The Ask (12 page)

“Pretty good, right?”

“Delicious,” I said. “I … I hope this wasn’t inappropriate.”

“It wasn’t,” said Vargina. “Until you said the word ‘inappropriate.’”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Milo.”

“This is delicious egg salad.”

“My husband made it.”

“He’s got a gift.”

“I’ll tell him you said so.”

“Please do.”

“So, Milo, how may I help you?”

I told her about my talk with Horace. I tried not to betray too much, kept things general. I just wanted to understand the terms of this arrangement.

“I see,” said Vargina. “It sounds like you had a very nice chat.”

“Come on,” I said, “be straight with me.”

“About what?”

“Are you guys going to screw me?”

“As far as I know, the terms stand.”

“But what are the terms? What’s the number?”

“What number?”

“How big does the give have to be for it to be considered a success, or enough of one to earn my job back? Is there a target on this give?”

“It’s hard to say, Milo.”

“Hard to say?”

“I mean it would have to be big.”

“Big.”

“Hate speech, sexual harassment, these are horrible allegations.”

“I prefer to think of them as challenges for me to meet and overcome.”

“That’s good, Milo. You’re coming around, I can tell. I’m on your side. Among other sides. But I am on your side. Think I like Llewellyn? The pastiness? The arrogance? Please. But he’s our rainmaker. Of course we can’t count out Horace. But you, this Purdy give, it sounds like it can be something. We need it to be something. I’m sure Horace told you that. This is larger than you. This whole game is poised for a gargantuan fall.”

“What game?” I said.

“Higher education. Of the liberal arts variety. The fine arts in particular. Times get tough, people want the practical. Even the rich start finding us superfluous. Well, they always think we’re superfluous, but when they’re feeling flush it doesn’t matter. You pay a whore to make you feel like a man, you fund a philharmonic to make yourself feel like a refined man. But it’s a pleasure many don’t feel like splurging on these days. Worse is the pain of the tuition payers. They are just small-time enough to really resent the price we charge to fool their children into thinking they have a lucrative future in, say, kinetic sculpture. Fat times it was maybe okay to send your slightly slow middle son to an expensive film program. He’d learn to charge around in his baseball cap, write his violent, derivative screenplay in the coffee shop. Idiotic, right? But ultimately affordable.”

“Those days are over?” I said.

“Not yet,” said Vargina. “Or none of us would be sitting here. But it’s not looking good. Donors are getting scarce. Everybody’s worried. That’s really my point. The whole deal’s in danger. And maybe it should be. Look at you.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You were an art major, right? What did it get you? Some egg salad from a crack baby?”

“That was good egg salad,” I said.

“I know you liked it.”

“You’re a good friend, Vargina.”

“I’m not your friend, Milo.”

“Good colleague.”

“So are we straight?”

“You still need to tell me the number. So I have an idea about what to shoot for. Unless you want to come in on this, work Purdy with me.”

“No, this is your deal.”

“So, what’s the number?”

“You’re thinking small again. It’s not a number. It’s a feeling. A great, big, wonderful, gleaming feeling.”

“Okay,” I said. “I think I got it now.”

“I know you can do it. I also know you can’t do it. But on some level I know you can do it. Good luck.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Now I’ve got a question for you.”

“Shoot,” I said.

“Do you know anybody who speaks Mandarin?”

“Maybe. Why?”

“I’m just looking into something in Beijing.”

“That’s exciting.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Tell me,” I said. “Does it have anything to do with that kid who is always sleeping outside Cooley’s office?”

“You need to mind your own business. Especially on the subject of business.”

“Will do,” I said.

“Here,” said Vargina, handed me the rest of her egg salad.

“No, I couldn’t,” I said.

“Yes, you could. Just wash out the dish when you’re done.”

One night in the House of Drinking and Smoking we were victims of what I would later call a home invasion. I didn’t know the term then. I think I learned it later, from a rap song, or a movie based loosely on a newspaper columnist’s fear of a rap song.

