Lost in the Meritocracy Part 4

My buddies swarmed in to share their prom-night war stories, and my girls slipped away past the bonfire into the trees, leaving me alone to contemplate-with the distaste and contempt that I a.s.sumed they suffered from every moment of their visits here--just how stupid Minnesota was. How stupid we all were, here in cra.s.s America. Everywhere I looked I saw the evidence. The barbarous chest-pounding of our square-jawed prom king as he bellowed "Seniors rule!" across the lake. The way the homely girl we'd nicknamed "Critter," and who pathetically answered to the name, sat alone and shoeless on a log, dipping her toes in the froggy, fetid water. And the music! The music was the worst. Ted Nugent blaring at teeth-rattling volume from the tape deck of someone's flame-streaked red Camaro. How had I ever borne this gruesome exile?

I went off to look for my tutors in exoticism. I stepped on Styrofoam beer cups that loudly crunched and would never, I knew from science cla.s.s, decompose, but would junk up our sacred earth for a thousand years. A drunk girl whose b.r.e.a.s.t.s I'd crudely mashed and squeezed once during a nighttime bus trip from a speech event sloppily grabbed my crotch and slurped my cheeks with a tongue that smelled like menthol cigarettes. As I twisted away from her, she said, "Not good enough for you, am I, college boy?" I didn't correct her. It wasn't nice, I knew, but sometimes the truth is the truth and can't be helped.

MY FIRST SEMESTER AT PRINCETON I HAD FOUR ROOMMATES who resembled no one I'd ever known: Peter, a foppish piano prodigy with a mature, fine-bristled mustache, who dreamed of writing Broadway musical comedies and spent his leisure time in a robe and slippers, smoking Benson and Hedges Menthol 100s and hunching, vulturelike, over his black Steinway, plinking out show tunes about doe-eyed ingenues who'd been seduced and ruined by caddish tyc.o.o.ns. Jennifer, the composer's plump heiress girlfriend, whose father owned a night club and often sent a limousine on weekends so that his daughter could party with celebrities, who-as I learned from a framed snapshot which sat on a dresser in her and Peter's bedroom-included the two best-known members of the Bee Gees. Tim, the son of a New York journalist, who kept his cheeks fresh with Oil of Olay and treated the composer and the heiress as surrogate parents, addressing them in baby talk and asking them to tuck him in at night, which they did, complete with fairy tales. And Joshua, an earnest Long Island Quaker kid with a close-trimmed, pious-seeming red beard, who played guitar and protested apartheid, which I pretended to be concerned about, too, although I wasn't certain what it was. The SATs hadn't required such trivial knowledge. who resembled no one I'd ever known: Peter, a foppish piano prodigy with a mature, fine-bristled mustache, who dreamed of writing Broadway musical comedies and spent his leisure time in a robe and slippers, smoking Benson and Hedges Menthol 100s and hunching, vulturelike, over his black Steinway, plinking out show tunes about doe-eyed ingenues who'd been seduced and ruined by caddish tyc.o.o.ns. Jennifer, the composer's plump heiress girlfriend, whose father owned a night club and often sent a limousine on weekends so that his daughter could party with celebrities, who-as I learned from a framed snapshot which sat on a dresser in her and Peter's bedroom-included the two best-known members of the Bee Gees. Tim, the son of a New York journalist, who kept his cheeks fresh with Oil of Olay and treated the composer and the heiress as surrogate parents, addressing them in baby talk and asking them to tuck him in at night, which they did, complete with fairy tales. And Joshua, an earnest Long Island Quaker kid with a close-trimmed, pious-seeming red beard, who played guitar and protested apartheid, which I pretended to be concerned about, too, although I wasn't certain what it was. The SATs hadn't required such trivial knowledge.

One night a report came over the radio that John Lennon, Joshua's hero, had been a.s.sa.s.sinated. We were lying on our bunks in the small bedroom that we shared at the far end of the suite, around the corner from a dank bathroom which smelled of wet feet and backed-up drains. My other three roommates slept closer to the common room, a bright south-facing sitting area neutrally furnished with nicked-up chairs and tables and a tough old inst.i.tutional sofa whose denim-covered cus.h.i.+ons hid a thick layer of pennies, ash, and paper clips. The suite was located in Wilson College, the ugliest cl.u.s.ter of buildings on the campus and the home to an inordinate number of glum-looking black and Jewish kids. That I, an unconnected transfer student, had ended up in Wilson was not surprising, but my Manhattan roommates seemed offended at having been a.s.signed such modest quarters.

