There was a sad landmark on every block of that town:
The bench they’d sat on, watching the other students walk by��with their backpacks, short skirts, iPods.
The tree they’d stood under during a downpour, laughing, kissing, chewing cinnamon gum.
There was the bookstore where he’d bought the collection of poems by Pablo Neruda for her, and the awful college sports bar where they’d first held hands. There were the pretend-Greek columns that pretended to hold up the roof of the Llewellyn Roper Library, and Grimoire Gifts, reeking of patchouli and incense and imported cloth, where he’d bought the amber ring for her—set in silver, a globe of ancient sap with a little prehistoric fruit fly trapped in it for eternity.
And the Starbucks where they went to study, and never opened a book.
Craig’s father cleared his throat and slowed down at an intersection when a girl in tight jeans, flip-flops, and a low-cut tank top walked in front of the car without even glancing over. She was nodding her head in time to something she was hearing through the white wires plugged into her ears. Craig’s father looked over and said, in a voice thick with emotion, “You okay, buddy?”
Craig nodded solemnly, straight ahead, and then looked over at his father. They both attempted to smile, but to someone seeing it through the Subaru’s windshield it might have looked like two men grimacing at one another, each gripped suddenly and simultaneously by chest pains or intestinal discomfort. Sun slid through the car windows in the slanted, distant way of a bright day in early autumn; obviously, their side of the planet was tilting away from the sun. The girl passed, Craig’s father stepped on the gas, and the car moved through the green shade of the huge, leafy oaks and elms that lined the road through campus, and which had been greeting new and returning students to the university for nearly a hundred and fifty Septembers.
“Take a left here, Dad,” Craig said, pointing.
His father turned onto Second Street. On the corner a girl with an old-fashioned bike was stomping at the kickstand near the curb. Her hair was so blond it glowed. It was the kind of hair that Craig had always distrusted—too seraphic, almost God-fearing—on girls.
Until Nicole.
But this girl at the curb with the bike was nothing like Nicole.
This girl had seen too many music videos, and was trying to look like one of the straggly, anemic blondes dancing behind the band. Her hair was greasy. Her nose was pierced. Her jeans sagged down over the sharp blades of her hipbones. She was the kind of girl Craig might have dated for a few weeks back home. Back then, before Nicole.
“Take a right now, Dad,” he said.
His father slowed down on narrow King Street. It was still cobblestone, somehow. Some strange nineteenth-century leftover. (Had they simply forgotten to pave it?) The tires of the Subaru rumbled over the stones, and the rearview mirror rattled.
Here, on King Street, the trees made a canopy overhead, and the houses sagged with their decades at the edges of the sidewalks. These decrepit mansions must have been, at one time, inhabited by the town’s elite; Craig could picture women in bustled skirts, men with handlebar mustaches and bowties, rocking on the front porches, being brought glasses of lemonade by servants.
But it was a student slum now. The thudding bass of someone’s stereo served as a heartbeat to the whole block. Couches sat on the porches and on the lawns. Bikes appeared tossed into piles, leaning into each other, locked up to wrought-iron fences. There were hitching posts for horses at the ends of the driveways, most of them painted the school’s colors: crimson and gold. Two shirtless guys standing several lawns apart threw a football between them with what seemed like malicious force, while a girl in a bikini on a lawn chair watched it fly back and forth in front of her. Against the sky that football looked like the pit of some piece of bright blue fruit.
“It’s this one.”
Craig’s father slowed down in front of the house, which had once been painted white but had weathered to gray. There were ten mailboxes beside the front door—the number of apartments—and there was Perry.
Good old Perry.
How long had he been standing there, waiting?
Eagle Scout. Altar boy. Best friend.
The realization of that fact filled the back of Craig’s throat with something that tasted like tears. He swallowed. He lifted his hand to wave.
Perry was wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates cap, a clean T-shirt, and khaki shorts. New tennis shoes? Had his mother ironed that perfect crease in the shorts?
Perry saluted—sadly, ironically, the perfect gesture—and Craig’s father’s chuckle sounded vaguely like a sob. “There’s your pal,” he said, and pulled up to the curb, and Perry strode solemnly over to the car, yanked open the passenger door, and called in, “Hey, asshole, welcome back,” and then bent down and looked past Craig to his father. “How are you, Mr. Clements?”
Dependable, presentable, sociable Perry. Just profane enough. Just polite enough.
