The Rule of Four (41 page)

I wonder why he chose that joke. Maybe he’s been getting at the same point this entire time. We’ve
all
been talking to him as if he were someone else. The Saab has been our idea of him, and it was our mistake. Gil himself is something unexpected, something spontaneous. An architect, a sailor, a duck.

“You know what I was listening to on the radio the other day?” he asks. “After Anna and I broke up?”

“Sinatra.” But I know it’s wrong.

“Samba,” he tells me. “I was scanning through the stations and WPRB was playing a Latin set. Something instrumental, no voices. Great rhythm.
Amazing
rhythm.”

WPRB. The campus radio station that played Handel’s
Messiah
when women first arrived at Princeton. I remember Gil on the night I first met him, outside the bell tower at Nassau Hall. He came out of the darkness doing a little rumba thrust, saying, “Now shake it, baby.
Dance.
” There has always been music about him, the jazz he’s been trying to play on the piano since the day we met. Maybe there’s something old about the new after all.

“I don’t miss her,” he says, trying for the first time to let me in. “She would put this stuff in her hair. Pomade. Her stylist gave it to her. You know how it smells after someone vacuums? Sort of hot and clean?”

“Sure.”

“It was like that. She must’ve blow-dried it until it burned. Every time she would lean her head on me, I would think, you smell like my carpet.”

He is everywhere now, free-associating.

“You know who else smelled like that?” he asks.

“Who?”

“Think back. Freshman year.”

Hot and clean. The fireplace in Rockefeller comes immediately to mind.

“Lana McKnight,” I say.

He nods. “I never knew how you guys stayed together as long as you did. The chemistry was so strange. Charlie and I used to make bets about when you two would break up.”

“He told me he
liked
Lana.”

“Remember the girl he dated sophomore year?” Gil says, already moving on.

“Charlie?”

“Her name was Sharon, I think?”

“With the different-colored eyes?”

“Now,
she
had great-smelling hair. I remember, she used to sit in our room waiting for Charlie to get back. The whole room would smell like this lotion my mom used to wear. I’ve never known what it was, but I always loved it.”

It occurs to me that Gil has only mentioned stepmothers to me before, never his real mother. The affection gives him away.

“You know why they broke up?” he says.

“Because she dumped him.”

Gil shakes his head. “Because he got tired of picking up after her. She would leave things in our room—sweaters, purses, anything—and Charlie would have to bring them back. He didn’t realize it was just a move. She was giving him a reason to visit her at night. Charlie just thought she was a slob.”

I struggle with my tie, trying to knot it between the fangs of the collar. Good old Charlie. Cleanliness next to godliness.

“She didn’t break up with him,” Gil continues. “The girls who fall for Charlie never do. He always breaks up with them.”

There is a slight suggestion in his voice that this is a fact about Charlie worth bearing in mind, an important character trait, this fault-finding. As if it helps to explain the problems Gil has had with him.

“He’s a good guy,” Gil says, catching himself.

He seems content to leave it at that. For a second there is no sound in the room but the friction of fabric against fabric as I pull off the black tie and begin again. Gil sits down on his mattress and runs his fingers through his hair. He got into that habit back when his hair was longer. His hands still haven’t adapted to the change.

At last I manage a knot, a sort of walnut with wings. I look in the mirror and decide it’s good enough. I slip on my jacket. A perfect fit, even better than my own suit.

Gil is still silent, watching himself in the mirror, as if his image were a painting. Here we are, at the end of his presidency. His Ivy farewell. Tomorrow the club will be run by next year’s officers, the members he created at bicker, and Gil will become a ghost in his own house. The best of the Princeton he knew is coming to an end.

“Hey,” I say, walking across the foyer into his bedroom. “Try to have a good time tonight.”

He doesn’t seem to hear me. He places his cell phone on its charger, watching the light pulse. “I wish this wasn’t the way things turned out,” he says.

“Charlie’ll be okay,” I tell him.

But he just eyes his jewelry case, the tiny wooden chest where he keeps his valuables, and runs his palm across the top, brushing off the dust. Everything in Charlie’s half of the room is old but spotless: a pair of athletic shoes from freshman year sits at the edge of the closet, laces tucked in; last year’s pair is still being broken in on weekends. But everything in Gil’s half of the room seems unlived-in, new and dusty at the same time. From inside the box he lifts a silver watch, the one he wears on special occasions. Its hands have stopped moving, so he shakes the casing gently, winding it.

