about monsters, Paul would think about Aaron and the way that he would tilt his head as he leered down at girls from the ceiling.

Professor Bauerschmidt’s class was called Monsters in American Literature, but he seemed to feel sad about that.  It was an alliterative title, and he told his students that alliteration was the besetting sin of class naming.  “It’s meant to appeal to a certain preening cleverness in undergraduates,” he said.  It took him awhile to even get around to this statement, to deign to embark on the subject of the class itself.  He spent twenty minutes of the first class session trying to lead a discussion about a sign that the city had placed on the main route out of town.  The sign said “fifteen hundred people enjoyed having you.”  He chortled slowly over this, waggling the piece of chalk in his mouth, making Paul wonder whether there was some sexual meaning to the sign, or if it just implied that the townspeople had swindled their visitors in some way.

Paul was from the town, Ascalon, Ohio, and he had never really noticed that sign before.  When packing for college, he had left his childhood room intact and had gone about the house collecting some of his parents’ objects that he thought might make him seem idiosyncratic and interesting.  His mother let him take her Tibetan temple bells and his father gave him a drab green Chinese army bag that he never used.  They argued over the accordion that had belonged to Paul’s grandfather, but eventually he was allowed to take that, too.  Aaron Hamilton broke the little mallet that was used to strike the temple bells during Paul’s first week at college.  The accordion remained under his bed after an abortive attempt to interest the guys on the hall in the fact that he had it.  He carried his books in the drab green army bag.

During the first week of classes, Paul and Aaron’s room became a hangout for the guys on the hall.  They were always sitting on Paul’s bed, leaning back against his pillow, rubbing the cotton of the sheets between their thumbs and forefingers.  The bed had begun to smell like them, and Paul slept in a thin grit of Doritos crumbs.  Sometimes they fell silent when he came into the room, and he knew that they’d been discussing him.  They gave him curious, hostile looks.  One of them was named Brom and the guys called him Brom Van Brunt.  It took Paul a little while to realize that this wasn’t his real name.  The guys laughed at him when he got it wrong.  “That’s from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, dumb ass,” Aaron Hamilton said.  All the guys were like Aaron.  They had gone to prep school and wore boxer shorts.  Paul found a nice clean desk at the library where he could sit for hours and pretend to study.  He would have slept there, if he could.

There was a girl in Professor Bauerschmidt’s class named Eudora Moxey.  Paul thought that it sounded like the name of a rock star.  During the second week of school he went up to her at a frat party and said her name, and then, because he couldn’t think of what else to say, he said it again.

“Yes,” she said.  “That is my name.”

“It’s a great name.  In the entire universe, it’s probably one of ten great names.”

“What’s another?”

Fortunately, he had anticipated this question and had spent several hours in the library’s card catalog, preparing his answer.  “Belladona Poppendick,” he said.  “She wrote a book about aborigines.”

They were on the frat house patio and Eudora was sitting on a stone wall.  She lowered her head and gave him a curious, comical gaze from under her eyebrows.  “You’re in my English class, aren’t you?”

“Right,” Paul said.  “Bauerschmidt breathes chalk tawbacky.”

“What?”

“Um, just some doggerel.  He’s always chewing on a piece of chalk.  You’ve noticed that, right?”

“I like Bauerschmidt.  I like what he said about the weird being a gateway into folly.”

Paul blinked.  “Yeah, that was great,” he told Eudora.  “Just great.”

“I mean, it’s fascinating, the idea that there’s this other world, this world of folly right beyond our own.”

A thin, dark-haired girl who was sitting beside Eudora on the wall rolled her eyes and said, “The world of folly again.”  Paul glanced at her and then back at Eudora, who had pert lips that looked a little too wrinkled, like the crimping on a pie crust.  He liked those lips and wanted her to talk more so that he could watch them move around.

“And that’s where the monsters live,” he suggested.

“No.  Weren’t you paying attention?  The monsters live here.  They just help us enter the world of folly by being so weird.  We look at them and think, ‘well, if that can exist then anything can exist,’ and we’re there, in the world of folly.”

It was at this moment that someone bumped against Paul and he spilled the wine that he was carrying in his Chinese army bag.  He was carrying it in a clear plastic lemonade pitcher with a flip top lid.  The lid flew off and the wine splashed out, falling in a single mass onto the patio stones between them.  Some of it splashed up across Eudora’s sun dress.  Paul was embarrassed.  Whenever he was embarrassed, he would pretend that he was someone suave, like Cary Grant.  “I’m dreadfully sorry,” he said, and fumbled in his pocket for a white handkerchief.