"Lennon. Dead," said the radio. "Imagine."

The first report, and the many that followed it, plunged Joshua into fits of heaving grief. "They finally did it," he moaned. "They finally got him." Lennon's untimely demise meant little to me thanks to my heavy-metal upbringing (I hadn't even known, before that night, that he'd gone on writing and recording after he left the Beatles), but I could tell from Joshua's stricken eyes that something momentous had occurred, a catastrophe which, in the words of one announcer, would "devastate an entire generation," and I wanted in on the cosmopolitan trauma. I saw the event as a chance to put behind me my provincial, ma.s.s-market sensibilities and join the ranks of the discerning elect.

"Let's sing something. 'Working Cla.s.s Hero,'" I said to Joshua, squeezing a few thin tears through my dry ducts. I hadn't heard of the song before that night but the radio people were making fancy claims for it, calling it one of Lennon's most "personal statements" and an "enduring critique of fame itself."

"I'd rather play another one. It's for the young man, the poor killer," said Quaker Joshua. He settled his shaky fingers on the guitar strings, strummed a chord, fell silent, sighed, then rallied.

"All the lonely people," he began.

The choice was a magical piece of luck for me. Afterward, spent, having sung with my whole rib cage and fully emoted on every memorized word, I felt the urge to cry for real-from grat.i.tude. Thanks to my gloomy second-grade music teacher, I'd managed to respond convincingly, in the company of a well-credentialed witness, to a historic cultural tragedy that would be revisited for decades. My genuine tears flowed along with my false tears, and as they did the distinction between them blurred. I wasn't ashamed of this. My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was in a way the truest thing about me. It represented ambition, longing, need. It sprung from the deepest chambers of my soul.

"Somehow it's going to turn out okay," said Joshua. "Somehow we're going to come through this."

"Let's hope," I said.

I needed a good cry that night for other reasons. I'd needed one for weeks. needed a good cry that night for other reasons. I'd needed one for weeks.

It had all started one Sunday afternoon when Jennifer, the heiress, returned from a weekend city trip accompanied by a uniformed driver who was lugging a case of champagne her father had given her. I watched from my bedroom doorway, thinking: I live with people who have servants. When Jennifer saw me loitering, unoccupied, she invited me into the common room where we popped the cork on a green bottle and drank the bubbly without gla.s.ses, licking the foam when it ran down the neck. This struck me as the height of decadence and reason enough for betraying my hometown buddies, with whom I'd promised to keep in touch but hadn't. I'd heard from my mother that a couple of them were in the army now, stationed in Korea and Germany, and that one had hitchhiked to Alaska to labor in a salmon cannery. Another guy from Taylors Falls, a famously volatile delinquent who used to call in bomb threats to the school, had married and fathered a child by a farm girl who suffered from a form of dwarfism. Her doctors had warned them that giving birth might kill her but my friend had received a message from G.o.d, reportedly, a.s.suring him that she'd survive. The delivery proved complicated and costly, and to cover the bills my friend had taken a job disposing of dangerous industrial wastes. The work had required him to wear a s.p.a.cesuit, but the outfit hadn't functioned well, apparently, and now he was ailing, unemployed, and, rumor had it, headed for divorce.

"What are you?" Jennifer asked me as we drank. "This is an arts room. What's your bag? Your talent?"

"I've written a bit of experimental poetry."

"To me you look more like a ... Let me think. A playwright."

I grinned from cheek to blus.h.i.+ng cheek, flattered that I looked like anything to someone who consorted with the Bee Gees.

"I think it's the way your hair sticks up," said Jennifer. "Playwrights are generally terribly unkempt. It's all they can do to shave and not catch crabs."

"Really? I've never heard that," I said. "Why?"

"Why are most virtuoso violinists perverted s.e.x fiends? Because they are," she said. "Why are all newspaper people disgusting drunks?"

"You've seen a lot," I said.

"I've seen it all. I've seen it from the front and from the back."

"What are the Bee Gees like?"

"Normal. Nice. You'd like them."

