Marine Park(24)

            “Peace, Social Change, Etc.” was a class taught by an elderly Iranian man named Yahya, who had converted to Judaism twenty-five years ago. He was one of a whole new host of Brandeis professors who were beginning to wear jackets without ties, and in the winter, under his blazer, a blue turtleneck that had sweat stains seeping from under the arms. You had to write multiple essays to get into the class, and it was only the most talented and dedicated who did—everyone wanted a spot because every other week they went on peace retreats to one of Yahya’s numerous friends’ cabins, in the Berkshires, or on the North Shore, or near Walden Pond. There, they cooked meals for each other, drank pinot grigio with Yahya, and practiced looking into each other’s eyes when they conversed, while they listed one thing they appreciated about each and every member of the class. Yahya wouldn’t smoke with them, but he said that it wasn’t for him to set rules for them to go by, and when, on the first day of class, they put smoking pot into the legal section of their new social constitution, he said that this would be a good experiment in learning each other’s boundaries.

            This was after their trip to the Berkshires, and I was staying until Monday. Hayden was sitting at his desk, mixing songs on GarageBand, and I was lying on the mattress, trying to decide why it somehow worked that Hayden left all the walls blank in his room. Above his desk he had a quote—“We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living”—but that was it, with his computer and the wires of his speakers in a corner. It was barely ten when three of his friends came over, bringing with them their leftover dinner, which we ate on the floor, the new people sitting on the mattress and Hayden in his chair. He offered them a beer but passed on one himself. He had told me that he was beginning to feel that he had a small drinking problem and had made me promise that I wouldn’t let him black out that night. He had a habit of doing so, back home when we’d go to bars in the East Village.

            One of the girls got a text on her phone to say there was something going on in Gordon, which was a fifteen-minute walk away and just outside the main entrance to campus. There was a semi-famous DJ playing there who had been making the rounds of New England colleges. The walk was frigid, and when we arrived we found only six guys from the tennis team drinking pink champagne out of a bottle. They were sitting in a circle and passing the bottle to one another. Hayden seemed to know a few of them, and I was introduced, and we let the bottle go around maybe once or twice before it was empty. The tennis players were reminiscing about stories from their preseason camp, and Hayden was listening politely and asking clarifying questions here and there. For a while we passed around the empty bottle, taking a swig from it, as if there was some left at the bottom. There didn’t seem to be any more bottles, or any newcomers, so we left.

            There was a similar situation in the works at a frat house, and this was promised to be better. Hayden had met his last girlfriend at a frat house. We had been slotted next on the beer pong table, and he told me to wait a second, he had to run to the bathroom. I never felt so alone as when he disappeared while I was visiting at Brandeis. Everyone, the entire time, knew that I wasn’t supposed to be around. The time he met his girlfriend he had disappeared, and when he came back, it was with two girls, one obviously his interest and one dragged along for my sake. That one, Gloria, had a perfectly diamond-shaped scar on her lower back. I traced the parallel lines later that night, in one of the upstairs rooms at the frat, once Hayden had brought his girl home. That lasted almost all semester, but she’d ended it after the Peace class started and he asked her to keep her eyes open during sex.

            The frat party was in the basement, below a set of water-heating pipes, and every once in a while a particularly tall boy wearing a backward flat-brim cap would hit his head on the ceiling. We made our way over to the bar area to get drinks. Hayden gripped my outside shoulder and pulled my ear close.

            Play along, he said.

            We were next in line when Hayden started collecting cups and bottles and making two drinks himself, with the bartender frowning over him. One of the backward-hat kids stopped dancing and came over.

            What’s up, big guy? he said.