Jake & Mimi (12 page)

It was music that finally calmed her.
The Kreisler Album
, Joshua Bell on violin. It is an album that I sent her six months ago, in the guise of a radio station giveaway. The fourth
track is her favorite. “Caprice Viennois.” She plays it more than any other, and there is a moment, one minute and twelve
seconds into it, that she loves especially. The aching violin refrain, which will find its mark in any heart receptive to
beauty. She has learned precisely when it comes, and no matter what she is doing — dressing, bathing, preparing dinner — she
stops and quiets. Tonight it worked again. Just before the refrain came, her slippers stopped sounding. And though I was twenty
blocks away, I could picture her, standing quietly in her living room, her eyes closed. I stared into my black speakers, and
together we listened to the pure violin notes.

And now minutes later, as the song ends, I listen to Miss Lessing cross to her stereo, take out the compact disc, and snap
it into its case. I wait for her pacing to start again, but instead her steps fade away. I silence the living-room Øre and
activate the one in her bedroom, in time to hear her footsteps and now the click of her bed lamp. And now the soft give of
her bed as she climbs into it. Most nights she will read before sleep, but now I hear the bed lamp click off. Sometimes she
will play a song on her cassette player. A minute passes, and now two, and the only sound is her breathing, calm and even.

It is late but I pour myself a small glass of wine and walk to the chair by the window. I sit down and look out, west into
the dark night. Anne Keltner’s phone message was not the only one this evening. Miss Lessing’s fiancé called as well. He was
sorry she would be stuck at the office all night, he said. She should think of tomorrow, and of the Caribbean, and be happy.

I take a sip of wine. Miss Lessing was home by 7:30. She went for a run, showered, dressed, and went out again. Without ever
calling her fiancé.

I look up suddenly into the speakers. Her breathing — it is different. Deeper. I hear other sounds. The rustle of her comforter.
I lean forward in my chair. Her breathing, so smooth a moment ago, is shortening now. Quickening. I set my wineglass on the
windowsill. Not once in a year have I heard this. With her fiancé, yes. But not this.

Her breathing quickens further. And still further. And now a soft gasp. A soft cry. And again. And again. And again.

N
ina Torring was a Delaware beauty with thin Scandinavian legs and hair like the noon sun. She was our dorm adviser freshman
year, and she made you want to tank a midterm or get caught in the lounge with liquor — anything to be called to her room
for a talk. She was the lone senior in the dorm, a woman among girls, but her delicate build fired all of us first-year men
with aching notions of purity. Just maybe, we imagined, nothing had ever been done to her.

From my top bunk I could see out the big window to the clearing in front of the dorm. The library closed at eleven, and night
after winter night I watched Nina come up the packed snow path at 11:15, hand in hand with Nick Simms. Nick was a senior,
too, and a tough Jersey kid whose steady play at shooting guard was keeping me out of the starting five. I’d see their breath
in the lamplight before they passed from sight, and then minutes later I’d see Nick start back down the path alone. If he
didn’t, I’d stare out at the falling snow, at the salt scattered along the empty walkway, and then up into the dark cement
ceiling above me.

All season long I gained on Nick in practice. By March I was torching him daily, blowing past him when he crowded me and knocking
down the jumper when he gave me room. Coach hated to trust freshmen, especially guards, but I knew that when the tournament
came, and it was win or go home, he’d put his best five out there on the floor.

A week before the tourney, I was lying in bed with a beer when I heard low whispers in the hallway and the sharp click of
a lighter. I dropped from the bunk, grabbed a towel, and stuffed it into the crack beneath the door. On the other side, I
knew, were Pardo and Reeder, drunk on stolen fraternity beer and armed with the fireworks we’d bought in South Carolina over
break. I heard the fizz of the fuses as I went for my own stash, and then one! two! three! sonic booms as the cherry bombs
exploded in the narrow hallway. I lit the fuse on my bottle rocket, waited three seconds, and pulled open the door.