Probably they thought we’d be out, which was funny, because we were never out. This night, though, we had turned in early. Eve of a test week, I think. Given the soporifics in our systems, I’m still surprised we ever woke up, or that Maurice Gunderson did, to the sound, he said later, of his dresser drawer sliding open. His shriek roused the rest of us, though by then they, the invaders, had dragged Maurice from his bed, commenced what Billy Raskov would by morning term a “total fucking rampage.” One of them banged a baseball bat on the walls and they all barked and shouted, flushed us from our smoky caves, herded us into the main room, where we sat in our underwear among the ashtrays and beer bottles that littered the glass coffee table we’d bought at the Salvation Army.

The invaders seemed quite familiar with the modality of the roust, knew the best ways to terrorize, corral. Later we learned at least one of them had been in the non-salvation army.

They wore ski masks, but we could tell by their hands that one was black and two were white. We could tell by their accents they were local. The largest invader, the apparent leader, the bat guy, as I later dubbed him, drifted about the room with his Easton
aluminum, tapped our shoulders, our knees, lightly, with humorless threat, while the others drew the shades.

I shivered on the sofa in my boxer shorts. Christmas break was not far off and the house was always cold. Constance and Charles Goldfarb sat beside me and through my grogginess I felt my arm brush Constance’s warm shoulder. Two things occurred to me simultaneously: that she must have been in bed with Charles, and that I missed her. Then the bat guy smashed his bat on the coffee table. Maurice Gunderson squealed from his camp chair.

“Shit, just take what you need and get out,” he said.

Glass twinkled in his scalp.

“What was that?” said the bat guy.

“I said just take what you need.”

“What do I need, faggot? Tell me what I need!”

He reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out a small pistol. Its diminutive aspect did not offer comfort.

“Calm down, dude,” said another invader.

“I’ll keep these fairies here,” said the bat guy. “You two go upstairs.”

“You sure?” said the third invader.

“Just fucking go!” said the bat guy. “I don’t have all night.”

If he was the leader, he was not a natural one. He seemed more disturbed than the others, twitchier, less clinical in his approach to the burglarious. That they figured we’d have cash and valuables stashed away here on Staley Street was not an indictment of their intelligence, but it did point to a knowledge deficit with regard to the various striations and flavors of capital accumulation at a private university. There were some varsity golfers down the block they would have done much better to rob. Maybe they already had.

I could hear the other two invaders smash around upstairs, pictured them in the blue light of my tiny room. What would they make of the sketches tacked to the wall, the condoms under the futon, the cracked, unstrung Telecaster in the corner (in case
the band idea ever blossomed), the scratched record on the Fold ’N Play? Would they see through the pose?

It did not seem odd that I was thinking about this while the bat guy lurched around us and his accomplices tore through our drawers and our duffels full of dirty jeans and jerk-off socks and plastic bongs and mint cookies and
Foucault Reader
s. I was still a little stoned and very tired but I wasn’t that frightened. I did not believe that we were in mortal danger, though I sensed some of us could get hurt. The bat scared me more than the gun. I saw it caving a skull, maybe that of Raskov, who sat on the sofa arm near Goldfarb. There was something melon-y and inviting about Raskov’s head, I understood that objectively, and despite our frictions the prospect of its stoving did not please me. But the downside of this muted state was that I maybe appeared too comfortable, too fragmented, dreamy, and I suddenly paid for this with a sharp chop to the ribs. I squinted up from the floor into the wool-ringed eyes of the bat guy.

“What!” he said. “What are you staring at!”

“He’s not staring at anything, man,” said Maurice, his voice high, airless. “Everything’s cool. I have morphine. You want that?”

“Fuck your morphine,” said the bat guy. “Yeah, give it to me.”

“It’s in my room.”

“Where’s your room?”

“End of the hall.”

“Go get it. Just fucking stay where you are.”

“I am,” said Maurice.

“Get back on the couch.”

The bat guy turned just as Constance put out her hand for me.

“Don’t touch him!” he said. “Shit, you’re a chick. Let me see you. You fuck him?”

It’s complicated, I wanted to say.

“He’s my friend,” she said.

“You fuck him. I can tell. You blow him and tell him how smart he is. But he’s a dumbshit. Take it from me.”

“I can vouch for that,” said Billy Raskov.

I didn’t take it personally, knew it for some kind of play, a ridiculous one.