“What time you got?” he says.

I show him the face of my watch, and he sets his to match.

Outside, night has risen. Gil takes his key ring in his hand, then the phone from its charger. “My dad’s favorite day of college was the Ivy ball his senior year,” he says. “He always used to talk about it.”

I think of Richard Curry, of the stories he told Paul about Ivy.

He said it was like living a dream, a perfect dream.

Gil places the watch to his ear. He listens to it as if there is something miraculous about the sound, an ocean trapped in a seashell.

“Ready?” he says, pulling the band around his wrist and fastening the metal.

He focuses on me now, checking the cut of the tux.

“Not bad,” he says. “I think she’ll approve.”

“You okay?” I ask.

Gil adjusts his jacket and nods.

“I don’t think I’ll be telling my kids about tonight. But yeah. I’m fine.”

At the door we both take one last look before locking up. With the lights out, the room comes to shadows. When I look out the window at the moon one last time, I see Paul in the reflection of my mind’s eye, trudging across campus in his worn winter coat, alone.

Gil looks at his watch and says, “We should be just on time.”

Then he and I, in our black suits and black shoes, head out to the Saab in the shoals of the night-colored snow.

A costume ball,
Gil had told me. And a costume ball it was. We arrive to find the club magnificent, the center of all attention on Prospect Avenue. Tall berms of snow rise like ramparts along the brick wall that surrounds the club, but the path leading to the front door has been cleared, and the walkway has been covered with a thin layer of black stones. Like rock salt they melt a swath through the ice. Mirroring the effect are four long cloths draped down the front bays of the clubhouse, each one with a vertical stripe of ivy green flanked by thin pillars of gold.

As Gil parks the Saab in his space, club members and the few other invitees are approaching Ivy ark-style, in twos, each entrance staggered from the next in polite intervals, careful not to intrude on one another. Seniors arrive last, because warm receptions are customary for graduating members, Gil tells me as he shuts off the headlights.

We cross the threshold to find the club bustling. The air is heavy with the heat of bodies, the sweet odor of alcohol and cooked food, the slurring conversations that form and re-form across the floor. Gil’s entrance is met with clapping and cheers. Sophomores and juniors stationed across the first floor turn toward the door to welcome him, some crying Gil’s name aloud, and it seems for a second that this could still be the night he hoped for, a night like his father had.

“Well,” he says to me, ignoring the applause when it continues too long, “this is it.”

I look around at the club’s transformation. The work Gil has been doing, the errands and planning and conversations with florists and caterers, is suddenly more than just an excuse to leave our room when things aren’t well. Everything is different. The armchairs and tables that were once here are gone. In their place, the corners of the front hall have been rounded by quarter-circle tables, all hung with silky cloths in regal dark green and decked in china platters trembling with food. Behind each one, as behind the wet bar to our right, stands an attendant in white gloves. Flower arrangements are everywhere, not a speck of color in any of them: just white lilies and black orchids and varieties I have never seen before. In the storm of tuxedoes and black evening gowns, it’s even possible to overlook the brown oak of the walls.

“Sir?” says a waiter dressed in white tie, who has appeared from nowhere bearing a tray of canapés and truffles. “Lamb,” he says, pointing at the first, “and white chocolate,” pointing at the second.

“Have one,” Gil says.

So I do, and all the hunger of the day, the missed meals and hospital food fantasies, all of it instantly returns. When another man circles by with a tray of champagne flutes, I help myself again. The bubbles rise straight to my head, helping to keep my thoughts from drifting back to Paul.

Just then, a musical quartet kicks up from the dining room antechamber, a place where weathered lounge chairs used to stand. A piano and drum set have been tucked into the corner, with enough room for a bass and electric guitar in between. For the time being, it’s R&B standards. Later, I know, if Gil has his way, there will be jazz.

“I’ll be right back,” he says, and suddenly he leaves my side, heading up the stairs. At every step, a member stops him to say something kind, to smile and shake his hand, sometimes to hug him. I see Donald Morgan place a careful hand on Gil’s back as he passes, the easy, sincere congratulations of the man who would be king. Junior women already in their drinks look at Gil with foggy eyes, sentimental about the club’s loss,
their
loss. He is tonight’s hero, I realize, the host and guest of honor both. Everywhere he goes he’ll have company. But somehow, without anyone by his side—Brooks or Anna or one of us—he looks alone already.

