Blue Angel (19 page)

A salesman approaches Angela. By the time Swenson catches up, Angela and a young man whose name tag says
Govind
are deep in conversation. The Indian kid's acne-scarred, friendly face is rigid with embarrassment as he tries to shrink his tall, skinny frame down to Angela's size. He wants to be helpful, to do his job and not have to deal with the shortness of the customer's skirt, the white legs, the boots.

Aside from that, Angela's the ideal customer. She knows exactly what she wants. The whole transaction takes minutes. Govind figures out what she needs and only then looks at Swenson—Dad—for agreement and approval. Swenson nods. Of course. By all means. My daughter's got this together.

When Angela takes out her credit card, Swenson discreetly drops back and lets her collect herself as the salesman dashes off to get printer cables. Smart girl, she politely refuses the in-store service plan.

Govind smiles. “I have tried,” he says.

“I'll swear to it,” Angela says.

He passes her the credit slip. “Enjoy,” he says.

He gives them directions to the drive-in pickup window, presses the receipts into Swenson's hand, and wishes Angela good luck.

“You're a prince,” Angela tells him.

“It is only my job,” he says, glowing with bashful pride.

Angela and Swenson leave the store far less quickly than they walked in, an almost postcoital languor dragging at their steps.

“That was easy,” Angela says. “Everything should be so easy.”

Swenson drives around to the side of the building. Like circus clowns, they both jump out at once. Angela grabs one of the smaller boxes, shoves it into the trunk. All these cartons can't possibly fit, but it's Swenson's job to try. He wills himself into a state of physical competence in which he can muster up the testosterone-linked ability to judge spatial relations. He hasn't forgotten that story about her damaged, wheezing dad. At last he's able to close the trunk. See! She needed him here. She may know her way around the brave new world of megaherz and RAM, but he's had to walk her through the simple old-fashioned geometry of squeezing bulky objects into a small cramped space.

“Well!” he says. “All rightee now! Should we get some lunch?”

“I don't think so,” Angela says. “I'd be nervous to leave this stuff out in the car.”

“This isn't exactly the South Bronx. It's Vermont, remember? You could leave it in the backseat with the door unlocked, and it would still be there when you came out.”

“That would be asking for trouble,” she says.

“Okay,” says Swenson. “How about we drive partway back to Euston and stop at some country diner where we can watch the car from the window—”

“I'd rather not. I'd be too worried to eat. Maybe if you're hungry we could find a McDonald's or something with a drive-through window.”

“I'm not that hungry.” Swenson can't believe he's begging this skanky kid to have lunch with him after he's driven her sixty miles and wasted his whole day. Still…he's disappointed. He'd so clearly imagined the shocking warmth of the restaurant after the cold outside, the smell of coffee, the soothing aromas of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, the jukebox. He feels like a kid whose date has announced she wants to go home early.

“The sooner I get back the better,” she says.

“I understand that.” He can't help sounding annoyed, or tromping on the gas as he pulls out of the lot. Angela has to brace herself to keep from falling against him.

Swenson turns onto the cloverleaf that leads out of the business strip. The highway narrows into the potholed two-lane county route.

“Anyway,” says Angela. “Listen. You could say no. But I was hoping you could help me carry this stuff into my dorm room. And help me set it up. I'll understand if you say no. I don't want to take up your day.”

Swenson waits a beat. “I don't think I'd be any help setting up a computer. My wife had to put mine together. I was totally useless.”

Idiot! Why mention Sherrie? What's he trying to communicate? Any normal male would take on the task of computer setup, whether he knew how or not.

“That's all right,” says Angela. “I could probably set it up. You could just give me moral support.”

“
That
I can do,” says Swenson.

“I know that. That's what's so great about you. No one's ever taken the time to encourage me or help me.”

Swenson says, “It is only my job.” Was the Indian accent a mistake? Will Angela think his Govind imitation is racist? Or is it a sign of a shared history that's accruing minute by minute, uniting them, a common past that's already a source of private jokes?