I could hardly see through the smoke bombs they’d laid down to cover their retreat, but I took aim and held the bottle steady,
realizing a split second too late that the moving target at the end of the hall wasn’t one of my pledge buddies but Suzie
Carr, scared from her room by the blasts and racing for the safety of the lounge. My low tracer caught her right in the ass.
She grabbed her singed pants with both hands and screamed and screamed, and as her screams mixed with the din of the smoke
alarm and the shouts of angry students jarred awake, I knew Pardo and Reeder were halfway across the quad. Nina Torring stepped
into the hallway seconds later, catching me dead to rights, a pile of spent fireworks at my feet and a smoking beer bottle
in my hands.

“Please clean all of this up,” she said quietly, her blond hair spilling down the long T-shirt she’d been sleeping in. I nodded,
and she turned and walked away.

Three things could get a player suspended from the team — bad grades, bad behavior, and alcohol. The next day after classes
I sat in my room, turning a basketball in my hands and waiting for the call to come. At five the phone rang, but it was Grandpa,
calling to tell me he’d be driving up for the tournament. I stared at the wall in front of me. He wouldn’t stay over, I knew,
but would drive four hours home after the game and, if we won, four hours back for the next one. I was still staring at the
wall when Nina Torring called. Could I please come to her room? I walked past the sulfur stains I’d tried to scrub out of
the rug, then through the lounge, where Suzie Carr sat, pretending to study.

Nina closed the door behind me and turned a wooden desk chair toward her bed. A blue sweatshirt hid her pliant body, but her
gray tights ended at her calves, and as she sat down cross-legged on her covers, I could see her golden ankles, see the small
medallion scar on her left one. I sat down on the chair just a few feet away from her.

“Somebody could have been badly hurt, Jake.”

“I know.”

“I have to turn you in.”

I looked down at the floor. I thought of Grandpa, of the silence on the line when I’d tell him.

“Nick put in his two cents, I’ll bet,” I said.

Her blue eyes flashed. “Actions have consequences, Jake. I’m sorry you had to learn this way.”

“Did Nick tell you Coach named me the starter in practice this morning?” I watched her eyes. “I didn’t think so.” I stood
to go. “More power to him,” I said quietly, walking to the door and from her room.

The next morning at 5:30 I crossed the silent white campus to the gym, my boots sinking deep into the crystalline snow. The
janitor was just opening the door, and I dressed alone in the locker room in the cold quiet, breathing in the smell of rubber
bath mats and tile. I laced up my sneakers and took to the court, rolling the ball racks into place and then moving hard from
station to station, firing jumpers from the corner, the elbow, the top of the key, the elbow, the corner, and then back around
the circle the other way. I shot for half an hour, finding my release point, repeating, repeating, moving and shooting even
as I saw Coach in the doorway, even as he walked over to me, even as I waited for him to ask me into his office. “Hold your
follow-through, Teller,” he said. “One-thousand one, one-thousand two.” A few minutes later, in practice, he put me with the
first team, and all morning the offense seemed to run itself. Every time I came hard off a screen, the ball was there, and
if I wasn’t rising over Nick Simms to knock down a jumper, I was feeding one of the big men at the rim.

That night I sat in my room again, staring at the phone. It never rang, and at 11:15 I watched Nina Torring walk up the path.
She walked alone, her blond hair tucked inside a wool cap, her flushed face framed for a second by the lamplight. I waited
twenty minutes and then went to her room and knocked on the door. She opened it a little, saw me, and opened it wide. The
heat was up all the way, and she wore shorts and a long pink T-shirt that she pulled down over her knees when she sat down
on the edge of her bed. I turned the desk chair toward her and sat down.

“Thank you,” I said.

She smiled. “If there’s a next time, I’ll call the dean at home.”

“There won’t be.”

“Write Suzie a nice letter of apology.”

“Sure. Nick was pissed, wasn’t he?”

“I’ll make it up to him.”

