The Book of Skulls

“Not mine.” Oliver.

“No?” Eli asked.

Oliver said, “No. I believe despite the absurdity.”

“Why?” Eli said.

“Why, Oliver?” I said, a long moment later. “You know it’s absurd, and yet you believe. Why?”

“Because I have to,” he said. “Because it’s my only hope.”

He stared straight at me. His eyes held a peculiarly devastated expression, as though he had looked into the face of Death with them and had come away still alive, but with every option blasted, every possibility shriveled. He had heard the drums and the fifes of the dead-march, at the edge of the universe. Those frosty eyes withered me. Those strangled words impaled me. I believe, he said. Despite the absurdity. Because I have to. Because its my only hope. A communique from some other planet. I could feel the chilly presence of Death there in the room with us, brushing silently past our rosy boyish cheeks.

chapter fourteen Timothy

We’re a heavy mixture, we four. How did we ever get together? What tangling of lifelines dumped us all into the same dormitory suite, anyway?

In the beginning it was just me and Oliver, two freshmen who’d been computer-assigned to a double room overlooking the quadrangle. I was straight out of Andover and very full of my own importance. I don’t mean that I was impressed by the family money. I took that for granted, always had: everybody I grew up with was rich, so I had no real sense of how rich we were, and anyway I had done nothing to earn the money (nor my father, nor my father’s father, nor my father’s father’s father, et cetera et cetera), so why should it puff me up? What swelled my head was a sense of ancestry, of knowing that I had the blood of Revolutionary War heroes in me, of senators and congressmen, of diplomats, of great nineteenth-century financiers. I was a walking slab of history. Also I enjoyed knowing that I was tall and strong and healthy — sound body, sound mind, all the natural advantages. Out beyond the campus was a world full of blacks and Jews and spastics and neurotics and homosexuals and other misfits, but I had come up three cherries on the great slot machine of life and I was proud of my luck. Also I had an allowance of one hundred dollars a week, which was convenient, and I may not actually have been aware that most eighteen- year-olds had to get along on somewhat less. Then there was Oliver. I figured the computer had given me a lucky dip again, because I might have been assigned somebody weird, somebody kinky, somebody with a squashed, envious, embittered soul, and Oliver seemed altogether normal. Good-looking corn-fed pre-med from the wilds of Kansas. He was my own height — an inch or so taller, in fact — and that was cool; I’m ill at ease with short men. Oliver had an uncomplicated exterior. Almost anything made him smile. An easygoing type. Both parents dead: he was here on a full scholarship. I realized right away that he had no money at all and was afraid for a minute that would cause resentment between us, but no, he was altogether levelheaded about it. Money didn’t appear to interest him as long as he had enough to pay for food and shelter and clothing, and he had that — a small inheritance, the proceeds of selling the family farm. He was amused, not threatened, by the thick roll I always carried. He told me the first day that he was planning on going out for the basketball team, and I thought he had an athletic scholarship, but I was wrong about that: he liked basketball, he took it very seriously, but he was here to learn. That was the real difference between us, not the Kansas thing or the money thing, but his sense of dedication. I was going to college because all the men of my family go to college between prep school and adulthood; Oliver was here to transform himself into a ferocious intellectual machine. He had — still has — tremendous, incredible, overwhelming inner drive. Now and then, those first few weeks, I caught him with his mask down; the sunny farm-boy grin vanished and his face went rigid, the jaw muscles clamping, the eyes radiating a cold gleam. His intensity could be scary. He had to be perfect in everything. He had a straight-A average, close to the absolute top of our class, and he made the freshman basketball team and broke the college scoring record in the opening game, and he was up half of every night studying, hardly sleeping at all. Still, he managed to seem human. He drank a lot of beer, he balled any number of girls (we used to trade with each other), and he could play a decent guitar. The only place where he revealed the other Oliver, the machine-Oliver, was when it came to drugs. Second week on campus I scored some groovy Moroccan hash and he absolutely wouldn’t. Told, me that he’d spent 17? years calibrating his head properly and he wasn’t about to let it get messed up now. Nor has he blown so much as a single joint, as far as I’m aware, in the four years since. He tolerates our smoking dope but he won’t have any.

