Lux Et Veritas
III.
Junior year we were just living life, being ourselves, taking classes, doing Duty, almost three years removed from our virginity (dang, becoming the upperclassmen we’d dreaded becoming!). But don’t worry, there were still fossils of grapefruit rinds between the cracks in Orange Couch, and more grapefruit being devoured every day.
Then, halfway through the year, weird things started to happen. In our common room we had a huge ugly uncomfortable black armchair (a prop from a mediocre play in which Ali had played Aphrodite) and we called it Beauty. Sometimes we’d arrive home after Duty and there would be something in Beauty, a lit beeswax candle or a box of stale Peeps. If we weren’t all on Team Forty-One, we’d have assumed it was one of us. But…
“ …gifts from the Invisible Poor?” Viv mused.
“Thank-you gifts!” Ali sugarcoated.
That was good enough for us, until one day we got home and Beauty smelled like pee, and then another day our doorknob was rubbed with a white slime that couldn’t be anything except what you’ve guessed it to be.
“Hate gifts?” Ali shivered.
“Whatever, just pranks,” Joey comforted her.
There were other weird things too. For instance, first semester Rob dated a girl named Anna, and then second semester he dated a girl named Anna. One night Anna sat down in the cafeteria with Rob and Anna. As it turned out Anna and Anna preferred each other to Rob, and for the first time all year Rob didn’t have an Anna.
In February, Tran was doing a problem set at his desk when he twisted around to crack his back; he was shocked to discover Viv napping naked in his bed. She must’ve been there ever since he got back from class. Weird. How hadn’t he noticed her? But, anyway, the situation called up in him certain responsibilities he had to Viv, even though he’d never before considered fulfilling such responsibilities; swiftly he fulfilled them, making those two even more joined at the hip than the eight of us had always been joined at the hip. No one except some people would ever know that Viv had also napped naked in Pat’s, Rob’s, Noah’s, Les’s, and even Joey’s bed. Tran was the first to have the proper reaction, and thus she loved him best. Maybe the others simply hadn’t noticed her—it was possible—or maybe were just more accustomed to and less startled by the idea of a naked napping girl appearing in one’s bed, no strings attached, no action necessary.
Ali fell in love not with Pat but with a guy by the name of Jared or Justin or Jeremy or Jordan or Jason. As we so often explained to her, it’s impossible to keep those J names straight. She actually, like, loved him, in complete defiance of every unspoken pact. Of course we’d slept with Others, safer fuel for our frenzy than one another, we all had stories, nobody minded the nakeds gathered in the saunas after each heat of Duty, there were tits and cocks aplenty, but love? How could we make room in our hearts beyond the seven steel compartments reserved for us? We had little sympathy for Ali, her ups and downs with Jared/Justin/Jeremy/Jordan/Jason made us yawn, we were so very bored, it was all we could do not to laugh when one night at three a.m. (she’d taken to going to bed earlier, that was another thing) she emerged from her room with a bottle of peach schnapps and announced that she must be an alcoholic, mustn’t she, if she’d dealt with her distress over Jared/Justin/Jeremy/Jordan/Jason’s latest transgression by taking a sip of this peach schnapps, alone, in her bedroom? Wasn’t that the sign of an alcoholic, to drink alone? A sip she’d drunk, all alone, and now wasn’t she a drunk? Her clear, worried, sober face forced us to muster our generosity of spirit and inform her that she was most certainly not an alcoholic, maybe we but not she, Ali of the Non-Bloodshot Eyes and the Granola Breakfast, our own Vermont-Wood-Burning-Stove Chick. She sighed with relief, we with disgust, with sadness at the loss of her.
Cleaning out his room (o miracle of miracles!) that spring, Noah found the poster from freshman year. DON’T LET THIS… BECOME THIS. Society of Optimistic Cynics. He taped it to the wall, accidentally on top of Viv’s glow-in-the-dark US HEARTS US, and we sat around eating grapefruits and staring at it. It looked so old, as though it had been made by children from a past century. The paper was yellowed and crappy, and Pat’s photoshopping looked low-tech, antiquated. We pulled out real absinthe (by then someone had been to France) and drank it all night long.
There were moments of redemption: it was spring, and the eight of us could still stroll toward the cafeteria under tremendous white blossoming trees and could note that each tree was a slightly different shade of white. We could stay in the cafeteria until they kicked us out, sampling six breakfast cereals for dinner, experimenting with how the ingredients in the salad bar might be combined into new and magnificent foods, and on the way back to the dorm in the softly falling rain could observe that the streetlamps (oh yeah, the streetlamps lit by our Idea, this whole place radiant with us) looked like streetlamps in a Van Gogh, the rain meeting the light to form these concentric circles, giving the light a body of its own. We could lie on the grass during the school-wide Spring Lollapalooza, while everyone else danced sillily we reclined in the background, away from the crowd, a pride of eight, absinthe in opaque water bottles, floating away on the sounds produced by the Battle of the Bands, never forgetting the source of the electricity that powered the spectacular speakers.