“You can vouch for what, potato head?”

“Jesus, Billy,” Goldfarb whispered.

The bat guy stuck his bat in the cushions of an armchair behind him, far from our reach, though I noticed Gunderson eye it. Now he snatched a handful of Billy’s lank hair, cranked his head back.

“What do you vouch for?”

“Nothing,” said Raskov.

“Nothing?”

Raskov snarled as the bat guy bent his head. Constance leaned in and stroked Raskov’s knuckles, as though what he needed most now was moral support, the structural integrity of his spinal column a minor matter.

“No,” said Raskov. “Just that I can vouch for what you said about the guy over here. Milo. He
is
a dumbshit.”

“Oh, is he?”

“Yeah.”

The bat guy slammed Raskov’s head down on a spindly wooden end table. A leg splintered.

Billy slumped, clutched his skull.

The bat guy turned to me, waved his gun.

“Nice friend you got there. Calls you a dumbshit. He’s fucking the chick, isn’t he? Or maybe you all are. Maybe I will. What do you think of that?”

I could see Constance out of the corner of my eye. Her lips twittered, as though moving briskly through a sequence of calculations.

“Been a while since I got my wick dipped.”

I could tell the bat guy was about to do something ugly with his penis. His pistol would authorize the ugliness. His pistol would have his penis’s back. He started to rub himself. We froze, Billy and Maurice and Charles and I, or else we watched the scene as though it were precisely that, a scene, unfurling in the present but with a structure, a destination, already in place. Like a TV show, if TV made you too scared to move. I guess in a sense it does, but this was also something else. I was waiting for some instinct to take over. Fight or flight, I remember thinking. I suppose just sitting there on the sofa was, technically, flight.

The bat guy made an experiment of bobbing his crotch near Constance’s face.

Something scraped on the hardwood behind us.

Purdy and Michael Florida squatted behind the armchair. Had they been here all along? Wandered in from the kitchen? Purdy put his finger to his lips. Michael Florida’s eyes blazed, flicked around the room. They each crept around a side of the chair. Purdy slipped the Easton from the cushions.

The bat guy cocked his head but did not look back.

“What the fuck took you so long?” he said. “Did you find the morphine? This kid says he got morphine.”

“Hey,” he said again, “I want to get out of here. You see this chick here? Let’s take her with us. She’ll have a better time than with these queers.”

Then we all heard footfalls from the hallway, the boots of his fellow invaders. I saw fear in the bat guy’s eyes and he had every right to feel it, because as he wheeled to see what forms he had mistaken for his friends, Purdy and Michael Florida vaulted over the wrecked coffee table. Purdy smashed the pistol from the bat guy’s hand. Michael Florida dove, speared the bat guy in the chest. Together they crashed to the floor. The bat guy rolled on top of Michael Florida, choked him, both men dusted with glass. Michael Florida clawed back and the bat guy’s mask peeled off and we saw his face, his brown hair and rosy cheeks. He looked
like a thousand young men in this city. But this one was throttling brave, meth-carved Michael Florida.

Purdy picked up the pistol, pointed it at the other two men.

“He’s a fucking nut,” said one of them. “We didn’t even want him with us.”

“He’s my cousin,” said the other. “But I don’t care. We just came for the cash.”

It was an odd moment, as though the narrative had somehow forked and we were witnessing two possible outcomes, the intruders subdued at one end of the room, our friend strangled at the other. The story had to decide. Or Purdy had to decide, because the rest of us just sat there, and he did, tossed the Easton, shouted, “Constance!”

Constance stood, snatched the airborne bat. The knob slid toward her fist and I remembered her stint on the freshman softball squad as she rocked her hips and swung into the bat guy’s head. He screamed, but did not let go of Michael Florida’s throat. Charles Goldfarb shouted. Constance bashed the bat guy on the elbow and his grip popped loose. Michael Florida rose, spun out, a practiced wrestler’s escape. Many of us, maybe, were secret jocks. Michael Florida pounced on the bat guy, pressed him into the table shards, tugged his arms behind his back, bound his wrists with a leather belt. Michael Florida, more than anyone, would also be practiced in the swift removal of his belt.

