going to be poor,” I told her. We were lying in the darkness of her bedroom. We were talking about university, about how we could survive for a few years on student loans and state aid. Too many girls she used to be friends with had dropped out of high school. Her sister got married and became a mother right after graduation. And then there was this girl Rebecca, Shelly’s best friend in middle school, who would graduate high school with a baby in her arms, a few contenders for the role of father. Shelly wanted something better for herself. Her family wanted better for her. Her father sold the boat he’d saved up for to help pay her first-semester tuition.
“Can you handle being poor until we have degrees?” I said.
Yes, she could.
But in the weeks before she broke up with me, Shelly complained that I never took her out anywhere. A few days later, walking back from the diner down the street from her college, she said her feet hurt and she wondered out loud why everyone had a car except for us. Only days after that, her friend from acting class squealed about a bracelet her boyfriend had bought her, and Shelly threw me this look like I had done something wrong. She had to be massaged, the lights off, her radio set on some slow jazz with the volume low so the singer sounded nailed inside a box somewhere far away. She spread a bath towel over the sheets to keep them clean. Then she had headaches all the time, menstrual cramps. Then she just didn’t feel like sex. She wasn’t in the mood.
“You don’t do anything romantic,” she said two days before she broke up with me. We were lying in her bed, watching Oprah. She always wanted me to watch Oprah with her.
“Yes, I do,” I said.
“Like what? Can you name even one time?”
“That time I walked into Hempstead at three in the morning to get you Nyquil. You were sick. You couldn’t sleep, remember?”
“That’s not romantic, Jared. That’s standard.”
“Hempstead,” I said, “at night. It’s a bad neighborhood. You want me to die for you?”
She took the remote, flicked through channels. “No, just something different.”
Four years together ended on a cold October night at the start of my junior year. Wind tore the leaves off the trees outside her window. She was too young to be so serious, she said. Pacing her floor between the closet and the door, Shelly sitting on the bed and crying and holding out to me the silver promise ring I’d given her, I looked back to three weeks before and saw it coming. I was too frustrated to unpack the slow, plotted route she’d taken to sever herself from me—too choked with disbelief that it was happening now.
“I guess I’ll see you around,” I said. I slammed the door behind me. Then I stood in the hallway, waiting for her to come looking for me, but after a long time nothing happened.
One night, about a month later, I saw Shelly in front of her dorm building. The parking lot had just been repaved. She clicked in heels to the passenger side of a black Lexus with tinted windows. Her dress was flimsy black. Her pale cheeks were colored with blush. She never wore blush.
I found a job at a Greek restaurant after Shelly dumped me. Craig, the manager, was in his thirties. On Sunday nights, after closing, when the boss left, Craig and I sat at the bar and had a few drinks. Conversations turned to sex if they went on long enough. I told him that Shelly had been a virgin and I’d had to be patient with her, but she came around eventually, opened to me, even asked me to spank her a few times. He told me about his lady (that’s what he called her) and how he’d watched her jerk off a stranger in a dark corner at a nightclub.
“I don’t care what anybody says,” Craig said one night. “The ass is full of nerve endings. It’s supposed to feel good. The toughest guy will admit that taking a shit feels good. It doesn’t mean he’s gay, just human. What’s wrong with a finger? What’s wrong with two fingers if it feels good?”
I nodded, sipped my beer. The top three buttons of his shirt had come undone over the last three drinks. The lights above the bar were dim and the liquor bottles glowed like church windows at sunset.
Craig fixed his eyes on me, leaned in a little. “I’m not ashamed to say that. Play with my prostate. Massage my anus.”
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” I said. I remembered when Shelly started loosening up in the bedroom, finally touched my balls, and before long I could talk her into grabbing anything—her hairbrush—and pushing the handle against my ass just as I was about to come. When she did this, I could imagine a hard penis pushing against me—an organ detached from anything human, like a rubber dildo, yet at the same time having the human capability to take pleasure in me offering myself to it.
Craig said, “Do you need to label yourself just because something feels good?”
“No.” And right then, I knew what would happen. “If it feels good, just go with it.”
His face was relaxed, his mouth slightly open. I could see his tongue pushing against the back of his teeth.
In the daytime, I sliced strips off a thick tube of gyro meat. First, I would slide a poker into the cylinder-shaped meat, and then it went into this vertical rotisserie that sent waves of heat into my face as I worked the knife along the side, shaving quarter-inch-thick lengths from the top to the bottom. Juice dripped from the meat and collected into a puddle at the base of the rotisserie. I jerked the knife back and forth. Back and forth. It was sweaty work.
If I had the chance, I would step out the back door to cool off, stick my hands in the snow if there was any around.
I met James in the bathroom of our second-floor dorm that December, a few weeks before I quit my job at the restaurant. I was back from work and had just finished showering. When I opened the curtain to the stall, James was lying on the floor. He had an openmouthed smile and his head slowly moved from side to side, his long hair fanned out behind him. I’d seen him before on those restless nights when I’d pace in my room, smoking cigarettes, writing crappy love sonnets on a whiteboard with my red dry-erase marker, counting the syllables with my fingers. I had a habit of peering through the spyglass on the door whenever I walked by it, as if I was expecting to see something in the hallway.
Something to take me away.
A few times, way past two in the morning, I saw James unlock his door.
Lying on the bathroom tiles, he said, “Hey, you live on this floor.”
He smelled like wet cigarettes and beer, a hint of cologne. I stood in the shower stall in my towel, my hand still on the open curtain. “Yeah,” I said, “I live in two-sixteen. You live in two-thirteen.”
“Yeah,” he said, still smiling and almost laughing to himself. “Dude, you should come out some night.”
“Yeah, I will. Sure. Sometime.” I stepped over him and walked out of the bathroom, not yet knowing his name.
I saw him again the next day, Saturday. I was tired of my job. I called in sick and figured I would get some reading done for psychology. I had to leave my room to do this. When I stayed in my room for too long I turned into a mad poet, my detachment from Shelly spilling out ugly onto my whiteboard.
James called from beyond the door. “Dude from the shower, come out tonight.”
I didn’t think he would remember.
