Fitting Ends (9 page)

FRATERNITY

C
al used to be president of the fraternity. But then he was in a car wreck. Cal and Hap and a group of boys from the fraternity house had been out to the bars, and they were on their way home. Afterwards Hap often pictured Cal dipping his hand into a cooler of beer, letting the water run off the can, popping the tab. Cal's head was tilted back, Hap could see him in the rearview mirror, and it was when he looked back to the road that he saw the parked truck. Hap remembered, or thought he remembered, someone screaming, “Mom!”

John wasn't hurt that bad. He was in the hospital for a few weeks, but then he didn't come back to school. He was still at home, working in his father's auto parts store. He didn't drink anymore; he didn't go out. Talking to him, Hap remarked to people, you'd think he was middle aged.

Alexander wasn't injured at all, but he graduated early—finished up his major and got out of school and their fraternity as quietly as possible, packing up like a swindler without even saying good-bye.

It was Cal who got the worst part of it. He'd ducked down at the last minute and covered his head, but it was his side of the car that was crushed. They had to cut him out of the wreckage, where he was pinned between the car door and the seat.

Cal was in a coma for nearly a month, and all that time they were expecting him to die. He woke up one morning, but he wasn't the same person. There was brain damage, and he had to go to a rehabilitation clinic.

Hap had been driving the car. He wasn't drunk, and in fact he took a Breathalyzer at the site of the accident. All he could remember were the faces peering out of the slow-moving cars, and the whirlpool of red and blue lights from the police cars. He passed the test. He'd had a beer or two, of course, but he was definitely within the legal limit. It was an accident. And it wouldn't happen again: he didn't drive anymore.

Not that anyone ever blamed him. Still, he sometimes noticed how their eyes darkened sidelong when he reached for another beer. He noticed how their faces suddenly tightened when he was in a good mood and got to laughing. It was as if, he thought, he'd turned for a second into something unclean.

Hap had tried to put everything back in order. They'd held an emergency meeting when they found out Cal wouldn't be returning, and since Hap was vice president at the time, they told him the presidency was his if he felt up to it. And so he'd stood there, with bandages on his head and hands, talking in nervous circles, saying how life had to go on, how Cal would have wanted it that way.

A few months after the accident, Hap began to pass out in unusual places. The first time it happened was for real: he woke up in the hallway, with no idea how he got there. His face and belly were scribbled with Magic Marker, as if he'd been trying to write himself a message.

After that first time it became an act. On mornings after parties, his fraternity brothers began to find him in the foyer, curled up among the discarded advertisements and catalogs, or in the shower fully dressed, with the water running, or outside under a tree, his hands caked with dirt as if he'd been digging. At first they thought it was funny. They joked that Hap ought to have bells tied to his heels before he was allowed to drink a beer. Some of the incidents became amusing anecdotes.

He planned things in advance, considering which place might be most surprising, most ridiculous. One night he'd squeezed onto a shelf in the trophy case, twisted around gold statuettes of basketball players and wrestlers and the engraved plaques. Even in that precarious position they couldn't tell he was faking. He opened his eyes with a start and sat straight up. One of the trophies fell, clattering onto the living-room floor.

Often he'd wait a long time before anyone found him. He'd get frustrated, sometimes, and decide he was just going to forget it and go on up to bed. But then he'd hear voices and his heart would pound and his mind would begin to whir like a fan. He could feel the shape of them as they moved closer, slow, hovering, and he'd open his eyes to find them leaning over him like surgeons. Once, this pre-med named Belcaster reached down and took his pulse. The pressure of his finger had run through Hap like an electric shock. He jerked up, and everyone laughed, circled around him, shaking their heads.

But the novelty began to wear off. “Oh, brother,” he heard Charlie Balbo say one morning. “Look who's passed out again.” Balbo pulled on Hap's arm. He was in ROTC and always woke up early to do exercises. Hap could hear Balbo sighing through his nose. “Rise and shine, buddy,” Balbo said, and when Hap fluttered his eyelids and moaned, none of them were smiling. Hap figured they were all thinking about the accident.

