Nothing Real Volume 1 (5 page)

“I don't know,” she says, fumbling for words. She can imagine her mother, her mouth turning down in the way that makes her look older than she is, the skin folding at the corners of her eyes, everything frail about her coming to the surface as she struggles to understand.
Going
to Boulder with Val.
When she'd said he was a genius, her father had asked
at what
? When she'd explained about his numbers, his IQ, her father waved her off and made a guttural sound, a
shtetl
noise. “A fat head is what he is, an egotist.” She'd felt fury at the time, that he'd display so much faith in her ordinariness, that somehow it wasn't within her to run off with geniuses, that her future was foreseeably stocked with lawyers and accountants.

“I don't want you to come,” she finally says, surprising herself. It sounds like a whine, like something a little kid would say to another kid. She feels the air around her ignite, tiny sparks bouncing around the chrome surfaces of the diner. She feels she is begging him for something, for release.

When the waitress comes back with the bill, fat tears are coursing down Nancy's cheeks. The waitress is an older woman, eyes downcast, a rock of a face under a low blond helmet. She hands the check to Val, who reaches into his back pocket for his wallet in a gesture of manliness that twists Nancy on the inside. It is demonic, this display of personhood.

“Don't do this,” he says when she gets up from the table and puts her hand out for her car keys.

She is sore head to toe from her first bike ride up Flagstaff. It's not an actual mountain, but a foothill from the top of which you can see the Continental Divide, a white-capped expanse of uninhabitable space. There is perfect clarity, an outline of infiniteness, but no human life. She can't believe she made it to the top. Never would have happened,
even with the daily training, had she not dropped all that weight the year before. That eternity ago when she dumped Val, finished senior year, and drove the Fiat across country with Fiona, who came just for the fun of it, the astonishing dreariness of town after town occupied by, it would seem, the same lank-haired gas-station attendant, the same kindly drugstore blonde at the motel. In Nebraska, they'd stayed at a Holiday Inn and bought beer from the 7-Eleven. The clerk would have sold liquor to a three-year-old, so long as she could pay. They smoked a joint in the room and ate hot dogs in the restaurant: at least Fiona did, while Nancy ate cottage cheese. “Anorexic even when stoned,” Fiona intoned, her dyed-black hair matted to her cheek like the hair of an animal, skunk tail with the white forgotten.

Fiona has dark eyes, irises the color almost of the pupil, inky lashes, a little bow mouth. She used to be the pretty one, but now it's Nancy's turn. Fiona doesn't seem to care when guys pass her over for Nancy. It is the way Fiona is with money, with sex—generous. But Fiona's gone now, back east to write poetry in Vermont. She stayed only a day in Boulder, long enough to buy a pack of clove cigarettes and a prerolled joint from the phony Rasta man on the mall. “This is a town that's pretending to be itself,” she told Nancy. It'll be the same in Vermont, though, Nancy is sure. It is what the movies have done to college.

But Nancy had come to Boulder partly just to be someplace far away, not looking for someplace real. She'd been to Colorado on ski vacations and thought she liked it. The sky was always endlessly blue. If
a puff of cloud infringed itself in the western distance, the inevitable followed—the wisp a harbinger, pushed forth by a massive front of wind, hail, or snow, or everything at once, crashing over the Flatirons, whose pinkish-brown slabs jutted skyward as though announcing to civilization its boundary. It was a natural barrier to the mountains, a gate.

The first wet snow is sometimes followed, within a few hours, by brilliant sun, the temperature reaching seventy, and kids going around in cutoff army pants. Nancy still has a closet full of pumps and flats. She was misguided in coming here, where the stylish kids are locals from Arapaho and Denver, who loathed the out-of-staters and took their teased fauxhawks too seriously. Nancy loathes Boulder now, its realness and its falseness, and only her thinness, her bike, the fact it never really gets too cold to ride, keep her from transferring out.

