ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

TO THE MANOR BORN
by Robin Mookerjee

I wasn't part of the planning committee, but I had a small role in the St. Stephens centennial. I made some phone calls, I arranged to have a banner made and, when a dispute arose with the caterers, I made another phone call. After all, I arrange client entertainment events for a living. Coming to the centennial which functioned also as a reunion for certain classes, I was a little self-conscious about my profession, even though I make good money. I know how it sounds to my classmates--filmmakers, production supervisors for film companies, writers and the like. It sounds like an anonymous, characterless vocation--lacking in significance or glamour.

As you can see, I myself also write. I do this as a gift to the people that enter my life. As you can see, I have a soulful side, and I read a lot. On the outside it doesn't seem to have anything to do with my professional life, but in fact it does. I gain a lot from reading, and have impressed people in the business world with my knowledge. Many of my clients are in high tech fields--half of them are young men who have no experience with or need for education. Nonetheless they've been impressed by the sophisticated airs I can sometimes put on.

And writing this about Marshall is a tribute to my ex-roommate who helped me develop these intellectual interests. Involved as I was in the organization, I was present in the yard in back of Blithewood, the women's dormitory that used to be a Hudson River mansion, before most of the guests. Rossella was already there. Now--I don't know her; I hardly knew her at St. Stephens. Oh, but I always looked at her. Here it was--the cusp of summer; all the real students had left. It was just a little after the Spring Festival. Two or make that three weeks ago, this yard was full of the genuinely young: freshmen having survived their first year and cultivated a certain world weariness, upperclassmen sick to death of this place and already with jobs or internships in the city--half a foot in the real world. The place, in other words, would be dripping with sex, because sex happens between the experienced and the inexperienced--that is, real sex. Freshmen may fuck freshmen, forming a dreamy bond of presumed, shared identity, but sooner or later they move on to the heterosexual mainstream--the love of the fresh and easily punctured for the sweet but impenetrable. Love is not between equals. Rossella and I, however, were unequal in all the wrong ways, so I watched her at the local bar, across the dining commons, we ran together at cross country practice but never spoke. Well, we spoke only once. My eyes traveled all over her though, her brown legs, slender thighs with a wisp of unruly hair the shorts did not hide, hairy belly like a treasure map and small, oddly shaped breasts. Her petite stature and long hair, determinedly erect carriage, showed a girl who was plain about her shortcomings but plain also, about her prettiness and the good things she had to offer. Marshall should have seen past all this.

There was already whispering about their meeting, as if they had been a movie star couple, and maybe for us they had. Maybe their affair had gotten distorted, even as it was happening, in the telling and retelling. Now, assembling the same tables that had been used for the Festival, using the same hot plates and heating elements (but not the same menu: for the alumni it was flounder, meat loaf and vegetarian), we wondered about their meeting. Had they talked or seen each other since college? Marshall was a successful writer and Rossella, we heard but were not sure, was an advertising executive. Of course, "success" is a glib formula at reunions, and Marshall had not written a book in five years. He had been through a divorce and some health concerns. Rossella? She had at first "shown everybody" and done well, gotten a desirable job at Winthrop & Lewis, then had fallen apart and suffered a hospitalization--not her first, not even her fifth, but her first since the age of about 26. Her much ballyhooed comeback had proven to be an expedient exaggeration of sorts. Perhaps, it was suggested, the former lovebirds should be kept apart. (It was funny how quickly and effortlessly we got back into our roles, unassumed for fifteen years, as commentators on the love lives of the glamorous few.)

Maybe I had had a "crush" on Marshall. I'm not talking about homosexuality. You should meet my fiancé, Marnie, she's very nice. But you know what I mean. We were roommates. I knew him before he became a star. He was so fawnlike and innocent, gushing, even, that first September, that I never saw the star quality. Marshall, to be fair, never wanted to be a star. He didn't seem to know he was the object of discussion, but perhaps that is the very essence of star quality. I always felt plain next to him--he was the tall, blond jock, the ideal--more so in those days. Later decades seemed to favor darker types, gloomy, brooding Latinate hunks. But Marshall was the ideal of a more optimistic era, or its tail end, and when he filled out a bit--in his sophomore and junior years, he reached the height of attractiveness. I came from Somerville, Massachusetts to his Scarsdale. I had worked at the Howard Johnsons that past summer and I told tales, better kept hidden, of the boss. who was a jerk. Marshall talked about French turn-of-the-century anarchism, having just read The Banquet Years at the Steiner-based private school where he'd shone but been kept somewhat under wraps. Now, influenced by a teacher friend from there, he was reading Brick and Brownstone, about the niceties of the architecture of days past. So, when we shared a bottle of Jack Daniels our conversation was guardedly affectionate in the manner of young men, but lacking in real substance.