“Great, Perry,” Craig’s father said in a voice full of gratitude and relief. “It’s really good to see you.”
Craig and Perry’s apartment was on the third floor. Perry had picked it out for them back in July. “It’s not the Ritz,” he said as they climbed the stairs behind him. “But it has indoor plumbing.”
Craig’s father carried a box of books and a tangled mass of USB cords. Perry had Craig’s duffel bag slung over one shoulder and a trash bag full of sheets and pillowcases over the other. Craig carried his laptop, towels, and another trash bag—boots and shoes and his down jacket—up a narrow staircase carpeted in dust and dirt, to the left, past the closed doors of two other apartments. One of the doors had a whiteboard nailed to it and I went to Good Time Charlie’s! meet us! written in purple Magic Marker on it, a big smiley face for the o in to.
“This is us,” Perry said, nodding at number seven. He pushed open the door with his sneaker.
“Great!” Craig’s father said again, stepping in behind Perry, exclaiming it so loudly that his voice echoed off the bare floors and walls, sounding even more falsely bright the second time.
The apartment was, of course, immaculate. Perry had moved in a few weeks before, having worked as an orientation guide for new students over the summer, and he’d obviously done his thing—swept, dusted, arranged a collection of books in alphabetical order on the narrow bookshelf next to the couch. Craig carried his things through the dark little kitchen with its freshly scoured sink, past Perry’s bedroom, to his own, and stood in the middle of it.
A bright whiteness. The windows looked freshly washed—something Craig felt pretty sure their slumlord hadn’t done—and the bed was made in crisp-looking blue sheets, a plaid bedspread.
“My mom did that,” Perry said, nodding at the bed, “and that,” he added, nodding at a bouquet of daisies in a clear vase on a scratched-up plywood dresser. “I like you, man, but not enough to buy you flowers. Yet.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows in the way that only Perry could, and Craig felt what might have been a chuckle start in his chest, but he suppressed it, just in case it might turn into something else.
“Well,” Craig’s father said, clapping both guys on the back at once. “This looks great!”
The year before, his freshman year, Craig’s whole family had rolled onto campus together to bring him to Godwin Honors Hall. Craig’s father had been laying on the horn the whole way through town, startling pedestrians and causing the drivers of the other vehicles to swivel their shocked faces at the Subaru. “Don’t they teach people how to drive in the Midwest?” he had growled.
Craig’s mother had just stared out the window, taking it in. Her silence made her dissatisfaction with the place palpable—a kind of thick green mist filling up the car. “It’s pretty,” she’d said, tapping her finger in the direction of the library’s ridiculous faux-classical columns, as if it weren’t the most damning praise she was capable of giving. Beside Craig in the backseat, Scar maniacally twiddled at the Game Boy in his hands, breathing heavily through his mouth as if he were alone at the control panel of a spaceship that was about to spin out of control.
Finally Craig’s father pulled the car up to the curb right under a sign that read, NO PARKING HERE TO CORNER, and asked, “This it?” as if it might not be, despite the name chiseled into the stone above the entrance, GODWIN, and the crimson-and-gold sign posted near the gate, GODWIN HONORS HALL, and the banner strung between two trees in the courtyard, WELCOME TO GODWIN HONORS HALL, and the student standing outside with a poster board sign that read, GODWIN HONORS HALL.
“I think so,” Craig said.
Godwin Honors Hall was the oldest building on campus, and looked it. It was the campus’s only “Living Learning” facility, a dorm in which selected students slept, ate, and attended classes all in one building. On a campus that covered two hundred and fifty acres, if you were allowed into the Godwin Honors Hall program, it was implied by the brochure materials, the farthest you would ever have to walk was to the library, and you would never have to take a class or share a meal with any non-honors student for your entire four years at the university.
The whole thing had started as an experiment in 1965—a way, mainly, for some hippie activists to keep the decrepit building from being torn down, Craig would learn later—the proposal being to create a private little liberal honors college (Oberlin? Antioch?) right there at the dead-center of one of the country’s biggest public universities. It would appeal, they’d implied, to students who didn’t want to get lost among the unwashed hordes.
Or who’d applied to Oberlin and not gotten in.
To Craig, it had sounded claustrophobic, a rat-in-a-maze kind of experiment that should have failed by 1966 due to rat insanity, but his father had insisted that the prestige of getting into the program would confer some sort of magical properties on Craig’s future. And once Craig got his acceptance letter, which had shocked them all, the subject was closed for discussion.
