#2.12

Author’s note: One of the problems with live-writing a book in this way is that its hard to fix the big structural problems once you notice them.  Something about this book has been bothering me and putting me off.  And if I feel stand-offish to my own work, how can I expect a reader to embrace it?  Last week, I figured out what the trouble was.  I’ve been telling much of the story from Paul’s perspective, but it’s not the most interesting perspective by far.  Although the plot has to do with things that mostly effect Paul, I think he’s rather passive at this moment in time.  I think Tucker is the active character, the one with something to do.  He wants to convince Paul that being good in the world is the key to happiness and meaning in life.  This should be easy, since Paul is basically a good person, but he’s also a confused, damaged, wandering person, and the events in his life are going to make it hard for him to be good in the way that Tucker thinks he should be.  So, given all of that, I am issuing a mid-course correction.  I will go back and rewrite previous sections from Tucker’s perspective as I put the book together after this draft is done.  But from now on, Tucker’s will be the third perspective along with Alexei’s and Sari’s.  Apologies, and thank you for your patience.

Tucker loitered near the door of Ellen Bakeless’s room, on the side of the room that had been left bare by her roommate.  The white cinderblock walls were harsh and glaring and there was a half-eaten banana on the roommate’s dresser that he found disgusting.  But still, he felt a jittery happiness moving along his legs and arms.  Paul and Ellen and some girls that they knew were all crowded into Ellen’s paisley-draped side of the room.  They emitted a little bubble of excitement that he was a satellite to.  A Zee Avi album was playing from the speakers on the window ledge, and he was pleased that he recognized it, because it gave him something to think about and seemed to hold out the possibility that he might find a way into their intimacy.  Odd smells came drifting down the hall and slipped under the door.  Marijuana smoke, and hair spray, and ramen noodle spice packet.  Strands of music slipped in.  He let himself slide into his ‘critic of everything’ persona, and wondered how he would critique this moment of loitering and waiting for his new found friends to be ready to go to a party.  ‘The sincere, pretty, and slightly emo college girl gathers with friends who are like her and drapes herself with scarves.  She isn’t interested in sexy clothes, and she doesn’t do shots to pre-game, but listens to songs by pixie-girl Malaysian artists that are full of longing.’

The door opened behind him and Alexei Pasquills came in.  He stopped when he saw Tucker and raised an eyebrow.  “What are you doing here?”

“I came with Paul.”

Alexei looked towards the scrum of people on Ellen’s side of the room and arched an eyebrow.  ‘God, he’s arrogant,’ Tucker thought, and he glanced towards Ellen, who didn’t seem arrogant at all, but simply attractive in her own odd way.  He felt a twinge of bitterness and had to remind himself, forcibly, of his mission in life.  He met Alexei’s cynical gaze with a smile, wondering how he could be good to him.

“Are you coming to the party, too?”

“I’ve been told that I should,” Alexei said.

“You don’t want to go?”

Alexei shrugged.  His mouth twitched, and slipped into a thin, humorous line, but then he looked away.  He looked towards Ellen, who had her back to him and was talking to a tall girl with feathered hair.

“Why don’t you go say hi to her?” Tucker asked, and Alexei gave him a look of strict contempt.  “Oh, come on, it’s what you want to do,” Tucker told him.  “Why are you denying yourself?  Go kiss your girlfriend.”

Alexei smiled sourly.  “I can kiss her anytime.”

“Don’t take her for granted,” Tucker said seriously.  “That was my mistake.”  He realized that he had said something like this to Alexei before, on a church balcony after a funeral.  “How’s Renata?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Alexei told him.  “She’s seems to have fallen out of the narrative.”

“The narrative?”

Alexei waved vaguely at the room.  “This.  This narrative.  This thing that’s supposed to be my life.”

“Isn’t it your life?”