Was this a promise? I could only hope. It didn't seem like an outlandish hope, though. The friends of one's friends very often became one's own friends-time and proximity were all it took. I slugged back more wine to cool my burning brain. A diploma, I was starting to see, was the least of what Princeton had to offer; the major payoff was front-row seats. To everything. But what would they cost? I suspected they might be free. Something told me that people such as Jennifer didn't obtain admission to things with tickets; they were ushered in through secret entrances, through fire exits and stage doors, and their guests were permitted to sweep on in behind them.

To consolidate what I believed to be my progress toward someday unwinding backstage with global pop stars, I asked Jennifer about her family history, guessing that owners.h.i.+p of a top hotel wasn't an overnight achievement. I was rewarded with a saga of American commercial striving which commenced at the end of the last century and took in the construction of famous bridges, the invention of basic industrial materials, the compounding of fortunes through advantageous marriages, and the advent of the modern theme park. Jennifer introduced the epic's cast with a certain formality, by their full names, including their middle and maiden names, but after a while she relaxed and the demiG.o.ds became "Harold," "Old Bill," "Great-Gran." Her story had a strange effect on me. It made me feel trusted, included, but also belittled, particularly when Jennifer called her family "my people" or "the clan." I had no clan, of course, and I knew there was little chance I ever would, since such lineages took ages to mature, as did the investments they were founded on. Yes, I could start on the project in a few years, and with luck it might still be advancing when I died, but I'd never know its ultimate fate. Jennifer obviously realized this, because she asked not one question about my background after she finished mythologizing hers.

When we'd drained the champagne, she said, "You owe me twenty."

I stared at her, uncomprehending. "For what?" I said.

"That was an excellent label. You owe me twenty. Though actually who you owe it to is Daddy."

I didn't have the money, and I said so. My parents sent checks now and then, but not for much; they lacked any sense of the cost of living at Princeton. My phone bills alone consumed most of their remittances, freezing me out of any real social life and limiting my wardrobe to a pair of wrinkled Levi's corduroys, a blue pocket T-s.h.i.+rt with a torn armpit, a white Oxford dress s.h.i.+rt I never wore, and one red, lumberjacky flannel number, which filled me with shame about my regional origins. My Adidas sneakers were fas.h.i.+onable enough, but they weren't the scuffed-up leather Top-Siders favored by the breezy gentry.

"Welsher," said Jennifer, putting me in my place. In Minnesota, I hadn't had a place, but here I did: several levels down from heiresses who charged their roommates to drink free wine. It seemed unfair that I had come so far in life only to find new ways to fall short.

"I'll pay you next week," I said.

"We'll just forget it."

"I don't want want to forget it." to forget it."

"Tough," said Jennifer. Then she gave me the bottle to throw away.

Week by week, the humiliations mounted. While reading Tim his bedtime story one night, Jennifer was forced to take a phone call and she asked me to fill in. The book was The Little Prince The Little Prince, in French, and Tim wound up having to read it to himself, throwing his baby voice through a stuffed koala worn down practically furless from years of hugging. Soon afterward, a friend of Peter's from Boston invited me to join him for a squash game. No racket, though. And no idea what one might look like.

Then came the business of the furniture.

Returning from cla.s.ses one afternoon, past the fat gray squirrels all nervous with their nuts, the squads of leggy female runners with sweaty ponytails flopping against their necks, the imperturbable immigrant science profs attentive only to their inner reveries, the rumbling riding mowers of the grounds crew vacuuming up dry leaves through their attachments, I was feeling vaguely content about the fact that I'd survived another day without exposing my naked ignorance when I noticed a Bloomingdale's delivery van parked on the sidewalk outside my dormitory. Its broad rear doors were open wide and its loading ramp was down, a pair of dollies with heavy canvas straps lying beside it on the chilly ground among a litter of empty cardboard cartons.

Inside, in the common room, two burly workers were taking orders from Peter, who was in his robe on the piano bench, an ashtray balanced on one of his crossed knees. The workers had brought in new armchairs, plant stands, lamps, a coffee table, a large TV set, and a voluptuous chintz sofa, setting them all on a Persian rug so vast that its edges curled up against the walls, blocking the electrical outlets. There were also white lace curtains on the windows and the floral smell of scented candles. The old inst.i.tutional decor had vanished, replaced with what looked like a set from an old movie about the lives of refined young socialites.

