“Are you fooling around with Perry or something?”
“What?”
“How many times have I passed you on the stairwell just as I’m headed up to the room, and when I get there Perry’s either asleep or has just left for the shower?”
“I was up there looking for you, Craig.”
They were standing in the stairwell, facing one another, and the late winter twilight from the one little window shone on the linoleum, casting the shadow of its diamond panes across Nicole’s pale feet.
She was wearing flip-flops. She wasn’t planning to go anywhere outside. Her toenails were painted pink. She rested her hand on the wooden rail and began to smooth it with her palm. Craig looked at the hand. Her fingernails were also pink, and the way she was touching that rail—recently varnished, it seemed, so that it shone, while still bearing under that gleaming shellac job all the nicks and scratches and carved initials of about a million students. He wanted to pull her hand away from the railing. Jesus, how many germs from how many hands was she touching as she touched it?
She licked her bottom lip, and suddenly that familiar little tic (when she was nervous or upset or about to cry) seemed almost obscene to him.
Her cheeks looked flushed against the pasty stairwell walls, and her lips were very red. Craig thought he could smell her, too, even though she was standing several feet from him, and it wasn’t her usual baby powder smell, or the smell of her flowery shampoo. She smelled, he thought, like sex.
He looked down again at her hand rubbing the railing, and had to stop himself from grabbing the hand, making her stop.
“I went up there to tell you I’ve got to do laundry tonight. Josie and I are picking out dresses for the Spring Event.”
“But you knew I wasn’t there. You knew I was at the lecture I was assigned to attend.”
(Awful: An old professor who mumbled into a microphone for over an hour about the Post-Copernican Double Bind and the epistemological consequences of the Cartesian cogito—whatever the hell all that was. The undergraduates had started to file out at the same moment, like a timer had gone off or something in the middle of the lecture, and Craig had followed them, as the professor droned on. He’d hurried back to the dorm, imagining the poor guy still going on and on back there for the benefit of the two graduate students in the front row.)
“I just happened to be back early. You had no reason to think I’d be back in the room yet.”
“I’m sorry. I guess I don’t know your schedule well enough, Craig.”
“But this isn’t the first time.”
“You’re saying you think I’m—?”
Was he? Was that what he was saying? Did he really think she was—what? Fucking Perry? Was he really looking at Nicole and thinking to himself that there was even the remotest possibility that all this sweet virginity business, the promise ring she wore on her left hand—the amber ring, he noticed now, was not on her right hand tonight, but she said she had to take it off sometimes when she did a lot of typing—that it was all a joke? That not only wasn’t she a virgin, but she was screwing his roommate?
Perry?
He knew Perry wasn’t crazy about him, but they’d been getting along a lot better lately. Perry, the Boy Scout. Even if Nicole would do it, Perry wouldn’t.
Still, there was one thing Craig remembered from the lecture that night, and it bothered him at the moment, just as Nicole took a step toward him, and he could see that her eyes were filled with tears, and her blazingly red lips were trembling, and he knew that she was about to put her head on his shoulder, or press her face into his chest—something about Kant. How the human mind orders reality subjectively. The geezer had called it the “relative and unrooted nature of human knowledge.”
It was the only thing Craig had bothered to write down.
It was stuck now in his mind like a disturbing image, a catchy song.
But when Nicole lifted her tear-streaked face to his, he shook his head and took her in his arms.