The windows of Godwin Honors Hall were of the tiny diamond-paned variety, one or two of them cracked, glittering in the sun. The heavy wooden doors—gouged and shellacked, gouged and shellacked—shone with the sad decay of having been abused by thousands of students for a century and a half. The tiles of the entranceway were blood red and cracked, chipped, ice-picked away in places and sloppily replaced in others. Inside, there was the smell of mildew and disinfectant. A guy leaned against a wall of mailboxes, wearing a baseball cap on backward and a football jersey. He might have taken a long soaking bath in stale beer that morning. Someone had spray-painted, misspelled, the great philosophical advice “KNOW THYSEFL.” Scar tapped Craig on the shoulder and mouthed the now-familiar and maddeningly annoying joke: “It’s not Dartmouth.”
Four flights up, through a maze of old carpet and blasted rap music and flyers taped to cinderblock warning the residents about STDs and inviting them to church jamborees and library orientations, they dead-ended at Craig’s room, number 416, opened the door, and found Craig’s roommate sitting at one of the two desks, reading a textbook of human anatomy.
That was Perry, back when Perry was a stranger.
His hair was shaved down to a millimeter of his scalp, and he was wearing khaki shorts and a fluorescent orange T-shirt that looked brand new, but which Craig would learn later wasn’t (Perry’s mother starched his T-shirts, per Perry’s request), that read, EVENT ASSIST, on it in alarmingly large black capital letters. What event? What assist? Craig would also learn later that this was the standard T-shirt worn by Perry’s Scout troop when they helped out in the parking lots of state fairs and Civil War reenactments. He just liked to wear it, whether he was assisting any events or not, and at the moment, it struck Craig as disorienting.
“Hello!” Perry said, closing his book.
“Hey,” Craig said, and then, “I guess I’m your roommate,” shrugging, feeling noncommittal, but Perry stood up quickly and offered his hand to Craig, shook it firmly, and then went around the room shaking the hands of each of Craig’s family members—even Scar, shaggy bangs falling across his face, who stood openmouthed before this new breed of human being. Had Scar ever seen a person under the age of twenty-five shake another person’s hand, except on television, or as a joke?
Had Craig?
“Welcome,” Perry said, and then, without a hint of irony, gesturing around, “Sorry the place is such a mess.”
They all looked at the room at once:
Four bare walls, a dustless linoleum floor, two closets with doors closed. Perry’s bed was made. (A green comforter. A pillow in a plaid pillowcase.) Where was the mess?
“Where are you from?” Craig’s mother asked Perry in a tone that suggested she fully expected Perry to admit that he’d been assembled in a laboratory, or that he’d grown up on the moon.
“Bad Axe,” Perry said, as if everyone would be familiar with “Bad Axe.”
“No way,” Scar said, sounding sincerely astonished.
“Yeah,” Perry said. He held up his hand and pointed at his thumb, as if that might explain something. “What about you?”
“New Hampshire,” Craig’s mother said. “Via Boston,” she added, as she always did, and Craig’s father stiffened, as he always did—but Craig could tell, by looking at Perry, that none of this meant anything to him.
Now, obviously, a year later, Perry had given Craig the better room in the apartment. The closet was large, and the window faced the backyard instead of the street.
“Don’t you think?” Craig’s father asked. “I mean, that it’s a great apartment? A lot better than the dorm?”
“Yeah,” Craig said, trying hard to sound appreciative. “It’s great.”
“We were pretty lucky,” Perry said. “Leaving it so late. It’s got a good view.” He walked across Craig’s room to the window and gestured out. Craig and his father followed, looked down into the backyard, where two girls of the bed-head-and-belly-button-ring variety were lying in bikinis on towels. Glistening in the sun. Their hipbones seemed to glow under their tanning skin. Craig looked away fast. His father and Perry looked at him, and then both cleared their throats at the same time.
“So. Shall we get something to eat?” Craig’s father asked. “Before I head back to New Hampshire?”
“You’re going back already?” Perry asked. “We can put you up for a night, Mr. Clements. Or for as long as you like.”