My instinct when I came upon this scene was to pa.s.s by in silence, brow scrunched and eyes averted, and hide out in my hovel of a bedroom, whose only improvement was a plastic bookcase fas.h.i.+oned from milk crates I'd found behind a dining hall. I didn't know exactly what was happening, only that it had happened without me, and not by accident, I presumed. I poked my head out the door at dinnertime but the sight of my roommates enjoying their plush new setup, champagne flutes raised, their faces bright and rosy, drove me back into protective seclusion. To block out the wickedness of their laughing voices I put an alb.u.m on Joshua's stereo-an early Bob Dylan record, full of lonesome ballads and drawling reproaches to the power structure.

"We figured out everyone's part in this whole thing," Peter informed me the next morning as I tried to slip past him and out the door. He was watching the Today Today show with Tim and Jennifer, all of them snugly embedded in the new sofa and showing no sign they intended to go to cla.s.ses or do anything but drink tea all day and snicker. "Your share is six hundred and seventy," he said. show with Tim and Jennifer, all of them snugly embedded in the new sofa and showing no sign they intended to go to cla.s.ses or do anything but drink tea all day and snicker. "Your share is six hundred and seventy," he said.

"My share of what?"

"Our new living room," said Tim.

"But I didn't order any of this stuff."

"Well, you'll benefit from it, won't you?" Jennifer said.

This was my first brush with a line of reasoning that would echo through my years at Princeton: even unbidden privileges must be paid for. Tuition, the university liked to tell us, covered only a fraction of the cost of students' educations. What's more, the benefits of a Princeton degree were so far-reaching and long-lasting, supposedly, that for the duration of our lives we would be expected to give money to various university funds and causes, all of which were portrayed as critical to carrying out what was called the place's "mission." I'd a.s.sumed that a deal was a deal when Princeton admitted me, but I was mistaken, it turned out. The price of getting in-to the university itself, and to the presumed wonderland it led to-would be an endless dunning for nebulous services that weren't included in the prospectus.

My roommates kept pestering me but I stood firm. I told them I couldn't pay and wouldn't pay. I told them there was a principle at stake, though I wasn't quite certain which one. It felt like more than one. After a while they stopped approaching me and convened a meeting in the common room-to discuss my "recalcitrance," they said. I sat out the proceedings in my bedroom as Joshua strummed a brooding Neil Young song about Cortes, the brutal Spanish explorer, and all the natives he'd smoothly decimated. Joshua had paid his bill without a fuss, it seemed, which struck me as an egregious violation of his solemn Quaker duty to resist unjust authority. I didn't press this point, however. The atmosphere in the suite was tense enough by then, and I needed a friend and ally, however meek. Or maybe he wasn't meek at all, maybe he'd mastered the art of wise acceptance, bending like the willow, Quaker style, and rendering unto Caesar, etcetera. We certainly seemed to be surrounded by Romans.

Tim delivered the verdict after the meeting. He addressed me in his unfamiliar adult voice, which sounded as phony as his baby voice, all husky and burred and ripped off from the movies. I was banned, he declared, from touching any item that I had not bought stock in. This included the Persian rug. Did I understand? I said I did. The necessity of avoiding the vast silk rug would place the entire common room off-limits to me, confining me to my sleeping quarters, the bathroom, and the hallway that ran to the front door.

The suite was now a concentrated version of what the whole campus would come to represent for me: a private a.s.sociation of the powerful which I'd been invited to visit on a day pa.s.s that, I sensed, might be revoked at any time as arbitrarily as it had been issued. I lay on my bunk that night and raged inside, sinking at last into a seething sleep that was the opposite of rest. Instead of dreams I had metaphysical wrestling matches with disembodied oppressors. I woke up with blood on my front teeth, having bitten or chewed a hole in my tongue tip. The next few nights were just as black and taxing. By the weekend I'd developed a rolling twitch, a sort of chronic electrical disturbance, deep in the calf muscles of both my legs. When I tried to ma.s.sage away the spasms, they spread to my thighs, then up into my hips. I started taking aspirin with every meal, switching to Tylenol when aspirin hurt my stomach. I borrowed a book on Buddhism from the library, learned the rudiments of meditation, and even devised a mantra for myself, "Ormalatala," a string of nonsense syllables that sounded as if they ought to soothe me but made me feel silly, desperate, and unhinged.