The thin, dark-haired girl was amused.  “Is that a lemonade pitcher?”

“Yes.”

“And is that a handkerchief?”

“Yes.”

“There’s something very old world about you.”

“I thought that if I put the wine in the pitcher, I would fool campus security,” he said, busy with trying to mop the wine off of Eudora’s hem.  Her sun dress was purple with red paisleys.  “Here, give me that,” Eudora said and took the handkerchief.  Their fingers touched as she did so and Cary Grant deserted Paul.  He watched her press the white cotton handkerchief against her dress and tried not to look at her knees, which were round and lithesome.

The thin, dark-haired girl noted his embarrassment and scooted over.  “Here,” she said, “sit on the wall between us.”

Paul sat.  There was a glass door that led off the patio into the living room of the frat house, and Paul could see Aaron Hamilton in there, dancing.  He stretched his long arms out over the heads of several girls at once and waved his hands in a rhythmic pattern, as if spinning a web.  “Do you see that guy in there?” he asked the thin, dark-haired girl.  “That’s my roommate.”

“Spiderman?” she said.  “We were just talking about him.  Why is he always climbing the walls?”

“I don’t know,” Paul said.  “He wears plaid boxers.”

“Are those comfortable?” Eudora asked, handing the wine-stained handkerchief back to him.

Paul blushed.  “I don’t know.”

“They’re pretty comfortable,” the thin, dark-haired girl said.

“When have you worn boxers?” Eudora asked her.

“I’ve lived a full and happy life.”

This embarrassed Paul, who could smell the distinct scents of both girls and felt a certain stretched feeling in his veins.  ”Tell me more about the world of folly,” he suggested.

The thin, dark-haired girl squinted her eyes and gazed disdainfully at Aaron.  “You’re looking at it,” she said.

That night the three of them got a little drunk at the frat party.  The thin, dark-haired girl scooted in and out of the frat house, bringing them drinks.  Paul kept trying to catch her name and failing.  He was too awkward to ask her what it was at first, and then they’d been talking too long, and he thought that it would seem weird.  When the party ended they walked back to north campus, where their dorms sat in a small, neo-Gothic cluster.  It was a warm night and the sky was very clear.  Paul felt excited and happy in a way that he wasn’t used to.  He thought about Jimmy Stewart singing “Buffalo Girls” in It’s A Wonderful Life, and he wanted to sing it, too, although he thought that they would know why and that it would embarrass them.  But he felt exactly that excitement of first love, a kind of drunken submergence in the two girls.  He tried to think of it in terms of what he’d been learning in college.  It was like they were suddenly fashioning their own ecosystem, or creating a tribe out of the remnants of a past society.   But these ideas didn’t seem sufficient, and he thought of himself wearing Jimmy Stewart’s striped football jersey and walking with his shoulders thrown back, a little out of balance and dismissive of gravity, his face totally transformed, not the usual, worried George Bailey, but someone else, a new person because of Donna Reed.  Eudora clung to his arm and fell against him a little as they walked, laughing.  He commented on the stars and waxed poetic.  “Like pinpricks on the mausoleum of the sky,” he said, and called them the tombs of lost radio signals, the bandwidth of spoiled hope.  Eudora found this hilarious and Paul laughed at himself, maybe for the first time in his life, having been too lonely previously to tolerate laughter at his expense.

They came to the thin, dark-haired girl’s dorm and she left them, with a smile and a backward wave, and it surprised Paul, although he realized that the girls must have communicated, somehow, that this was how Eudora wanted it to be.  He turned with Eudora and walked along a narrow sidewalk that led up a small incline between spruce trees.  There were lights overhead but their illumination fell on the boughs and stuck there, and Paul and Eudora walked in shadow.  Her mood changed.  She loosed her arm and walked at a little distance from him.  Then she seemed to change her mind and come back.  The path came to the door of her dorm and she held the outer door open so that Paul could squeeze in behind her.  The dorm hallways were lit by panels of overhead florescent lights.  Every door had its white board and the smell of must and bodies and spilled beer seeping from behind it.  Eudora’s door was at the end of the hall and had two names on it, so he knew that she had a roommate, but there was an empty feeling to the door and he also knew that the room behind it was silent and dark.  Eudora fumbled out her key and went in slowly, pausing right on the threshold as if she needed a minute to decide something.  She turned with her hand on the doorframe and looked at Paul.  She flattened out the crimps in her lips.  “I’m sorry,” she said.  “This is a mistake.  You’ll have to go now.”  She closed the door.