But Angela seems to be thinking of something else entirely. “You know…if I get the computer working, I could print out those missing pages and give them to you before you leave.”

And that's the last thing either of them says until they're almost back at Euston. As they drive through the college gate, Swenson feels depleted. He wishes he could drive back into the country and pull over to the side of the road and take a nap with his head in Angela's lap.

Angela's exaggerated sigh is so much the sound
he
wants to make that for one alarming moment he thinks he might have made it. She says, “I feel like I've been out on parole and now you're returning me to prison.”

“It's not so bad,” lies Swenson. But that's exactly how he feels.

“That's easy for you to say,” she replies. “You've got a car. You can leave.”

“Look…if you really need to get away, if there's anyplace you need to go, please, feel free to call me…. We could take a ride.” He can no longer pretend that this is part of his job.

“Thanks. That's so unbelievably nice. You might want to watch those speed bumps, what with all that stuff in the trunk.”

Swenson slows down, comforted by the thought of the computer—exonerating evidence. They had an errand to do, and they did it. He no longer cares if someone sees him driving back with Angela. He's innocent. They've completed their mission, and nothing improper happened.

“Remind me. Which dorm is yours? They all look the same. My wife and I were dorm parents in Dover. Prehistory. Obviously.” There he goes, invoking Sherrie again. She gets the point. He's married. Angela, he notices, doesn't mention
her
boyfriend. Why isn't
he
waiting to help her bring her computer upstairs, some big strong kid with wide-open, pumping coronary arteries.

“Newfane. One dump named after another.” Euston students think their dorms are named after Vermont towns. No one tells them that the towns were named after Elijah Euston's friends. In its effort to seem like an inclusive, democratic institution, the college has been underplaying the fact that its founder and his pals once owned most of the state. “Turn right. That one over there.”

But of course, he knew that. He picked her up there this morning. He parks in front of her dorm. “Are gentleman callers permitted at this hour?”

“Are you kidding? It's a coed dorm. It's been, like, a trillion years since they had rules about visiting hours. Guys can come in anytime. Anyhow, you're a professor. You can do anything you want.”

“Given the current climate,” Swenson says, “that makes me all the more suspect.”

“What do you mean?” says Angela.

“Forget it,” Swenson says.

Angela gets out of the car. “Hey, maybe you should stay with the car. You could sit here and make sure nothing gets taken. I can carry the boxes up.”

“I'd feel weird just sitting here with you busy working.” He'd feel weirder if someone came by and saw him sitting in a parked car outside a student dorm. “No one's going to break into a locked trunk on campus.”

“I guess you're right,” concedes Angela. “But let's be careful, okay?”

Swenson goes around and unlocks the trunk. They each take one carton. Angela heads for the front door, and he hurries after, hugging the monitor box.

It's been ages since he's been inside a dorm. Ruby's dorm is more like a dilapidated housing project. The only time he saw it was when they moved her a year ago August, at the start of the semester, when every dorm has a ghostly, theoretical quality.

Now, as he enters the foyer—a soda machine, a bulletin board, bare but for a list of fire regulations—he's assaulted by the smell of sneakers, sweat, sports equipment. How can these kids stand being greeted, every time they come home, by this oppressive fruity rottenness, this edge of saline decay? Which only shows how far he is from their age. To them, this is the smell of life itself. The aromas he prefers—garlic, roasting chicken, wine, apple pie, flowers from Sherrie's garden—reek to them of parents and airless stifling boredom. Evenings trapped at home, away from their friends. The stench of living death.

They climb a flight of stairs, up past a deserted TV lounge furnished with a Ping-Pong table and a few grimy armchairs apparently chosen for the undiluted purity of their institutional ugliness. There's not one touch of hominess, not one poster on the wall, no sign that humans spend time here.

Swenson's still sprinting after Angela as they take off down the hall, rushing past doorways into which he can't help peeking. What if he meets one of his students, Makeesha or Jonelle or Claris?

