My second chance came the next morning, when we were both awoken by the sound of a recycling truck gobbling glass bottles. The lie had sat in my stomach all night long like an iffy piece of seafood, and I knew that forcing myself to puke it up now was preferable to letting it stay where it was and slowly absorb itself into my system. But then Thao flipped onto his back to stretch his arms, showing he was at full morning attention. Addressing that erection was infinitely preferable to eliminating it with words about Chase.
My third chance was during breakfast downstairs, though I’m not sure that even counts as a chance, since all eight of Thao’s roommates ate with us. These boys were becoming nearly as important to me as Thao was, comprising as they did a community into which I was automatically, unquestioningly accepted, making as they had this house into a haven where the whole of me could be present and accounted for, a place where I could sit and talk without the usual desperate self-pruning. But they were also eight boys who loved Henry, and whenever Chase came up in conversation, they didn’t pronounce his name so much as spit it. Why ruin breakfast?
I kissed Thao goodbye and drove to West Campus. I was enrolled in two real classes and two joke classes—a Melville seminar Professor Grayson was teaching and a survey of the New York School poets for the former, and The Golden Age of American Film and an introduction to cultural anthropology for the latter.
American Film was held first thing Monday morning, in a large auditorium that, intentionally or not, resembled a crummy old movie house—faded black walls, creaky chairs upholstered with ugly orange cloth, and little dotted stair lights that illuminated your steps while the film was in progress. My teammates had already claimed the last, highest rows when I arrived, and my pulse spiked when I spotted Chase. After getting fictionally castrated by these players not twelve hours earlier, I expected him to do something now to prove he still possessed his balls, maybe ask me where I had slept last night and listen to me stammer, maybe call me a faggot to watch me squirm. But I was pleasantly surprised. Chase only gave me a subtle chin lift before ignoring me.
The house lights dropped and a clip from The Godfather began. We open with Sonny Corleone, the family’s loose-cannon scion, visiting the apartment of his pregnant sister Connie, who opens the door with her face turned away, trying to hide her blackened eyes and scabbed lips. When Sonny sees what his sister’s new husband, Carlo Rizzi, has done to her, he bites his knuckle and prepares to rush out and murder his brother-in-law. But a teary, slightly slurry Connie tells Sonny she’s to blame for her bruised face, she hit Carlo first, was asking for it, and she makes Sonny promise he won’t touch Carlo. With frightening ease, Sonny’s features relax. He nods and kisses his kid sister reassuringly on top of her head, telling her he wouldn’t dream of making her child an orphan before he was born. In the very next scene, we cut to Carlo’s New York neighborhood on a hot summer day. Carlo and his goons lounge on a short concrete stoop while kids play in the gushing water of an open hydrant. Carlo is king of the stoop, dressed nattily in a silk suit the colors of an orange Creamsicle and murmuring lordly orders to his underlings about stopping taking action on Yankees games. Then Sonny and Company screech up in a black Lincoln. Carlo knows instantly what this is about and flees across the street, but Sonny catches him by the scruff of his silk shirt and hurls him into a garbage area in front of an apartment building, a small rectangular space fenced in by a low wrought-iron gate. The space becomes a cage for Carlo, and he can do little more than desperately clutch a rail while Sonny jumps in to maul him—punching him, kneeing him in the ribs, even throwing his own shoe at Carlo’s head. Sonny tries to loosen Carlo’s grip on the rail by biting his knuckles, taking us back to when he bit his own knuckle in Connie’s apartment, a harbinger of the violence to come. When that doesn’t work, he lifts a metal garbage can and pounds Carlo over the head with it, then takes the can’s lid and smashes Carlo’s face. By this point Carlo is half alive and crawls out of the cage on his belly, kicked in the ribs again and again. Carlo has just reached the curb when Sonny finishes him off with a punt to the jaw. Carlo flops into the gutter, blood mingling with the hydrant’s runoff.
—You see Sonny’s shoes? O’Connor said as we filed down the auditorium steps. Those joints were tight as hell.
—They’re called wingtips.
—What, like wing wings?
—Like a bird, young.
—Wingtips, O’Connor said, savoring the new term. I’m going to Nordstrom tonight.
We entered the hot, bright West Campus quad, the lawns and flagstone paths busy with freshly returned students. I had my Melville class coming up and broke away from the group, toward the English building. I noticed Chase walking in my peripheral vision, but we didn’t acknowledge each other until we were out of our teammates’ sight.
—Ordered my Urlacher jersey, he told me.