The one thing I didn't try was disobedience. I reacted to the new charter by strictly heeding it, thinking this might draw attention to its absurdity. I limited my movements to the traffic lanes, looking away when the TV was on and laying not a toe upon the rug. My wardens ignored me, unembarra.s.sed, strangers both to pity and to shame. Two weeks after sending me into outer darkness, they started throwing big parties in the common room, setting out trays of vegetables and cheeses and mixing c.o.c.ktails from a well-stocked bar whose bottles and gla.s.ses had arrived by limousine. The guests were giddy campus drama types, mostly from New York City or its best suburbs, who seemed to have known one another, in many cases long before they entered Princeton, through a network of New England summer arts camps directed by luminaries I'd seen in magazines and couldn't imagine stooping to teach teenagers. The party guests looked at me with s.h.i.+ning eyes and curious faces as I trod silently past them to the bathroom or darted, head down and sheepish, into my bedroom. What did they think was my problem, or did they know?

One night a dark-haired junior named Nina, an established director at Princeton's Theatre Intime, shadowed me to my bedroom. She plunked down a whiskey sour on my desk next to the Hermes manual typewriter which held a page from a play I'd started writing about the president and his top national security aide. Making up lines for imaginary people eased the spasms in my legs, I'd found. As long as I was them, I wasn't me, and as long as I wasn't me, I didn't twitch.

"You're fond of stichomythia," said Nina, straightening and reading the curled page. "You're a Beckett fan, obviously. Or is it Pinter?"

I let these baffling allusions ride.

"What's it about?"

"Armageddon."

"In what respect?"

"Pretty much all of them," I said.

Nina sat down with her drink on Joshua's mattress in a manner that showcased her black stockings and the red straps that hooked them to her garter belt. Her skirt was made of wet-looking black vinyl, a fabric I'd only seen once, on a TV show, worn by a foxy LA vice cop working undercover as a prost.i.tute.

"I know why you're not at the party. Infantile. If it makes you feel any better, they're clowns. They're hacks. Their idea of a show is girls in tights, kicking their pretty ankles above their heads."

I toasted this insult with my plastic cup. Nina's black turtle-neck tightened across her chest as she returned the gesture. I could tell she'd grown up in New York like all the rest of them, and I thought I could even guess which neighborhood: the Upper West Side. One of her parents was probably a professor, of history or philosophy, most likely. Childhood trips to Florence and Madrid, a fondness for Jamaican reggae, and a sibling who was in trouble with the law thanks to a weakness for heroin or gambling. Just a few months after leaving my small town, I was becoming an expert social bird-watcher. And there weren't all that many species, I'd discovered-not, at least, among the Princeton art crowd. There were the somber iconoclasts like Nina, children of darkest intellectual Europe, and the exuberant show-offs like my roommates, who reveled in spectacle and song. My natural loyalties were with the first group, but not because I understood their premises. I liked them because they disliked the others, as I did.

By the time Nina left to fetch us two fresh drinks, I sensed that she found my outcast status intriguing and fancied herself a sort of exile, too, as wasn't uncommon, I'd find out, with kids who'd been raised at the center of everything. An hour later I was lying on top of her in a cold off-campus communal house which reeked of has.h.i.+sh, creme de menthe, and brown bananas. On the cracked stucco walls were unframed student paintings whose abstract muddiness irked me for some reason. My love-making was brisk, ungenerous. This suited Nina just fine. "You're good," she said. "You know how to take, to be selfish. I guessed right."

"How?" I said.

"The beautiful wild fury behind your eyes."

That Nina had seen my anger surprised me. Ever since being booted from the common room, I'd labored to hide my wrath under a smirk so as not to gratify my enemies. With Nina's wet breath roaring warmly in my ear ca.n.a.ls, I decided to change this policy. Raw disgruntlement was rare at Princeton, and some people found it beguiling, it seemed. "Play your best card," my father had always said. Mine would be an ace of spades. A black ace.