Alexei lowered his head.  “Choose the life that really is life,” he murmured.  Then he looked up, to where Ellen was standing.  Tucker followed his gaze.  At that moment Ellen turned around and saw them.  She smiled over her shoulder at Alexei and gave a little dip to her waist.  It was so intimate, so coquettish, that Tucker blushed.  He glanced at Alexei, who was smiling in spite of himself.  Tucker noticed that he wasn’t wearing one of his odd coats, or his patterned vests, that he was in a sweatshirt and corduroys and looked, more or less, like a normal human being.  But Ellen’s shift of attention had shifted the whole party in their direction, and Paul was standing with the girls who came to float by the door with the expectation of leaving.

“Are you ready?” Paul asked Tucker, turning his head slightly away from Alexei, as if he was shy of him.

“Paul, do you know Alexei Pasquills?” Tucker asked him, feeling that it was the good thing to do.

“We know each other,” Alexei said.  “He was in a play I directed.  I owe him an apology.”  Paul glanced up and met his eyes, and Alexei, who was a head taller, looked like a bird of prey as he stared down at him and tried to twist his lips into a regretful smile.

“Well, why don’t you apologize, then?” Tucker asked him.

“I’m sorry,” Alexei said.

“What are you apologizing for?” the girl next to Paul asked.  This was Eudora Moxey, who tucked her hands into the front pockets of her jeans and rocked back and forth on her heels, looking from Alexei to Paul.

“It doesn’t matter,” Paul said.  “You don’t owe me an apology.”

“Let’s go,” Ellen said, hooking her arm through Alexei’s.  “Let’s go to the party!”  And she let out a false whoop and pumped her fist in the air.

It had been a curiously warm and dry winter, and the yellow campus lights shone down on crocuses that were coming out between the brown grasses beside the path.  “I like you, you know,” Tucker thought, glancing at the faces of the people who were walking beside him.  “I like all of you, even the ones I don’t know.”  And he felt exactly the warmth and optimism that he knew he should have been feeling when he went to the Christian college.  He didn’t think about God very often, but he thought that this was the way that religion should make you feel.  Happy and in love with the universe.  “I wish Tom could be here,” he thought, and glanced at Paul, and then almost laughed because it would be so odd if Tom Whin was there, walking along in his t-shirt, bulging with muscles, his aging face transformed back into that of somebody young.

The party was at a frat house.  Eudora had met some fraternity brother in a class and been invited.  Dance music poured down from a patio and Tucker stood at the bottom of some stone steps and looked up at the house, taking in the strung Christmas lights under the eves and a yellow fog of perspiration that seemed to blur them.  He could smell beer and sweat, and heard voices drifting down under the beat of the music, high, strident girl’s voices, broken into rasps and accompanied by the sharp odor of cigarette smoke.  He had crashed a frat party at Didymus with some of his high school friends when he was seventeen.  Maybe it had even been at this frat house, he couldn’t remember.  He wondered how he would compare and contrast the experience, how he could assign a system of rating to this party that he could inform his criticism with.  And he wondered what people up there on the patio and in the blaring house needed.

But he was in danger of being left behind.  He hurried up the stone steps and was let in by the frat brother at the door, who stamped his hand and handed him a red cup and then looked past him, trailing after Ellen and the girls with his eyes.  They stood for a moment inside a large, darkened room, lights throbbing at them and music battering at their ears, and Tucker saw naked elbows jolting on the dance floor, and dresses clinging by spaghetti straps to almost bare skin, and fingers running through auburn and blonde and black hair.  He glanced at Paul, who was looking down, embarrassed.  He glanced at Alexei, who was squinting at the lights and sucking his cheeks in.  “I bet he wishes he had brought his cane,” Tucker thought.

The girls were moving, threading through the crowd that pushed at the edges of the dance floor.  Then they were out on the patio, and gentle, coold air sloped over them.  But they went through another set of patio doors and Tucker followed them, into a room where a jostling crowd pushed its way towards a line of kegs at one end.  This was what Tucker remembered from being seventeen, and at the time he had liked the anonymity, and been titillated by the sweaty shoulders and arms that brushed against him.  He looked around and noticed that Alexei hadn’t followed them in, but had gone to lean back against a stone wall, his arms crossed over his chest and his face turned up, as if he were studying the house’s roof line.  Tucker hesitated.  Then he thought, “Alexei’s allergic to fun,” and thrust himself into the crowd.