Paul stood there, blinking.  He found that he was close to tears.  He turned and took a step away from the door.  Then he stopped and turned back.  “I have nothing to lose,” he thought, “and, anyway, her name is Eudora Moxey.”  He knocked.  She opened the door a crack.  “Look,” he said, “I wasn’t going to kiss you, or try anything.  I’ve only ever kissed one person and that…well, that didn’t work out too well.  I don’t know, I’d just like to have a friend, I guess.  I don’t have that many friends.”

She looked at him and then she held the door wide.  “Come in.”

She had a rabbit in the room.  It was small and fluffy and had brown ears.  It sat in a cage full of wood shavings on the floor.  There were two beds, each neatly made, and the floor was clean.  The room smelled clean and cold.  She told him that her roommate had acquired a boyfriend on the second day of school and hadn’t slept in the room since.  Eudora lit a stick of incense and turned on a floor lamp so that she could cut the overhead florescent light.  Paul could tell that none of this was meant to be romantic, it was just her domesticity, and he waited, sitting indian style on the floor and watching her, as she went through her small rituals of settling in.  She made tea in a hot pot.  Then she sat down opposite him and brought her knees in to touch his knees.  He could smell the spilled wine from the hem of her dress.  “I want to tell you something, if we’re going to be friends,” she said.

“Okay,” he said.  She hesitated, and he was intimidated by the sense of import and said, “Listen, if it’s something that we can be friends without you telling me, then you really don’t have to.”

“No,” she said slowly.  “I want to tell you, so that you’ll understand why its friends and not something else.”

“Okay.”

She took a sip of tea and then held her mug in front of her face, hiding her lips.  She looked at the dark, blank windows.  “I was molested by my uncle,” she said, “starting when I was thirteen.”

Paul felt the warmth of her knees against his own.  Her words made him feel immediately guilty, as if he had violated her in some way.  “I’m sorry,” he said.  “That…that must have been horrible.”

“It was.”  She sipped and then put the mug down.  She looked straight at him and let her voice become flat and expressionless.  “I think he wanted to rape me, but I told my parents before it went too far.  The whole family disowned him.  Only I could see how sad it made them.”  She paused, then went on, reciting something she’d said to herself many times before.  “They were great, they really were.  They’d take me places and try to cheer me up.  But I could see that they were working at it, that they had to try hard to be cheerful themselves.  It all got so dishonest, and I didn’t really want to be around them, but also I was grateful to them, and to my grandma.  It really broke her heart.”

Paul was thinking about how she’d taken his arm and fallen against him on the walk home, and he thought about the way that Donna Reed’s bathrobe slipped off and she had to hide behind a bush as Jimmy Stewart walked around her and said, “This is a very interesting situation.”  Paul stared into Eudora’s eyes because she seemed to need him to, and he thought about how the men came to tell George Bailey that his father had a stroke, and his face fell and he was no longer the man who had walked along happily singing ‘Buffalo Girls.’  “Why did it break your grandma’s heart?” he asked after a moment.

Eudora blinked.  His question had fractured her script.  “I mean,” she said, “if someone you love does something that you can’t forgive them for, that’s heartbreaking, isn’t it?  You know that you’ve lost them, and you have to look back over everything you ever knew about them and wonder if there wasn’t a seed of it somewhere.  Wonder if you really knew them at all.”

Paul frowned and looked away.  The rabbit shuffled nervously through the wood shavings in its cage.  “I’m so sorry.  I don’t really know what to say.”

She set her mug down and reached out to touch his arm.  “That’s what I like about you,” she said.  “You don’t try to be wise when you’re not.  You’re a funny boy, Paul Whin.”

They slept in the same bed that night.  It was the first of many nights that they slept together in that bed, rarely touching but aware of the other’s warm presence.  Paul was a virgin and he had all of the little physiological nightmares of any eighteen year old boy, the nocturnal emissions, the weird disjointed dreams about sex acts that he’d never seen and that he thought probably didn’t really exist.  But when he slept in Eudora’s bed his body never betrayed him.  It was as if his body knew that it was ensconced in a holy place, an unlooked for and unmerited intimacy, and it responded with all the careful fervency of a devout believer.

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