Dating Nina raised my profile in serious campus drama circles and brought support for the staging of my play: Late Modern, an Apocalyptic Comedy Late Modern, an Apocalyptic Comedy. My roommates were unmoved by my step up and didn't admit me to their get-togethers-their "salons," as they'd begun to call them. Nina was no longer welcome at them, either. The wonder was that she ever had been. Her spare, dimly lit productions of Beckett's Endgame Endgame and Ionesco's and Ionesco's Rhinoceros Rhinoceros were, according to Peter, "utter masturbatory anarchy." I didn't entirely disagree with him. Nina's theatrical hero, I'd discovered, was a mad Frenchman, Antonin Artaud, whose writings suggested that the ideal play ought to resemble a sort of torchlit orgy climaxing in a crackdown by the police. were, according to Peter, "utter masturbatory anarchy." I didn't entirely disagree with him. Nina's theatrical hero, I'd discovered, was a mad Frenchman, Antonin Artaud, whose writings suggested that the ideal play ought to resemble a sort of torchlit orgy climaxing in a crackdown by the police.

My piece was staged in an airless black-box theater tucked beneath a campus rec room stuffed with clacking foosball tables and beeping s.p.a.ce Invaders consoles. The director was Adam, whom I'd met through Nina, who'd begun taking credit for my ascent while privately telling me, "You'll choke. You'll blow this." She had good reason to be concerned. On rehearsal nights, before the cast arrived, Adam and I would push thin coffee straws through the drilled-out rubber stopper of an ampoule of pure liquid cocaine which he'd pilfered from a New York hospital where he'd worked as an orderly that summer. The drugs, we thought, sharpened our vision of the production, but they also prevented us from clearly conveying it to our two main actors, who rolled their eyes at our psychedelic suggestions to "lead with your auras," "float above the lines," "gesture negatively through stillness," and "turn every pause into a small inferno."

One night my lead, my President, a sorrowful tall Southerner named Reynolds who seemed to be at Princeton on the strength of having carried the antique gene for tubercular romantic wispiness into modern times, mounted a polite aesthetic mutiny.

"The script has weaknesses. It's thin. A tissue. It's part an homage to Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove-"

"A movie," I said, "which of course I've never seen."

"You must have. Believe me. You've just forgotten. My obsession with purity, my hypochondria, that's one hundred percent out of the film."

"Maybe some of it, twenty minutes, on TV once."

"And part a stereotypical revue sketch on erotically blocked religious maniacs."

"I was a Mormon, Reynolds. These aren't stereotypes. I had a bishop in my early teens whose remedy for my dirty thoughts-no lie-was buying a Playboy Playboy, tearing out the centerfold, and drawing wounds on it, gaping b.l.o.o.d.y wounds, with a red Magic Marker."

"I'm sorry you went through that. My largest concern is not the content, though. It's the shape of the play. The narrative skeleton."

I nodded to show respect for his concern, then blew out a roiling plume of cigarette smoke into the beam of a high-intensity can light.

"You're saying it's cloud-shaped. A swirl. A nebula."

"I'm saying nothing. I'm letting physics speak for me."

"So what's my goal in this thing? My inner arc?"

"To launch a nuclear missile, call G.o.d to earth, and usher in the age of peace and love. It might be a dream, though. A hallucination. Happening not in the White House to the president but to a patient in an asylum."

"I can't even tell you how often that's been done. It's like when the Martians invade and people panic, except it turns out they've come to teach, to heal."

"Maybe. But not to my knowledge," I said.

"Then get more knowledge. Please."

"Stand on your tape mark and wait till Adam gets back. Practice your speech about when you were a kid and blew up a firecracker in your hand that left a round scar like the sky wheel in Ezekiel."

I'd put down the revolt, but I was rattled. I stopped attending rehearsals. When I learned that my roommates had all bought tickets to the opening performance, I begged Adam to call off the production, but his drug-stoked momentum was unstoppable. "We're here to disturb, not impress or please," he said. "And the play's not just yours now. It's all of ours. It's its. It belongs to itself. It's a creature with a will. You need to drop the leash and let it run."

"The c.o.ke's all gone, isn't it? Let me see the ampoule."

Adam tapped a finger on his forehead. "Metabolized, not gone."