“No. No,” Craig’s father said, shaking his head, making the expression of someone who’d just been offered a lifesaving drug but who didn’t want to bother anyone to go to the cupboard to fetch it. Clearly he wanted to escape. “I really need to—”
Perry nodded, pretending Rod Clements had finished the sentence with something that explained it—although Craig knew that there could be nothing his father needed to get back to New Hampshire for so fast. His father was a writer. He was in the middle of writing a one-thousand-page sequel to his last novel. He hadn’t sat down at the computer to work on it since Christmas.
Craig knew precisely why his father wanted to get out of there as quickly as he could. If there was anything Rod Clements couldn’t stand, it was to see anyone he cared about suffer. Even as a child, Craig had intuitively understood that it would have been easier for his father to shoot him, like a racehorse, than to drive him to the hospital screaming in pain with a broken leg.
It had happened once—the broken leg—and Craig’s mother had done the driving, Craig’s father insisting that he should drive behind them, separately, just in case her car broke down, and even in his writhing agony Craig had picked up on the sneer of contempt his mother shot at his father’s back as he trotted away from her car, huge sweat stains spreading out in the armpits of his gray shirt.
This time, Craig knew, his dad would probably drive a couple of hours east, as quickly as he could, and take a room at a Holiday Inn.
“That’s a lot of driving, Mr. Clements,” Perry said. “But, okay.”
For the bite to eat, they went to the fanciest restaurant in town, Chez Vin. Chez Vin was where the Clements-Rabbitts had dined as a family the year before, overdressed and exhausted after their long drive, the four of them shoulder to shoulder at the hostess’s podium as Craig’s father announced to the toothy redhead that they were meeting a friend.
“Oh!” she’d said. “You guys are here to meet Dean Fleming!”
Craig’s mother rolled her eyes behind the hostess’s back and mouthed “you guys” to Scar. She’d been complaining about this phrase since they’d passed through Ohio, where, at every gas station and fast food place, someone addressed them as “you guys.” At a 7-Eleven in Dundee, Michigan, when the ponytailed twenty-something at the cash register chirped, “How are you guys today?” Craig’s mother had finally snapped and said, “Do I look like a guy?” She’d gestured toward the family she obviously thought looked far more dignified than they were being given credit for, and said, “Are we guys? What’s this you guys thing?”
Craig had turned with his Tic Tacs and hurried out the electric doors into the parking lot as quickly as he could, listening to the girl at the register giggle in panic. Hopefully, she thought it was a joke. Hopefully, Craig’s dad would get his mother out of there before she disabused the poor girl of that.
But, that first night at Chez Vin, standing at the hostess’s podium, Craig had looked away from his mother, away from Scar, and away from the redhead, and had stared hard at the side of his father’s face while registering for the first time that his father’s friend from college, the one they’d come to meet for dinner, this friend from way back, was the dean of the Honors College—the incredibly selective honors college they’d all been so astonished that, “with your low-achiever grades and unambitious test scores,” Craig had been so lucky, so honored, to get into.
“What?” his father had said to Craig, sensing his stare and turning around with both his hands up, as if to prove that there was nothing up his sleeve.
This year, the hostess was an older woman, who nevertheless said, “Hi, you guys,” to which they all three nodded as she directed them to a corner table. Only Perry had bothered to wear a long-sleeve buttoned shirt and dress shoes. They ate all the bread in the basket before the waiter arrived with their mineral water. Craig’s father and Perry talked about weather and the relative merits of certain kinds of mountain bikes as Craig watched the candle at the center of the table surge and recede—now a perfect diamond shape, now a teardrop, now a fluttering fingernail followed by a crescent followed by a dog tooth followed by a burning vertical eyelid.
“Perry,” Craig’s father said later, in front of the apartment house, pressing both of Perry’s hands in his own as the boy bid them farewell, “I’m so glad Craig’s—”
“Craig will be fine, Mr. Clements,” Perry said.
“Son,” Rod Clements said, turning to Craig, “I—”
“Be careful driving, Dad.”
They stood in the middle of the sidewalk. A few feet away from them a couple kissed with abandon under a dead streetlamp. A sad foursome of ugly guys parted around the couple, and then around Perry, Craig, and his father.
“Love ya,” Craig’s father said, and clapped Craig to him, patting him hard on the back.
“I love you, too,” Craig said.
They held the embrace for at least three seconds, long enough for Craig to notice, just beyond his father’s shoulder, hanging above the couple kissing, far over the place where the streetlamp should have been shining, the moon, which appeared to be made of either solid rock or the softest of human flesh, floating in an ink-blue sky.