Heart the Lover (3)

Could he tell how little experience I’d had? Only one boyfriend so far, Jay, the year before. We met in the fall and I brought him home for spring break and fell out of love with him in my mother’s kitchen. I told him on the plane back to school, which is a terrible place to break up. He cried and thrashed around but wouldn’t get up and go to the bathroom to pull himself together. The conversation started quietly enough, with him saying what he often said to me, which was that I bottled up my feelings until they came out like a fire hose, that if I didn’t withhold so much we could reach each other better. But as he slowly realized that he wasn’t going to be able to talk me out of my decision, his recriminations got louder. He’d paid for our flights. He could have gone to Key West with his friends instead of a shitty town in Massachusetts. His mother thought I was lesbian. ‘I taught you everything I know about sex!’ he hollered all the way down the aisle into the cockpit, which had no door back then. It was true. He had. I’d been a virgin and he’d been a fun and loving guide. I’d had nothing to compare him or our sex to at the time, but now I know that he was particularly uninhibited and passed along that attitude to me. He did not like that now I was going to pass it along to someone else. He got very hung up on that fact. It was the longest flight of my life, and I was grateful when the wheels hit the runway and my freedom was near. After Jay, I made out with the bartender at the restaurant I worked at, with a guy at the senior pig roast at the start of the semester, and most recently with a friend of Carson’s who had also dressed up as Cyndi Lauper for our Halloween party.



Sam invites me for dinner on Friday. I imagine having the house to ourselves, Dr. Gastrell’s candlesticks lit in the dining room. At the door, I hand him a bottle of wine.

Sam looks at the label and puts his arm out for me to go into the living room.

‘We’re pairing a 1987 Riesling with the pepperoni this evening,’ he says behind me to Yash and a guy I don’t know on the couch. This guy has a mat of ginger curls six inches thick on top of his head. He has short legs and big sneakers splayed on top of Dr. Gastrell’s polished coffee table. Beside the sneakers are four boxes of pizza. Yash goes to fetch some wineglasses.

Ginger guy points at me. ‘Freshman year. Stranger mixer. You went with Dale Greensmith.’

‘This is Ivan,’ Sam says.

Ivan shuts his eyes. ‘Red dress. Black buttons.’

‘Well you’re freaky.’

‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘About the dress. The date I don’t remember.’

They laugh like I’m lying, like you could never remember a dress better than a guy.



‘In Riesling veritas,’ Yash says, pouring the wine into small, impossibly thin glasses the shape of bluebells. ‘We’ll get to the truth about old Dale Greensmith before the end of the night.’

Sam and I sit in the armchairs across from Yash and Ivan. The wine is sweet and foul, but I love holding the fragile little glass in my fingers.

Ivan is another English major I’ve never met before. ‘Tell me everything, bar-none everything, that comes to mind when you think about James Joyce,’ he says.

Fortunately my high school English teacher was a little obsessed with Joyce. ‘Stream of consciousness, onomatopoeia, epiphany, yes I will yes I said Yes, and falling softly, softly falling on the living and the dead.’

Ivan presses the heels of his hands into his eyeballs and rocks his head back and forth. ‘“Falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” I’m so fucked,’ he whines.

‘He’s writing his thesis on Finnegans Wake,’ Sam says.

Ivan parts his hands to look at me with a last shred of hope. But I’ve never heard of it.

‘Are you writing a thesis?’ I ask Sam.

‘You have to, in the honors program.’

‘Oh, right.’ The honors program. I feel like I go to a different college, and they know it.



‘Who have you taken?’ Ivan asks.

It was that kind of thing. They don’t ask what classes but which professors.

I strain a little to think of some names. ‘Brody, Iyengar, Doukas.’ They were the only ones that came to mind.

No recognition.

‘They teach creative writing.’

‘Those poor fucks,’ Ivan says. Sam signals something to him. ‘I just mean, what could be worse than reading crappy stories all semester?’

‘They’re not crappy anymore. I’m in advanced.’ You had to take 101, 201, and 301 to get into advanced.

‘Oh, advanced.’ Ivan laughs.

‘I took a creative writing class freshman year,’ Yash says.

‘No you didn’t,’ Sam says.

‘I did. With Iyengar.’ He looks at me. ‘She hated my story.’

‘That is not true,’ Sam says.

‘Hated it.’

‘There were little checkmarks and a nice comment.’

‘Two checkmarks in fifteen pages, and the comment was patronizing.’

‘It wasn’t.’

‘This shows future promise.’ He grimaces.



‘It was probably the first paper you’d ever gotten back without the word “genius” or “incandescent,”’ Sam says, ‘at the bottom.’