My duties done, finally drifting into the tent area to hear the first speeches--a salvo of sentimentality before the fundraising message kicked in--I felt the warmth of this Spring Festival for adults. Everything seemed to be happening a little later than it should because, being adults, we didn't need to worry about bedtime. A summery warmth had settled in this week and filled the evening with sweet fragrances, heightened by the beer, wine, spirits and champagne being ladled freely out. Why not? An alumnus in the liquor business had donated much of it, making up for decades of stinginess. And we all hoped to do that; we wrote checks, paying, really, for this chance to pretend we were young. And we were not so very old. We had come into our own and were not embarrassed by a few zeroes. We were dashing in our suits, bought or spruced up for the occasion, and elegantly showed our curves beneath summer gowns. Being old, we no longer had the need to pretend with the opposite sex. We showed the curves, the black underwear under white cotton, as a gift freely given to the handsome and dashing suit wearers, and these counterparts knew what we expected in return. Not only the times, but our age had bred in us this honesty, and it made us in a fashion younger than the crowd who had danced their mating dance under this tent almost a month before. We were aware of those ghosts--they were our ghosts.

From the back of a tent perched on the hill that immediately preceded Blithewood's English backyard garden, I could see Marshall at the food tables, elegantly ignoring Maya Causen '81, speaking about the "spirit of experimentation" that so characterized St. Stephens and its people. This was not my first glimpse of him but was my first good look. He was as near to forty as myself and showing it as much as I, but it was ever so much more becoming on him. The freshness and innocence that had come with his blondness, the air of a goodness imparted by nature, not by will or experience, had by now left him. His face was broader, coarser, even the blond had darkened but still applauded his salient charms in youthful waves. He had put on weight; an inconspicuous belly added to the overall impression of a retired tennis pro. I angled around the rows of chairs toward him and along the way spotted Rossella, sitting in the middle of a row, feigning diligence and good manners. Her one notable talent, an ability to construct a chic impression without really trying, had not been employed in the creation of this new persona, a smartly dressed New Yorker on an upstate jaunt. The old Rossella won you over with her Italian lips and by talking up her own sensuality. Then a strange sky blue scarf, an ill-chosen peach beret and '70s eye shadow sucked you in. You realized you were in the presence of a one-of-a-kind product, something you had to purchase and bring home to show your friends. That girl had died a predictable death. Looking past the seating area, past the west edge of Blithewood, I could see the much smaller Manor, the Gomorra of St. Stephens. It was just a distant A-frame roof fading as evening closed in. Rossella, to my distress, got up as politely as possible, and began heading towards her old lover for the first hello, but my eyes were still fixed on a mirage from the other side of campus.