“Give me two!” he shouted to a frat brother who was working a keg.

“You only got one cup!” the frat brother shouted back.

“So?  Give me another one!”

The frat brother glanced around to see if campus security was watching, then shrugged and picked a sleeve of cups out of a spill of beer on the floor and filled a second cup for Tucker.  Tucker held the two cups over his head and pushed back through the crowd, spilling droplets of beer over sleek, sweaty heads.  When he found Alexei at the wall, the others had joined him.  “Here,” he said, thrusting one of his cups into Alexei’s hand.  Alexei looked down at it.  “It’s beer,” Tucker shouted over the music.  “You know, beer?  You were drinking it last summer, at Kate Wilson’s bonfire, remember?”

“I don’t want it.”

Tucker glanced at Ellen, who shrugged and took a drink from her own beer.  He glanced at Paul, who was looking at a girl on the other side of the patio.  Tucker followed his gaze.  She was a tall girl with a big face and mousy brown hair.  “Who’s that?” he shouted to Paul.  Paul muttered something.  “Who?”

“Pippy,” Paul shouted.  “Pippolotta.  She’s Gwen’s niece.”  The girl had heard her name.  She looked at them, saw Paul, and smirked.  “She doesn’t go here,” Paul shouted.  “I don’t know what she’s doing here.”  At that moment a song ended in the house and the next song was quieter, and apparently not as well liked, because a stream of people came flowing out of the dance room.  Tucker was jostled against Eudora, and together they were both squeezed closer to Paul.

“Who’s Gwen?” Tucker asked.

“One of my parents’ friends.  I think you’ve met her.”

“Nope.  That girl’s coming over.”

They watched Pippy’s big face bobbing towards them through the crowd.  “God, this party sucks,” she said.  She was pushed up close against Tucker’s side.  “Is that an extra beer?  Can I have it?”  Tucker handed it to her.  She tilted it back and drank, her throat working up and down and glistening with sweat.  “Thanks.”  She handed Tucker the empty cup.  “They won’t play any dub step,” she said, to explain why the party sucked.

Ellen shrugged.  “It’s a frat party.”

“Yeah, it is!  Frat Party!” Pippy shouted, thrusting both hands into the air and flipping the bird with two pink-polished middle fingers.  Her breath was thick with beer and cigarettes.

“Hi, Pippy,” Paul said.

“Paulie boy,” she said.  “Shit, Paulie boy, you’re in the crapper.  Sucks, man.  I’m sorry, really I am.”

Paul blinked.  “What?”

“Your mom, dude.  Sucks, that’s all I’m saying.”

“What about my mom?”

Pippy stared at him.  Then she laughed a spray of beery spittle.  “Shit, man, you don’t know.  Sorry,” she snickered.  “Shouldn’t have said anything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing.  Don’t worry about it.”

Paul’s eyes had gone wide and they had the wrinkled, fragile look they got when he was suffering.  Tucker reached out and touched his arm.

“Tell him,” Alexei said, and there was something about his voice that made Pippy snap out of her low gloat.  She glanced at him.  “Tell him whatever it is,” Alexei said again.  “Don’t leave him in suspense.”

“Well, all right,” Pippy said.  She drew her mouth down into a sulk, but then flicked it into a cruel little grin.  “She’s man-huntin’, dude.  She wants to have an affair.”

Paul’s head dropped.  “How do you know that?” Alexei demanded.

“Who are you, dude, the Grand Inquisitor?”

“Tell him how you know that.”

“She told my aunt, okay?  She’s sick of his dad and wants to have an affair.  Sorry, Paulie, but that’s the sitch.”

“What the hell is a sitch?” Alexei asked.  He had thrown his shoulders back and dropped his arms, and Tucker was afraid that he was going to hit the girl.

“It means situation,” Ellen said.  “Come on Paul, let’s get out of here.”

Pippy had lowered here face and was glancing from face to face around the circle.  She met Tucker’s eye and simpered at him.  ‘She’s afraid,’ he thought.  ‘And she feels guilty.’

But she said, “Yeah, why don’t you do that.  Why don’t you get out of here.”

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