Now Purdy waved the pistol at the two economically motivated, mostly non-violent invaders.

“Go,” he said. “Get out of here. Run. Nobody’s seen your faces. Just run on out of here.”

“What about Jamie?” said one intruder to the other.

“Fuck Jamie. He’s my cousin, and I say fuck him.”

“They’ll kill him.”

“Don’t be stupid,” said Purdy. “We won’t kill anybody. We want to graduate on time.”

“There’s nothing here,” said Jamie’s cousin. “We got nothing.”

“You have everything,” said Purdy. “The only important thing. Leave with it now.”

“Wait!” called Jamie, started to thrash.

Michael Florida cinched his improvised truss. Billy Raskov stood, kicked Jamie in the kidney.

“Shit!”

It was craven, but at least Raskov had bare feet, and anyway I hadn’t been cracked with a used end table.

“Billy,” said Constance, pulled Raskov off.

“Leave him here,” said Purdy to the other two. “You guys deserve better.”

The deserved invaders nodded, bolted for the door. I watched them through the window fly down the street, weave off under streetlamps.

Michael Florida sat on the bat guy until the police arrived.

Charles Goldfarb, who had been sitting in stunned lotus on the sofa, rose, paced, cursed, smoked.

A lot happened after that, testimonies and court appearances and a hung jury and vague threats, never made good, from townier parts of town. That summer the newspaper reported the bat guy had been shot dead outside Star Market. He was a local boy named Jamie Darling. He’d drawn down on some cops with an unloaded revolver. I think the term “suicide by cop,” like “home invasion,” came later, but that’s what it was.

A lot happened even after all the stuff that happened after, but years later I couldn’t remember most of it, at least not the legal and ethical intricacies that entertained us for many stoned hours back then.

What lingered was that frozen feeling, the paralysis, the unnerving awareness that came with it, my real-time curiosity about the nature of my cowardice, as though I were already
beyond any possibility of action, just wanted to ascertain, in the moment of my acquiescence, whether I was going to ascribe it all to moral failure or grant a kinder, chemical explanation. Of course, the bat guy had a gun. Nobody ever blames you for freezing in front of a gun.

But it was still the bat that scared me.

The biochemical states of Maurice and Billy and Constance also intrigued, and then, of course, loomed the indelible fact of Purdy and Michael Florida, the aristocrat and the outcast, hurling themselves over the coffee table like some heroic tandem from the mendacious mythopoetry of another age, one of whistles and human waves and the Maxim guns ripping away. You had to either have everything or have nothing to act in this world, I mused then, to make the move that will deliver you, or cut you to pieces. The rest of us just cling to the trench’s corroded ladder, shut our eyes the way I remember Bernie used to shut them, squeeze them hard, call it hiding.

Of course, this feeling, this hysterical read on agency’s dispensations, was a lot of what Maura used to term, with the full-bore Midwestern irony she’d somehow absorbed near Brattleboro, Vermont, “hooey,” or what Claudia might have deemed a crock of absolute shit.

Still, a final tally, a statistical breakdown of this moment, did exist.

Future Apocalypse Guru: Smidgen of composure, ineffective diplomacy, intractable whininess.

Artistic Provocateur: Ineffectual response to threat, admirable behavior under physical duress, unseemly and gratuitous assault on downed invader.

Larkish Frankfurtian: Frightened retreat into walls of self.

Marxist Feminist Who Fucked: Initial paralysis, subsequent display of courage.

Semi-Brain-Damaged Crystal Tweaker: Valiant and focused response to threat.

Ruling-Class Brat: Remarkable bravery and tactical leadership in face of threat.

Home Invaders: Bold initiative, bad intel, poor battle management.

Painting’s New Savior: Utter cowardice, experienced as bodily paralysis in conjunction with what he would later describe, in an effort to steer the conversation away from actual events, a “bizarre floating sensation.”

But no matter my conversational machinations, I knew the truth. Nobody ever mentioned it, of course. It meant not much. Physical bravery probably held the same value in our milieu as skill at parallel parking: a useful quirk. But the box score stayed in my wallet, or the wallet of my heart, so to speak, a smeared and origamied scrap to remind me how little I resembled the man I figured for the secret chief of my several selves.