She finds refuge in her dorm room, which she has mostly to herself, her roommate, Kate, looking to party whenever and wherever. She doesn't mind Kate, but they aren't exactly friends. Kate is a heavy-metal chick from Boston, an anomaly in Boulder, an outspoken girl who has the audacity or denseness to laugh in the face of the dominant hippie culture, the hacky sack–playing collection of earnest pot smokers from Laguna and Jersey bonding over their various jam-band recordings, trading shows in cryptic displays of dominance. Nancy is unprepared for the scene, wants not to care, but cannot impose herself, her cropped pleather jacket, on this place. She puts it in the back of her closet and buys an Indian print dress she is at least skinny enough to wear.

She bought the dress at a stall at the student union and figured she'd create some sort of hybrid style, some hybrid individual out of herself. Someone who could live in Boulder, see the four years out riding her bike in the thin air, wearing desert boots with her trendy neon sweaters.

It is early December, a week before finals, when she gets the email. She isn't sure how Val found her, at first, but then it occurs to her that she is not exactly living incognito, just like a normal college freshman a continent away.

At lunch, she shows the email to her best friend, Alex. Alex is from Reno, which she pronounces
Weno
: baby talk, whore talk, a joke Nancy doesn't get. Alex has a retro style, wears white patent-leather loafers, lime-green pants. She is prematurely gray, but people think she dyes her hair that color.
It isn't a color,
she tells them when they ask, and this makes Nancy laugh, reminds her of things back east, things Alex can't know about coming from Reno, like the steel frame of the bridge, like the creek that ran orange with iron sediment in the back of her house. Things were fucked up out west in a completely different way, made obscure by enormity, by beauty.

“This is a diseased person,” Alex says when Nancy tells her about Val's letter, but Nancy knows these are her own words coming back to her.

“He says he's going to Columbia, some kind of degree program for older students, living in New York.”

“What else?”

“What do you mean what else?”

“Why get in touch with you?”

“He says I am the star on which he is pinning all his hopes.”

“Oh my God, where?”

Nancy looks at Alex quizzically. “Beginning or end,” Alex wants to know. It matters whether hope is something he starts with or finishes with, though Nancy can't understand why.

She doesn't tell Alex that she is saving the email, the phone number included, for when she goes home over break. She knows what she had with Val wasn't real, but now she knows nothing else is either. Not Boulder. Not the shroudless sky, nor the frat boys in their Ray-Bans. Not the neopunks, the hipsters, or the Rastas, and certainly not the hippies. All of them in a movie, or a play, or a song someone once heard and thought to copy into endless strands of variation, all replication of endless replication. The town shouldn't exist, is a continuation of either city or mountain, rock or pavement.

The corner of Amsterdam and 106th has nothing on it. A Laundromat and an unstocked bodega, nothing to keep the punk kids from congregating. He has to toss the keys out a third-floor window—either that or run down all those steps—to let her in. She catches the keys, and a guy from the corner with a dark hoodie under a red parka gives her an appraising stare, then a nod. As if she's cool, though she knows she's not. She opens the outer door with difficulty. There is a hole in the glass and she doesn't like to think what made it. Val has a roommate, a sign of normalcy. He's like her, a student, in student housing. The
roommate is a neat freak, which makes Nancy laugh, to think that Val has to bend to the roommate's need for a clean, wiped-out sink and a bath mat free of stink.

Val looks younger. His hair is close cropped, and he is thin again—not thin like Nancy, whose elbows poke through the worn wool of her sweater, but in shape, like a guy who goes to the gym. He is wearing a gray T-shirt with the indistinct name of a bar on it, so that seems like Val at least. She is nervous, and keeps talking even though he is silent, staring at her, and his eyes have a shielding darkness to them. She tells him how she dislikes Boulder, but tries to make it funny, not depressing, not a crisis of some kind. She says there's too much light, the air is too dry, her hair practically stands on end from static. She tells him how confusingly polite Coloradans are, how it's hard to tell when someone is giving you shit, because they almost never do. Everyone just says what's on their mind, except for maybe the frat boys, but who cares about them.

She feels light-headed, thirsty. She wants to touch him, but it's not affection. It's some sort of animal need, a pattern of recognition. He takes a step closer to her, then seems to think again, and asks her if she wants a drink—a Diet Coke, which is all he has in the fridge, though he could run down to the bodega and get some beer. He says this as an afterthought, as if thinking some people might do that, drink during the day. As if that had never been him.