We sat quietly for a few seconds. On the shelf above her bed was a row of stuffed animals.

“He says you’ll cost us in a close game,” she said.

“He’ll have a pretty good view of it.”

She laughed. Her T-shirt slipped off her knee, and she pulled it back down.

“You watch me come up the walk, don’t you?” she asked.

“Every night.”

She drew a pillow from behind her and held it in her lap.

“Tell me, Jake Teller. When the boys talk — in the locker rooms, on the buses. What do they say?”

I looked at the flower bedspread, at the shape of her knees through her shirt.

“They brag about how much wood they’re giving their girls. About how many days it takes them to walk right again.”

“Nick doesn’t say those things.”

I paused. “No.”

I reached out, slipped her T-shirt off her leg, and pressed my hand to her small knee. Her leg tensed, and she covered my
hand with both of hers, but her eyes, on mine, were calm. I tried to slide my hand up her leg. “No, Jake,” she said, and I
stopped. She lifted her hands from mine, and I left it on her knee a few electric seconds, looking into her eyes, my heart
racing, and then took it away and stood, trying not to shake as I walked to the door. “Jake,” she said evenly. I turned around.
“Shoot well — it’s tournament time.”

We swept through the field and took the trophy. I scored twenty-two in the final, and Nick, sent in to play the point when
our starter fouled out, hit four big free throws down the stretch and found me in the corner for the long jumper that put
them away. Grandpa took me to dinner after the game, then dropped me off behind the chapel, where Pardo and Reeder waited
with sixteen-ounce Coors and a Psi U brother who, for five bucks a man, led us down an icy path to the back of the old fraternity
house. He pointed to the window he’d jimmied open, and we climbed through, up a set of back stairs, and stood, magically,
at the keg, dizzy at the thought of free beer and dazzled by the sight of the coeds dancing in the dark to “Rosalita.” The
old wooden floor shook as they answered the call to “jump a little higher,” their arms above them, their jeweled wrists shimmering
in the dark. We pounded down plastic cups of beer, then high-fived one another and headed into the swarm. I cut in on a girl
in a black leather mini who didn’t run when the music slowed but held my hand to her waist and pressed against me, her neck
smelling of some forgotten spice, her fingers in my hair as I brushed at the glitter on her cheek. She was pulling me in for
a kiss when the shrill burst of the sentry’s whistle cut through the music.

I looked to the front door and, sure enough, there came the goon squad, the team of campus cops and turncoat students that
raided frat parties to check IDs. I kissed the girl once, hard; said, “Sorry — freshman”; and then slipped down the stairs
and out the same window I’d come in, pulling myself up into the snow in time to see two more cops slip-sliding toward me down
the icy path. I escaped into the glen, starting the long way home across campus as, through the open windows of the frat house,
the piano and harp intro started up and then, clear and strong, Bruce:

The screen door slams

Mary’s dress waves

Like a vision she dances across the porch

As the radio plays

Roy Orbison singing for the lonely

Hey that’s me and I want you only

Don’t turn me home again
…

The words faded as I walked deeper into the pristine glen, over the icy footbridge, the bark glittering on the white trees
all around me. I felt vital, invincible, the cold air sharp in my lungs, the future stretching before me like a runway. I
was still a month from my first fuck, but I could sense it now, had seen the possibility of it in the eyes of the girl on
the dance floor. And tomorrow morning the school paper would lead with the story of the game. Twenty-two points. Ten of thirteen
from the field. I closed my eyes and remembered the shots. The beauty of them, the purity. The way I’d known they were going
in before they ever left my hand.

I came up out of the glen into the field behind the dorm. I could see into the windows of the dark rooms, the blinds left
up because there was only the empty field and then miles and miles of farmland rolling away to the Adirondacks. In the corner
room on the first floor I saw, in profile, a girl sitting up in her bed, looking down on someone I couldn’t see, someone who
lay beneath the window line but whose hands played with the buttons of the girl’s shirt.