Cal's mother called. Cal was back home, she told Hap, and she hoped some of his fraternity brothers would come for a visit. It had been six months since the accident.

Hap wondered how she'd gotten his number. He hadn't met her, really, just shook hands with her once during parents' weekend when Cal pointed them out to each other and said, “Mom this is Hap—he's one of my best pals,” or something like that, quick and stilted; that was the way he talked. Later, after Cal had gone to the clinic, Hap sent a get-well card to his home. He never visited the hospital, though he told people he had: “Cal's doing real good,” he'd say. He called the hospital a number of times, and that's what they told him. “Under the circumstances,” they said, “he's doing well.”

As the visit approached, Hap would feel a wave of panic pass over him, and he was desperate to call Cal's mother and make some excuse. But what? He couldn't think of any excuse that wouldn't provoke disbelief. He would think of it from time to time, when he wasn't expecting to. That Saturday, a week before he was to go, it was like a rushing at his back.

There was a party that night, and Hap had been downstairs long before anyone else, organizing guys to clear the furniture and push it against the wall, directing the football players to lift kegs of beer into ice-filled trash cans, hurrying to get the tap or the strobe light. There were certain things Hap did that he felt no one else could do quite so well. Hap was the one who liked to put up decorations and make up themes for parties—putting red lights in the windows and taping up orange and yellow posterboard in the shape of flames, so the house looked afire; lining the dance floor with old matresses and balloons; setting up elaborate spreads of dips and vegetables and so on. He played the music, building up to the best dance songs, urging the crowd into a kind of frenzy. He'd stand on the window ledge and look out over their heads, calling out chants, which the crowd would repeat. It was almost as if this were his fiefdom, for one night at least.

Cal used to shake his head. “Geez,” he used to say. “Take a Valium.” Hap remembered one night they'd gone to this place, Elbow's Room, where they didn't card. It was a dim, hazy bar, with country music on the jukebox, and they went in before a party. Hap was eager to get back; he didn't want to miss anything. But Cal was in no hurry. Hap was telling him that he was going to miss the fraternity when they graduated, that it was one of his main reasons for staying in school, and Cal stared at him. His face was lit by the fireplace glow of neon, made spooky and dark by it. Hap was hoping he'd say, “Me, too,” or even, “Yeah, when we go that place is dead.” But all he said was, “Christ, I can't wait to get out. You're crazy, Hap.” He shrugged, and Hap felt something clench inside him; it was like Cal was abandoning him.

That was one of the things that stuck in his mind that night. The dancing had died down early, and Hap was making his way upstairs to his room. There were four girls on their way up to the ladies' room when they saw Hap rubber-legging up the steps. He nearly fell over them, and they caught him, laughing. It was what he did, sometimes; he wasn't sure why. He liked to act more drunk than he was. The girls wrapped their arms around his shoulders and guided him toward his room—someone in the hall directed them. Hap kept his eyes closed, and shortly he felt one of the girls sliding her hand in his back pocket to get his keys. “I can't believe I'm doing this,” she said breathlessly, and another whispered, “Is he out?” He wasn't, of course. But when their grip loosened, he slumped to the floor, and another girl said, “I guess he's out.” They carried him in and put him on the bed, but he didn't sleep. The more he lay there, the more awake he became, listening to the music pulsing through the floor. A couple stood outside his door, thinking they had privacy, and murmured urgently—he couldn't tell if they were arguing or making out. When he was sure the party was over, at nearly five in the morning, he went downstairs. He planned to pass out again, this time sprawled on the pool table.

It was a gray morning: it could have been dawn, or dusk again. When he passed the window in the stairwell, a heavy bird lifted from the sill and blurred into the fog. It startled him, and he felt suddenly that there was someone watching him. He wondered if the house was all closed up. Often after a party he found the front door hadn't been bolted, or one of the fire exits was slightly ajar, or a window on the first floor was open, crepe paper streamers trailing off into the breeze. Sometimes it was hard to feel safe.