She says no and they sit down on the couch, and, to her surprise, start making out. It feels like nonsense, like not having anything else to do. He feels like Val, but clean, his hands soft. “I'm glad to see you,”
he says, and she realizes for him it is real, a moment. “I hope my email didn't freak you out. It was a low point. Mostly I'm okay, though.”

“It didn't,” she lies.

He stands up and starts walking around the room. He seems agitated. “Let's go for a walk.” He can feel something isn't right. He can see right through her, and she wonders why that quality, that knowingness, can't be love.

They go down the street, to a coffee shop. She orders an espresso and a little orange cake covered in poppy seeds. She hasn't eaten anything since dinner the day before. Her usual one meal. The cake is so sweet it makes her head spin.

“One time I almost got in my car and drove to Boulder, but then I decided that would
not
be a good idea.” He says this with a shake of his head, as though he can't believe this distant memory.

Nancy shakes her head too. “Probably not.”

“I felt like you hated me, were disgusted by me.”

“No,” she says.

“Look, just say it.” He drums his fingers on the table. “I know I was a total asshole.”

“Why? What's the point?”

“How about for the record?”

“There isn't a record. There's a past. And now. A whatever.” She feels clever for once. Like maybe she's outgrown him, or herself.

He takes a bite of his croissant and Nancy fingers the cake, breaks off a crumb. She can smell the synthetic quality of the orange
flavoring. She's already taken a nauseating bite.

“Anyway, how is school? How are you doing?” he asks, leaning back in his chair. He looks self-assured, a young academic at the coffee shop. She wonders if he knows anyone, recognizes any of the girls, their hair in messy buns, cool and pale, so unlike the Boulder hippies in their beads and white-girl dreads.

She's embarrassed by the thought of Colorado and its relentless sunshine. She shrugs. “Taking this feminist-theory class with this professor who doesn't believe in grades. Everyone starts with an eighty-five and then moves up, ‘as a community,' from there. She says the grading system is patriarchal. Like the way everyone asks, ‘What'd you get?' Sounds like a jock after a drunken party.”

He chuckles, but like he's heard this already, which he probably has. After all, he's at Columbia. The messy-haired girls in the coffee shop would be beyond joking about such things. They would be visiting Professor Gail Windham during office hours.

“You have to be dead to get a B anyway,” Val says. He lights a cigarette. It must be the price of sobriety. A Marlboro Red. She looks around to see who will tell him to stop, but it seems like a chill scene, everyone looking the other way.

“So now you smoke,” Nancy says.

“It's all I have left.” He smiles and looks genuine, but she can no longer stop seeing the artifice in him, in everyone—in the stage set of the pastry shop, in the steam on the windows, and the little bits of poppy-seed cake on her plate. Everything seems too yellow, distant, like looking through a slightly dirty lens. Maybe all that glare
from the Colorado sun is making the rest of the world appear forlorn. But then why didn't Colorado feel real to her? It was as if her move cross-country had lifted her not from one place to another, but from everywhere.

“Let's go back to my place,” Val suggests meaningfully. “My roommate's gone until tomorrow, back to Connecticut.” He says this in a funny voice, coming down hard on the second, usually silent
c.

His room is empty but for the futon on the floor, piles of books strewn everywhere, and a grayish-blue towel that, she is afraid, is the source of a musty smell, like something recovered after weeks underground. His books aren't her books, she notices with surprise. No
Riverside Shakespeare
, no
Intro to Critical Theory
, not even Nietzsche. He has instead
Politics and Markets
,
Democracy in America
, and, most surprising, several thick books with German titles. She decides not to ask about the German. It is too depressing, the old topic, Val's genius. Somehow, with the booze and the paunch gone, the fact of his genius itself has gained a kind of squalor in Nancy's mind. Knowledge seems to gather around him like the musty old towel, a form of detritus.

Val puts on a record, real vinyl on a turntable. It's folk music, something Appalachian, a song celebrating the eating of muskrat. She raises her eyebrows.