Manor was where Rossella had led me after our one exchange in the spring semester of my sophomore year--1983. At St. Stephens, during my early years there, I learned to believe that a moment could change your life--a belief I later abandoned. And so it was that during the dinner hour one evening, for no reason at all, I sat at an unaccustomed table--with Rossella and her friends. They were all determinedly motley, sitting slackly in their seats picking at their food. I noticed that, unlike my own friends, these people didn't gossip. They didn't bother. They were--if not stars like Marshall turned out to be--at least demi-gods or aspirants--in any case, well above my level of things. Because I did the worst thing of all at St. Stephens; I studied, I did well in courses. It would have been respectable to succeed without trying, but I didn't have it in me. It would have been at least acceptable to succeed while also giving the appearance of living the high life, but no one would have ascribed such an appearance to me. Nothing, in short, ever happened to me, and here I was sitting with the strange and fascinating Rossellites. Really, they were the Fortites, or what you will, because Joe Fortier was their leader. At this very moment, I divined soon enough, he was under the influence of shrooms or 'cid or something. He was famous, in any case, for having, as a freshman, written his name in blood on the various mirrors of the various dormitories--Sands, Stone Row, Tewksbury and of course Manor, where he had by now taken up permanent residence. It was the home of all sorts of dissipated types. He did not speak at this table, but smiled occasionally and somehow gave the impression of being a somewhat passive ringleader. I talked as much as possible, trying to appear languid and bored, and seemed to score occasional points with the group. I professed and in fact had some knowledge of PCP, which none of them had actually tried. They had only heard rumors, and I was able to set them straight on a few points. But perhaps my pose of knowledge backfired. They all headed back to Manor, and I assumed a tacit invitation to join them. For what? Well, straightforwardly for an orgy, as they gleefully put it. I followed them down the hill from the Commons and onto a path through the woods, a short cut to the dorm that had in fact, in old days, been a mental institution. Unused red lights still perched above each door in Manor, once the patients' way of calling for a nurse or orderly. The whole group of us filed into one room, Joe's dormroom as I gathered, and they began piling, fully dressed, on the queen-size bed. I hesitated, wanting at this point an explicit invitation, before being told by Joe himself, "We don't think there's room for you in here." I nodded and said something, stunned but trying to appear casual and understanding, but only drew laughter. So I walked out of Manor and headed to my own dorm, the dull people's dorm, Robbins. My life had almost begun that day. I had almost entered the orgy that I had always known was going on right under my nose, but to which I had never been able to secure an invitation. It began and ended that day.

I tried not to watch or listen as Rossella and Marshall chatted at the food tables and the host, Stuart Levine, one time Dean of Students, came up to introduce a new speaker. I turned towards the Hudson, always a comforting presence, and watched the wide strokes of red and blue. Upstate New York has the most glorious skies, particularly in the transitional seasons. I could barely hear the ex-lovers' chitchat, but glancing at their body language, they appeared stiff.

I am not the only one who thought she had been bad news for him from the start. They never should have met, really. They came, not only from different worlds (she was from Passaic, New Jersey, home to all manner of perversions), but from different realities. He was America, the good life, the future, the ease of an assured inheritance, not only monetarily but in every way: psychologically, socially and genetically. She was the emotional cripple who hoped to make it look good. She was the seduction of the dark side, of nights listening to ambient music with candles and wondering whether you were responsible for your own birth. She asked all those questions--questions that slow down and impede the flow of life, so that the good things for which one lives exist only in theory. That orgy--had I participated in it--wouldn't have given me the kind of satisfaction Marnie can give me, but only a theoretical satisfaction, something I would have had to spend my life hoping to make real. Rossella's weakness was never meant to mix with Marshall's shadowless world.

Further, in a practical way, she had been bad news. After a year of dating, making out at the Winter Dance, coming to class late because one or the other couldn't leave the bedroom, Rossella freaked out and left school. Marshall, finding a note on his pillow one morning, abandoned his work and followed her to the Denville Hospital. There, for the first time, he met her parents: her father the aloof businessman, her mother alcoholic and prone to hysteria. "Rossella is a very sick girl," the father said, and Marshall knew from that that her condition was not a recent and/or freakish development. In the ward on the 32nd floor Rossella, somewhat medicated, showed him how to light the cigarettes he had brought for her (Export A's, her favorite) by using the holes in the wall. She said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry." Her kind always does.

And so Marshall helped put through the paperwork for Rosella's leave of absence. He went to the second floor of Ludlow, the administrative building, and talked to the younger Dean Levine, who was avuncular and understanding. Where were Rossella's parents, the Carusos, through all this? It cannot be answered. And did Marshall receive any thanks for his efforts? No, hardly any. Rossella's letters were by turns overly sweet and strangely irritable. After a while, meeting other girls, Marshall began to rise above them.

But the experience hurt him and slowed him down, I know it did. Witness his first wife Cynthia, who served two jail terms for shoplifting. Were they, a rising upper west side couple, so impoverished that she needed to steal? Imagine Marshall's embarrassment at agents' parties or his horror at the small article in the Observer. Marshall's first novel, The Unthinkable, drew heavily on his experience with Rossella, as did his second. And after that? His pen seemed to run dry. She had been, for him, a sensational blind alley in a life that should have been free of the sensational.

