After this first meeting Curry and I became friends. We often discussed whether or not this was proper: it was a friendship that would give great pleasure to both of our families, and that was something that neither of us particularly wanted to do. During the fall and winter of my sophomore year we wasted dozens of afternoons together over cooling cups of coffee in the Winthrop House dining room. Sometimes we played repetitive games, like trying to flip a cigarette butt into a glass across the table; other times we talked about a scholarly circle we’d invented that revolved around an imaginary publication called Condiment Review. “Have you seen Spazzola’s monograph ‘Restructuring Relish’? Absurd. The price of dillweed alone…”
We thought we were awfully clever. Curry was a visual studies major who was planning—with the insouciance that returned so suddenly to male students after the end of the Vietnam draft—to spend a year after his graduation that June traveling and taking pictures in northern Brazil. I was concentrating in English and putting the finishing touches on a collection of angular-looking poems with a lot of asterisks in them. Like most of our friends, Curry and I both harbored ill-conceived ideals of leading lives that would almost geometrically contravene anything of which our parents would approve. We spent a lot of time talking about what it meant to come from the kind of earnest, prosperous black family in which civil rights and concern for the underprivileged are served up, so to speak, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “It made us naughty and perverse,” insisted Curry. When he was home on vacation, he liked to scandalize his father, veteran of a score of nonviolent desegregation campaigns, with long quotations from Marcuse and Che Guevara.
The funny thing was that when I was with Curry, as daringly as we talked, I didn’t feel much like the anarchistic poet I hoped I might be. When I was with him, in fact, I experienced a sweet feeling of nostalgia, a faint but concentrated and lingering suggestion of dear past days in the small world of home and family.
Encountering Curry at Harvard had reawakened a memory I hadn’t been aware of for many years: it was an image of a Sunday morning in autumn, during the time his family had visited our house in Philadelphia. Very early—before the grownups had come downstairs, and while Curry’s two little brothers were still asleep—Curry, Matthew, and I, all of us in pajamas, had been on our knees on the dining-room rug, reading the comics. The first sunlight was shining through reddish leaves and gauze curtains at the window, striking the polished legs of the furniture around us, and over everything lay the magical freshness and conspiratorial quiet of the awakening day. As I pored over the bright-colored funny paper, my brother made a rather labored joke (I thought) about the comics being full of “nuts”—“nut” being a derisive nickname the boys had bestowed on me. Curry looked at me and gave a cruel snicker; as he did so, a sunbeam struck his round cheek, and I saw for the first time, with the feeling of having learned a secret, that at the corner of his left eye he had a birthmark shaped like a long tear. It was faint, but it lay on his cheek with a formal precision, like the stylized tears clowns sometimes paint on their faces.
I never mentioned the birthmark to him, not even when I met him again in college, but my eyes automatically sought it out as something reassuring, a familiar landmark, whenever I sat down to have lunch with him in the Winthrop House dining room. Sometimes we lingered so long that they turned out the lights on us; in the early dusk of fall and winter the dim, high-ceilinged room seemed like a cave. We usually sat at one of the side tables, two little figures dwarfed by the tall, many-paned windows, cracking jokes and guffawing as the kitchen help walked back and forth in the half-light. Occasionally the stout Irishwomen who served the meals would give us curious glances that we imagined were hostile—it was a year of accelerating race conflict in South Boston—and Curry responded by talking in an outrageous Georgia redneck accent that he’d learned at his fancy prep school.
On Wednesdays Curry’s girlfriend Philippa would join us after her tutorial. Philippa was a blonde from New York, undeniably beautiful, but a little faded and monotone in coloring, a fine-arts major with feminist ideas that she expressed in an incongruous wispy, little girl’s voice. She and I professed warm friendship, but I made fun of her behind her back. “Phil’s like an aquatint of Gloria Steinem,” I once remarked to Curry, and he, disloyally, agreed.
Curry and I used up a lot of energy making fun of each other’s lovers; each of us treated the other’s romantic escapades as if they were recurring bouts of insanity. Curry was especially cruel about a Chinese law student I went out with for a few weeks during my sophomore year. “Why don’t you go out with your own kind, dear?” he asked me one afternoon in a meddlesome, grandmotherly manner. “Your circle of men is like the United Nations.”
“Look who’s talking,” I snapped back. “You’d better find a black girlfriend before you get yourself thrown out of that Frantz Fanon study group.”
“You and I ought to get married,” said Curry, abstractedly twiddling his bony fingers. “Except with such a nice colored girl and a nice colored boy, it would be…”
“A little too boring,” I finished for