The spring of our sophomore year we acquired Ned. Oliver and I had signed up to room together again that year. Ned was in two of Oliver’s classes: physics, which Ned needed to fulfill his minimum science requirement, and comparative lit, which Oliver needed to fulfill his minimum humanities requirement. Oliver had a little trouble digging Joyce and Yeats, and Ned had a lot of trouble digging quantum theory and thermodynamics, so they worked out a reciprocal coaching arrangement. It was an attraction of opposites, the two of them. Ned was small, soft-spoken, skinny, with big gentle eyes and a delicate way of moving. Boston Irish, strong Catholic background, educated in parochial schools; he still wore a crucifix when we were sophs and sometimes even went to mass. He intended to be a poet and short-story writer. No, “intended” isn’t the right word. As Ned explained it once, people with talent don’t intend to be writers. Either you have it or you don’t. Those who have it, write, and those who don’t, intend. Ned was always writing. Still is. Carries a spiral-bound notebook, jots down everything he hears. Actually I think his short stories are crap and his poetry is nonsense, but I recognize that the fault probably lies in my taste, not in his talent, since I feel the same way about a lot of writers much more famous than Ned. At least he works at his art.

He became a kind of mascot for us. He was always much closer to Oliver than he was to me, but I didn’t mind having him around; he was somebody different, somebody with a whole other outlook on life. His husky voice, his sad-dog eyes, his freaky clothes (he wore robes a lot, I suppose by way of pretending he had gone into the priesthood after all), his poetry, his peculiar brand of sarcasm, his complicated head (he always took two or three sides of every issue and managed to believe in everything and nothing simultaneously) — they all fascinated me. We must have seemed just as foreign to him as he to us. He spent so much time around our place that we invited him to room with us for our junior year. I don’t remember whose idea that was, Oliver’s or mine. (Ned’s?)

I didn’t know he was queer, at the time. Or rather, that he was gay, to use the term he prefers. The problem with leading a sheltered Wasp life is that you see only a narrow slice of humanity, and you don’t come to expect the unexpected. I knew such things as fags existed, of course. We had them at Andover. They walked with their elbows out and combed their hair a lot and talked with a special accent, the universal faggot accent that you hear from Maine to California. They read Proust and Gide all the time and some of them wore brassieres under their T-shirts. Ned wasn’t outwardly swishy, though. And I wasn’t the sort of meatball who automatically assumed that anyone who wrote (or read!) poetry had to be queer. He was arty, yes, he was hip, he was nonjock all the way, but you don’t expect a man who weighs 115 pounds to have much interest in football. (He did go swimming almost every day. We swim bare-ass at the college pool, of course, so for Ned it was like a free beaver flick, but I didn’t think of that then.) One thing, he didn’t go around with girls that I noticed. Still, that in itself isn’t a condemnation. The week before finals, two years ago, Oliver and I and a few other guys had what I guess you’d call an orgy in our room, and Ned was there, and he didn’t seem turned off by the idea. I saw him balling a chick, a pimply waitress in from town. It was a long time afterward that I realized: one, that Ned might find an orgy useful to him as material to write about, and two, that he doesn’t really despise cunt, he just doesn’t care for it as much as he does for boys.

Ned brought us Eli. No, they weren’t lovers, just buddies. That was practically the first thing Eli said to me: “In case you’re wondering, I’m hetero. Ned doesn’t go for my type and I don’t go for his.” I’ll never forget it. It was the first hint I had had that Ned was that way, and I don’t think Oliver had realized it either, though you never really know what’s going on in Oliver’s mind. Eli had spotted Ned right away, of course. A city boy, a Manhattan intellectual, he could put everybody into the proper category with one glance. He didn’t like his roommate and wanted out, and we had a huge suite, so he said something to Ned and Ned asked if he could transfer in with us, the November of our junior year. My first Jew. I didn’t know that, either — oh, Winchester, you naive prick, you! Eli Steinfeld from West Eighty-third Street, and you can’t guess he’s a Hebe!