They had repaired to an alcove in the garden as the speeches continued. I myself spent time with some old friends, especially Chris, who had made quite a business selling books in the Commons. He and his buddy Tom had called themselves Books Brothers. I always thought Chris would be a businessman and he had indeed become one; he owned an electronics store outside Princeton. Talking, we drank more than we needed to facilitate our innocuous exchange. After a while I was longing to break away from it, to make better use of my high mood. Stepping carefully down the hill I saw that the sunset had extinguished itself. The garden lights--a new addition since graduation--were on, and the evening began once again in earnest. The ladies had put on soft sweaters which, while obscuring some of their charms, seemed like an invitation to feel other softnesses. It was a chance--and we knew it--to undo what had happened in our youth, or to do what had never been done. But such opportunities can go wrong. Think of the consequences if Marshall, having done on the whole not so badly but floundered in recent years, yet still well equipped to get his life back on track--think of the consequences if he were to renew his relationship with that woman. I saw them, at the topmost plateau of the garden, near Blithewood's patio, kissing in the moonlight. I knew that her soft body, the body with which she had teased him in years past, was now so enticingly his for the taking. Everything that was difficult in his life, everything that could not be obtained without struggle served to increase her attractiveness. And her put-together appearance advertised her falsely as a way to recover something good from his past, some part of his own impaired confidence and virility, to set his life straight. I felt a sinking feeling as I saw them kissing. It was every bit as public as one of their past kisses during their heyday, and just as unfortunate. I decided to turn away from them.

I am not a voyeur. I needed to connect with my own love life. I walked out in the field, towards the Hudson but a bit west, to where I knew there was a gazebo. And I found it, so dark that I stumbled upon entering. I took out my cell and dialed Marnie.

"How is it, honey?"

I knew what she would be doing. Watching "Mystery" on TV.

"Rather disappointing."

"Oh! Sorry to hear that."

"How about you? How's your weekend?"

"Oh, you know. Why even ask?"

"Is it one you've seen?"

"No, a new one."

"Oh, I called right in the middle, didn't I?"

I heard her laugh. "Sorry, honey."

"You'd like to get back?"

"You don't mind, do you?"

"No. I'll see you tomorrow."

There I sat for a while, thinking that happiness was in these simple exchanges, not in the extravagances of feeling to which we were sometimes drawn. These feelings were idealities, mental fictions. Daily comfort and loyalty were much more real. I dwelt on these things for a while, then suddenly came out of my reverie.

From here I could see the top of the garden, lit by spotlights, and my two friends were not there. Looking towards Manor I saw two figures, so shadowy they could have been spooks, enter the path through the woods. Rossella and Marshall were heading there to reenact some past orgy. I knew that I had to stop them, whatever was going on in there had to be stopped. I ran carelessly but with purpose through the darkness, risking a stumble and realizing instantly that I was in no shape for running. So I slowed to a brisk walk but then picked up to a run again, thinking to redeem myself once I got my stride. Finally, far from the party and having passed no one on my way, I reached the door, utterly winded and needing to collect my breath before entering. The hallway was unlit but otherwise looked much the same as I remembered, only the red lights above each door had been removed. Whatever craziness used to go on here and still went on now seemed saner by virtue of the fact that the lights were gone. My generation's insanity had been sanctified and made normal. But I was not accepting this, I thought, as I scanned the bottom edge of each door for a sign of light. I knew what was and was not normal. Would they make love with the lights on? I did not know for sure but imagined that they would. And at the end of the hall, just before the stairway, to my left, a light was on. Something was still going on in this abandoned hostel. Lingering for just a moment outside the door, I wondered if those inside--for now I heard sounds--could hear my labored breathing. I should have knocked but knew that I was past considerations of politeness. I pushed the door forcefully, thinking to find it locked or blocked in some way, and it swung freely open carrying me with it. And I heard the familiar sound of laughter. Marshall and Rossella were not here but the bed was full in any case with--not four, as there had been at the orgy of Joe and company--but five occupants. And they were very undressed. In fact I may have seen things, like buttocks and pubic hair, that I didn't wish to see. They stopped in mid-action. Five of them! Five! This proved that there had been room in the bed for me on that earlier occasion. I paused, not knowing what to say, not knowing, in fact, what I was doing there or how to justify my presence. I was an adult, maybe that was all it took. I should interrogate them. For all they knew I was a dean or a security officer.

But I did nothing. I said nothing. And they stared at me, their breath descending, reverting to more relaxed positions. Then:

"Hey, Pops, want to join us?"

I still couldn't move. There were two girls, three boys. Was this what I had been waiting for, an invitation?