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In the weeks after Thanksgiving, I took clearer stock of s There was a boy who lived down the hall whose father was the htly, who spoke with a heavy Spanish accent, was said to be the daughter of a South American dictator; one of , that his family owned a summer house in France All this information coalesced into a whole neareness of where I was, and the thought ed to learn more about it, to penetrate its social codes and see where Itoto do with any of it Throughout the weekend, he had made no secret of his contempt for his sister, his parents, even the house, which he called, in typical Lucessian fashion, "an idiotic pile of rock" I atteot nowhere; ry and snappish What I had begun to discern intoo s rea pleasure in any of it To Lucessi, the world was a collection of interlocking systeoverned only by itself He could, for instance, recite the batting averages of every player on the New York Yankees, but when I asked him who his favorite was, he had no answer The only emotion he seeh even that possessed a quality of childish bewilderment, as if he were a bored toddler in a rown-ups’ table and listen to incomprehensible conversations about the price of real estate and as divorcing whom I believe this pained him--he wasn’t ahat the proble in a kind of nihilistic loneliness: he both despised and envied everybody else, except for me, to whom he attributed a similar vision of the world, simply because I was always around and didn’t make fun of him
As for his unhappy fate: perhaps I didn’t value hiht have been the only friend he ever had And it is strange, after so hts still turn to hih he was, after all, but a minor actor in my life Probably it is the idleness of my circumstances that draws me to the recollection With so , opens each drawer of the mind to rustle around inside it I did not know Lucessi well; no man could Yet the failure to know a person does not rule out his iard me now? Were he to wander, , this becals lost, ascend the ait and stand beforetrousers and Yankees’ jersey stinking of unwashed Lucessian sweat, ould he tellNow you really get it, after all
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I returned to Ohio for Christladness; none of it seeone for years, not months Harvard was not my home, at least not yet, but neither was Mercy, Ohio The very idea of home, of one true place, had become odd to reat deal of weight, and her slaze of sweat appeared on her brow at the s at face valueready for the holidays I dutifully went through the sentiht Mass (we never attended church otherwise), opening my presents while my parents looked on--an aard ceremony that is the bane of all only children--but my heart was nowhere in this, and I departed two days early, explaining that with exaet back to my studies (I did, but that wasn’t the reason) Just as he’d done in September, my father drove me to the station The rains of su cold, the ind through open s by a blast of desiccated air from the dashboard vents It would have been the perfect tiful, if either of us could have iht be When the bus pulled away, I did not look back
About the remainder of that first year, there is not h I knew I had done well, I was still astonished to see my first-semester report with its barricade of A’s, each emphatically embossed into the paper by the old-fashioned dot matrix printer I did not use this as an opportunity to slack off but redoubled irlfriend, the daughter of the South Aentine minister of finance) What she saw in ate the point Carood deal reat deal She was the kind of woman who used the word "lover," as in "I have taken you as reedy abandon She was blessed with a single room, rare for a freshman, and in that hallowed precinct of draped scarves and feht have passed for actual, grown-up eroticishts, appetizers to dessert We did not love each other--that sainted emotion still eluded me, and Carmen had little use for it--nor was she what I would call conventionally attractive (I can say this because I wasn’t, either) She was a little heavy, and her face possessed a slightly masculine bulk around the jawline, which looked like a boxer’s But unclothed, and in the heat of passion, crying out naughty things in her Argentine-inflected Spanish, she was the nified a hundred-fold by her oareness of it