At last Angela reaches her door and fishes for the keys on the leather cord hanging from her waist. On the door is a poster: a black-and-white photo of a Hell's Angel with long hair, a Nazi helmet, a beard, his thatched chest crisscrossed by menacing chains.

“Friend of yours?” says Swenson.

“Avedon,” says Angela. “Isn't it terrific? It's like having a Beware of the Dog sign. Only not nearly so corny.”

Swenson follows Angela into her room and stops, frozen by the hundreds of faces staring back at him. Every inch of wall—except for a few mirrors glittering among the photos—is covered with postcards of actors, writers, saints, musicians, artists. At first the order seems random, but after a moment he notices the patterns, grouped by theme (Janis, Jimi, Jim, Kurt Cobain) or by era (Buster Keaton next to Charlie Chaplin and Lilian Gish). The elderly Picasso facing the equally rakish, equally bald Jean Genet. Chekhov and Tolstoy, Colette, Virginia Woolf, and…is that Katherine Mansfield?

Across the room is a single bed, narrow as a monk's, covered with a monastic brown cloth. Running the length of one wall is a white formica desk, on which Angela sets down her box and motions for Swenson to do likewise.

“This isn't a room,” says Swenson. “It's an…installation.”

“Like it?” says Angela proudly. “Everyone else thinks it's a mess. Another reason so many chicks on the hall think I'm totally insane. They've all got, like, the one perfect poster of Brad Pitt over the bed. And you should see Makeesha's room. It's all done up with Black Panther shit, posters and rasta flags, and this huge blow-up poster of Snoop Doggy Dog. The thing is, everybody knows Makeesha's dad teaches at Dartmouth. They're way richer than my parents.”

“Now now.”

Swenson might
look
like a drooling lecher skulking around some nymphet's room, but in fact he's a consummate professional who never forgets his position, or the inappropriateness of joking with one student about another, even about another's interior decor.

“Where's your old computer?” he says.

“This is sort of retarded,” Angela admits. “I got so mad when it ate my work I threw it out the window. That's how I knew it couldn't be fixed. The creepy part was that right after I did it I remembered seeing some terrible movie where Jane Fonda played a writer who throws her typewriter out the window. I couldn't believe I'd done it.”

“Oh, I saw that movie. What was it? I can't remember.”

“I don't know,” says Angela. “Let's go get the rest of the stuff.”

So they've got another gauntlet to run, or rather, the same one again. Swenson's luck can't possibly hold. This time he'll meet
all
his students, gathered to watch their professor race after Angela Argo.

They hurry back outside. Angela's still worried that her equipment might get filched from the locked trunk of Swenson's car. He's touched by how deeply, how passionately she wants that machine. No wonder her parents were willing to fork over the money. If Ruby wanted
anything
that badly…. He takes the box that contains the minitower. She grabs the bag of cables. Okay, this is the final trip. After this, they're done.

Angela opens doors for him and walks slightly ahead. In the room, she clears space for him to set the box on the desk.

“Let me help you unpack it,” he says. “Got a knife? Sharp scissors?”

“Try this.” Angela produces a bush knife from her purse. “Don't look so alarmed. I hitchhike. A girl can't be too careful.”

“You shouldn't be hitching,” Swenson says. “You could wind up like those girls that hunters find a couple of seasons after the serial killer picked them up.”

He can't conceal his horror at the thought of something happening to her. Meanwhile he's aware of the irony of having these tender protective feelings while watching her slash heavy cardboard with a hunting knife. And really, for such a frail creature, she's got remarkable upper body strength, holding the boxes while Swenson wrestles the monitor and console loose from their Styrofoam liners.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Okay. Is there a manual or something…?”

“Look,” says Angela. “Do me a favor. Sit down on that bed over there and, like I said, just be there if I need moral support, if I start freaking out….”

Swenson laughs. “How can you tell I have no idea what I'm doing?”

“By how many times you just said
okay
.”