My adversaries took seats in the third row, their playbills neatly settled on their laps, their postures preposterously magisterial, as though they were overseeing a war-crimes trial. I lurked in the back against an exit door. The shudders rippled down my thighs and calves as though my legs were being unzipped. The disasters materialized early. The President skipped an entire page of dialogue only a minute or two into the show, while the National Security Adviser absently twisted a pinkie in his left ear during a speech that was intended by the author as a symphonic lamentation over our hunger for belief, for faith, and the dangers posed by the fact that we never feel full. There were technical issues, too. The lighting guy, who'd eaten a hash brownie which he'd sworn would wear off before the show, toggled at random between clas.h.i.+ng colors, turning the stage into a cruise-s.h.i.+p disco, and during the silences between big lines misfired foosb.a.l.l.s from the upstairs lounge bounced on the ceiling, as sharp as hammer strikes, then rolled along endlessly above our heads in grainy, resonant acoustic detail.

The audience didn't seem to mind, though. There was even a fair amount of laughter. It came in different spots than I'd antic.i.p.ated, but this made it no less heartening to me. Indeed, it seemed to bear out Adam's theory about the way that plays escape their masters.

People patted my shoulder as they left. I even got several kisses on both cheeks from stylish uppercla.s.smen. My roommates' reactions were stingy and oblique but nothing like the sharp lashes I'd expected. Jennifer winked in the way that people do when they want you to lie in bed all night wondering exactly what they meant. Peter said, "Not at all a total debacle." Tim turned and faced me as though he planned to speak but instead he tapped me on the breastbone with a tightly rolled-up playbill, either granting me a kind of knighthood or threatening me with Mafia violence-I couldn't tell. Which I knew was what he wanted.

Feeling content, then jaunty, then philosophical-my tiny success would change nothing, I suspected; I'd still have to circ.u.mambulate the rug; I'd still have to live in my hole, surrounded, cowed-I went with Adam, Nina, and the cast to the Annex bar on Na.s.sau Street, a watering hole for freethinkers on the prowl. Toasts were drunk, bubbles of flattery were blown, and I was pressed by the group to play the big shot, which was hard for me at first, but with a bit more alcohol and nicotine, alarmingly easy and instinctive. My speech sped up ferociously, my energized legs kicked away beneath the table, I rocked in my chair, I roared, I railed, I ripped. My paroxysm of pent-up ego drew people nearer-to feel the heat, perhaps-but eventually they withdrew to other groups, migrated to other scenes, and I found myself alone beside a stranger who looked like he'd slept in a field the night before but wore the vest-pocket pen of a professor. He'd plunked himself down at our table, uninvited, about an hour ago, and un.o.btrusively, stubbornly abided even though no one had spoken a word to him.

He introduced himself as Julian and said that it would be his privilege to buy me a c.o.c.ktail in honor of my play. He said my work sounded interesting, provocative, judging by the talk around the table. A creep had cornered me, I feared. Still, because my throat was dry from boasting and I'd begun to dread leaving the bar, which meant either returning to the suite or going home with Nina to dish out s.e.xual punishment till dawn, I accepted Julian's offer, clinked gla.s.ses with him, and asked him what he did.

The best conversation of my life ensued-one I could never have had in Minnesota and one that helped me forget my recent troubles by occupying me with cosmic issues of just the sort a place like Princeton should raise but so far hadn't, at least when I'd been listening. Julian taught psychology, he said, despite having no diploma in the subject, only a book he'd written as an amateur. It had grown out of his reading of ancient literature and concerned, he said, "the history of consciousness." I asked him to explain but keep it simple. He told me that he'd try. The modern human brain, he said, was actually two brains functioning as one brain, but there had been a time, long, long ago, when man's double brain had operated differently. Its parts, its halves, had been separate then, divided. In fact, they'd been virtual strangers to each other. When a thought arose in one of them, the other one, acting as a receiver, processed the thought as a voice, an actual voice. This voice seemed to come from outside the self, said Julian; it seemed to come from another being, really. But who was this being? Who were these secret speakers? Man had answered these questions in many ways. He'd conceived of G.o.ds and spirits, angels and demons, trolls and fairies. Muses.

"Back when, before the Breakdown," said Julian, "before the G.o.ds and voices fell silent, writers truly believed in inspiration. They experienced inspiration. It was real to them. Tell me: did you ever feel, during the composition of your script, that someone else, not you, was in control?"

"Honestly?"