Everything seemed to pause, waiting. He peered in on each floor. All the doors were closed, lined up as still as motel rooms. Long shadows stretched in the dim hallways. He felt as if the place had been abandoned.

When he went downstairs the living room seemed thick with haze. No one had cleaned up after the party. The furniture was all cleared out still, and there were plastic cups cluttered on every surface. From across the room he could hear the wind blowing through an open window. He squinted in the pale half-light. For a moment he was certain he saw the shape of someone standing there, a figure by the window, with the curtains fluttering around him.

“Hello,” he called, and his voice rang hollowly in the empty room. “Hello? Is someone there?”

And then he turned and ran up the stairs to his room. He bolted the door and put on the radio. He wanted to wake someone up, just to prove he wasn't alone in the house. He kept turning the stereo louder, until at last Doug Cohn in the next room began knocking heavily on the wall between them. Hap turned off the stereo and sat there in the bed until it was light enough to sleep.

There were times, lots of times, when it seemed like everything was back to normal. Hap would go downstairs before dinner to find a group of guys standing around the pool table, tapping balls into the pockets with the palms of their hands, and the talk was all easy jokes and gossip. Mornings, he'd walk into the bathroom, where a line of people from his floor were all at sinks, shaving, and he'd move in beside them without a hitch. Even the day after the party, when he woke, there was a moment when he imagined himself shrugging to Doug Cohn, and he heard himself chuckling, “Hey, thought I saw a ghost last night, Doug. Scared myself shitless.”

But later, when he saw Doug Cohn on his way out the front door with his bookbag, it seemed that the things he planned to say were frivolous and artificial. He drew back, acting as if he hadn't noticed Doug, and he decided that it was probably best not to mention anything at all. After that, the day didn't seem like it would cruise along so easily. There was always some little snag to send him spinning.

The early evenings were the worst, after everyone had gone off to the library or their girlfriends' rooms. He flipped through channels in the television room, one after the other so the voices and music and yelps of white noise melted together in a collage, an abstract code he could almost recognize. Or he'd end up back in his room, listening for someone to come down the hall. He made lists: party ideas; things he planned to do tomorrow; friends, in ascending order of closeness. He'd number things from one to ten. It was calming to mark things down.

Sometimes he thought he would just give in, that he would let himself spend the whole day brooding about Cal. But he found he couldn't. He tried to remember something specific about Cal, some significant conversation they had, the special things they used to do together. But his mind would go blank. Or rather, he'd remember how once someone spray-painted ELIMINATE GREEKS on the outside of their house. They'd circled the
A
in ELIMINATE, and there was a picture of Cal in the campus newspaper, standing in front of the big red
A
in his Greek-letter sweatshirt and grinning. He recalled the time he and Cal came up with a way to combine philanthropy and partying. They planned to get a bunch of organ-donor cards from the Department of Motor Vehicles and use them as admission tickets to a huge bash. They were going to have T-shirts that said LOSE YOUR LIVER—DONATE AN ORGAN/HAVE A BEER!

It seemed to Hap that all these memories were grotesque, like the old photos he'd found once in his basement at home, pictures half-eaten by silverfish. He wondered if something was wrong with him. He believed that if things were the other way around, Cal would remember him better—that Cal would have fond stories of the night they pledged or the time they were both elected officers of the fraternity; some recollection that would make everyone laugh.

He didn't know what the others were thinking. At the chapter meeting on Monday night, he announced, effortlessly, it seemed, that “a group of brothers will be visiting Cal Fuller this Sunday,” and then went on with the other items on the agenda. When he scanned their faces he couldn't read anything. Even the other three guys who planned to go to Cal's house didn't seem to respond. Eric sat staring at the textbook he'd opened on the table in front of him; Charlie Balbo rocked back in his chair, balancing on two legs; Russ, Cal's freshman-year roommate, traced his index finger across his palm.

He didn't know what he expected. But he didn't like it when Balbo patted him on the back, and said, “I hear you made it to bed Saturday night, for once.” He didn't like his own reply: “Yeah, your girlfriend showed me the way.” He gave a short laugh, and the sound of it made his face feel pale and visible.