“Tom!” comes a voice from behind me.

I turn, and the air converges in a single fragrance, the one Gil’s mother and Charlie’s girlfriend must’ve worn, because it has the same effect on me. If I imagined that I liked Katie best when I saw her with flaws, with her hair up and her shirt untucked, then I was a fool. Because here she is now, tucked into a black gown, hair down, all collarbones and breasts, and I am undone.

“Wow.”

She puts a hand on my lapel and rubs off a flake of dust that turns out to be snow, still lingering in this heat.

“Same to you,” she says.

There is something wonderful in her voice, a welcome ease. “Where’s Gil?” she asks.

“Upstairs.”

She pulls two more flutes of champagne from a passing tray.

“Cheers,” she says, giving me one. “So who are you supposed to be?”

I hesitate, unsure what she means.

“Your
costume.
Who’d you come as?”

Now Gil reappears.

“Hey,” Katie says. “Long time no see.”

Gil sizes the two of us up, then smiles like a proud father. “You both look beautiful.”

Katie laughs. “So who are
you
supposed to be?” she asks.

With a flourish, Gil swings back the side of his jacket. Only now do I see what he went upstairs to get. There, hanging between the left flank of his waist and his right hip, is a black leather belt. On the belt is a leather holster, and in the holster is an ivory-handled pistol.

“Aaron Burr,” he says. “Class of 1772.”

“Flashy,” Katie says, watching the pearly butt of the gun.

“What’s that?” I blurt.

Gil seems taken aback. “My costume. Burr shot Hamilton in a duel.”

He puts an arm at my back and leads me toward the landing between the first and second floors.

“See the lapel pins Jamie Ness is wearing?” He points at a blond senior whose bow tie is embroidered with treble and bass clefs.

On the left lapel I can make out a brown oval; on the right, a black dot.

“That’s a football,” Gil says, “and that’s a hockey puck. He’s Hobey Baker, Ivy section of 1914. The only man ever inducted into both the football and hockey halls of fame. Hobey was in a singing group here—that’s why Jamie’s tie has notes on it.”

Now Gil points to a tall senior with bright red hair. “Chris Bentham, right beside Doug: James Madison, class of 1771. You can tell by the shirt buttons. The top one is a Princeton seal—Madison was the first president of the alumni association. And the fourth one is an American flag. . . .”

There is something mechanical in his voice, a tour guide’s inflection, as if he’s reading a script in his head.

“Just make up a costume,” Katie interjects, joining our conversation from the foot of the stairs.

I glance down at her, and the leverage gives me a new appreciation for the way she fits into her dress.

“Oh, listen,” Gil says, looking past her, “I’ve got to go deal with something. Can you two manage on your own for a second?”

Over by the wet bar, Brooks is pointing to one of the white-gloved attendants, who is leaning heavily against the wall.

“One of the servers is drunk,” Gil says.

“No rush,” I tell him, noticing how Katie’s neck looks impossibly thin from this height, like the stem of a sunflower.

“If you need anything,” he says, “just let me know.”

Side by side, we begin to descend. The band is playing Duke Ellington, the champagne flutes are clinking, and Katie’s lipstick has a high red gloss, the color of a kiss.

“Want to dance?” I say, when I step down from the landing.

Katie smiles and takes me by the hand.

Listen
. . .
rails a-thrumming
. . .
on the “A” train.

At the foot of the stairs, Gil’s tracks and mine diverge.

Chapter 26
                           

The dance floor is ten degrees hotter than the rest of the club, couples pressed tight into each other, merging and turning, an asteroid belt of slow-dancers, but I instantly feel comfortable. Katie and I have moved to a lot of music since that first night we met at Ivy. Each weekend on Prospect Avenue the clubs hire bands to suit every taste, and in just a few months we’ve tried ballroom and Latin and every style in between. With nine years of tap behind her, Katie has enough elegance and grace for three or four dancers, which means that between us we average about as much as the next couple. Still, as her charity case, I’ve come a long way. We get bolder the longer we’re at it, succumbing to the champagne. I manage to dip her once without falling on top of her, she manages to spin from my good arm once without dislocating anything, and soon we’re dangerous on the floor.